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a girl friend at a hotel. Mr. McKee was a pale, feminine man from the flat
below. He had just shaved, for there was a white spot of lather on his
cheekbone, and he was most respectful in his greeting to every one in the
room. He informed me that he was in the "artistic game," and I gathered
later that he was a photographer and had made the dim enlargement of Mrs.
Wilson's mother which hovered like an ectoplasm on the wall. His wife was
shrill, languid, handsome, and horrible. She told me with pride that her
husband had photographed her a hundred and twenty-seven times since they had
been married. Mrs. Wilson had changed her costume some time before, and was
now attired in an elaborate afternoon dress of cream-colored chiffon, which
gave out a continual rustle as she swept about the room. With the influence
of the dress her personality had also undergone a change. The intense
vitality that had been so remarkable in the garage was converted into
impressive hauteur. Her laughter, her gestures, her assertions became more
violently affected moment by moment, and as she expanded the room grew
smaller around her, until she seemed to be revolving on a noisy, creaking
pivot through the smoky air. "My dear," she told her sister in a high,
mincing shout, "most of these fellas will cheat you every time. All they
think of is money. I had a woman up here last week to look at my feet, and
when she gave me the bill you'd of thought she had my appendicitis out."
"What was the name of the woman?" asked Mrs. McKee. "Mrs. Eberhardt. She
goes around looking at people's feet in their own homes." "I like your
dress," remarked Mrs. McKee, "I think it's adorable." Mrs. Wilson rejected
the compliment by raising her eyebrow in disdain. "It's just a crazy old
thing," she said. "I just slip it on sometimes when I don't care what I look
like." "But it looks wonderful on you, if you know what I mean," pursued
Mrs. McKee. "If Chester could only get you in that pose I think he could
make something of it." We all looked in silence at Mrs. Wilson, who removed
a strand of hair from over her eyes and looked back at us with a brilliant
smile. Mr. McKee regarded her intently with his head on one side, and then
moved his hand back and forth slowly in front of his face. "I should change
the light," he said after a moment. "I'd like to bring out the modelling of
the features. And I'd try to get hold of all the back hair." "I wouldn't
think of changing the light," cried Mrs. McKee. "I think it's----" Her
husband said "SH!" and we all looked at the subject again, whereupon Tom
Buchanan yawned audibly and got to his feet. "You McKees have something to
drink," he said. "Get some more ice and mineral water, Myrtle, before
everybody goes to sleep." "I told that boy about the ice." Myrtle raised her
eyebrows in despair at the shiftlessness of the lower orders. "These people!
You have to keep after them all the time." She looked at me and laughed
pointlessly. Then she flounced over to the dog, kissed it with ecstasy, and
swept into the kitchen, implying that a dozen chefs awaited her orders
there. "I've done some nice things out on Long Island," asserted Mr. McKee.
Tom looked at him blankly. "Two of them we have framed down-stairs." "Two
what?" demanded Tom. "Two studies. One of them I call MONTAUK POINT--THE
GULLS, and the other I call MONTAUK POINT--THE SEA." The sister Catherine
sat down beside me on the couch. "Do you live down on Long Island, too?" she
inquired. "I live at West Egg." "Really? I was down there at a party about a
month ago. At a man named Gatsby's. Do you know him?" "I live next door to
him." "Well, they say he's a nephew or a cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm's. That's
where all his money comes from." "Really?" She nodded. "I'm scared of him.
I'd hate to have him get anything on me." This absorbing information about
my neighbor was interrupted by Mrs. McKee's pointing suddenly at Catherine:
"Chester, I think you could do something with HER," she broke out, but Mr.
McKee only nodded in a bored way, and turned his attention to Tom. "I'd like
to do more work on Long Island, if I could get the entry. All I ask is that
they should give me a start." "Ask Myrtle," said Tom, breaking into a short
shout of laughter as Mrs. Wilson entered with a tray. "She'll give you a
letter of introduction, won't you Myrtle?" "Do what?" she asked, startled.
"You'll give McKee a letter of introduction to your husband, so he can do
some studies of him." His lips moved silently for a moment as he invented.
"GEORGE B. WILSON AT THE GASOLINE PUMP, or something like that." Catherine
leaned close to me and whispered in my ear: "Neither of them can stand the
person they're married to." "Can't they?" "Can't STAND them." She looked at
Myrtle and then at Tom. "What I say is, why go on living with them if they
can't stand them? If I was them I'd get a divorce and get married to each
other right away." "Doesn't she like Wilson either?" The answer to this was
unexpected. It came from Myrtle, who had overheard the question, and it was
violent and obscene. "You see," cried Catherine triumphantly. She lowered
her voice again. "It's really his wife that's keeping them apart. She's a
Catholic, and they don't believe in divorce." Daisy was not a Catholic, and
I was a little shocked at the elaborateness of the lie. "When they do get
married," continued Catherine, "they're going West to live for a while until
it blows over." "It'd be more discreet to go to Europe." "Oh, do you like
Europe?" she exclaimed surprisingly. "I just got back from Monte Carlo."
"Really." "Just last year. I went over there with another girl." "Stay
long?" "No, we just went to Monte Carlo and back. We went by way of
Marseilles. We had over twelve hundred dollars when we started, but we got
gypped out of it all in two days in the private rooms. We had an awful time
getting back, I can tell you. God, how I hated that town!" The late
afternoon sky bloomed in the window for a moment like the blue honey of the
Mediterranean--then the shrill voice of Mrs. McKee called me back into the
room. "I almost made a mistake, too," she declared vigorously. "I almost
married a little kyke who'd been after me for years. I knew he was below me.
Everybody kept saying to me: 'Lucille, that man's 'way below you!' But if I
hadn't met Chester, he'd of got me sure." "Yes, but listen," said Myrtle
Wilson, nodding her head up and down, "at least you didn't marry him." "I
know I didn't." "Well, I married him," said Myrtle, ambiguously. "And that's
the difference between your case and mine." "Why did you, Myrtle?" demanded
Catherine. "Nobody forced you to." Myrtle considered. "I married him because
I thought he was a gentleman," she said finally. "I thought he knew
something about breeding, but he wasn't fit to lick my shoe." "You were
crazy about him for a while," said Catherine. "Crazy about him!" cried
Myrtle incredulously. "Who said I was crazy about him? I never was any more
crazy about him than I was about that man there." She pointed suddenly at
me, and every one looked at me accusingly. I tried to show by my expression
that I had played no part in her past. "The only CRAZY I was was when I
married him. I knew right away I made a mistake. He borrowed somebody's best
suit to get married in, and never even told me about it, and the man came
after it one day when he was out. 'oh, is that your suit?' I said. 'this is
the first I ever heard about it.' But I gave it to him and then I lay down
and cried to beat the band all afternoon." "She really ought to get away
from him," resumed Catherine to me. "They've been living over that garage
for eleven years. And tom's the first sweetie she ever had." The bottle of
whiskey--a second one--was now in constant demand by all present, excepting
Catherine, who "felt just as good on nothing at all." Tom rang for the
janitor and sent him for some celebrated sandwiches, which were a complete
supper in themselves. I wanted to get out and walk southward toward the park
through the soft twilight, but each time I tried to go I became entangled in
some wild, strident argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my
chair. Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have
contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the
darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within
and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible
variety of life. Myrtle pulled her chair close to mine, and suddenly her
warm breath poured over me the story of her first meeting with Tom. "It was
on the two little seats facing each other that are always the last ones left
on the train. I was going up to New York to see my sister and spend the
night. He had on a dress suit and patent leather shoes, and I couldn't keep
my eyes off him, but every time he looked at me I had to pretend to be
looking at the advertisement over his head. When we came into the station he
was next to me, and his white shirt-front pressed against my arm, and so I
told him I'd have to call a policeman, but he knew I lied. I was so excited
that when I got into a taxi with him I didn't hardly know I wasn't getting
into a subway train. All I kept thinking about, over and over, was 'You
can't live forever; you can't live forever.'" She turned to Mrs. McKee and
the room rang full of her artificial laughter. "My dear," she cried, "I'm
going to give you this dress as soon as I'm through with it. I've got to get
another one to-morrow. I'm going to make a list of all the things I've got
to get. A massage and a wave, and a collar for the dog, and one of those
cute little ash-trays where you touch a spring, and a wreath with a black
silk bow for mother's grave that'll last all summer. I got to write down a
list so I won't forget all the things I got to do." It was nine
o'clock--almost immediately afterward I looked at my watch and found it was
ten. Mr. McKee was asleep on a chair with his fists clenched in his lap,
like a photograph of a man of action. Taking out my handkerchief I wiped
from his cheek the remains of the spot of dried lather that had worried me
all the afternoon. The little dog was sitting on the table looking with
blind eyes through the smoke, and from time to time groaning faintly. People
disappeared, reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each
other, searched for each other, found each other a few feet away. Some time
toward midnight Tom Buchanan and Mrs. Wilson stood face to face discussing,
in impassioned voices, whether Mrs. Wilson had any right to mention Daisy's
name. "Daisy! Daisy! Daisy!" shouted Mrs. Wilson. "I'll say it whenever I
want to! Daisy! Dai----" Making a short deft movement, Tom Buchanan broke
her nose with his open hand. Then there were bloody towels upon the
bath-room floor, and women's voices scolding, and high over the confusion a
long broken wail of pain. Mr. McKee awoke from his doze and started in a
daze toward the door. When he had gone half way he turned around and stared
at the scene--his wife and Catherine scolding and consoling as they stumbled
here and there among the crowded furniture with articles of aid, and the
despairing figure on the couch, bleeding fluently, and trying to spread a
copy of TOWN TATTLE. over the tapestry scenes of Versailles. Then Mr. McKee
turned and continued on out the door. Taking my hat from the chandelier, I
followed. "Come to lunch some day," he suggested, as we groaned down in the
elevator. "Where?" "Anywhere." "Keep your hands off the lever," snapped the
elevator boy. "I beg your pardon," said Mr. McKee with dignity, "I didn't
know I was touching it." "All right," I agreed, "I'll be glad to." . . . I
was standing beside his bed and he was sitting up between the sheets, clad
in his underwear, with a great portfolio in his hands. "Beauty and the Beast
. . . Loneliness . . . Old Grocery Horse . . . Brook'n Bridge . . . ." Then
I was lying half asleep in the cold lower level of the Pennsylvania Station,
staring at the morning TRIBUNE, and waiting for the four o'clock train.
