Der große Gatsby

III

The summer heat thrummed through West Egg as Jay Gatsby’s parties rolled on in unbroken, glittering succession. Music spilled from his blue gardens every night, drawing men and girls who drifted through the grounds like moths among champagne toasts and starlight, while motorboats slashed through the Sound and his Rolls-Royce shuttled city guests to and from the train station. Five crates of oranges and lemons arrived every Friday, leaving the next Monday as piles of pulpless rinds, and a corps of caterers transformed the lawn into a canvas-wrapped wonderland of colored lights and heaped buffet tables every fortnight, while an eight-person cleaning crew patched up the ravages of each night’s revelry by Monday morning.

Most guests showed up uninvited, drifting to Gatsby’s door after a night out in the city, treating the estate like an amusement park where no introduction was required to join the fun. Nick Carraway was one of the rare few to receive a formal invitation, delivered by a chauffeur in robin’s-egg blue uniform early one Saturday morning. Dressed in white flannels, he arrived just after seven, ill at ease among the crowds of strangers, until he spotted Jordan Baker leaning on the marble steps. The two drifted through the party together, listening to the swirling, unsubstantiated rumors about their host: that he had killed a man, that he was a German spy, that he had attended Oxford, claims Jordan dismissed out of hand. Earlier, they had sat with a group that included two girls in yellow, who regaled them with stories of Gatsby’s generosity: one had torn her gown on a chair at a prior party, and received a $265 gas blue replacement from a Parisian boutique inside a week. Jordan’s own party, a group of staid East Egg couples and a persistent undergraduate who made no secret of his designs on her, felt too stiff and proper for her taste. “Let’s get out,” she had whispered after half an hour. “Large parties are so much more intimate, anyway—no one pays attention to you at small ones.” The undergraduate had nodded at their departure with cynical, melancholy amusement.

Their search for Gatsby led them first to the bar, then to a gothic library panelled in carved English oak, where a drunk, owl-eyed middle-aged man marvelled aloud that the shelves of books were real, not cardboard props, rushing to grab a volume of the Stoddard Lectures to prove it, and muttering that if a single brick was removed from the shelves, the whole library would collapse. Back in the garden, the party hit its peak: a famous tenor sang Italian arias, a contralto performed jazz, and the stage twins Nick had met earlier did a baby act in costume, while champagne was served in bowls bigger than finger-glasses. Just as the orchestra launched into Vladimir Tostoff’s Jazz History of the World, Nick realized the man he had been chatting with about their shared WWI service was Gatsby himself, the host with the rare, reassuring smile that made him feel seen and welcome. Gatsby excused himself to take a phone call, and when Jordan returned from a private word with him, she was flustered, refusing to share what they had discussed, only pressing her phone number into Nick’s hand under the alias Mrs. Sigourney Howard.

As the party wound down, with wives hauling their disgruntled husbands out to the cars, Nick spotted a crash in the driveway: a coupé had sheared its wheel on a wall, and Owl Eyes was standing dazed beside it, insisting he hadn’t been driving, while the actual driver, dopey and disoriented, asked if there was a nearby gas station, unaware the wheel had fallen off. Nick left Gatsby standing alone on his porch, waving goodbye, a strange quiet settling over the estate after the night’s chaos.

The crash was just one small, vivid event in a crowded summer that otherwise centered on Nick’s quiet routine: he worked long hours at the Probity Trust, lunched with fellow clerks on cheap sausages and coffee, and had a brief fling with a Jersey City accounting clerk that fizzled when her brother started glowering at him and she left for vacation in July. He spent his evenings studying investments at the Yale Club library, then wandered New York’s streets, watching crowds head to the theatre and imagining the lives of the women he passed, feeling a quiet, shared loneliness with the other solitary young men loitering in the dusk. He reconnected with Jordan in midsummer, charmed at first by her fame as a golfer, then drawn to the guarded, curious thing she hid behind her bored, haughty expression. He learned she was incurably dishonest: she had left a borrowed car out in the rain with the top down and lied about it, and had nearly been exposed for moving her ball during a high-stakes golf tournament, only saved when a caddy retracted his statement. She lied, Nick realized, to keep her cool, insolent front intact, never letting herself be at a disadvantage. He didn’t blame her deeply—dishonesty in a woman, he thought, was never a deep failing—but when she told him she hated careless people, which was why she liked him, he felt a flicker of affection, quickly tempered by the memory of the girl back home he still wrote weekly love letters to. He knew he would have to end things with Jordan before he could be free. He closed the summer with his core conviction: he was one of the few honest people he had ever known.