There was so much to read, for one thing, and so much fine health to
be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. I bought a dozen
volumes on banking and credit and investment securities, and they
stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint,
promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and
Maecenas knew. And I had the high intention of reading many other
books besides. I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a
series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the Yale News—and now
I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become
again that most limited of all specialists, the “well-rounded man.”
This isn’t just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at
from a single window, after all.

It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of
the strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender
riotous island which extends itself due east of New York—and where
there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of
land. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in
contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most
domesticated body of salt water in the Western hemisphere, the great
wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. They are not perfect ovals—like the
egg in the Columbus story, they are both crushed flat at the contact
end—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual
wonder to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a more
interesting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular
except shape and size.

I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though
this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little
sinister contrast between them. My house was at the very tip of the
egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge
places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on
my right was a colossal affair by any standard—it was a factual
imitation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one
side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble
swimming pool, and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. It was
Gatsby’s mansion. Or, rather, as I didn’t know Mr. Gatsby, it was a
mansion inhabited by a gentleman of that name. My own house was an
eyesore, but it was a small eyesore, and it had been overlooked, so I
had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbour’s lawn, and
the consoling proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dollars a
month.

Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg
glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins
on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom
Buchanans. Daisy was my second cousin once removed, and I’d known Tom
in college. And just after the war I spent two days with them in
Chicago.

Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of
the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven—a
national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute
limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savours of
anticlimax. His family were enormously wealthy—even in college his
freedom with money was a matter for reproach—but now he’d left Chicago
and come East in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for
instance, he’d brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake
Forest. It was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was
wealthy enough to do that.

Why they came East I don’t know. They had spent a year in France for
no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully
wherever people played polo and were rich together. This was a
permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn’t believe
it—I had no sight into Daisy’s heart, but I felt that Tom would drift
on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of
some irrecoverable football game.

And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East
Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all. Their house
was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red-and-white
Georgian Colonial mansion, overlooking the bay. The lawn started at
the beach and ran towards the front door for a quarter of a mile,
jumping over sundials and brick walks and burning gardens—finally when
it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though
from the momentum of its run. The front was broken by a line of French
windows, glowing now with reflected gold and wide open to the warm
windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with
his legs apart on the front porch.

He had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy
straw-haired man of thirty, with a rather hard mouth and a
supercilious manner. Two shining arrogant eyes had established
dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning
aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding
clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill
those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing, and you could
see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his
thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage—a cruel body.

His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of
fractiousness he conveyed. There was a touch of paternal contempt in
it, even toward people he liked—and there were men at New Haven who
had hated his guts.

“Now, don’t think my opinion on these matters is final,” he seemed to
say, “just because I’m stronger and more of a man than you are.” We
were in the same senior society, and while we were never intimate I
always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like
him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own.

We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch.