Tom Buchanan introduces Nick to his mistress Myrtle

On a Sunday afternoon, Tom Buchanan, with a violent determination bordering on drunkenness, forces Nick Carraway off the train at the Valley of Ashes to meet his mistress. Nick, who has heard rumors of Tom's affair, is reluctant but physically compelled by Tom, who takes hold of his elbow and literally forces him from the car. They walk back along the road under the persistent, giant stare of the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, an advertisement looming over the desolate landscape. Their destination is a small block of yellow brick containing a garage—Repairs. GEORGE B. WILSON. Cars bought and sold—a place that seems to Nick a shadow of a garage, possibly a blind for sumptuous apartments concealed overhead.

The Garage and the Wilsons

The interior of Wilson's garage is unprosperous and bare, containing only the dust-covered wreck of a Ford in a dim corner. The proprietor, George Wilson, emerges from an office wiping his hands on a piece of waste. He is a blond, spiritless, anaemic man, faintly handsome, with a damp gleam of hope in his light blue eyes when he sees Tom. Tom slaps him jovially on the shoulder and asks about business, but Wilson's unconvincing answer and his anxious inquiry about a car Tom promised to sell him are met with cold impatience. Then, footsteps on a stairs announce the arrival of Myrtle Wilson. She is in her middle thirties, faintly stout, but carries her surplus flesh sensuously. Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crepe-de-chine, contains no facet or gleam of beauty, but there is an immediately perceptible vitality about her, as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering. She smiles slowly, walks through her husband as if he were a ghost, and shakes hands with Tom, looking him flush in the eye. She then wets her lips and, without turning around, orders her husband to get chairs so somebody can sit down. Wilson hurriedly agrees, his dark suit and pale hair veiled in the white ashen dust that covers everything in the vicinity—except his wife, who moves close to Tom. Tom tells her to get on the next train, and she agrees, moving away from him just as George Wilson emerges with two chairs.

The Journey to New York

Tom and Nick wait for Myrtle down the road and out of sight. Tom dismisses any concern about her husband, explaining that Wilson thinks she goes to see her sister in New York and is too dumb to know he's alive. They travel to New York together, though Myrtle sits discreetly in another car, a deference Tom pays to the sensibilities of any East Eggers who might be on the train. She has changed into a brown figured muslin dress that stretches tight over her wide hips. At the news-stand she buys 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, she lets four taxicabs drive away before selecting a new one, lavender-colored with gray upholstery. On the way, she insists on buying a dog from a gray old man who bears an absurd resemblance to John D. Rockefeller. She wants a police dog, but the man produces an Airedale, which Tom decisively identifies as a bitch. Myrtle fondles the dog with rapture as they drive to the apartment Tom keeps for her.

The Apartment and the Party

The apartment is on the top floor of a long white cake of apartment-houses at 158th Street. It is a small living-room, a small dining-room, a small bedroom, and a bath, crowded with tapestried furniture entirely too large for it. The only picture is an over-enlarged photograph of Mrs. Wilson's mother, which looks like a hen sitting on a blurred rock. Myrtle calls her sister Catherine and insists that the McKees come up. Tom brings out a bottle of whiskey from a locked bureau door. Nick gets drunk for only the second time in his life that afternoon. The party becomes a chaotic, loud affair. Catherine, Myrtle's sister, is a slender, worldly girl of about thirty with a solid, sticky bob of red hair and a complexion powdered milky white. Mr. McKee, a pale, feminine man from the flat below, is a photographer who has made the dim enlargement of Mrs. Wilson's mother. His wife is shrill, languid, handsome, and horrible. Myrtle changes into an elaborate afternoon dress of cream-colored chiffon, and her personality undergoes a change, her intense vitality converted into impressive hauteur. The conversation turns to Gatsby, with Catherine claiming he is a nephew or cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm's. Myrtle tells the story of her first meeting with Tom on the train, and the party descends into a drunken, violent argument when Myrtle begins shouting Daisy's name. Tom Buchanan breaks her nose with his open hand, a short, deft movement. The scene ends with bloody towels on the bathroom floor, women's voices scolding, and a long, broken wail of pain from Myrtle on the couch, trying to spread a copy of Town Tattle over the tapestry scenes of Versailles.