The Chosen and the Beautiful

by Nghi Vo

She and I disappeared from each other’s lives like this enough that it wasn’t suspicious,

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

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. Touching Daisy was largely a privilege, even, and sometimes especially, to those closest to her.

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,

he only ever really took offense when she wasn’t needling him. When she was only herself and moody or strange or angry for herself.

I noticed that we had left a heat-imprint of our bodies there with our sweat and the oil of our skin and the oil of our perfumes. I hoped that those impressions would last in the marble, some kind of permanent snow angel that Daisy and I could leave behind to haunt the house long after we were both gone.

It was one of those untidy and inelegant affairs, where everyone has some vague idea of what to do, but no real ability to force the issue, and half the people have secret opinions and the other half, in this case, Nick and Gatsby, were too easily swayed by one person or the other to decide.

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

When she broke, it was real, even if she allowed it to happen.

You became the linchpin holding Hell to Earth, and how they all loved you for it.”

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.

“Against all the old laws, we made soldiers out of paper,” I said wisely to myself, “but look what became of them.” A bomb went off on the quay, shaking the world and setting off the siren,

and I took a hurried sip from the bottle, compounding my sins by swallowing fast. It hit my throat like a controlled prairie fire,

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.

My eyes burned like two eggs left too long on the skillet,

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?

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.

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 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.

I pulled out his heart so easily that I could see why he had been so free with it.

I folded up his heart and slipped it into my purse,

Under the wrack and wreck of what had come before, the sky was new, and I reached for it with a yearning eager hand.