The Chosen and the Beautiful Read online

  The first time I went, I was in a shimmering black beaded dress that was rather too old for me and too soaked in Scandinavian gloom for words. I wore a red rosebud pinned to my dress, and I’d stolen Aunt Justine’s sparkling diamond earrings to complete the picture. I shook a little, thinking that this was when everything was going to change. I had escaped Louisville, come to New York, and everything would be different.

  I gave the password in my most unaccented voice, conspiring to look bored when the man looked me over and opened the door. If I didn’t pass muster, I wondered if I was prepared to spend the next hour or so watching the Amazing Ming juggle plates in the scanty dusty theater or to walk out in defeat. There were already a few people in the seats who looked excited by the prospect and I was certain that if I had to sit with them, I would simply perish.

  The man at the door nodded me in, and the moment I stepped past the threshold, I felt as if I were falling, not plummeting down a rabbit hole, but instead that gut-clenching rush of missing the very last steep stair in the basement. My foot came down, and I looked down into an elegant ballroom of veiled mirrored walls, a long bar of rosewood and brass, and an integrated orchestra that were, to a man, playing blindfolded.

  I felt a rush of heat and pleasure when I looked down at all the people below me and knew, rather than suspected or hoped, that they were like me. Of course they weren’t, but that single moment left me speechless and almost in tears before a party of young men arrived behind me and pushed me out of the way to descend the stairs and join the fun.

  That shove broke me out of my spell somewhat, but even four years later, I felt a trace of that old wonder as I came through the door with a showy pink peony tucked behind my ear, wearing my emerald green silk slip dress with its dancing fringe of copper beads. I had come with plenty of energy to spare that night, and as the band struck up the first song, I found myself in the arms of a fat Black girl in a white tuxedo, the satin of her lapels gleaming like stars in the soft light. She had long eyelashes that curled up like angel wings, and when she pressed her round cheek against mine, she made my heart beat faster. She was light on her feet, but I wondered if she had mistaken me for someone else because she passed me on at the end of “Broadway Baby.”

  After the girl in the tuxedo came Maurice Wilder, who struck a strange and exciting chord in me by being the most handsome boy in a flaming red dress.

  “Tacky,” I teased him, liking the blush that came up on his narrow face when I did, and he pulled me close to hide his face in my hair. Someone should have told him to wear a slip, because I could feel every inch of him through the gossamer fabric, but I was glad that no one had told him yet. He let me pull him behind one of the vast Boston ferns to kiss him, but I let him go when he wouldn’t let me do more.

  Like every halfway fashionable thing, I had a tab at the Cendrillon. Mine was under the name Miss Shanghai, something I absolutely did not choose for myself, but it still got me delicious drinks in Venetian glassware. I was wearing green that night, and fortunately they had a good absinthe, straight from their supplier on the Gulf. I leaned against the bar to watch the bartender set the drink up for me, from the thick glass tumbler just barely tinted to enhance the green of the drink to the slotted spoon where a little sugar cat crouched, its face, paws, and tail lightly singed brown. The bartender balanced the spoon in the notch on the tumbler’s edge, and then holding the cloudy bottle high so that the arc was elegant and narrow, poured the green alcohol over the cat. When the sugar dissolved entirely and the tumbler was three-fourths of the way full, the bartender slid the glass towards me, and I smiled, taking the spoon to mix my drink and find myself a seat.

  People make such a fuss about home. Daisy talked in raptures about Louisville and Chicago, while Nick, when he had a few, could be quite a pain about Minnesota snow and the pale faces and gleaming eyes seen from the car in the cornfields. I listened, but I never cared all that much.

  Despite that, the Cendrillon was one of my homes, and I could perch on the high stools by the ruby-glass mirror and sip my drink, my legs crossed so that if someone I wanted walked by, I could tap them easily on the thigh and make them look at me.

  Without windows, the Cendrillon had an underground feel. It kept things cooler in the summer months, but it was New York in one of the hottest years on record. We were in a roiling boil, and I only kept cool by filling an old perfume atomizer with water and spritzing myself liberally as the night went on. I added a few drops of actual perfume to the mix, so not long into the evening, I was lightly drenched in citron, but still a little cooler and a little more alert than the other people there.

  “Why, Jordan Baker!”

  I was already smiling as I turned because it was Miriam Howe, and everyone loved Miriam Howe. She was tall and lean with the far-seeing eyes of some fabulous savannah cat, and when she draped herself around you, it was better than wearing mink, not that anyone could think of mink in New York in the summertime.

  That night, she was glamorous in a lilac silk sack dress that left her long throat and her soft white arms bare. Around her neck was a fortune in perfectly matched pink pearls, and the moment I saw them, I wanted to put my mouth to them and her skin underneath.

  The band slowed down for “Lavender Blue Moon,” and I put my arm around her waist to lead her onto the floor. She let me lead, and we swayed together, more in time with the massive fans above our head than with the saxophone.

  “Are you here with Nan again?” asked Miriam.

  “No, Nan went off to Athens for the summer. Who knows who I’ll be when she gets back.”

  Miriam gave me a slightly calculated smile, twin to the one I gave her.

