The Chosen and the Beautiful

by Nghi Vo

  From my angle, I could see just a sliver of her reflection in the mirror. To my heat-dazed eyes, her reflection seemed to glance at me, rounder and younger than Daisy was herself. She glared at me and then went back to studiously replicating Daisy’s pursed lips and useless attempts to put her hair back in order as I looked away. We hadn’t even had any of the demoniac.

  Tom pulled out a bottle of whiskey I hadn’t seen him bring from the car, and he started pouring a measure into each of the gold-rimmed glass tumblers that the hotel provided for us.

  “Let it go, Daisy,” Tom growled. “Don’t you know that the heat only gets worse when you talk about it?”

  “Let’s talk about something else, then,” Nick said suddenly, reminding us all that he was there. It was his peculiar gift again, that he could fall flat out of existence when he was quiet and watching, because he was always watching.

  “Oh, just leave her alone,” Gatsby said from his chair, watching Tom with a glittering look in his eye, “and all that after being the one to insist we come to town.”

  Tom splashed some of the whiskey over the rim of the last glass, turning towards Gatsby like a wounded bull.

  “What’s the matter with you, anyway,” he said. “Don’t think I don’t see what you’re doing, old sport…”

  “Well, if you know, then certainly tell me all about it,” said Gatsby with interest, but Daisy made an exhausted huffing sound.

  “Oh don’t be so tiresome,” she said. “Tom, if you’re going to be so positively wretched, I will leave right out that door. Just send for some ice for the whiskey, if you please. Be useful.”

  Tom grudgingly turned away from Gatsby, denied his proper prey, I thought, but as he spoke on the phone, I saw his face in profile. He looked confused and devastated, like the old bear whose kingdom has been taken over by a bunch of democratic sparrows.

  He does love her, I thought in surprise, and at that point, I suppose I thought that it counted for something even when it stood up alone, without kindness or consideration or mercy or intelligence to back it up.

  After Tom hung up the phone, the peculiar silence that falls over a group of people already ill at ease covered us, bringing the tinny opening strains of the “Wedding March” floating up from the ballroom under our feet.

  “Oh!” Daisy cried. “A wedding!”

  “Imagine getting married on a day like this,” I mumbled, but then she was thrusting a handful of dripping rosebuds from the vase on the table into my hands before she pushed me at Nick. She snatched up the telephone book from where it had fallen on the ground, standing before us with a great production of mock solemnity.

  “And I now pronounce you man and wife,” she intoned. “You may kiss your bride!”

  Nick turned to me with a shy halfway grin, and I gave him a loud and smacking kiss on the lips over Gatsby’s laugh and Tom’s faint protests.

  “Be gentle with me, darling,” I told him.

  “Always.”

  There was absolutely no telling what stupid thing I was going to say next when Daisy shoved the phone book at me. My heart sank when I saw her grab Gatsby’s hand, and I acted without thinking.

  “All right then, Jay and Nick, it’s your turn,” I cried, ignoring Daisy’s hurt gaze. To make sure I wasn’t misunderstood, I gave Gatsby my roses and wound Nick’s arm through his.

  “But it’s—it’s bigamy,” Nick said, taking a stab at humor despite the startled fear in his eyes.

  “Don’t worry, I shan’t tell if you make sure to keep me in mink and diamonds.”

  “I’ll take care of that,” Gatsby said playfully. “You won’t want for anything so long as we can share, Mrs. Carraway.”

  Actually, it turned out I hated the sound of Mrs. Carraway, but I was more than happy to keep Tom only fuming rather than explosive. I married Gatsby and Nick with great pomp and circumstance, and while Nick refused to kiss, he took the phone book from my hands, and pushed me towards Daisy.

  “Now, you two!”

  That was awkward, but Daisy had picked up one of the tumblers of whiskey, and sipping steadily, she gave in to the fun, forgetting the idea of trying to marry Gatsby in front of her actual husband. When Nick pronounced us wife and wife, she leaned over, splashing a few teaspoons of whiskey on my dress, and bent me back in a showy Broadway kiss. She bent me so far back that we lost our balance. We would have gone down in a tangle of limbs and laughter if Gatsby hadn’t been there in a flash, getting us both back on our feet. He would never have bothered with me if it was not for Daisy, but he did it all the same, and I thought maybe I could grow to like him a little more, that he was not such a terrible person with whom to share.

