The Chosen and the Beautiful

by Nghi Vo

  I got up as quietly as I could, making my way out the door and shutting it behind me. Just as it closed, Daisy burst out in a bright peal of laughter, delighted and breathy with an edge of tears. I went looking for Nick.

  He wasn’t in the bedroom just off the main hallway. I looked around curiously because we hadn’t spent any time there. It was close and dim, just big enough for a wardrobe and a bed with an iron headboard. Everything was old rather than antique. The bed was unmade, and as I passed by, I touched the dent in the pillow, the sleeping pills that sat on the windowsill next to his head along with a bottle of brandy.

  In his wardrobe, there was a packet of unopened letters stuck in a dusty pair of shoes. I pulled them out, noted that they were from Minnesota, and put them back with a slight smile. I half-hoped that Nick would come in, because there was some part of me that was strangely curious about his bed and what it would be like with him in it, but he didn’t.

  Instead, I went out and down the hall. He wasn’t in the bathroom or the kitchen either. His maid told me he was on the back step, but it was empty when I went out there. The step itself was a solid block of some strange stone, something taken from somewhere else to guard this passage into the home. There were stories every few years where people discovered their step was taken from the grave of this king or that saint, but that didn’t interest me right now.

  The rain had mostly stopped, but there was the faintest drizzle in the air. I could barely feel the drops, but cool water beaded up on my skin, weighing down the hems of my dress. From the magicked step, I could just barely make out the shape of Nick under the branches of the enormous black elm that took up most of his carefully groomed backyard.

  I dashed across the yard just as the rain got worse, and when I arrived, my shoes were quite ruined. He looked at me with faint surprise. It wasn’t as if he were surprised to see me, more as if he were surprised that anyone remembered him at all. He was in his shirtsleeves leaned against the monstrously coarse bark of the tree. The tree’s leaves, broader than my outstretched hand, stitched a canopy over us, leaving us mostly dry.

  A cigarette burned down unheeded between his fingers, so I pointed at it and he held it to my lips, letting me take a quick draw. It gave me an excuse, anyway, to cup my hands around his, steadying them, steadying him a little bit as well. When I let him go, he stubbed the cigarette out on the tree trunk and tucked it behind his ear.

  “Come here,” Nick said, pulling me into his arms, dragging me against his body.

  I allowed it for a few moments, fascinated by the depth of his emotions, and then I gave him a hard shove back because I knew that a light one wouldn’t do it.

  “Don’t,” I said, deadly serious. “I’m not some little paper doll you can chew up.”

  Nick glared at me, and then nodded, abashed, sticking his hands deep into his pockets. I wondered where his jacket had gotten to. The rain gave the air a kind of English countryside chill.

  “I feel like the morning edition someone left on a park bench, and it’s begun to rain,” Nick muttered, looking towards Gatsby’s house. From this angle, it was the only thing to look at, a wonderland castle moored on the Sound for a season. When the weather turned, I thought, it would float away into the fall mists, the gray waves of the Atlantic slapping up against its pale stone walls.

  “You’re not,” I said with confidence. “I like you too much for that.”

  “And it’s only your opinion that matters?”

  “It’s the only opinion that matters to me,” I said with half a smile.

  I offered him my hand, and he took it, bringing it absently up to his lips for a kiss and then hanging on as if he had no other lifeline. He nodded at Gatsby’s house.

  “You know he raised it up out of the ground,” he said. “There was a mansion there before, something small and sensible. One night this past spring, he drove here straight from the city. He had bought the land and the house from some bootlegger or other, pennies on the yard for the marshland, the terns, the foundation that would never dry out and the old ghosts of the sailors they marooned here. He looked around and said, No, that won’t do.”

  Nick’s voice had a distant quality to it, telling me a story he had once been told. I had noticed before that he was good at telling other people’s stories.

