Chapter 4

On Sunday morning while church bells rang in towns along the coast, the world and its mistress showed up again at Gatsby’s house, sparkling on his lawn.

"He’s a bootlegger," the young women said, drifting between his cocktails and his flowers. "He once killed a guy who found out he was related to Von Hindenburg and second cousin to the devil. Hand me a rose, honey, and pour me a last sip into that crystal glass."

I wrote down the names of the people who came to Gatsby’s house that summer on a blank timetable. It’s falling apart now, all worn and faded, and it says "Schedule in effect July fifth, nineteen twenty-two."

But I can still read those names, and they’ll give you a better idea than I can of who accepted Gatsby’s hospitality and paid him the subtle compliment of knowing absolutely nothing about him.

From East Egg came the Chester Beckers and the Leeches, and a guy named Bunsen, who I knew at Yale, and Doctor Webster Civet, who drowned last summer up in Maine.

And the Hornbeams and the Willie Voltaires, and a whole group called the Blackbucks, who always huddled in a corner, looking down their noses at whoever came near.

And the Ismays and the Chrysties (or rather Hubert Auerbach and Mr. Chrystie’s wife), and Edgar Beaver, whose hair, they say, turned totally white one winter afternoon for no reason at all.

Clarence Endive was from East Egg, as far as I remember. He showed up once, wearing white knickerbockers, and got into a fight with a bum named Etty in the garden.

From farther out on the Island came the Cheadles and the O. R. P. Schraeders, and the Stonewall Jackson Abrams from Georgia, and the Fishguards and the Ripley Snells.

Snell was there three days before he went to prison, so drunk he stumbled onto the gravel driveway and Mrs. Ulysses Swett’s car ran over his hand.

The Dancies came, too, and S. B. Whitebait, who was well over sixty, and Maurice A. Flink, and the Hammerheads, and Beluga the tobacco importer, and Beluga’s girls.

From West Egg came the Poles and the Mulreadys and Cecil Roebuck and Cecil Schoen and Gulick the State senator and Newton Orchid, who ran Films Par Excellence, and Eckhaust and Clyde Cohen and Don S. Schwartz (the son) and Arthur Mc Carty, all involved with the movies in some way.

And the Catlips and the Bembergs and G. Earl Muldoon, brother to the Muldoon who later strangled his wife.

Da Fontano the promoter showed up, and Ed Legros and James B. ("Rot-Gut") Ferret and the De Jongs and Ernest Lilly - they came to gamble, and when Ferret wandered into the garden, it meant he was broke and Associated Traction would have to make a good profit the next day.

A guy named Klipspringer was there so often he became known as "the boarder" - I doubt he had any other place to live. There were actors too: Gus Waize and Horace O’Donavan and Lester Myer and George Duckweed and Francis Bull.

From New York were the Chromes and the Backhyssons and the Dennickers and Russel Betty and the Corrigans and the Kellehers and the Dewars and the Scullys and S . W . Belcher and the Smirkes and the young Quinns, who are divorced now, and Henry L .

Palmetto, who killed himself by jumping in front of a subway train in Times Square.

Benny Mc Clenahan always showed up with four girls. They were never quite the same ones, but they looked so much alike that it always seemed like they’d been there before.

I’m drawing a blank on their names - Jacqueline, I think, or maybe Consuela, or Gloria or Judy or June, and their last names were either pretty names like flowers and months, or the tough names of big American capitalists, and if you pressed them, they’d claim to be cousins.

Yeah, I remember Faustina O’Brien showed up at least once, and the Baedeker sisters, and young Brewer - he lost his nose in the war - plus Mr. Albrucksburger and his fiancée, Miss Haag, Ardita Fitz-Peters, and Mr. P. Jewett, who used to run the American Legion.

There was also Miss Claudia Hip with a guy everyone thought was her driver, and this prince of something, we just called him Duke, though I’m blanking on his actual name.

All these people came to Gatsby’s place during the summer.

Around nine o’clock one morning, late in July, Gatsby’s awesome car pulled up to my driveway on the rocky road, blasting this three-note melody from its horn.

It was the first time he’d stopped by, even though I’d crashed two of his parties, ridden in his hydroplane, and, at his invitation, used his beach a bunch of times.

"Hey, old sport! Lunch with me today? Figured we’d roll up together."

