The Chosen and the Beautiful

by Nghi Vo

  The sky above Gatsby’s parties was a deep blue, always clear and just barely garlanded with silky clouds to give it an air of mystery. Once, he had produced a troupe of aerial artistes who did their acts on invisible ladders far above our heads, giving them the appearance of true flight, their sequined costumes flashing tangerine, lemon, and lime from the lights beneath. As we watched, one young woman in chartreuse missed her grip and fell, plummeting towards the flagstones below. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my friends cover their faces, but I couldn’t look away. There was a flash of light the instant she would have struck the ground, and instead of a broken little body, a still-faced man in black held her safe in his arms. There was a stunned look on her face. Her eyes were studded with rhinestone-like tears, and I saw a dark pink mark, mottled blackberry, crawling to cover the side of her neck like a port-wine stain.

  He set her down gravely on the ground, and her hand flew to the mark, feeling gingerly for the bones that assuredly had been broken and mended. He took her other hand, and they both bowed to rapturous applause.

  “Death doesn’t come to Gatsby’s” went the rumor, and it might even have been true. Certainly ugliness didn’t, and neither did morning or hangovers or hungers that could not be sated. Those things waited for us outside the gates, so whoever wanted to go home?

  The first time I ever went to Gatsby’s house, I went with Henry Conway’s set. I knew his sister from the golfing club where we were both members, and after a match early in May, dinner at L’Aiglon, and drinks at Tatsby, the cry went up that of course we must go to Gatsby’s in West Egg.

  One girl, some cousin from Atlanta, squeaked that she didn’t have an invitation, and Henry Conway gave her an affably sharp look.

  “Look, darling, no one needs an invitation to go to one of Gatsby’s parties. I don’t think he’s ever sent a single one out.”

  The girl from Atlanta bit her lip, getting a smudge of inexpertly applied lipstick on her small teeth.

  “But then, how do we know we’re wanted?”

  I forgot who replied to her and how unkind they might have been when they did it, but just a few hours later, just five minutes until midnight, I saw her dancing madly under the harvest moon with some boy from Queens. Her eyes were dilated to bright black shoe buttons and her hands fluttered like sparrows caught on a silvery wire. She came out once or twice after that while I was still passing time with Henry and his crowd, but she disappeared soon after, back to Atlanta, probably, though of course there were the standard rumors of things far stranger.

  She was right in the end, and we none of us were wanted, but you never would have guessed it then. The lights that draped the gardens twinkled as if Heaven had come down at Gatsby’s command, and the fruit borne in the delicate domestic little orchard by the house was like nothing I ever had before, something smaller than an apple and darker than a plum. When I plucked one down from curiosity, it was so ripe that my fingers bruised it, and licking up the red juice made me dizzy and slightly delirious. For a moment, I saw among the twisted branches a figure that looked like my own, back against a twisted tree and pushing someone down to kneel in the moss, but then I spat and the image was gone.

  There was really no need to go picking fruit at Gatsby’s mansion. The food on the long white tables—baked ham glazed in sweet apricot, milky clam broth, delicately cut fruit that bloomed like flowers on their celadon platters—were so perfect that you thought it must have been magic rather than the machinery of more than four dozen waitstaff and caterers who made that kind of magic their business.

  Gatsby never tried to hide the underpinnings of human work that aided in creating the wonder of his five before midnight world. It would have been gauche. It would have put him with the new money of Astoria, where every meal was whisked to the table by unseen hands and where every fire on the hearth was lit by a snap of the fingers. His servants were more than visible in their crisp black and white, more dignified, more sleekly dressed and more sober than his guests would ever be. For him, as in the hallowed halls of the elite from New York to Chicago to San Francisco, there would always be a human price for his luxury. Otherwise, I could see him musing, what was the point?

  What Gatsby’s parties were was easy. It felt as if every wish you had while within his domain might be granted, and the only rule was that you must be beautiful and witty and bright.

