The Chosen and the Beautiful

by Nghi Vo

  “Oh Jordan, but he loves me—”

  “Daisy…”

  She shook her head, as if all that it took to tip her one way or the other was me saying her name with disbelief.

  “Oh Jordan, he loves me so much. I’ve never felt anything like that. There’s nothing like it in all the world, being loved by someone like Jay Gatsby.”

  She said his name like some kind of incantation, a god if you could own a god.

  “What are you going to do?”

  I thought of the night of her bridal dinner. She straightened, pushing her shoulders back, and then went to splash some cold water on her face, scrubbing away the little touch of lipstick which was all she ever used.

  “Why … we’re going over to his house, darling.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  And so we did. The entire time, I felt unreal, a little as if I were floating, a little like I was getting ready to fall. Daisy and I bundled into the back of Gatsby’s car with Nick in the front, and we drove down Nick’s drive and up Gatsby’s, tumbling out in front of his gracious marble steps like so many puppies.

  If I had thought about it at all, I would have guessed that Gatsby’s house would have a haunted air to it during the day, when the only people who walked its gorgeous halls were servants, when the only people enjoying themselves might be the ghosts. For some reason, it had never occurred to me that Gatsby himself actually lived there. It was too big to live in, but now he proved me wrong as he led us in the doors, nodding an absent hello to his butler.

  He showed us Daisy’s suite, done up after the fashion of Marie Antoinette, and he pulled Nick through the door to his own, shutting it firmly behind them.

  We explored her set of rooms, roving from her marble bathroom with solid gold fixtures and a mirror tinted a nostalgic copper, to the small sitting room with a silk robe edged with peacock feathers hanging off a hook waiting for her. In the bedroom was a four-poster bed draped with blue velvet and she lay back on it as I went to explore her generous cedar-paneled closet.

  I expected something remarkable and gauche. I had visited the Park Avenue apartments of the expensive boys and girls who were lavishly entertained by their old men, and they kept their real clothes in trunks under the bed. The closets were marvels of marabou feathers, sequins, leather, and lace, everything from clothes that were two straps and a patch away from being illusory to what I was told was a full Elizabethan ball gown kitted out with corset and farthingale.

  Instead, the first thing that met my eyes was a rack of dresses not unlike what Mrs. Fay would have back in Louisville, updated of course because New York was not Missouri, but all longer hems, high as hell necklines, and conservative lines. I saw camel and charcoal and navy, and I made a face, pushing them aside.

  “Come on, Jay,” I muttered. “Surely you can dream a bit grander, can’t you?”

  Behind that first rack was one of presentation gowns, fewer because the skirts were so thick and full. I guessed that they were for fantasies of White House visits and balls of the kind that only the older set ever seemed to have anymore. I knew that Gatsby had never consulted anyone for this wardrobe, because anyone clever would have told him that Daisy would never do off the rack for such a thing, even if that rack was enchanted and made to fit her to the very shadow.

  Finally, at the back was a rack of dresses I could at least imagine Daisy wearing, both the lightly boned dresses in seemingly ephemeral blue silk to the more dashing things in orchid, fuchsia, and jonquil that would be pronounced fast.

  “Can I borrow this one?” I asked wryly, coming out with a number in soft pink crossed with a geometric design of diamonds.

  “Oh take whatever you like, my dear,” she said, waving her hand grandly. “I’m sure I won’t miss it.”

  “So generous of you.”

  The white drawers built into the far wall opened to reveal layers and layers of underwear, camisoles, stockings, jeweled garters, French knickers with real lace insets, all stacked neatly between pale sheets of perfumed tissue paper, all as tempting as marzipan on Christmas. My hair was a disaster, but the clothes suited me just fine, and soon enough I was in bed with Daisy, hands clasped together and counting the stars on the night-sky canopy over her bed.

  “Are you happy?” I asked.

  “Happiness must come later, don’t you think?” she said in wonder. “When you want something so very much, and then you have it?”

  I almost asked her if she was talking about herself or Gatsby, but then the door opened and Gatsby and Nick entered. Daisy stayed where she was while I propped myself up on one elbow to look at them.

