She exhales, slowly. In the distance, the lights are going out, one by one by one, all over the city.
“We were partners in crime—contra mundum. We used to hold hands and walk through the Met and talk about running away together. We had the whole itinerary planned out. It was going to be this Grand Tour—you know—just going everywhere beautiful and seeing every beautiful thing and we were going to go to Vienna to see Klimt’s The Kiss up close at the Belvedere, and to Venice for Carnevale. When we were finally free.”
Louise thinks about Virgil Bryce, on the railroad bridge.
“Anyway,” Lavinia says. “We never went.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing happened. He just got boring. That’s all.”
“When?”
Lavinia snorts. “A couple years ago. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I told you. He’s dull. He’s even got Facebook now. At least, I think he still has. I wouldn’t know. He blocked me.”
The snow shines on her cheeks. Her lips are red.
“God, I hope he hates me,” Lavinia says, suddenly.
“Why?”
“It means they still think about you.” Lavinia exhales smoke.
Lavinia leans out over the railing: “Have you ever been in love?”
Louise has to think about it.
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. When you know, you know.”
“I moved to New York with someone,” Louise says. “I was in love with him. I think.”
Louise does not talk about Virgil Bryce, ever. But then again, nobody has ever asked.
“Was he in love with you?”
“Yes.”
“Where is he now?”
“I don’t know. I blocked him.”
“Did he break your heart?”
“I don’t know. I think I broke his.”
Lavinia claps. “I knew it. I knew it! God—you’re such a little femme fatale.”
“I’m really not.”
“All quiet and haughty and mysterious—God, I knew it. The second I saw you—”
“I’m really, really not.”
“I thought—a man would slit his wrists for a woman like that.”
“He didn’t,” Louise says. “But he did threaten to, once.”
Lavinia grabs Louise’s wrist.
For a second, Louise thinks she has said too much, that she has shocked Lavinia, that she has done that awful over-sharing thing people so often do that makes the room go quiet, and makes everybody say something sympathetic, and makes everybody feel sorry for you, and makes everybody hate you.
Then Lavinia bursts out laughing.
“Jesus Christ, I love you.”
There are tears in her eyes. She is shaking. She squeezes Louise’s hand so tight.
Louise can’t help it. She starts laughing, too.
It has never been funny before.
But with Lavinia, on this bridge, which is so much higher and so much brighter than any bridge in Devonshire ever was, everyone else seems that little bit less real. Everything about that other Louise—the Louise with mousy brown hair and a crooked smile and who was a little fat and whom nobody but the charitable and the insane could ever really love—is fiction.
“Of course he didn’t do it, did he?” Lavinia is still racked with laughter.
“No, of course not.” Not as far as Louise knows.
“Men.”
“Men!”
“They never keep their fucking promises.”
Lavinia is laughing so hard that tears seep from her eyes.
Louise offers her a handkerchief.
Lavinia stops laughing.
“Where did you get that?”
“Oh. Oh—Rex.”
“He gave it to you?”
“I sneezed. I forgot to give it back. I’m sorry.”
“Let me see.”
Lavinia takes it.
“He probably still has his wristwatch, too.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t see.”
Lavinia is silent.
Then: “Hand me the lighter.”
Louise does.
A slow smile spreads across Lavinia’s face. She lights the corner of the handkerchief. The fire is slow, at first. Then the whole thing bursts into flame.
“Jesus, fuck!” Lavinia drops it.
For a moment the two of them stand there, staring, at the small, persistent fire in the middle of the path.
Lavinia sucks her thumb where she has burned it.
“You see,” she says softly. “They don’t mean a thing to us, do they?”
She is so beautiful by the firelight.
She is so beautiful, Louise thinks, that you even believe her.
Lavinia takes another step closer to the fire.
“We should be maenads, instead,” she says, so softly. “We should abjure all men and tear them apart with our teeth when they come near us. Fuck you, Rex Eliot! Fuck you, Hal Upchurch! Fuck you, Beowulf Marmont.” She spins on her heels. “Your one—what’s he called?”
“Um—Virgil?”
“What a name!”
“His mom was a history teacher.”
“Virgil what?”
“Bryce.”
“Fuck you, Virgil Bryce!”
Lavinia turns to her.
“Well, come on! Your turn—what’s the point if you don’t say it, too?”
“Fuck you, Virgil Bryce,” she says quietly.
“Pathetic!” Lavinia grabs her wrist. “Do it again!”
“Fuck you, Virgil Bryce!”
“For God’s sake—FUCK YOU, VIRGIL BRYCE!”
“FUCK YOU, VIRGIL BRYCE.”
“FUCK ALL MEN EVERYWHERE.”
It feels so good to scream.
