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. 3 paragraphs

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

I had my card in my pocket and, for once, felt the oddness of being properly received. The gates opened onto the blue gardens and the whole place turned into a private constellation: lanterns strung through the beeches, faces lit by the shifting, almost theatrical light. The air was thick with champagne and citrus; somewhere in the kitchen a machine was ticking off oranges so fast that a butler’s thumb might have been blurred, and beyond the veranda I could hear, faint and continuous, the cut of motorboats on the Sound as if the sea itself were joining the chorus. Men and girls moved like moths among the whisperings; groups formed and dissolved with the ease of surf, and the orchestra — not a meagre five-piece but a small army of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and cornets and piccolos and drums — laid down the sound that made the whole place tilt toward indulgence. A woman in trembling opal seized a cocktail, danced alone on a canvas platform, and for a suspended minute the rumor that she was some Follies understudy was the only important fact in the world.

I wandered, and in wandering discovered the party’s peculiar economy of acquaintance. There was a long table set with spiced hams and salads in harlequin designs, pastry pigs and turkeys dark and perfect-looking as stage props; a bar with a real brass rail poured cordials the girls did not know, and every few steps someone offered me a drink and a name and then, astonishingly, forgot both. Jordan Baker found me where the light was softest and explained, with half a smile, how it all worked: the Rolls-Royce that became an omnibus, the yellow station wagon that met trains, the caterers who arrived by the fortnight with their canvas and colored bulbs. In the library an owl‑eyed man admired the books as if astonished they were real; on the lawn laughing couples moved under strings of bulbs that made the whole garden look like a Christmas we might have invented in a fever. I saw the crates of oranges stacked like little suns by the back door and, beyond them, a pyramid of pulpless halves waiting to be carried off on Monday — the invisible arithmetic of extravagance that ran the party from Friday’s delivery to Monday’s clean-up.

I had no expectation of meeting the owner of it all, and so I was not surprised when he introduced himself as if we had been friends for years. He came up from the crowd with an easy, unpatronizing manner; his greeting was simple, the sort of civility that never felt like a performance, and for a moment I forgot the rumor mill and the gleam of glass and brass and tasted something almost human beneath the spectacle. We spoke of nothing much — the music, the absurdity of the pastry pigs, how Jordan played the host’s adjunct without being owned by him — and yet in that brief exchange he made the house less a machine and more an intention. When I left, the orchestra still played its yellow cocktail music and the lights made the earth feel as if it were moving; out by the driveway the station wagon shuttled on, servants mopped and repaired the small injuries of the night, and the pile of citrus halves lay like spent fireworks waiting for Monday’s order. The party went on behind me, unbroken, while I walked home with the odd conviction that I had not so much seen the man who made it as passed through one of his many conjurings.