  Gatsby had the self-satisfied swagger of an overgrown tomcat, and he pulled Nick behind him by the elbow. Nick was taller and thinner than Gatsby, but he did surprisingly well in a dove-gray suit with the most discreet green stripe over a matching green shirt. The entire thing, I was certain, cost as much as Nick’s rent for the summer did, and he wore it awkwardly, all angles and reticence.

  They came to stand on either side of the bed, and I reached up to twine my arms around Nick’s neck, pulling him down for a kiss. I guessed that we both still had a hint of the Sound on us, but we had been baptized with some better scents, lemony Emeraude by Coty for me, and the fantastically popular L’Ambre de Carthage for him. He hardly smelled like himself as he dipped down to brush his lips against mine.

  “This is utterly mad,” he whispered against my mouth, and I smiled.

  “It’s a dream,” I said, kissing him back. “Why not enjoy it for a little while?”

  We turned our heads and felt a little shabby at the fact that Gatsby and Daisy were barely touching at all. Instead, he was simply bent over her, ravishing her, worshiping her, and adoring her with just his eyes. Daisy herself looked like Sleeping Beauty awakened, a delicate flush on her cheeks and her lips slightly parted, if unkissed.

  It should have felt as if we were intruding, but these two were made for an audience. I could feel that Nick was quite taken with the picture that they made; for my part, I only wondered if I should clap.

  Finally, it was Gatsby who broke the spell, standing back and helping Daisy to her feet.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let me show you around the place.”

  There was a something Middle Western about the way he said it, I thought as we followed him into the halls, like the place might have been a hundred-acre spread of timber or perhaps some prime riverland that would be good for leasing out to hunters once the weather turned.

  Nick briefly tried to excuse himself, but Gatsby and Daisy wouldn’t hear about it, and I wound my arm through his.

  “Don’t you dare leave me with just the two of them,” I said with a grin. “I do hate being a third wheel. With you along, we rather complete the coupe, don’t we?”

  Daisy insisted on seeing Gatsby’s room before we went farther afield, and we wandered through a room that was only Spartan compared to Daisy’s, and if a room with its own mahogany bar could be said to be in any way lesser. She cooed over a solid gold mirror and comb while I inspected the drawers where pocket watches and cuff links were stored like prize jewels. In one velvet tray, I found a pigeon blood ruby the size of my thumbnail, and for some reason, it made Nick laugh. Where Daisy’s were gracious and sprawling, Gatsby’s rooms went up, his beautiful clothes located not in polished inlaid wardrobes but in open cabinets and racks a story above, accessed by a winding staircase that uncurled into a brass walkway all the way around the room.

  “I made Nick come up and choose something for himself,” Gatsby said with a conspiratorial wink. “I couldn’t get him to choose something nicer than that old thing.”

  “I like it,” Nick said with a shrug and a slight smile.

  “No, no, old sport, you should have had the peach or the aqua, certainly…”

  Gatsby sprang up the delicate staircase to the mezzanine, drawing out shirts for me and Daisy to see.

  “Look at this,” he cried, shaking out a pale orange shirt with a
winged collar. “Wouldn’t this be splendid on our boy? It’s from England, and before that, Egypt. Or this, they call it Nile Blue…”

  Nick tried to laugh, Daisy clapped her hands for the colors, and Gatsby threw them down towards us, grabbing at linen shirts and cotton shirts in a mania, tossing them down to us by the handful. There was something here directed at Nick, but before I could figure it out, the shirts tumbling down towards us spun and stretched out wings, sleeves stretching into long and graceful necks.

  As a dark blue shirt Gatsby had named faience from London spun past me, I caught a glimpse of a mother-of-pearl button eye before it swept up to the glass skylight above, followed in turn by the rosy plum from Paris and the lemonade yellow from Quebec.

  We gaped as the shirts flew around our heads in a rush of crisp fabric, rising up towards the gray glass sky. I saw Daisy closed her eyes, but I watched as they gained the ceiling, and then, freedom just a shower of shattered glass away, they fell back defeated as shirts, coming back to the ground limp and disappointed.

