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1"Wha's matter?" he inquired calmly. "Did we run outa gas?" "Look!" Half a dozen fingers pointed at the amputated
2wheel--he stared at it for a moment, and then looked upward as though he suspected that it had dropped from the sky. "It
3came off," someone explained. He nodded. "At first I din' notice we'd stopped." A pause. Then, taking a long breath and
4straightening his shoulders, he remarked in a determined voice: "Wonder'ff tell me where there's a gas'line station?" At
5least a dozen men, some of them a little better off than he was, explained to him that wheel and car were no longer
6joined by any physical bond. "Back out," he suggested after a moment. "Put her in reverse." "But the wheel's off!" He
7hesitated. "No harm in trying," he said. The caterwauling horns had reached a crescendo and I turned away and cut across
8the lawn toward home. I glanced back once. A wafer of a moon was shining over Gatsby's house, making the night fine as
9before, and surviving the laughter and the sound of his still glowing garden. A sudden emptiness seemed to flow now from
10the windows and the great doors, endowing with complete isolation the figure of the host, who stood on the porch, his
11hand up in a formal gesture of farewell. ------------------------------------------------------------------------
12Reading over what I have written so far, I see I have given the impression that the events of three nights several weeks
13apart were all that absorbed me. On the contrary, they were merely casual events in a crowded summer, and, until much
14later, they absorbed me infinitely less than my personal affairs. Most of the time I worked. In the early morning the
15sun threw my shadow westward as I hurried down the white chasms of lower New York to the Probity Trust. I knew the other
16clerks and young bond-salesmen by their first names, and lunched with them in dark, crowded restaurants on little pig
17sausages and mashed potatoes and coffee. I even had a short affair with a girl who lived in Jersey City and worked in
18the accounting department, but her brother began throwing mean looks in my direction, so when she went on her vacation
19in July I let it blow quietly away. I took dinner usually at the Yale Club--for some reason it was the gloomiest event
20of my day--and then I went upstairs to the library and studied investments and securities for a conscientious hour.
21There were generally a few rioters around, but they never came into the library, so it was a good place to work. After
22that, if the night was mellow, I strolled down Madison Avenue past the old Murray Hill Hotel, and over 33rd Street to
23the Pennsylvania Station. I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night, and the satisfaction that
24the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye. I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick
25out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one
26would ever know or disapprove. Sometimes, in my mind, I followed them to their apartments on the corners of hidden
27streets, and they turned and smiled back at me before they faded through a door into warm darkness. At the enchanted
28metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--poor young clerks who loitered in
29front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most
30poignant moments of night and life. Again at eight o'clock, when the dark lanes of the Forties were lined five deep with
31throbbing taxicabs, bound for the theatre district, I felt a sinking in my heart. Forms leaned together in the taxis as
32they waited, and voices sang, and there was laughter from unheard jokes, and lighted cigarettes made unintelligible
33circles inside. Imagining that I, too, was hurrying towards gaiety and sharing their intimate excitement, I wished them
34well. For a while I lost sight of Jordan Baker, and then in midsummer I found her again. At first I was flattered to go
35places with her, because she was a golf champion, and everyone knew her name. Then it was something more. I wasn't
36actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity. The bored haughty face that she turned to the world concealed
37something--most affectations conceal something eventually, even though they don't in the beginning--and one day I found
38what 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
39down, and then lied about it--and suddenly I remembered the story about her that had eluded me that night at Daisy's. At
40her first big golf tournament there was a row that nearly reached the newspapers--a suggestion that she had moved her
41ball from a bad lie in the semifinal round. The thing approached the proportions of a scandal--then died away. A caddy
42retracted his statement, and the only other witness admitted that he might have been mistaken. The incident and the name
43had remained together in my mind. Jordan Baker instinctively avoided clever, shrewd men, and now I saw that this was
44because she felt safer on a plane where any divergence from a code would be thought impossible. She was incurably
45dishonest. She wasn't able to endure being at a disadvantage and, given this unwillingness, I suppose she had begun
46dealing in subterfuges when she was very young in order to keep that cool, insolent smile turned to the world and yet
47satisfy the demands of her hard, jaunty body. It made no difference to me. Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never
48blame deeply--I was casually sorry, and then I forgot. It was on that same house-party that we had a curious
49conversation about driving a car. It started because she passed so close to some workmen that our fender flicked a
50button on one man's coat. "You're a rotten driver," I protested. "Either you ought to be more careful, or you oughtn't
51to drive at all." "I am careful." "No, you're not." "Well, other people are," she said lightly. "What's that got to do
52with it?" "They'll keep out of my way," she insisted. "It takes two to make an accident." "Suppose you met somebody just
53as careless as yourself." "I hope I never will," she answered. "I hate careless people. That's why I like you." Her
54grey, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had deliberately shifted our relations, and for a moment I
55thought I loved her. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires, and I knew that
56first I had to get myself definitely out of that tangle back home. I'd been writing letters once a week and signing
57them: "Love, Nick," and all I could think of was how, when that certain girl played tennis, a faint moustache of
58perspiration appeared on her upper lip. Nevertheless there was a vague understanding that had to be tactfully broken off
59before I was free. Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the
60few honest people that I have ever known. IV On Sunday morning while church bells rang in the villages alongshore, the
61world and its mistress returned to Gatsby's house and twinkled hilariously on his lawn. "He's a bootlegger," said the
62young ladies, moving somewhere between his cocktails and his flowers. "One time he killed a man who had found out that
63he was nephew to Von Hindenburg and second cousin to the devil. Reach me a rose, honey, and pour me a last drop into
64that there crystal glass." Once I wrote down on the empty spaces of a timetable the names of those who came to Gatsby's
65house that summer. It is an old timetable now, disintegrating at its folds, and headed "This schedule in effect July
665th, 1922." But I can still read the grey names, and they will give you a better impression than my generalities of
67those who accepted Gatsby's hospitality and paid him the subtle tribute of knowing nothing whatever about him. From East
68Egg, then, came the Chester Beckers and the Leeches, and a man named Bunsen, whom I knew at Yale, and Doctor Webster
69Civet, who was drowned last summer up in Maine. And the Hornbeams and the Willie Voltaires, and a whole clan named
70Blackbuck, who always gathered in a corner and flipped up their noses like goats at whosoever came near. And the Ismays
71and the Chrysties (or rather Hubert Auerbach and Mr. Chrystie's wife), and Edgar Beaver, whose hair, they say, turned
72cotton-white one winter afternoon for no good reason at all.
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