Gatsby goes about to try to change everything to make his lifestyle more appealing to Daisy Buchanan by first firing all of his servants so that they cannot gossip about her coming over so often. Since she had not enjoyed his great drunken parties, he no longer has them. The cars used to spending Saturday evenings at his home drive away after arriving and seeing his mansion dark and quiet. Curious, Nick walks over one day to inquire what is the reason for this change in routine. A strange man, somewhat rude, answers the door and replies simply that he will tell Jay that he had come by. The next day Gatsby calls Carraway on the phone.
Explaining that these changes were all because of Daisy and that the new servants were all friends of Wolfsheim he asks that Nick go with him to lunch at Daisy's home in East Egg that following day. Daisy calls soon after to make certain that he will be going over. Nick arrives on that very hot day to find that "Daisy and Jordan lay upon an enormous couch, like silver idols weighing down their own white dresses against the singing breeze of the fans." Chapter 7, pg. 115. That they are compared to silver idols only accentuates the height of their personalities and the great demands they may place upon anyone who pursues them in love. They are both things desirous of being worshipped in every way. Tom Buchanan is on the telephone supposedly speaking to, as Daisy surmises, his mistress although his conversation relates to selling his car, implying that it is George Wilson on the other end. Daisy goes over and kisses Gatsby while her husband, having hung up the telephone, is in the next room preparing drinks. Feeling left out of the affection and seeing their kissing as inappropriate, Jordan complains, and Daisy offhandedly replies that she should kiss Nick. The scene portrays a game of emotions. Daisy suddenly utters to Gatsby that she loves him.
Daisy's baby is brought into the room by her nurse. The little girl shakes hands with both Nick and Gatsby, and her mother asks the child if the two men are "pretty," once again focusing on appearances and image. The child only asks where her father is, which Daisy ignores and only marvels to her guests at how much of her own looks the child has, bearing little resemblance to Tom. The nurse takes the girl, addressed as "Pammy," out of the room since her mother has finished visiting with her. Tom returns to the room with drinks and passes them around, commenting on how he had read somewhere that the sun was getting hotter every year and then remembers that he had read that the sun was actually getting colder every year. The five walk outside and Tom points to the tip of West Egg where Jay's mansion rests. Daisy suggests that they should all go to New York City to do something since she is bored. Suddenly she gazes at Gatsby as Tom rambles on about this or that thing and stares at him saying, "You always look so cool." Tom immediately becomes suspicious at this and insists that they go into New York at once. The three men wait outside as the ladies get ready while Tom says that he doesn't understand why they must go to the city, but he knows that "[w]omen get these notions in their heads" and goes inside himself to get whiskey.
Gatsby murmurs to Nick while they are alone that he can't say anything in Daisy's house, because he feels overshadowed and out of place because it is "full of money." Nick agrees that it is "full of money" because of the golden girl, Daisy. Jay begins to realize how deeply her obsession with luxury is, as when she had cried into his shirts while visiting West Egg. The displacement he feels now in East Egg mirrors Daisy's discomfort while visiting West Egg. Tom offers to drive Gatsby's big yellow station wagon into the city while he drives Tom's coupe. Daisy states that she will ride alone with Gatsby in the coupe. Along the way, Tom grumbles about Gatsby and expresses doubts about the authenticity of his having gone to Oxford University in England and is suspicious about what existed between the two before he married Daisy. Tom decides to stop for gas at Wilson's gas station.
In approaching the gas station, Doctor T. J. Eckleburg's eyes stare on. Nick observes George's face as green in the sunlight, recalling Gatsby's green light in the bay, which had reminded Gatsby of Daisy. Wilson declares that he shall soon be taking Myrtle out West since he suspects she is having an affair with someone, not knowing Tom to be that man, just as Tom suspects Gatsby, and Daisy suspects Tom. Even as Tom drives off quickly to catch up to the coupe, Myrtle gazes jealously out of a window above the garage, thinking Jordan in the front seat with Tom to be his wife. Nick observes George, who is sick with suspicion, and it occurs to him that "there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well. Wilson was so sick that he looked guilty" Chapter 7, pg. 124. Due to Wilson's intense attachment and obsession with Myrtle, he is called a sick man, much as Gatsby clings to Daisy. Tom begins to panic since he is now losing both Daisy to Gatsby and Myrtle to Wilson.
Jordan ponders what they should do that evening, suggesting they should go see a movie. Tom decides they shall all meet at the Plaza Hotel, desperate to stay close behind the coupe so Gatsby and Daisy cannot dash off somewhere alone. Finally they arrive and rent a room in which to relax and drink mint juleps. However, already irritated by the heat, there is only rising tension between the people in the room, particularly between Tom and Jay.
As they recline, Mendelssohn's Wedding March plays downstairs as a couple apparently is getting married. Daisy mentions that she had been married in the heat of June and a man named Biloxi had fainted due to the humidity. Biloxi had said he'd gone to Yale with Tom, but Tom doubts this, saying that he had not known him. This discussion turns into an attack on Gatsby, criticizing his credentials. Jay finally admits that he went to Oxford for only five months since it was a program open to soldiers to have schooling in Europe if they had fought in the war. Daisy tries desperately to change the subject, telling him to make their drinks; Tom disregards her and confronts him about Daisy after which Gatsby declares that she had never loved Tom.
