El Gran Gatsby

VII

The summer’s curiosity about Jay Gatsby was still burning when his Saturday-night lights failed to come on, and as suddenly as the rumors had begun, the legend of Trimalchio ended. Only gradually did Nick Carraway notice that the automobiles pulling expectantly into Gatsby’s drive lingered a moment before sulking away. Concerned, Nick walked over to the mansion, where a stranger with a villainous face answered the door. Gatsby was not sick, the butler said grudgingly, and slammed the door before Nick could finish speaking.

The Finnish servant next door explained everything: Gatsby had dismissed his entire household a week earlier, replacing them with six or so mysterious people who never went into West Egg village, ordered supplies by phone, and were rumored not to be servants at all. They were, Gatsby later confirmed on the telephone, people Meyer Wolfshiem had wanted him to help—relations who had once run a small hotel. The reason was simple. Daisy Buchanan came to his house in the afternoons, and he would not have the staff gossiping about it.

He was calling at Daisy’s request. Would Nick come to lunch at the Buchanans’ tomorrow? Jordan Baker would be there. Half an hour later Daisy telephoned herself, relieved and faintly nervous, and Nick understood that something was about to break.

The day was one of the hottest of the summer, the train cars almost combusting on their straw seats, the conductor shouting his cheerful refrain of “Hot! Hot! Hot!” At the Buchanans’, Tom was on the hall telephone, his voice gruff and husky. Daisy and Jordan lay on the enormous couch like silver idols, declaring they could not move. Tom’s voice rose in annoyance: he was not selling the man his car. “Holding down the receiver,” Daisy said cynically. Tom flung open the door, blocked its space with his thick body, and greeted Gatsby with well-concealed dislike.

“Come here,” Daisy said to Gatsby after Tom left the room, pulling his face down and kissing him on the mouth. “You know I love you.” She began to clog on the brick fireplace until the heat overcame her. The nurse entered with little Pammy, the bles-sed pre-cious, and Gatsby stared at the child with surprise, as though he had never quite believed in her existence. The girl, after reciting that she had dressed before luncheon, was led away, and Tom returned bearing four gin rickeys.

Tom suggested they go to town. Daisy, on the verge of tears, insisted—everything was so confused, and it was so hot. Gatsby’s eyes floated toward her, and Tom saw. His mouth opened a little, as though he had just recognized his wife from years before. The suggestion that Gatsby drive and Tom follow in the coupé was distasteful to Gatsby, but Tom insisted, and so Daisy and Gatsby took the coupé while Tom, Jordan, and Nick followed in the yellow car.

They stopped for gas at Wilson’s garage. The man was sick—visibly, greenly sick, hollow-eyed and trembling—though he insisted on serving them. Tom had promised him the coupé, and Wilson said he needed money to take his wife West, away from this place. Nick looked up and saw Myrtle Wilson peering from the window above, her eyes fixed not on Tom but on Jordan Baker, whom she took to be his wife. The confusion of a simple mind was terrible to witness.

The party ended up in a stifling suite at the Plaza Hotel, after Daisy proposed five bathrooms and then a place for mint juleps. Tom turned his investigation on Gatsby, demanding when he had gone to Oxford. Gatsby answered that he had stayed five months in 1919, an opportunity given to officers after the armistice. The two sparred, the air thick and Mendelssohn’s wedding march drifting up from the ballroom, and then Tom drove straight to the throat of the matter: what kind of a row was Gatsby trying to cause in his house?

Gatsby said it: Daisy’s never loved you. She loves me.

Tom laughed, and then did not laugh. He dredged up Kapiolani, the Punch Bowl, the afternoon he had carried her so her shoes would not get wet. Daisy, trembling, threw her cigarette on the carpet. “I did love him once—but I loved you too.” Tom pressed harder, calling Gatsby a swindler, naming Wolfshiem, the drugstores, the grain alcohol, Walter Chase’s month in a New Jersey jail. The unfamiliar yet recognizable look came back into Gatsby’s face—a look Nick could only describe, in contempt for garden slander, as the look of a man who had “killed a man.”

Daisy’s voice begged to go. Tom, magnanimous in victory, ordered her home in Gatsby’s car. They vanished like ghosts, and Tom, wrapping the unopened whisky, asked if Nick wanted any. It was Nick’s birthday. He was thirty.

The drive home carried them through the cooling twilight, and somewhere along the dark bridge Jordan’s wan face fell against his shoulder, but Nick’s mind was elsewhere. Near the ash-heaps, Tom slowed and then stopped, and the high wailing from Wilson’s garage resolved itself into the words “Oh, my God!” Myrtle lay wrapped in blankets on a worktable. Wilson swayed in the office doorway. Tom pushed through the crowd, lied that he had not been driving the yellow car that afternoon, and whispered to Nick, “Let’s get out.”

In the coupé, Tom wept. “The God damned coward! He didn’t even stop his car.”

At the Buchanan house, Tom told Nick there was nothing to be done tonight. Nick refused to come inside, feeling sick and full of contempt that had spread by then to Jordan. Walking down the drive, he found Gatsby stepping from between two bushes in his luminous pink suit, watching Daisy’s window. Gatsby confessed that Daisy had been driving; he had tried to take the wheel, but the shock had killed the woman instantly. He intended to wait outside all night, in case Tom turned brutal.

Nick crept to the pantry window and saw Daisy and Tom at the kitchen table, hands touching across the cold fried chicken, conspiring in their unmistakable air of natural intimacy. He walked back to Gatsby and told him all was quiet. Gatsby, putting his hands in his coat pockets, turned back to his vigil. Nick left him there in the moonlight, watching over nothing.