  “And you,” I said. “Still trying to get a ring out of Perry Sloane?”

  “Oh darling, where have you been? Perry found God.”

  “Scandalous,” I said with a grin, and so we were clear.

  Miriam was a good dancer, at least as good as I was and likely better, so we stayed on the dance floor for a while. We were attractive together, and I liked the look of my body next to hers as we twirled past the tall mirrors. The last song was fast enough to make us both sweat, and when she threw her arm over my shoulder, we slipped against each other in the most intriguing way.

  “Get me a ginger water, won’t you?” she asked. “I’ll find us a spot in back.”

  I elbowed my way to the bar to get Miriam’s ginger water and to get a caipirinha for myself. I sipped at my drink diligently as I went to find Miriam, but by the time I got to the back, I could see that someone else had found her first.

  His back was to me, and past his shoulder, I caught Miriam’s face, chagrined, nervous, and maybe a little hypnotized. Then the man turned around, and I could see that it was Jay Gatsby, sharp as a razor blade in a pale gray suit, buttons undone and the color high on his cheeks.

  “There you are, Miss Baker. Miss Howe and I were just talking about you.”

  One thing I liked about Miriam, she was never one to let grass grow under her feet. She was around Gatsby in a heartbeat, and she even made it look natural. She plucked the ginger water from my hand as she went by, gave me a significant look, and then was gone. At a loss for what to do, I took a slow sip of my drink, watching Gatsby over the edge of my glass. There was a bubble around us, as if the crowd could be ordered as nicely as his clothes or his shoes.

  “Are they afraid of you or did you do something?” I asked, and he grinned.

  “Does it matter? Come here.”

  “I don’t have to,” I told him, gripping my drink a little tighter. He looked surprised.

  “Of course you don’t. It was a request.”

  No, it really wasn’t, I thought.

  “Then make a request,” I said, staying right where I was. Around us, the other patrons were oblivious, not even watching us out of the corner of their eyes to report elsewhere later. He had done something, and the only comfort was that he hadn’t done more.

  He looked at me for a moment
, blank-eyed, and then he smiled. His eyes got soft, and so did his mouth, and it came to me that he had such a beautiful mouth. It was something I liked on men and women, a beautiful mouth that might kiss me or whisper secrets in my ear or open and let me kiss them …

  I realized that I was flushed all over, and I just barely managed to stop my drink from tumbling from my hand. I swallowed, took a better hold of the glass, and gave him a look to tell him I knew exactly what he was doing.

  “Jordan, will you please come with me?”

  “Yes,” I sighed. Sometimes, the only excuse for doing something stupid is knowing that you are doing it and being willing to accept the consequences.

  He put his hand at the small of my back to press me forward and I went, just barely stopping myself from leaning against him. Just because I liked how he felt, just because it was intriguing and appealing and delicious was no reason to reward him for this display.

  The back rooms at the Cendrillon are numerous, dim and cool, clad in brick and boned with bare rafters. Jacquard couches that were quite big enough to fit two or three, Pashmin rugs and delicately embroidered lampshades mostly hid the fact that they were in reality something a great deal like cells. Gatsby handed me the key to the room he had found for us and then spread himself out on one end of the couch, watching me through half-lidded eyes.

  He was good to look at, so I looked, and I saw the dark love bites that peppered his throat, the disorder of his clothes and the looseness of his limbs. His mouth was almost as red as what I painted on, and I bet that if I touched him there, he would flinch.

  “Does Nick know you’re here?” I asked, and he shot me a bemused look.

  “Of course he doesn’t. He wouldn’t want to hear about a place like this.”

  I could still feel Nick pressed against my shoulder, hear that soft please, and I shrugged.

  “You could bring him. He’d come for you.”

  Gatsby smiled disarmingly.

  “Oh he won’t do anything for me,” he said. “Nick thinks I’m a social climber. Very Minnesota of him. He can’t forgive people for their origins, and at the same time, he won’t forgive people for trying to overcome them.”

  “Is that what you’re doing?” I asked, finally relenting to come and sit next to him. I kept some space between us—it wouldn’t do to get overly familiar with him, but there was something there that told me he wasn’t a hazard to me, not tonight.

  “You haven’t spoken to him,” he said, reaching for the hem of my dress. He toyed with the fringe there for a moment. “Have you decided against me?”

  “I haven’t decided anything,” I said a little sharply. “I’ve been busy.”

  “With Nick?”

  “You don’t own him,” I said stubbornly, and he blinked as if something had snapped into focus.

  “I don’t want to own him any more than I want to own the Sound,” he protested, and I gave him a sideways look.

  “Would you mind awfully owning the Sound?”

  The bright grin was unexpected in this place, like a knife cutting through an opium fog.

  “No, I would probably like that. All right, shall we lay our cards on the table, Miss Baker?”

  “I would if I were playing cards. That’s just you.”

  He sat up, leaning towards me and with the sensuality he had been wearing set aside. He didn’t seem to know what to do with me, which face worked best, which tone would melt me. Now Gatsby looked at me, a little blank, a little curious, and to my surprise, a little desperate.

  “I need Nick,” he said quietly. “I need him to get Daisy.”

