There was music
from my neighbor’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
motor-boats slit the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of
foam. 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. 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 colored lights to make a Christmas tree of Gatsby’s enormous garden. On
buffet tables, garnished with glistening horsd’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 fivepiece 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 colors and hair shorn
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 center of a group and then excited with triumph glide
on through the seachange of faces and voices and color 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.
em The
Great Gatsby, Free Ebooks at Planet Eboom.com, pp. 43-45
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário