Social Creature

by Tara Isabella Burton

  * * *

  —

  Cordelia and Louise sit in silence on the sofa until six in the morning. Cordelia puts on a dressing gown covered in cat hair (there is no cat to be seen) and reads a paperback copy of John Henry Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua. Louise reads clickbait articles from Misandry! on her phone.

  She is very tired, but she also needs four hundred fifty dollars more than she needs sleep.

  Lavinia comes home at dawn, covered in feathers.

  “I’m so terribly, terribly sorry,” she exclaims. She trips over the threshold. “Of course, I’ll pay you for the hours. Every hour. Every one.”

  She catches her skirt in the door. It rips.

  “Christ.”

  Feathers slice the air as they fall.

  “All my pretty chickens,” Lavinia cries. She gets on her hands and knees. “All? What, all my pretty chickens and their dam.”

  “I’ll get some water,” Cordelia says.

  “It’s a bad omen.” Lavinia has fallen over, now, laughing, with a black feather in her hand. “It means death!”

  Louise grabs the trailing feathers from underneath the door.

  “No, don’t! Let them be!”

  Lavinia grabs Louise’s wrists; she pulls her in.

  “It died a noble death.” She hiccups. “This dress—it has been felled in battle.” Her hair fans out on the floor all the way to the steamer trunk she has made into a coffee table. “And what a battle! Oh—what’s your name again?”

  “Louise.”

  “Louise!” Lavinia yanks her wrist again, but joyfully. “Like Lou Salomé. [Louise doesn’t know who that is.] Louise! I’ve had the most wonderful, wonderful night in the world. One of those nights. You know?”

  Louise smiles politely.

  “Don’t you?”

  Louise hesitates.

  “I believe in things again, Louise!” Lavinia closes her eyes. “God. And glory. And love and fairy dust—God, I love this city.”

  Cordelia leaves a glass of water on the steamer trunk.

  But Lavinia is scrambling to the sofa. She’s beatific and dark with glitter, and light with different glitter, and Louise doesn’t know what to do or say to make Lavinia like her but she is good at watching people and she knows what they need and so, like she always does, she finds an opening.

  “I can fix that, you know.”

  Lavinia sits up. “Fix what?”

  “It’s just the hem. I can sew it back on. If you have a needle and thread.”

  “A needle and thread?” Lavinia looks at Cordelia.

  “My room,” says Cordelia.

  “You can fix it?”

  “I mean—unless you don’t want me to.”

  “Don’t want you to?” Lavinia gathers up her skirts. “Lazarus, back from the dead.” She piles them in her lap. “I have come to tell thee!” She flings back her arms. “Oh, I’m so—so!—sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” Louise says.

  “I know—I know—you must think I’m ridiculous.”

  “I don’t think you’re ridiculous.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Louise doesn’t know what Lavinia wants her to say.

  “I mean—”

  Lavinia doesn’t even wait.

  “You’re not judging me?”

  “I’m not judging you.”

  “You’re sure?”

  Louise speaks very slowly. “Yes,” she says. “I’m sure.”

  “It was just—it was only just a few of us. Me and Father Romylos and Gavin—Gavin’s a narcissistic sociopath. He told me so, once. One of the nicest people in the world, but technically, a narcissistic sociopath. Anyway, we decided to see if you can break into the Botanic Garden. Apparently you can! Look!”

  She shows Louise a photograph. Lavinia and an Orthodox priest and a bald man in a turtleneck are collapsing in a hedgerow.

  “Father Romylos is the one in the cassock,” she says.

  “Are there even any flowers this time of year?” Cordelia has returned with a sewing kit. She hands it to Louise.

  “It’s my favorite thing in the world, breaking into places! It makes you feel so alive—to be somewhere you’re not supposed to be. We got caught, once, had to pay an awful fine at the Central Park Zoo, but other than that! Oh—don’t look at me like that.”

  “Like what?”

  Louise is sewing the hem. She hasn’t even looked up.

