Tea in the Rain — The Great Gatsby

The night before the meeting, Gatsby's house blazes from tower to cellar and the lawn stays silent. Nick thinks the place looks like the World's Fair. Gatsby is restless enough to suggest Coney Island or a midnight swim, then calms when Nick says he will call Daisy and invite her to tea. Rain soaks the next day. Gatsby sends someone to cut Nick's ragged grass so the two lawns meet, and he even offers Nick a little business on the side. None of that is the point. The point is the hour he has waited five years to reach.

He arrives at the cottage early, pale and miserable. Nick tells him it is just two minutes to four. When Daisy's roadster comes up the lane the reunion starts wrong. Gatsby leans against a stopped mantel clock until it tilts, then he catches it with trembling fingers and puts it back. He says they have met before. She asks how long it has been, and he answers with automatic precision: five years next November. Nick makes tea in the kitchen. From the next room the silence is so loud he goes back in, then leaves them alone. A maid opens the upper windows of Gatsby's house and leans out over the garden.

The rain eases and Gatsby walks Daisy through the house he built for this afternoon, rooms copied from European hotels, then cabinets of shirts in coral, apple-green, and lavender. Daisy buries her face in the silk and sobs that she has never seen such beautiful shirts. Out by the dock he tells her that the green light at the end of her pier burns all night. The moment he says it, the light's colossal significance is gone, because she is beside him and the distance that made the symbol work is over.

Klipspringer plays the piano. Nick sees that the dream has grown past Daisy herself until the woman in the room cannot fill it. Doubt crosses Gatsby's face. Then she speaks, he takes her hand, and they forget Nick is there. He walks down the marble steps into the rain and leaves the two of them together.