Lunch with Wolfshiem — The Great Gatsby

On a Sunday morning the party crowd returns while church bells ring alongshore, and Nick reads back the guest list he once copied from a timetable dated July 5, 1922: East Egg names, West Egg names, people who accepted Gatsby's hospitality and repaid him by knowing nothing about him. The rumors keep growing. Young women call Gatsby a bootlegger and trade wild stories while Klipspringer, the boarder, drifts through the house often enough to become part of the furniture.

The next morning Gatsby picks Nick up in the cream Rolls and asks, bluntly, what his opinion is. He offers a rehearsed origin story about wealthy Middle West parents and an Oxford family tradition, then produces proof: a Montenegro medal for valour and a photograph of him at Oxford in blazers. At a cellar restaurant on 42nd Street he introduces Meyer Wolfshiem, a gambler with cufflinks made of human molars who fixed the 1919 World Series and still thinks Gatsby died in the war. Nick steps into the anteroom and finds Tom Buchanan. When he brings Tom back to the table, Gatsby has already vanished.

That afternoon Jordan Baker tells the real story over tea at the Plaza. In October 1917 she and Daisy, eighteen and dressed in white, drove through Louisville in a roadster and found a handsome officer named Jay Gatsby. He went to war. Daisy waited, then married Tom while Gatsby was still at Oxford, or so he claimed. After the war Gatsby bought the house across the bay and waited five years for a chance to come over. His request now is modest: Nick must invite Daisy to tea without telling her Gatsby will be there.

Jordan says Daisy ought to have something in her life. Nick puts his arm around Jordan in the dark, stops thinking about Gatsby's plan for a moment, and pulls her closer as the chapter ends on his own pursuit instead of Gatsby's.