Who calls Nick while he is at work?

For Nick, the day drags on; he feels uneasy, preoccupied with the past day’s adventures. Jordan calls, angry that he left her at Gatsby’s house. They talk for a while, and then listen to silence on the phone, then they hang up. Jordan’s pragmatic opportunism, which has so far been a positive foil to Daisy’s listless inactivity, is suddenly revealed to be an amoral and self-involved way of going through life. Instead of being affected one way or another by Myrtle’s horrible death, Jordan’s takeaway from the previous day is that Nick simply wasn’t as attentive to her as she would like.

Nick is staggered by the revelation that the cool aloofness that he liked so much throughout the summer – possibly because it was a nice contrast to the girl back home that Nick thought was overly attached to their non-engagement – is not actually an act. Jordan really doesn’t care about other people, and she really can just shrug off seeing Myrtle’s mutilated corpse and focus on whether Nick was treating her right. Nick, who has been trying to assimilate this kind of thinking all summer long, finds himself shocked back into his Middle West morality here.