Nick Carraway, a Midwesterner bondsman, rents a cottage in West Egg next to the mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby. Drawn into the world of his cousin Daisy and her brutish husband Tom, Nick becomes the confidant for Gatsby's singular, five-year obsession: to win back Daisy and recreate a perfect past, a dream that ultimately collides with reality and ends in violence.
The apartment is a single crowded room stuffed with over-sized, tapestry-covered furniture. Nick, who seldom drinks, accepts whisky from Tom and soon feels the world soften at the edges. Guests arrive: Catherine, Myrtle’s sister, a slender woman with a rigid red bob and a face powdered white; and the McKees from the flat below—Chester, a photographer with a dab of lather on his cheek, and his loud, handsome wife. Smoke fills the room.
Myrtle retires and returns in a cream chiffon dress. The transformation is complete. The raw vitality she wore in the garage has hardened into a brittle, theatrical hauteur. Her laugh becomes a shriek, her gestures grand and affected; she swells to fill the small space, revolving through the smoky air like a performer.
Talk turns to gossip and the characters’ delusions. Catherine leans to Nick and whispers that their neighbour Gatsby is a nephew of Kaiser Wilhelm, that his fortune comes from German royalty, and that she is afraid of him. The subject shifts to Tom and Myrtle. Catherine declares that neither can stand their spouse. To justify the affair, she claims Daisy is a Catholic, which prevents Tom from divorcing her—a lie Nick knows to be false, exposing the flimsy moral scaffolding of their plan. Myrtle, with bitter clarity, recounts her marriage to George: she thought him a gentleman, only to discover he had borrowed his wedding suit and that the owner came to reclaim it while George was out. She wept all afternoon, she says, and has never forgiven the mistake. This realization, she implies, is what justifies her pursuit of Tom.
The bottle circulates. Nick feels himself both inside the revelry and outside it, a spectator to the raw appetites on display. Myrtle grows giddy and bold, her intoxication fueling a defiant energy. She recounts her first encounter with Tom on a train—the press of his white shirtfront against her arm, her frantic thought that one cannot live forever. She then lists the luxuries she will buy: a massage, a permanent wave, a collar for the dog, a spring-loaded ashtray, a silk-bowed wreath for her mother’s grave. Her voice is loud, insistent, a performance of the life she believes she deserves.
Time dissolves. The puppy whines on the table. Mr. McKee naps, fists clenched. Near midnight, the party’s brittle joy snaps. Tom and Myrtle stand face to face, arguing over her right to speak Daisy’s name. Drunk and defiant, Myrtle begins to chant it—“Daisy! Daisy! Daisy!”—and Tom swings his arm in a short, brutal arc. The sound of the impact is dull; Myrtle’s nose breaks.
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