  Then the ice came, and I started to think that we would get through the terrible day without any actual trouble. I was just starting to relax, my ankle pressed against Nick’s where he had finally managed to claim a spot next to me, when Tom spoke again, glancing at Gatsby out of the corner of his eye.

  “What is it with you and with Nick, anyway?” he asked meaningfully. “Are you friends from the war, or something like that?”

  “Afraid I didn’t have the honor,” Gatsby replied. “We were strangers until he came to one of my parties this summer.”

  Gatsby refused to care about the menace in Tom’s voice, but Nick stiffened next to me. I frowned, putting fingers chilled from my glass against the back of his neck, and he relaxed a little, though not all the way.

  “Those parties,” Tom said, shaking his head with theatrical disgust. “I suppose you’ve got to make your house into a pigsty in order to have any friends—in the modern world. Nowadays people begin by sneering at family life and family institutions, and next they’ll throw everything overboard and have intermarriage between Black and white.”

  “Well, no one’s Black here,” I snapped. “Really, Tom.”

  Tom spared me an irritated look.

  “There’s nothing for you to get so hot over, Jordan. You know I wasn’t speaking about you.”

  “In this heat, you needn’t bother speaking at all,” I started, but he was already blundering ahead, lurching to his feet, and glaring at us all in turn as if we had all in our own way challenged him and his American family values. I realized that leaving aside the issue of his marriage, if it was Gatsby, Nick, and me, we did.

  “What I want to know,” he continued, gesturing emphatically with his almost empty tumbler, “is how long a man is expected to tolerate this kind of perversity in his own house. They may say it’s all in good fun, there’s no harm to it, but they never think about the way it erodes the values on which we built this country.”

  “We?” Gatsby asked, and Tom gave him a startled look, as if not expecting him to admit to his own perversity so quickly. Tom hadn’t yet twigged to the fact that there were in fact several kinds of institutions attacking his precious country stretched out in the suite.

  “Tom, stop,” Daisy said. “You’re embarrassing yourself.”

  There was something tense in her voice, and she was turned towards the mirror again, stroking her hair with agitation. It occurred to me that she could see our reflections in the glass. I wondered if the versions of us in the glass were doing much better than we were.

  “No, you are,” Tom shot back. “You think you can get away with so much more just because you’re a woman? You and your little China doll…”

  My hand tightened on the glass in my hand. The whiskey was mostly gone so I could likely throw it and storm out without much guilt, but Nick’s hand tightened on mine, his face pale. In that, he matched Daisy, whose face peeking over her shoulder was as colorless as a mourning lily. They never looked more alike than when they were afraid, and I wanted to scold them both for paying Tom any heed.

  “Oh we’re all being so very silly,” Daisy said mechanically. “Do let’s go home, won’t we?”

  “No,” Gatsby said, in the manner of a man who has not been listened to enough in the last quarter hour. “No, Tom. Daisy’s not going home wit
h you. She loves me, only me.”

  His mistake, I thought in a distant kind of way, was watching Tom in that moment and not Daisy. Daisy looked untethered to the world, as if she might suddenly take a step and go flying, tumbling through the air like a piece of dandelion fluff. She gazed between Gatsby and Tom, and she looked unsure, her footing wrong. The light in the suite dimmed as clouds scuttled across the sun.

  “Oh yes?” Tom said, scanning Gatsby from top to bottom. “And why don’t you tell me where you’ll take her to live? Do you have rooms at that damned perverts’ club, or is it a little pied-à-terre in Hell? What about a tipi in—”

  “Oh my goodness, look at the time!” I burst out in my gayest voice. I thought that I should just get out of the room, taking whoever wanted to come with me, but this was beyond salvaging. “I’m so sorry, but my aunt Justine—”

  “Her aunt Justine,” Nick agreed. “She’s expecting. Us. Can’t disappoint her…”

  “You’re not going anywhere, old sport,” Gatsby said seriously to Nick.

