The Chosen and the Beautiful Read online

  I ended up on the first train to East Egg, and in a plain cotton dress in Oxford blue, I curled up next to a window to watch the world go by. The tall buildings of Manhattan gave way to smaller residences, marble and glass to brick and wood, and I felt something in me ease up slightly, as if relieved to see more of the watercolor blue sky.

  With a slightly superstitious air, I crossed my fingers as the train surged through Willets Point in Queens, where all the city’s ash came to rest. Even this early in the morning, fine light white sediment billowed up from the ground in a feathery fury, curling up into the air like some kind of secret. Wind cut the tallest and broadest heaps with intricate desert-like ridges, making me think of the far-off deserts of the Sahara or the Atacama, and watching over all of this was a perfectly horrid, perfectly tacky billboard of some long-defunct spectacle maker, two great eyes staring down with lurid interest over what went on below.

  Down among the ashes, their faces and hands turned gray and grimy with the refuse of New York, I could see the men who lived and worked in the ash. It was their lot to shovel the ash that came in. It was a titanic struggle that I imagined they could only cope with by realizing that they were after an impossible goal and therefore were free to ignore it. Their shapes flickered among the little shanties that they had put together, made from spare pieces of wood and the odd bit of cast-off wealth of the city. From my spot on the train, as we pulled into the station for a brief and pointless stop, I could see them plodding with a kind of dull and frustrated purpose among the ash heaps, armed with shovels and clothed in grime. I imagined their lungs were protected in their youth by keeping their mouths shut tight. Then as they grew older themselves, more prone to voice their opinions, more eager to make sure that the world did not go one second longer without their words than it absolutely had to, the ash won over, sliding over their skin and then into their open mouths.

  As we pulled away, I saw an unlikely woman with flaming red hair dressed in lemon yellow. She came out of a garage door, a cigarette between two stiff fingers, and a dark fingerprint smudging of ash already on her skirt. She watched after the train with something I could only term a contemptuous longing, and I swore for a moment that our eyes met.

  I forgot all about her when we pulled into the station stop at Lilac Hill, still a mile away from Daisy’s house. I thought about ringing her to send a car for me, but I summoned up a cab instead. Lilac Hill was a little more stiff-necked about such things than we were in the city. It took almost twenty minutes before I could find a cab that would take me, and when I did, I tipped the driver, a silver-haired Black man, as extravagantly as I could.

  I should have called, I thought, as I made my way up the broad front steps. I don’t even know if she’s in.

  The Buchanans’ butler, at least, did not look surprised to see me, and he had one of the men take my small bag to the guest room I customarily used before escorting me to the blue and ivory solar that was generally kept for Daisy’s use.

  The room’s tall windows were open to the Sound, and I looked out over the water. From where I stood, I realized with some discomfort that I could easily see Gatsby’s mansion, the white walls gleaming even across the misty distance, the glittering gold beach and the pier that stretched out from it.

  He stands on that pier, I thought suddenly. 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.

  I was startled from my strange thoughts by a crash, followed by an outraged shriek. I flew to the door, throwing it open just as the butler appeared again with an icy glass of limeade and a small plate of water crackers and cucumber slices. He wasn’t a big man, but he wore his importance like a barred gate, and there was no getting around him.

  “Madame will be with you shortly,” he told me, his face serene. “In the meantime, I have brought you some refreshments. Would you care for some reading materials?”

  “Just the Post,” I said reluctantly, and I sat back down. I had no doubt that if I tried to leave the solar again that he would be there like magic, hemming me in.

  He brought me the Post, and I thumbed through it impatiently until Daisy made an appearance, blowing in like a gale from some wild place. She moved so lightly, her color so high, that I had to glance down to make sure that her kid slippers touched the ground.

  “Oh Jordan, what a delight, what a wonder!” she cried, reaching for me. “I had thought you had quite forsaken me! Now that Tom has thrown me over, I must look to my real friends, mustn’t I?”

  I was usually quite immune to Daisy’s flights of fancy, but this one made me blink twice. Before she appeared, I had heard a great stomping and slamming, followed by an inarticulate shout of the kind I associated with football matches.

  “Thrown you over…?”

  Her hands fluttered like shot birds, her mouth red and smiling. She couldn’t be bothered to tell me the details, so she told me the very heart of it instead.

  “Oh he will go out with that girl this evening. He doesn’t care. He doesn’t care about me.”

  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.

  “Listen,” I said, looking around. “Take me someplace safe. Someplace you trust.”

  Her eyes shone, and she took my hand.

  “Oh, an adventure? Jordan, you dear, you always know what I need.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  She took me out in her midnight-blue roadster, tearing around the hills of East Egg as if they had personally offended her. We went past the paddock where Tom’s ponies grazed, through a small copse of trees where Daisy told me the last witch of Long Island had been hung, and then we stopped at the high and sandy dunes on the undeveloped side of the peninsula. She parked us overlooking the water, nothing in view but blue and the encroaching creep of Briarwood Island, and then she slumped over, her head on my shoulder and both her hands playing with one of mine.

