The Chosen and the Beautiful

by Nghi Vo

He looked genuinely shocked at that, looking at me as if unsure what kind of serpent he had brought to his bosom. This was a look I actually got a lot.

Gatsby was like a storm blowing up far out to sea, and soon enough he would crash to the land.

“What if I say no?” His eyes darkened, and his mouth firmed at that. This was something that he had considered, and he was angry with me for even bringing it up. “Then I hope you are prepared to run, Miss Baker,” he said, obviously sorry that I had to go ruining his polite intimidation.

This then was why Daisy kept me. Unlike her other friends, I didn’t tell her that it would be all right or swear vengeance or offer her a way to be so beautiful he would never turn from her again. It wouldn’t be all right, there was precious little vengeance a woman like Daisy might have against her man, and she was already so beautiful. Instead, I offered her something else.

An ache came to rest between my eyes and through my temples as the clouds rolled like a croupier’s dice.

I could see all the hollows of her face, how corpse-like she could look when the light inside her was flickering.

I didn’t actually trace around the Daisy in the picture. Instead, working free-handed, I snipped a figure that approximated Daisy’s own out of the card stock. With Daisy whispering encouragement in my ear, with my eyes half-closed and a kind of instinct guiding me that I usually preferred to ignore, I cut out her entire figure, her bob, her neat hands, her love of the water, and her quick clever dancing. I made sure to cut out her narrow hips, her full lips, the way Christmas lights sparkled in her eyes as soon as the first of December rolled around, and how summer left her nearly stunned with sweat and exhaustion.

“Why won’t you ask me what the matter is?” she asked finally. “Because you’ll tell me in your own time, or you won’t,” I said.

“Do you care about anything?” It wasn’t an accusation, but an actual question.

“Wicked thing,” he said with some delight. “Of course,” I replied, pleased.

I liked their independence, their wealth, the fact that they were so well-fed and poison-tipped, and they never cared who knew it.

Her suite looked as if a modiste’s shop had grown too full and simply split apart at the seams, throwing vast drifts of silk and cotton and beads and lace on every spare surface.

Back in Louisville, that high wet smell coupled with the uncomfortable prickling heat meant that a twister was on the way, crossing the flat cropland with a destructive fury that was out to ruin lives. We were in the East, however, and we had other ways to ruin our lives.

“And it’s only your opinion that matters?” “It’s the only opinion that matters to me,” I said with half a smile.

His large hands curled around my thighs, and there was a kind of Middle Western, old religion fervor to how he devoured me.

There’s this moment, during good sex at least, where you forget how you’re meant to look or what you think a properly self-contained creature should look like.

Nick laughed, and I wondered if that was what love was, making someone forget the pain that gnawed at them and would not stop.

What does it look like when a thousand-year hunger gets a taste of what it’s craved? His eyes were pale before, but now there was something blackened and charred about them, sending up wisps of steam that I could almost feel but not see. He was still buttoned up to a nicety, but there was something stripped to him, as if we had come in from the water and caught him in the midst of shedding his skin like a snake.

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.

It should have felt as if we were intruding, but these two were made for an audience.

When you’re alone so much, realizing that you’re not is terribly upsetting.

I wondered if, after Gatsby, he had outgrown that sort of thing, but I doubted it. I had never known of anyone who did, though of ones who said they had, plenty.

I was a strange combination of bereft and relieved when he was gone.

It wasn’t true, but it gave people who wanted something to believe in something to believe in.

Tom smiled at her, and I realized that he had no idea what she was thinking of him, the slow animosity that rolled off of her like a wave over a sandbar, the narrow-eyed malice that would make any young girl in Louisville nervous.

She was in a slightly better humor, even if she twisted easily away from Tom’s hand when it came to rest on her shoulder. She had a cat-like way of doing it, something that you couldn’t take offense at.

I couldn’t help the way her fantasy tugged at me. The world was a book for the two of them. They would let the wind flip the pages, Daisy would put down one delicate finger, and away they would go.

“I’d consider it, anyway,” I said, but for the first time, the idea of getting out of New York appealed to me. I was tired of the heat and the summer, I thought, but maybe I was only tired of who I was in the heat.

I let her smooth the color over my lips, but it didn’t feel like good luck. It felt like a bookend, in that we had started something that day in June and today we were capping it off.

I could almost hear things being dropped on the great scales that served for his mind, the house Daisy shared with Tom against the one she would share with him, the windows against his windows, the finery of Tom’s servants versus his own.

The gin had gotten to me, I decided, freezing the inside of my head. For a moment, I was utterly sure that one of them would kill the other, and then we would be in some kind of wretched murder mystery, trying to decide how to cover up the crime and falling into paroxysms of paranoia as we offed each other one by one.

The kiss sent a shock through me because it didn’t seem to shock her at all. She winked at me, pressing her thumb against my lower lip as if to wipe the kiss away.

He looked confused and devastated, like the old bear whose kingdom has been taken over by a bunch of democratic sparrows.

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.

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.

Hell was as expansionist as France or England—and Jay Gatsby, with his singular focus and ability to harness the power of human desire, was the perfect envoy to gain them a foothold in the world above.

“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.

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.

“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.”

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.

“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.”