The Chosen and the Beautiful Read online

  I went up on tiptoe because he was surprisingly tall, and put my hand on his shoulder to steady myself.

  “I’ve just heard the most amazing thing,” I whispered. “How long were we in there?”

  He shivered a little with my breath so close to his ear, and his arm went around my waist as I had hoped it would.

  “Why, about an hour.”

  Of course it had been. The showoff.

  “It was—simply amazing,” I murmured. “But I swore I wouldn’t say any more and here I am tantalizing you.”

  He looked dubious, but I could tell that wouldn’t last. He had come to Gatsby’s party, he had eaten the food, he had fallen under Gatsby’s spell. It was already too late.

  I told him to come find me when he liked. I was in the phone book under Aunt Justine, Mrs. Sigourney Howard. I thought he might, provided Gatsby didn’t snap him up like something good to eat. Nick didn’t strike me as the sort to make a good mistress, living off another man’s money and light in some little Park Avenue apartment, but he might flirt with the experience of it before running back to Minnesota.

  The grand glass doors with the late night behind them were a perfect mirror of the room. In their reflection, I saw Nick’s hungry eyes on me as I walked away, and I could see as well the moment they turned from me towards Gatsby too.

  CHAPTER SIX

  And then? The whole thing slipped my mind.

  At a distance, it might have seemed as if my entire summer was occupied with time at Daisy’s and a rather remarkable party at Gatsby’s. However, it was a crowded summer, and it was not until later, when I could thread the steps to disaster together like glass beads on a string, that those times stood out at all.

  The undergrad that I had attended that particular party with disappeared, and since his family was a good one, there was a slight commotion over it. He wasn’t seen again after that night, and there were some dark rumors before his sister told everyone he had gone to study abroad. No one believed it, but then, we were not required to. I took up one of Aunt Justine’s causes, campaigning against the dress trade down in the garment district. Young girls would rent out their bodies for ten minutes, an hour, or a day, and though there were charms to prevent pregnancy, injury, and disease, more than one girl opened her eyes to find herself in trouble with some group or other, whether it was the law, one of the organized crime factions, or some duped man who had been entranced by canny eyes in a fresh young face.

  The dress girls, or vêtes, as they were called after the French Caribbean tradition, were mostly white, mostly too young, and variously clever. Under Aunt Justine’s instruction, I posted bail, took accounts, wrote determined letters, and mainly just came to the conclusion that if I were in their position, I would be a fair amount more clever than they were about who got to sit behind their faces. It took me around the city from the precincts to the courthouse to the poorhouses, and though I was never terribly diligent about it the good I did piled up willy-nilly like a careless mound of coins close to the laundry bin.

  When the good work got to be too tedious, there were plenty of people to see. New York in the summer was a playful kind of purgatory. The men sent their wives and the kids to the shore or the countryside, and then they sent for their pretty girls and boys who could bear the heat. Despite the lack of actual children, there was a childish, carnival air to the still summer months, of a breeze that would carry a hint of saltwater taffy and the soft shrill cry of a carousel carillon.

  The summer of 1922 came with a whoosh of hot dry air. Upstate the fires had begun, and they wouldn’t stop until the autumn rains came. Sometimes, the ash that blew down from the Catskills tumbled over the city, large fat black flakes settling down on our shoulders to mar crisp white linen beyond repair. In the city, we started out the summer irritable and indolent, and we only grew worse as time went on.

  I lost sight of Nick for a few weeks after Gatsby’s party. I wondered in an absent kind of way if Gatsby had gotten him or if perhaps he had lapsed into that genteel kind of obscurity that affected so many who came to the city from the Middle West. They came East looking for some kind of excitement they thought they lacked, and then they shut themselves up in stuffy rooms like they had never left home.

  I thought about calling over at Daisy’s, to see when he might be around, but Daisy, restless and rootless, had blown down to Atlantic City for a short while. One night, while Tom was out with his girl, she wandered into the Toybox Casino and won a hundred dollars in a single bored moment at the tables. She was in the papers the next day for standing high up on the green baize table and casting chips to the less lucky below her. Her mouth was opened in a smile, and for a short moment, captured forever in inky, blotchy tabloid newsprint, she was a goddess.

  So no Daisy, and I figured that that meant no Nick, until one evening when I was leaving the Bijoux with Nan Harper, a handsome girl who was more than a little stuck on herself. The show had been a good one, and after bidding her a pleasant good-bye, I scanned the street for a cab. I was distracted or else Nick would never have been able to come up to me.

  “Where can I take you?” he asked, his voice welcoming and soft.

  “Oh!” I said, looking him up and down and back again, and instead of telling him that I was rather looking forward to going to bed, I had him take us to the Lyric, a speakeasy built straight underneath a subway station that didn’t strictly exist. You had to get on the subway at Wall Street, take it across the river to the Henry Street station, and then ride back again. If you did this at least twice, you might find that on the return trip, there would be a station stop that hadn’t been there the first time around, the Columbia Street station. It took three trips back and forth before the train paused at the Columbia Street station for us, and I tugged him onto the platform by his tie, careful not to get my heel caught in the gap. I pulled him across the platform and partway down the tunnel, making him nervous as we heard the distant rumble of another train.

