Social Creature

by Tara Isabella Burton

* * *

  —

  They take a selfie of their naked bodies, from the lips down. They use their arms to cover their nipples, because otherwise Instagram will censor it, and so they have two remnants of MORE POETRY!!! across the center of the photo.

  “We’ll get that tattooed on our arms,” Lavinia says.

  They are huddled, now, under the fur. Lavinia has put her dress back on. Louise has nothing but a shift, and a useless coat.

  “I want to remember this forever,” Lavinia says. She can’t stop laughing. “Until the day I die.”

  * * *

  —

  When somebody says I will remember this until the day I die, they usually mean I had a pretty good time, or else, just I want to fuck you. That poly male feminist Louise dated that time used to say that he’d never forget her; so did the guy who was really into kink (I’ll never forget what you let me do to you, you are so not like other women that way); so did Virgil Bryce. Even the guy who ghosted her once said, the night he took her for a walk in Prospect Park in summertime, I’m probably going to leave New York, eventually, but when I do I want to remember nights like this (that was the night she fucked him).

  But Lavinia isn’t like other people.

  And when, six months from now, Lavinia dies, she will be thinking exactly of this night, and of the stars, and of the sea.

  Louise will know this. She will be there.

  * * *

  —

  They walk toward the elevated train.

  Lavinia hails a cab.

  “Take it,” she says. She is smiling. Louise marvels at Lavinia’s lipstick, still so dark even after all that champagne. “My coat is warmer than yours.”

  Louise can’t afford a cab.

  “It’s fine,” Louise says. “I’ll take the subway.”

  Lavinia laughs, like this is a joke. “God, you’re beautiful,” she says. She kisses Louise on both cheeks. “I miss you already.”

  She throws herself into the cab.

  Two minutes later, Louise gets a notification on her phone. Lavinia has posted the photograph of the two of them on Facebook.

  * * *

  —

  She walks ten minutes to the Coney Island Q, because none of the other trains are running, for reasons that passeth all understanding. She doesn’t step on the cracks in the sidewalk.

  She sits on the subway, shaking in her slip underneath her flimsy coat, with holes in the pockets, that she bought at H&M like four years ago when GlaZam gave her a hundred dollars for a Christmas bonus, tries to avoid eye contact with the man who wanders up and down the subway car in a hospital gown with a medical bracelet on his arm, but everybody else is doing this, too, and you have to watch out for yourself, especially when you’re five-foot-five and weigh one hundred fourteen and a half pounds on a period day. She is drunk enough to be sick, and tries not to throw up when two young men get on at Kings Highway with Burger King bags and proceed to noisily chomp on their fries all the way to Atlantic Avenue.

  Here Louise has to switch to the R, even though it means doubling back, and some girls who maybe were part of a bachelorette party are screaming and waving their sparklers, and on the R-train platform there’s a man standing on a plastic crate prophesying the end of the world.

  I hate, I despise your festivals, he is shouting, although nobody is looking at him. He is looking straight at Louise. (Though ye offer me burnt offerings and your meat offerings, I will not accept them: neither will I regard the peace offerings of your fat beasts.) At least, Louise thinks he is looking straight at her. (Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs; for I will not hear the melody of thy viols.)

  * * *

  —

  Louise gets off the R at Fifty-third Street.

  Her heels bleed. There is sand between her toes and it blisters. She keeps her keys between her fingers.

  On the corner before her house she sees the man who catcalls her, every day, to and from the subway. He is smoking weed. He is looking at her.

  “Hey,” he says.

  She keeps her head down. She does not look at him.

  “Hey, little girl,” he says.

  Louise does not answer this, either.

  “You know it’s cold outside?”

  She thinks just keep walking; just keep walking.

  “You know I’d warm you up!”

  He is smiling—like this is friendly, like she should be flattered, like this is the nicest thing anybody has ever done for her.

  “I’d warm you up, little girl.”

  He is following her—sauntering, not running, like this is a pleasant stroll, like this is not something that makes her want to scream.

  “Don’t you want me to warm you up?”

  Louise tries so hard not to hear him.

  She is so fast, with the key in the door, even though her hands shake. She’s had practice.

  “Don’t flatter yourself,” he calls after her, when she has at last made it inside. “I wouldn’t fuck a dog like you with a ten-foot dick.”

  * * *

  —

  By the time Louise gets to bed it’s nine.

  She sets her alarm for twelve.

  When Louise wakes up she can barely move but she moves anyway, because her shift at the coffee shop starts at two, and the knee-fondling cokehead who runs it will dock her pay if she is even a half-minute late to work.

  2

  LOUISE DOESN’T HEAR FROM LAVINIA.

  She’d think she’d dreamed it, were it not for the MORE POETRY!!! on her arm, that she cannot bring herself to scrub off underneath her sleeves, were it not for the bad cold she gets that week that makes her have to cancel one of her tutoring sessions with Paul, whose parents are so much more annoyed by this than he is. Nights like that, with people who know “Ulysses” and stroke your hair—are not real. People take what they want from you, and tell you what you want to hear, and forget if they meant it.