“FUCK ALL MEN EVERYWHERE!”
The fire goes out.
Lavinia says, “Let’s get drunk.”
* * *
—
They do.
They go through both bottles of champagne, right there on the High Line, with nothing but the stars over them and the rails extending to convergence in both directions. They drink and Lavinia tells Louise about all the places they will go together, when they finish their stories, when they are both great writers—both of them—to Paris and to Rome and to Trieste, where James Joyce used to live, to Vienna to see the paintings, to Carnevale.
Lavinia will never go.
She is going to die soon. You know this.
* * *
—
They take more photos. Louise in the snow. Lavinia on the railing. Lavinia and Louise: leaning, about to fall.
They post them.
“You should add him on Facebook,” Lavinia says.
“Who?”
“Rex. He’s on there now, isn’t he?”
Louise looks.
“Yes.”
“Add him. Hal, too.”
Louise does.
* * *
—
They drink until the stars spin. They lean on each other’s shoulders. They make more snow angels.
“Hey, Louise?”
“Yeah?”
“Will you read my novel?”
“Of course.”
Lavinia sits straight up. “Fantastic. Let us set off.”
“Wait, now?”
Lavinia’s already on her feet. “It’s not that far!”
“It’s two o’clock in the morning!”
“So there’s no point in you going all the way to, like, Bumfuck, Brooklyn, is there? You might as well stay at mine.”
She is so charming, pleading.
“Oh, don’t say no, Louise. Please—please—please don’t say no
!”
Louise can’t.
* * *
—
They cab it back to Lavinia’s. Lavinia pays.
Lavinia gets her enormous skirt caught in the cab doors. Louise pulls it out. Lavinia is drunker than Louise realized and she has to help her into the apartment. She doesn’t mind. It’s nice, she thinks, to be so necessary.
“Home at last!”
Lavinia tumbles in.
“Christ, it’s so empty. I hate it when Cordy leaves.” She sails to the kettle. “We shall have tea. From the shores of Asia! From the Edgware Road. Do you want chocolate-caramel or lavender-mint? And we should have music, too! Mood music! Atmosphere!” She makes her way to the computer; she blasts Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde so loud Louise worries that the neighbors will hear, and come down, and start a fight.
“So they’ll hear!” Lavinia shrugs. “Fuck ’em! If there’s one thing the Upper East Side needs it’s more Wagner!”
She turns the volume higher still.
“I love this part.” She lets herself fall on the sofa. She closes her eyes.
Louise makes the tea because nobody else will.
“Do you want me to put milk—”
“Shhh!”
Louise puts milk in the tea.
“It’s the lovers’ duet. They’re the only two people in the world, right now. The two of them.”
Louise brings the tea over.
“Listen!”
Louise does.
“It never lasts, though, does it? It all falls apart in the end. Doesn’t it?”
“Yes,” Louise says. She sets the tea down. “It does.”
“God, you’re so mysterious—I love it! Fuck—my dressing gown!” She extends a long white hand into the middle distance. “It’s in my bedroom.”
Louise gets the dressing gown. It is powder-blue and silk and stained and very impractical, with little flowers on it. She helps Lavinia put it on.
Louise sits next to Lavinia on the sofa. Lavinia strokes her hair. “It’s three in the morning.”
“I know. I know. But—just one chapter, okay? Please? Then—then you can take Cordy’s bed and—and I’ll get up early and I’ll make us pancakes tomorrow before your shift, okay?”
“Just one chapter?”
“It’s just that I care so much what you think! You should be flattered!” Lavinia whines, a bit, and puts her shoes up on the steamer trunk. “I’d stay up all night reading yours, you know. If you had it for me.”
She takes out her phone.
“Here,” she says. “It’s all on here.”
The light is blinding. The text is so small.
Louise starts to scroll. “How long is it?”
“Just start it. If you don’t like it you can stop. I promise.”
“I can barely read it.”
“I want to see your reactions. That’s the best way. If I can see your face. And you don’t have to like it, you know. In fact, if you like it too much—I won’t respect you. So you should probably hate it, just a little bit.”
“Come on—I’m not going to hate it!”
But here’s the thing: Louise does.
* * *
—
It’s not just that it’s bad. It is bad—the prose is too purple and the sentences are too long and the literary allusions are too forced and every other line is a quotation or a character monologuing about the nature of Life and Art; or a character does something intensely symbolic but that doesn’t quite come off. But it’s worse: it’s self-indulgent. There’s a character called Larissa who is very beautiful and very blonde and is kind of like a saint because her passions are so much greater and more important and more significant than anyone else’s.