  I ignored it, rapping twice on what looked like a service door, and when it opened, we were met by a burst of laughter and a blast of tinny horns. The Lyric was popular that year, setting a trend for more secretive speakeasies. They tipped out to the NYPD just as the more open clubs did, but the fun was in pretending that they didn’t. That added element of danger helped make up for the Lyric’s obscurity, and that summer, it was doing a brisk business, people crammed in cheek to jowl even when they weren’t on the imported dance floor.

  At the bar, I ordered us two corpse revivers before turning back to Nick, who was gazing around at the warm red brick, the tapestries on the walls, and the curved ceiling over us from which sprouted, mushroom-like, orange Tiffany lights. The velvet booths weren’t as full as they would have been on a weekend, but it was still a notable assemblage. From where I stood, I could see a few hungry young lawyers from the district attorney’s office, a silver-haired Russian plutocrat with two Ziegfeld girls on his arms, and Donna Brunswick, less popular than she had been but still dressed to the nines in what might have been real gold snakeskin.

  “Quite a place,” he said, and I grinned.

  “You thought I was just mad over subways?”

  “I admit I’m not sure quite what to expect.”

  “From me?”

  Nick’s eyes flickered to one side briefly, a little as if he were looking for the exits.

  “From New York, maybe,” he said, and I took his hand, kissing his palm before I gave it back.

  “Well, don’t worry,” I said. “I can show you around.”

  He liked the corpse reviver well enough that he had two others, and by then he was carefree enough to come dance with me. He was more graceful than I thought he would be, and after the first few turns, he was confident enough to enjoy himself without the standard protestations of inexpertise.

  By the end, he was closer to me than he intended to be, and warm and flushed, I pulled us into one of the more humble booths towards the back. The high sides blocked out most of t
he sound, and I came to sit on the same side with him, tucking myself neatly under his arm. Whatever he wore, it smelled good, fresh and a little unrefined, but that seemed to suit me right this moment.

  “I don’t get you,” he said, not moving away from me. He rested his warm cheek on the top of my head, folding his hand over mine where it curled around my drink, a sidecar this time.

  “What’s not to get?” I asked gaily. “I play golf. I go to parties. I like you.”

  “Do you?” he asked, so surprised and earnest that I laughed.

  “Yes, I do. Otherwise I wouldn’t be making the time. Do you like me?”

  “Well, I don’t know you.”

  “Oh, what does that have to do with liking me?”

  I thought he might kiss me then, but instead he pulled away, looking slightly abashed.

  “I don’t know you,” he said, “but I think I would like to.”

  I took a sip of my drink to buy some time because that wasn’t a line I heard very often. I wasn’t sure I liked it, but with Nick’s eyes on me, I decided I did.

  “I think I might let you get to know me,” I said, and he smiled with real pleasure.

  In the end, we stayed at the Lyric for a few hours, and then we were both hungry so we stopped for a short while at a restaurant for a shared plate of corned beef hash and eggs. Nick told me a little about the war, nothing dark at all, but the day the sun came up silver instead of gold over Cantigny, the peeping of chicks inside an abandoned helmet. I wasn’t much of a soldier’s girl, but I liked listening to him, more solemn than I usually was over our meal.

  After that, there were only a handful of hours left before Nick needed to be back at his work, which made me laugh because it had been some time since I had been with anyone who needed to worry about something like that.

  “Don’t go back to West Egg,” I said. “Come home with me. You may have your own room. I promise I won’t even climb into bed with you and keep you up.”

  It looked like he might attempt to be chivalrous about it and insist on going home, so I scooted close to him on the bench seat, taking him by his shirt and planting a little kiss right behind his ear.

  “Don’t make me ask again,” I murmured. “I’ll be cross with you.”

  “Can’t have that,” he said with a faint smile, but when he tried to hold me close for a kiss of his own, I retreated ladylike back to my side of the car. I liked that he only sighed after it a little, and then he turned the car north on Park Avenue towards home, where Aunt Justine’s friends were just now breaking things up.

  “Ah, that’s a nice one for you, Jordan,” cried Mrs. Crenshaw, who had after all killed her husband and replaced him with a soldier even prettier than Nick. Her imp, held by a delicate Tiffany chain dangling from her wrist, hissed speculatively at us, and I tugged my skirt out of the way. It was the delicate silk overlaid with sheer chiffon, and I was hoping to wear it to the party on Governors Island the next Saturday.

  “Goodness, it’s been a while since we’ve seen you with a lad, my dear,” said Mrs. Baddicock sternly. “Do make sure he minds his place.”

  “Of course,” I said, and left him there while I rang for Lara, Aunt Justine’s girl of all work. She shook out the guest room and even managed to locate a pair of striped pajamas that had belonged to the late Mr. Sigourney Howard. I took them from her and went to find Nick, who was having a nightcap with my aunt.