He was balanced on the dashboard of his car, moving with this totally American vibe - you know, that effortless grace that comes from not doing a ton of manual labor when you’re young, and just a whole lot of our spontaneous, energetic games.

He was always restless, and you could see it breaking through his polite act. He was never still, always tapping his foot or fidgeting with his hands.

He noticed me checking out his car.

"Pretty cool, right, old sport?"

He hopped out to give me a better look.

"Haven’t you seen this thing before?"

I’d seen it. Everyone had. It was this rich cream colour, shiny with nickel, bulky in places with huge hatboxes, dinner boxes, and toolboxes, and covered in a maze of windshields that reflected a dozen suns. We slid into these layers of glass in a kind of green leather lounge, and headed into town.

I’d talked with him maybe half a dozen times over the last month, and I was disappointed to find he didn’t really have much to say. So my first impression that he was some important person, just faded, and he became just the guy running this elaborate roadside spot next door.

Then came that weird ride. We hadn’t even reached West Egg village before Gatsby started leaving his fancy sentences unfinished and slapping his knee in this caramel-colored suit.

"Look, old sport," he blurted out unexpectedly, "what do you really think of me, anyway?"

A little thrown off, I started with these vague answers that the question deserved.

"I’m gonna tell you something about my life," he cut in.

"I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about me from all the gossip you hear."

So he knew about all the crazy rumors floating around at his parties.

"I’m gonna give you the straight story."

His right hand suddenly seemed to call down some kind of divine judgment.

"I’m the son of some wealthy folks from the Midwest - all gone now. I was raised in America, but I went to Oxford, because all my ancestors have been educated there for years. It’s a family thing."

He looked at me sideways - and I knew why Jordan Baker thought he was lying. He rushed through the words "educated at Oxford," or swallowed them, or choked on them, like it had bothered him before.

And with that doubt, his whole story started to fall apart, and I started to wonder if there was something a little shady about him after all.

"What part of the Midwest?" I asked casually.

"San Francisco."

"I see."

"My family all died, and I came into a lot of money."

His voice was serious, like the memory of that sudden loss of his family still haunted him. For a moment, I thought he was messing with me, but a look at him convinced me otherwise.

"After that, I lived like a total king - a young rajah - in all the major cities of Europe - Paris, Venice, Rome - collecting jewels, especially rubies, hunting big game, painting a bit for myself, and trying to forget something really sad that happened to me a long time ago."

I managed to hold back my laughter. The phrases were so overused, they didn’t bring up any image except that of a goofy, cartoonish guy in a turban, basically falling apart as he chased a tiger through Paris.

"Then came the war, old sport. It was a huge relief, and I tried really hard to die, but it seemed like I had some kind of charmed life. I got a commission as a first lieutenant when it started."

In the Argonne Forest, I pushed my machine-gun battalion so far ahead that there was a half-mile gap on either side where the infantry couldn’t move forward.

We held out there for two days and nights, a hundred and thirty guys with sixteen Lewis guns, and when the infantry finally showed up, they found the insignia of three German divisions among the dead.

"I got promoted to major, and every Allied government gave me a medal - even Montenegro, little Montenegro down on the Adriatic Sea!"

"Little Montenegro!"

He lifted the words and nodded, smiling. His smile understood Montenegro’s tough history and felt bad for the brave struggles of the Montenegrin people. It totally appreciated the chain of events that led to this tribute from Montenegro’s little heart.

My disbelief faded into fascination; it was like quickly flipping through a bunch of magazines.

He reached into his pocket, and a piece of metal, hanging from a ribbon, dropped into my hand.

"That’s the one from Montenegro."

To my surprise, it looked legit.

"Orderi di Danilo," read the circular inscription, "Montenegro, Nicolas Rex."

"Turn it."

"Major Jay Gatsby," I read, "For Valour Extraordinary."

"Here’s another thing I always carry. A souvenir from my Oxford days. It was taken in Trinity Quad - the guy on my left is now the Earl of Doncaster."

It was a photo of a bunch of young guys in blazers hanging out in an archway with a bunch of spires visible behind them. There was Gatsby, looking a little, not much, younger - holding a cricket bat.

Then it all clicked. I saw the skins of tigers blazing in his palace on the Grand Canal; I saw him opening a chest of rubies, using their red glow to ease the ache in his broken heart.

"I’m going to make a big request of you today," he said, putting his souvenirs away, "so I thought you should know a little about me. I didn’t want you to think I was just some random person."

