“Mrs. Wilson’s Affair” details life, motivations of Fitzgerald character

The eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg, blue and gigantic behind yellow glasses, were always watching her. Sure, the paint on the billboard had worn thin in places, but not around the eyes. So full of compassion, as if eternally watching a hopeful, rosy little baby lurching its first steps.

Flat but focused, those eyes cut through the gray, powdery air and rumbling sounds that haunted the minds of those unfortunate enough to live beneath them. The eyes never moved, never blinked, just towered over the trains and tracks, looking at her.

Myrtle Wilson often looked back. There wasn’t much else for her to look at or do anyway. The hissing gas pumps, grease-stained garage floor, and dusty road wouldn’t hold many people’s interest, least of all hers.

The trio of yellow brick shops was her home, and the railroad tracks her means of avoidance and wishful desertion. She wasn’t one to desert, though, which is why she was there that day in the Valley of the Ashes, staring into the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg, an optometrist in Queens who’d decided that this was the place to advertise his services.

She could see them clearly from her bedroom, which was on the second floor of one of those yellow brick buildings, hovering over her husband George’s garage. They’d been up there for a few years now—the eyes; Myrtle had been suspended for much longer. So long that she couldn’t remember what had been there before. Perhaps an advertisement for a drugstore or hotel. But now it was Eckleburg who blended in so casually that he may as well have been one of the passing locomotive’s heavy, smoky billows.

She heard George’s pounding of metal on metal ascend over the tick-tick-tick of a slowing train. George. So content to give all of his attention to other people’s things, she thought. Fixing, mending, and adjusting what already existed. Never creating. Endlessly reliant upon the brokenness of other people’s stuff.

Myrtle fixed herself in the mirror. That was her train that had just pulled in. She’d ride it into the city to see her younger sister, Catherine, but mainly to see something other than damaged cars and giant blue eyes on a billboard.

Downstairs, George was hidden by a wreck of a black Chevrolet Light Six. The garage doors were wide open to the April day, but the ashy air veiled the sun just enough to make it look like winter’s stubborn dimness remained.

A face looked out from under the hood, inky grease overwhelming milky skin. 

“Where you going?” he asked.

“To my sister’s,” Myrtle replied. “Don’t ask when I’ll be back. Maybe tomorrow. I don’t know.”

He looked back into the car’s clumps of metal. They made sense to him.

She passed the open bottle of whiskey, out in plain sight. Already, she thought. So pathetic. So weak. So vile. She couldn’t so much as get a glimpse of the man she’d married anymore—and she tried. All that ever greeted her was a spiritless drunk, withdrawn into . . . well, she didn’t know. And she’d long stopped caring enough to want to know. How can one care when feeling is gone?

The railroad tracks, road, and three yellow brick buildings ran parallel to each other, but unlike the tracks and road, there was no movement in the buildings. They’d housed the same occupants—George Wilson’s garage (formerly his father’s garage), Michaelis’s all-night restaurant, and a third perpetually vacant spot, empty for years. While the cars and trains propelled their occupants forward in smooth, continuous lines, the yellow-bricked trio kept everyone exactly as they had always been. 

Michaelis, a Greek who probably ate too much of his own food, sauntered out front when he saw Myrtle go by. He liked George and Myrtle very much, mainly because they were the type of neighbors who left him alone most of the time. He admired that they minded their own business and did not concern themselves with his. 

“Mrs. Wilson!” he called, in the way he always said it. Meesus Wheelson. “I have an idea. To attract the ladies. There are always the men—so many men over here. We need more ladies, no? And you are a lady—a fine lady—and I want you to listen to my idea. My idea to get the lady customers.”

“I’d be happy to listen to your idea, Michaelis, but I’m catching that train.”

“It will only take a second, Mrs. Wilson.” Meesus Wheelson. “My idea is this: tea and cigarettes. What do you think, as a fine lady yourself? The ladies, they like tea and cigarettes. I will sell them.”

“Sounds great,” she said. “Some women enjoy tea and cigarettes.”

“I can put out flowers and candles and other things the ladies like. Get them all into my restaurant.”

“That sounds like a good idea. I’ve got to catch that train though now.”

“Tea and cigarettes and flowers and candles, and we will have more ladies!”

“Great! We can talk about it more when I get back, if you like.”

Myrtle hurried on and stopped at the edge of the two-lane road. The morning rush had already gone, but a trickle of cars sped by, sending dirt clouds into the already cloudy air. Those must be the important people, she thought. Those who were so accomplished, so successful that they could get to work when they pleased. She wanted to know those people.