  Louise wonders, from time to time, if it was because she tore the dress.

  * * *

  —

  Louise works. She takes the subway. She fixes her roots, strand by strand by strand.

  * * *

  —

  Lavinia does so many interesting things that week. Louise sees them all on Facebook and Instagram. Lavinia goes to a Russian Orthodox Christmas party and she goes to the season premiere of Rusalka at the Met and gets photographed for the opera fashion blog in a floor-length silver-sequined gown and she goes for a snow-capped tea-party picnic with Athena Maidenhead and Father Romylos at the Alice in Wonderland statue in Central Park, and she spends a whole night going back and forth, back and forth, on the Staten Island Ferry (we were very very tired, she captions the Instagram photo, and we were very very merry). The official photographs from the MacIntyre hit Urban Foxes and also the gossip section of the Fiddler blog, which used to only cover literary gossip but now makes an exception every now and then for literary-adjacent party photos, and Lavinia is in every single photo in the gallery.

  Louise finds herself in one of them.

  It’s not actually of her, exactly—she’s reflected in a mirror on the hotel lobby floor where the gin bar was, her face half-turned, while Lavinia poses, but it’s so beautiful she doesn’t even recognize it at first.

  She right-clicks it. She saves it. She even goes to the Staples near Union Square before her bar shift, and spends $4.99 to print it out glossy, just in case the whole Internet collapses one day because of nuclear holocaust or war or something and she is never able to look at it again.

  * * *

  —

  After a week, Lavinia texts her:

  Just a name—Bemelmans—and a time.

  Louise is supposed to work a shift for GlaZam. She does a Google search for Bemelmans and finds out that it’s in the Carlyle Hot
el and that glasses of wine start at twenty dollars, before tax, before tip.

  * * *

  —

  Lavinia is there first.

  She has spread out over two stools. Her skirt is voluminous and she’s slung her ratty mink and her purse over one of them, even though the bar is so crowded with hotel guests, tourists, businessmen, all of whom are staring with unacknowledged fury at Lavinia’s accessories.

  “Sit. I’ve already ordered us champagne. I’m on my second drink, already—you’re late!”

  Louise is out of breath. “I’m sorry. The train.”

  “Have you ever been here before?”

  “Not that I can remember.”

  Lavinia tosses her hair back—it looks like she might have tried to pin it up, this morning, but since then it has come undone and the pins have relented and she doesn’t care enough to try to fix it.

  “It’s my local,” she says. “I’m the only person under forty here who isn’t a prostitute.”

  The wood is dark and although the place isn’t candlelit this early in the evening, it looks like it might be and that is the beauty of it. There are murals on all the walls. There is a piano in the middle of the room and the piano man is playing “New York, New York.” Lavinia hums along.

  “They always play that here,” Lavinia says. “Everyone always plays it. I don’t mind. It’s comforting. Like Christmas.”

  She slides Louise a champagne flute.

  “Shall we have a toast?”

  Louise’s hands are still shaking from the cold. “To what?”

  “To our New Year’s resolutions, of course!”

  “Of course.”

  “And to us!”

  “And to us.”

  They clink glasses.

  Sure, Louise has been in beautiful places before. Sometimes, when she has time between tutoring sessions, she goes to the Met and pays a dollar admission to wander the halls alone, like a ghost, just to be around beautiful things. But she has always been an alien there. For Lavinia this is home. “Have you done it yet?” Lavinia is beaming. “Your story. How many journals have you sent it to?”

  “Oh.”

  Louise hasn’t worked on her stories at all.

  “None, yet—but I’m almost ready!”

  “Will you let me read it? I want to read it. I can’t wait to read it.”

  “What about your novel,” Louise says. The best way to get somebody to forget they’ve asked you a question you don’t want to answer is to encourage them to talk about themselves. “How’s it coming?”

  “Oh. It is as it always is. Ever was. Ever shall be. But I won’t go back to school until it’s finished—I promised myself that—I swore the solemnest of oaths. I will not step foot in New Haven until the final period is on the final sentence. Not that anyone wants to ever step foot in New Haven.”

  Lavinia knows the bartender, and so they get another round without asking for it.

  Across the bar, Louise sees somebody she recognizes. High cheekbones and a plunging neckline, lips that are wine-dark, and she is leaning on the arm of a man who is older, and whose wristwatch blinds Louise.

  “She’s always here,” Lavinia says. “With someone.”

  She raises her glass. The woman winks.

  “Mother would be horrified. What company you keep, she’d say. You’d have more luck getting a boyfriend, you know, if you went to dinner parties with your Chapin friends. But I don’t think it matters what a person does for a living, do you? Paris in the nineteenth century had a demimonde. And nobody judged Baudelaire. Anyway, she looks perfectly all right without the feathers.”

  Now Louise gets it. It’s Athena Maidenhead.

  “Anyway, she’s not really a prostitute,” Lavinia says. She applies more lipstick. “She’s just—you know. A demimondaine. She’s on WhatsYourPrice and everything.” She purses her lips. “How do I look?”