Jordan and Nick, seeing things to have only worsened, prepare to depart, as does Daisy, although now she is on the spot and is prompted by Gatsby to tell Tom the truth of her feelings. Daisy wavers and states she had loved both men at different times. Tom recalls past experiences when he had carried her once in his arms and made her remember how he had treated her before. Finally she says that she cannot admit that she had never loved Tom because she did. Jay wishes to calm her down and talk to her, surprised at this news, although Tom continues with his onslaught aggressively and next attacks his profession and source of money. The drug store chain, he had learned, was bought with Meyer Wolfsheim to sell grain alcohol over the counter in violation of Prohibition, thus the rumor that he was a bootlegger is true. But currently Gatsby was involved with something so big that Tom's informant about Gatsby, Walter Chase, would say nothing about it due to Wolfsheim's intimidation.
Gatsby has truly become a shady character, and his precious illusion is shattered before everyone's eyes. The claims of great deeds and a past of dignity are all lain aside here due to Tom's investigations and, shocked into silence, Jay Gatsby has nothing left to say, but rather looks very sorry as if he "had killed a man." He appeals to Daisy in a flurry of words, denying the accusations. This is ineffective, for "with every word she was drawing further and further into herself, so he gave that up, and only the dead dream fought on as the afternoon slipped away, trying to touch what was no longer tangible, struggling unhappily, undespairingly, toward that lost voice across the room." Chapter 7, pg. 135. At last, Tom, satisfied, insists "with magnanimous scorn" that Daisy and Gatsby start driving back in Gatsby's car, to which Daisy begins to object now that she has become confused and upset. Gatsby remains reduced beyond recovery as all that he has striven for to win back Daisy seems to have been lost. The two leave together.
Nick suddenly recalls that this day is his thirtieth birthday, as Tom packs everything up to leave. He reflects on this for a moment as Tom talks on and on unheard and recalls this day as
"the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair. But there was Jordan beside me, who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age....So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight."Chapter 7, pg. 136-7.
Despite this sudden attack of loneliness and isolation, Jordan Baker offers comfort to Nick in the midst of these disastrously twisted love affairs between Jay, Daisy, Tom, George and Myrtle. They get into Tom's coupe and he begins the journey back to East Egg. Yet Nick seems to still bear deep within a sense of isolation and disconnection. Although only thirty years old and younger than Wolfsheim, Nick sees himself as a man dying. Instead of lingering like Daisy and Jay on things past and ended, Carraway looks ahead at what is to come in the future. Jordan is one who looks towards what lies ahead, for she is free of these "well-forgotten dreams" of Daisy. Despite Nick's loneliness, Jordan is the only one who bears any real connection to him.
Of the three buildings in the ash heaps near the train station, there is Wilson's gas station, another building waiting to be rented out, and a third which was a restaurant owned by a young Greek man named Michaelis. Michaelis is trying to calm down George, since he had become so distraught over his wife's affair that he had now locked her in their house. Seeing customers approach his place to eat, Michaelis leaves Wilson, planning to return. Michaelis forgets, though, and later hears Myrtle screaming from within the garage and watches her run out of the house. She dashed into the road to suddenly be run over by a car speeding from the direction of New York. The car is described as possibly "light green" in color--it stopped briefly then continued towards Long Island.
Tom Buchanan sees the accident scene in his return from New York and, curious, stops the car. Upon viewing Myrtle's body now lying on a workbench in the garage, he becomes distraught hearing a witness say that it was a "big yellow car" which had killed her, knowing it to be Gatsby's station wagon. A policeman on the scene begins asking questions although Tom approaches George Wilson in a very distraught state of mind, screaming maniacally and standing near his office in the doorway. Tom brings the man inside and explains to him that the big yellow station wagon he had been driving earlier in the day on the way to New York was not his own. He then continues driving home.
Arriving at East Egg, Tom offers to call a taxi to take Nick home to West Egg and invites him inside to wait for it to arrive. However, Nick "had enough of all of them for one day, and suddenly that included Jordan too. She must have seen something of this in my expression, for she turned abruptly away and ran up the porch steps into the house." Chapter 7, pg. 143. Unlike Daisy, Jordan is seen by Nick as intelligent, and yet he remains disconnected due to these twisted events and even shuts her out due to these associations with East Egg and money and the Buchanans. Dismissing the entire scene, Carraway waits outside in the night for his cab to arrive and is surprised to see Gatsby emerge from the bushes. He explains that Myrtle was killed by his car. Jay says in response that Daisy had actually been driving since she had thought driving would calm her down although he says he'll accept responsibility for the accident himself. Gatsby waits outside to make sure Tom does not hurt Daisy, fearing for her safety despite Nick's urging that he ride back in the taxi with him to West Egg. However the real danger would be if Tom discovered that Daisy had been driving since he might think she had hit her purposely, jealous of Myrtle.
Nick peers inside of the house where "Daisy and Tom were sitting opposite each other at the kitchen table....They weren't happy...yet they weren't unhappy either. There was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the picture, and anybody would have said that they were conspiring together." Chapter 7, pg. 146. Tom has lost his mistress and Daisy has lost Gatsby as well. Thus with both threats to one another removed, they return to serenity and peace despite the evening's gruesome events. Daisy had killed a woman and Tom had lost a woman whom he supposedly cared for a great deal. Yet they sit and talk calmly, Tom's hand holding hers. Jay Gatsby, not realizing that Daisy's interest in him has been severed, waits faithfully outside as Nick returns home alone. All of the energy, which had prodded Jay along for the past five years to earn his money, persists, despite its pointlessness. He waits, oblivious and caught up in the illusions which have consumed him all his life. Implied to be a sick man in comparison to Wilson earlier, this proves truer than ever as he waits faithfully outside of a house for a woman who does not care for him at all. Tired of all of these ridiculous people, Carraway simply goes home to bed.
