The Plaza in the heat

The prolonged and tumultuous argument that ended by herding us into that room eludes me, though I have a sharp physical memory that, in the course of it, my underwear kept climbing like a damp snake around my legs and intermittent beads of sweat raced cool across my back. The notion originated with Daisy’s suggestion that we hire five bathrooms and take cold baths, and then assumed more tangible form as “a place to have a mint julep.” Each of us said over and over that it was a “crazy idea”—we all talked at once to a baffled clerk and thought, or pretended to think, that we were being very funny …

Renewed faith

I wanted to get up and slap him on the back. I had one of those renewals of complete faith in him that I’d experienced before.

“She loves me”

“Your wife doesn’t love you,” said Gatsby. “She’s never loved you. She loves me.”

The appeal in her eyes

She hesitated. Her eyes fell on Jordan and me with a sort of appeal, as though she realized at last what she was doing—and as though she had never, all along, intended doing anything at all. But it was done now. It was too late.

“I never loved him”

“I never loved him,” she said, with perceptible reluctance.

“I loved you too”

“Oh, you want too much!” she cried to Gatsby. “I love you now—isn’t that enough? I can’t help what’s past.” She began to sob helplessly. “I did love him once—but I loved you too.”

Gatsby’s eyes close

Gatsby’s eyes opened and closed.

As if he had killed

I glanced at Daisy, who was staring terrified between Gatsby and her husband, and at Jordan, who had begun to balance an invisible but absorbing object on the tip of her chin. Then I turned back to Gatsby—and was startled at his expression. He looked—and this is said in all contempt for the babbled slander of his garden—as if he had “killed a man.” For a moment the set of his face could be described in just that fantastic way.

Thirty today

I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.

Toward death

So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.