So much inside an ellipsis...
"...I was standing beside his bed and he was sitting up between the sheets, clad in his underwear, with a great portfolio in his hands."
--The Great Gatsby, pg. 38
This sentence is part of a scene that felt a little out of place to me. It takes place after Tom takes Nick and his mistress Myrtle to a party and Tom breaks Myrtle's nose. The party seems to have turned very unpleasant at this point, and when Nick follows Mr. McKee out the door, it seems like for sure he's going to go back home. But in the elevator Mr. McKee invites him to have lunch with him sometime, and one ellipsis later, they're in his room, and Mr. McKee is in his underwear for some reason. Pair that with Mr. McKee being stereotypically described as a "pale, feminine man" (pg. 30) as well as the potentially homoerotic undertones of "'Keep your hands off the lever'" and "'I beg your pardon...I didn't know I was touching it'" (37) and it certainly seems as though Nick and Mr. McKee had some sort of tryst during those ellipsis marks. And yet Nick appears to be heterosexual by all other accounts; he seems to be somewhat attracted to Jordan ("for a moment I thought I loved her", 58). Is Nick bisexual? Did he just have one drunken tryst with a man? Or am I just reading too much into that one passage and their encounter was purely celibate? I don't know. But it seems that if Fitzgerald wanted to portray the narrator of his story as homosexual, he wouldn't have been able to do it very bluntly, given the social mores of the time; the character may not even be willing to admit his homosexuality to himself. But what would be the point of this subtext? From what we have read so far, what seems to be linking all the main characters is that they all have some amount of subterfuge going on in their lives--Tom has a mistress, Daisy is secretly extremely unhappy in her marriage, Nick seems to believe Jordan is a compulsive liar who's covered up a scandal over a golf tournament among other things, and the title character himself has a mysterious background. Since Nick is telling the story, he wouldn't willingly tell us any of his secrets, so it makes sense to include small suggestive details that may clue us in to what he may be hiding. He may claim to be attracted to Jordan, but his initial description of Gatsby's smile is much more enamored than the way he describes any woman thus far--"He smiled understandingly--much more than understandingly...It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood...and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey" (48). Nick's attraction to Gatsby may or may not be romantic, but it certainly fixates on an aspect of him all the main characters could readily gravitate to--belief in the facade they are hoping to convey to the world rather than the secrets they are hiding behind the facade.
I don't think Nick's character must be interpreted as homosexual, but it certainly adds an interesting dynamic that resonates with the themes that seem to be present in the novel so far. It at least provides more clarity to me about why Fitzgerald would include such a seemingly incongruous scene on pages 37-38.