When there was a big enough gap in traffic, she dashed across the road, her overnight bag bouncing against her side. This was the exact spot at which she would die, but of course she did not know that. Nobody knows the exact spot, or moment, at which they will cease to exist. No one wants to know, and even if they did want to know, they shouldn’t. 

She didn’t really want to see Catherine. The last time she’d seen her, just a week before, all Catherine talked about was the parties she’d been to, as if life was nothing more than a parade of smartly dressed people pretending to care about one another for an hour, two tops, then retreating home to rest up so they could pretend all over again the next night. 

To Myrtle, it seemed like Catherine had all the freedom in the world. She worked the cosmetics counter at Gimbels department store, which provided her with just enough of an income to share a room with another girl in a downtown hotel and to keep herself outfitted in whatever New York City women who went to those sorts of parties were supposed to wear.

Myrtle rarely bought new dresses. The money George allowed her barely covered groceries, but she’d gladly buy expiring meat if it meant she could pocket a few cents. She’d save whatever was left and then make a trip out to the city and to Gimbels when Catherine was working. She’d pick out a bright lipstick and pay full price for it, and Catherine would drop another and maybe some eye shadow into the bag. She wanted her big sister to always be beautiful and have nice things. Myrtle pretended not to notice.

It wasn’t much of a station, across the road from Myrtle’s home, and she only saw one or two men outside the train. They stared at her as she walked toward the passenger car, as confidently and comfortably as if they were watching their own dog trot along the platform.

She hated taking the train. She’d much prefer driving herself to the city, but George would never let her drive one of the old cars he fixed up at the garage. She knew how to drive, too; her dad had taught her back on Long Island. Just before he died and she married George.

She took out her book, as much for the material itself—a romance—as for an effective defense against the eyes turned her direction. 

She liked being looked at because she knew what it represented. Desire. Wanting. It was the only power she felt she had left. Of course, the harsh reality—which she, too, knew—was that the power didn’t last. Not over the men, who’d direct their short-winded elations onto the next moving target as soon as they’d hit the first, nor in the nature of the power itself. The body decays, the face withers. It’s what they must do.

Her face was that of her mother’s. Not in the sense that many daughters look markedly similar to their mothers, but in an uncanny, even unsettling, way. It seemed the creator was feeling lazy the day Myrtle was born, and instead of giving Myrtle her own twist on those predetermined genetic features, he simply stuck her mother’s face—which he’d already spent much time and energy creating—onto that newborn baby’s soft little head. The face had done well enough the first time around, so why not give it another go? That’s how Myrtle began life—with a shortcut, identical face.

One day, when Myrtle was just old enough to wade into the Sound by herself because she’d learned to swim the previous summer and Catherine still couldn’t, she’d drifted a little way down from where the rest of her young family sat atop the gravelly sand. Because the sun had been burning especially violently, many other families had also elected to visit the Sound that day. The water was cool, although it seemed to Myrtle that it heated up slightly with each new body that entered it. She made a game of counting each one that came in, each set of legs that gingerly disappeared below the surface, in the case of the larger bodies, or eagerly thrashed in, the protocol for the legs that were about her size.

The top half of a larger body was coming her way. In fact, many bodies, big and small, were moving her direction, but it was this one’s movements that sparked an instinct in young Myrtle to grab at the too-distant sand with her eyes, scanning for her family. Unable to find them amid all the umbrellas and uniform human shapes, she looked back at the man approaching her in the water. She definitely did not know him, and he was definitely coming for her. His chest was covered with matted-down dark, straight hair and his eyes were locked on her own. That’s all that she remembered of him—the wet, black mass cloaking his chest and the questioning eyes, so focused on her.

She stood in the water, awaiting him. It was her first taste of the erotic, even though she didn’t yet recognize it as erotic. The dark, shiny hair, the dark, shiny eyes. 

“Josephine,” he said. Her mother’s name.

Myrtle didn’t answer. She was filled with jealousy, maybe even anger, over not being Josephine. She shook her head, breaking the man’s spell.

“I—I’m sorry,” he stammered. “I thought you were someone else. But that would have been impossible.”

As he walked away, more dark hair retreating on his back, she both loved and resented her mother more than she ever had.

Usually, having her mother’s face served her well. It got her easy friends in childhood and easy dates when she got older. It got her George, who showed her such a true, loyal love that she married him. It got her to exactly where she was today.

