The Chosen and the Beautiful

by Nghi Vo

I had never seen a moon like that before. It was no Mercury dime New York moon, but a harvest moon brought all the way from the wheat fields of North Dakota to shine with sweet benevolence down on the chosen and the beautiful.

“Death doesn’t come to Gatsby’s” went the rumor, and it might even have been true. Certainly ugliness didn’t, and neither did morning or hangovers or hungers that could not be sated. Those things waited for us outside the gates, so whoever wanted to go home?

He smiled, and just sitting close by, I could feel Gatsby’s warmth and earnest belief that of course Nick would forgive him any kind of small sin. In that moment, Nick was open to me too. Nick Carraway, who had gone to war and come home amid some strange family tragedy, who had blown east like an apple seed, and taken root, improbably, in one of the richest neighborhoods on the island. Nick wanted, so deeply, to be known and understood, and it was something that I couldn’t give him, even if I wanted to. But Gatsby told you with just his eyes and his smile that he did. Gatsby’s smile was a rare thing, something I have not seen more than four or five times in my life, and it’s likely just as well.

Aunt Justine once gave me some advice when I was newly come to New York. If I was going to be passing anything more than time in public with a man, I should always find out what happened when he heard no, whether it was from me, a taxi driver, a waiter, or his employer.

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. In that one still moment, it was as if Daisy had, all unknowing, taken Jay Gatsby’s heart for her own, and he would spend the rest of his life trying to get it back.

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.

When I looked at famous Jay Gatsby, soul gone and some terrible engine he called love driving him now, I could see that for him, the world was always ending. For him, it was all a wreck and a ruin, and he had no idea why the rest of us weren’t screaming.

Daisy wasn’t good for that sort of thing. She could only lash out, quick and potentially deadly, but for anything that required a sustained effort, she was at a loss.

“Demons, foreigners, one’s as bad as the other. By all rights, they should have been pushed back the first time we tried to quell the Chinese, begging your pardon, young Jordan.” “Accepted, since I’m not Chinese,”

“Of course. It was all only ever for her.” If he had said it bitterly or angrily, I would have had some defense against it. Instead there was a longing and sorrow there that I had not learned to guard against,

I was a strange combination of bereft and relieved when he was gone. Even after all our time together, 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.

I reached in my purse and pulled out three crisp dollar bills, folding his hand over them neatly. “There you go. That’ll get you back to Chinatown, and pay for the alcohol I’ve drunk so very much of.” He glared at me. “You know that’s too much.” “You mustn’t give it back, I’ll be ever so—” “What are you? Of course I’m not going to give it back.”

“The truth is, Jordan, I miss you,” she said, lowering her voice to a conspiratorial tone. “Isn’t it just too awful? I really do delightfully and deliriously miss you. I’ve been so very lonely, and it’s been ever so long since you came out.” “Being lonely is not the same as missing me,”

My eyes half-closed and shining under the lids, I thought I could see what kind of monster she was. Daisy Buchanan was, underneath her dress waving surrender and her face like a flower, a rather handsome and lazy monster. She wasn’t something that stalked her prey for miles through the underbrush. Instead she would lie so still that something unwary might think she was dead, and when they came for her skin, for the reputation of killing her, for her virtue or her wealth, then she would be upon them.

Tom narrowed his eyes and, at the last moment, remembered I was there. Sometimes, having a witness around was enough to remind him he was a good man with a foolishly temperamental wife, and even if Daisy didn’t agree, I liked it better than the other options.

I had always thought that Daisy was like the rest of us Louisville girls, liars every one for the right cause, though of course you would never convince any of us of what one right cause that should be. Now I could see that she was no kind of liar at all, as her hand came out to touch Gatsby’s face right in front of her husband. “Oh,” she said in faltering tones. “Oh but you look so cool…” At the last moment, she pulled back. That feeling of disaster that had hung over us all day finally disappeared, because the disaster had come. And Gatsby, who turned out to be nothing more than the son of a dirt farmer and his half-Chippewa wife, who had constructed a palace so profoundly beautiful that we need never look for the truth, simply forgot to lie with any part of his body in that moment. In that moment, they were alone together in the dining room, in the mansion, in the state, in the country, in the world, and the rest of us were left to beat our fists on the wall outside. “You always look so cool,” she said, and then the spell was broken.

“I don’t know what’s happening,” she said vaguely, more doubtful than she had been before. “I don’t know either,” I said, “but Daisy, make a decision. You can’t have them both, you know. You can’t live in East Egg for Tom and your parents, and row across the Sound to Gatsby’s as soon as the sun sets.” “But of course I can,” she said as if scandalized. “You just don’t know, Jordan. It’s not just double lives. It’s triple, quads and quints…” She wasn’t drunk. That was the horror of it.

He does love her, I thought in surprise, and at that point, I suppose I thought that it counted for something even when it stood up alone, without kindness or consideration or mercy or intelligence to back it up.

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 talk a lot about the selling of souls in The Chosen and the Beautiful. I’ve never thought it would be such a bad thing to do, depending on who you’re selling to.