Chapter 3 There was music from my neighbor's house through the summer
nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the
whisperings and the champagne and the stars. At high tide in the afternoon I
watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft, or taking the sun on
the hot sand of his beach while his two motor-boats slit the waters of the
Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of foam. On week-ends his
Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city between
nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his station wagon
scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains. And on Mondays eight
servants, including an extra gardener, toiled all day with mops and
scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden-shears, repairing the ravages of
the night before. Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived
from a fruiterer in New York--every Monday these same oranges and lemons
left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves. There was a machine in
the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an
hour if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler's thumb.
At least once a fortnight a corps of caterers came down with several hundred
feet of canvas and enough colored lights to make a Christmas tree of
Gatsby's enormous garden. On buffet tables, garnished with glistening
hors-d'oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of harlequin designs
and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold. In the main hall a bar
with a real brass rail was set up, and stocked with gins and liquors and
with cordials so long forgotten that most of his female guests were too
young to know one from another. By seven o'clock the orchestra has arrived,
no thin five-piece affair, but a whole pitful of oboes and trombones and
saxophones and viols and cornets and piccolos, and low and high drums. The
last swimmers have come in from the beach now and are dressing up-stairs;
the cars from New York are parked five deep in the drive, and already the
halls and salons and verandas are gaudy with primary colors, and hair shorn
in strange new ways, and shawls beyond the dreams of Castile. The bar is in
full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside,
until the air is alive with chatter and laughter, and casual innuendo and
introductions forgotten on the spot, and enthusiastic meetings between women
who never knew each other's names. The lights grow brighter as the earth
lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail
music, and the opera of voices pitches a key higher. Laughter is easier
minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word.
The groups change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form
in the same breath; already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave
here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous
moment the centre of a group, and then, excited with triumph, glide on
through the sea-change of faces and voices and color under the constantly
changing light. Suddenly one of the gypsies, in trembling opal, seizes a
cocktail out of the air, dumps it down for courage and, moving her hands
like Frisco, dances out alone on the canvas platform. A momentary hush; the
orchestra leader varies his rhythm obligingly for her, and there is a burst
of chatter as the erroneous news goes around that she is Gilda Gray's
understudy from the FOLLIES. The party has begun. I believe that on the
first night I went to Gatsby's house I was one of the few guests who had
actually been invited. People were not invited--they went there. They got
into automobiles which bore them out to Long Island, and somehow they ended
up at Gatsby's door. Once there they were introduced by somebody who knew
Gatsby, and after that they conducted themselves according to the rules of
behavior associated with amusement parks. Sometimes they came and went
without having met Gatsby at all, came for the party with a simplicity of
heart that was its own ticket of admission. I had been actually invited. A
chauffeur in a uniform of robin's-egg blue crossed my lawn early that
Saturday morning with a surprisingly formal note from his employer: the
honor would be entirely Gatsby's, it said, if I would attend his "little
party." that night. He had seen me several times, and had intended to call
on me long before, but a peculiar combination of circumstances had prevented
it--signed Jay Gatsby, in a majestic hand. Dressed up in white flannels I
went over to his lawn a little after seven, and wandered around rather ill
at ease among swirls and eddies of people I didn't know--though here and
there was a face I had noticed on the commuting train. I was immediately
struck by the number of young Englishmen dotted about; all well dressed, all
looking a little hungry, and all talking in low, earnest voices to solid and
prosperous Americans. I was sure that they were selling something: bonds or
insurance or automobiles. They were at least agonizingly aware of the easy
money in the vicinity and convinced that it was theirs for a few words in
the right key. As soon as I arrived I made an attempt to find my host, but
the two or three people of whom I asked his whereabouts stared at me in such
an amazed way, and denied so vehemently any knowledge of his movements, that
I slunk off in the direction of the cocktail table--the only place in the
garden where a single man could linger without looking purposeless and
alone. I was on my way to get roaring drunk from sheer embarrassment when
Jordan Baker came out of the house and stood at the head of the marble
steps, leaning a little backward and looking with contemptuous interest down
into the garden. Welcome or not, I found it necessary to attach myself to
some one before I should begin to address cordial remarks to the passers-by.
"Hello!" I roared, advancing toward her. My voice seemed unnaturally loud
across the garden. "I thought you might be here," she responded absently as
I came up. "I remembered you lived next door to----" She held my hand
impersonally, as a promise that she'd take care of me in a minute, and gave
ear to two girls in twin yellow dresses, who stopped at the foot of the
steps. "Hello!" they cried together. "Sorry you didn't win." That was for
the golf tournament. She had lost in the finals the week before. "You don't
know who we are," said one of the girls in yellow, "but we met you here
about a month ago." "You've dyed your hair since then," remarked Jordan, and
I started, but the girls had moved casually on and her remark was addressed
to the premature moon, produced like the supper, no doubt, out of a
caterer's basket. With Jordan's slender golden arm resting in mine, we
descended the steps and sauntered about the garden. A tray of cocktails
floated at us through the twilight, and we sat down at a table with the two
girls in yellow and three men, each one introduced to us as Mr. Mumble. "Do
you come to these parties often?" inquired Jordan of the girl beside her.
"The last one was the one I met you at," answered the girl, in an alert
confident voice. She turned to her companion: "Wasn't it for you, Lucille?"
It was for Lucille, too. "I like to come," Lucille said. "I never care what
I do, so I always have a good time. When I was here last I tore my gown on a
chair, and he asked me my name and address--inside of a week I got a package
from Croirier's with a new evening gown in it." "Did you keep it?" asked
Jordan. "Sure I did. I was going to wear it to-night, but it was too big in
the bust and had to be altered. It was gas blue with lavender beads. Two
hundred and sixty-five dollars." "There's something funny about a fellow
that'll do a thing like that," said the other girl eagerly. "He doesn't want
any trouble with ANYbody." "Who doesn't?" I inquired. "Gatsby. Somebody told
me----" The two girls and Jordan leaned together confidentially. "Somebody
told me they thought he killed a man once." A thrill passed over all of us.
The three Mr. Mumbles bent forward and listened eagerly. "I don't think it's
so much THAT," argued Lucille sceptically; "it's more that he was a German
spy during the war." One of the men nodded in confirmation. "I heard that
from a man who knew all about him, grew up with him in Germany," he assured
us positively. "Oh, no," said the first girl, "it couldn't be that, because
he was in the American army during the war." As our credulity switched back
to her she leaned forward with enthusiasm. "You look at him sometimes when
he thinks nobody's looking at him. I'll bet he killed a man." She narrowed
her eyes and shivered. Lucille shivered. We all turned and looked around for
Gatsby. It was testimony to the romantic speculation he inspired that there
were whispers about him from those who found little that it was necessary to
whisper about in this world. The first supper--there would be another one
after midnight--was now being served, and Jordan invited me to join her own
party, who were spread around a table on the other side of the garden. There
were three married couples and Jordan's escort, a persistent undergraduate
given to violent innuendo, and obviously under the impression that sooner or
later Jordan was going to yield him up her person to a greater or lesser
degree. Instead of rambling, this party had preserved a dignified
homogeneity, and assumed to itself the function of representing the staid
nobility of the country-side--East Egg condescending to West Egg, and
carefully on guard against its spectroscopic gayety. "Let's get out,"
whispered Jordan, after a somehow wasteful and inappropriate half-hour.
