The Chosen and the Beautiful

by Nghi Vo

Brief moments of sympathy and absent-minded kindness did not make a good man,

There are women who will forgive a great deal for a moment of kindness from a handsome man, but Daisy and the other older girls who had taken me under their wings had taught me not to be one of them.

Seeing him then, you knew he would remake the world for the object of his desire, but what a world it would be, and it wasn’t as if you could stop him.

He called me careless because he didn’t have the words to sort out how jealous he was of my money and my freedom and how very few people in the world could act as I did.

There are some kinds of careless that a girl in 1922, if she was rich, if she was pretty, if she was arrogant, could be.

“Don’t tell anyone,” she pleaded, and I decided to pretend she said thank you.

Careful, we had to be so very careful all the time, and the reward was this, lying in the dark as if we were the same girls we had been the week before.

I smiled wide with my white sharp teeth, and I learned to laugh like the clink of champagne flutes, but even then I never had much interest in sweetness.

You weren’t meant to look at people the way that Lieutenant Gatsby looked at Daisy Fay. You couldn’t peel your skin back and show them how your heart had gone up in flames, how nothing that had come before mattered and nothing that came afterward mattered as long as you had what you wanted.

“I’m not like that,” he said, his voice shaking just a little. “Please?” “I’m not the one who decides that,” I said as gently as I knew how.

I knew that there was something empty in him before, but now I could see that it wasn’t empty all the time. Now there was a monstrous want there, remorseless and relentless, and it made my stomach turn that it thought itself love.

He stands there, and he looks across the water, and he looks across the years to when she was his and when she will be his.

Can’t disappoint, darling, never can … and that is all that Jay Gatsby will do.”

She said things, they lit up gold in the air, and then they fell to nothing like so much cigarette ash. This wasn’t something that floated around inside her head and then out her mouth. This was something she had put away somewhere dark, where the light wouldn’t fade it, where no one could talk her out of it.

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

“Oh God in Heaven, he loves me so much,” she said, hiding her face in her hands. “I don’t think God has anything to do with it,”

I hadn’t quite resigned myself to being a couple yet, half of an equation when the male half could somehow continue as a whole without me.

“You don’t like me,” he said. “Is there a reason I should?” I asked.

think you’re pretty wonderful, Jordan. Nick and Daisy sing your praises—” “If you expect me to believe that either of them talk about me when they’re with you, I have a bridge to sell you,”

I was meant to be Daisy’s best friend, and I didn’t know this version of her. This version of her felt like a gun primed to fire.

“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.

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.