  “So what’s the crisis, darling?” she asked, her voice conspiratorial. “Have you fallen in love with Nick after all? I had so many plans to bring you two together, but you both keep on in the city as if there’s anything there.”

  “There’s nothing but sand and sea here,” I said. “Daisy … Gatsby wants you.”

  She went still, her head a weight on my shoulder, her hands suddenly squeezing mine tight before letting go. She didn’t move.

  “Oh?” she asked. Her voice sounded as well-balanced as a throwing knife, but she had no target at the moment, only me in her car with her, overlooking the glittering water.

  “Yes … look.”

  I told her all of it, starting from the night I had met Nick at Gatsby’s party, through to what had happened last night at the Cendrillon. I spared nothing, not the love bites on Nick’s throat or how Gatsby had looked after his expensive Amherst boy. I might have been telling her a fairy tale, none of it real enough to reach her where she was huddled against my side.

  I came to a stop, because the story had run out for the moment, and I prodded her so she would finally sit up. She did so reluctantly, and to my shock, my complete and utter shock, her eyes were full of tears.

  “My God, my God,” she said in a fascinated whisper. “He loves me.”

  “I don’t know if he does,” I said. “There was … I don’t know, Daisy.”

  “He does,” she said, her hand tightening into small fists. “He does, he does.”

  Over the Sound, dark clouds were forming, and a cold breeze chilled the sweat on my bare arms. An ache came to rest between my eyes and through my temples as the clouds rolled like a croupier’s dice.

  “Daisy…”

  “Tell me again,” she demanded, turning to me. The Sound
and the sky had gone to match her eyes, and I told her again.

  The words sank into her, and as I finished, fat drops of water fell on us, wide-spaced and hard, leaving us speckled rather than soaked in our light dresses.

  When she finally looked away from me, I fell back against the seat, wisps of my hair stuck to my face from the falling water. Almost as an afterthought, Daisy raised the roadster’s roof and lit us both cigarettes. We smoked together in silence, and her hand covered mine, possessively and almost afraid.

  It’ll be fine, I thought to myself. I remembered the last time she had held my hand like that, and it had been fine then too.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Daisy married Tom just nine months after the Armistice, three months after Fulbright’s, and just three years before I came looking for her at her home in East Egg. It had been a rainy June, but that Sunday morning, the sun came out to burn away the clouds as if it could not resist the soon-to-be Mrs. Thomas Buchanan.

  Daisy’s wedding was a wonder, and it drew people from all over the state and beyond. There were Carlyles from Fulton County, Parrishes from Upton, and of course plenty of Tom’s people from Chicago: the Weltys, the Anselms, the Evanston Palmers, and the Tollands. Daisy’s side of the aisle was hardly lacking either, with Phelpses, Moons, and Petries, and a scattering of relatives from farther afield. The Carraways, distant and distinguished, sent along a representative despite suffering some small tragedy earlier that year, and the Millays from Wisconsin provided Daisy with a flower girl in the form of a tiny cousin who was like a rosebud come to life.

  The wedding took place at Church of the Nazarene, where we had both attended since we were little girls, and the entire place bloomed with blue hyacinth, perfume that made me feel almost drunk as I walked in. Hyacinth starts to die the moment it is cut, I told Walter Finley much later that night; they had had the florists there and setting up the arrangements at four in the morning to make sure that they didn’t go brown and limp before the processional.

  Tom wore sharp black, Daisy floated in white, and the bridesmaids were in blue voile that made us look a bit like the hyacinth, though perhaps a little more sturdy. I was partnered with Peter Woolsey, a friend of Tom’s from college. He was built like a wall someone dressed up in decent tie and tails, and before the wedding, Tom’s mother charged me with making sure he didn’t drink himself silly and make a rude toast. I did my duty and kept him on champagne until the reception started, and after that, everyone was drinking and making rude toasts, so I gave up and joined in.

  The stars danced overhead for Daisy’s wedding, and I found myself with Walter, fresh back from the war, and sporting a rather dashing black sling for his wounded arm. It didn’t keep him from the dance floor, and when he kissed me at one in the morning, I started to laugh as if I had never been kissed before.

  It would be a few hours yet before the mother-in-law unit behind my house would be occupied by out-of-town guests, so I took him back there. I liked Walter for his pretty eyes and his generous mouth, for the way he swung me around the dance floor and was so bitingly polite to Audrey Lister that she barely knew she had been insulted. I liked him a great deal, but I also wanted to keep my mind off of what had happened just twenty-four hours before.

  Daisy had made me a bridesmaid on account, I suspected, of what I had done for her in March, and I was the only one who was at her house the day before the wedding, when the letter came. We had been making up the garlands that we would carry the next day, hardy daisies and carnations twined into long ropes, wound with long strings of glass beads to make them shine. We coiled them up like snakes in the Fays’ ice box, and I stayed for lunch while Verna Wilcox and Amity Peters went home.

  I curled up for a nap on the sun porch, and when I awoke it was dusk. I wondered if I could catch a ride home rather than walking or perhaps if the Fays might not mind my staying the night and going home for my dress and shoes in the morning.