  I went first with Henry’s set, and then at the end of May with Coral Doughty. I liked going to Gatsby’s, the drive along the bridge and through the warmth of the setting sun to emerge into the sweet coolness beyond his gates, but there were other things I liked just as well. There were séances held weekly at St. Regis, a circus of gargoyles in Soho, and of course the delightfully endless round of dinners and soirees to be had if you had some money and just a touch of charm. There was plenty to do that summer, and I had started taking over the odd social responsibility from Aunt Justine as well. She was in no way weakening, she said, but thought it important that I learn to handle my responsibilities as befit my place in her world. We both knew, of course, that my place in her world was tenuous at best and only growing more tenuous the older I became, but she acted as if she could wave that all away with the force of her personality and will.

  I was busy, but nevertheless, Gatsby threw a good party, one where I could secret myself in the corner with someone, nursing a drink while they told me what was in their heart.

  I was a little crazy after secrets that year. I liked collecting them, and though I seldom told, I did gloat. I was years from who I had been in Louisville, some of those scars healed over to give me a kind of hard polish that made me more mean but less vulnerable. The shades of Louisville were worn away to a few stories that I told to entertain and to disarm. When they asked where I was from, and when the first answer did not satisfy, I asked them where they were from; a question they weren’t used to and a sincere look spilled all sorts of things between us.

  One night in early June, I quickly realized that there were no secrets to be had from the undergrad with whom I had arrived. We were there with his older sister and her husband, and at first, their presence kept the undergrad from being too obnoxious. Then the music started, the first imported California starlet danced out onto the canvas that covered the garden green, and the taps opened. The sister and her husband had a taste for straight gin, and the undergrad was crossing the line from being obnoxious to becoming a serious incident. I sent him to fetch me something with a wedge of lime in it, and under the flickering, foolish lights and the strains of “Sweet Summer June,” I slipped away.

  I liked being alone in the crowd. It was something that I had grown to find comforting, and I kept a drink in my hand to fend off someone unwelcome bringing me one. There was a famous tenor bullied by his friends to standing on the edge of the fountain, and when he sang the first notes of Parama’s solo in L’Enfer d’Amélie, the air before his lips shaped itself into sinuous twists of golden light. He sang, and the golden notes came down to dance over the head of a pretty man in a cheap suit. He was a hustler from Queens or from Brooklyn or someplace worse, but with the tenor’s grace hanging over him, he was exalted into something else. I watched for a moment until the inevitable happened and someone pushed the tenor into the fountain. The notes went sodden and unhappy before dissipating altogether and then more people were jumping into the fountain, splashing the water as high as the head of the stone nymph who stood at the center.

  I wove my way through the crowd, calling to the people I knew, nodding at the people I didn’t know as if I did know them, and keeping an eye out for the man himself. By then I remembered him, but Daisy had gone into a funk after that dinner, as she did sometimes. She went quiet and absent from herself, smiling at me in a vague way, as if she were a ghost or I was. In the end, there was nothing for me to do but return to the city. I had not been out to see her since that day, and I thought there might be a chance that I wouldn’t see her until the Fourth of July or after.

 
Still I wanted to look at Gatsby, sort out what kind of disguise he had created that had caused this change. I wanted, as my aunt might have said, to examine the lion’s teeth, and of course the best way to do that was to stick my head in the lion’s mouth.

  So I was, in a lazy and undirected way, looking for Gatsby, and instead I found Nick.

  Despite the slightly poleaxed look and the stammering introductions, he would not have stuck out at all if he had not kept asking if Gatsby were about. He learned better after the third or fourth time he asked, when people told him of course they had no business with Gatsby. It was one of those people who put the first drink in his hand, but Nick apparently didn’t get the hint and only wandered away with it, drinking it faster than he should have.

