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scott155   

scott155
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He tells Tita that he doesn’t care that she is not a virgin – that it does not matter if it has not changed the

essential love between them. He still wants her to be his life’s companion. He also knows that Pedro is

the one she is talking about.

I have the perfect comeback. A Spaz-12.

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scott155
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About half way between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily joins the

railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a

certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes — a fantastic farm where

ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take

the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent

effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.

Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly

creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden

spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations

from your sight. But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift

endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg.

The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic — their irises are one yard

high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow

spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an

oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then

sank down himself into eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved away. But his

eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days, under sun and rain, brood on over the

solemn dumping ground.

The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and, when the

drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on waiting trains can stare at

the dismal scene for as long as half an hour. There is always a halt there of at least a

minute, and it was because of this that I first met Tom Buchanan’s mistress.

The fact that he had one was insisted upon wherever he was known. His

acquaintances resented the fact that he turned up in popular restaurants with her

and, leaving her at a table, sauntered about, chatting with whomsoever he knew.

Though I was curious to see her, I had no desire to meet her — but I did. I went up

to New York with Tom on the train one afternoon, and when we stopped by the

ashheaps he jumped to his feet and, taking hold of my elbow, literally forced me

from the car.

“We’re getting off,” he insisted. “I want you to meet my girl.”

I think he’d tanked up a good deal at luncheon, and his determination to have

my company bordered on violence. The supercilious assumption was that on

Sunday afternoon I had nothing better to do.

I followed him over a low whitewashed railroad fence, and we walked back a

hundred yards along the road under Doctor Eckleburg’s persistent stare. The only

building in sight was a small block of yellow brick sitting on the edge of the waste

land, a sort of compact Main Street ministering to it, and contiguous to absolutely

nothing. One of the three shops it contained was for rent and another was an all-night restaurant, approached by a trail of ashes; the third was a garage — Repairs.

GEORGE B. WILSON. Cars bought and sold.— and I followed Tom inside.

The interior was unprosperous and bare; the only car visible was the dustcovered wreck of a Ford which crouched in a dim corner. It had occurred to me

that this shadow of a garage must be a blind, and that sumptuous and romantic

apartments were concealed overhead, when the proprietor himself appeared in the

door of an office, wiping his hands on a piece of waste. He was a blond, spiritless

man, anaemic, and faintly handsome. When he saw us a damp gleam of hope sprang

into his light blue eyes.

“Hello, Wilson, old man,” said Tom, slapping him jovially on the shoulder. “How’s

business?”

“I can’t complain,” answered Wilson unconvincingly. “When are you going to

sell me that car?”

“Next week; I’ve got my man working on it now.”

“Works pretty slow, don’t he?”

“No, he doesn’t,” said Tom coldly. “And if you feel that way about it, maybe I’d

better sell it somewhere else after all.”

“I don’t mean that,” explained Wilson quickly. “I just meant ——”

His voice faded off and Tom glanced impatiently around the garage. Then I

heard footsteps on a stairs, and in a moment the thickish figure of a woman blocked

out the light from the office door. She was in the middle thirties, and faintly stout,

but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can. Her face, above a

spotted dress of dark blue crepe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty,

but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her

body were continually smouldering. She smiled slowly and, walking through her

husband as if he were a ghost, shook hands with Tom, looking him flush in the eye.

Then she wet her lips, and without turning around spoke to her husband in a soft,

coarse voice:

“Get some chairs, why don’t you, so somebody can sit down.”

“Oh, sure,” agreed Wilson hurriedly, and went toward the little office, mingling

immediately with the cement color of the walls. A white ashen dust veiled his dark

suit and his pale hair as it veiled everything in the vicinity — except his wif e, who

moved close to Tom.

“I want to see you,” said Tom intently. “Get on the next train.”

“All right.”

“I’ll meet you by the news-stand on the lower level.” She nodded and moved

away from him just as George Wilson emerged with two chairs from his office door.

We waited for her down the road and out of sight. It was a few days before the

Fourth of July, and a gray, scrawny Italian child was setting torpedoes in a row along

the railroad track.“Terrible place, isn’t it,” said Tom, exchanging a frown with Doctor Eckleburg.

“Awful.”

“It does her good to get away.”

“Doesn’t her husband object?”

“Wilson? He thinks she goes to see her sister in New York. He’s so dumb he

doesn’t know he’s alive.”

So Tom Buchanan and his girl and I went up together to New York — or not

quite together, for Mrs. Wilson sat discreetly in another car. Tom deferred that

much to the sensibilities of those East Eggers who might be on the train.

