His wife and his mistress, until an hour ago secure and inviolate, were slipping precipitately from his control.
Instinct made him step on the accelerator with the double purpose of overtaking Daisy and leaving Wilson behind, and we sped along toward Astoria at fifty miles an hour, until, among the spidery girders of the elevated, we came in sight of the easygoing blue coupe.
“Those big movies around Fiftieth Street are cool,” suggested Jordan.
“I love New York on summer afternoons when every one’s away.
There’s something very sensuous about it—overripe, as if all sorts of funny fruits were going to fall into your hands.”
The word “sensuous” had the effect of further disquieting Tom, but before he could invent a protest the coupe came to a stop, and Daisy signalled us to draw up alongside.
“Where are we going?” she cried.
“How about the movies?”
“It’s so hot,” she complained.
“You go. We’ll ride around and meet you after.”
With an effort her wit rose faintly, “We’ll meet you on some corner.
I’ll be the man smoking two cigarettes.”
“We can’t argue about it here,” Tom said impatiently, as a truck gave out a cursing whistle behind us.
“You follow me to the south side of Central Park, in front of the Plaza.”
Several times he turned his head and looked back for their car, and if the traffic delayed them he slowed up until they came into sight.
I think he was afraid they would dart down a side street and out of his life forever.
But they didn’t.
And we all took the less explicable step of engaging the parlor of a suite in the Plaza Hotel.
The prolonged and tumultuous argument that ended by herding us into that room eludes me, though I have a sharp physical memory that, in the course of it, my underwear kept climbing like a damp snake around my legs and intermittent beads of sweat raced cool across my back.
The notion originated with Daisy’s suggestion that we hire five bathrooms and take cold baths, and then assumed more tangible form as “a place to have a mint julep.”
Each of us said over and over that it was a “crazy idea”—we all talked at once to a baffled clerk and thought, or pretended to think, that we were being very funny …
The room was large and stifling, and, though it was already four o’clock, opening the windows admitted only a gust of hot shrubbery from the Park.
Daisy went to the mirror and stood with her back to us, fixing her hair.
“It’s a swell suite,” whispered Jordan respectfully, and every one laughed.
“Open another window,” commanded Daisy, without turning around.
“There aren’t any more.”
“Well, we’d better telephone for an axe——”
“The thing to do is to forget about the heat,” said Tom impatiently.
“You make it ten times worse by crabbing about it.”
He unrolled the bottle of whiskey from the towel and put it on the table.
“Why not let her alone, old sport?” remarked Gatsby.
“You’re the one that wanted to come to town.”
There was a moment of silence.
The telephone book slipped from its nail and splashed to the floor, whereupon Jordan whispered,
“Excuse me”—but this time no one laughed.
“I’ll pick it up,” I offered.
“I’ve got it.”
Gatsby examined the parted string, muttered “Hum!” in an interested way, and tossed the book on a chair.
“That’s a great expression of yours, isn’t it?” said Tom sharply.
“What is?”
“All this ’old sport’ business.
Where’d you pick-that up?”
“Now see here, Tom,” said Daisy, turning around from the mirror, “if you’re going to make personal remarks I won’t stay here a minute.
Call up and order some ice for the mint julep.”
As Tom took up the receiver the compressed heat exploded into sound and we were listening to the portentous chords of Mendelssohn’s Wedding March from the ballroom below.
“Imagine marrying anybody in this heat!” cried Jordan dismally.
“Still—I was married in the middle of June,” Daisy remembered,
“Louisville in June!
Somebody fainted.
Who was it fainted, Tom?”