"You see, I usually find myself around strangers because I drift around trying to forget the sad things that happened to me." He paused.

"You’ll hear about it this afternoon."

"At lunch?"

"No, this afternoon. I found out you’re taking Miss Baker to tea."

"Do you mean you’re in love with Miss Baker?"

"Nah, old sport, I’m not. But Miss Baker has kindly agreed to talk to you about this."

I had no idea what "this" was, but I was more annoyed than interested. I hadn’t asked Jordan to tea to talk about Mr. Jay Gatsby. I was sure the request would be totally wild, and for a second, I regretted ever stepping onto his crowded lawn.

He wouldn’t say another word. He seemed more and more proper as we got closer to the city. We passed Port Roosevelt, where I caught a glimpse of red-belted cargo ships, and sped along a cobbled street lined with the dark, abandoned bars of the faded-glory nineteen-hundreds.

Then the valley of ashes opened up on both sides of us, and I saw Mrs. Wilson struggling at the garage pump with a burst of energy as we drove by.

With fenders flared out like wings, we blasted through half of Astoria - just half, because as we weaved between the pillars of the elevated train, I heard the familiar "vroom-vroom-splat!" of a motorcycle, and a cop was right on our tail.

"Alright, buddy," called Gatsby.

We slowed down. He pulled a white card from his wallet and waved it in front of the guy’s eyes.

"You got it," agreed the cop, tipping his cap.

"I’ll recognize you next time, Mr. Gatsby. Gotta go!"

"What was that?" I asked. "That picture of Oxford?"

"I did the police commissioner a favor once, and he sends me a Christmas card every year."

Over the huge bridge, with the sunlight flashing through the metal supports on the moving cars, the city rose up across the river in white buildings and sugary mounds, all built with money that smelled like nothing.

The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always like seeing it for the first time, full of the wild promise of all the mystery and beauty in the world.

A guy in a hearse piled high with flowers passed us, followed by two limousines with dark windows, and then by brighter cars for friends.

The friends looked out at us with the sad eyes and tight lips of people from southeastern Europe, and I was glad to see Gatsby’s awesome car was part of their somber celebration.

As we crossed Blackwell’s Island, a limo zipped past, driven by a white chauffeur, with three stylish Black people inside - two cool dudes and a girl. I laughed out loud when I saw their eyeballs rolling toward us in a haughty stare.

"Anything can happen now that we’ve crossed this bridge," I thought; "anything at all..."

Even Gatsby could happen, and it wouldn't even be a big deal.

Blazing noon. In a well-ventilated Forty-second Street basement, I met Gatsby for lunch. Blinking away the brightness of the street outside, I spotted him in the waiting room, talking to another guy.

"Mr. Carraway, this is my friend Mr. Wolfshiem."

A short, flat-nosed Jewish guy raised his head and looked me over with two thick tufts of hair sticking out of his nose. After a moment, I made out his tiny eyes in the dim light.

" - So I took one look at him," said Mr. Wolfshiem, shaking my hand seriously, "and what do you think I did?"

"What?" I asked politely.

But he wasn't talking to me, because he dropped my hand and leaned in close to Gatsby with his nose.

"I handed the money to Katspaugh and I said: ‘Look, Katspaugh, don’t pay him a dime until he shuts his mouth.’ He shut up right then and there."

Gatsby took an arm of each of us and moved into the restaurant, and Mr. Wolfshiem swallowed the sentence he was starting and drifted off into a dreamy state.

"Highballs?" asked the head waiter.

"This is a nice restaurant here," said Mr. Wolfshiem, looking at the statues on the ceiling. "But I like the place across the street better!"

"Yeah, highballs," agreed Gatsby, and then to Mr. Wolfshiem: "It’s too hot over there."

"Hot and small - yeah," said Mr. Wolfshiem, "but full of memories."

"What place is that?" I asked.

"The old Metropole."

"The old Metropole," Mr. Wolfshiem said gloomily. "Filled with faces that are dead and gone. Filled with friends who are gone forever. I’m never going to forget the night they shot Rosy Rosenthal there. There were six of us at the table, and Rosy had eaten and drunk a lot all evening."

When it was almost morning, the waiter came up to him with a strange look and said someone wanted to talk to him outside. ‘Okay,’ said Rosy, and started to get up, and I pulled him back into his chair.

‘Let the jerks come in here if they want you, Rosy, but don’t you, so help me, move outside this room.’

