The worst part is that she’s still smiling.
Even when she goes over to Lavinia. Even when Lavinia recoils.
“I’ve missed you,” she says.
* * *
—
The girl gyrates up to Louise.
“I’m me,” she says. “Me.”
“What?”
“Mimi,” she says, like Louise is supposed to know her.
“Oh,” says Louise.
Mimi hands her her phone. She knots her arms around Lavinia’s neck.
“Take a picture!”
Lavinia isn’t smiling.
Mimi snatches the phone back. She scrolls through the photos.
“We look great,” she says. “I’m gonna post them all.”
* * *
—
Now it’s ten. Now the moon is full.
“Promise me something,” Lavinia says. They’re smoking on the rooftop; they’re in a hedgerow or a maze or something full of rosebushes that are still in bloom despite the frost; Louise has no idea how they got here. “I want to usher 2015 in right. I want things to be as they should be. I want it to be a better year than the last one.” She breathes out smoke. “It’s got to be.” (Nobody else is here, not Mimi nor Gavin nor Father Romylos nor Athena Maidenhead, but Louise doesn’t remember saying goodbye to them, either.)
“Of course,” Louise says.
“I want to recite poetry with you tonight.”
At first Louise thinks Lavinia is joking. But Lavinia is tight-lipped and unsmiling and more serious than Louise has yet seen her.
“Don’t let me forget, okay?”
“Okay,” Louise says.
“Promise?”
“Yes,” Louise says. “I promise.”
Louise can’t remember any poems.
Lavinia takes a pen out of her purse. She writes it on her arms. MORE POETRY!!! The letters are misshapen. She writes it on Louise’s, too.
“There,” Lavinia says. “Now we’ll remember.”
Together they gaze out over the city. There are so many stars, although Louise knows some of them must only be city lights.
“Hey, Louise?” Lavinia’s smoke spirals from her lips.
“Yes?”
“What’s your New Year’s resolution?”
Louise has so many: eat less lose weight make more money get a better job write a story write that story finally write that fucking story and send it somewhere if you only had the nerve stop reading Misandry! at four in the morning when you can’t sleep read an actual fucking book sometime maybe maybe write a fucking story.
“I don’t know.” (Be less boring, that’s another one.)
“Come on—you can tell me!”
She says it like she means it. She says it like Louise is safe.
Louise wants to believe her.
“It’s stupid,” Louise says.
“I bet it isn’t! I’ll bet you a hundred dollars it isn’t.” Technically Lavinia owes Louise between four hundred fifty and eighteen hundred dollars, depending on whether or not Louise counts the hours spent with Cordelia waiting for Lavinia to come home, but Louise is no longer counting.
“I want to send one of my stories out. Maybe. If it’s good enough.”
Louise is so afraid that, having said it, she will have to do it.
“To a magazine?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve never done it before?”
“No. I mean—I have. But not in years.”
“I bet they’re brilliant,” says Lavinia. “I bet they’re genius. I bet everybody’s going to love you.”
“Come on, that’s not—”
“Don’t contradict me. I have a feeling. I know.” Lavinia throws back that never-ending hair.
“What’s yours?”
Lavinia shakes the last ember out of her cigarette. “Same one I make every year. Same one I’ll make every year until I die.” She takes a deep and delicious breath. “I want to live,” she says. “I mean really, really, live. Do you know what Oscar Wilde says?”
Louise doesn’t but she knows it was probably witty.
“He says—I put my talent into my work, but my genius into my life. That’s what I want to do, too. Or maybe you think that’s trite?” She spits the last word.
“No—no!”
“Probably it is. Fuck it. I don’t care. That’s what I want.”
* * *
—
Now it’s eleven. Now they’re on the dance floor, again; now everybody on the dance floor is kissing everybody else; everybody except Lavinia, who is standing in a spotlight in the center, inviolate, dancing alone.
“Whatawildoutrageousnight.”
Mimi’s lipstick is smeared. So is her eyeliner.
“Come on!” She’s tugging at Lavinia’s sleeves. She’s still speaking in that clipped and amateurish way. “We’ll have some champagne!” Mimi cries. “We’ll take a selfie!”
Then Louise gets it: what’s so uncanny about that strange, pantomime way Mimi is talking.
She’s trying to talk like Lavinia.
Lavinia isn’t smiling. “We’ve already taken a selfie.”
Mimi is smiling so desperately. “Then we’ll take another!”
She pulls herself against Lavinia and holds out the camera. She leaves a sloppy lipstick kiss on her cheek.
“Jesus, Mimi!”
“Shit—my eyes were closed in that one! Let’stakeanotherokay?”
She can’t keep her hand steady. The photos all come out blurry.
“Okay, we’re done here.”
“Just one more! One more!”
Mimi keeps pawing at Lavinia, pushing her breasts against her, leaning in to kiss her.
“Just one more, come on!”
