The Chosen and the Beautiful Read online

  She was already beginning to cramp four hours later when it was time for us to brew the second half of the jam jar. She drank this just as quickly, winced, and then dropped into her bed in a miserable ball, dragging me along with her.

  For the next three hours, she drifted in a light sleep, woken from time to time by cramps that racked her entire body.

  What if she gave us something too strong? I thought but didn’t say. What if it kills her?

  Daisy was shaking and sweating when she staggered to the bathroom. They had a modern one, thankfully, and she stayed there a long time. From the other side of the door, I heard her crying, quiet sobs that made me pace restlessly beyond. There was nothing I could do for her but wait. The toilet flushed and then flushed again, and I imagined her hand tight on the cord, knuckles white and bandaged fingertips digging into her palm. I was braced to call the doctor, but when she came out, she was pale but steady, her face and hands scrubbed under cold water.

  “Come get into bed with me,” she said.

  There was something exhausted in the air as we lay back down. Everything had changed or maybe only we had.

  “If you’re still bleeding by tomorrow, you have to go to the doctor,” I said suddenly, remembering something that some girl had told me earlier that year. “You have to, because—”

  “Hush,” Daisy said, pressing my head against her shoulder. “It’s all fine. It’s all fine now.”

  The smoke hung over our heads, and Daisy drew it into a heart for me, and then a castle and a horse.

  “Do you remember when we met?” she murmured dreamily. “Someday, I want you to cut me something grand, far bigger than that lion. Make me a house to live in, and a prince to come save me, and of course so many apple trees to scent the air, and a mountain to put it all on, far, far from here.”

  “Of course,” I said dryly. “No big thing at all.”

  We both drowsed for a while, not waking up until Mr. Fay knocked on the door, opening it just a crack.

  Daisy was cut from his pattern rather than her mother’s. He was a lean spare man with hair that was as black as ink, and he had a dreaminess to his eyes as well, as if he were somehow fundamentally unmoored from the world, perpetually startled by its sharp edges and small cruelties.

  “Daisy? You sent Cypress away before she could make dinner. I didn’t know you were having Jordan over for the evening.”

  “Sorry, sorry,” Daisy yawned, waving her hand sleepily. “There was some tea I wanted to bring to Mother to say sorry for breaking her box, and I wanted to try brewing it myself.”

  Mr. Fay snorted at his daughter, shaking his head.

  “I’ll call down to the club and have them send something over.”

  “Not me, I’m afraid I can’t eat anything but moonlight and rose petals tonight, Papa. But do get Jordan something, won’t you? She’s been looking after me very well, you see.”

  “Of course. Jordan, will you take a chop and some potatoes?”

  “Yes, sir. Thanks much.”

  He closed the door behind him, leaving us in the evening darkness again, and I closed my eyes. Careful, we had to be so very careful all the time, and the reward was this, lying in the dark as if we were the same girls we had been the week before.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A veil dropped down over me as I followed the butler through Gatsby’s mansion. It was as sheer as summer-weight chiffon, as light as nothing at all, and it prevented anyone we passed in the halls from seeing me or stopping me. As I walked, I idly wondered if it was simply custom and a healthy sense of self-preservation that prevented people from looking at Gatsby’s affairs too closely or if there truly was some kind of charm at work, some little figure in the butler’s pocket or the heel of his shoe.

  We passed by Mina Lochlear, fresh back from her tour of the Continent, and I saw a pair of men talking avidly under a bust of Antinous in an alcove. One of the men was Denis Rader, the Broadway comedian, and though I didn’t know the other young man, I thought they would not have to work very hard at seducing each other. There were no rules at Gatsby’s parties, no conventional ones anyway, and I wondered if they would stay like the man in the library had, cut adrift from the world they had come from.

