The Great Gatsby

VI

An ambitious young New York reporter knocked on Gatsby’s door one morning, asking for a statement about the half-formed rumors of the millionaire floating around his office, his day off driving him to seek out the subject he couldn’t quite name or explain. For months, Gatsby’s notoriety had grown just short of newsworthiness, fueled by the hundreds who’d accepted his lavish hospitality and spun tall tales of his past: an underground pipeline to Canada, a houseboat secretly shuttled up and down the Long Island shore. James Gatz, the 17-year-old North Dakota farm boy who’d loathed his shiftless, unsuccessful parents and crafted a Platonic ideal of himself as Jay Gatsby, a “son of God” tasked with serving vast, vulgar beauty, found these fictions a quiet satisfaction.

Gatz had changed his name the day he saw Dan Cody’s yacht anchor off a shallow Lake Superior flat, rowing out to warn the wealthy silver prospector of incoming wind that could break the vessel in half. He’d spent a year scraping by as a clam-digger and salmon-fisher, his nights filled with fantastical reveries of grandeur, before dropping out of St. Olaf’s Lutheran College in southern Minnesota after two weeks, repelled by its indifference to his grand destiny. Cody, a 50-year-old product of Nevada silver fields, Yukon gold rushes, and every metal rush since 1875, hardened by decades of wealth but softened by age, took the ambitious young man under his wing, buying him a blue yachting coat and six pairs of white duck trousers, and hiring him for a vague personal role that saw him serve as steward, mate, and even jailor for Cody’s drunken excesses over five years of global sailing. When Cody died, Gatsby was left a $25,000 inheritance, but he never understood the legal device used to strip him of the rest of Cody’s fortune, which went intact to Ella Kaye, leaving Gatsby with only the fully formed identity he’d built for himself.

Nick only learns this story weeks later, during a lull in Gatsby’s affairs when he’d barely seen his neighbor. That Sunday, Nick visits Gatsby’s house to find Tom Buchanan, Sloane, and a woman in a riding habit arriving unannounced. Gatsby, desperate to win Tom’s approval, fumbles through small talk, blurting out that he knows Tom’s wife, and introduces Tom as “the polo player” after a split second of hesitation, a nickname Tom halfheartedly objects to but that sticks for the rest of the evening. Gatsby is left confused and disappointed when the group leaves abruptly, Sloane making clear Gatsby is not welcome to join them for supper. A week later, Tom brings Daisy to one of Gatsby’s parties, the evening carrying an undercurrent of tension Nick has never felt before. Daisy is giddy at first, whispering playful jokes to Nick and marveling at the celebrities in attendance, but grows appalled by West Egg’s raw, unrefined energy as the night wears on, noting that uninvited guests often force their way in, and Gatsby is too polite to turn them away. Tom prowls the crowd, openly speculating Gatsby is a bootlegger, and abandons the party to eat with strangers when Daisy dances with Gatsby. As they wait for their car, Daisy sings softly to the waltz playing inside, her voice warm and magical, before she and Tom leave. Gatsby, who waited up to speak to her, is despondent when he learns she didn’t enjoy the party, his tanned skin drawn tight, eyes bright and tired as he rants to Nick about his plan to repeat the past, to undo the five years he and Daisy have spent apart. He tells Nick of the autumn night five years prior, when they walked under a moonlit treeless sidewalk, and he kissed Daisy for the first time, feeling as if he’d “gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder.” As Gatsby speaks, Nick is struck by a half-remembered, unspoken fragment of rhythm and lost words from his own past, a wisp of memory he can’t quite place that vanishes before he can give it voice.