Social Creature

by Tara Isabella Burton

  It was just that Louise looked blonde and thin and pretty, and they were dumb enough to think that all these things were true of her, and not just qualities she wore. And so they were dumb enough to think that her other qualities (she was so chill, she was so clever, she was so open-minded in bed) were real, too.

  * * *

  —

  It never lasts, of course. Louise knows this. You can’t fool them forever, not even the very stupid ones. They realize every good thing about you is a trick.

  Louise has fooled Lavinia, she thinks, and so Lavinia must be stupider than she is. She hates herself for thinking like that about Lavinia, who has been nothing but kind to her, but she thinks it all the same.

  Unless Lavinia said go home because she knew Louise couldn’t—not at this hour, not in this cold—

  Louise would hate herself for thinking that, too.

  * * *

  —

  “Hey, Louise?”

  Lavinia is half-asleep.

  “What is it?”

  “You don’t think I’m, like—too much, do you?”

  “Too much?”

  “I mean. You know. Too much. Too everything.”

  “No,” says Louise. “Of course not. Am I too much?”

  “Of course not,” Lavinia murmurs. “You’re—I mean—you’re the opposite of too much.”

  Louise doesn’t say anything.

  “I love you.”

  Lavinia starts to snore on her shoulder.

  * * *

  —

  Louise tries to sleep on the sofa, because if she moves she will wake Lavinia. She plays with her phone. She reads stupid articles on Misandry!

  She wants to cry.

  She hates herself for wanting to cry, because she has had such a good night—not the assholes at the bookstore, maybe, but after that. They have had such a wonderful night and they broke onto the High Line and they burned Rex’s handkerchief in effigy for all men, everywhere, who had ever hurt them, and they took so many cabs Louise didn’t even have to pay for, and now Louise is sleeping in such a beautiful apartment surrounded by such beautiful things and there is somebody who has squeezed her hand and said I love you and everything they have done tonight is everything that Louise, in Devonshire, would have been so happy—so happy and so proud and so justified—to see Louise, in New York, doing now.

  You’re being dumb, she tells herself. That’s all.

  She keeps looking at the photograph Lavinia has posted of the two of them.

  They’re on the High Line. They’re surrounded by snow and branches and stars that, on this filter, you can’t even distinguish from the city lights.

  We look happy, Louise thinks. Maybe they were.

  Everybody’s Liking it. Father Romylos and Gavin Mullaney and even Beowulf, and so many other names that are by now at least a little bit familiar.

  Mimi Kaye.

  * * *

  —

  hey lady.

  Mimi has added Louise on Facebook.

  you look super cute in those pics

  Winking smiley cat-eye emoji.

  Thanks (Louise says)

  (flirty heart-eyed fox, says Mimi)

  isn’t it fun out there?

  (boggle-eyed dancing-footed toad)

  yeah it was nice thanks

  lavinia and I used to do it alllll the time hahaha

  one time we even slept out there

  the cops found us but lavinia got us out of it

  isn’t that so funny

  (chicken with clown makeup on)

  don’t you think that’s funny?

  (owl wearing a cap and gown and glasses looking inquisitive)

  Louise doesn’t answer.

  She doesn’t sleep, either.

  3

  THE THIRD PARTY LAVINIA TAKES LOUISE TO is a loft party off the Jefferson L at this performance space this guy she knows owns where they’ve turned the entire mezzanine into a poetry library. The fourth party Lavinia takes Louise to is this cabaret benefit at the Laurie Beechman Theatre over in Hell’s Kitchen, where everybody but Louise and Lavinia is ninety and is wearing tattooed eyeliner and sequined shawls. The fifth is the release party in Gramercy for this coffee-table book called Sexual Secrets of Europe by this degenerate Australian travel writer called Lydgate who must only be fifty-five but looks eighty, and it is there that Louise does coke for the first time and races Lavinia all the way up First Avenue.

  They go to parties neither of them is invited to.

  “It’s easy,” Lavinia says. “You just walk right in.”

  * * *

  —

  They get matching tattoos. This is Lavinia’s idea.

  “I don’t ever want to forget our trip to the sea,” she says. “I want to think about that night all the time. I want to commemorate it.”

  They are standing on Saint Mark’s Place, which is the most expensive and least hygienic place to get a tattoo in New York City. They are drunk because they’ve just gone to that speakeasy you can only get to by entering through a telephone booth and putting your name down two hours in advance. Earlier they’d gone to the perfume shop on East Fourth Street, because Lavinia had to get her signature fragrance made, which is called Sehnsucht and which Louise can by now smell on all her clothes, and that night is the night Louise gets her own (because Lavinia pays for this, too), which is made of dandelion and fern and tobacco and heather, but when she smells it now she thinks it smells all wrong, because it smells nothing like Lavinia’s.