She had changed her dress to a brown figured muslin, which stretched tight

over her rather wide hips as Tom helped her to the platform in New York. At the

news-stand she bought a copy of TOWN TATTLE. and a moving-picture magazine,

and in the station drug-store some cold cream and a small flask of perfume. Upstairs, in the solemn echoing drive she let four taxicabs drive away before she

selected a new one, lavender-colored with gray upholstery, and in this we slid out

from the mass of the station into the glowing sunshine. But immediately she turned

sharply from the window and, leaning forward, tapped on the front glass.

“I want to get one of those dogs,” she said earnestly. “I want to get one for the

apartment. They’re nice to have — a dog.”

We backed up to a gray old man who bore an absurd resemblance to John D.

Rockefeller. In a basket swung from his neck cowered a dozen very recent puppies

of an indeterminate breed.

“What kind are they?” asked Mrs. Wilson eagerly, as he came to the taxiwindow.

“All kinds. What kind do you want, lady?”

“I’d like to get one of those police dogs; I don’t suppose you got that kind?”

The man peered doubtfully into the basket, plunged in his hand and drew one

up, wriggling, by the back of the neck.

“That’s no police dog,” said Tom.

“No, it’s not exactly a polICE dog,” said the man with disappointment in his

voice. “It’s more of an Airedale.” He passed his hand over the brown wash-rag of a

back. “Look at that coat. Some coat. That’s a dog that’ll never bother you with

catching cold.”

“I think it’s cute,” said Mrs. Wilson enthusiastically. “How much is it?”

“That dog?” He looked at it admiringly. “That dog will cost you ten dollars.”

The Airedale — undoubtedly there was an Airedale concerned in it somewhere,

though its feet were startlingly white — changed hands and settled down into Mrs.

Wilson’s lap, where she fondled the weather-proof coat with rapture.

“Is it a boy or a girl?” she asked delicately.

“That dog? That dog’s a boy.”“It’s a bitch,” said Tom decisively. “Here’s your money. Go and buy ten more

dogs with it.”

We drove over to Fifth Avenue, so warm and soft, almost pastoral, on the

summer Sunday afternoon that I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a great flock

of white sheep turn the corner.

“Hold on,” I said, “I have to leave you here.”

“No, you don’t,” interposed Tom quickly.

“Myrtle’ll be hurt if you don’t come up to the apartment. Won’t you, Myrtle?”

“Come on,” she urged. “I’ll telephone my sister Catherine. She’s said to be very

beautiful by people who ought to know.”

“Well, I’d like to, but ——”

We went on, cutting back again over the Park toward the West Hundreds. At

158th Street the cab stopped at one slice in a long white cake of apartment-houses.

Throwing a regal homecoming glance around the neighborhood, Mrs. Wilson

gathered up her dog and her other purchases, and went haughtily in.

“I’m going to have the McKees come up,” she announced as we rose in the

elevator. “And, of course, I got to call up my sister, too.”

The apartment was on the top floor — a small living-room, a small dining-room, a

small bedroom, and a bath. The living-room was crowded to the doors with a set of

tapestried furniture entirely too large for it, so that to move about was to stumble

continually over scenes of ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles. The only

picture was an over-enlarged photograph, apparently a hen sitting on a blurred

rock. Looked at from a distance, however, the hen resolved itself into a bonnet, and

the countenance of a stout old lady beamed down into the room. Several old copies

of TOWN TATTLE. lay on the table together with a copy of SIMON CALLED

PETER, and some of the small scandal magazines of Broadway. Mrs. Wilson was

first concerned with the dog. A reluctant elevator-boy went for a box full of straw

and some milk, to which he added on his own initiative a tin of large, hard dogbiscuits — one of which decomposed apathetically in the saucer of milk all

afternoon. Meanwhile Tom brought out a bottle of whiskey from a locked bureau

door.

I have been drunk just twice in my life, and the second time was that afternoon;

so everything that happened has a dim, hazy cast over it, although until after eight

o’clock the apartment was full of cheerful sun. Sitting on Tom’s lap Mrs. Wilson

called up several people on the telephone; then there were no cigarettes, and I

went out to buy some at the drugstore on the corner. When I came back they had

disappeared, so I sat down discreetly in the living-room and read a chapter of

SIMON CALLED PETER.— either it was terrible stuff or the whiskey distorted

things, because it didn’t make any sense to me.Just as Tom and Myrtle (after the first drink Mrs. Wilson and I called each other

by our first names) reappeared, company commenced to arrive at the apartmentdoor.

The sister, Catherine, was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty, with a solid,

sticky bob of red hair, and a complexion powdered milky white. Her eye-brows had

been plucked and then drawn on again at a more rakish angle, but the efforts of

nature toward the restoration of the old alignment gave a blurred air to her face.

When she moved about there was an incessant clicking as innumerable pottery

bracelets jingled up and down upon her arms. She came in with such a proprietary

haste, and looked around so possessively at the furniture that I wondered if she

lived here. But when I asked her she laughed immoderately, repeated my question

aloud, and told me she lived with a girl friend at a hotel.

