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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.
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