  Beneath the shelter of a staircase, there was Senator Barnes Hillcock, with his jacket off and a Maduro Habano cigar in his hand. He was talking with a man who sketched pictures in the air between them with his elongated fingers, and over that man’s shoulder, I saw the senator’s face grow ruddy and rich with a new ambition that was probably older than the Romans.

  Soon we arrived before an elegantly paneled door with a handle made of pure jade. The butler opened it, announced me, and then stepped back with a slight gesture for me to enter. The moment the door shut behind me, I could feel that veil which had surrounded me being whipped away, though I still could not tell whether it was because some charm had been removed or whether Gatsby’s eyes were simply that sharp.

  “Jordan Baker!” he said with pleasure. “Well, you have grown into a fine-looking girl, haven’t you?”

  He looked, I decided, as if he had tried out several poses before the butler announced me. The room he had chosen for our meeting was small and intimate with a piano in one rear corner and a cold hearth at the back. I imagined him leaning one elbow on the mantel or staring out the window that looked out over the Sound before simply deciding to wait for me at the center of the room, a smile on his face and his hands stuck in his pockets. Other men might have been awkward about it, but he appeared to be entirely at his ease, content to be gazed at as long as the one doing the gazing was sufficiently awed.

  “I have,” I agreed, coming farther into the room. “And I might have thought that you would come up with something a little more original. I’m a New Yorker now, and therefore have higher expectations.”

  There was just enough humor in my voice to keep that smile on his face, and he gestured towards one of the wing-chairs by the fireplace.

  “Won’t you have a seat, Jordan? Can I pour you something?”

  “Whatever you are having, of course.”

  I had an idea of what was on offer given the rest of the party, but whatever Jay Gatsby was having would be exceptional. He wouldn’t allow it to be otherwise, and I watched with interest as he removed a cut-glass stoppered bottle from the delicate drinks cart. The liquid inside was a deep and sticky black, like blackberry syrup. It moved with a languid sluggishness as he poured it into two gold-rimmed thimble glasses. He handed one to me, smiling down at it a little.

  “This lot came from Italy. It was actually harder getting it out of Italy than into the States. They had to pack it into a shipment of Malatesta violins, one bottle inside each one. Prato holds those violins sacred, you know, which was funny enough for the purpose they were put to.”

  He took his seat across from mine, sipping at the drink without taking his eyes away from me.

  Demoniac is meant to be drunk straight, a small amount taken for medicine, a larger amount for pleasure. I split the difference because I wasn’t with friends, and I held it in my mouth for a moment, letting it go partway to warm vapor before swallowing. It was strong enough that I would have coughed without that precaution, and even then I had to sit up very straight, my eyes focused on a spot on the wall opposite from me as the room gently tilted. It put a pull in my lower belly like falling in love, and I enjoyed it even as I reminded myself it was purely a matter of infernal machinery.

  “What happened to the violins?” I asked. I didn’t play, but there were musicians on Broadway, not poor ones either, who might have done a little bit of discreet evil for a real Malatesta.

  Gatsby shrugged, a slight smile on his face, the glass already empty in his fingertips.

  “Smashed, unfortunately. A shame, but the demoniac was worth it, don’t you think?”

  “Is that a story you often tell to people you want to get on your side?” I asked.

  “It is the story I am telling you,” he said wi
th a different smile, and that smile tugged at me to suggest that he wouldn’t tell just anyone. I was special, and the low warmth from the demon’s blood in my stomach suggested that it was true.

  But I knew that Nick had been special as well, and the stunned, overwhelmed look I remembered in Nick’s eyes reminded me again to sit up a little straighter, keeping what was left in the thimble glass rather than drinking it right away.

  “Is that meant to convince me to tell you a story as well?”

  It was too blunt for him, I could tell. He wanted something agreeable, something sweeter around the edges, but I was never very good at sweet.

  “Do you remember me?” he asked instead, looking down at his glass. There was something almost vulnerable in his tone.

