Question

Writing Prompt: Write an original narrative story that continues the story and focuses on the narrator’s experience at Gatsby’s party. Use relevant, concrete, and sufficient details from the passage to support your story.

There was music from my neighbour’s house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. At high tide in the afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft, or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach while his two motorboats slit the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of foam. On weekends 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. And on Mondays eight servants, including an extra gardener, toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden-shears, repairing the ravages of the night before.

Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York—every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves. There was a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler’s thumb.

At least once a fortnight a corps of caterers came down with several hundred feet of canvas and enough coloured lights to make a Christmas tree of Gatsby’s enormous garden. On buffet tables, garnished with glistening hors-d’oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold. In the main hall a bar with a real brass rail was set up, and stocked with gins and liquors and with cordials so long forgotten that most of his female guests were too young to know one from another.

By seven o’clock the orchestra has arrived, no thin five-piece affair, but a whole pitful of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and cornets and piccolos, and low and high drums. The last swimmers have come in from the beach now and are dressing upstairs; the cars from New York are parked five deep in the drive, and already the halls and salons and verandas are gaudy with primary colours, and hair bobbed in strange new ways, and shawls beyond the dreams of Castile. The bar is in full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside, until the air is alive with chatter and laughter, and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot, and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other’s names.

The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of voices pitches a key higher. Laughter is easier minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word. The groups change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath; already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment the centre of a group, and then, excited with triumph, glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and colour under the constantly changing light.

Suddenly one of these gypsies, in trembling opal, seizes a cocktail out of the air, dumps it down for courage and, moving her hands like Frisco, dances out alone on the canvas platform. A momentary hush; the orchestra leader varies his rhythm obligingly for her, and there is a burst of chatter as the erroneous news goes around that she is Gilda Gray’s understudy from the Follies. The party has begun.

I believe that on the first night I went to Gatsby’s house I was one of the few guests who had actually been invited. People were not invited—they went there.

Answer 1

People did not need invitations; they came as if drawn by some legion of small compasses set in their pockets. I had come because I had been asked, and because curiosity—what passes for courage in the city—made me want to see how a house could be built around a rumor. The party was everything the stories promised and stranger besides.

As I forded the lawn the light changed on the trees into a theatrical green. The blue gardens were a stage for a small, extravagant ecosystem: champagne fluted and fizzing like sea-broken glass; faces lit from below by the strings of bulbs that caterers had hung like a modern constellational map; the air heavy with a sweet tang of citrus, the city’s oranges and lemons making the night smell of breakfast and of decay. A butler in white, his sleeve dusted with powdered sugar or perhaps the lemon pulp that escaped him, pushed a featureless tray through the crowd at a careful, relentless angle. At a corner of the terrace a machine in the kitchen muttered on, an industrious throat pressing out a winter's worth of juice for the night’s thirsts.

Inside there were rooms that flowed into one another like streams, bright and shallow. Buffet tables crouched under paper lamps—spiced hams gleaming like polished skin, salads laid out in harlequin designs and pastry pigs looking absurdly proud. A bar with a true brass rail had been planted across the ballroom; men in rented tails leaned on it as if on someone’s handrail in a foreign port. The cordials were old-fashioned and looked back at the girls with an amused, knowing face; most of the women were too young to have much memory of them, and sipped them as if sampling some antique language.

The orchestra arrived like a new weather. It was not merely entertainment but a force—oboes and trombones and saxophones that suggested things you could not name, cornets that made small buildings out of sound. The music turned to that yellow cocktail mood the boys in town treasured: bright but slightly drunk, as if the notes themselves had taken a nip. On the canvas platform by the band a girl in trembling opal still had the stage. Her hands flittered in a kind of self-taught, charming mimicry; for a single moment, under a bloom of light, she was an actress rehearsing happiness for others. Someone whispered that she was an understudy for a show, and in that whisper the aura of professional glamour wrapped itself about her like a shawl.

I found myself moving where the light took me, a small passive body amid sculpted animation. Groups assembled, burst, and reassembled with a speed that made the evening feel like a ship changing its course continuously. Conversations were thinly tethered—names, trivialities, the quick, obliging lie that passes for acquaintance. Once, by the conservatory, a woman with a bright hat told me that people came just to say they had been; they collected other people's evenings the way collectors stock curios. I said, perhaps too politely, that it was marvelous to see so much life at leisure. She laughed with the ease of habit and drifted away.

There were the absurd mechanical notes of the household everywhere—the Rolls-Royce and the station wagon that ferried guests, the servants who moved silently to repair the night as if it were a garment frayed by too much merriment. Beyond the glitter of the lawns the Sound lay dark and indifferent; Gatsby's two motorboats might have been toy versions of the ocean’s impatience. The whole place seemed to make merry defiance of the horizon.

