The Great Gatsby: The Hottest Day

Then, one Saturday night, the lights in Gatsby’s house did not go on, and his parties were over as suddenly as they had begun.He had sent his servants away and hired new ones who would not gossip, because Daisy now came to his house in the afternoons.The next day was the hottest of the summer, and Daisy invited Gatsby, Jordan and me to lunch at her house.

In the middle of the heavy afternoon, Daisy looked at Gatsby across the table and said, “You always look so cool,” and Tom understood everything.“Her voice is full of money,” Gatsby said to me quietly, and suddenly I understood: that was the endless charm in it.To escape the heat we all drove into New York, Tom in Gatsby’s yellow car with Jordan and me, and Gatsby with Daisy in Tom’s blue one.

In a hot room at the Plaza Hotel, Tom finally asked Gatsby what kind of trouble he was trying to cause in his house.“Your wife doesn’t love you,” Gatsby answered. “She’s never loved you. She loves me.”Daisy said at last that she had never loved Tom, but her voice was unwilling, and then she cried, “Oh, you want too much! I love you now — isn’t that enough?”

Then Tom spoke about Gatsby’s business — the secret deals with Wolfshiem, and the drugstores that sold alcohol against the law.Gatsby began to talk wildly, defending himself, but with every word Daisy drew further away from him.Finally Tom told Daisy to go home with Gatsby in his car, because he knew now that she would never leave him.

They left without a word, and the dream Gatsby had carried for five years seemed to die in that hot room.Suddenly I remembered that it was my birthday: I was thirty years old, and a new decade stretched ahead of me, lonely and uncertain.So Tom, Jordan and I drove back through the cooling twilight toward Long Island — toward death.