  “So he stepped out of his car, and beckoned as if he were some great old king, something whose want was law, and it came, all of it, the mullioned windows, the marble floors, the glass blued by age and the books with the demons still sealed inside them. He didn’t even have to ask, all he had to do was want, and there it was waiting for him. The history was his, the ghosts were his, and all of it waiting for the … the soul that would come in to make it perfect, make it shine.”

  “His soul,” I guessed, but then I corrected myself. “No. Daisy’s. It’s for her.”

  Nick laughed a little, not looking at me.

  “Of course. It was all only ever for her.”

  If he had said it bitterly or angrily, I would have had some defense against it. Instead there was a longing and sorrow there that I had not learned to guard against, and I reached up, taking his face between my palms and turning him back to me.

  “Come here,” I said, and I pulled him down for a kiss.

  “You didn’t want—”

  “I changed my mind. I’m allowed to do that. You are too.”

  That messy entangling anger had gone out of him, leaving him sweeter and more pliable. I didn’t mind the sadness; he wore it like a girl might wear a becoming if old-fashioned veil. It left him open in a way he hadn’t been before, raw and pretty and intriguing.

  He put his back against the tree and I leaned up on my toes to kiss him. He set his hands on my shoulders almost tentatively at first, but after a few moments, he clung to me. He was going to leave small finger-tip marks on my skin, and the thought made my heart flutter a little, made my breath come faster. The kiss went on until my lips felt bruised, and his hand reached for the hem of my dress, tugging it up so he could palm my bare skin above my stockings. He traced his fingers under the strap of my garters, plucking at them restlessly until I nipped at his chin.

  “You can get a little more serious than that today,” I told him, and with a slight groan he reached down to cup me between the legs, making me rock against him with a pleased sound. He buried his face in my hair, and I tugged his shirt open, nuzzling at the base of his throat.

  I could feel his cock harden against my hip, and deliberately I pressed against it, making him swear softly. Something about the way he swore, foreign words, words I didn’t have a hope of understanding, made me laugh.

  “Poor Nick,” I murmured with false sympathy. “Are you feeling quite overwhelmed, darling?”

  “Every day of my life,” he retorted, and to my surprise, he took me by the shoulders and pushed my back against the tree. For a moment, a spark of uncertainly singed me, making me wonder if despite all the precautions I had taken, despite all of Nick’s fine recommendations, I had made a mistake after all.

  Between deep kisses, he was still rocking up against me, and now my dress was flipped up to my hips. I did a quick check; we were out of sight of both Gatsby’s mansion and Nick’s own little house, and if that didn’t satisfy propriety, I didn’t know what did. He was stroking me with the confidence he had earned in the weeks after finding me on the street in front of the Bijoux, a sweet sure touch that I had shown him, his mouth laying a line of soft kisses down the side of my throat. I raked my fingers hard up his arms and his shoulders and then up over the back of his neck, making him hiss. He could always take at least a little bit of rough treatment, and while I suspected that I didn’t give him the kind of rough he liked best, it still made his eyes close in pleasure. He pressed his face against my neck, his hands still moving as if they belonged to someone else.

  “Oh I believe I love you,” he said, and I laughed again at that. I liked to hear it, I liked to laugh at it, and it made me wonder what Daisy
would say about it when I told her later. I liked my secrets, but there were some that were for the telling, and I dropped a fleeting kiss on his forehead.

  “You hold that thought,” I whispered. “You hold on to it for dear life, all right?”

  He told me yes in a way that was half a dream and half a daze, and I leaned back against the tree as he worked at me, delighting in my own indolence and the way his body moved against mine. Once in a while, I reached out to palm the front of his trousers, but after the third or fourth time, he reached for my wrist, shaking his head.

  “I won’t thank you if you make a mess out of me,” he said, and I was a little disappointed because I realized that was exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to make a mess of him, to walk him back in front of Jay Gatsby all red-faced and shattered. In some strange and half-formed way, I realized, I wanted to do him that favor, of showing Gatsby that there was more to life than just him. Of course, what kind of favor would it be if Gatsby never saw, and what kind of favor would it be if it mended Nick not at all? I sighed.

