The Chosen and the Beautiful

by Nghi Vo

  “No mouth,” I said to the stars. “I can fix that.”

  Off to the side there was a skinny ladder, and after I discarded my flimsy slippery shoes, I used it to climb up to the narrow walkway ledge that stretched from end to end across the billboard. I paced back and forth in front of it for a moment, but no further inspiration came until I looked down at the bottle in my hand.

  Well, there’s not a great deal more, I thought, and I drank the rest, ending on fumes like gasoline and honey, vanilla and gin. For a moment, I tottered on the ledge, clever enough not to look down though not to have avoided putting myself in this position in the first place. When I got my legs back underneath me, my stockinged toes digging into the grating of the walkway, I bent over and smashed the bottle against the steel.

  There was an almighty crash as shards of glass fell to the grass below, gleaming like stars in the streetlamps, and I found a large shard from the shoulder of the bottle, about half as wide as my palm.

  “All right,” I said as authoritatively as I could. “You’re going to talk to me, aren’t you?”

  I walked from one end of the billboard to another, the shard of glass digging into the paper glued to the wood backing. The paper split as if it was longing to do so, showing the wood underneath. Over the years, the glue had gone and the paper curled away, above and below. When I was done, it looked a bit like the lips of a drunk, lolling open and foolish. It was an ugly and careless job, and for a moment, I wished that Khai were there to show me how to do it properly. He would probably laugh at me for how badly I was doing, and I wanted him to close his capable hand over mine and teach me the way that I should have been taught.

  Hey, where are you, anyway? I thought indignantly. I want to see you, I have to talk to you.

  I sent the thought out of my mind, because I had always had to teach myself. I shook my head, continued.

  When I was done, I dropped the shard of glass and clapped my hands.

  “Talk,” I said, and then more insistently, “Talk.”

  I felt it this time, my first bit of paper magic done only for myself. Daisy wasn’t there to want it to look a certain way or to need me to be a certain thing. Instead it was just me under a plain Willets Point moon, drunk on something I wasn’t sure people should be drinking at all, watching as a pair of painted paper eyes slowly, oh so slowly opened and loose paper lips started to flap.

  What should I talk about? I am only paper.

  I glared at Eckleburg’s coyness, crossing my arms over my chest.

  “You’re paper with eyes,” I said. “You’re paper that sees, aren’t you?”

  My eyes are closed, and I have no tongue.

  The eyes tried to close, but I clapped my hands hard right in front of where a nose should be.

  “Your eyes are plenty open enough for me, and I gave you a mouth so you can talk. What did you see? Tonight? What happened?”

  The eyes blinked almost coquettishly, and then the paper lips spread to speak.

  I saw a car, too fast. I saw a woman who needed to leave, and I saw her go flying. I saw the car stop, and then I saw eyes.

  “Eyes. Wait. Wait … you saw eyes.”

  I saw eyes, mistress, and then I saw no more.

  T. J. Eckleburg lowered its lashes but I didn’t think it was being coy this time. I was suddenly possessed of an intense sleepiness as well, a feeling of weight on every limb of my body. I knew that I had to get down before I fell down, and with my luck, I might fall straight into the glass I had shattered all over the ground below.

  “I … I have to go…”

  I will sleep, mistress, and I will see no more. I am through.

  As I watched, the eyes closed and the paper started to peel back from my cut, slowly at first, then faster. Soon enough, the old paper was peeling away from the billboard entirely, the top half staying to promote the optician, the lower falling off to reveal an advertisement for the Bonney Brothers’ Traveling Circus, featuring daring acrobats, the finest freaks, and the death-defying lion tamers.

  I stroked the paper lion’s face as I went past, and somewhere, whether it came from the paper or from some deep place inside me, I heard a soft growl.