"This is much too polite for me." We got up, and she explained that we were
going to find the host: I had never met him, she said, and it was making me
uneasy. The undergraduate nodded in a cynical, melancholy way. The bar,
where we glanced first, was crowded, but Gatsby was not there. She couldn't
find him from the top of the steps, and he wasn't on the veranda. On a
chance we tried an important-looking door, and walked into a high Gothic
library, panelled with carved English oak, and probably transported complete
from some ruin overseas. A stout, middle-aged man, with enormous owl-eyed
spectacles, was sitting somewhat drunk on the edge of a great table, staring
with unsteady concentration at the shelves of books. As we entered he
wheeled excitedly around and examined Jordan from head to foot. "What do you
think?" he demanded impetuously. "About what?" He waved his hand toward the
book-shelves. "About that. As a matter of fact you needn't bother to
ascertain. I ascertained. They're real." "The books?" He nodded. "Absolutely
real--have pages and everything. I thought they'd be a nice durable
cardboard. Matter of fact, they're absolutely real. Pages and--Here! Lemme
show you." Taking our scepticism for granted, he rushed to the bookcases and
returned with Volume One of the "Stoddard Lectures." "See!" he cried
triumphantly. "It's a bona-fide piece of printed matter. It fooled me. This
fella's a regular Belasco. It's a triumph. What thoroughness! What realism!
Knew when to stop, too--didn't cut the pages. But what do you want? What do
you expect?" He snatched the book from me and replaced it hastily on its
shelf, muttering that if one brick was removed the whole library was liable
to collapse. "Who brought you?" he demanded. "Or did you just come? I was
brought. Most people were brought." Jordan looked at him alertly,
cheerfully, without answering. "I was brought by a woman named Roosevelt,"
he continued. "Mrs. Claud Roosevelt. Do you know her? I met her somewhere
last night. I've been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might
sober me up to sit in a library." "Has it?" "A little bit, I think. I can't
tell yet. I've only been here an hour. Did I tell you about the books?
They're real. They're----" "You told us." We shook hands with him gravely
and went back outdoors. There was dancing now on the canvas in the garden;
old men pushing young girls backward in eternal graceless circles, superior
couples holding each other tortuously, fashionably, and keeping in the
corners--and a great number of single girls dancing individualistically or
relieving the orchestra for a moment of the burden of the banjo or the
traps. By midnight the hilarity had increased. A celebrated tenor had sung
in Italian, and a notorious contralto had sung in jazz, and between the
numbers people were doing "stunts." all over the garden, while happy,
vacuous bursts of laughter rose toward the summer sky. A pair of stage
twins, who turned out to be the girls in yellow, did a baby act in costume,
and champagne was served in glasses bigger than finger-bowls. The moon had
risen higher, and floating in the Sound was a triangle of silver scales,
trembling a little to the stiff, tinny drip of the banjoes on the lawn. I
was still with Jordan Baker. We were sitting at a table with a man of about
my age and a rowdy little girl, who gave way upon the slightest provocation
to uncontrollable laughter. I was enjoying myself now. I had taken two
finger-bowls of champagne, and the scene had changed before my eyes into
something significant, elemental, and profound. At a lull in the
entertainment the man looked at me and smiled. "Your face is familiar," he
said, politely. "Weren't you in the Third Division during the war?" "Why,
yes. I was in the Ninth Machine-gun Battalion." "I was in the Seventh
Infantry until June nineteen-eighteen. I knew I'd seen you somewhere
before." We talked for a moment about some wet, gray little villages in
France. Evidently he lived in this vicinity, for he told me that he had just
bought a hydroplane, and was going to try it out in the morning. "Want to go
with me, old sport? Just near the shore along the Sound." "What time?" "Any
time that suits you best." It was on the tip of my tongue to ask his name
when Jordan looked around and smiled. "Having a gay time now?" she inquired.
"Much better." I turned again to my new acquaintance. "This is an unusual
party for me. I haven't even seen the host. I live over there----" I waved
my hand at the invisible hedge in the distance, "and this man Gatsby sent
over his chauffeur with an invitation." For a moment he looked at me as if
he failed to understand. "I'm Gatsby," he said suddenly. "What!" I
exclaimed. "Oh, I beg your pardon." "I thought you knew, old sport. I'm
afraid I'm not a very good host." He smiled understandingly--much more than
understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal
reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It
faced--or seemed to face--the whole external world for an instant, and then
concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It
understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you
as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had
precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.
Precisely at that point it vanished--and I was looking at an elegant young
rough-neck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech
just missed being absurd. Some time before he introduced himself I'd got a
strong impression that he was picking his words with care. Almost at the
moment when Mr. Gatsby identified himself, a butler hurried toward him with
the information that Chicago was calling him on the wire. He excused himself
with a small bow that included each of us in turn. "If you want anything
just ask for it, old sport," he urged me. "Excuse me. I will rejoin you
later." When he was gone I turned immediately to Jordan--constrained to
assure her of my surprise. I had expected that Mr. Gatsby would be a florid
and corpulent person in his middle years. "Who is he?" I demanded. "Do you
know?" "He's just a man named Gatsby." "Where is he from, I mean? And what
does he do?" "Now YOU'RE started on the subject," she answered with a wan
smile. "Well, he told me once he was an Oxford man." A dim background
started to take shape behind him, but at her next remark it faded away.
"However, I don't believe it." "Why not?" "I don't know," she insisted, "I
just don't think he went there." Something in her tone reminded me of the
other girl's "I think he killed a man," and had the effect of stimulating my
curiosity. I would have accepted without question the information that
Gatsby sprang from the swamps of Louisiana or from the lower East Side of
New York. That was comprehensible. But young men didn't--at least in my
provincial inexperience I believed they didn't--drift coolly out of nowhere
and buy a palace on Long Island Sound. "Anyhow, he gives large parties,"
said Jordan, changing the subject with an urbane distaste for the concrete.
"And I like large parties. They're so intimate. At small parties there isn't
any privacy." There was the boom of a bass drum, and the voice of the
orchestra leader rang out suddenly above the echolalia of the garden.
"Ladies and gentlemen," he cried. "At the request of Mr. Gatsby we are going
to play for you Mr. Vladimir Tostoff's latest work, which attracted so much
attention at Carnegie Hall last May. If you read the papers, you know there
was a big sensation." He smiled with jovial condescension, and added: "Some
sensation!" Whereupon everybody laughed. "The piece is known," he concluded
lustily, "as Vladimir Tostoff's JAZZ HISTORY OF THE WORLD." The nature of
Mr. Tostoff's composition eluded me, because just as it began my eyes fell
on Gatsby, standing alone on the marble steps and looking from one group to
another with approving eyes. His tanned skin was drawn attractively tight on
his face and his short hair looked as though it were trimmed every day. I
could see nothing sinister about him. I wondered if the fact that he was not
drinking helped to set him off from his guests, for it seemed to me that he
grew more correct as the fraternal hilarity increased. When the JAZZ HISTORY
OF THE WORLD was over, girls were putting their heads on men's shoulders in
a puppyish, convivial way, girls were swooning backward playfully into men's
arms, even into groups, knowing that some one would arrest their falls--but
no one swooned backward on Gatsby, and no French bob touched Gatsby's
shoulder, and no singing quartets were formed with Gatsby's head for one
link. "I beg your pardon." Gatsby's butler was suddenly standing beside us.
"Miss Baker?" he inquired. "I beg your pardon, but Mr. Gatsby would like to
speak to you alone." "With me?" she exclaimed in surprise. "Yes, madame."
She got up slowly, raising her eyebrows at me in astonishment, and followed
the butler toward the house. I noticed that she wore her evening-dress, all
her dresses, like sports clothes--there was a jauntiness about her movements
as if she had first learned to walk upon golf courses on clean, crisp
mornings. I was alone and it was almost two. For some time confused and
intriguing sounds had issued from a long, many-windowed room which overhung
the terrace. Eluding Jordan's undergraduate, who was now engaged in an
obstetrical conversation with two chorus girls, and who implored me to join
him, I went inside. The large room was full of people. One of the girls in
yellow was playing the piano, and beside her stood a tall, red-haired young
lady from a famous chorus, engaged in song. She had drunk a quantity of
champagne, and during the course of her song she had decided, ineptly, that
everything was very, very sad--she was not only singing, she was weeping
too. Whenever there was a pause in the song she filled it with gasping,
broken sobs, and then took up the lyric again in a quavering soprano. The
tears coursed down her cheeks--not freely, however, for when they came into
contact with her heavily beaded eyelashes they assumed an inky color, and
pursued the rest of their way in slow black rivulets. A humorous suggestion
was made that she sing the notes on her face, whereupon she threw up her
hands, sank into a chair, and went off into a deep vinous sleep. "She had a
fight with a man who says he's her husband," explained a girl at my elbow. I
looked around. Most of the remaining women were now having fights with men
said to be their husbands. Even Jordan's party, the quartet from East Egg,
were rent asunder by dissension. One of the men was talking with curious
intensity to a young actress, and his wife, after attempting to laugh at the
situation in a dignified and indifferent way, broke down entirely and
resorted to flank attacks--at intervals she appeared suddenly at his side
like an angry diamond, and hissed: "You promised!" into his ear. The
reluctance to go home was not confined to wayward men. The hall was at
present occupied by two deplorably sober men and their highly indignant
wives. The wives were sympathizing with each other in slightly raised
voices. "Whenever he sees I'm having a good time he wants to go home."