  Nick Carraway was twenty-nine that summer. He had been in the war and killed men, but there was something about the awkward angles of his body in his new white flannel suit, the lost look in his eyes that made me feel oddly soft towards him. I followed him through the crowd, almost at his elbow, eavesdropping as he sought first Gatsby, and then some sort of anchor that would stop him from drowning in the eddies and undertows of Gatsby’s entertainments.

  Finally, before he could actually embarrass himself—something he was working up to when he took a third cocktail—I dropped my drink behind the hedge and put myself on the stairs in his path. I knew he recognized me. There were a few foreigners in the place, someone’s Chinese mistress, a pair of rather beautiful Italian brothers, and a wild gorgeous woman whose dark skin and curly hair proclaimed her an exotic of some kind or another, but I was the only one he had been introduced to.

  I spared him the trouble of coming up with a reason to talk to me, instead plucking the drink from his hand. It was a bijou, vermouth and gin flavored with absinthe; a strange choice for Nick if it was a choice he had made at all.

  “Thank you.” I took a delicate sip. “I was hoping that someone would bring me something.”

  “I’ll bring you anything you want,” he said, and I tilted my head at him.

  “You ought not say such things to me,” I said gravely. “I might ask you for the moon, and what would you do then?”

  “Get it for you, of course.”

  I laughed at that, because something in his voice meant it. He didn’t sound like New York at all. The army and foreign travel had rumpled his broad flat northern vowels, but he was still marked out as different from the rest, more subtly than I was, but marked nonetheless. Even then, I knew it wasn’t just the place of his birth that set him apart from the crowd, but I could not say what else it might be.

  I was just thinking about suggesting we go to the garden maze or perhaps into one of the intimate little rooms in the house when a pair of girls in yellow came down the stairs towards us. I saw them too late to turn, and they came up to us, their cheeks glittering with a dusting of mica and petroleum jelly and their teeth set in identical smiles. I had no problem with Ada, but of course wherever she went May came along, and May was terrible.

  “Hullo Jordan,” May said sweetly. “So sorry about your match!”

  I smiled, because anything else would have been a victory for her. I had lost in the finals, and I mentioned it to Nick, who nodded sympathetically.

  “Do you remember us?” Ada said hopefully. “We met you here last month.”

  “I do remember you,” I said. “You’ve dyed your hair since, haven’t you?”

  I felt Nick startle slightly. St. Paul still had a deep streak of Protestantism that would see makeup, let alone hair dye, as more than a little morally suspect. He looked closer at Ada, as if to see what degree of fakery he could find in her. He would have found none; Ada and May were on the chorus line at one of the better theaters, and part of their stipend was time at a decent salon.

  They asked us to come sit with them, and because it was easier to sit for a few moments and leave than to say no, Nick offered me his arm and we came down the stairs to the veranda. Someone had fished the tenor out of the fountain, and now, drip-drying, he had someone else’s plump and pretty wife on his knee as he burbled little amber notes for her. Behind him, still hopeful and a little pathetic, was the hustler from Queens or Brooklyn, but no one was paying any attention to him any longer.

  At a table with the girls were three men whose names were deliberately obscured. One wore a black fingernail, but the chips in the finish told me it was only painted on. All three had the self-important air of men who I should know, but I didn’t know any of them. They knew me of course, and after the usual pleasantries, I turned to Ada, who was, besides Nick, perhaps the most tolerable of the lot.

  “Do you come to these parties often?” I asked. The group’s eyes fell on her, allowing me to lay my hand gently over Nick’s. There was a minuscule flinch, and then he went still, as if he were afraid my hand were a butterfly he might startle away.

  “We were here last month and met you,” she reminded me. “But I like to come. There are always so many wonderful people to talk to, so many things to see. Why, just a couple of weeks ago, someone brought a firespeaker from Borneo! She pulled the fire right from the torches and made them dance in wheels and whorls, big as anything. I barely noticed that a spark got on my dress and put a hole straight through the trim until later.”

