The Chosen and the Beautiful

by Nghi Vo

  “How very vulturish,” I said, sitting up and rubbing my eyes, but no one paid me any mind.

  “Let’s keep driving,” Nick said, but Tom wasn’t paying any attention to him either, swinging the coupe off the road to where a cluster of cars were nosed into the ash yard. There was a tired police officer taking names, and an ambulance as well, but there was urgency to the scene. After a moment, we realized that the long low wail was not the siren, but the sound of someone’s pain trying to squeeze out their mouth.

  “Oh G—o—o—d, oh God,” came the wail, and I jumped because I hadn’t heard that kind of religious suffering since I left the South.

  “Tom, let’s go,” I said sharply, but he was already stumbling forward. His face looked pale, pale enough that Nick and I fell into line without further questions, and then we stood in the garage’s open door, taking in the scene in front of us like solemn children told to learn a lesson.

  Stretched on the workbench was a woman wrapped in blankets, only her red hair visible at one end and her small bare white feet at the other. Someone had tied her big toes together with string, a tradition in the East to keep a corpse from walking. The man who stood at her head was the garage station owner who had spoken with Tom earlier that day, and in the shadows behind us were his neighbors, come to see the carnage.

  “She landed in the ditch left of the road, she must have flown like a bird.”

  “Struck her so hard her shoes came right off, flew who knows where.”

  “Which ones?” asked another voice, and still another answered, “The copper ones with the silk bows. Crying shame, they were expensive too.”

  Tom made a gruff and startled sound at that, taking a step forward towards the workbench. His face was pale, his eyes were too dark, and a thick sweat had broken out on his brow.

  “What in the world is happening?” I asked, bewildered, and it was Nick, of all people, who answered me.

  “What happens when a man’s girlfriend is struck dead in the road,” Nick said. “She might have had the courtesy to wait until we had passed by, don’t you think?”

  Despite his surprisingly cruel words, Nick was as pale as Tom, staring at the woman on the workbench as if at any moment she might stand up and try something against his virtue. You saw her wild, red, and wholly artificial hair first, as I think she meant you to, but her face was as round, soft, and white as a powder puff, the mouth small and dainty. Her face was still in good shape (open casket is possible, if desired, I could hear sensible Aunt Justine say in my head), and that meant that the rest of her must be pulverized.

  I looked up to find Tom muttering incessantly into the bereaved husband’s ear, his hand fallen like an anvil on Wilson’s shoulder, repeating the same thing over and over again.

  “That car that ran her down, it wasn’t mine, it was a loan for the day,” he insisted. “I was in the coupe, we came out from the city just now … do you hear me, we came up from the city just now.”

  “He looks guilty,” I muttered, and Nick pulled me away.

  “We all do,” he said, sounding a little stricken.

  “Not me,” I said.

  I got him into the back seat, holding him close. I asked him once if he needed to throw up, and he shook his head.

  “I saw worse things at war,” he said indignantly.

  “But not,” I said with a sigh, “in New York. Once I saw a girl hit by a car trying to cross Broadway, you know. She was hit so hard she was knocked out of her shoes and her hat. Her friend who was with her ran to fetch her hat and then tried to set it on her head as if she were alive again.”

  It seemed to take hours, but Tom came back out, stumbling a little bit, his thick frame hitting the car and making it shudder. Clumsily, he climbed into the driver’s seat, ignoring Nick’s tentative offer to take the wheel on the way back to East Egg. Instead, Tom only stared at the road blankly for a few moments, and then he hit the accelerator so hard the coupe lurched back before surging forward. We got a half mile down the road before I realized he was weeping.

  “The God damned coward!” he whimpered. “He didn’t even stop his car.”

  No, he didn’t, the thought came to me.

  Gatsby would have known how to fix this, and he would have, I realized. It might have been with polite threats, it might have been with hundred dollar bills handed out like benedictions, but … he would have fixed this.