  As I was thinking things over in the late afternoon light, Mrs. Fay came in, dressed for an outing in her violet walking dress. She was sharp where her husband and daughter were all curves, and while Mr. Fay, I thought, found me to be a charming novelty, she had no such patience.

  “The Columbus cousins are arriving in half an hour and expect to be taken to dinner,” she said, speaking as clipped as she might to a servant. “Do something about Daisy.”

  “Do what about Daisy?” I asked, but she was already turning.

  “As if anything can be done about that girl,” she said to herself, and then I was left alone.

  The lower level of the Buchanan house was a riot of tulle, paper flowers, extra invitations, and luggage for the honeymoon trip. Daisy had wanted an Old World tour, but Tom had won out with the South Seas, and so her luggage was loaded up with light dresses, shoes with blindingly intricate leather cutwork, and cunning straw hats decorated with bands of pure silk ribbon.

  I dodged around the dress dummy that had stood in the parlor for six weeks, sized exactly like Daisy and used for her dress fittings when she was too tired to bear the dressmaker’s pins, and climbed the stairs. When I knocked lightly on the door, the only response I got was a deep sob, and so I entered anyway.

  Daisy was sprawled on her bed, flat as a playing card, facedown, her head cradled in one hand while the other clung to a completely empty bottle of Sauternes. I had enough experience with the stuff to know that it was sickly sweet going down and burned like fire if it came back up. I closed the door after me, and she didn’t even realize I was there until I pried the bottle from her hand and set it aside.

  When I placed it on her windowsill, she rolled over to her side to look at me, her limbs as careless as that of a marionette whose strings had given way.

  “’Gratulate me,” she muttered. “Never had a drink before, but oh how I do enjoy it.”

  “Daisy, what’s the matter?” I asked uneasily. She hadn’t a reputation for drinking, but I figured she did it in private company, with those she trusted more than the rest. Now though, I could see she wasn’t lying. Her face was slack and her eyes slitted, too careless of her looks to be anything but honest. I had never seen her like that before, and I felt as if some cold finger were numbering the bumps of my spine.

  In answer, she reached into the wastebasket by her bed, and to my surprise she pulled out a string of creamy white pearls, graded so that the smallest was the size of a pill bug and the largest the size of the ball of my thumb. Tom had presented her with the pearls just seven weeks ago, and she had worn them at the announcement dinner. They were a little too pale for her coloring, washing her out, but something about the light made them look ruddy in her hand.

  “Here, dearest,” she said, taking my hand and folding the pearls into it. “Take ’em downstairs and give ’em back to whoever they belong to. Tell ’em all Daisy’s change’ her mine. Say: ‘Daisy’s change’ her mine!’”

  She met my eyes when she said it, pleading with me and making me think of March. Somehow, I got the idea that this wasn’t something I could fix with the right connections. I could see a thin sheet of onionskin paper in her hand, crumpled so only the ends emerged from her fist. I pocketed the pearls because I didn’t know what else to do with them, and I tore my eyes away from the letter because I could tell that Daisy would not suffer to have it taken from her.

  I sat on the bed next to her, rubbing her back for a moment, trying to think. My mind spun like a whipped top, and I was distracted by how she curled up against my hip, still crying with a helpless and burnt-out sound that tore at me.

  “It’s the bridal dinner tonight,” I told her. “Don’t you want to go, Daisy?”

  She shook her head, crying into the coverlet. She looked so small, as if she wished the world would go away and leave her be. She was Daisy Fay, soon to be Buchanan, however, and that wasn’t going to happen.

  “Daisy,” I said, almost begging. “Please. Please get up. People want to see you.”

  I sounded like a little idiot, but the
truth was I was frightened. Daisy’s tears were like a deluge, flowing in sheets down her face, and I thought of the fact that if they were allowed to do so, those tears would drown exactly one person, and that was Daisy herself.

  Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe if she breaks enough, something true will come out.

  The thought shocked me with its gibbous nature. I didn’t know how to deal with it, so I stuffed it in the same pocket as the pearls, and put it out of my mind.

  It became very clear, very quickly that there was no way that we could get her ready for dinner in half an hour. Her face was a blotchy red mess, her eyes swollen from tears, and somehow in the middle of it, she had raked long scratches into her thin arms, not breaking skin but leaving raised red welts on both wrists.

  At some point, Daisy stumbled to her feet, pawing at my pocket for the pearls.

  “I’ll go tell them myself,” she swore. “If you won’t take them I will. I’ll take them to the … I’ll … I’ll…”

  A confused look came over her face. She shook her head.

  “I have to go to the bridal dinner,” she said in surprise. “Oh God, I need to go, I don’t…”

  Her hand was still in my pocket where the pearls were. I didn’t know what she thought then, if she needed to go as Tom Buchanan’s fiancée or as someone else entirely. I didn’t trust it either way, and after a moment, I could tell that she didn’t either.

  “Jordan…”

  “Bathroom,” I said, as firmly as I could. “We need to get you under some cold water.”

  She stumbled a little as I dragged her into the hallway, but she was pliant as a doll as I filled the tub with cold water, removed her frock and her underthings, and helped her get into it.

  “Oh Jordan, cold! You beastly little thing, why is it so cold?”