  I stared at him, because of all places to hear Daisy’s name, the Cendrillon wasn’t one of them. She might dance with a girl to cause a scene, but anything else made her feel funny. I would have taken it more personally if I didn’t suspect she felt that way about boys too, once the kissing and petting turned to something else.

  “What’s this to do with Daisy?”

  “Oh, Jordan, I love her,” he said, and I burst out laughing.

  “You knew her for—”

  I had suspected he was fast and strong. I didn’t realize how much so until he had taken me by the shoulders and dragged me up to my feet. I had been hauled around enough to know that I didn’t like it, but staring up into his eyes, I forgot all about how I had been taught to strip shins and break foot bones. I could barely feel any strain in his hands or his body, and my feet still touched the ground, but it was a close thing.

  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.

  “I love her, Miss Baker,” he said, his face close to mine. “I have never loved anyone else. And I know that she loves me. She has since we first met.”

  Unwillingly I remembered a cry that sounded as if it had been dug up from Daisy’s body, as if she had stretched out on the ground and someone had driven a spade deep into her. I remembered the smell of crème de menthe and how I still couldn’t bear to drink it after that evening.

  The night before her wedding, Daisy taught me that after the world ended, you still had to get up in the morning, and the things that you ruined would still be there, needing to be fixed. 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.

  I didn’t look away, and I didn’t fight him, because I had some idea how terribly stupid such a thing might be. The only way to deal with a thing that terrifying was to not be afraid, or at least, to make sure that it didn’t think you were.

  “I remember,” I said, which was only the truth. I remembered a lot of things. “Now put me down.”

  He blinked and let go of me. He was either surprised at himself or he thought he was. All that mattered to me was that he pulled back.

  “Miss Baker, I do not like to repeat myself, but I think I will have to ask again.”

  “Yes, I’ll sing your praises the next time I see Nick.”

  “It might not be enough. I want him to bring her to West Egg.”

  “You’re … asking Nick to bring his own cousin to you like some pretty baby off of Broadway?”

  “No!” 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.

  “Then what?”

  “I want him to bring Daisy to his house in West Egg. I can be there. I can meet her, talk to her. Remind her.”

  I gave him a long look.

  “It actually made more sense when I thought you wanted her served up like a bit of cold lapin.”

  “Don’t be disgusting.”

  “Oh really? Whose cock were you sucking before you spotted me and Miriam Howe?”

  “Some expensive boy from Amherst, what does that matter?”

  And I could see that to him, it didn’t. I marveled at that a little, and he took my hand. This time he was careful about it, holding it like something too fragile.

  “Look, Miss Baker. Jordan. I need your help. Have him bring her to West Egg.”

  I didn’t tell him I could do it, because I wasn’t sure I wanted to. Gatsby was like a storm blowing up far out to sea, and soon enough he would crash to the land. Whether he struck marshland or a coastal city was still uncertain but I was beginning to realize how little control I had over all of this.

  “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.

  “I’m not,” I said, trying to sound bored. “Fine. I’ll tell Nick. Happy?”


  “I will be.” He hesitated. I wondered if he was getting some inkling that his grand romance was involving an awful lot of underhanded threats.

  “This isn’t real,” he said abruptly. “What I have said here with you. It’s not real.”

  “It feels real to me,” I responded, and he gave me the most charming and oblivious smile. This was never a man who could tell me to run. This was in fact someone that Daisy might have been in love with, someone she really would cheat on Tom for. He looked boyish, endearingly regretful. It was enough to give me whiplash.

  “I’m so sorry you got the wrong idea,” Gatsby said, reaching over to tuck a strand of hair behind my ear. “But you will tell Nick?”

  “Of course I will,” I said, and I must have sounded forgiving or chipper enough to make him beam.

  He took my hands in his, kissing them in grand style.

  “Thank you again, you’re an absolute darling, Jordan Baker.”

  What Jordan Baker was was alarmed, overly warm, and intensely ill at ease. I was back in the main hall of the Cendrillon, and though Miriam was long gone, clever thing, Maurice Wilder had just gotten his heart broken over something, so I dragged him into one of the rear booths, hanging on to a fold of his dress and letting him drape half over me. I held on to him and drank something light and fizzy to clear my mind, but there was really no clearing it of something like Jay Gatsby. I kissed Maurice all over his face and shoulders, but in the end I couldn’t sustain it.

  He sat up, cupping his sharp chin in his hand, sighing.

  “Bit of a wash for both of us, isn’t it?” he asked.

  “Yes, I suppose it is.”

  I rolled my cool glass over his shoulder, making him shiver a little.

  “Well, Jordan, should I see you home? I think I’m about done for.”

  “No, I—yes, actually. That would be ever so good if you came by car.”

  I would go home, I decided, but I wasn’t there to stay.

  No, in the morning, I had to take the train out to East Egg to see Daisy.

  CHAPTER NINE

  I didn’t end up going to sleep when I got home after all, and I made myself some very strong Turkish coffee to compensate. The harshness of the drink made me feel as if I was vibrating two inches beyond the barrier of my skin, and I knew my mouth would taste dark and a little gritty all day, but that was fine.