At some point, to escape the press of bodies, I wandered out toward the edge of the garden where the grass cooled and the light thinned. The chatter receded and the orchestra became a soft luminous line beyond which the water hinted at black distances. There, near an old fountain where the spray had turned the stone satin-grey, I saw a man standing alone.

He was not conspicuous—his dress was of the sort you would expect at a party, but his presence had a quality that arrested me: not flamboyance, but a deliberate reserve. He stood with his hands lightly clasped behind him, turned a little away so that light only kissed one cheek. As I approached, he glanced at me in the way one glances at a stranger who might be a friend—an acknowledgement that had neither the urgent heat of a challenge nor the coolness of a dismissal.

“Are you enjoying it?” he asked. The question was simple, exactly the kind of question people at an enormous party ask one another to create a small intimacy. His voice, though, carried the hint of not being asked for the sake of answer, but as a way to place me within the scene beside him.

I told him the truth—that I had been invited and that I had come because I wanted to see what it was like to be at the center of a rumor. He smiled, and the smile was not large but it altered the geometry of his face; it suggested that he had expected something like my confession and received it with the patience of someone who had been waiting for all manner of explanations.

We talked, then—about trivial things, about the music and about how the oranges seemed to perfume everything. He mentioned, almost casually, that they always had five crates come on Friday and that they always became pulp by Monday, and I could see in his manner a man who had studied the details of abundance as if they were a kind of scripture. There was that curious confluence of care and command in him: he spoke of the servants with a manner of someone who loved the efficiency of movement, and of the canvas lights with the affection of an amateur astronomer describing an invented constellation.

A flotilla of small human dramas passed between our words. A young couple strolled past, giggling as if rehearsing future confidences; two men in side-glances debated some racetrack or another with a fervor that made their faces red; a woman in a shawl that looked woven of moons floated through the crowd and waved at no one in particular. Every now and then someone would call the name of the host—always that name, always the same—a name everyone knew and few could affix to a face.

He never announced himself, and I did not ask. There are moods in which a name spoils a tableau; at that hour and under those lights a name would have been the last indispensable piece of business to break a spell. So I watched and listened, and though we were near enough to be companions in passing, there remained in him a small, reserved distance that kept him half in the garden and half in some private place I could not see.

After a time, drawn by a new burst of music, he excused himself and walked back toward the house. He moved without haste, but there was a purpose that left the impression he had errands to attend to—small, necessary errands that maintained the integrity of his world. I stood by the fountain while the party rebuilt itself without him. The music surged, the brass rail clinked with glasses, a waiter flung a tray for an instant like some small bright accident; the gypsy in opal had been replaced by a troupe of dancers and laughter rose like sparks.

Left alone, I felt the odd sensation of being at once a spectator and a necessary piece of the evening. Parties are made of intimacies and of the deliberate art of being seen. Yet the thing that pressed in upon me most insistently was how many of those here had no particular reason to be where they were beyond the sheer pleasure of belonging to a place for an hour. They drifted like moths among the whisperings and the stars, taking the light where it shone and leaving it where it did not.

When I finally reentered the house, the rooms were buzzing with new energy. The brass-rail bar had accumulated a ring of drinkers, dancing feet kept time to the wind of the saxophones, and a group of men were arguing about the best motorship for the Sound as if the matter were of world consequence. Somewhere beyond, through the windows, a boat threw a silver wake. For all the ostentation, there was that private, almost melancholy fact that the household would need eight servants to bleach the remainder of the revelry from the carpets by Monday morning, and that the bright pyramids of pulpless peel would be swept out like the remains of a feast.

I moved among the faces then, not wholly comfortable, but oddly comforted by the large, indifferent mercy of the place. A girl stopped me to inquire about a mutual acquaintance; a man bought me a drink with the careless generosity of the person who has never had to count his indulgence. In all of it there lay something mythic: a man had constructed an empire of parties so that for a few hours every week the island reassembled itself into a spectacular lie. And at the heart of that lie—just out of plain sight, present in gesture rather than in proclamation—was the man I had passed at the fountain.

I do not know whether I fully understood him that night. It is too easy to mistake the architecture of a party for the architecture of a life. Still, there was in that evening and in my brief, unannounced company with him the outline of a truth: that one can be surrounded by a thousand people and yet occupy a solitude all one’s own. The orchestra played on, yellow and generous, the gypsy’s laugh was mulched under the roar, and the house made bright with its electric stars continued to be the place everyone came to be seen—except for a single man who seemed to be looking not at the guests but past them, toward some small, private shore.