  “Oh no, don’t go,” Daisy said to me, her mouth drooping down excessively at the corners and a distant thunder rumbling somewhere over the bluffs. “Stay, stay, we can still have such a lovely time together.”

  I tried to exchange a speaking glance with Nick—these people have all gone mad, and I am afraid that madness is catching—but he wouldn’t meet my eyes. Tom gave him a scornful look, shaking his head, before he continued.

  “So you think you’re taking my wife,” he said, his voice flat and inviting.

  “Your wife doesn’t love you,” said Gatsby, climbing to his feet. “She’s never loved you. She loves me.”

  He said those words with a kind of set-in-stone belief. It was true, or he would make it true by believing in it hard enough.

  “She never loved you, do you hear?” he continued. “She only married you because I was poor, and she was tired of waiting for me. It was a terrible mistake, but in her heart she never loved anyone except me!”

  We all flinched from the theatrical sound of his voice. It was too much for people like us, too genuine and passionate. Some love could survive being put on show like that, but almost every kind of love that I knew would wither through it, curl up from shame and exposure and die.

  “Jay…” Daisy said, faltering. “Let’s go home…”

  Tom turned to her, incredulous.

  “With him? You’re going to go home with him? Give up me and Pammy and Chicago and Louisville?”

  “Five years,” Gatsby continued, as if he had planned this out so well that he couldn’t bear to deviate from the script. “We’ve loved each other for five years now, and you never knew—”

  For the first time, Tom seemed genuinely appalled. He looked at Daisy in shock.

  “You’ve been seeing him for five years?”

  Before Daisy could answer, Gatsby cut the air with his hand, shaking his head.

  “No, old sport, it was in our hearts. We met, we fell in love with a kind of passion you could never understand, and then fate split us apart. She never loved you, not for a moment.”

  It was like a romance out of the pulps, but he wasn’t a dime store hero, and Daisy was certainly no one’s pure and pale lady.

  “Jay,” she said, her voice warning, but Tom was shaking his head, rubbing his hands over his face as if he could rid himself of this confusion that way. We could all feel the shifting pressure in the room, water drenching the air and making it rest heavy in our lungs.

  “She loves me,” Tom said, his voice cold. “Of course she does, and I love her. We don’t love perfect, and I like my little sprees. I make a fool of myself sometimes, but she always takes me back. We’ve got Pammy, and the property in Lake Shore Drive, and the big house in West Egg. We’ve got her people in Louisville, and mine in Chicago. What have you got, Mr. Drug Store, Mr. Damnation?”

  “The rest of the world,” Gatsby said extravagantly, but Daisy was biting her lip, looking back and forth between them, as if suddenly realizing what was at stake and what she might lose. Daisy wasn’t used to losing, not at all, and I could feel the wind changing course around us, whipping first into one window and then into another.

  “Oh, we should just go home,” she said faintly, but I doubted she could say then where that home might be.

  Then Gatsby turned.

  “Tell him,” Gatsby insisted. “Tell him you never loved him. Tell him it was all a lie.”

  “Yes, Daisy,” Tom said, his voice a little quieter, a little more beguiling. “Tell him that you never loved me at Kapiolani, the day I carried you down from the Punch Bowl to keep your shoes dry…”

  I held my breath because something was going to die in that room. I might have wanted to leave before, but now I couldn’t take my eyes away.

  I saw the moment when Daisy broke, when it all became too much for her. Gatsby was beautiful, but there was a history he would never have, a kind of homey and dignified pleasure he would never provide. He might take her dancing every night under the moon, but there would always be a sting of dirt and scandal to it, and as a Louisville Fay, she could never abide by it. When she broke, it was real, even if she allowed it to happen.

  She shook her head, her hands pressed to her eyes. Gatsby went to her, and Tom let him, something that told me the game was nearly over. The sun came back out, the wind died down, and any hope for the storm died without a whimper.