  “All right, but I won’t always want to,” I told him warningly.

  “Why, Miss Baker, I would never presume.”

  Presuming actually wasn’t one of his flaws, so I let it go, knocking my head back against the cool wet elm bark and letting it dig patterns into my back and into my palms where I reached back to grasp it. I felt pastoral, like some kind of wild nymph come to enchant a human man from his world. I wondered if Nick liked my looks as well as Gatsby’s for all that they were of a different sort.

  Then thoughts of pastoral nymphs and even Gatsby himself went straight out of my head as Nick’s fingers quickened on me and in me. I could feel my body hitching like a car whose engine wouldn’t turn over, that familiar tightening inside me that always took me at least a little by surprise.

  While I still had the wit to do so, I tugged on his hair. He thought it was for fun at first, so I tugged harder, until he yelped.

  “You might have said that you didn’t care for—”

  He paused when he looked down at my face, his eyes bright as the foil around a candy bar, his mouth a tempestuous red. There was my answer to if he thought I was as beautiful as Jay Gatsby, and it made me smile.

  “Get down on your knees,” I murmured, pushing down on his shoulders.

  “Why?” The confusion in his voice was genuine, and I laughed. It was just a little mean, prep school girl to the boy who worked at the garage, and he flinched, biting his lip.

  “You know.”

  After a moment he did, and he dropped as pretty as you please. I stepped out of my silk drawers, stuffing them into the back of one of my stockings to keep them neat. I hauled up my skirts with one hand and with the other, I took hold of him by the hair and dragged him forward.

  “I don’t … That is … I’m not sure how…”

  He looked up at me, begging, and I stroked his cheek.

  “Well, I’ll tell you if you get it wrong, won’t I?”

  Eager. He was so damned eager. He might not have done it for someone with my precise looks between the legs before, but it’s not all that different overall. Skin’s skin, and he liked mine. His large hands curled around my thighs, and there was a kind of Middle Western, old religion fervor to how he devoured me. His people weren’t that far from the tent revivals that spoke of angels like spinning chariot wheels in the sky and demons under every apple tree, and he chased my pleasure like it might be his very own salvation.

  I didn’t think I’d tip over. I might have done with his hand, but mouths were usually trickier for me, without the pressure I usually liked behind it. Then I remembered that I could do something about the pressure, or at least, I could with Nick, and I took a fistful of his hair and dragged him against me hard. His hands tightened on my legs, palms pressing my garter clips into my skin, and oh I didn’t care, oh it was good, so good, and he thought he loved me, and absolutely nothing else in that moment mattered but how good he made me feel.

  In the middle of it, I turned my head and though the angle was all wrong, I could see into the orchard on Gatsby’s property, and I saw myself there, watching with eyes that hadn’t even fallen on Nick yet or on Gatsby himself for that matter. I tasted that fruit again, sweet and bright and lovely, and I started to laugh.

  There’s this moment, during good sex at least, where you forget how you’re meant to look or what you think a properly self-contained creature should look like. My hair was full of bits of bark, one of my garters had given up entirely, and I didn’t even like to think of what my paint was doing on my face, but none of it mattered at all when I could feel just the barest innocent threat of Nick’s teeth against me.

  I went over with my hand over my mouth, still not quite ready to give him more, but he groaned when he felt me shake, pressing against me even harder. He was so enthusiastic that I had to give him a hard shove backwards at the end, pushing and then dropping back against the tree because I would fall otherwise.

  He rose unsteadily to his feet, and I saw with satisfaction how I had ruined him. His face was flushed and slick, eyes starry, and a grin that didn’t know what to do with itself on his red, red lips.

  “Just a minute … Just give me a minute and…”

  “You don’t have to—”

  “Think I would if I had to?”

