let me tell you, let me show you

---------------------- [excerpt, The Great Gatsby]------------- "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."

"Ask Myrtle," said Tom breaking into a short shout of laughter as Mrs. Wilson entered with a tray.  "She'll give you a letter of introduction, won't you, Myrtle?"

"Do what?" she asked startled.

"You'll give McKee a letter of introduction to your husband, so he can do some studies of him."  His 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 to."

"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 obscene.

"You see?" cried Catherine triumphantly.  She lowered her voice again.  "It's really his wife that's keeping them apart.  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'd be more discreet to go to Europe."
"Oh, do you like Europe?" she exclaimed surprisingly.  "I just got back from Monte Carlo."
"Really."
"Just last year.  I went over there with another girl."
"Stay long?"
"No, we just went to Monte Carlo and back.  We went by way of Marseilles.  We had over twelve hundred dollars when we started but we got gypped out of it all in two days in the private rooms.  We had an awful time getting back, I can tell you.  God, how I hated that town!"

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

The bottle of whiskey -- a second one -- was now in constant demand by all present....Tom rang for the janitor and sent him for some celebrated 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 entangled in some wild strident argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my chair.  Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering.  I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.

Myrtle pulled her chair close to mine and suddenly her warm breath poured over 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...."

------------------------------ ...With enchanting murmurs Daisy admired this aspect or that of the feudal silhouette against the sky, admired the gardens, the sparkling odor of jonquils and the frothy odor of hawthorn and plum blossoms and the pale gold odor of kiss-me-at-the-gate.  It was strange to reach the marble steps and find no stir of bright dresses in and out the door and hear no sound but bird voices in the trees.

... We went upstairs, through period bedrooms swathed in rose and lavender silk and vivid with new flowers, through dressing rooms and poolrooms, and bathrooms with sunken baths.... Finally we came to Gatsby's own apartment, a bedroom and a bath and an Adam study, where we sat down and drank a glass of some Chartreuse he took from a cupboard in the wall.

He hadn't once ceased looking at Daisy and I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes.  Sometimes, too, he stared around at his possessions in a dazed way as though in her actual and astounding presence none of it was any longer real.  Once he nearly toppled down a flight of stairs.
------------------- [end excerpt]

{The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Copyright, 1925.  Charles Scribner's Sons.}

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