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 rain cooled about half past three to a damp mist through which occasional thin drops swam like dew.
The sun had gone down behind the tall apartments of the movie stars in the West Fifties and the clear voice of little girls, already gathered like crickets on the grass, rose through the hot twilight….
The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon.
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.
She was a slender, small-breasted girl with an erect carriage which she accentuated by throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet.
She was extended full length at her end of the divan, completely motionless and with her chin raised a little as if she were balancing something on it which was quite likely to fall.
So engrossed was she that she had no consciousness of being observed and one emotion after another crept into her face like objects into a slowing developing picture.
There was nothing to look at from under the tree except Gatsby’s enormous house so I stared at it, like Kant at his church steeple, for half an hour.
They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house.
With fenders spread like wings we scattered light through half Astoria – only half, for as we twisted among the pillars of the elevated I heard the familiar “jug-jug-spat!” of a motor cycle, and a frantic policemen rode alongside.
With his hands still in his coat pockets he stalked by me into the hall, turned sharply as if he were on a wire and disappeared into the living room.
"At 158th Street the cab stopped at one slice in a long white cake of apartment-houses."
When he realized what I was talking about, that there were twinkle-bells of sunshine in the room, he smiled like a weather man, like an ecstatic patron of recurrent light, and repeated the news to Daisy.
Tom taped his thick fingers together like a clergyman and leaned back in his chair.
They were gone, without a word, snapped out, made accidental, isolated like ghosts even from our pity.
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 already crumbling through the powdery air.
Tom talked incessantly, exulting and laughing, but his voice was as remote from Jordan and me as the foreign clamor on the sidewalk or the tumult of the elevated overhead.
She took it into the tub with her and squeezed it up into a wet ball and only let me leave it in the soap dish when she saw that it was coming to pieces like snow.
On week-ends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city, between nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains.
Before I could reply that he was my neighbor dinner was announced; wedging his tense arm imperatively under mine Tom Buchanan compelled me from the room as though he were moving a checker to another square.
Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to her, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to the moon.
Daisy and Jordan lay upon an enormous couch, like silver idols, weighing down their own white dresses against the singing breeze of the fans.
At the grey tea hour there were always rooms that throbbed incessantly with this low sweet fever, while fresh faces drifted here and there like rose petals blown by the sad horns around the floor.
At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.
A damp streak of hair lay like a dash of blue paint across her cheek and her hand was wet with glistening drops as I took it to help her from the car.
“After that I lived like a young rajah in all the capitals of Europe – Paris, Venice, Rome – collecting jewels, chiefly rubies, hunting big game, painting a little, things for myself only, and trying to forget something very sad that had happened to be long ago.”
And the Hornbeams and the Willie Voltaires and a whole clan named Blackbuck who always gathered in a corner and flipped up their noses like goats at whosoever came near.
For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened – then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk.
Gatsby, pale as death, with his hands plunged like weights in his coat pockets, was standing in a puddle of water glaring tragically into my eyes.
It was this night that he told me the strange story of his youth with Dan Cody – told it to me because “Jay Gatsby” had broken up like glass against Tom’s hard malice and the long secret extravaganza was played out.
Mr. McKee was asleep on a chair with his fists clenched in his lap, like a photograph of a man of action.
My incredulity was submerged in fascination now; it was like skimming hastily through a dozen magazines.
It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.
In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.
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.
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.
A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling – and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.

Featured Simile

Tom taped his thick fingers together like a clergyman and leaned back in his chair.
-- Great Gatsby, The - Fitzgerald, F. Scott - 1925