Mr. McKee was a pale, feminine man from the flat below. He had just shaved,

for there was a white spot of lather on his cheekbone, and he was most respectful

in his greeting to every one in the room. He informed me that he was in the “artistic

game,” and I gathered later that he was a photographer and had made the dim

enlargement of Mrs. Wilson’s mother which hovered like an ectoplasm on the wall.

His wife was shrill, languid, handsome, and horrible. She told me with pride that her

husband had photographed her a hundred and twenty-seven times since they had

been married.

Mrs. Wilson had changed her costume some time before, and was now attired

in an elaborate afternoon dress of cream-colored chiffon, which gave out a

continual rustle as she swept about the room. With the influence of the dress her

personality had also undergone a change. The intense vitality that had been so

remarkable in the garage was converted into impressive hauteur. Her laughter, her

gestures, her assertions became more violently affected moment by moment, and

as she expanded the room grew smaller around her, until she seemed to be

revolving on a noisy, creaking pivot through the smoky air.

“My dear,” she told her sister in a high, mincing shout, “most of these fellas will

cheat you every time. All they think of is money. I had a woman up here last week to

look at my feet, and when she gave me the bill you’d of thought she had my

appendicitis out.”

“What was the name of the woman?” asked Mrs. McKee.

“Mrs. Eberhardt. She goes around looking at people’s feet in their own homes.”

“I like your dress,” remarked Mrs. McKee, “I think it’s adorable.”

Mrs. Wilson rejected the compliment by raising her eyebrow in disdain.

“It’s just a crazy old thing,” she said. “I just slip it on sometimes when I don’t

care what I look like.”

“But it looks wonderful on you, if you know what I mean,” pursued Mrs. McKee.

“If Chester could only get you in that pose I think he could make something of it.”We all looked in silence at Mrs. Wilson, who removed a strand of hair from over

her eyes and looked back at us with a brilliant smile. Mr. McKee regarded her

intently with his head on one side, and then moved his hand back and forth slowly

in front of his face.

“I should change the light,” he said after a moment. “I’d like to bring out the

modelling of the features. And I’d try to get hold of all the back hair.”

“I wouldn’t think of changing the light,” cried Mrs. McKee. “I think it’s ——”

Her husband said “SH!” and we all looked at the subject again, whereupon Tom

Buchanan yawned audibly and got to his feet.

“You McKees have something to drink,” he said. “Get some more ice and

mineral water, Myrtle, before everybody goes to sleep.”

“I told that boy about the ice.” Myrtle raised her eyebrows in despair at the

shiftlessness of the lower orders. “These people! You have to keep after them all

the time.”

She looked at me and laughed pointlessly. Then she flounced over to the dog,

kissed it with ecstasy, and swept into the kitchen, implying that a dozen chefs

awaited her orders there.

“I’ve done some nice things out on Long Island,” asserted Mr. McKee.

Tom looked at him blankly.

“Two of them we have framed down-stairs.”

“Two what?” demanded Tom.

“Two studies. One of them I call MONTAUK POINT— THE GULLS, and t he

other I call MONTAUK POINT— THE SEA.”

The sister Catherine sat down beside me on the couch.

“Do you live down on Long Island, too?” she inquired.

“I live at West Egg.”

“Really? I was down there at a party about a month ago. At a man named

Gatsby’s. Do you know him?”

“I live next door to him.”

“Well, they say he’s a nephew or a cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm’s. That’s where all

his money comes from.”

“Really?”

She nodded.

“I’m scared of him. I’d hate to have him get anything on me.”

This absorbing information about my neighbor was interrupted by Mrs.

McKee’s pointing suddenly at Catherine:

“Chester, I think you could do something with HER,” she broke out, but Mr.

McKee only nodded in a bored way, and turned his attention to Tom.

“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.

“I almost made a mistake, too,” she declared vigorously. “I almost married a

little kyke who’d been after me for years. I knew he was below me. Everybody kept

saying to me: ‘Lucille, that man’s ‘way below you!’ But if I hadn’t met Chester, he’d

of got me sure.”

“Yes, but listen,” said Myrtle Wilson, nodding her head up and down, “at least

you didn’t marry him.”“I know I didn’t.”

“Well, I married him,” said Myrtle, ambiguously. “And that’s the difference

between your case and mine.”

“Why did you, Myrtle?” demanded Catherine. “Nobody forced you to.”

Myrtle considered.

“I married him because I thought he was a gentleman,” she said finally. “I

thought he knew something about breeding, but he wasn’t fit to lick my shoe.”

“You were crazy about him for a while,” said Catherine.

“Crazy about him!” cried Myrtle incredulously. “Who said I was crazy about

him? I never was any more crazy about him than I was about that man there.”