  I used the opportunity to look him over. By this point in the evening, most men had at least unbuttoned their jackets if not done away with them altogether. He still looked as if he were straight from his dresser, the part in his hair as precise as the cream slash in an expertly made black velvet. His shoes shone as if he had purchased them new for the occasion, and the patent leather echoed only poorly the glossy black nail on his ring finger.

  It was on the tip of my tongue to say that I didn’t remember him, not in the least, but then he looked up at me. It spun me a little, because it felt as if he were letting me see all the way to the center of him, that empty room, and it wasn’t empty because there was nothing to fill it with. No, there was a mansion full of things and people waiting to fill it, and a legion of demons, likely, standing by to do the same.

  It was empty because he had refused to fill it, held off, barred the door. It was too easy to see how someone might stumble into such a place and be lost forever. A person could never fill that place. It would take a story.

  The door snapped closed, and the look that Gatsby gave me was alarmed. I had seen too much, more than he intended; that wasn’t the way it was supposed to go. I turned back to my glass, taking another tiny sip to give us both time to recover.

  “Jordan, I need your help.”

  Whatever I had anticipated from him, it was not that. My eyes felt too big in the dimness of the room, as if they were gobbling up all the light that they could to form an image of him. It wasn’t easy, the demoniac in my blood told me. There was too much to him, something bigger than a person should be, as if I could not see every part of him at once.

  “Of course you do,” I said pertly, and he smiled as if I had said something genuinely amusing.

  “Will you talk to Nick for me? Will you tell him about me?”

  “I don’t know anything about you,” I said. “And I like him. Why should I?”

  His smile got a little harder before it relaxed into something more rueful. That looked enough like the truth that I blinked.

  “Because I am a romantic. I always have been.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “It is,” he insisted. “I need to speak to Nick. I need him … to know who I am, who I really am.”

  “You spoke to him on your own just fine earlier,” I protested, but he shook his head.

  “No, of course I didn’t,” he said. “We were at a party, we spoke of the war, and his head was getting turned every few moments by some distraction or another.”

  I wondered for a moment if he remembered the same conversation I did. I learned later that it was entirely possible that he didn’t.

  “I don’t like to involve myself with other people’s love affairs,” I lied.

  “It’s not like that,” he said hastily, but the guilt that flashed over his face told me otherwise. “Look. I want to be fair to you. What do you like, what do—”

  “No!” I said, glaring at him. “We are not doing that, do you hear me? No bargains, please, not for this. I’m just fine as I am, thank you.”

  The corner of his mouth kicked up in a little smile.

  “I could find something you wanted. I could give you something you wanted. I’m good at that. I’m the best.”

  I tossed the rest of the demoniac down because I didn’t want to look at him being right, because he probably was. I hadn’t even reached the bottom of learning what I wanted, and even if he couldn’t give those things to me, maybe I liked that he wanted to try.

  I licked my lips, ready to stand up and storm out in high drama, but then he was crouched down by the arm of my chair, looking up at me with those pretty eyes and absolutely no hint of Hell in him at all.

  “Please, Jordan?”

  That hint of vulnerability again, and I sighed, because even then I knew I liked it too much. He was older than I was, more important in every way that the world cared about, and the fact that he had to say please to me sat in my heart like a warming ember.

  “You’re the only one that can do this, you know,” he murmured. “There’s no one else I could ask, no one else I could count on.”

  He reached for my hand, but I moved it quickly away from him. I didn’t know why, maybe the demoniac. It was self-destruction in a pretty bottle, but there was something else and other about Jay Gatsby.

  He looked faintly offended, but before he could capitalize on that, I nodded.

  “Fine,” I said. “There are things that I don’t share, but I don’t suppose that Nick Carraway is one of them.”

  Gatsby smiled, no artifice or seduction in it, but only relief. I gasped when he took my hand in both of his, squeezing tightly before letting go. No, I did not like it much at all.

  “Someday, I’ll dance at your wedding,” he promised, and that hurt was smoothed over enough that I could laugh.