"Never heard anything so selfish in my life." "We're always the first ones
to leave." "So are we." "Well, we're almost the last to-night," said one of
the men sheepishly. "The orchestra left half an hour ago." In spite of the
wives' agreement that such malevolence was beyond credibility, the dispute
ended in a short struggle, and both wives were lifted, kicking, into the
night. As I waited for my hat in the hall the door of the library opened and
Jordan Baker and Gatsby came out together. He was saying some last word to
her, but the eagerness in his manner tightened abruptly into formality as
several people approached him to say good-bye. Jordan's party were calling
impatiently to her from the porch, but she lingered for a moment to shake
hands. "I've just heard the most amazing thing," she whispered. "How long
were we in there?" "Why, about an hour." "It was--simply amazing," she
repeated abstractedly. "But I swore I wouldn't tell it and here I am
tantalizing you." She yawned gracefully in my face: "Please come and see me.
. . . Phone book . . . Under the name of Mrs. Sigourney Howard . . . My aunt
. . ." She was hurrying off as she talked--her brown hand waved a jaunty
salute as she melted into her party at the door. Rather ashamed that on my
first appearance I had stayed so late, I joined the last of Gatsby's guests,
who were clustered around him. I wanted to explain that I'd hunted for him
early in the evening and to apologize for not having known him in the
garden. "Don't mention it," he enjoined me eagerly. "Don't give it another
thought, old sport." The familiar expression held no more familiarity than
the hand which reassuringly brushed my shoulder. "And don't forget we're
going up in the hydroplane to-morrow morning, at nine o'clock." Then the
butler, behind his shoulder: "Philadelphia wants you on the 'phone, sir."
"All right, in a minute. Tell them I'll be right there. . . . good night."
"Good night." "Good night." He smiled--and suddenly there seemed to be a
pleasant significance in having been among the last to go, as if he had
desired it all the time. "Good night, old sport. . . . good night." But as I
walked down the steps I saw that the evening was not quite over. Fifty feet
from the door a dozen headlights illuminated a bizarre and tumultuous scene.
In the ditch beside the road, right side up, but violently shorn of one
wheel, rested a new coupe which had left Gatsby's drive not two minutes
before. The sharp jut of a wall accounted for the detachment of the wheel,
which was now getting considerable attention from half a dozen curious
chauffeurs. However, as they had left their cars blocking the road, a harsh,
discordant din from those in the rear had been audible for some time, and
added to the already violent confusion of the scene. A man in a long duster
had dismounted from the wreck and now stood in the middle of the road,
looking from the car to the tire and from the tire to the observers in a
pleasant, puzzled way. "See!" he explained. "It went in the ditch." The fact
was infinitely astonishing to him, and I recognized first the unusual
quality of wonder, and then the man--it was the late patron of Gatsby's
library. "How'd it happen?" He shrugged his shoulders. "I know nothing
whatever about mechanics," he said decisively. "But how did it happen? Did
you run into the wall?" "Don't ask me," said Owl Eyes, washing his hands of
the whole matter. "I know very little about driving--next to nothing. It
happened, and that's all I know." "Well, if you're a poor driver you
oughtn't to try driving at night." "But I wasn't even trying," he explained
indignantly, "I wasn't even trying." An awed hush fell upon the bystanders.
"Do you want to commit suicide?" "You're lucky it was just a wheel! A bad
driver and not even TRYing!" "You don't understand," explained the criminal.
"I wasn't driving. There's another man in the car." The shock that followed
this declaration found voice in a sustained "Ah-h-h!" as the door of the
coupe swung slowly open. The crowd--it was now a crowd--stepped back
involuntarily, and when the door had opened wide there was a ghostly pause.
Then, very gradually, part by part, a pale, dangling individual stepped out
of the wreck, pawing tentatively at the ground with a large uncertain
dancing shoe. Blinded by the glare of the headlights and confused by the
incessant groaning of the horns, the apparition stood swaying for a moment
before he perceived the man in the duster. "Wha's matter?" he inquired
calmly. "Did we run outa gas?" "Look!" Half a dozen fingers pointed at the
amputated wheel--he stared at it for a moment, and then looked upward as
though he suspected that it had dropped from the sky. "It came off," some
one explained. He nodded. "At first I din' notice we'd stopped." A pause.
Then, taking a long breath and straightening his shoulders, he remarked in a
determined voice: "Wonder'ff tell me where there's a gas'line station?" At
least a dozen men, some of them little better off than he was, explained to
him that wheel and car were no longer joined by any physical bond. "Back
out," he suggested after a moment. "Put her in reverse." "But the WHEEL'S
off!" He hesitated. "No harm in trying," he said. The caterwauling horns had
reached a crescendo and I turned away and cut across the lawn toward home. I
glanced back once. A wafer of a moon was shining over Gatsby's house, making
the night fine as before, and surviving the laughter and the sound of his
still glowing garden. A sudden emptiness seemed to flow now from the windows
and the great doors, endowing with complete isolation the figure of the
host, who stood on the porch, his hand up in a formal gesture of farewell.
Reading over what I have written so far, I see I have given the impression
that the events of three nights several weeks apart were all that absorbed
me. On the contrary, they were merely casual events in a crowded summer,
and, until much later, they absorbed me infinitely less than my personal
affairs. Most of the time I worked. In the early morning the sun threw my
shadow westward as I hurried down the white chasms of lower New York to the
Probity Trust. I knew the other clerks and young bond-salesmen by their
first names, and lunched with them in dark, crowded restaurants on little
pig sausages and mashed potatoes and coffee. I even had a short affair with
a girl who lived in Jersey City and worked in the accounting department, but
her brother began throwing mean looks in my direction, so when she went on
her vacation in July I let it blow quietly away. I took dinner usually at
the Yale Club--for some reason it was the gloomiest event of my day--and
then I went up-stairs to the library and studied investments and securities
for a conscientious hour. There were generally a few rioters around, but
they never came into the library, so it was a good place to work. After
that, if the night was mellow, I strolled down Madison Avenue past the old
Murray Hill Hotel, and over 33rd Street to the Pennsylvania Station. I began
to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night, and the
satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives
to the restless eye. I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic
women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter
into their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove. Sometimes, in my
mind, I followed them to their apartments on the corners of hidden streets,
and they turned and smiled back at me before they faded through a door into
warm darkness. At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting
loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--poor young clerks who loitered
in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant
dinner--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night
and life. Again at eight o'clock, when the dark lanes of the Forties were
five deep with throbbing taxi-cabs, bound for the theatre district, I felt a
sinking in my heart. Forms leaned together in the taxis as they waited, and
voices sang, and there was laughter from unheard jokes, and lighted
cigarettes outlined unintelligible 70 gestures inside. Imagining that I,
too, was hurrying toward gayety and sharing their intimate excitement, I
wished them well. For a while I lost sight of Jordan Baker, and then in
midsummer I found her again. At first I was flattered to go places with her,
because she was a golf champion, and every one knew her name. Then it was
something more. I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender
curiosity. The bored haughty face that she turned to the world concealed
something--most affectations conceal something eventually, even though they
don't in the beginning--and one day I found what it was. When we were on a
house-party together up in Warwick, she left a borrowed car out in the rain
with the top down, and then lied about it--and suddenly I remembered the
story about her that had eluded me that night at Daisy's. At her first big
golf tournament there was a row that nearly reached the newspapers--a
suggestion that she had moved her ball from a bad lie in the semi-final
round. The thing approached the proportions of a scandal--then died away. A
caddy retracted his statement, and the only other witness admitted that he
might have been mistaken. The incident and the name had remained together in
my mind. Jordan Baker instinctively avoided clever, shrewd men, and now I
saw that this was because she felt safer on a plane where any divergence
from a code would be thought impossible. She was incurably dishonest. She
wasn't able to endure being at a disadvantage and, given this unwillingness,
I suppose she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she was very young in
order to keep that cool, insolent smile turned to the world and yet satisfy
the demands of her hard, jaunty body. It made no difference to me.
Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply--I was casually
sorry, and then I forgot. It was on that same house party that we had a
curious conversation about driving a car. It started because she passed so
close to some workmen that our fender flicked a button on one man's coat.
"You're a rotten driver," I protested. "Either you ought to be more careful,
or you oughtn't to drive at all." "I am careful." "No, you're not." "Well,
other people are," she said lightly. "What's that got to do with it?"
"They'll keep out of my way," she insisted. "It takes two to make an
accident." "Suppose you met somebody just as careless as yourself." "I hope
I never will," she answered. "I hate careless people. That's why I like
you." Her gray, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had
deliberately shifted our relations, and for a moment I thought I loved her.