  By the time I hit the ground, I was exhausted. I could barely move, and it took all the strength I had to make it back to Daisy’s roadster. I knew that the state I was in, I would never make it back to East Egg, so I simply crawled into the back, getting the white seat filthy with ash, with everything I had picked up on my sojourn through Willets Point. I thought briefly about smearing everything I had learned all over the leather upholstery, but I couldn’t figure out how to do that, so instead, I fell asleep.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  I could ignore the soft tapping sound on the glass, rolling over and pressing my face to the leather under my face, but the harder rapping that rattled the window finally convinced me to look up. My eyes burned like two eggs left too long on the skillet, and when I yanked the door handle, I spilled halfway out of the car. I would have hit the filthy ground face-first if strong arms hadn’t pulled me back up.

  “There you are,” Khai said, and then I rewarded him by almost throwing up on him. He stepped back just in time, and crouched beside me as I heaved in the car’s shadow.

  At first he tried to stroke my shoulders and say encouraging things, but after a while, he simply stood back and let me empty out what felt like the entire contents of my stomach on the ground. It seemed to take forever, and then I was down to dry heaves, and then I was finally able to stand up.

  It was just a little before dawn, and the heat had diminished in the night, leaving the day a little more bearable. I looked at the lightening sky until I felt more human, and then I turned to Khai.

  He was in his shirt sleeves with dark rings under his eyes, and he looked at me with a mixture of curiosity and dismay.

  “Couldn’t stay away, could you?” I asked with a wink. I looked ghastly, but sometimes I could brazen it right out.

  “You came looking for me,” Khai said shortly. “Last night.”

  “I … did?”

  “Through a dream about green parrots that run a Shanghai bar. I heard you, and I saw that damned billboard that you mutilated. I remembered it coming back and forth to Gatsby’s parties. You said you wanted me, and then I woke up.”

  “How very rude of me…” I murmured, but Khai glared at me. I had cost him some serious sleep.

  “Stop it! Can’t you just stop it? What do you want? Just tell me!”

  People were stirring in the garage and, dead wife or no, I hardly wanted to have a run-in with George Wilson in my state. He wouldn’t care for me or Khai, so I found the keys to the roadster thrown carelessly on the passenger’s seat and thrust them at Khai.

  “Here,” I said. “Drive.”

  It wasn’t until we passed under the ruined billboard of T. J. Eckleburg that I realized we were going to New York rather than back to East Egg. I started to protest, but then I shook my head. I wanted to go home.

  “Oh!” I said. “Just so you know, I think this car is stolen.”

  Khai shot me a dark look as he edged the car forward on the crowded motorway. Somewhere in this mess would be Nick, making his way to work if he hadn’t cried off after the night he had had.

  “I don’t have the money for a bribe,” Khai warned me. “It’ll have to be you.”

  We sat in silence for a moment, and I almost fell asleep before he spoke again.

  “We’re leaving on Friday,” he said. “Bai found us a berth aboard the Princess Titania, and we’re out.”

  I felt very strangely hurt.

  “So soon? You told me…”

  “They vote on the Manchester Act today, and they’re going to pass it,” Khai said. “Bai’s parents still remember when the exclusion acts rolled through. She lost almost all of her uncles. She wants us gone.”

  I let that sink in. The Manchester Act was something that Aunt Justine’s friends discussed over dinner, it wasn’t even men
tioned in the smart set that I ran with normally. Sitting in a stolen car with Khai, however, it felt more real than it ever had.

  “I guess you could go anywhere you like, right?” asked Khai, trying to be encouraging. “You could go to Paris or London…”

  “I suppose I hadn’t thought about it,” I said stiffly, and he laughed a little, shaking his head.

  “Lucky,” he said, without much rancor. “Well, if you want to come find us, we’re going to be in Shanghai. Probably trying to stand up to acts that have been cutting paper since before someone came up with paper, but in Shanghai nonetheless.”

  “I may very well,” I said, and then because I couldn’t fathom the idea of being forced from my home, “my aunt Justine has perhaps been looking for a change of climate. Shanghai would be a change.”