One of the things Myrtle often wondered about was how that face of theirs would age. She never saw her mother get old. She never saw her not young and beautiful.

She fretted often about getting older and losing the only currency she thought she had. Clearly life hadn’t yet revealed its true beauty to her, which had nothing to do with hers.

The train raced toward the city, an increasing number of buildings blurring past the windows. Green, a color Myrtle didn’t see much of at home, began popping into view, as trees were regenerating the leaves they’d lost during winter.

She, too, started to feel alive again. Being alone in a place not her own did that to her. The very same day, with the very same potential, felt like crushing despair to her at home. But here, whizzing toward the unknown, she only felt optimism about what could possibly be.

She’d change over to the subway and take that to Herald Square, where Gimbels and Catherine would be. She’d look around at the things she couldn’t afford to buy, with the detachment of someone well aware that she couldn’t afford to buy them. She’d have lunch, alone, on the sidewalk somewhere, watching people go by and occasionally dreaming up a narrative for them, maybe involving a secret lover or illicit business dealings. This was all of great interest to her. This was, at this point in her life, all that she wanted. To escape from her own life and imagine that of others.

The lurch of the braking train brought Myrtle out of her romance novel and back into her day. She looked up to find a pair of eyes looking down at her legs. This reassured her. Those legs had thickened in recent years. As her mind and emotions had grown increasingly lethargic, so followed her body. So much so that she almost didn’t recognize it as her own. She silently thanked the man for appreciating a part of her that she did not appreciate.

As the train wheezed its way to a full stop, Myrtle stared at the rush of humanity outside. Men balancing cigars on solid lower lips, women holding onto one another with the bravest of familiarity, little boys whose eyes looked like they’d seen one too many disappointing adults. She knew that she didn’t belong there, but that made it all the more thrilling.

It was a quick walk to the subway, one that became more and more clogged with people the closer she got. Her overnight bag rubbed against one person after another, and she apologized in vain, her words falling into the air as the bodies rushed past. No one cared about her or her bag, a thought that both distressed and freed her.

She filled in an empty space on the platform, like a missing piece in a jigsaw puzzle, bringing the scene to completion. So many people, knitted so tightly together. Myrtle sucked in her breath, involuntarily trying to shrink herself and get some space in a spaceless place. The subway train squeaked its way through the mass of people on either side and opened its doors to them.

Myrtle rushed in and secured a seat, her overnight bag set on the floor between her legs. The car filled up, brimming with people yet strangely devoid of sound.

Surveying her fellow passengers, her attention clung to a young man seated across from her. Even sitting down, she could tell that his body was long and broad. He was handsome in the way that money made some men handsome, which is to say that he would not have been considered so had he not had that confident air and expensive suit wrapped around him. 

With so many bodies between them, and depending on the directional sway of the train, at times she could only see his shoes. Black patent leather, without a single smudge. How could there not be a single smudge? she wondered.

As the train delivered passengers to their destinations, the space between Myrtle and the man cleared, giving her a less and less obstructed view. He caught her watching him.

Over the course of a day, a month, a year, we look into the eyes of countless people, casual interactions that are so easily forgotten that they shouldn’t even be considered forgotten because they were never really noted or remembered in the first place. So many black pupils, surrounded by banded rings of muted colors, as unique as visible fingerprints, go completely unnoticed. Eyes meet, lips move, and we move on, completely missing the humanity of those we encounter, subconsciously dismissing those eyes as ordinary, expected things that we routinely experience. Eye contact as just another overlooked action in a sea of daily overlooked actions. 

When Myrtle Wilson’s eyes met those of the man across from her on the subway, this was not one of those overlooked actions. 

He looked back with such an intensity that her entire body took note. She glanced up to the cigarette advertisement above his head, embarrassed that he’d caught her staring. But she had to know if he was still looking. Down went her eyes, back to his.

There was no time to process the feeling that flooded her body. It was now just another part of her—as suddenly there as sprinkles of rain let loose by a fleeting cloud on an otherwise sunny day. One moment she felt one way, which wasn’t much of anything, really, and the next a whole other, new way.

Tom and Myrtle looked at each other and there was a knowing that shouldn’t have existed between two strangers on a subway train. A connection forged across seven feet at twenty-five miles per hour.

Excerpted from “Mrs. Wilson’s Affair” by Allyson Reedy. Copyright © 2025. Available from Union Square &Co., a division of Grand Central Publishing, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

---