She reaches out for Lavinia’s sleeve. She tears it.
Louise cannot believe how loud a sound the rip makes.
“For fuck’s sake, Mimi, don’t you know when to fucking leave?”
Lavinia’s eyes are terrible.
Mimi’s eyes fill with tears. She’s still smiling.
“Come on,” Mimi keeps whimpering, like a dog. “It’s one of those nights. Isn’t it? Isn’t it?”
“You’re drunk, Mimi. Go home.”
Mimi does.
* * *
—
An hour later Mimi posts every photo she’s taken that night. She tags Lavinia in all of them.
Me and bae, she writes, with a dancing fox emoji and a wiggling Hula-Hoop girl emoji and a cat that rolls over and over doing somersaults, like anybody even says bae anymore.
* * *
—
Now the music is so loud you can’t hear anybody else unless you’re close enough to kiss them; now we are dancing; now we’re all standing four abreast on one of the raised columns, seven feet above the crowds, and here Lavinia stands, chin up, shoulders back, like a god.
Now they’ve lowered the big clock; now everybody’s screaming yes, yes; now Lavinia’s standing and scanning the crowd with those eyes so bright they burn.
“What is it?”
Lavinia doesn’t answer her.
“Are you looking for Mimi?”
Lavinia keeps looking, looking, and Louise tries to follow her gaze but she doesn’t see anything, just a couple of boys in black tie doing shots she doesn’t recognize, and then it is like an electric shock, the way Lavinia digs her nails into Louise’s wrist, and Louise asks what is it but by now she’s so drunk that by the time Lavinia turns back to her Louise forgets what she was asking about in the first place.
Lavinia grabs Louise’s shoulders.
“We should jump,” Lavinia says.
“What?”
“You. Me. We should do it.”
Nobody crowd-surfs. Not in real life.
But this isn’t real life.
“What’s the worst that can happen?”
It’s one minute to midnight.
“Trust me,” says Lavinia. “Please.”
* * *
—
Ten—nine—
Now Louise remembers everything she is afraid of.
She remembers that she doesn’t have health insurance and if she breaks a bone she will not be able to afford to fix it and that she has work tomorrow and she can’t afford to take off even if she could (eight) and she doesn’t even know Lavinia that well and shouldn’t even trust her because new people generally let you down if they don’t do worse and (seven) even though Lavinia is looking at her so raptly Lavinia is a stranger and the most surefire way of fucking it up is to open up to another person and (six) she cannot afford to be stupid—stupidity, like happiness, is a luxury, but her heart is beating so fast, like it is a hummingbird that will beat out all its breaths (five) and die before midnight but for the first time in as long as she can remember Louise is happy, and she will spend all her heartbeats if she has to, if it means feeling like this (four) because in the end she only really wants one thing in the world and that is to be loved and (three, two, one).
The crowd catches them.
So many people—they bear up her waist and thighs and back and Louise isn’t afraid; she knows, she knows they will not let her fall; she knows she can trust them, because they are all in this together and they are all so riotously, gloriously drunk and they all want her to stay up as much as she does, because it is a beautiful thing to be up so high, and they all want to be a part of it.
Lavinia reaches across the crowd; she is smiling; she is so far away and then she is closer, just a little bit closer, and then she is close enough to grab Louise’s hand, and she squeezes it tightly.
* * *
—
Now it’s almost dawn.
Everybody has spilled out into the street. They’ve taken off their heels. Girls walk barefoot on the ice. Taxis are charging a hundred dollars a person just to go to the Upper East Side.
* * *
—
Louise is a little bit sober by now; she can feel the blisters in her shoes, but she is too happy to care. She wraps herself in her coat, which is not elegant enough to justify how flimsy it is, and huddles against the wind, and Lavinia orders an Uber without thinking about it, even though the surge pricing must be insane at this hour.
“Where are we going?”
Lavinia puts a finger to her lips.
“I have a surprise for you.”
The cab takes them through the West Village, the Lower East Side, across the Brooklyn Bridge.
“Was it what you wanted?” Lavinia is huddled in an enormous fur coat. She is blinking very intently.
“What?”
“The party. Was it what you wanted?”
“Yes,” Louise says. “It was wonderful!”
“Good. I’m glad. I wanted to make you happy.”
The cab rolls on past the water.
“Just think,” Lavinia says. “You could be home in bed right now.”
Louise should be home in bed right now.
“But instead…” Lavinia opens the window. The wind whips their faces. “You’re going to watch the sun rise. Isn’t that wonderful?”
The cab comes to a stop underneath the Ferris wheel: by the bright-painted gates, the freak-show signs, the Cyclone.
The park is closed for the season. But the streetlights illuminate the carousel, the haunted houses, the boardwalk beyond it: beyond that, the waves.
“I wanted to be near water,” Lavinia says.
