Goodbye

The sweltering, sticky heat of late August clung damp and warm over West Egg, a strangling pall even after the sun started to set, and Nick Carraway stood on the edge of the wide black lawn, where the laughter and the crashing of bottles were already long past. The silence of Gatsby's black house was an empty empty, an incredibly magnificent mausoleum that sickened Nick with a comfortable pang of melancholy not for the missed parties themselves, but for the dreadful human tragedy which they had hidden. He descended slowly to the dock, his gaze on the lightless bay's diminishing sparkle, to discover Jordan Baker leaning against a piling, her spare line trim and holiday against the blunted purple of the east sky. "I thought you'd be long gone by now," she stated, crisp as dry leaves, not looking at him. Nick informed him he was leaving day after tomorrow, after returning to have another glance, and she finally turned, heavy black eyes and knowing, and said, "There is nothing to look at, Nick." Just a house and a bay and a lot of wasted motion." A small, insignificant green glow not the great, dizzying procession from the Buchanan wharf but a small pilot light on a distant buoy sparkled on the water, and Jordan caught his eye with a swift, bitter smile. "Even the lights are smaller nowadays, aren't they? Less to hope for." He did not move, viewing her cynicism as a cicatrice, the wound of one who had seen the beautiful, lethal chimera for what it was and had still been drawn. "Home, Nick," she commanded him, her step unhurried and gracious as she withdrew from the piling, "Go and forget all about this. It's the only decent thing left to do," and she vanished into the blackness of the still, immense house, and left him facing the small, insistent green light that now represented not the future, but a sharp, sickly recollection of an un-lived past.