The Chosen and the Beautiful

by Nghi Vo

  “Daisy,” I said sharply. “Stop looking at that damned haunted house, and talk to me.”

  “Oh, why should I!” she said with a flash of temper, turning to look at me. “What does it matter now? Jay’s dead and gone, it’s over, why can’t you just let it be over?”

  “It’s not over to me yet. Daisy, just tell me.”

  She glared at me, and I cast around for more than just orders.

  “No one’s going to believe anything I say even if I did say anything,” I said finally. “Aunt Justine’s probably sending me off to Shanghai to see the sights. Come on, Daisy.”

  She turned from me, stumbling to sit on the lawn facing the mansion again, her thin legs cast like pick-up sticks in front of her. She shook her head, and then she nodded. The sky went a flat aluminum gray with sullen purple highlights, a warning of danger.

  “She ran out so fast,” she said, her voice soft and dull. The sky rumbled thunder after her words. “She seemed certain we would stop. She shook the whole car when it hit her. I felt it all the way through my arms. The only reason I didn’t hit the steering wheel is because Jay threw his arm across and stopped me.”

  “She flew,” I said, remembering what I had been told.

  “Yes. Straight forward. In our headlights like a showgirl doing a tumble.”

  I swallowed, stopping myself from stopping her. Why did I think I wanted to hear this? What in the world did I think would be improved?

  “And then what happened?”

  “Oh Jordan, you won’t like me if I keep going.”

  I realized I didn’t like her now. Maybe I hadn’t for a while. The love might take a little longer to die out, but I could work on that. I waited. Daisy abhorred a silence.

  “Jay.… did something. Made sure that no one saw. He stood up in the car, closed his eyes, and the world went quiet around us. It was frightening. I never saw him do anything like that before, never saw anyone do anything like that.”

  I thought then that it must have been his infernal powers coming into play. Later, when I learned about his half-Chippewa mother, and when I learned that her other half was Black and not white, I came to a different conclusion. The native nations had taken in plenty of escaped slaves after the Civil War, and the old spells to help the hunters helped them now even when they were the hunted. Two eyes, closed.

  “And you, Daisy?”

  “Oh Jordan, she was right in the road in front of us. Jay was chanting, and doing that crazy stuff, and I knew…”

  “You knew, Daisy…”

  She shook her head, and the wind caught at the trees, making them sway back and forth like an overly dramatic Greek chorus.

  “What was I supposed to do, Jordan? We couldn’t drive around her! So I pulled her off the road, that’s all.”

  She must have flown like a bird, I heard in my head. Something deep and dark yawned open in me; I was sick.

  “Daisy…”

  “She was making the most terrible noises,” Daisy said, shaking her head so that her hair fluffed out like a chick’s feathers. “She was saying something, or at least, she was trying to say something. Jordan, she sounded like she was trying to curse me, and the blood…”

  My heart was beating too fast, I had broken into a cold sweat. She flew. She landed. She cried out. She cursed. When had she died? I knew now it wasn’t on the road.

  “Her mouth was moving, open and shut, open and shut … it was frightful,” Daisy said, covering her face. “I still see it sometimes when I close my eyes.”

  “Good!” I exploded. “Good! I’m glad!”

  She was on her feet, slapping me hard on the face just as a crack of lightning struck off the headland. We stared at each other, in shock, and as the sky opened up to drop a torrent of cold autumn rain on our heads, I reached up to touch the ringing flesh. It felt oddly good, real in a way that nothing had been since we’d gone to the city for the day.

  “Oh darling, I’m so sorry,” she said, her fingers brushing over mine as she touched my cheek. The rain slicked her hair straight to her head, dripped off the delicate point of her chin. “I’m so sorry. This has been terrible for you, hasn’t it?”

  It had, and for a moment, I swayed towards her.

  “Come with us,” she said, her voice warm in spite of the rain. “Come with us. Why go to dirty old Shanghai when you can come to Barcelona with me and Tom? Barcelona’s a delight, and we can come back in October, just in time for the best part of fall, won’t that be grand?”