  He parked the car on Park Avenue, handing over the keys in exchange for the three dollars that he didn’t raise an eyebrow at this time. We probably both looked like we were ready for the trash bin. The morning foot traffic split around us, glaring, and I wondered if it had as much to do for what we looked like as it did for the fact we were in their way. I was more vulnerable with him, I realized. Alone I was a charming oddity. With him, I became a foreign conspiracy. Was that why I had never spent much time in Chinatown?

  “A change,” Khai echoed.

  “Yes. A change.”

  He shrugged.

  “However or whyever you come, just come,” he said. I thought perhaps he wanted to say something stronger, but we were very little to one another. It would have been oddly shaming for both of us.

  He tried a smile.

  “Me and Bai will teach you about proper paper-cutting, not the butchery you were doing last night,” he said, and then before I could tell him no, he walked away. It was, I thought, rather smart. If I didn’t say no, there was a chance I could find my way around my own pride and come looking for him in Shanghai after all.

  I was shaking by the time I locked the apartment door behind me. I kept my head down so I wouldn’t see myself in the mirror by the door, and I staggered to my room that felt like I hadn’t slept in it in years. I stripped down and fell into bed, leaving my white sheets smudgy with the ash that clung to my hands, my hair, the soles of my feet, and even my belly.

  I wonder what the world will be like when I wake up, I thought blearily.

  I woke up at noon. The Manchester Act had passed.

  Jay Gatsby was dead.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  It was George Wilson who shot him, of course, and Tom at the bottom of it, though I didn’t know it for some while. It was Tom who told him who must have been driving the car that night, Tom who directed him to Gatsby’s home where the smashed-up Rolls was all the proof Wilson needed.

  I wanted to make Tom a lowering presence, the hand holding the gun that was Wilson, but I couldn’t give him that much. Tom was only shoveling the blame away from himself, and the scales tipped over, this time against Gatsby and all of his promise and all of his potential.

  George Wilson came to the mansion in East Egg, and the iron gates did not stop him, and the paths of the gardens did not confuse him. He found Gatsby in the pool where I had once watched people turn into gorgeous ornamental carp as they slipped into the water, and as the newspaper said the next morning, he shot Gatsby twice in the head before moving off to shoot himself behind the boxwood bushes.

  Before I knew all of that, I saw the gleeful headline that the Manchester Act had passed, sitting alone at the breakfast table because Aunt Justine was sleeping almost fifteen hours out of every twenty-four. I ate my toast, I read the article carefully, and then I called Nick.

  “I want to see you,” I said immediately, and I heard him go still on the other end of the line.

  “I’m at work,” he said, the most Middle Western of excuses, and I decided to forgive it.

  “I was thinking of doing some traveling,” I said, my voice falsely gay. “I was thinking, oh, wouldn’t it be fine to go somewhere now that the weather’s not so horrid?”

  “Traveling?”

  “Yes,” I said eagerly. “Montreal or Buenos Aires, or maybe even Paris … or Shanghai. You could show me around Paris, couldn’t you, darling?”

  “Great God, Jordan!” Nick exclaimed and my cheeks went hot red.

  I imagined both of us touching the broken edges of our relationship, trying to decide what could be mended and what might need to be jettisoned entire.

  “You know, you weren’t so very nice to me last night,” I said finally.

  Nick snorted.

  “Because that’s what the world is about. People being nice to you.”

  I gritted my teeth until I thought they would crack. He was obviously new at this sort of thing, because otherwise he would have hung up on that.

  “It’s better than a world where they’re cruel and you stay anyway,” I said. “Keeping the line open for him, are you?”

  I hung up, and because it was all rather too much, I went back to bed.

  Two eyes, T. J. Eckleburg had told me, and in my shallow dreams, they opened and shut for me.

  * * *

  I had a busy week. Aunt Justine had another setback, and ridiculously enough, I had a match in Hempstead, where I performed abysmally. Nan Harper came back from Greece, and I had to break up with her, and then Aunt Justine wanted to speak to me about Shanghai.

  “It’ll be an adventure for you,” she said from the bed at Bellevue, and I scowled.

  “I don’t care for the idea of running away.”