  Gatsby opened his hands like a stage magician, and Daisy clapped, her eyes filled with strange tears. It struck me that there was something in her that seemed to want to speak, to cry out perhaps in protest or in question, but she only smiled, smiled.

  “What beautiful shirts they were!” she cried, but for a moment they had been birds.

  * * *

  We trailed after Gatsby, who was pointing out all his particular treasures to Daisy, like the rose window set at the top of the stairs, preserved from the wreckage of a cathedral in Mont-Louis and shipped all the way to the United States, or the statue of the Venus emerging from the mountain, missing only her right raised hand and flecked with bits of ancient paint.

  The house had taken on more galleries and even grander aspirations since I had last been there. There was a hall made of glass where lush green plants wove together to scent the world with lemon, and bay and honey, and a hall roofed in what Gatsby told us was the longest night of the year in some town in Norway. We stood in that hall for several minutes, letting the Norwegian winter cool us down as shimmering green and violet lights danced above our heads. We could hear bells in that room, and the clacking of bone chimes hung up in lonely pine trees. I was pleased to leave it, though Daisy less so.

  Daisy was an old hand at admiring the houses and lives of others, but I thought I heard a genuine delight in her voice. It was easy to be impressed by Gatsby, a man with rugs so intricate that they were known to send the twelve-year-old weavers blind and whose halls played a tender kind of music, not quite pipes and not quite violin, wherever we passed.

  The thing he had not quite grasped yet, I thought, was that as the master of such a fine and notable place, he wasn’t meant to be impressed with them himself, and of course he was. As he pointed out this frieze or that memorial urn, I could hear a sense of wonder in his voice, as if in showing Daisy, he was showing himself as well. Maybe he hadn’t allowed himself to think that it was real until she was here to admire it.

  He took us past a gallery I had spent some time in earlier that summer, a shallow hall full of marble statues of Gatsby’s Greek ancestors, and as we went by, I saw a strange flush of movement, someone darting behind one of the wide granite bases and standing very still after that.

  A guest, I thought, because servants would know better. I wonder which one that is.

  I walked on a few steps, and then let go of Nick’s arm. I was barefoot after leaving my shoes in Daisy’s suite and utterly silent as I slipped back to the gallery and peeked past the edge of the doorway.

  The guest I had seen had come from his hiding place was now looking around as if he were at the art museum. He was dressed like a workman, without a jacket in gray duck trousers, his braces hanging down around his thighs, a flat cap stuck into his waistband and his shirt sleeves rolled up. When he turned, I saw that he was eating a sandwich, that he was surprised to see me, and that he … looked like me.

  I blinked, drawing back a little in surprise to see a face round like mine and dark like mine. I felt an immediate rush of recognition and warmth followed by an almost equal amount of repulsion and panic. When you’re alone so much, realizing that you’re not is terribly upsetting.

  Gatsby’s guest didn’t seem to suffer from my little crisis, instead focusing on looking at me desperately and pressing a finger to his mouth.

  “Jordan?” called Nick from the corner. “Come on, they’re getting ahead of us.”

  I looked for another moment at the boy in the gallery, for some reason unable to tear myself away even as he grew increasingly frantic.

  “Coming,” I said finally. “I was only looking at the pretty things.”

  I turned and tripped along towards Nick, who squired me away after Gatsby and Daisy’s disappearing shadows.

  We were just examining a set of steel gates to the observatory (from some cloister filled with mad nuns, apparently) when his butler appeared like a jack-in-the-box.

  “A call for you, sir.”

  Gatsby gave him a puzzled look that hardened into something sharp and deadly.

  “Now?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Apparently, there were some calls that even Gatsby couldn’t ignore. We trailed after him like so many lost kittens as he retreated to his study, picking up the ivory and brass phone with an impatient gesture. Nick went to the window to give him some privacy, but Daisy and I ended up at his desk, her seated with her feet dangling at his leather chair, me more interested in the picture hanging next to the volumes of legal texts to one side.

