The Chosen and the Beautiful Read online

  “He did invite you,” I said, handing it back. The uncertain look was back in his eyes. If he was meant to be the associate of a man who might be a prince in Hell or a German spy, I thought he rather needed to toughen up.

  “I didn’t think it was so strange,” he muttered, just as we passed by a tall and gaunt man with pale eyes and still face talking with Anastasia Polari, the famous silent film beauty. Her eyes were as dark as holes burned in silver nitrate and as hungry as winter, and he held her hand in both of his. There seemed to be either more or less joints in his fingers than there should be. Nick stared, his footsteps slowing, and I pulled him forward, touching my fingertip to his lips.

  “Shouldn’t stare,” I murmured, and he looked at me instead. Long eyelashes, of the kind they say are wasted on a boy, but I never found them wasted. It made him prettier, and gave him an appearance of innocence I doubted he deserved.

  For a moment, I thought he might kiss me right there, but I turned and drew him briskly along. I liked the tingle on my skin, the blush and the way I could feel his gaze on the bare back of my neck, the indent of my waist and the sway of my hips. There wasn’t much there, but they did sway, and he followed behind. I liked the anticipation as much as the thing itself, and though I hoped Nick wouldn’t be one of those, sometimes more.

  No Gatsby at the bar or on the veranda. No Gatsby in the music room or the armory or in the private dance that had sprung up in the blue parlor. We ended up in the library, where I had few hopes of finding Gatsby, but where I thought we might be alone for a while.

  The library I later heard was a true Gothic miracle. It had burned down sometime in the 1500s, its ashes tilled under the earth. A rather pedestrian apartment block stood there now. Gatsby, they said, resurrected it the way he might resurrect a beloved dead ancestor. As we walked down the cavernous space, our footsteps echoed and the tall stained glass windows flickered with a hot orange light from beyond, a far cry from the cool twinkling stars that lit the party.

  There were alcoves set between the shelves, and I had been back there before with Coral Doughty to find that the reading sofa was very comfortable. Nick looked a little sharper when we were alone, as if he had finally figured out what he was for.

  “Jordan, wait a minute,” he said.

  “Are you going to talk to me about your girl in St. Paul?” I asked, raising my eyebrows. It would have surprised me, but I could stand being surprised.

  “Shouldn’t I?”

  “I don’t get out of the city much,” I said, and slid my fingers down the lapel of his jacket. I didn’t touch his skin, not yet, but his breath stuttered.

  “Come here,” I started to say, and then I had to stifle a yelp when a rumpled gray man sat up from the very sofa that I had had my eye on. He peered around, his eyes enormous behind thick owlish spectacles, and he squinted at us both before looking me up and down. He pointed at the books.

  “What do you think?” he demanded.

  “About what?” I snapped. I was still blushing, and I hoped it looked like anger.

  “The books!”

  He had made something of a nest for himself in the little alcove. There was a pile of blankets on the cushion, and a small table close to one side that held a glass of water and the remnants of a sandwich. A pair of slippers peeped out from under the sofa, and he had dragged a lamp over to light the whole affair.

  “They’re real. They’re the real thing. About that. As a matter of fact you needn’t bother to ascertain. I ascertained.”

  Something in our faces must have suggested we were in the least interested, because the man rushed to the bookcase and came back brandishing a leather-bound copy of a Renaissance treatise on the machinations of the princes below. It was a gorgeous thing, a volume that I knew Aunt Justine would have coveted, and if it had not made such an obvious gap in the shelves, I might have considered taking it to her.

  “See! It is a bona-fide authentic piece of demonologica. He fooled me at first. What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop too—didn’t break the seals. But what do you want? What do you expect?”

  He showed us the pages that were still shut with old wax and imprinted with the seals of Great Solomon. Terrible things could be learned from the pages underneath those seals, but they were as unbroken as the day they were made.

  “Who brought you?” he demanded. “Or did you just come? I was brought. Most people were brought.”

  “He was invited,” I said a little spitefully, pointing at Nick, but the man bobbed his head knowingly.

  “I was brought,” he continued. “I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.”

  “Has it?” Nick asked in a tone just a fraction off of mine.

  “A little bit, I think. I can’t tell yet. I’ve only been here an hour. Did I tell you about the books? They’re real. They’re—”

  “You told us,” I said with mock kindness.

  We shook hands with him gravely and went back outdoors.

  The dancing had started, and of course it was far too late for anyone who wasn’t a good dancer to begin with. Men walked girls much too young for them in awkward circles, and the famous couples competed for the best angles even while keeping in the dimmer reaches of the space in a half-hearted attempt at privacy.

  “Should I ask you to dance?” Nick inquired.

  “Another time,” I said absently, because something had caught my eye. We stood at the base of the steps. In front of us were the garden and all the pleasures that Gatsby had implicitly promised us, but the man himself was not down enjoying them. Instead he stood on the veranda behind us, and he was staring straight at Nick.

  “Hey, it’s the girls from before,” Nick said, pointing towards the stage. Ada and May were doing their baby act, grown women toddling around with big eyes and singing nonsense songs in their high squeaky voices. It was a spectacle all right. Nick had apparently never seen anything like it, because he watched them, allowing Gatsby to watch him, allowing me to watch Gatsby.