Even Louise knows the first rule of good writing is to never assume that your life is more significant than anyone else’s just because you say it is. And Larissa wants to live Life as Art, except of course she can’t, because nobody around her understands concepts like Beauty and True Love the way she does. So she tries to make a suicide pact with her lover, who of course is undeserving of her, and of course he doesn’t go through with it and so she throws herself off a bridge all on her own for no obvious reason.
Also, she uses too many em dashes.
* * *
—
Louise feels so many things. She does not show any of them.
She is embarrassed, like she has walked in on somebody watching porn. She feels that she has looked at something raw and quivering, exposed and unholy.
She is angry, too, because in everything Lavinia has written there is such a perfect confidence: that Lavinia’s thoughts and Lavinia’s passions and Lavinia’s philosophy and Lavinia’s heartbreak are worth hours of somebody else’s time, and Louise has never had that confidence.
Also, Louise is relieved.
There is something she has that Lavinia doesn’t.
* * *
—
Louise’s eyes glaze over. She is tired; she wants to sleep—she wants to sleep so badly—but Lavinia is looking at her and bouncing on her knees on the sofa, and nodding, and smiling, and if she gives away a hint—a single hint—of all that she is feeling she will never be able to take it back again.
“What do you think?” Lavinia is breathless.
Louise hesitates.
“You think it’s bad.”
“No! No—I don’t think it’s bad at all!”
Lavinia lets herself laugh. “I wasn’t sure.”
“It’s good! It’s—I mean, it’s good!”
“But?”
Louise takes a deep breath.
Lavinia takes a deep breath.
“But nothing—”
“Oh come on!” Lavinia pats Louise’s hand. “There’s always something.”
“It’s just—”
“Yes?”
“I mean—Larissa is you, of course.”
“Why do you say of course?”
Lavinia is blinking so quickly.
“I mean the name.”
“Well of course the name.”
“I mean—I wonder…” Louise has to be so careful, now. “I mean—I wonder if there’s just so much overlap.”
“Too much? You can tell me. I can take it. I can take it. Tell me.”
“No. No—not too much. Just—there’s not a lot of distance from the protagonist, is there?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Louise has seen that face on Lavinia before. She saw it on New Year’s Eve, when Mimi tore her dress.
“Nothing.”
“You think I let her off easy, or something?”
“I didn’t say that!”
“I’m sorry.” Lavinia inhales. “I’m sorry.” She pulls the throw over her knees. “I’m sorry. You’re right. I should—I’m just tired, that’s all. I’m tired and I’m in a bad mood. I should let you go home.”
She pulls the blanket up to her chin.
And Louise thinks she cannot mean to do this.
You are crazy to think this of her, Louise thinks. You are a bad person to think this of her. She just forgot. That’s all. Just ask to stay—just remind her—that’s all you have to do. You cannot always think the worst of people.
Lavinia’s eyes are already closed.
And Louise, she knows that all she has to do is say it’s still cool if I stay, right. But she is so afraid Lavinia will say yes and mean no, that Lavinia will make pancakes and then never call her again, because she has fucked it up because of course, of course, she’s fucked it up. Nobody ever wants to know the truth about themselves, not really, and she—of course—she should know this more than anyone.
It would be so easy, she thinks, just to ask for what she wants.
“I love it,” Lo
uise says.
Lavinia’s eyes pop open. “You do?”
“That’s what I was trying to say. It’s so—emotional. It’s so—raw.”
“Really? You really think that?”
“You’re going to be Great, Lavinia. I don’t have any doubt. I don’t have any doubt in the goddamn world.”
That night, for the first time, Louise realizes just how young Lavinia is.
* * *
—
It’s so easy to lie to her.
That’s the other thing Louise realizes.
Lavinia flings her arms around Louise; she squeezes her so tight Louise can’t breathe.
“God, I love you so much,” she says. “You really don’t know how much it means to me.” She draws the blanket over Louise’s feet. “I wouldn’t trust anyone else to read it, not even Cordy. Nobody but you.”
Louise leans her head on Lavinia’s shoulder. Lavinia squeezes her hand.
Louise thinks: we cannot be known and loved at the same time.
* * *
—
It is very simple, Louise knows. There are two kinds of people in the world: the people you can fool into liking you, and the ones clever enough not to fall for it.
The day Louise dyed her hair, that first time, the month she first moved to Sunset Park, the month she bought a book of mantras and changed her number and blocked Virgil Bryce on social media, she looked into the mirror and found, for the first time in her life, that she was fuckable.
It was like she was getting away with something.
It took her a month or two to get the measure of it. First the cat-callers, and then the older men in bars, and then even the men a little closer to her own age in bars, and on Tinder, back when she used Tinder (the polyamorist, the kinky one, the ghost). Men thought she was special.
* * *
—
They did this, you understand, because they were stupid.
* * *
—
They didn’t notice Louise.
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