  “Like you think I’m horrible!”

  “I don’t,” says Louise.

  What she is thinking is this:

  Lavinia isn’t afraid of anything.

  “I’m not drunk, you know,” says Lavinia. She sways her hair—her long, coarse, wonderful hair—across Louise’s shoulder. “I swear. Do you know what Baudelaire said?”

  Louise puts another stitch in the hem.

  “Baudelaire said that you should get drunk. On wine. On poetry. On virtue—as you choose. But get drunk.”

  “Vinny’s drunk on virtue,” says Cordelia.

  Lavinia snorts. “It’s only prosecco,” she says. “Even Cordy drinks prosecco. Mother makes us.”

  “I abhor alcohol.” Cordelia winks at Louise as she picks stray feathers out of the couch cushions. “It’s a vice.”

  “God, don’t you just hate her?” Lavinia puts her feet on the steamer trunk. “I bet you don’t even believe in God, do you, Cordy? She’s kept it up a whole year—can you believe it? Before that she was vegan. And—oh, God, you’re brilliant!”

  She has seen the hem Louise has fixed for her.

  “Are you a costumier? I have a friend who’s a costumier. She makes eighteenth-century outfits every year for Carnevale in Venice.”

  “I’m not a costumier.”

  “But you can sew.”

  Louise shrugs. “Lots of people can sew.”

  “Nobody can sew. What else can you do?”

  Louise is caught off guard by the question.

  “Not a lot.”

  “Don’t lie to me.”

  “What?”

  “You’re special. You have the mark of genius on your brow. I could tell—soon as I saw you. And you—you kept vigil with Cordy, didn’t you? All night long. That’s special.”

  Louise isn’t special. She knows this. We know this. She just needs four hundred fifty dollars.

  “Are you an actress? You’re pretty enough to be an actress.”

  “I’m not an actress.” (Louise is not pretty enough to be an actress.)

  “An artist?”

  “No.”

  “Then you’re a writer!”

  Louise hesitates.

  She hesitates because you can’t really call yourself a writer when you haven’t written anything anyone else likes enough to publish; not when you haven’t even written anything you like enough to even ask somebody to publish; not when there are so many failed writers to laugh at in this city. But she hesitates long enough before saying “no” that Lavinia seizes.

  “I knew it!” She claps her hands. “I knew it! Of course you’re a writer. You are a woman of words.” She scoops up the flash cards: assuage, assert, assent. “I shouldn’t have doubted you.”

  “I mean—”

  “What have you written?”

  “Oh, you know—not a lot. Just a couple of stories and things.”

  “What are they about?”

  Now Louise is fully afraid. “Oh, you know. New York. Girls in New York. The usual stuff. It’s dumb.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous!” Lavinia is staring up at her with those bright and blazing eyes. “New York is the greatest city in the world! Of course you want to write about it!”

  Lavinia’s hand is so tight on her wrists and Lavinia is staring at her so intently and blinkin
g so innocently that Louise can’t bring herself to let her down.

  “You’re right,” Louise says. “I am a writer.”

  “I’m never wrong!” Lavinia crows. “Cordy says I have a sense about people—I always can sense if a person is going to be interesting. It’s like telepathy, but for poetic qualities—it makes things happen.” She stretches like a cat along the sofa. “I’m a writer, too, you know. I mean—I’m working on a novel, right now. I’m on a sabbatical, actually.”

  “A sabbatical?”

  “From school! That’s why I’m here.” She shrugs. “Living in squalor, you see. I’ve taken the year off to finish it. But my problem is I don’t have any discipline. I’m not like Cordy. She’s so smart.” (Cordelia is back at her Newman and doesn’t look up.) “Me, I just go to parties.” She yawns, long and luxuriant. “Poor Louise,” she says, so softly. “I’ve ruined your night.”

  The light streams in through the window.

  “It’s fine,” Louise says. “You haven’t.”

  “Your beautiful Friday night. Your beautiful winter Friday—right in the middle of the holiday season, too. You probably had plans. A Christmas party, right? Or a date.”