"It was four in the morning then, and if we’d opened the blinds, we’d have seen daylight."

"Did he go?" I asked innocently.

"Yeah, he went."

Mr. Wolfshiem’s nose flared at me, totally annoyed.

"He turned around in the door and says, ‘Don’t let that waiter take away my coffee!’ Then he went out onto the sidewalk, and they shot him three times in his stomach and drove off."

"Four of them were electrocuted," I said, remembering.

"Five, with Becker."

His nostrils turned toward me, interested.

"I hear you’re looking for a business connection."

The way those two things were said back-to-back was wild. Gatsby answered for me:

"Oh, no," he exclaimed, "this isn’t the guy."

"No?" Mr. Wolfshiem seemed bummed out.

"This is just a friend. I told you we’d talk about that later."

"My bad," said Mr. Wolfshiem. "I had the wrong guy."

A really good hash showed up, and Mr. Wolfshiem, forgetting about the old-school vibes of the Metropole, started eating like crazy. His eyes were darting all around the room - he finished the circle by checking out the people right behind us.

I think, if I hadn’t been there, he would’ve quickly glanced under our table.

"Look here, old sport," said Gatsby, leaning in, "I’m worried I made you a little mad this morning in the car."

There was that smile again, but this time I didn’t let it get to me.

"I don’t like mysteries," I answered, "and I don’t get why you won’t just be upfront and tell me what you want. Why does it have to go through Miss Baker?"

"Oh, it’s nothing shady," he assured me.

"Miss Baker’s a great sport, you know, and she’d never do anything wrong."

Suddenly he looked at his watch, jumped up, and hurried out of the room, leaving me with Mr. Wolfshiem at the table.

"He has to make a call," said Mr. Wolfshiem, still watching him. "Good guy, right? Good-looking and a perfect gentleman."

"Yeah."

"He’s an Oxford man."

"Oh!"

"He went to Oxford College in England. You know Oxford College?"

"I’ve heard of it."

"It’s one of the most famous colleges in the world."

"How long have you known Gatsby?" I asked.

"A few years," he answered, looking pleased. "I met him right after the war. But I knew I’d found a guy with class after I talked to him for an hour. I said to myself: ‘That’s the kind of guy you’d want to bring home and introduce to your mom and sister.’ "

He paused.

"I see you’re looking at my cuff buttons."

I hadn’t been, but I was now. They were made of really weird, familiar pieces of ivory.

"The finest specimens of human molars," he told me.

"Wow!" I checked them out.

"That’s a really interesting idea."

"Yeah."

He rolled up his sleeves under his coat.

"Yeah, Gatsby’s really careful with women. He wouldn’t even look at a friend’s wife."

When the guy we were talking about came back to the table and sat down, Mr. Wolfshiem gulped his coffee and got to his feet.

"I enjoyed lunch," he said, "and I’m going to head out before I overstay my welcome."

"Don’t rush, Meyer," said Gatsby, without much enthusiasm.

Mr. Wolfshiem raised his hand in a kind of blessing.

"You’re very polite, but I belong to a different generation," he announced seriously.

"You guys sit here and talk about your sports and your girls and your - " He came up with an imaginary word with another wave of his hand.

"As for me, I’m fifty years old, and I won’t hang around you any longer."

As he shook hands and turned away, his tragic nose was shaking. I wondered if I’d said something to offend him.

"He gets really sentimental sometimes," explained Gatsby.

"This is one of his sentimental days. He’s quite a character around New York - a regular on Broadway."

"Who is he, anyway, an actor?"

"No."

"A dentist?"

"Meyer Wolfshiem? Nah, he’s a gambler."

Gatsby hesitated, then added, coolly: "He’s the guy who rigged the World’s Series back in nineteen nineteen."

"Rigged the World’s Series?" I repeated.

The whole thing blew my mind. I remembered, of course, that the World’s Series had been fixed in nineteen nineteen, but I always thought of it as just something that happened, like the inevitable end of a long chain of events.

It never crossed my mind that one person could mess with the faith of fifty million people - with the focus of a burglar cracking a safe.

"How’d he even manage that?" I asked after a minute.

"He just saw the opportunity."

"Why isn’t he in jail?"

"They can’t get him, old sport. He’s sharp."

I insisted on paying the check. As the waiter brought my change I spotted Tom Buchanan across the crowded room.

"Come on with me for a minute," I said; "I gotta say hi to someone."