  While his voice lowered to something like the rumble of the mythical 21 train that ran from Manhattan to the city of Dis in Hell—well, yes, I know the vote is coming, just listen, old man, it will be done, it will all be done—I took the small picture off the wall to look at it more closely. It featured a healthy-looking barrel-chested man in his fifties or perhaps his well-preserved sixties, staring unsmiling at the camera in front of a sleek and knife-like yacht. It would have been utterly unremarkable save for two things. The first was it was the kind of dull picture that one kept around of one’s relatives, and I had no reason to think that Gatsby had anything like that. The second was that I could see perched on the railing an unbelievably young Gatsby himself, lean as a ray of sunshine, grinning and unrepentant as a boy playing hooky.

  “That’s Dan Cody,” Nick said quietly, drifting over to me. “Gatsby rounded the Horn with him in 1907.”

  Before I could react to that bit of news (doing the math now, Gatsby would have been seventeen at the time), Gatsby hung up the phone with a muttered curse and came to take the picture out of my hands.

  “Cody was a good man,” he said with a slight smile at me. “Think of him every time someone at the house asks for that damned pisco from Chile. He was a Chicago man, through and through, and it’s only Chicagoans that drink that stuff.”

  “And Chileans, possibly,” I suggested, but no one was listening.

  “Can we go back to Chicago, Jay?” asked Daisy, spinning lazily in his chair. “I did love it so. They’re saying that they’ve found a way to send their winter downstate, so it’ll always be sunny on Michigan Avenue…”

  A brief frown passed over Gatsby’s face, and I saw his eyes flicker around the room. Just as quickly he shrugged, because if he could raise a palace like this out of the muck of West Egg, then he could certainly do it next to Lake Michigan as well.

  “Of course we can,” Gatsby said, spreading out his hands. “Why stop there? We could go to Paris, Marrakesh, Johannesburg, perhaps even have Jordan show us around Ceylon.”

  The last was addressed to me with a broad wink, one that I acknowledged with an eyebrow raised in mock friendliness.

  “Well, if you want to test my ability to find a drink in under twenty minutes, we certainly can, but for something really exotic, why don’t we ask Nick? He could show us all the wonders of St. Paul.”

  “My great-grandmother was from Bangkok,” Ni
ck said suddenly, and I reached over to give his face a little squeeze.

  “And such a family resemblance, don’t you think?” I asked, and he ruffled my hair with a grin.

  “Not in the least, dear. Her parents were missionaries from the order of Francis the Redeemer. She was born on the banks of the Gulf of Siam just as her mother and father disembarked from the ramps of their ship, the Carmine.”

  Closer then, in some ways, than mere geological coincidence, though Nick certainly didn’t know that. I had never told him the sad and tragic story of Eliza Baker, or how I came to be a Louisville Baker myself. I suddenly wondered how he thought I’d come about at all.

  Of course Daisy knew, and she had already grown bored with this conversation. She wandered from the study to the conservatory with the three of us in her wake like the tails of a lovely kite, and in the conservatory, quite to our surprise, we discovered a piano player.

  Michel Klipspringer had fled Germany that year, not ahead of any wartime retribution, but after his wife, famous stage actress Greta Manning, took up with some high-ranking warlock or another. They crowned him with a pair of the most delicate and dear antelope horns that stuck up insistently from his curly brown hair. It turned out to be a mistake, as he ended up shooting them both, killing the warlock and maiming his wife. He fled to Makhnovia, which ceased to exist when the Bolsheviks pulled the plug, and then to Greece, and then to New York City.

  I had seen him a few times that I had been to Gatsby’s parties, but admittedly I had never seen him in his striped undershirt and drawers, scrambling up from a decidedly awkward position on the floor. His clothes hung neatly over the edge of an open cabinet door, and his heavy black concert shoes were pressed, toe-first, to the wall.

  “Oh,” he said, recovering badly. “Just at my exercises, you know. They are for—for my liver … I will get out of your way in…”

  “Oh I don’t care about that,” said Gatsby. “Only play for us.”