  I felt my stomach sink as if it had been sewn shut with stones inside, and as we sped down the road, Tom’s breathing thick with tears, Nick’s head lolling back on the seat like he was a dead man, I thought we had come to the final disaster of the night.

  We got back to the house in East Egg to find that all of the lights had been turned on, flooding the place with illumination as if for a great party. Despite the lights, however, it was eerily silent. Instinctively, I looked over towards Gatsby’s place across the Sound. It was dark as it had been for weeks. Margaret Dancy had said that the party was well and truly over, and for the first time, I really thought I might believe her.

  Tom halted the coupe in front of the porch, gazing up at the house lit up like a beacon.

  “Daisy’s come home,” he said, and if he had said it with any degree of satisfaction, I might have struck him. He frowned back at Nick.

  “Sorry, I should have thought to drop you off in West Egg…”

  Nick shook his head as he handed me out of the car.

  “No, no worries at all…”

  “I’ll have a cab sent for you,” Tom said, handing the keys of the coupe off to an indifferent footman. “Til then, why don’t you and Jordan get inside? You’re likely both starving, and they should be able to do you up something.”

  “Oh, I don’t know if I will ever eat again,” I started to say, but Nick shook his head at Tom’s retreating back.

  “No, thank you, but I won’t say no to that cab.”

  We both watched Tom ascend the porch stairs, his chin up as if he had some kind of noble purpose. When the gracious double doors closed behind him, I reached for Nick’s hand.

  “Come on,” I said, being as gentle as I knew how. “Even if we’re not hungry, we can poke at their plates as if we were.”

  “No.”

  “Oh come on, the Buchanans have just the most lovely plates,” I said, trying to tease, but he turned to me with a look that stopped just short of being fury.

  “I said no, can’t you understand?” he cried.

  I might have taken it better if he had been sorry immediately, stumbled all over himself with an apology for the terrible thing we had seen and for the conclusions we were all drawing. Instead he glared at me, and I glared right back.

  “Of course I understand,” I said coldly. “Good night, Nick.”

  I went in the front doors. I had some idea of going to the kitchen and getting some kind of food for my poor empty belly, but the moment I was in the house, I wanted right out of it again. Going through the sitting room, I picked up the dusty bottle of demoniac that Gatsby had so thoughtfully left, and I took the stairs two at a time. Tom and Daisy were in the middle of what sounded like a council of war in her sitting room, and though I pressed my ear hard against their door, I could not make out more than a few scattered words. I heard Spain. I heard Shanghai.

  I thought of Chicago and how they had left so quickly. I had thought for a long time that it was some issue of Tom’s, some little Pilar Velazquez or some Mrs. Wilson. Now I was beginning to wonder.

  Try as I might, I could not make out more than one word in a dozen, and I was just about ready to give it up for a bad job when I heard Daisy take a sharp breath of surprise. It sounded like she had seen a mouse or found some unpleasant news waiting for her in the paper. Then there was a soft clatter of something falling onto the carpeted floor, and I drew back as I realized what was happening.

  They would be at it for a while. Tom had little to trade on back during his football game except for his animal endurance, and that hadn’t changed. I decided
to give them some time for the occasion, and that perhaps everything would be a bit more sane when I got back.

  As I passed through the dining room, Providence offered me a corkscrew on the table, and some imp of the perverse convinced me to use it on the bottle clutched in my hand. If I were in good company, someone would surely have protested my rough handling. The cork came to pieces as I roughly yanked it out and dropped the gritty pieces on the floor. I didn’t care, and I took a hurried sip from the bottle, compounding my sins by swallowing fast. It hit my throat like a controlled prairie fire, too hot and almost out of control, and it burned all the way to my belly.

  I opened my eyes to see an old woman with disheveled hair streaming down over the shoulders of her antique gown glaring at me from the window of the dining room. The moonlight shone through her like silver arrows, and she started to raise her finger to point at me. I ducked out of the dining room double quick because whatever ghost or phantom that might have been, I certainly didn’t want any part of it.