  “Daisy,” Gatsby said softly, holding her by the shoulders, his fingers digging into her pale arms before he remembered himself. “Tell him…”

  “I can’t,” she cried helplessly. “I can’t. If you can love more than one person at once, then why can’t I?”

  “I only love you,” Gatsby insisted in confusion, and without looking I laid my hand on Nick’s arm. I didn’t think he had been such a fool, but I would have believed it.

  “You see I’ve been doing some of my own investigations,” Tom said after a tactful pause. “You didn’t just sell your soul for some drug stores and way off the dirt farm, did you? No, you let Meyer Wolfsheim broker you some kind of deal. You traded up, old sport, until you got to someone grand, and then…”

  Tom turned to me and Nick, frozen on the divan and by then entirely a captive audience.

  “And what do you think they wanted from him?”

  “I’m sure you’ll tell us,” I said acidly, and he nodded as if to say thank you. Jesus Christ.

  “You kept the party going for Hell and for New York. You opened the doorway to all the fun, and you turned an old-world tipple into big business, got it running like blood throughout the East and the Midwest. You became the linchpin holding Hell to Earth, and how they all loved you for it.”

  It was more than that, I realized, thinking over the nights I had spent at Gatsby’s. His house bridged the gap, and it was safe. It was safe for all of us, for me to kiss who I liked, for Nick to kiss Gatsby, for Gatsby to love Daisy, and for Hell to play its games.

  “And then,” Tom said with satisfaction, “the party stopped.” It had, because of Daisy—who didn’t care for his parties—and I wondered with a pang of contagious panic how that must have looked, what would happen when you didn’t hold up your end of a bargain with Hell.

  Daisy cried out, pushing at Gatsby in a panic. When she stepped back, we could all see a red handprint high up on her arm, the fingers distinct and visible. It was blistered a little, like she had spent too much time in the sun, but even for that he might have been forgiven. Just before he let her go, however, just before he realized what he had done and started to apologize, I saw the look on his face, cold and sick and furious. He had sold his soul, and in exchange for the power to be a man worthy of Daisy Fay, he had created a way station for Hell, a little piece of the infernal in West Egg where the demoniac never stopped flowing and where no one ever noticed if someone disappeared and came back strange and hollow, or never came back at all. Hell was as expansionist as France or England—and Jay Gatsby, with his singular f
ocus and ability to harness the power of human desire, was the perfect envoy to gain them a foothold in the world above.

  He had never asked them for Daisy. He had instead built and baited for her a gorgeous gold and velvet trap, as much like Hell as Hell was like itself, and I knew that Daisy had seen it too.

  After that, it was just about over, and it was time for us all to limp back to West Egg.

  With a kind of brutal sangfroid that I almost had to admire, Tom sent Daisy along with Gatsby in Gatsby’s own cream Rolls, which the papers afterward called the death car, and Tom, Nick, and I bundled across the bench seat of the coupe. The sun was down all the way, and the black road unrolled in front of us like a mourning ribbon.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I fell asleep with my head on Nick’s shoulder, and I dreamed of strange things. I was a little girl standing on the deck of a ship as it pulled away from the mainland. It was not a memory, for I was younger when Eliza Baker took me from Tonkin, but there was something rather more than less real about the plumes of gunpowder smoke in the distance and the rush of people on the quay, some carrying their most precious things and others carrying guns.

  The air was full of paper scraps, falling down from the tropical sky like snow, and I stretched out my hand, curious when they didn’t melt like snowflakes.

  “Against all the old laws, we made soldiers out of paper,” I said wisely to myself, “but look what became of them.”

  A bomb went off on the quay, shaking the world and setting off the siren, I opened my eyes and found a world fractured by chaos. I sat up just as we passed beyond the sightless, spectacled eyes of T. J. Eckleburg, and I saw that rather than being wide and wise, they were now closed and refused to look any further. We pulled to a complete stop in Willets Point, and Tom was craning his neck up and around to see what was the matter.

  “Some kind of trouble?” asked Nick, who had been sleeping as well, and Tom nodded excitedly.

  “Accident of some kind,” he said. “Good for Wilson, I guess.”