On a Sunday morning the party crowd returns while church bells ring alongshore, and Nick reads back the names he once copied onto a timetable dated July 5, 1922. East Egg sits beside West Egg. The people accepted Gatsby's hospitality and repaid him by knowing nothing about him. The rumors keep growing. Young women call him a bootlegger, then a killer, and trade the stories between his cocktails and his flowers. Klipspringer drifts through the house so often that he is simply the boarder.
The next morning Gatsby picks Nick up in the cream-coloured car and asks, bluntly, what his opinion is. He offers a rehearsed origin: wealthy parents from the Middle West, all dead, and an Oxford education he calls a family tradition. The phrases are worn smooth. He lived, he says, like a young rajah in Paris, Venice, and Rome. Then he produces proof, a Montenegro medal inscribed for valour and a photograph of himself at Oxford in blazers, and he almost chokes on the word Oxford. At a cellar restaurant on 42nd Street he introduces Meyer Wolfshiem, a gambler whose cufflinks are human molars. Wolfshiem fixed the 1919 World Series, still thinks Gatsby died in the war, and tells how Rosy Rosenthal was shot on the sidewalk after he told a waiter not to take his coffee. 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 Louisville story over tea at the Plaza. In October 1917 she and Daisy, eighteen and dressed in white, met a handsome officer named Jay Gatsby. He went to war. Daisy waited. The day before the wedding Tom gave her a string of pearls. Jordan found her drunk on the bed, a letter crushed in one hand, the pearls pulled from a wastebasket, begging to send them back. They locked the door, put her in a cold bath, and half an hour later the pearls were around her neck again. Next day she married Tom without so much as a shiver, while Gatsby was still at Oxford, or so he claimed. After the war he bought the house across the bay and waited five years. The request now is small. Nick must invite Daisy to tea and must not tell her Gatsby will be there.
Jordan says Daisy ought to have something in her life. In the dark Nick thinks of the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired, puts his arm around Jordan, and draws her closer. The tea is agreed. His own pursuit is what the chapter actually stops on.
Coming Up in Chapter 5
Gatsby asks Nick to invite Daisy to tea at his cottage, the meeting he has waited five years to arrange. Rain will soak the reunion, a mantel clock will tilt as if time itself might break, and the house Gatsby built for one afternoon will finally open its doors.