But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my
desires, and I knew that first I had to get myself definitely out of that
tangle back home. I'd been writing letters once a week and signing them:
"Love, Nick," and all I could think of was how, when that certain girl
played tennis, a faint mustache of perspiration appeared on her upper lip.
below. He had just shaved, for there was a white spot of lather on his
cheekbone, and he was most respectful in his greeting to every one in the
room. He informed me that he was in the "artistic game," and I gathered
later that he was a photographer and had made the dim enlargement of Mrs.
Wilson's mother which hovered like an ectoplasm on the wall. His wife was
shrill, languid, handsome, and horrible. She told me with pride that her
husband had photographed her a hundred and twenty-seven times since they had
been married. Mrs. Wilson had changed her costume some time before, and was
now attired in an elaborate afternoon dress of cream-colored chiffon, which
gave out a continual rustle as she swept about the room. With the influence
of the dress her personality had also undergone a change. The intense
vitality that had been so remarkable in the garage was converted into
impressive hauteur. Her laughter, her gestures, her assertions became more
violently affected moment by moment, and as she expanded the room grew
smaller around her, until she seemed to be revolving on a noisy, creaking
pivot through the smoky air. "My dear," she told her sister in a high,
mincing shout, "most of these fellas will cheat you every time. All they
think of is money. I had a woman up here last week to look at my feet, and
when she gave me the bill you'd of thought she had my appendicitis out."
"What was the name of the woman?" asked Mrs. McKee. "Mrs. Eberhardt. She
goes around looking at people's feet in their own homes." "I like your
dress," remarked Mrs. McKee, "I think it's adorable." Mrs. Wilson rejected
the compliment by raising her eyebrow in disdain. "It's just a crazy old
thing," she said. "I just slip it on sometimes when I don't care what I look
like." "But it looks wonderful on you, if you know what I mean," pursued
Mrs. McKee. "If Chester could only get you in that pose I think he could
make something of it." We all looked in silence at Mrs. Wilson, who removed
a strand of hair from over her eyes and looked back at us with a brilliant
smile. Mr. McKee regarded her intently with his head on one side, and then
moved his hand back and forth slowly in front of his face. "I should change
the light," he said after a moment. "I'd like to bring out the modelling of
the features. And I'd try to get hold of all the back hair." "I wouldn't
think of changing the light," cried Mrs. McKee. "I think it's----" Her
husband said "SH!" and we all looked at the subject again, whereupon Tom
Buchanan yawned audibly and got to his feet. "You McKees have something to
drink," he said. "Get some more ice and mineral water, Myrtle, before
everybody goes to sleep." "I told that boy about the ice." Myrtle raised her
eyebrows in despair at the shiftlessness of the lower orders. "These people!
You have to keep after them all the time." She looked at me and laughed
pointlessly. Then she flounced over to the dog, kissed it with ecstasy, and
swept into the kitchen, implying that a dozen chefs awaited her orders
there. "I've done some nice things out on Long Island," asserted Mr. McKee.
Tom looked at him blankly. "Two of them we have framed down-stairs." "Two
what?" demanded Tom. "Two studies. One of them I call MONTAUK POINT--THE
GULLS, and the other I call MONTAUK POINT--THE SEA." The sister Catherine
sat down beside me on the couch. "Do you live down on Long Island, too?" she
inquired. "I live at West Egg." "Really? I was down there at a party about a
month ago. At a man named Gatsby's. Do you know him?" "I live next door to
him." "Well, they say he's a nephew or a cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm's. That's
where all his money comes from." "Really?" She nodded. "I'm scared of him.
I'd hate to have him get anything on me." This absorbing information about
my neighbor was interrupted by Mrs. McKee's pointing suddenly at Catherine:
"Chester, I think you could do something with HER," she broke out, but Mr.
McKee only nodded in a bored way, and turned his attention to Tom. "I'd like
to do more work on Long Island, if I could get the entry. All I ask is that
they should give me a start." "Ask Myrtle," said Tom, breaking into a short
shout of laughter as Mrs. Wilson entered with a tray. "She'll give you a
letter of introduction, won't you Myrtle?" "Do what?" she asked, startled.
"You'll give McKee a letter of introduction to your husband, so he can do
some studies of him." His lips moved silently for a moment as he invented.
"GEORGE B. WILSON AT THE GASOLINE PUMP, or something like that." Catherine
leaned close to me and whispered in my ear: "Neither of them can stand the
person they're married to." "Can't they?" "Can't STAND them." She looked at
Myrtle and then at Tom. "What I say is, why go on living with them if they
can't stand them? If I was them I'd get a divorce and get married to each
other right away." "Doesn't she like Wilson either?" The answer to this was
unexpected. It came from Myrtle, who had overheard the question, and it was
violent and obscene. "You see," cried Catherine triumphantly. She lowered
her voice again. "It's really his wife that's keeping them apart. She's a
Catholic, and they don't believe in divorce." Daisy was not a Catholic, and
I was a little shocked at the elaborateness of the lie. "When they do get
married," continued Catherine, "they're going West to live for a while until
it blows over." "It'd be more discreet to go to Europe." "Oh, do you like
Europe?" she exclaimed surprisingly. "I just got back from Monte Carlo."
"Really." "Just last year. I went over there with another girl." "Stay
long?" "No, we just went to Monte Carlo and back. We went by way of
Marseilles. We had over twelve hundred dollars when we started, but we got
gypped out of it all in two days in the private rooms. We had an awful time
getting back, I can tell you. God, how I hated that town!" The late
afternoon sky bloomed in the window for a moment like the blue honey of the
Mediterranean--then the shrill voice of Mrs. McKee called me back into the
room. "I almost made a mistake, too," she declared vigorously. "I almost
married a little kyke who'd been after me for years. I knew he was below me.
Everybody kept saying to me: 'Lucille, that man's 'way below you!' But if I
hadn't met Chester, he'd of got me sure." "Yes, but listen," said Myrtle
Wilson, nodding her head up and down, "at least you didn't marry him." "I
know I didn't." "Well, I married him," said Myrtle, ambiguously. "And that's
the difference between your case and mine." "Why did you, Myrtle?" demanded
Catherine. "Nobody forced you to." Myrtle considered. "I married him because
I thought he was a gentleman," she said finally. "I thought he knew
something about breeding, but he wasn't fit to lick my shoe." "You were
crazy about him for a while," said Catherine. "Crazy about him!" cried
Myrtle incredulously. "Who said I was crazy about him? I never was any more
crazy about him than I was about that man there." She pointed suddenly at
me, and every one looked at me accusingly. I tried to show by my expression
that I had played no part in her past. "The only CRAZY I was was when I
married him. I knew right away I made a mistake. He borrowed somebody's best
suit to get married in, and never even told me about it, and the man came
after it one day when he was out. 'oh, is that your suit?' I said. 'this is
the first I ever heard about it.' But I gave it to him and then I lay down
and cried to beat the band all afternoon." "She really ought to get away
from him," resumed Catherine to me. "They've been living over that garage
for eleven years. And tom's the first sweetie she ever had." The bottle of
whiskey--a second one--was now in constant demand by all present, excepting
Catherine, who "felt just as good on nothing at all." Tom rang for the
janitor and sent him for some celebrated sandwiches, which were a complete
supper in themselves. I wanted to get out and walk southward toward the park
through the soft twilight, but each time I tried to go I became entangled in
some wild, strident argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my
chair. Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have
contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the
darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within
and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible
variety of life. Myrtle pulled her chair close to mine, and suddenly her
warm breath poured over me the story of her first meeting with Tom. "It was
on the two little seats facing each other that are always the last ones left
on the train. I was going up to New York to see my sister and spend the
night. He had on a dress suit and patent leather shoes, and I couldn't keep
my eyes off him, but every time he looked at me I had to pretend to be
looking at the advertisement over his head. When we came into the station he
was next to me, and his white shirt-front pressed against my arm, and so I
told him I'd have to call a policeman, but he knew I lied. I was so excited
that when I got into a taxi with him I didn't hardly know I wasn't getting
into a subway train. All I kept thinking about, over and over, was 'You
can't live forever; you can't live forever.'" She turned to Mrs. McKee and
the room rang full of her artificial laughter. "My dear," she cried, "I'm
going to give you this dress as soon as I'm through with it. I've got to get
another one to-morrow. I'm going to make a list of all the things I've got
to get. A massage and a wave, and a collar for the dog, and one of those
cute little ash-trays where you touch a spring, and a wreath with a black
silk bow for mother's grave that'll last all summer. I got to write down a
list so I won't forget all the things I got to do." It was nine
o'clock--almost immediately afterward I looked at my watch and found it was
ten. Mr. McKee was asleep on a chair with his fists clenched in his lap,
like a photograph of a man of action. Taking out my handkerchief I wiped
from his cheek the remains of the spot of dried lather that had worried me
all the afternoon. The little dog was sitting on the table looking with
blind eyes through the smoke, and from time to time groaning faintly. People
disappeared, reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each
other, searched for each other, found each other a few feet away. Some time
toward midnight Tom Buchanan and Mrs. Wilson stood face to face discussing,
in impassioned voices, whether Mrs. Wilson had any right to mention Daisy's
name. "Daisy! Daisy! Daisy!" shouted Mrs. Wilson. "I'll say it whenever I
want to! Daisy! Dai----" Making a short deft movement, Tom Buchanan broke
her nose with his open hand. Then there were bloody towels upon the
bath-room floor, and women's voices scolding, and high over the confusion a
long broken wail of pain. Mr. McKee awoke from his doze and started in a
daze toward the door. When he had gone half way he turned around and stared
at the scene--his wife and Catherine scolding and consoling as they stumbled
here and there among the crowded furniture with articles of aid, and the
despairing figure on the couch, bleeding fluently, and trying to spread a
copy of TOWN TATTLE. over the tapestry scenes of Versailles. Then Mr. McKee
turned and continued on out the door. Taking my hat from the chandelier, I
followed. "Come to lunch some day," he suggested, as we groaned down in the
elevator. "Where?" "Anywhere." "Keep your hands off the lever," snapped the
elevator boy. "I beg your pardon," said Mr. McKee with dignity, "I didn't
know I was touching it." "All right," I agreed, "I'll be glad to." . . . I
was standing beside his bed and he was sitting up between the sheets, clad
in his underwear, with a great portfolio in his hands. "Beauty and the Beast
. . . Loneliness . . . Old Grocery Horse . . . Brook'n Bridge . . . ." Then
I was lying half asleep in the cold lower level of the Pennsylvania Station,
staring at the morning TRIBUNE, and waiting for the four o'clock train.
