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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.
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