Work Text:
On an awfully hot day in August, Myrtle Wilson stands alone in her and her husband’s bedroom, attempting to fix a horrid case of bedhead. Separate clumps of thick, tight knots seem to make an alliance with others, and her hair resembles more a tumbleweed than something tameable. She attempts one last attempt at preening, a heavy-handed stroke that damn near rips the entire nest off her head, and promptly declares it as a lost cause. This only contributes to a brewing bad mood, which started when Tom Buchannan hadn’t picked up the phone after a few dozen calls.
Moments after she abandons her attempts to tame her unruly locks, George, her husband, stumbles in through the door, forehead glistening with sweat and his green face affixed with a pallid, sickly expression.
Maybe he’s ill because of this heat? she wonders. Though, instead of asking him why he looked so awful, she comments, mean for the sake of being mean, “You’re looking awfully anaemic today, Georgie-poo.”
George, even in his worst of moods, never rises to her bait. Only this time, his silence seems tense.
Just as she’s about to ask what’s wrong, he says, suddenly, “We’re moving West.”
“What? We’re moving where?” she exclaims.
George takes a step closer to her, placing his calloused hand—greasy from fixing the motor on the red two-sweater that had just come in—on her smooth skin. “You’ve been begging me to sell this place for years. You’ve always wanted something better than what I could give you here,” he says quickly, sulphur licking his tongue. Then he leans his mouth closer to her neck, but hovers just above the skin. His hot, muggy breath feels like fire. “But I’ll make sure to give you anything out there, because you’re mine, my wife, not any other man’s.”
“You’re being silly,” she tries, growing apprehensive. This conversation had started too suddenly, too heavy, and she hadn’t the time to put her defences up. What would happen to her and Tom if she moved away so suddenly? “I— us— I mean, we have a life here!”
“Yes, you have a life here,” he mutters, more to himself than to her. His grip on her arm tightens, like he’s afraid even an inch of space between them will give her the chance to fly away. She considers ripping his hand off her. “You go on long trips to the city to see your sister, and you always come back smelling like those nice perfumes–– the ones rich ladies wear, with their husbands who own nice cars and big houses.”
Dread starts to creep into her heart at his words and odd behaviour. He knows, she thinks with a terrible certainty, like a rabbit who had finally succumbed to the jagged teeth of a hunting trap.
The heat seems to swelter in their little garage, and with every harsh breath, the air sends a blistering draft down her throat. “Damn you, George, you’re being insane,” she snarls, a hand fanning her red and sweat-ridden face. All at once, the space between her and George becomes suffocating, and she tries to pull away from him; but he suddenly removes his hand so roughly that she stumbles pack, giving him an opportunity to head towards the door.
“Start packing,” are his last words to her before the faint click of a lock signals his departure, and she realises that he’d trapped her in their room; but more broadly than that, she was trapped in a cage of cheap wooden walls, fear and dust particles. In a life of dull, pointless oblivion.
Realising this, she starts to scream and bang against the wall, shrieking obscenities. How dare he, she thinks, sick with the injustice of it all. Why does he think he can just move them away without asking her first? What right does he have to rip her away from Tom, who loved her and cherished her in a way George never could?
She claws against the door for what seems like hours. The sun soon begins its descent and blazing day turns to buzzing, humid twilight. Her body becomes weary with fatigue, but her fury burns deep in her stomach, like a raging, unstoppable house fire.
The only thing that distracts from the nightmare is hours later, when the roar of an engine outside pulls her to the window. Moving the curtain aside, she sees George and three other people gathered around a yellow car: a man, her Tom, and the woman who must be his wife. Her eyes widen, at first delighted to see Tom, and then white-hot jealousy fills her body as she focuses on the woman. Myrtle knew that he had a wife, of course, but to actually see her in the flesh was nauseating.
The woman is breathtakingly beautiful and young, slim and sublime. Against the backdrop of her dark surroundings, she glows in her white attire. In the shadows of her cage, Myrtle looks over at herself in the mirror—at her red, wrinkled eyes and dishevelled hair—and only feels an aching self-loathing.
The three depart quickly, leaving Myrtle to her lonely prison. Unable to do anything else, she imagines Tom turning the car around and coming to get her. He imagines his chest pressing protectively on her back, and she imagines him dropping to one knee and proposing to her. She imagines being the one dressed in white.
In reality, she lingers on George’s moth-eaten chair, thinking, this is not the life I deserve.
In a pure state of misery, she sets her eyelids low and stares out through the dark window. A crown of juniper springs free from her mind and curls tightly around her head. She grips his chair and thinks about killing him.
George eventually slinks into the room again, a faint tap at the door announcing his entrance. She refuses to look at him. She has already decided she cannot take living in the Valley any longer. She cannot continue living as the lowest breed of person, and she cannot muster up the energy to pretend to love her dirty, filthy husband anymore.
He sits quietly on their bed, but the creak of rusty springs breaks the illusion of silence. As if being given the direction to speak by an unseeable director, George says, an odd, quiet tenor entering his voice, “God knows what you've been doing, everything you've been doing.” His eyes, a cobalt blue, surrounded by a ring of fire, strain towards the moon. Somewhere in his mind, she thinks he must believe that great big ball of unfeeling rock will give him some undeniable truth that he’d been missing. “You may fool me, but you can't fool God.”
Trapped by thorns and splinters, Myrtle stays rooted in her seat. She knows her affair, her newfound love, is not holy, but by God was she devoted to Tom Buchannan. But religion was built on devotion, wasn’t it? And what’s to say devotion was not simply loyalty bought by love?
It is here Myrtle finds herself in an unfamiliar familiar place. Exercising her unalienable Rights had never been an issue before, when freedom was trips to the city, phone calls to a lover, and a dog; but premonition tells her that she’ll never escape the birdcage again if she can’t wrench herself off the chair and out the door. Yet, she’s just restraining herself so hard from launching up and wringing her hands around George’s neck.
It becomes clear what her path is when George lifts himself off the bed and makes a start towards her. Renewed vitality hits her limbs, and she overturns the stupid chair in her mad scramble away from her jail keeper. She rushes towards the door, his fingers barely grazing her shoulder, but she wrenches her body away from him. With an anger a decade in the making, she spits, “Beat me! Throw me down and beat, you dirty little coward!” as she runs downstairs and out into the cool night air.
Body humming with adrenaline, she thinks, with disjointed, manic energy, that she hasn’t a clue what’s going to happen to her now; but she knows she has to get away from George for the time being, lest she implodes like a dying star.
As she hurries away from the garage, a shimmer catches her eye. Turning her head toward the horizon, she sees a yellow car approaching quickly, headlights ablaze like one of the Lord’s angels.
Tom, she thinks, wild nerves transforming into a frenzied ecstasy. He’s come back to get me! He wants me! He wants me!
Under the shadowed sky, Myrtle Wilson sees her salvation.