  I jerked back from her soft touch, my heart pounding, because there had been a chance, not a large one, maybe, but one nonetheless, where I might have gone with her, if only she hadn’t forgotten that I might not get to come back.

  “Stop,” I choked. “Stop, stop, I’m not in love with you, you can’t treat me like this.”

  She looked at me stunned.

  “Of course you are,” she said, and the thread between us snapped, stinging me hard as I stared at her. The rain flowing down my face suddenly felt warmer, almost like blood.

  Of course I am, I thought, but I wasn’t Jay Gatsby. Love wasn’t enough for me, and Daisy had proved it would never be enough for her.

  I turned on my heel and ran for the house.

  She called my name twice, faltering, and then she stopped.

  I walked through the house, trailing water over the parquet floors, out the front door, and then I kept walking. I had picked wretched shoes for this, dark forest green suede to match my green dress, so I took them off and let them swing from my hooked fingers.

  I sloshed through the soft grass by the side of the road, and every time a car came up from behind me, I thought it might be Daisy sending for me, or even Daisy herself in her blue roadster.

  If she stops me before I make it to the main road, I might forgive her, I thought, and it horrified me.

  She didn’t, however, and instead the car that stopped for me came from the opposite direction.

  It was Nick, dressed in a good suit I hadn’t seen before, his eyes red and hollow.

  “Oh it’s you,” I said as he pulled up in front of me.

  “Come on,” Nick said, and when I got a stubborn look on my face, “please. Please, Jordan.”

  He opened the door for me, and we drove back to West Egg as I slipped my shoes back on.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  We took the main road in, and Gatsby’s palace loomed up in front of us. From across the Sound, it looked like a ruin, a reminder of the wages of sin. Now, coming up on it before we veered to Nick’s house, it looked … normal. Just a building, though a beautiful one. It still gleamed as if at any moment it might burst like fireworks on a hot July night, as if it still had some kind of potential for glamour and for beauty. It likely still did, for it had survived Jay Gatsby, and now anything was possible. We all had.

  For one horrid moment, I thought that Nick would take us to the mansion for some reason. I let out a held breath when we pulled into his own weedy drive.

  “His funeral was today,” he said when he saw my relief. “His father is staying there now.”

  “How was it?” I asked, and his mouth tightened.

  “A pauper’s affair,” Nick said. “I’ve seen mass graves given better.”

  “Is that why you were in East Egg? To see if you could shame Daisy into going?”

  He blinked at me in confusion. He hadn’t been thinking of Daisy at all.

  “No. I … I couldn’t stay there, and I couldn’t stay here. It was too much. I wanted you.”

  “He never liked me all that much,” I said coldly. “I don’t think he always liked you either.”

  Nick flinched from me as if I had struck him. I suppose I had. He gave me his hand out of the car. We ended up walking slowly through the rain to his door, as if neither of us wanted to remember the last time we had dashed from the water to his doorstep. We were different people now. We didn’t run through the rain together.

  “You’ve forgotten a few dresses here,” N
ick said. “You should change, you’re soaked.”

  I felt a kind of bitter twist in my heart as I looked at him. I hadn’t forgotten them at all, and instead of being dresses I could spare, I rather liked them. He stood still dripping in the doorway as I changed into a pale orange dress of figured silk, too fancy for such a dull rainy day, but I hardly cared.

  When I turned back towards him, he was watching me with a gaze that was nothing so much as exhausted.

  “Did you really love him so much?” I asked.

  He hesitated, and I saw the terrible moment when he realized he had nothing left to give me but the truth. He stared at the floor between us as if it held the answers.

  “I still do. I’m not going to stop. It was like no matter what I did, no matter who I met or slept with in France or this summer, it was just him, it was always him … Maybe it always will be him.”

  I felt as if I had been spun around several times and then encouraged to drink a champagne glass full of what turned out to be top-shelf whiskey. My mouth tasted like smoke.

  “Who you slept with this summer?”

  “That boy from Amherst, Grayson Lydell, Evelyn Bard. None of them could even … no one else compared.”