  She paused, and then like a bride flourishing her wedding band, she brought out the rest.

  “You know, he saw? He asked after my name and address, and three days later, a man came from Croirier’s with a new evening gown for me!”

  Something about fairy gifts and Trojan horses nibbled at the back of my head, something that Daisy’s own mother had told us when she walked in on us at play one afternoon. Her eyes were red from crying, and the velvet dressing gown fell half off of her shoulders, and I thought from the way her voice shook that she knew something about the family name of Fay and unlooked-for gifts.

  “Did you keep it?” I asked. I wouldn’t have been so sanguine about taking gifts from someone like Gatsby, but she gave me an indignant look. Things were different where she came from, apparently, or perhaps she wasn’t so very bright.

  “Two hundred and sixty-five dollars, gas blue with lavender beads? Of course I did!”

  “There’s something funny about a fellow that’ll do a thing like that,” said May. “He doesn’t want trouble with anybody.”

  “Who doesn’t?”

  Nick’s sudden question reminded me of Daisy’s What Gatsby? That moment, I felt, should have been edged with sable, marked for the disaster it would bring, but of course it wasn’t, and I could say many similar things about other moments that were still to come.

  May turned to Nick, triumphant under his polite regard.

  “Gatsby. Somebody told me—”

  She paused and obligingly we all leaned in.

  “Somebody told me they thought he killed a man once.”

  A speculative thrill went through all of us. It was a brush with the underworld, the ones run by the Irish, the Italians, and the Jews in the city and the ones run by the pale-eyed, still-faced gentlemen who all seemed to style themselves princes and dukes of the far reaches of Hell. Both, went the rumor, came to Gatsby’s parties, dressed in their best and hiding their natures under hats, gloves, and fine manners. Nick, likely the only one at the table who had actually killed someone, looked reluctantly intrigued. Ada shook her head.

  “No, he was a spy during the war.”

  “For the Germans or the Americans?” asked one of the men I was meant to know.

  She shook her head and pursed her lips. She pointed discreetly down, towards other masters, and I saw her other hand stole into her pocket where she was likely rubbing a saint’s medal.

  “He’s no spy, he’s one of them,” said another man, giving us a significant look. “One of their princes, you know, or the son of such. It was everywhere in Morocco last year.”

  “No, he must be an American,” insisted May. “He was in the American Army during the war. You look at him sometimes when
he thinks nobody’s looking at him. You can tell right away he’s killed a man.”

  She and Ada shivered dramatically, and I stole a glance at Nick. His mouth was perhaps a trifle stern, but he didn’t laugh at her statement. I noticed that our voices had lowered. It wasn’t that we were afraid of being overheard, but rather because I wasn’t the only one who liked secrets. There was never a secret like Gatsby, and even if he was a public sort of thing, it still intrigued.

  Supper was served after that, and poor Nick ended up joining me and the group I had come with. The sister and her husband were drunk and disgustingly in love, and they only had eyes for each other. The undergrad had not been improved by drinking at all, and as the soup course went and the appetizer course arrived, Nick’s responses were getting shorter and shorter, and my charming deflections were growing less charming and moving towards some kind of accident with the unused cheese fork.

  “Great God, of course it doesn’t open sideways!” Nick finally cried, and I took that as my hint to pull him away. The undergrad slumped back down with a muttered word I decided not to hear, and when Nick might have said more, I tucked my hand into his arm and started walking.

  “Come on, this is getting too polite for me.” When he hesitated, I offered, “We can go find Gatsby.”

  That brought him along.

  “What are you looking for him for, anyway?” I asked.

  “Well, he invited me. You know. Seemed polite to thank him.”

  “What? He never did! Show me.”

  He drew the invitation from his jacket, and I turned it over in my hands. It was good paper, deep red as if dipped in blood, with gold lettering sunk into the card stock. It felt heavy in my hand with all the weight of an imperial summons. It was real, and I doubted more than one or two had ever been printed.