  I couldn’t believe more people weren’t watching Gatsby. He stood at the balustrade like an emperor overlooking his kingdom, but in this moment, the only thing he had eyes for was Nick. Everything else was faded for him, all sounds muted. It was almost indecent, and something in me responded to it.

  He had the gravitational pull of the sun itself, drawing planets into his orbit even as he summoned up all of New York’s smart set for his parties. I couldn’t imagine what would happen if he turned that look on someone who saw it, but of course I could. He had looked that way at Daisy, and I knew what had happened to her.

  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. I knew Gatsby right then for what he was: a predator whose desires were so strong they would swing yours around and put them out of true. I was feeling the reflection of it rather than the thing itself, and I charged myself to remember it as well as the pit of cold wariness that had come to curl in my stomach.

  Nick clapped for the girls on the stage, waking me from my reverie. I avoided looking up at Gatsby, and instead took Nick by the arm. Somewhere, he had gotten another finger-bowl of champagne, and his smile was silly and a little puppyish.

  “Where shall we go next, Jordan?”

  “Right here,” I said, sitting him down at a table. I waved away a couple who wanted to join us, and I sat with Nick at the edge of the crowd, clearly visible from the veranda. There was a flushed look to Nick’s face, and I stopped myself from reaching to brush the dark hair out of his eyes. I felt strange about it now, as if I was trespassing on territory that Gatsby had claimed with only that one desperate look. It was irritating to say the least, but at least he didn’t keep us waiting.

  One moment I was collecting a gin rickey for myself, and the next, the man himself was seated at the table with us as if he had been there all along. Up close, he was less handsome, more vita
l. I could see a faint scar at the point of his chin, old and white against his tanned skin, and his hair, cut so very short, made me think of an army man who had not quite acclimated to life at peace. He had eyes for no one but Nick, and when Nick’s head came up from a second finger-bowl of champagne—where was he getting them from?—he gazed at Gatsby with a kind of curious wonder. It might have just been the drinks, but I thought it was more than that. Even I wanted to scoot my chair closer to Gatsby’s warmth, touch his bare forearm where it rested on the table, and he wasn’t even looking at me.

  It was only when Nick met his eyes that Gatsby smiled, and somewhere in the house, the clock chimed midnight.

  “Your face is familiar,” Gatsby said, his voice low and warm, as if he had no idea who Nick was. “Weren’t you in the First Division during the war?”

  “Why, yes. I was in the Twenty-Eighth Infantry.” Nick spoke automatically, eyes never falling from Gatsby’s. His hands, forgotten on the table, twitched as if still seeking a trigger.

  I hadn’t known Nick’s division, but I had heard of the Twenty-Eighth. Everyone had. They had carried away America’s first victory in France, and that meant Nick was allowed as only a few other men in the country were to wear the insignia of the Black Lions of Cantigny. I was a little more impressed with him. Every boy who came home was a war hero, but there was apparently something more to this one.

  “I was in the Sixteenth until June nineteen-eighteen. I knew I’d seen you somewhere before.”

  “I would have remembered someone like you,” Nick said, attempting a diffidence he obviously did not feel. I couldn’t tell whether Gatsby was telling the truth, but Nick was, and I changed the few things I knew about him around a bit in my head.

  They talked for a moment about some depressing little villages in France. Gatsby mentioned he had just bought a hydroplane, and was going to try it out in the morning.

  “Want to go with me, old sport? Just near the shore along the Sound.”

  Nick’s fingers curled as if they wanted to make a fist but had forgotten how. If he had had his gun there, we would all have been dead.

  “What time?”

  Gatsby laughed as if Nick’s sensible question was delightful.

  “Any time that suits you best.”

  They were staring into each other’s eyes, clearly at a standstill in the conversation and not sure where to go next. If I left them like that, perhaps they would simply stare into each other’s eyes forever. Then the party would never end, and that would be dreadful.

  “Having a gay time now?” I asked, breaking the silence with a smile.

  “Much better,” Nick admitted, and I felt a pang. He really hadn’t been until now, and I hadn’t noticed or I hadn’t cared to notice.

  Nick turned back to Gatsby even as his hand reached over onto mine. I let him have it. I could have used the comfort too if Gatsby was looking at me like that.

  “This is an unusual party for me. I haven’t even seen the host. I live over there”—he waved vaguely at the invisible hedge in the distance—“and this man Gatsby sent over his chauffeur with an invitation.”

  Gatsby stared, for a moment at a loss that anyone might not recognize him. He deflated, and in that moment he met my eyes, saw that I was witnessing his embarrassment. All of that charm and for a man who had no idea who he was.

  “I’m Gatsby,” he said finally.

  Nick jumped.

  “What!” he exclaimed. “Oh, I beg your pardon.”

  “I thought you knew, old sport. I’m afraid I’m not a very good host.”

  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.

  A growing certainty came over me that I should let go of Nick’s hand before something terrible happened to him and I was pulled along. Before I could, a butler appeared to let Gatsby know that Chicago was calling him on the wire. Gatsby made a face.