  That shut him up, and he braced his hands on either side of my head against the tree as I reached down to unbutton his trousers and return the favor. My wrist ached, and I suspected he was holding back to make it last, but he finished with his face buried in the crook of my neck and I decided that fair was fair.

  When he got his breath back, before I was quite ready to be done with the satisfaction, Nick tried to put us both in order, buttoning up his trousers and pulling out a single sad handkerchief before staring at it in dismay as if wondering which disaster it could possibly help.

  “No, come on,” I said, dragging him down towards the water. “When you can’t fix a thing, the best course of action can be to ruin it all so that no can see what truly happened.”

  Nick laughed, and I wondered if that was what love was, making someone forget the pain that gnawed at them and would not stop.

  After the rain of the week before, the water was murky and gray, frigid like January. Nick grabbed me as if he expected me to be able to warm him. My dress floated around me like a swirl of green liqueur in vodka, I lost my drawers entirely, and Nick kissed me so hard I lost my breath as well.

  “Why, you’re affectionate,” I murmured, ruffling his hair, and it occurred to me without much rancor that with me, he was permitted to be.

  We hauled ourselves out of the surf, our shoes dangling from our fingers. A car filled with women dressed like bright buttery flowers chugged by, and we waved merrily at them before we crossed the road back to Nick’s front door. We were at our best, I decided, when we were just the two of us on our own, but of course that changed once we crossed the threshold.

  In the parlor, Daisy and Gatsby sat on either end of Nick’s sofa like children on a seesaw, Daisy with her knees curled up and her face full of tears, a tremulous smile on her face. When she saw us, she leaped up in a showy flourish, dabbing furiously at her flushed cheeks with the pads of her fingers until all gracious, Gatsby offered her a handkerchief.

  Gatsby—

  What does it look like when a thousand-year hunger gets a taste of what it’s craved? His eyes were pale before, but now there was something blackened and charred about them, sending up wisps of steam that I could almost feel but not see. He was still buttoned up to a nicety, but there was something stripped to him, as if we had come in from the water and caught him in the midst of shedding his skin like a snake. I took a step back, bumping right into Nick’s chest, and from the way he held my hand, I could tell he saw it too. Daisy didn’t react at all.

  “Oh there you two dears are,” she said, drying her face furiously. “We were just beginning to wonder where in the world you might have gotten
to. Nick, your house is just the dearest thing, but there’s not much space to lose oneself, is there?”

  “Just your mind, your memory, and your dignity,” Nick offered, and I smiled.

  “Nick and I decided we were done doing things by half measures,” I chirped. “The rain half-wet us, so I thought the sea should finish the job. We do look rather too awful, don’t we?”

  “Not at all,” Gatsby said with friendly indifference. “But you can hardly stay like that all day. Come on.”

  “It’s fine,” Nick said hesitantly. “I mean, it’s stopped raining…”

  It had, the clouds rolling back to let some refugee sunshine through, and Gatsby grinned.

  “So it is. Come on, we’ll take my car.”

  I started to say how silly it was when we could simply go out the back and cut through his small orchard, but Daisy seized my hand.

  “Oh, just give us a moment to powder up a little! We’ll meet you on the lawn…”

  She crammed us both into Nick’s tiny little bathroom, closing the door behind us. The moment we were alone, she fell into my arms, shaking as if she had a fever.

  “Daisy?”

  “Oh God in Heaven, he loves me so much,” she said, hiding her face in her hands.

  “I don’t think God has anything to do with it,” I muttered, but she shook her head.

  “There’s just so much, and so deep, and oh Jordan, I don’t think I could reach down to the bottom of it if I drowned.”

  I shivered, nervously running my hands up and down her arms. I had just been in the freezing ocean, but there was something even clammier and colder about her. He hadn’t warmed her at all, him or his love.

  “Don’t do that, Daisy. Do you want to go? Should we just call Ferdie back, or ask Nick to drive us back to East Egg?”

  Her eyes were wide and startled, and she looked at me with a delicate little kiss on her pursed mouth.