  “How could they?” I asked, faint and appalled.

  You must always be precise when commanding imps, Mrs. Crenshaw said in my memory. Never say wealth when you can say the precise number of dollars, never say eliminate when you can say murder.

  And apparently, never say women when you should have been asking about people. No wonder the singed thing had snickered so upon telling me about the girl from Jersey City.

  Nick finally looked up, and noticed my surprise. A red blush swept up his face, not embarrassed but exposed.

  “I thought you knew,” he said.

  “And you wouldn’t have told me if I didn’t.”

  “No. God, you always seemed to know so much.”

  “Not everything,” I had to admit. I suddenly felt very young and very lonely.

  I sat on his bed, wiping my eyes. Outside, Daisy’s storm had slowed to a kind of soft patter. I imagined tears pouring ceaselessly down her face as she sat at the dinner table. I shut the thought away because I did not want to think about Daisy Buchanan again.

  Nick stripped off his jacket and came to sit sodden and sad on the bed beside me. Two broken hearts, I thought with a kind of strange pleasure at it.

  He touched my chin to make me look around, and he kissed me. This time, I was searching for it, and I could taste something pulpy and dry in his kiss, something I knew. A lion, a paper girl, and now a paper soldier. I would have laughed if it wouldn’t have hurt his feelings.

  “Tell me the first thing you remember,” I said softly, and he kissed me again, open and gentle and searching. “That you really remember, I mean.”

  “I remember muster at Fort McCoy in Wisconsin,” he said between kisses. “I remember hearing my name, my rank, and my service number.”

  “And that was you, Nicholas Carraway, forever and ever.”

  “Lieutenant Nicholas Carraway, five-two-seven-one-one-five.”

  He felt good kissing me. I wondered again if I had always known, but then the question came back—always known what?

  I pushed him back on the bed, straddling his hips as I bent down to kiss his throat. He watched me, docile not just because of the tingle in my fingers or the strange and new hunger I had for him, but because he had been made to be so. I wondered if the original Nick Carraway had been like this. I decided not, and that I probably wouldn’t have cared for him at all. I heard in passing that that tragedy that had kept the St. Paul Carraways from Daisy’s wedding was a car accident, and now I knew who the mysterious casualty was. What a blow it had been for his parents when he died just as the war was ending, all that work by their shameful foreign secret gone to waste.

  No wonder they had sent this one east, this one made of paper, this one with a heart that he ripped to pieces and threw like trash in front of the worst people. This one was mine.

  “I like you best,” I told him, and he smiled at me, halfway happy.

  “No, you don’t,” he said. “You like Daisy best.”

  “Not anymore.”

  It would be true in a while. I would make it true. I would tear her straight out of my heart if I had to, and fill the hole she left behind with paper flowers.

  “Besides,” I said, “you never liked me best either.”

  “Oh, I love you,” Nick said regretfully as my hands tightened on his shirt. “It’s just that my love only goes so far.”

  I laughed at him, and then I reached for the small penknife on his shabby nightstand, kept terribly keen through countless night watches of idle sharpening. His breath went soft and long, so long it seemed he stopped breathing entirely, and his eyes fluttered closed as I cut a long line from the base of his throat down to his belly.

  Eyelashes wasted on a boy, I thought as I had years ago earlier this summer, and his hands fell lightly on my thighs, the fingers twitching slightly with a papery dry rhythm. He opened like a song; it occurred to me that I must have a talent for this. That pleased me, and it was strange to find any kind of pleasure on a day like that one.

  I pulled out his heart so easily that I could see why he had been so free with it. His great-grandmother, out of some sentimentality, had cut it from a map of Minnesota and carefully glued to it a picture of the Carraway clan, two-dozen stern-faced Lutherans at some church picnic or another. I looked closely, squinting under the soft light from Nick’s lamp until I thought I found the ancestress herself, off to one side, hair as white as poplar bark, and a stern expression on her crabbed face. I traced her face, feeling an odd kinship with her. She had at least had the courage to choose a picture she was in rather than erasing herself entirely.