  “Beautiful.”

  “Perfect,” Lavinia says. “Selfie.”

  They do.

  “I’m sending it to you. I want you to put it up. And tag me. And make it public, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  * * *

  —

  They have another drink, and then another, and then another still.

  An ambassador buys them one, and Timmy the bartender brings them yet another round Louise isn’t sure whether or not they’ve ordered, and they send one over to the piano man, and then—and then, the bill comes.

  Lavinia picks it up without even looking at it.

  “Come on,” she says. “Let’s go to my party.”

  * * *

  —

  The second party Lavinia takes Louise to is in a bookstore that is not a bookstore. It is a rent-controlled apartment on East Eighty-fourth Street whose tenant, a gap-toothed belly laugh of a man called Matty Rosekranz, used to have a real bookstore, only he lost it after the recession because nobody buys books anymore. So he gutted his apartment and threw out the sink and got rid of the gas stove and now it holds nothing but books—good books but also pulp erotica and science fiction novels from the 1950s that have been out of print almost as long. The people who know the number buzz up and they bring a bottle or a joint. If they’re pretty girls they just bring friends, and read their work out loud, and Matty entertains them, and nobody really buys a book but everybody leaves feeling like they’ve been part of something special.

  Nobody has ever seen Matty Rosekranz outside the secret bookstore.

  “Gavin says he saw him at the DMV in Harlem once,” Lavinia says, as she leans against the buzzer. “But I don’t believe him.”

  * * *

  —

  “What the fuck are you doing here?” asks Matty Rosekranz, when they come up. At first Louise is afraid he means her, but then he laughs, and lifts Lavinia up by her waist. “I thought we got rid of you.”

  “You can’t get rid of me,” Lavinia says. “I’m like a bad habit.”

  There are so many people here. The air is swamp-like and smells of beer. Everything that isn’t full of beer has been turned into a bookshelf, except for a bookshelf that has been turned into a table, and over this Matty Rosekranz presides, with a bottle of Tito’s and a six-pack and a bunch of red plastic Solo cups that everybody keeps knocking over and which Louise automatically picks up.

  “Identity politics have been decimated,” insists a man in a bright turquoise-and-dandelion bow tie, “by the left. The whole basis of truth relies on that fundamental statement—x equals x. But then you say oh, I’m a man, but I’m a woman—sorry, I know it’s not politically correct.”

  He’s talking at a very thin, very frail-looking woman with wide eyes and flaxen hair who looks impressed.

  Lavinia gets right between them.

  “Hello, stranger.”

  She kisses him on the cheek like she’s not even interrupting him.

  * * *

  —

  “Lavinia!” It takes him a second. “How have you been? I haven’t seen you since—”

  “I’m doing splendidly!” Lavinia flings out her arms. “It’s been wonderful—I’ve been doing such things lately—Christ—it’s a wonder I get anything done, these days, it’s just been so busy—thank God I have Louise.” She grabs Louise’s hand and holds it up in the air. “She’s keeping me on the straight and narrow. She’s so disciplined—she writes all the time. She’s an inspiration.”

  “You’re a writer, too, then?”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry! You haven’t met. Louise, this is Beowulf Marmont. Beowulf, this is Louise—”

  “Wilson.”

  “Louise Wilson. Oh, you have so much to talk about. Louise is the most interesting person you’ll ever meet. Christ—there’s Gavin!”

  She sails away.

  This is a test, Louise thinks.
>
  Lavinia is testing her: to see how well Louise gets on with her other friends, now that they’re not all piss-drunk, now that they can hear one another speak.

  Louise doesn’t blame Lavinia—it’s a thing you do with an outsider.

  “So.” She is so chipper. “How did you and Lavinia—”

  “Yale.”

  “Oh. Of course.”

  “You?”

  “Oh.” Louise shrugs. “You know. Parties.” She keeps smiling.

  Beowulf sniffs. “Sure,” he says. “Where are you from?”

  “I went to school in Devonshire,” Louise says. She does that thing she does—almost without meaning to, now—where she sounds so clipped, it might as well be foreign.

  “So you know Nick Gallagher.”

  “Oh. No. I mean—he probably graduated after me.”

  “When did you graduate?”

  She hesitates. She works out his probable age, how young she can get away with being.

  “2008.”

  She hopes she can pass for twenty-five.

  “You should know him, then. He was class of 2010. He’s a good kid. He’s on staff at The New Yorker now.”

  “Sorry. I mean—it was a pretty big place.”

  “You should look him up. I just had lunch with him—last week. At the New Yorker offices. You’ve been?”

  “Not yet!” She is doing such a good job of staying so desperately chipper.

  “You should look him up. If you want to, you know, write for The New Yorker.” He shrugs. “I mean—like, a lot of young women writers don’t. Because, you know, the patriarchy. They’re really into, like, new media or whatever. Like, The New Misandrist or whatever.” He snorts. “So where have you written for, then?”

  She could lie. But she knows he already knows what she is. Insufficiency is a thing people can smell.