Chapter 3 There was music from my neighbor's house through the summer
nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the
whisperings and the champagne and the stars. At high tide in the afternoon I
watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft, or taking the sun on
the hot sand of his beach while his two motor-boats slit the waters of the
Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of foam. On week-ends his
Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city between
nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his station wagon
scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains. And on Mondays eight
servants, including an extra gardener, toiled all day with mops and
scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden-shears, repairing the ravages of
the night before. Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived
from a fruiterer in New York--every Monday these same oranges and lemons
left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves. There was a machine in
the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an
hour if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler's thumb.
At least once a fortnight a corps of caterers came down with several hundred
feet of canvas and enough colored lights to make a Christmas tree of
Gatsby's enormous garden. On buffet tables, garnished with glistening
hors-d'oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of harlequin designs
and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold. In the main hall a bar
with a real brass rail was set up, and stocked with gins and liquors and
with cordials so long forgotten that most of his female guests were too
young to know one from another. By seven o'clock the orchestra has arrived,
no thin five-piece affair, but a whole pitful of oboes and trombones and
saxophones and viols and cornets and piccolos, and low and high drums. The
last swimmers have come in from the beach now and are dressing up-stairs;
the cars from New York are parked five deep in the drive, and already the
halls and salons and verandas are gaudy with primary colors, and hair shorn
in strange new ways, and shawls beyond the dreams of Castile. The bar is in
full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside,
until the air is alive with chatter and laughter, and casual innuendo and
introductions forgotten on the spot, and enthusiastic meetings between women
who never knew each other's names. The lights grow brighter as the earth
lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail
music, and the opera of voices pitches a key higher. Laughter is easier
minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word.
The groups change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form
in the same breath; already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave
here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous
moment the centre of a group, and then, excited with triumph, glide on
through the sea-change of faces and voices and color under the constantly
changing light. Suddenly one of the gypsies, in trembling opal, seizes a
cocktail out of the air, dumps it down for courage and, moving her hands
like Frisco, dances out alone on the canvas platform. A momentary hush; the
orchestra leader varies his rhythm obligingly for her, and there is a burst
of chatter as the erroneous news goes around that she is Gilda Gray's
understudy from the FOLLIES. The party has begun. I believe that on the
first night I went to Gatsby's house I was one of the few guests who had
actually been invited. People were not invited--they went there. They got
into automobiles which bore them out to Long Island, and somehow they ended
up at Gatsby's door. Once there they were introduced by somebody who knew
Gatsby, and after that they conducted themselves according to the rules of
behavior associated with amusement parks. Sometimes they came and went
without having met Gatsby at all, came for the party with a simplicity of
heart that was its own ticket of admission. I had been actually invited. A
chauffeur in a uniform of robin's-egg blue crossed my lawn early that
Saturday morning with a surprisingly formal note from his employer: the
honor would be entirely Gatsby's, it said, if I would attend his "little
party." that night. He had seen me several times, and had intended to call
on me long before, but a peculiar combination of circumstances had prevented
it--signed Jay Gatsby, in a majestic hand. Dressed up in white flannels I
went over to his lawn a little after seven, and wandered around rather ill
at ease among swirls and eddies of people I didn't know--though here and
there was a face I had noticed on the commuting train. I was immediately
struck by the number of young Englishmen dotted about; all well dressed, all
looking a little hungry, and all talking in low, earnest voices to solid and
prosperous Americans. I was sure that they were selling something: bonds or
insurance or automobiles. They were at least agonizingly aware of the easy
money in the vicinity and convinced that it was theirs for a few words in
the right key. As soon as I arrived I made an attempt to find my host, but
the two or three people of whom I asked his whereabouts stared at me in such
an amazed way, and denied so vehemently any knowledge of his movements, that
I slunk off in the direction of the cocktail table--the only place in the
garden where a single man could linger without looking purposeless and
alone. I was on my way to get roaring drunk from sheer embarrassment when
Jordan Baker came out of the house and stood at the head of the marble
steps, leaning a little backward and looking with contemptuous interest down
into the garden. Welcome or not, I found it necessary to attach myself to
some one before I should begin to address cordial remarks to the passers-by.
"Hello!" I roared, advancing toward her. My voice seemed unnaturally loud
across the garden. "I thought you might be here," she responded absently as
I came up. "I remembered you lived next door to----" She held my hand
impersonally, as a promise that she'd take care of me in a minute, and gave
ear to two girls in twin yellow dresses, who stopped at the foot of the
steps. "Hello!" they cried together. "Sorry you didn't win." That was for
the golf tournament. She had lost in the finals the week before. "You don't
know who we are," said one of the girls in yellow, "but we met you here
about a month ago." "You've dyed your hair since then," remarked Jordan, and
I started, but the girls had moved casually on and her remark was addressed
to the premature moon, produced like the supper, no doubt, out of a
caterer's basket. With Jordan's slender golden arm resting in mine, we
descended the steps and sauntered about the garden. A tray of cocktails
floated at us through the twilight, and we sat down at a table with the two
girls in yellow and three men, each one introduced to us as Mr. Mumble. "Do
you come to these parties often?" inquired Jordan of the girl beside her.
"The last one was the one I met you at," answered the girl, in an alert
confident voice. She turned to her companion: "Wasn't it for you, Lucille?"
It was for Lucille, too. "I like to come," Lucille said. "I never care what
I do, so I always have a good time. When I was here last I tore my gown on a
chair, and he asked me my name and address--inside of a week I got a package
from Croirier's with a new evening gown in it." "Did you keep it?" asked
Jordan. "Sure I did. I was going to wear it to-night, but it was too big in
the bust and had to be altered. It was gas blue with lavender beads. Two
hundred and sixty-five dollars." "There's something funny about a fellow
that'll do a thing like that," said the other girl eagerly. "He doesn't want
any trouble with ANYbody." "Who doesn't?" I inquired. "Gatsby. Somebody told
me----" The two girls and Jordan leaned together confidentially. "Somebody
told me they thought he killed a man once." A thrill passed over all of us.
The three Mr. Mumbles bent forward and listened eagerly. "I don't think it's
so much THAT," argued Lucille sceptically; "it's more that he was a German
spy during the war." One of the men nodded in confirmation. "I heard that
from a man who knew all about him, grew up with him in Germany," he assured
us positively. "Oh, no," said the first girl, "it couldn't be that, because
he was in the American army during the war." As our credulity switched back
to her she leaned forward with enthusiasm. "You look at him sometimes when
he thinks nobody's looking at him. I'll bet he killed a man." She narrowed
her eyes and shivered. Lucille shivered. We all turned and looked around for
Gatsby. It was testimony to the romantic speculation he inspired that there
were whispers about him from those who found little that it was necessary to
whisper about in this world. The first supper--there would be another one
after midnight--was now being served, and Jordan invited me to join her own
party, who were spread around a table on the other side of the garden. There
were three married couples and Jordan's escort, a persistent undergraduate
given to violent innuendo, and obviously under the impression that sooner or
later Jordan was going to yield him up her person to a greater or lesser
degree. Instead of rambling, this party had preserved a dignified
homogeneity, and assumed to itself the function of representing the staid
nobility of the country-side--East Egg condescending to West Egg, and
carefully on guard against its spectroscopic gayety. "Let's get out,"
whispered Jordan, after a somehow wasteful and inappropriate half-hour.