When he saw us Tom jumped up and took a bunch of steps in our direction.

"Where have you been?" he demanded, all excited.

"Daisy’s furious because you haven’t called."

"This is Mr. Gatsby, Mr. Buchanan."

They shook hands briefly, and a weird, uncomfortable look came over Gatsby’s face.

"How are you doing, anyway?" demanded Tom of me.

"How’d you happen to come up this far to eat?"

"I’ve been having lunch with Mr. Gatsby."

I turned toward Mr. Gatsby, but he was gone.

One October day in nineteen-seventeen -

(said Jordan Baker that afternoon, sitting up straight on a straight chair in the tea-garden at the Plaza Hotel)

- I was walking around, half on the sidewalks and half on the lawns. I was happier on the lawns because I had shoes from England with rubber knobs on the soles that gripped the soft ground.

I had on a new plaid skirt, too, that blew in the wind, and whenever it did, the red, white, and blue banners in front of all the houses would stretch out stiff and say tut-tut-tut-tut, in a disapproving way.

The biggest banner and the biggest lawn belonged to Daisy Fay’s house. She was just eighteen, two years older than me, and by far the most popular girl in Louisville.

She dressed in white, and had a little white roadster, and all day long the phone rang in her house and excited young officers from Camp Taylor would beg to monopolize her that night.

"Anyways, for an hour!"

When I got opposite her house that morning her white roadster was parked on the curb, and she was sitting in it with a lieutenant I’d never seen before. They were so into each other that she didn’t notice me until I was five feet away.

"Hello, Jordan," she called unexpectedly.

"Come over here."

I was flattered that she wanted to talk to me, because out of all the older girls, I admired her the most. She asked me if I was going to the Red Cross to make bandages. I was. Well, then, would I tell them that she couldn’t come that day?

The officer looked at Daisy while she was speaking, in a way that every girl wants to be looked at sometime, and because it seemed romantic to me, I’ve remembered the whole thing ever since.

His name was Jay Gatsby, and I didn’t see him again for over four years - even after I’d met him on Long Island, I didn’t realize it was the same guy.

That was nineteen-seventeen. By the next year, I had a few guys interested in me too, and I started playing in tournaments, so I didn’t see Daisy very often. She hung out with an older crowd - when she went out with anyone at all.

Crazy rumors were going around about her - how her mom found her packing her bag one winter night, planning to go to New York and say goodbye to a soldier heading overseas. They stopped her, but she wasn't speaking to her family for weeks.

After that, she didn’t mess around with soldiers anymore, but only dated a few awkward, near-sighted guys in town who couldn’t even get into the army.

By the next fall, she was happy again, as happy as ever. She had a debut after the armistice, and in February, she was probably engaged to a guy from New Orleans. In June, she married Tom Buchanan of Chicago, with more fanfare than Louisville had ever seen.

He showed up with a hundred people in four private cars, and rented an entire floor of the Muhlbach Hotel, and the day before the wedding, he gave her a string of pearls worth three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

I was a bridesmaid. I went into her room half an hour before the wedding dinner, and found her lying on her bed, looking as gorgeous as a June night in her flowered dress - and totally wasted. She had a bottle of Sauterne in one hand and a letter in the other.

" ’Gratulate me," she mumbled.

"Never had a drink before, but oh, I love it."

"What’s wrong, Daisy?"

I was freaked out, I can tell you; I’d never seen a girl like that before.

"Here, darlings."

She dug around in a wastebasket she had on the bed and pulled out the string of pearls.

"Take them downstairs and give them back to whoever they belong to. Tell them Daisy’s changed her mind. Say: ‘Daisy’s changed her mind!’ "

She started crying - she cried and cried. I rushed out and found her mom’s maid, and we locked the door and got her into a cold bath. She wouldn’t let go of the letter .

She took it into the tub with her and squeezed it up into a wet ball, and only let me take it when she saw it was falling apart like snow.

But she didn’t say another word. We gave her smelling salts and put ice on her forehead and got her back into her dress, and half an hour later, when we walked out of the room, the pearls were around her neck and it was over.

The next day at five o’clock she married Tom Buchanan without even flinching, and started off on a three-month trip to the South Seas.

I saw them in Santa Barbara when they came back, and I thought I’d never seen a girl so obsessed with her husband. If he left the room for a minute, she’d look around nervously, and ask: "Where’s Tom gone?" and wear the most distracted expression until she saw him coming in the door.