  I paused at the doorway, amused at how they looked like a cartoon about flaming youth and severe age. Nick was looking quite debauched with his eyes glassy and his tie undone, while Aunt Justine, who had likely been drinking more than we had, gave him a cool look with her spine perfectly straight and her hair swept back in immaculate silver wings. He was trying to thank her for letting him stay, and she was telling him that it had nothing to do with her.

  “Nick,” I said. “I’m being ever so domestic. I have some pajamas for you here.”

  He mumbled something to my aunt and followed me to the room, where he took the striped pajamas from me with an awkward nod of thanks.

  “I think your aunt hates me,” he said, sitting down on the edge of the newly turned bed.

  “She might. I would say she doesn’t know you well enough to hate you yet. She probably only disapproves of you and dislikes you.”

  “Wouldn’t that bother you?” he asked, and I smiled.

  “It used to, when I was very young. Now it seems so much less important.”

  “And what is important to you in your great old age?”

  I let him take me by the hand and draw me to stand between his legs. He was of course older than I was, but in the soft light from the green-shaded lamp, he looked only my age or perhaps even younger. His hands rested lightly on the curve of my waist as he looked up to me. He was almost painfully in earnest and so very sincere.

  I leaned down to cup his face in my hands, kissing his forehead gently. He was going to get even less sleep than we had thought.

  “Being clever. Knowing things. Knowing myself best of all.”

  “Miss Baker, I don’t think you’re always a very nice girl,” he said, reaching up to cover my hands with his. There was a teasing note to his voice, as well something that might turn into genuine affection someday.

  For some reason, it made me draw back, my hands falling away from his like water. Being liked like that felt like a little too much in that moment. I would have to go back to my room for a while, among my own safe and familiar things, to mull it over before I decided if it was all right or not.

  “I’m not a nice girl at all,” I said with a wink. “I’m better.”

  I closed the door behind me when I went, and it felt like there were bubbles in my chest and a champagne sweetness. My face was warm, and it had nothing to do with the drinks we had had or the heat that seeped into the apartment through the cracks, giving the whole building a kind of damp sogginess that made the walls swelter in the summer.

  Oh I like him, I thought, a little giddy.

  I passed by my aunt’s study on my way to my own bedroom. Her light was still on; she had taken on the restless habit of sleeping away the heat of the day. I poked my head in to say goodnight, but ever unsentimental, she only shook hers.

  “I hope you know what you are doing,” she said mildly.

  “Of course I do,” I said with confidence.

  I slept a few hours in my own bed, dreaming of a train full of people whose faces had been rubbed away by an enormous gum eraser. I awoke just before eight to the sound of Aunt Justine finally going to bed. I thought about rolling over and going back to sleep, but then I remembered Nick all on his lonesome in the guest room.

  Barefoot, I padded down the hall and opened the door to find him still asleep, and as silently as I knew how, I crept in to look at him. He slept on his belly, all pushed over to one side of the large bed with one arm hanging down so that his fingertips grazed the floor. There was something quaintly old-fashioned about him in my great-uncle’s striped cotton pajamas, and with a slight smile, I slipped between the sheets with him. I wanted to look at him more closely, perhaps to touch his face while it was so loose and relaxed, but his eyes opened before I could do so.

  For a moment, there was a perfect blankness to him, like the first page in a school notebook. He had no idea who I was, where he was, or what I meant. Then his mouth smiled, and slowly the rest of him came along.

  “Good morning,” Nick said quietly, reaching out to cover my hand with his where it lay on the pillow. “Am I so late that I might as well stay in bed?”

  “I’m afraid not,” I said. “But you are early enough to run down the street for breakfast if you hurry.”

  “And if I don’t hurry?”

  In response, I propped myself up on one elbow and bent down to kiss him, my other hand tangled in his short hair. I kissed his eyelids, his cheeks, the edge of his jaw, and the corners of his mouth before swinging my legs over the edge of the bed.

  “Well, Lara will probably do
you up some toast and eggs when she does mine, but you do have to get dressed for that. My aunt does not tolerate slovenliness from men at her table.”

  I started to stand up, but Nick had come up behind me, wrapping his arms around me from behind. I tensed for a moment, but he only wanted to nuzzle at the back of my neck.

  “I think I made a good start in getting to know you yesterday. When can I continue the process?”

  I was glad that I was facing away from him, because it wouldn’t do to let him see how very pleased I was over that.

  “I’m playing a match in East Hills Friday afternoon,” I said. “You can come and cheer me on after work if you like.”

  “I would. And would you like to come to my house after that? It wouldn’t be far from East Hills to West Egg.”

  “I’ll be spending the night at the Tysons’ unfortunately. I rather promised Chrissy I would.”

  “Ah. Can’t disappoint Chrissy. I’ll come and bring you a lemonade, how’s that?”

  “Perfect. Now get a move on if you want that toast and eggs. You dawdled so long you’ll have to leave straightaway after.”

  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 may decide what to do after that,” she said, “but most times, your course of action will be clear.”

  Nick passed that bar when plenty of other people hadn’t, and at breakfast, he was valiantly charming with Aunt Justine, who had come out to take his measure. She had never had that much time for men, so Nick ended up chattering like a jaybird while she examined him like an exhibit in a museum and I watched them both with a fond amusement.