  “I didn’t have a date.”

  “What did you plan, then? Before I smashed it all to pieces?”

  Louise shrugs.

  “I dunno. I was going to go home. Maybe watch some TV.”

  Truth is, Louise was planning to sleep. Sleep is the most seductive thing she can think of.

  “But it’s almost New Year’s Eve!”

  “I don’t really go out, much.”

  “But this is New York!” Lavinia’s eyes are so wide. “And we’re in our twenties!”

  It is expensive to go out. It takes so long to get home. You have to tip for everything. It’s too cold. There are puddles in the subway stations. She can’t afford a cab.

  “Come with me,” Lavinia says. “I’ll take you to a party!”

  “Now?”

  “Of course not now, silly—what am I, crazy? There’s a New Year’s Eve party happening at the MacIntyre—it’s going to be wonderful. It’s going to be their best party yet. And I owe you! All those extra hours you stayed—I owe you interest.”

  “You owe her one-fifty an hour,” says Cordelia, from the armchair. “Seven until”—she checks her wristwatch—“seven.”

  “Jesus fuck,” says Lavinia, so violently Louise starts. “I gave all my cash to the busker. He was playing “New York, New York” outside the Bandshell. We were very tired—we were very merry.”

  She straightens up.

  “Now you have to come,” she says. “If I don’t see you again, I won’t be able to pay you for tonight.”

  She smiles so ecstatically.

  “I owe you more than money,” she says. “I owe you the most beautiful night of your life.”

  * * *

  —

  This is the first party Lavinia takes Louise to, and the best, and the one Louise will never stop trying to get back to. She goes in Lavinia’s dress from the 1920s (it is actually a reproduction from the 1980s, store-bought, but Louise doesn’t know this), which she found on the street, because that is the kind of thing that happens to people like Lavinia Williams, all the time.

  * * *

  —

  Now, the MacIntyre Hotel is not a hotel. It’s kind of a warehouse and kind of a nightclub, and kind of a performance space, in Chelsea; there are a hundred or so rooms over six floors. Half of them are decorated like a haunted hotel from the Great Depression, but also there’s a forest and a whole insane asylum on the top floor where Ophelia goes mad (they also perform Hamlet, but they do it without any words), and Louise hears that sometimes actors take you into secret bedrooms or chapels and kiss you on the cheek or on the forehead or on the mouth, but tickets are a hundred dollars each (and that’s before you add the coat check, or the ten-dollar ticketing charge), and so Louise has never been herself to verify this.

  Some nights, those nights, one of those nights, they do special themed costume parties in the space: all-night open-bar kiss-a-stranger-and-see parties where everybody dresses up and lurches through all the labyrinthine interconnected rooms, where every floor has its own sound system and even the bathtubs in the insane asylum are full of people making love.

  Louise has never had one of those nights before.

  Don’t worry. She will.

  * * *

  —

  Here is what’s inside the MacIntyre, in the order Louise makes sense of it: red velvet, candles, ostrich feathers, champagne flutes, people with Happy 2015 glasses, people taking selfies, a woman in a red backless sequined dress singing Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is?,” people taking selfies. Lavinia. A girl in a tuxedo. Marie Antoinette. Someone in a lion tamer uniform. Lavinia.

  People in black tie. People who actually own black tie in black tie. People in corsets. People in lingerie. Lavinia.

  A man in a cassock (“Don’t tell him I told you, but he’s actually defrocked”). A woman six feet tall wearing nothing but pasties and feathers with the most grating and New York accent Louise has ever heard (“Her burlesque name is Athena Maidenhead. I don’t know her real name”). A bald man in black skinny jeans and a turtleneck who is the only person there not in costume and who doesn’t seem to notice (“That’s Gavin. He keeps Excel spreadsheets of all the women he dates”). Lavinia.

