In chapter 2, Fitzgerald writes that the mistress, Myrtle, tells her husband, George Wilson, that she is visiting her sister, Catherine, in New York City when she is actually meeting up with Tom Buchanan. It is not until chapter 7 that Wilson starts to figure out the truth, though he never suspects that Tom is his wife's lover. Wilson informs Tom and Nick in chapter 7 that he is going to move West with Myrtle, something they have been planning for the last two years, but with Wilson's new understanding, something he is going to act on immediately. Nick notes the irony of the two men meeting at that moment:
He [Wilson] had discovered that Myrtle had some sort of life apart from him in another world, and the shock had made him physically sick. I stared at him and then at Tom, who had made a parallel discovery less than an hour before — and it occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.
To put Wilson, a low-class gas station owner, parallel with Tom, a high-class playboy, degrades Tom the most, who thought that he had power and control over everything in his world.
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