  Impulsively, I took another sip of the demoniac, and then another and another until I bounced myself outside. I came down the broad steps, staggering to the side yard, and half in the bushes and half out of them, I was startled to see Gatsby and Nick.

  Gatsby looked like a plucked rooster, shoulders hanging and eyes cast up to Heaven—no, only to Daisy’s window, and if I didn’t remember what kind of thing he was, I could hate her for making someone look at her like that. I could almost hear the chorus, his only sin was loving her too much, and at the same time, I could hear the rejoinder in my own voice: his sin was in only loving her and nothing else.

  Nick put his hand on Gatsby’s shoulder, murmuring something soft and urgent to him. I was suddenly as sick of him as he apparently was of me, and taking another pull from the bottle in my hand, I circled around them, giving them both a wide berth that neither of them noticed or cared about.

  I briefly interrupted a huddle of horses in the paddock closer to the house, and as I walked through the tall grass, they came to investigate me, whuffing at me with their velvety noses, their flanks shining silver and gold in the risen moon. The demoniac gave them great purplish eyes, big and dark like the deepest wells in the country around Louisville. You could lose almost anything in those eyes, and it felt as if the horses were inviting me to do just that, to drop my secrets into their eyes, to open the locked gate and to let them run away.

  “No,” I said, shaking the bottle at them and sending a few drops sizzling into the grass. “No. Haven’t you heard, darlings, I don’t have any secrets. None at all. That’s for better than the likes of me.”

  “You’re a fool if you think you’ve no secrets worth sending away,” said a roan foal.

  Before I could ask it what it meant, it fled across the paddock, taking most of the herd with it. I could see strange sparkling things kicked up as they ran, and imagined it was the glory of the Triple Crowns and Derbies in their future, flying up behind them before they met their ends with their long legs shattered on the field and a bullet between their eyes.

  I made my way across the meadow to the garage which hadn’t been turned into a stable just yet. The door had a heavy-duty lock on it, but neither Daisy nor Tom could be bothered when they wanted to go for a quick drive so I found it unlocked as usual, and the keys to the cars kept there were halfway hidden in a turquoise pot high on a shelf at the back. I was shorter than Daisy or Tom, and I had to reach all the way up to hook my finger through the rim of the pot, pulling it down with my fingertips to shatter on the concrete floor with a terrible smash. The earthenware fragments went everywhere, and I had to pick out the keys I wanted from the dust and the shards. The keys to the coupe were missing, but I pulled out the keys to Daisy’s little blue roadster, a glittering platinum D hanging off the key chain to let the whole world know to whom the roadster belonged.

  I took Daisy’s car out onto the road, roaring west as soon as I was clear of the drive. I took another bolt of the demoniac for luck, and I turned towards Willets Point and the ash yard.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  It was all over except for the shouting by the time I made it to Willets Point, and in truth, the shouting was just a long thin wail that came from the garage, the door still open and the thin light from a hurricane lamp spilling out. Every time George Wilson paused for breath, I could hear a lifetime of chewing tobacco in his throat. I parked the car crooked on the verge close to the gas station, behind the edge of the building so it would be out of sight.

  While I was driving, the moon had risen, and I lifted the demoniac, almost half gone by now, to its pocked and imperfect face.

  I wonder what the moon will look like in Tonkin. No, no, it’s Vietnam, I remembered. Bai had been quite down on me calling it Tonkin, and now I was mostly doing it to spite her memory in my head. The Manchester Act was going to pass, I realized in my haze, and Louisville or not, Baker or not, I had better decide what it might do to me and what I would do about it.

  I hated the thought of leaving New York, not for a holiday or a retreat but because I had to, and I drank down another measure of the demoniac in protest. The taste had mellowed now, or I had managed to burn away the part of me that cared. I thought it was getting less effective the more I drank, but then a pair of men stumbled by, arm in arm, and I saw their skeletons underneath their clothes and their skin, grinning faces knocking together affectionately as they passed a bottle of something cheap back and forth between them.

