The Valley of Ashes — The Great Gatsby

Halfway between West Egg and Manhattan the road cuts through the valley of ashes: grey dust, ash-heaps, and the faded eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg brooding over the dump. Tom drags Nick off the train at Wilson's garage, already drunk from lunch and treating Nick's Sunday as his property. George Wilson is a spiritless man trying to buy a car Tom keeps dangling; Myrtle walks through her husband like a ghost to meet Tom's eyes. Tom sends her ahead on the next train while Wilson fetches chairs, then tells Nick that Wilson thinks Myrtle visits her sister and is too dumb to know he is alive.

In New York Myrtle buys gossip magazines, cold cream, perfume, and an Airedale puppy from a street vendor before Tom bullies Nick into coming up to her top-floor apartment at 158th Street. The rooms are stuffed with tapestried furniture too large for the space. Myrtle changes into cream chiffon and her whole personality swells with fake hauteur; the apartment shrinks around her as she performs being rich. Whisky flows. Catherine, her sister, whispers that Tom and Myrtle will marry once Daisy, who is supposedly Catholic, releases Tom. Nick knows Daisy is not Catholic and that the story is a lie built so Myrtle can keep pretending. Myrtle explains she married Wilson because she thought he was a gentleman, then lists shopping errands as if spending could rewrite her life. Nick tries to leave for the twilight streets and keeps getting pulled back into arguments; he feels within and without at once, enchanted and repelled.

Toward midnight Myrtle chants Daisy's name on purpose. Tom breaks her nose with his open hand. Blood on the towels, women shouting, Myrtle trying to cover the Versailles scenes on the couch with Town Tattle while she bleeds. Nick wipes shaving lather from the photographer McKee's face, follows him out, accepts a vague lunch invitation, and then the chapter snaps into a blurred image of McKee in his underwear showing portfolio titles before Nick wakes at four in the morning in Pennsylvania Station, waiting for the train home.