  When I flipped it over, I saw a page from his yearbook at Yale, perhaps just pasted there to give him a little more sturdiness and strength, perhaps to give him some personality. It was the page featuring Yale’s football team, and I picked out Tom from the lineup of similar, serious, slab-faced men. What a mess.

  Over all of this, inscribed with what looked like heavy grease pencil, were names, names written large and crude and without understanding of what such a thing would mean. Largest of course was Gatsby’s—not Jay, but Gatsby—and there were a few other men’s names scrawled there as well, men I thought he must have known in the war.

  I was touched to see that my own name was written neatly and with care paid towards the shaping of the letters. He had written it more deliberately, perhaps with more purpose and with more duty and fear involved than with the others, but I didn’t blame him for that. It was still there.

  “Poor love,” I said, looking down at him. His head was turned to one side, his lips slightly parted. He was lovely. I had always thought so.

  I folded up his heart and slipped it into my purse, and from my purse I drew out my planner, which only let me see two weeks in advance. I used the penknife to cut one of the pages into a pretty heart shape, like the Valentines I had refused to cut in school. I looked at it, toyed with writing my name on it and taking up all the space so that it could not be taken up with any other, but I didn’t.

  Instead, I only pressed a lipstick kiss to one edge, because I’ve never been so keen on being forgotten, and slid it back into his chest. A moment later, he shifted into a true sleep, and I climbed off of him, giving him another kiss on his forehead.

  I put my shoes back on, and I found his car keys on the nail where he had left them.

  I took one last look at his house, and when the door closed behind me, I heard the lock snap into place. The rain had stopped, leaving the sky a leaden gray, and I forced myself not to look across the Sound, where Daisy waited to be packed away like the good china and the delicate furniture.

  * * *

  I took Nick’s car and drove west towards the city. The sun set below the edge of the world, and the shadows came out, longer and sharper than they
had been during the summer. I wished I had a few sips of demoniac to hurry things along, but it was past summer now, so certain things would be easier.

  I pulled over at Willets Point and bought a candy bar from the general store. I nibbled it hungrily, because I hadn’t had anything since the start of the day, as I walked along the edge of the road. The rubber marks from the coupe’s tires were still visible, faint and dim, on the road, but then the sun sunk a little lower and they disappeared as well.

  I didn’t have to wait long.

  One moment I was alone on the slick grassy verge, and the next, Myrtle Wilson rose up out of the ditch beside me. Her pale face was perfect, her hair gleamed like a stoplight, her small feet were bare, and unless she left, she would be the Willets Point ghost for a generation or more. I was leaving. I didn’t see why she had to stay.

  She started for me, a dire look in her eyes, but I shook my head.

  “You want Daisy, and you want Tom, one or the other,” I said firmly. I sounded like Aunt Justine. “They’re going to Barcelona. You could meet them there.”

  She looked at me, flat-eyed, pale, and dead. I reached into my purse and gingerly gave her a twenty-dollar bill. It wasn’t much, but it would get her started.

  As I drove away, I saw her in the rearview window, gazing towards oncoming traffic, and thumb crooked for a lift.

  As the city grew up around me, as the noise and the brutal indifference of it took shape, it hit me all at once that I would be leaving it soon, and for the first time, I had no idea when I would be back. The thought was like a broad hand slapped across my chest, but the pain after that sunk in almost comfortable, like something I could live with until I learned to banish it entirely.

  Shanghai first, I thought, because after all, I had been invited, and then Vietnam. It was, I could already tell, going to be a journey full of awkward pauses, terrible humiliations, and so many places where I couldn’t be anyone but myself, but I thought I would survive it well enough. It was full dark by the time I made it to the city proper, and I stopped at a small drug store just as the weedy-looking young man was getting ready to close. I smiled and flirted until he opened back up for me, and as I made my way through the aisles for home goods, I wondered slightly giddily if this might have been one of Gatsby’s, where there might be anything under the cashier’s counter from demoniac to guns to other destructions no less seductive.