  Or not so very weak after all, I thought, and I got out of the car.

  The moment I stepped out of the car, I was in some dark land, separate as Park Avenue was separate from Chinatown. The few city blocks of Willets Point was its own kingdom entire. With a solemn face, I wandered through the tall ash palaces where the towers and the wings were always drifting away, only to be replaced by the burning of New York itself.

  Oh, I thought in sudden revelation, this is where New York goes when it is tired, when it is done.

  I expected to see ghosts of all sorts, of gin baby socialites, of gangsters and bellhops and countermen and maids and grand dames and ambassadors, but I never did.

  “C’mon, jelly bean,” said a Black man with a trumpet case walking by. He had a brilliant maroon suit with a narrow black pinstripe, and the ash blew away from him as if too shy to touch the hem of his sleeve. “You know better than that. New York’s ghosts are a discerning lot; there’s no way they would stay here to play in the ash.”

  I nodded because he was right, and I waved to him when a black car with a driver whose face I could not see pulled over to let him in.

  I walked through the palaces of ash, and more than once I had to hide because the men who lived there were a restless lot. Bearing the heads of pigs and dogs, like those cursed by Circe for crimes against her, they came out of their houses and crept into the windows of their neighbors, but their wives, I saw, roamed not at all. I giggled as a man with a parrot head somehow got turned around and climbed into his own window, making his wife shriek in anger and distaste, and I moved on.

  The stars were fainter here than they were in West Egg, but I tilted my head back and drank to them anyway, letting the demoniac give them voices to tell me their secrets. Stars didn’t talk like people did, and I couldn’t listen with my ears, but when I closed my eyes, they appeared to throw moving pictures across the darkness.

  The stars showed me a neat town of wood houses, not grass-sided huts like I had always pictured. A woman with her hair cropped like mine, her face round like mine, shook her head at Eliza Baker, shook it again and again before turning away, and I saw Eliza with a packet of money in her hand and a confused look on her face.

  I was meant to love her, you know, I told the stars solemnly.

  Oh? Which?

  It was confusing to me, so I asked for something else, and after some thought, the stars offered me this:

  Nick’s great-grandmother died just as the war was starting. She was a tiny little lady, and age had p
ut camouflaging wrinkles on her face, turned her sleek black hair white, and given her such a stoop that no one was much able to look at her straight on anymore. In her old-fashioned dresses and her small and elegant apartment in Milwaukee, almost no one in St. Paul remembered that she was foreign.

  I remembered what Nick had said, that she was born as her missionary parents came off the Carmine on the Gulf of Siam. I wondered if I had seen some kind of family resemblance in his face after all, whether his dark hair was more like mine than Daisy’s, whether there was something kept hidden somewhere in his easy handsome features. I didn’t think so. I only considered the thought because of what I knew now, and then when his grandmother held up a pair of scissors in her hand, looking straight at me with a solemn look, I realized I knew something else too, and maybe had for a long time.

  No wonder I like you so, I thought, and then I put it straight out of my mind.

  “Can’t you show me something important?” I asked the stars. “Drinking this much demoniac may just kill me, and I would like it to be a bit grander than old family secrets…”

  The stars considered and then the ground in front of me lit up, the starlight catching on every bottle cap, scrap of metal, and lost bolt. Curious, I followed their winding path through the palaces of ash, and I came at last to the billboard west of Willets Point.

  T. J. Eckleburg disdained the glorious city of ash below his eyes. They were closed tight, and while a sensible part of me told me that I only misremembered, that they had always been closed, I knew that that was not true.

  I took another sip from the demoniac, thinking that it was rather shabby of Gatsby to give us one only partially filled. Surely I hadn’t drunk enough for it to feel so light in my hand. I glared up at the billboard, frustrated with its silence, and frustration opened up into a childish fury.

  “Well, come on,” I said loudly. “Speak. You see so much, what’s the point of you if you don’t speak?”

  The eyes stayed closed, but then I realized that I was trying to get water out of a stone.