CHAPTER 3

I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a superficial

label to convey the bizarre and somewhat sinister contrast between them. My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between

two enormous places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on

my right was a colossal affair by any standard—it was an exact imitation of some Hôtel

de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin veil of raw ivy, a marble swimming pool, and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. It was Alex

Sterling's mansion. Or rather, as I didn't know Mr. Sterling, it was a mansion inhabited by a gentleman of that name. My own house was an eyesore, but it was a small eyesore,

and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor's lawn, and the reassuring proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dollars a month.

Across the courtesy bay, the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to

have dinner with the Max Caldwells. Lily was my second cousin once removed, and I'd known Max in college. And just after the war, I spent two days with them in Chicago.

Her husband, among various physical achievements, had been one of the most

powerful ends ever to play football at New Haven—a national figure in a way, one of those men who attain such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything

afterward seems like an anticlimax. His family was enormously wealthy—even in college, his generosity with money was a subject of reproach