  “Come on!” Lavinia says. She has gone into a shitty shop that even Louise knows only NYU freshmen patronize. “God, Louise, don’t you want to live?”

  * * *

  —

  Two hours later Louise sobers up in Washington Square Park and realizes that both of them have MORE POETRY!!! tattooed in tiny letters on their forearms, and she isn’t as horrified as she should be.

  “Worst case scenario”—Lavinia shrugs—“you get it lasered off. It’s not that expensive.”

  She leans her arm against Louise’s arm.

  They take a picture of the two of them, holding hands.

  * * *

  —

  There are so many wonderful pictures of them on the Internet. There’s the one of the two of them in Lincoln Center, between the opera and a costume party at the MacIntyre, taking off their evening gowns to reveal the corsets underneath. There’s one of them in drag at something called the Tweed Picnic, which is a flash mob in Bryant Park.

  Everybody, everybody Likes them.

  “You certainly look like you’re taking better care of yourself,” Louise’s mother tells her on the phone. “Your hair looks nice.”

  Louise has been dyeing it a slightly more strawberry shade of blonde. It looks so good on Lavinia, she thinks, and the two of them have the same skin tone.

  People from Devonshire Like the photos—people who have barely spoken to her. So does Beowulf Marmont. So does the guy that ghosted.

  More than once.

  * * *

  —

  Louise starts finishing stories. She even sends them out.

  She and Lavinia sit on the divan in Lavinia’s apartment that smells like incense and sit together at their laptops and set the timer for an hour and write, and even though half the time Lavinia gets bored and gets up to make a pot of cinnamon-raisin-date tea and then forgets about that, too, Louise sits and types. Lavinia orders dinner for both of them on Seamless and it is so glorious to eat food that somebody else has cooked, and not to have to clean up, after.

  “It’s the least I can do,” Lavinia says. “You’re keeping me on the straight and narrow. You inspire me.”

  She sends an essay about Devonshire to Gavin Mullaney after a Fiddler Valentine’s Day party. It’s not the
one she deep down wants to write, which is the one about pretending to go to the Academy for a week, because she doesn’t like writing about herself, but she writes a reportage kind of thing about this crazy thing that happened to her sophomore year when a couple of Academy kids went nuts and ran away and they had the whole police after them. Gavin likes it.

  I’m not a really big fan of narrative, Gavin says, and I don’t also personally really care about things like characterization since personally I don’t have a lot of empathy for other people but it’s super-readable and people apparently really like stories that are very driven by primal emotions.

  Could you Tweet it when you get a chance?

  A few days later he suggests she pitch his second-favorite person of all the people he’s dating (he has a spreadsheet), a woman called Michelle-Ann who left Misandry! to start a new, more intersectionally aware magazine called The New Misandrist. Louise does.

  * * *

  —

  Louise lets herself get stupid.

  She stops paying such close attention to money (somehow, even with Lavinia paying for everything, Louise is always broke, and she isn’t sure why). She starts missing GlaZam shifts. She starts eating bread (Lavinia loves the croissants from Agata & Valentina, and insists on buying a dozen even though she only ever eats one). She starts trusting people, the way Lavinia trusts people, secure in the knowledge that the world is a well-ordered and reasonable place in which nothing ever goes unsalvageably wrong.

  Louise stops waiting for the world to end.

  Until the night it almost does.

  * * *

  —

  Louise is so happy, that night. They have gone to this erotic illustrator’s art Ballets Russes party at this gay culture museum on the Lower East Side, and they have stayed out so late at this Marie Antoinette–themed cocktail bar, and she is so happy that she has that final glass of champagne that she knows she shouldn’t have. She takes the long, slow train ride, and when she gets off she is singing.

  Louise never sings.

  When she walks home she always hunches over. She puts her hands in her pockets. She always stares straight ahead. She always puts her keys between her fingers.

  Always.

  * * *

  —

  But tonight Louise is drunk, and Lavinia has invited her to the opera, in a couple of weeks, and promised to sew her a dress. Of course Louise will do the sewing but Lavinia will buy the raw materials and the vintage base; and they have so many grand plans, so Louise is humming “As Time Goes By,” because that’s what they played over and over at the Ballets Russes party and she leaves her keys in her purse.