"This is much too polite for me." We got up, and she explained that we were
going to find the host: I had never met him, she said, and it was making me
uneasy. The undergraduate nodded in a cynical, melancholy way. The bar,
where we glanced first, was crowded, but Gatsby was not there. She couldn't
find him from the top of the steps, and he wasn't on the veranda. On a
chance we tried an important-looking door, and walked into a high Gothic
library, panelled with carved English oak, and probably transported complete
from some ruin overseas. A stout, middle-aged man, with enormous owl-eyed
spectacles, was sitting somewhat drunk on the edge of a great table, staring
with unsteady concentration at the shelves of books. As we entered he
wheeled excitedly around and examined Jordan from head to foot. "What do you
think?" he demanded impetuously. "About what?" He waved his hand toward the
book-shelves. "About that. As a matter of fact you needn't bother to
ascertain. I ascertained. They're real." "The books?" He nodded. "Absolutely
real--have pages and everything. I thought they'd be a nice durable
cardboard. Matter of fact, they're absolutely real. Pages and--Here! Lemme
show you." Taking our scepticism for granted, he rushed to the bookcases and
returned with Volume One of the "Stoddard Lectures." "See!" he cried
triumphantly. "It's a bona-fide piece of printed matter. It fooled me. This
fella's a regular Belasco. It's a triumph. What thoroughness! What realism!
Knew when to stop, too--didn't cut the pages. But what do you want? What do
you expect?" He snatched the book from me and replaced it hastily on its
shelf, muttering that if one brick was removed the whole library was liable
to collapse. "Who brought you?" he demanded. "Or did you just come? I was
brought. Most people were brought." Jordan looked at him alertly,
cheerfully, without answering. "I was brought by a woman named Roosevelt,"
he continued. "Mrs. Claud Roosevelt. Do you know her? I met her somewhere
last night. I've been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might
sober me up to sit in a library." "Has it?" "A little bit, I think. I can't
tell yet. I've only been here an hour. Did I tell you about the books?
They're real. They're----" "You told us." We shook hands with him gravely
and went back outdoors. There was dancing now on the canvas in the garden;
old men pushing young girls backward in eternal graceless circles, superior
couples holding each other tortuously, fashionably, and keeping in the
corners--and a great number of single girls dancing individualistically or
relieving the orchestra for a moment of the burden of the banjo or the
traps. By midnight the hilarity had increased. A celebrated tenor had sung
in Italian, and a notorious contralto had sung in jazz, and between the
numbers people were doing "stunts." all over the garden, while happy,
vacuous bursts of laughter rose toward the summer sky. A pair of stage
twins, who turned out to be the girls in yellow, did a baby act in costume,
and champagne was served in glasses bigger than finger-bowls. The moon had
risen higher, and floating in the Sound was a triangle of silver scales,
trembling a little to the stiff, tinny drip of the banjoes on the lawn. I
was still with Jordan Baker. We were sitting at a table with a man of about
my age and a rowdy little girl, who gave way upon the slightest provocation
to uncontrollable laughter. I was enjoying myself now. I had taken two
finger-bowls of champagne, and the scene had changed before my eyes into
something significant, elemental, and profound. At a lull in the
entertainment the man looked at me and smiled. "Your face is familiar," he
said, politely. "Weren't you in the Third Division during the war?" "Why,
yes. I was in the Ninth Machine-gun Battalion." "I was in the Seventh
Infantry until June nineteen-eighteen. I knew I'd seen you somewhere
before." We talked for a moment about some wet, gray little villages in
France. Evidently he lived in this vicinity, for he told me that he had just
bought a hydroplane, and was going to try it out in the morning. "Want to go
with me, old sport? Just near the shore along the Sound." "What time?" "Any
time that suits you best." It was on the tip of my tongue to ask his name
when Jordan looked around and smiled. "Having a gay time now?" she inquired.
"Much better." I turned again to my new acquaintance. "This is an unusual
party for me. I haven't even seen the host. I live over there----" I waved
my hand at the invisible hedge in the distance, "and this man Gatsby sent
over his chauffeur with an invitation." For a moment he looked at me as if
he failed to understand. "I'm Gatsby," he said suddenly. "What!" I
exclaimed. "Oh, I beg your pardon." "I thought you knew, old sport. I'm
afraid I'm not a very good host." He smiled understandingly--much more than
understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal
reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It
faced--or seemed to face--the whole external world for an instant, and then
concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It
understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you
as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had
precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.
Precisely at that point it vanished--and I was looking at an elegant young
rough-neck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech
just missed being absurd. Some time before he introduced himself I'd got a
strong impression that he was picking his words with care. Almost at the
moment when Mr. Gatsby identified himself, a butler hurried toward him with
the information that Chicago was calling him on the wire. He excused himself
with a small bow that included each of us in turn. "If you want anything
just ask for it, old sport," he urged me. "Excuse me. I will rejoin you
later." When he was gone I turned immediately to Jordan--constrained to
assure her of my surprise. I had expected that Mr. Gatsby would be a florid
and corpulent person in his middle years. "Who is he?" I demanded. "Do you
know?" "He's just a man named Gatsby." "Where is he from, I mean? And what
does he do?" "Now YOU'RE started on the subject," she answered with a wan
smile. "Well, he told me once he was an Oxford man." A dim background
started to take shape behind him, but at her next remark it faded away.
"However, I don't believe it." "Why not?" "I don't know," she insisted, "I
just don't think he went there." Something in her tone reminded me of the
other girl's "I think he killed a man," and had the effect of stimulating my
curiosity. I would have accepted without question the information that
Gatsby sprang from the swamps of Louisiana or from the lower East Side of
New York. That was comprehensible. But young men didn't--at least in my
provincial inexperience I believed they didn't--drift coolly out of nowhere
and buy a palace on Long Island Sound. "Anyhow, he gives large parties,"
said Jordan, changing the subject with an urbane distaste for the concrete.
"And I like large parties. They're so intimate. At small parties there isn't
any privacy." There was the boom of a bass drum, and the voice of the
orchestra leader rang out suddenly above the echolalia of the garden.
"Ladies and gentlemen," he cried. "At the request of Mr. Gatsby we are going
to play for you Mr. Vladimir Tostoff's latest work, which attracted so much
attention at Carnegie Hall last May. If you read the papers, you know there
was a big sensation." He smiled with jovial condescension, and added: "Some
sensation!" Whereupon everybody laughed. "The piece is known," he concluded
lustily, "as Vladimir Tostoff's JAZZ HISTORY OF THE WORLD." The nature of
Mr. Tostoff's composition eluded me, because just as it began my eyes fell
on Gatsby, standing alone on the marble steps and looking from one group to
another with approving eyes. His tanned skin was drawn attractively tight on
his face and his short hair looked as though it were trimmed every day. I
could see nothing sinister about him. I wondered if the fact that he was not
drinking helped to set him off from his guests, for it seemed to me that he
grew more correct as the fraternal hilarity increased. When the JAZZ HISTORY
OF THE WORLD was over, girls were putting their heads on men's shoulders in
a puppyish, convivial way, girls were swooning backward playfully into men's
arms, even into groups, knowing that some one would arrest their falls--but
no one swooned backward on Gatsby, and no French bob touched Gatsby's
shoulder, and no singing quartets were formed with Gatsby's head for one
link. "I beg your pardon." Gatsby's butler was suddenly standing beside us.
"Miss Baker?" he inquired. "I beg your pardon, but Mr. Gatsby would like to
speak to you alone." "With me?" she exclaimed in surprise. "Yes, madame."
She got up slowly, raising her eyebrows at me in astonishment, and followed
the butler toward the house. I noticed that she wore her evening-dress, all
her dresses, like sports clothes--there was a jauntiness about her movements
as if she had first learned to walk upon golf courses on clean, crisp
mornings. I was alone and it was almost two. For some time confused and
intriguing sounds had issued from a long, many-windowed room which overhung
the terrace. Eluding Jordan's undergraduate, who was now engaged in an
obstetrical conversation with two chorus girls, and who implored me to join
him, I went inside. The large room was full of people. One of the girls in
yellow was playing the piano, and beside her stood a tall, red-haired young
lady from a famous chorus, engaged in song. She had drunk a quantity of
champagne, and during the course of her song she had decided, ineptly, that
everything was very, very sad--she was not only singing, she was weeping
too. Whenever there was a pause in the song she filled it with gasping,
broken sobs, and then took up the lyric again in a quavering soprano. The
tears coursed down her cheeks--not freely, however, for when they came into
contact with her heavily beaded eyelashes they assumed an inky color, and
pursued the rest of their way in slow black rivulets. A humorous suggestion
was made that she sing the notes on her face, whereupon she threw up her
hands, sank into a chair, and went off into a deep vinous sleep. "She had a
fight with a man who says he's her husband," explained a girl at my elbow. I
looked around. Most of the remaining women were now having fights with men
said to be their husbands. Even Jordan's party, the quartet from East Egg,
were rent asunder by dissension. One of the men was talking with curious
intensity to a young actress, and his wife, after attempting to laugh at the
situation in a dignified and indifferent way, broke down entirely and
resorted to flank attacks--at intervals she appeared suddenly at his side
like an angry diamond, and hissed: "You promised!" into his ear. The
reluctance to go home was not confined to wayward men. The hall was at
present occupied by two deplorably sober men and their highly indignant
wives. The wives were sympathizing with each other in slightly raised
voices. "Whenever he sees I'm having a good time he wants to go home."