  “Business, business, business,” he sighed.

  He rose, gave us both a small bow, and me a second look that held nothing of want and everything of estimation. It was an oddly sexless look, almost bracing after what he had been throwing around before.

  “If you want anything just ask for it, old sport,” he said to Nick. “Excuse me. I will rejoin you later.”

  The moment he was gone, Nick turned to me, blinking a little as if one of the girls walking by had slapped him and kept walking. Whatever he had expected, it wasn’t that, and to be fair, there was no expecting Gatsby in that kind of form at all.

  “Who is he? Do you know?” he demanded.

  I shrugged, taking my time and making him wait for it.

  “He’s just a man named Gatsby.”

  It was at least the truth. It was better than bringing up any of the rumors we had heard before, whether they were true or not.

  “Where is he from, I mean? And what does he do?”

  I sighed, because now he was looking at me almost desperately. I liked that, even if it wasn’t for me, and I remembered a conversation I had had with the man himself weeks ago. I was rather more drunk than I should have been, and I had somehow found myself talking to him beside the fountain. He stopped me from going in once, but his grin said there had been a chance he would just let me fall in and ruin my dress.

  “Now you’re started on the subject,” I said. “Well, he told me once he was an Oxford man. However, I don’t believe it.”

  “Why not?”

  I shrugged.

  “I don’t know. I just don’t believe it.”

  Lieutenant Gatsby with his one pair of good shoes had never been to Oxford, but we weren’t talking about him now. This was another creature entirely. I still doubted him, but, if you understand, in a different way.

  “Anyhow, he gives large parties,” I said abruptly. There were deeper waters here than I wanted to go swimming in. It was too much to handle for Nick, who I after all had only known for a night, and Gatsby himself, it was clear, was too much trouble for anyone.

  “And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.” I said it defiantly, daring Nick to bring us back to our host.

  Before Nick could answer that, thankfully, a bass drum boomed, and some little man in a tuxedo came up to introduce some music for us. It had apparently been a sensation, and half of the audience laughed in agreement and the other half laughed not to be left out.

  The music started, and Nick turned entirely in his seat, looking up with the attention of a dog to his master at the steps where Gatsby now sat. He reclined on the steps, watching over the party not with an emperor’s pride but a boy’s possession. We were his garden, or his ant farm perhaps. He approved, for the moment, and God only knew what happened when he didn’t.

  Nick saw, and I did too, how alone Gatsby was. No one came close. No one leaned their head on his shoulder or took his arm to pull him into a dance. The music was good, the moon was setting. It was after midnight with that tired charm that all parties on the downturn acquire. The fact that a man like him sat alone, no matter the rumors about him, was an unnatural thing. I was used to being alone, and apparently so was Gatsby, but he shouldn’t have been, not a man like that, not ever.

  There’s something wrong with him, I thought, clear as a bell.

  I didn’t have time to ponder that further when a butler—perhaps the same one as before, perhaps not—appeared next to me.

&nb
sp; “Miss Baker?” he inquired. “I beg your pardon, but Mr. Gatsby would like to speak to you alone.”

  “With me?” I asked, glancing up. He had disappeared from the steps now.

  “Yes, madame.”

  I got up, exchanging a look with Nick. From him, confusion, longing, a little jealousy that was extinguished before he recognized it for what it was. I threw him a casual salute before I went off to follow the butler wherever he would lead me.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  During the brief time that Nick and I were stepping out together—and afterward, I’m sure—he liked to call me careless. Sometimes he said it with a kind of admiration when I bluffed us past a steel door into an underground gin joint (“Well, that was the password that Arthur Clarence told me last night, wasn’t it?”), but towards the end, it was said with a kind of wondering disapproval, as if anyone with any sense would have learned some kind of caution.

  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. I never gave him a real answer because the real answer wasn’t one that men got. Men had no idea how careless the women of their set weren’t allowed to be. They laughed at how fussy we were about which cars we got into, and they never wondered about the long stretches of bad road between glittering place and glittering place. It was a kind of darkness that could swallow someone whole, and whoever walked back, shoes in her hand, stockings shredded and calling for help from some dingy pay phone, she wouldn’t be the same girl who roared off in that unwise Tourister.

  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. I was foreign and orphaned as well, and that added a few more. I might choose to stagger in just past dawn and find Aunt Justine still at the dinner table with her old friends from the suffragette circuit, a demolished plate of baked meats between them and the air thick with the fug of their cigar smoke. There was always a chittering around them, of the imps they had inherited from their Puritan witch ancestresses, and more than one of them trucked in the minor trade of souls that was such big business down in Venezuela and Argentina. They looked like every cartoonist’s idea of the ugly suffragette, raucous, crude, and sly, some widows, some spinsters, all with a very certain idea of the place that should be made for them in the world. When I came in in the morning with my stockings hanging down to my ankles and a very respectable bite from Nick at the base of my throat, they laughed and pointed at me, but none of them would ever have troubled themselves to stop me. They had been careless themselves at my age, and they had mostly survived it.