The Great Gatsby: The Swimming Pool

I couldn’t sleep that night, and just before dawn I crossed the lawn to Gatsby’s house and found him home, tired and hopeless.Nothing had happened at the Buchanans’: at four o’clock Daisy had come to the window for a minute, and then turned out the light.“You ought to go away,” I told him, because his car would soon be traced, but he would not leave while there was any hope of Daisy.

That morning he told me the true story of his youth with Daisy, because the “Jay Gatsby” he had invented had broken like glass against Tom’s hard strength.He had been a poor young officer without a family name, and he had let Daisy believe that he came from the same world as she did.He had meant to take what he could and go, but instead he had fallen in love with her, and after that he could never let the dream go.

When I finally left for work, I turned back at the hedge and shouted across the lawn, “They’re a rotten crowd. You’re worth the whole bunch put together.”I’ve always been glad I said that; it was the only compliment I ever gave him.He smiled his wonderful, understanding smile, and stood on the steps in his bright pink suit as I walked away.

Meanwhile, George Wilson had sat up all night beside his wife’s body, repeating that he would find out who owned the yellow car.In the afternoon Gatsby put on his bathing suit and went down to swim in his pool for the first time that summer, while he waited for Daisy to telephone.But no call came, and he floated alone on an air mattress, looking up at an unfamiliar sky through the leaves.

Wilson had learned from Tom whose car it was, and that afternoon he came quietly through the trees toward the pool.When the servants and I ran down, we found Gatsby dead on the mattress in the water: Wilson had shot him, and then himself in the grass nearby.The mattress moved slowly around the pool in the small wind, and the dream was over.