The boardwalk is frozen slick, and so Lavinia uses Louise to steady herself; both of them slip and both of them fall and they skin their knees a little bit, doing it, but there they are.
“At last,” Lavinia says.
It is too cold to sit, but they squat, anyway, and huddle together under Lavinia’s enormous fur.
Lavinia hands Louise a flask.
“Drink this,” she says. “It’ll warm you up.”
There’s whiskey in it—good whiskey, that’s much too nice to be tippled out of a flask just to keep you warm when you can’t feel your hands, but that’s Lavinia for you.
“On the Titanic, they drank whiskey,” Lavinia says. “They were going down with the ship and they saw the end before them and they said fuck it, we might as well so they got completely plastered on the finest whiskey, and then once the ship sank it saved them. They were so warm on the inside they didn’t feel the cold. They swam all the way to the lifeboats. I think about—all the time—when—oh, your dress!”
Lavinia’s dress—the one she has been so kind and good and generous enough to entrust to Louise, the one she found on the street in the East Village and which represents beauty and truth and everything good in the world and maybe, even, the existence of God, is in shreds. There are wine stains. There are cigarette holes.
And Louise thinks, you fucked it up.
She wasn’t careful. She was selfish and thoughtless and she drank too much and she let her guard down—even animals know never to let their guard down—and now Lavinia will turn on her the way she turned on poor, pathetic Mimi, who ripped Lavinia’s sleeve. It will be so much worse than before, now that the night has been so good, now that she knows what she’s been missing.
Louise tries not to cry, but she is drunk and weak and so of course she can’t, and so she starts to sputter tears, and then Lavinia looks at her with astonishment.
“What is it?”
“I’m sorry. God, I’m so sorry—your dress.”
“What about it?”
“I ruined it!”
“So?”
Lavinia tosses that long hair of hers. It whips in the wind.
“You had a good night, didn’t you?”
“Yes, of course, I—”
“So what’s the problem? We can always get another dress.”
She says it like it’s so easy.
“I told you,” Lavinia says. “Things happen around me. The gods will bring us another one.”
Louise’s tears freeze-dry on her face.
“It’s a sacrifice,” Lavinia says. “We’ll sacrifice to the old gods—we’ll put the dress in the water and let the water take it and, oh!”
“What?”
Lavinia shoves her forearm in Louise’s face.
MORE POETRY!!! is mostly smudged by now, and really more like MRE PERY!1, but Louise can make it out.
“You almost let me forget! How could you?”
“I—”
“That clinches it.”
Lavinia leaps to her feet. She lets the fur fall. She lets her beautiful white dress that makes her look like an angel fall, too. Against the snow she is cold, bitten, naked. Her breasts are blue. Her nipples are purple.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck!”
She’s hysterical, laughing.
“Fuckfuckfuckit’ssocold!”
Louise gapes.
“Come on! Your turn!”
“You want me to—”
Louise is already shaking from the cold, now, under the furs.
“Come on! You have to do it!”
Lavinia’s eyes are so wild, so wide. Louise is so cold.
“You promised!”
Lavinia extends her trembling, blue-veined hand.
“You promised!”
Louise did. So she does.
* * *
—
At first she thinks the cold will kill her. It is in the back of her eyes and at the back of her throat and up her nose and all the way down her esophagus, and not even the whiskey c
an help. If she were on the Titanic she would drown. Lavinia takes the dress from the crumpled heap of frost and sand and boardwalk splinterwood at her feet and gathers it up to her breasts and says “Come.”
’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
* * *
—
The thing about Tennyson’s “Ulysses” is that everybody knows it. You’re not special for knowing it. If you know one poem by Tennyson it’s probably that, and if you know one poem, period, there’s still a greater-than-fifty-percent chance that it’s this one. Lavinia is not special for knowing it (some of it), and Louise is not special either, for having memorized it (all of it) back in Devonshire, nor for whispering it to herself on the railroad bridge, nor for trying so desperately to make Virgil Bryce see that sail beyond the sunset were the four most beautiful words in the English language, and if she could not sail then she would, at least, swim. There is no such thing as fate, probably, and it is probably just coincidence. It’s probably trite: like Klimt posters, like Mucha, like “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” like Paris (Louise has never been to Paris).
But Louise has that poem written on her heart, and she is so relieved that Lavinia does, too.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
Lavinia hurls the dress in the water. It recedes; it comes back: borne up—like a drowned woman—on the waves.
* * *
—
Lavinia and Louise look at each other.
And they’re so goddamn cold Louise thinks they will turn into statues, they will turn to ice like Lot’s wife (or was that salt? she cannot think) and they will stay there forever, the two of them, hand to hand and breast to breast and foreheads touching and snow on their collarbones, and Louise thinks thank God, thank God, because, if they could petrify themselves for all time so that all time was nights like these and never any morning afters, then Louise would gladly give up every other dream she ever had.
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