She used to sit on the sand with his head in her lap for hours, rubbing her fingers over his eyes and looking at him with unbelievable delight. It was sweet to see them together - it made you laugh quietly, fascinated. That was in August.

A week after I left Santa Barbara, Tom ran into a wagon on the Ventura road one night and ripped a front wheel off his car. The girl who was with him ended up in the papers too, because her arm was broken - she was one of the maids at the Santa Barbara Hotel.

The next April, Daisy had her little girl, and they headed to France for a year. I saw them one spring in Cannes, then later in Deauville, and they came back to Chicago to settle down. Daisy was super popular in Chicago, you know.

They ran with a fast crowd - all young, rich, and wild - but she somehow managed to keep a totally spotless reputation. Maybe because she doesn't drink. It's a huge advantage not drinking when everyone else is hard-drinking.

You can keep your mouth shut, and you can time any little slip-up so everyone else is too blind to even notice or care. Maybe Daisy never even got into serious relationships at all - but there's something in her voice...

Well, about six weeks ago, she heard the name Gatsby for the first time in years. It was when I asked you - remember? - if you knew Gatsby in West Egg. After you’d left, she came into my room and woke me up, and said, "What Gatsby?"

And when I described him - I was half-asleep - she said in this really strange voice that it had to be the guy she used to know. It wasn’t until then that I realized this Gatsby was the officer who was in her white car.

When Jordan Baker finished telling me all this, we’d left the Plaza for about half an hour and were driving in a horse-drawn carriage through Central Park.

The sun had dipped behind the really tall apartments where the movie stars lived in the West Fifties, and the clear voices of kids, already gathered like crickets on the grass, rose through the warm twilight:

"I’m the Sheik of Araby. Your love belongs to me. At night when you’re asleep, I’ll sneak into your tent - "

"It’s a crazy coincidence," I said.

"But it’s not a coincidence at all."

"Why not?"

"Gatsby bought that house so Daisy would be just across the bay."

So, it hadn’t just been the stars he’d been reaching for that June night. He suddenly came to life for me, like he’s been released from a pointless, fancy existence.

"He wants to know," continued Jordan, "if you’ll invite Daisy over to your house one afternoon and then let him come by."

The humbleness of the request blew me away. He’d waited five years and bought a huge mansion where he threw parties for anyone who wandered by - just so he could "come over" one afternoon to a stranger’s backyard.

"Did I really have to know all this before he could ask for something so small?"

"He’s nervous, he’s waited so long. He thought you might be offended. You see, he’s tougher than he looks."

Something felt off.

"Why didn’t he ask you to set up a meeting?"

"He wants her to see his house," she explained.

"And your house is right next door."

"Oh!"

"I think he kind of hoped she’d wander into one of his parties, sometime," Jordan went on.

But she never did. Then he started casually asking around if anyone knew her, and I was the first one he found. It was that night he asked me to his dance, and you should have heard how elaborate he was about it. Of course, I immediately suggested a lunch in New York - and he almost lost it:

"‘I don’t want to do anything weird!’ he kept saying. ‘I want to see her right next door.’"

"When I said you were a close friend of Tom’s, he started to back out of the whole idea. He doesn’t know much about Tom, even though he says he’s read a Chicago paper for years just to catch a glimpse of Daisy’s name."

It was dark now, and as we went under a little bridge, I put my arm around Jordan’s golden shoulder and pulled her closer, asking her to dinner.

Suddenly, I wasn’t thinking about Daisy and Gatsby anymore, but about this clear, tough, limited person who was skeptical about everything and leaned back casually within the circle of my arm.

A phrase started echoing in my ears with a kind of excited buzz: "There are only the pursued, the pursuer, the busy, and the tired."

"And Daisy deserves something in her life," murmured Jordan to me.

"Does she want to see Gatsby?"

"She can’t find out about it. Gatsby really doesn't want her to know. You’re just supposed to ask her to come over for tea."

We drove past a wall of trees, and then we saw Fifty-Ninth Street - a whole block glowing with soft, pale light shining into the park.

Unlike Gatsby and Tom Buchanan, I didn’t have a girl whose face I kept picturing along the rooftops and bright signs, so I pulled the girl next to me closer, holding her tight. Her pale, kind of unimpressed mouth curved into a smile, and I pulled her even closer, this time right up to my face.