LITMIR.BIZ

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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. We all looked at the subject again, after that 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. “These people! You have to keep after them all the time.” She looked at me and laughed pointlessly.

      The sister Catherine sat down beside me on the couch.

      “Do you live down on Long Island, too?” she asked. “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’s49. That’s where all his money comes from.”

      “Really?”

      She nodded.

      Mrs. McKee pointed suddenly at Catherine:

      “Chester, I think you could do something with her,” she said, 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.50”

      “Myrtle, you’ll give McKee a letter of introduction to your husband, so he can do some studies of him.” Tom’s 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 to51.”

      “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 rude.

      “You see,” cried Catherine triumphantly. She lowered her voice again. “It’s really his wife who is in their way. 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 would be more sensible to go to Europe.”

      “Oh, do you like Europe?” she asked surprisingly. “I just got back from Monte Carlo. I went over there with another girl. We had over twelve hundred dollars when we started, but we lost all money in two days in the private game rooms. We had an awful time getting back, I can tell you.”

      The late afternoon sky bloomed in the window for a moment like the blue honey of the Mediterranean52 – then the high voice of Mrs. McKee called me back into the room.

      “I almost made a mistake, too,” she continued energetically. “I almost married a little kike53 who’d been after me for years. I knew he was below me. But if I hadn’t met Chester, he could be my husband now.”

      “Well, I married him,” said Myrtle, ambiguously. “And that’s the difference between your case and mine.”

      “Why did you, Myrtle?” asked Catherine. “Nobody forced you to.”

      “I married him because I thought he was a gentleman,” she answered. “I thought he knew something about good manners but he wasn’t fit to lick my shoe54.”

      “You were crazy about him for a while,” said Catherine.

      “Crazy about him!” cried Myrtle with anger. “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 everyone 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 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 to get it back one day when he was out.” She looked around to see who was listening. “ ‘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 so much all afternoon.”

      “She really ought to get away from him,” told me Catherine. “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 constantly wanted by all present people, excepting Catherine, who “felt just as good on nothing at all.” Tom rang for the janitor and sent him for some famous sandwiches, which were a complete supper in themselves. I wanted to get out and walk eastward toward the Park through the soft twilight, but each time I tried to go I became involved in some wild argument which pulled me back into my chair.

      Myrtle sat close to me, and suddenly her warm breath told 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.55 I was going up to New York to see my sister and spend the night. He had on a dress suit and 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 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 tired of it. I’ve got to get another one tomorrow. I’m going to make a list of all the things I’ve got to get. A massage and a hair wave, and a collar for the dog, and a wreath with black silk flowers 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 – then I looked at my watch and found it was ten. Mr. McKee was asleep on a chair with his fists on his lap, like a photograph of an important man. The little dog was sitting on the table looking with blind eyes through the smoke, and from time to time groaning weakly. 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 passionate voices if 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 skilled movement, Tom Buchanan broke her nose with his open hand56.

      Then there were bloody towels upon the bathroom floor, and women’s voices scolding, and a high voice full of pain over all this noise. Mr. McKee awoke from his sleep and went toward the door. When he had gone

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