  Lavinia dancing. Lavinia drinking. Lavinia taking so many photographs, pulling Louise in with her, pulling her so close Louise can smell her perfume. It’s made for Lavinia, Louise will learn one day soon, at a Chinese hole-in-the-wall over on East Fourth Street, and it smells like lavender and tobacco and fig and pear and everything beautiful in this world.

  Peggy Lee sings the line is that all there is to a fire? and Louise downs a flute of champagne like it’s a pickleback and then she starts to get nervous because when she drinks she stops concentrating as much on not fucking up, and when Louise stops concentrating is when she fucks up most; but Lavinia puts one hand on Louise’s waist and uses the other to tilt a bottle of Bombay Sapphire straight into Louise’s overflowing mouth, and even though Louise is not stupid and she is so good at watching people and she is so very careful—all the time she is so careful!—the intense pressure of Lavinia’s hand on the small of her back makes her think that if the world is going to end, anyway, it might as well end tonight.

  “Friends! Romans! Countrymen! Bring me more gin!”

  Lavinia. Lavinia. Lavinia.

  * * *

  —

  When Louise lived in New Hampshire, she often imagined that once in New York, she’d go to parties like this.

  When she and Virgil Bryce would stand on the railroad bridge, and she would beg him to touch her breasts and he would finally, magnanimously agree, and they would talk about running away together (he wanted to live in Colorado and illustrate manga), and he would remind her how cruel the world was, she would try to explain to him that New York wasn’t like anywhere else.

  It didn’t matter if you weren’t that special, she’d say, or even if you weren’t pretty, not even by the standards of Devonshire, New Hampshire, as long as you wanted it badly enough. The city would scoop you up and carry you skyward to all your vaulted aspirations; every single party on every single night in that whole, glistening, glaring city would make you feel like you were the only person in the world, and also the most special, and also the most loved.

  * * *

  —

  You and I, of course, we know the truth.

  We know how easy it is to fake it. All you need is to keep the lighting low; all you need are a couple of showgirls with cheap feathers superglued to the end of their corsets; all you need is to keep people drinking.

  But girls like Louise don’t know this. Not yet.

  This is the
happiest Louise has ever been.

  * * *

  —

  Nine o’clock. Lavinia and Louise and Gavin Mullaney and Father Romylos and Athena Maidenhead and so many other people without names are dancing the Charleston on top of a stage, underneath a chandelier the size of a giraffe. “Are we even allowed to be onstage?” Louise asks, but Lavinia can’t hear her over the music. Two aerialists are knotting their bodies together, kicking the crystals in the chandelier, and Athena has abandoned her feathers and there is nothing between her skin and everybody else’s sweat except for two pasties and a merkin in the shape of the moon.

  “New Year’s resolution,” Lavinia roars. “Be it resolved: we shall drink life to the lees.”

  Lavinia’s dress has fallen off her shoulder, exposing her breast. She doesn’t even care.

  Then two hands close over Louise’s eyes. Someone kisses her on the neck.

  “Guess who,” she whispers, into Louise’s collarbone.

  * * *

  —

  Louise jerks around so quickly.

  The girl is so confused. “But…”

  “Mimi?” Lavinia has stopped dancing. She isn’t smiling.

  “Butyourdress.” The girl’s voice is loud and monotonous and artificial, like she’s speaking lines from a high school play. “I thought…” She laughs. It is no less artificial, and no less loud. “Yousee?” Her smile hangs desperately off her mouth. “Shetookyourdress!”

  Nobody says anything.

  “SorryImlate,” she says. “Therapytookforever. AndthenIcouldntfindmyniceunderwear.”

  Nobody reacts to this, either.

  “HesaysIhaveneuroticdespair.”

  The music is so loud. The girl gets closer. She blinks very intently.

  “ISAID: HESAYSIHAVENEUROTICDESPAIR.”

  Nothing. Not even a nod.

  “IT’SNOTEVENINTHEDSMYOUKNOW.”

  Father Romylos lamely nods at her and this is worse, Louise thinks, than if nobody acknowledged her at all.