《了不起的盖茨比》

In a cool, well-fanned cellar on Forty-second Street, Nick was introduced to Meyer Wolfshiem, a small flat-nosed man whose nostrils were graced with twin tufts of hair. Wolfshiem spoke of the night his friend Rosy Rosenthal was shot outside the old Metropole, of coffee and electrocutions, and he sized up the room with the caution of a man who has long trusted no surface that was not his own. He gave Nick a businesslike glance and wondered if he might be looking for a connection, but Gatsby waved this off: Nick was merely a friend. Wolfshiem wore cufflinks of human molars, spoke fondly of “Oggsford,” and assured Nick that Gatsby was a gentleman who would never look at a friend’s wife. When he rose to leave, he raised a benedictory hand and announced that he belonged to another generation, his tragic nose trembling.

“He’s the man who fixed the World’s Series back in nineteen nineteen,” Gatsby said coolly, when Wolfshiem had gone.

The idea staggered Nick, though he had always known, abstractly, that the fix had occurred. It had never crossed his mind that one man might have done such a thing with the single-mindedness of a burglar.

Nick paid the check. Across the crowded room he caught sight of Tom Buchanan, and brought Gatsby over for an introduction. They shook hands briefly, and an unfamiliar embarrassment settled over Gatsby’s face. When Nick turned, Gatsby had vanished.

That afternoon, in the tea-garden at the Plaza, Jordan Baker sat up very straight on a straight chair and told Nick the rest of the story. In October of nineteen seventeen, she had been crossing lawns in Louisville in English rubber-soled shoes, and Daisy Fay had hailed her from her white roadster. Beside Daisy sat a young lieutenant, looking at her in a way that every girl wishes to be looked at once. His name, said Jordan, was Jay Gatsby, and she had not set eyes on him again for more than four years.

Wild rumors had circulated about Daisy afterwards: of a winter-night suitcase packed for New York, of a soldier sent overseas, of a mother who locked her away. Then came the début, the engagement to a man from New Orleans, the wedding to Tom Buchanan with a hundred people in four private cars, and a string of pearls worth three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Jordan had been a bridesmaid, and had found Daisy the day of the bridal dinner lying on the bed in a flowered dress, as lovely as the June night and as drunk as a monkey, with a letter crushed in one hand and a bottle of Sauterne in the other.

“’Gratulate me,” Daisy had muttered. “Never had a drink before, but oh how I do enjoy it.”

She had wept. She had clutched the letter into the tub with her. The next day, at five o’clock, she had married Tom without so much as a shiver and gone off to the South Seas. They had come back from France with a daughter, and Daisy had come out of it all with a perfect reputation, perhaps because she did not drink.