She pointed suddenly at me, and every one looked at me accusingly. I tried to

show by my expression that I had played no part in her past.

“The only CRAZY I was was when I married him. I knew right away I made a

mistake. He borrowed somebody’s best suit to get married in, and never even told

me about it, and the man came after it one day when he was out. ‘oh, is that your

suit?’ I said. ‘this is the first I ever heard about it.’ But I gave it to him and then I lay

down and cried to beat the band all afternoon.”

“She really ought to get away from him,” resumed Catherine to me. “They’ve

been living over that garage for eleven years. And tom’s the first sweetie she ever

had.”

The bottle of whiskey — a second one — was now in constant demand by all

present, excepting Catherine, who “felt just as good on nothing at all.” 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 southward 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. I was going up to New York to see my sister and spend the night.

He had on a dress suit and patent leather shoes, and I couldn’t keep my eyes off

him, but every time he looked at me I had to pretend to be looking at the

advertisement over his head. When we came into the station he was next to me,

and his white shirt-front pressed against my arm, and so I told him I’d have to call a

policeman, but he knew I lied. I was so excited that when I got into a taxi with him I didn’t hardly know I wasn’t getting into a subway train. All I kept thinking about,

over and over, was ‘You can’t live forever; you can’t live forever.’”

She turned to Mrs. McKee and the room rang full of her artificial laughter.

“My dear,” she cried, “I’m going to give you this dress as soon as I’m through

with it. I’ve got to get another one to-morrow. I’m going to make a list of all the

things I’ve got to get. A massage and a wave, and a collar for the dog, and one of

those cute little ash-trays where you touch a spring, and a wreath with a black silk

bow for mother’s grave that’ll last all summer. I got to write down a list so I won’t

forget all the things I got to do.”

It was nine o’clock — almost immediately afterward I looked at my watch and

found it was ten. Mr. McKee was asleep on a chair with his fists clenched in his lap,

like a photograph of a man of action. Taking out my handkerchief I wiped from his

cheek the remains of the spot of dried lather that had worried me all the afternoon.

The little dog was sitting on the table looking with blind eyes through the

smoke, and from time to time groaning faintly. People disappeared, reappeared,

made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each other, searched for each other,

found each other a few feet away. Some time toward midnight Tom Buchanan and

Mrs. Wilson stood face to face discussing, in impassioned voices, whether Mrs.

Wilson had any right to mention Daisy’s name.

“Daisy! Daisy! Daisy!” shouted Mrs. Wilson. “I’ll say it whenever I want to! Daisy!

Dai ——”

Making a short deft movement, Tom Buchanan broke her nose with his open

hand.

Then there were bloody towels upon the bath-room floor, and women’s voices

scolding, and high over the confusion a long broken wail of pain. Mr. McKee awoke

from his doze and started in a daze toward the door. When he had gone half way he

turned around and stared at the scene — his wife and Catherine scolding and

consoling as they stumbled here and there among the crowded furniture with

articles of aid, and the despairing figure on the couch, bleeding fluently, and trying

to spread a copy of TOWN TATTLE. over the tapestry scenes of Versailles. Then

Mr. McKee turned and continued on out the door. Taking my hat from the

chandelier, I followed.

“Come to lunch some day,” he suggested, as we groaned down in the elevator.

“Where?”

“Anywhere.”

“Keep your hands off the lever,” snapped the elevator boy.

“I beg your pardon,” said Mr. McKee with dignity, “I didn’t know I was touching

it.”

“All right,” I agreed, “I’ll be glad to.”. . . I was standing beside his bed and he was sitting up between the sheets, clad

in his underwear, with a great portfolio in his hands.

“Beauty and the Beast . . . Loneliness . . . Old Grocery Horse . . . Brook’n Bridge

. . . .”

Then I was lying half asleep in the cold lower level of the Pennsylvania Station,

staring at the morning TRIBUNE, and waiting for the four o’clock train

I have the perfect comeback. A Spaz-12.

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scott155   

scott155
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Gatsby’s Party, July 1922

Guest List

A. Doc. Webster Civet B. Edgar Beaver

The Blackbucks Ripley Snell

Clarence Endive G. Earl Muldoon

C. Ernest Lily D. The Quinns

Henry Palmetto Benny McClenahan

Mr. Brewer Miss. Claudia Hip

I have the perfect comeback. A Spaz-12.

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scott155
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[Wall of text related to F. Scott Fitzgerald]

 

I actually just finished the Great Gatsby for the first time yesterday. What a remarkable coincidence :)

 

http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Theme

Well, I have to do a bunch of work with that book. I'm pretty sure that's a whole chapter. On a related note:

 

“It’s

really his wife that’s keeping them apart. She’s a Catholic, and they don’t believe in

divorce.”

I have the perfect comeback. A Spaz-12.

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