  “My dear one, you are rich. You don’t run away. You go on retreat. You holiday. You take the waters, and when things are better, you return if you wish to do so.”

  When she tired, which never took long, I kissed her on the cheek to say goodbye and returned to the Park Avenue apartment to pick up Daisy’s car.

  The drive out to East Egg had never taken longer. I held my breath passing the ash yard, and I noticed that T. J. Eckleburg’s billboard was worn quite away, great flaps of paper hanging almost down to the ground like broken wings.

  As I drove east, I could tell that summer’s back was broken. That terrible day at the Plaza snapped to yield autumn, and though there was no hint of gold or crimson in the leaves, the air seemed clearer and colder, the sky hinting towards gray and the white that would come after.

  I couldn’t see Gatsby’s mansion from the road of course, but it was too easy to imagine it as I passed West Egg. Would it be worse to find it pristine as if nothing had happened or to see it falling down into a ruin? I couldn’t say for sure, and I debated it with myself all the way to Daisy’s door.

  I found the house in a turmoil of servants and groundsmen, people in uniform rustling back and forth with tarps and with boxes and crates large enough to ship me all the way over the sea. Most of the furniture had been covered up with white sheets, and instead of looking ghostly, it gave everything a strange air of anticipation, as if the whole place was just waiting for some lucky new owner to whip it all back in delight at her good fortune.

  I finally found Daisy seated on the wicker swing on the veranda, where, to my surprise, she was dandling Pammy in her arms. The tiny girl looked exalted to be so close to Daisy, a terrified look on her face as if she was afraid she might ruin it. Behind them both was Pammy’s nurse, watching warily, eyes flickering from her charge to Daisy and back again.

  “I’ve brought your car back,” I said by way of greeting.

  “Oh, have you? Thanks so, darling.”

  She handed Pammy to her relieved nurse, and when the two of them were gone, Daisy nodded after them.

  “They tied me down so tight to deliver her,” she said flatly. “I didn’t know why my wrists and legs were so bruised until I started having the dreams.”

  I dropped the keys onto the small table that held an untouched glass of lemonade and a small enamel box for pills.

  “You told me that before,” I said. “Daisy, what happened?”

  She l
ooked at me so blankly that for a moment, I thought that she must be drugged. There was a perfect lack of understanding on her face as if she needed to sort out the events from the previous week from what she had had for breakfast, what parties she had been to, and whether the gardener had taken care of the roses.

  Daisy shook her head, standing to walk down the stairs to the lawn.

  “Oh Jordan, don’t bother me with that, not today when I have such a headache.”

  I followed her down the steps, feeling an unaccustomed anger rise up in me. Above us, as if responding to my anger, the sky went a growling gray and the water reflected it back sullenly.

  “I rather think we’ve been friends long enough that you can spare me some time even if your head does ache!” I said. “Daisy, what happened?”

  “It doesn’t matter, does it? Of course it doesn’t, it’s all in the past, and Tom says—”

  “You don’t care what Tom says, and I will know you for the worst kind of liar if you start saying you do now,” I said. “Tell me.”

  She shook her head, not as if she wanted to say no to me, but more as if she was trying to clear the cobwebs that had fogged up her memories of that night. In front of us, the Sound rose up in delicate white foam blooms, the water choppier than it had been.

  “Oh, darling, why are you being so cruel to me? It was an accident, of course it was an accident.”

  “Yours,” I said, and she shook my hand off to stalk down towards the water.

  “Of course mine,” she said, staring out over the water towards Gatsby’s mansion. Even from this distance, there was something hollow about it, something defeated and caved in. “It’s always mine, isn’t it?”

  Two eyes, T. J. Eckleburg had said, and then it had seen no more. Daisy couldn’t do that kind of thing, but I had a feeling that Gatsby could have.

  “What else?” I asked, and Daisy wrung her hands.

  “Jordan, you must stop this at once, I cannot bear this kind of questioning, not now…”

  I saw the tears in her eyes, real as they always were, but I didn’t care about them today. I clenched my fists, shuddering as a cold wind cut both of us from the east.