"Never heard anything so selfish in my life." "We're always the first ones
to leave." "So are we." "Well, we're almost the last to-night," said one of
the men sheepishly. "The orchestra left half an hour ago." In spite of the
wives' agreement that such malevolence was beyond credibility, the dispute
ended in a short struggle, and both wives were lifted, kicking, into the
night. As I waited for my hat in the hall the door of the library opened and
Jordan Baker and Gatsby came out together. He was saying some last word to
her, but the eagerness in his manner tightened abruptly into formality as
several people approached him to say good-bye. Jordan's party were calling
impatiently to her from the porch, but she lingered for a moment to shake
hands. "I've just heard the most amazing thing," she whispered. "How long
were we in there?" "Why, about an hour." "It was--simply amazing," she
repeated abstractedly. "But I swore I wouldn't tell it and here I am
tantalizing you." She yawned gracefully in my face: "Please come and see me.
. . . Phone book . . . Under the name of Mrs. Sigourney Howard . . . My aunt
. . ." She was hurrying off as she talked--her brown hand waved a jaunty
salute as she melted into her party at the door. Rather ashamed that on my
first appearance I had stayed so late, I joined the last of Gatsby's guests,
who were clustered around him. I wanted to explain that I'd hunted for him
early in the evening and to apologize for not having known him in the
garden. "Don't mention it," he enjoined me eagerly. "Don't give it another
thought, old sport." The familiar expression held no more familiarity than
the hand which reassuringly brushed my shoulder. "And don't forget we're
going up in the hydroplane to-morrow morning, at nine o'clock." Then the
butler, behind his shoulder: "Philadelphia wants you on the 'phone, sir."
"All right, in a minute. Tell them I'll be right there. . . . good night."
"Good night." "Good night." He smiled--and suddenly there seemed to be a
pleasant significance in having been among the last to go, as if he had
desired it all the time. "Good night, old sport. . . . good night." But as I
walked down the steps I saw that the evening was not quite over. Fifty feet
from the door a dozen headlights illuminated a bizarre and tumultuous scene.
In the ditch beside the road, right side up, but violently shorn of one
wheel, rested a new coupe which had left Gatsby's drive not two minutes
before. The sharp jut of a wall accounted for the detachment of the wheel,
which was now getting considerable attention from half a dozen curious
chauffeurs. However, as they had left their cars blocking the road, a harsh,
discordant din from those in the rear had been audible for some time, and
added to the already violent confusion of the scene. A man in a long duster
had dismounted from the wreck and now stood in the middle of the road,
looking from the car to the tire and from the tire to the observers in a
pleasant, puzzled way. "See!" he explained. "It went in the ditch." The fact
was infinitely astonishing to him, and I recognized first the unusual
quality of wonder, and then the man--it was the late patron of Gatsby's
library. "How'd it happen?" He shrugged his shoulders. "I know nothing
whatever about mechanics," he said decisively. "But how did it happen? Did
you run into the wall?" "Don't ask me," said Owl Eyes, washing his hands of
the whole matter. "I know very little about driving--next to nothing. It
happened, and that's all I know." "Well, if you're a poor driver you
oughtn't to try driving at night." "But I wasn't even trying," he explained
indignantly, "I wasn't even trying." An awed hush fell upon the bystanders.
"Do you want to commit suicide?" "You're lucky it was just a wheel! A bad
driver and not even TRYing!" "You don't understand," explained the criminal.
"I wasn't driving. There's another man in the car." The shock that followed
this declaration found voice in a sustained "Ah-h-h!" as the door of the
coupe swung slowly open. The crowd--it was now a crowd--stepped back
involuntarily, and when the door had opened wide there was a ghostly pause.
Then, very gradually, part by part, a pale, dangling individual stepped out
of the wreck, pawing tentatively at the ground with a large uncertain
dancing shoe. Blinded by the glare of the headlights and confused by the
incessant groaning of the horns, the apparition stood swaying for a moment
before he perceived the man in the duster. "Wha's matter?" he inquired
calmly. "Did we run outa gas?" "Look!" Half a dozen fingers pointed at the
amputated wheel--he stared at it for a moment, and then looked upward as
though he suspected that it had dropped from the sky. "It came off," some
one explained. He nodded. "At first I din' notice we'd stopped." A pause.
Then, taking a long breath and straightening his shoulders, he remarked in a
determined voice: "Wonder'ff tell me where there's a gas'line station?" At
least a dozen men, some of them little better off than he was, explained to
him that wheel and car were no longer joined by any physical bond. "Back
out," he suggested after a moment. "Put her in reverse." "But the WHEEL'S
off!" He hesitated. "No harm in trying," he said. The caterwauling horns had
reached a crescendo and I turned away and cut across the lawn toward home. I
glanced back once. A wafer of a moon was shining over Gatsby's house, making
the night fine as before, and surviving the laughter and the sound of his
still glowing garden. A sudden emptiness seemed to flow now from the windows
and the great doors, endowing with complete isolation the figure of the
host, who stood on the porch, his hand up in a formal gesture of farewell.
Reading over what I have written so far, I see I have given the impression
that the events of three nights several weeks apart were all that absorbed
me. On the contrary, they were merely casual events in a crowded summer,
and, until much later, they absorbed me infinitely less than my personal
affairs. Most of the time I worked. In the early morning the sun threw my
shadow westward as I hurried down the white chasms of lower New York to the
Probity Trust. I knew the other clerks and young bond-salesmen by their
first names, and lunched with them in dark, crowded restaurants on little
pig sausages and mashed potatoes and coffee. I even had a short affair with
a girl who lived in Jersey City and worked in the accounting department, but
her brother began throwing mean looks in my direction, so when she went on
her vacation in July I let it blow quietly away. I took dinner usually at
the Yale Club--for some reason it was the gloomiest event of my day--and
then I went up-stairs to the library and studied investments and securities
for a conscientious hour. There were generally a few rioters around, but
they never came into the library, so it was a good place to work. After
that, if the night was mellow, I strolled down Madison Avenue past the old
Murray Hill Hotel, and over 33rd Street to the Pennsylvania Station. I began
to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night, and the
satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives
to the restless eye. I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic
women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter
into their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove. Sometimes, in my
mind, I followed them to their apartments on the corners of hidden streets,
and they turned and smiled back at me before they faded through a door into
warm darkness. At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting
loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--poor young clerks who loitered
in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant
dinner--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night
and life. Again at eight o'clock, when the dark lanes of the Forties were
five deep with throbbing taxi-cabs, bound for the theatre district, I felt a
sinking in my heart. Forms leaned together in the taxis as they waited, and
voices sang, and there was laughter from unheard jokes, and lighted
cigarettes outlined unintelligible 70 gestures inside. Imagining that I,
too, was hurrying toward gayety and sharing their intimate excitement, I
wished them well. For a while I lost sight of Jordan Baker, and then in
midsummer I found her again. At first I was flattered to go places with her,
because she was a golf champion, and every one knew her name. Then it was
something more. I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender
curiosity. The bored haughty face that she turned to the world concealed
something--most affectations conceal something eventually, even though they
don't in the beginning--and one day I found what it was. When we were on a
house-party together up in Warwick, she left a borrowed car out in the rain
with the top down, and then lied about it--and suddenly I remembered the
story about her that had eluded me that night at Daisy's. At her first big
golf tournament there was a row that nearly reached the newspapers--a
suggestion that she had moved her ball from a bad lie in the semi-final
round. The thing approached the proportions of a scandal--then died away. A
caddy retracted his statement, and the only other witness admitted that he
might have been mistaken. The incident and the name had remained together in
my mind. Jordan Baker instinctively avoided clever, shrewd men, and now I
saw that this was because she felt safer on a plane where any divergence
from a code would be thought impossible. She was incurably dishonest. She
wasn't able to endure being at a disadvantage and, given this unwillingness,
I suppose she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she was very young in
order to keep that cool, insolent smile turned to the world and yet satisfy
the demands of her hard, jaunty body. It made no difference to me.
Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply--I was casually
sorry, and then I forgot. It was on that same house party that we had a
curious conversation about driving a car. It started because she passed so
close to some workmen that our fender flicked a button on one man's coat.
"You're a rotten driver," I protested. "Either you ought to be more careful,
or you oughtn't to drive at all." "I am careful." "No, you're not." "Well,
other people are," she said lightly. "What's that got to do with it?"
"They'll keep out of my way," she insisted. "It takes two to make an
accident." "Suppose you met somebody just as careless as yourself." "I hope
I never will," she answered. "I hate careless people. That's why I like
you." Her gray, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had
deliberately shifted our relations, and for a moment I thought I loved her.
But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my
desires, and I knew that first I had to get myself definitely out of that
tangle back home. I'd been writing letters once a week and signing them:
"Love, Nick," and all I could think of was how, when that certain girl
played tennis, a faint mustache of perspiration appeared on her upper lip.