  “As if anyone would be good enough for me,” I said lightly. “Shall I tell him that you hung the moon or that you defeated the Huns single-handedly at the Rhône?”

  He hesitated, and I could see then what sort of creature he was. He wanted me to tell Nick just that, but in the end, he shook his head.

  “You remember me from before I shipped out, don’t you? When I was with—”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell him about me then.”

  That touched me unexpectedly. If he wanted Nick to know about who he was before, when he still had a soul, when he was only an ambitious young man who loved someone he couldn’t have, well, that was romance, wasn’t it? I had seen little enough of it in my life that I smiled a bit wistfully at him.

  “All right. Now may I return to my world?”

  “Of course, Miss Baker.”

  He rose smoothly to his feet to give me a hand out of my chair and drew me to the door. Senator Hillcock was passing by, as neat as a doctor’s case full of morphine vials and scalpels, and he gave Gatsby a formal nod. Gatsby, smiling, touched two fingers to his temple in a brief salute.

  “Honestly, these new money types,” he said.

  * * *

  It would have made some sense if Gatsby had released me to the crowd then, but he didn’t. Instead, he kept me by his side, my hand tucked firmly in his arm, and back in the living glamour of his natural setting, something shifted in him again.

  He was my friend now, squiring me through the halls, taking care to steer me around the pile of debs at the foot of the grand stairway, and smiling just for me. Gatsby wasn’t showing me off, nor was he trying to impress me. Instead, when he leaned in closer to murmur something scandalous about that admiral or to tell me that a certain redhead’s dress would look much lovelier on me, I realized it was something otherwise.

  You and I are made out of the same stuff, he seemed to be saying. Won’t we have fun?

  I knew it was a white lie at best, but as we passed through his golden halls, the strains of music drifting up from the garden and smell of money in the air, I realized that he might not think it was.

  My God, he thinks he’s sincere, I thought with wonder, and perhaps in that moment, I warmed to him just a little more. It was just a tiny crack in my defenses, but it was really all that was necessary.

  He gestured in the air with long-fingered hands, an excitement in his v
oice for the brilliant new innovations of his house, for how big the world after the war could be. It was as if he was inviting me into his world, wanting to share all its pleasures with me.

  And with Nick, of course, but as I watched his hands tracing gleaming patterns in front of us and the shape of his lips around his grandiose words, I decided that if I were asked properly, I would not mind sharing so very much.

  The party was winding down into a graceless mess, something that had always irritated me. People are at their worst in transition, moving from one life to another. All of Gatsby’s beautiful people were being revealed for the sloppy, irritable, wayward, and human creatures they really were. There was a fight going on in the drive, not even magic could get everyone into the same coats and shoes they had when they first showed up, and the light suddenly seemed to reveal all manner of blemishes where before it had hid them.

  In the crowded front hall, I was pressed against Gatsby by the common crush, and courteously, he put his arm around me to keep me from falling. The sudden push of our bodies together made me blush, and something in his gaze heated at that.

  “Why, you’re lovely, Miss Baker,” he said softly, and I could tell in his surprise that he meant it.

  “I am,” I said with a smile, and that won one in return from him.

  Then Gatsby went stiff, something impatient on his face. I thought for a moment he had remembered himself, but then I followed his eyes and saw a pair of those tall men in dark suits approaching, expectant in their stance and their stride if not in their still faces.

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to forgive me,” he said shortly, stepping away from me.

  It didn’t look like a scene that he cared to have observed or that I cared to witness, and right about then, anyway, the ones I came with, thankfully minus the undergrad, started waving at me from the porch. Before I could grudgingly go to them, however, I nearly walked straight into Nick, who had been standing so close that I was surprised I hadn’t seen him. I wondered if there was something stiff about the way he looked at me; he had obviously seen my good-bye with Gatsby. I wavered between impatient and fond, and settled on intrigue instead.