  “You’ve got a voice on you, little girl.”

  He is always there.

  Louise isn’t afraid of him tonight. She tosses her long strawberry-blonde hair, and shoots him the kind of world-destroying smile Lavinia shoots bartenders when she doesn’t want to pay for something.

  “You want to give me singing lessons.”

  “No, thank you!”

  She’s almost skipping.

  “What’s your name?”

  “What’s it to you?”

  God’s in his heaven, Louise is thinking, with the part of her brain that can still think, and all is right with the world.

  “I said—what’s your name?”

  “Artemesia Gentilleschi!” She flings out her arms.

  “You fucking with me?”

  He is so close to her. She has not realized how close he is to her.

  “Hey! I asked you a question!”

  He grabs her arm.

  * * *

  —

  Here’s the thing: there’s only so much you can lie to yourself. You can blunt instinct, if you want to—you can drink too much, you can laugh and smile and reapply your lipstick and say let us get drunk, on poetry and virtue, you can pretend to be a human being, a little while—but in the end, you are what you are.

  Somebody comes too close, you run.

  He follows you, you run faster.

  His steps meld into yours, you stop.

  You turn.

  He hesitates.

  You do what you have to do.

  And if you’re lazy enough and stupid enough and arrogant enough to forget to put your keys between your fingers—the one time, that one time, you’re lazy and stupid and arrogant enough to not put your keys between your fingers—you use whatever you have to hand.

  Your elbows. Your nails. Your teeth.

  You punch a stranger straight in the eye before he can tell you whether he wants to rape you or just tell you he likes your smile.

  You keep hitting him, and scratching him, and pulling out his hair, and even kicking him, straight between the legs, until you have made sure he is on the floor.

  You kick him once more, in case he still wants to follow you.

  You run.

  * * *

  —

  Louise doesn’t stop shaking until she’s on the stairs.

  She doesn’t let herself cry until she’s inside.

  She doesn’t let herself scream. Not now. Not ever. She just holds her wrist to her chest, her wrist with the bruise where he has grabbed it and MORE POETRY!!! still healing on her forearm, and she takes very slow, very measured, very deep breaths, that rack and strangle but do not make any sound.

  You little fool, she thinks. You deserve everything bad that ever happens to you.

  Maybe the moon is full. Maybe the stars are bright. Maybe cigarettes smell like incense.

  But not for her, she thinks. Never for people like her, who don’t live on the Upper East Side, who don’t go to Yale, who aren’t even naturally blonde.

  Everybody who has ever told her this was right.

  * * *

  —

  “That’s bollocks,” says Lavinia, when Louise tries to return the opera tickets the next day. “It’s the season premiere.”

  Louise has made some vague and unconvincing excuse. Paul needs extra SAT lessons because he smokes too much weed. Something like that.

  “The tickets are paid for,” Lavinia says, like that’s all there is to it.

  She catches sight of Louise’s bruise.

  “Jesus Christ.”

  Louise explains that it’s nothing, that there’s just some guy who likes to chat her up, that he got a little handsy because she was too sassy, that this kind of thing happens all the time.

  “All the time?”

  Lavinia stretches out her legs along the steamer trunk. She fans herself with the peacock feathers. She turns up the music.

  “Just move into Cordy’s room,” she says. “She’s going to be in Paris the whole summer, anyway.”

  * * *

  —

  It is a stupid thing to do. Louise knows that.

  But so is turning down a free room on Seventy-eighth and Lex.

  * * *

  —

  Lavinia hires a moving van a week later. She shows up at Sunset Park in palazzo pants, with a scarf in her hair, like she’s some 1930s explorer, like she’s off on an adventure to the land of here-be-dragons, even though it’s only South Brooklyn (it’s not even real South Brooklyn, like Gravesend or Bensonhurst, just Sunset Park). She looks with such bewilderment at the bodegas, at the white plastic chairs, at the Greek man pissing in the lobby.

  “I love it,” Lavinia says. She taps a cigarette against the lobby walls. “You should write about him. A mad Greek—maybe he’s a prophet. I bet The Fiddler would love it.”

  Louise never wants to think about the mad Greek again.

  They get in the moving van, which Lavinia apparently can drive (“I learned in Newport one summer. I destroyed a mailbox”), with the single box of useless shit Louise doesn’t plan to keep anyway.

  There he is, on t
he corner.

  He has a black eye. He has a bruise on his lip.

  He sees her. He looks up.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” says Louise. “Keep driving.”

  “You look like you’ve seen—”

  “Let’s go!”

  A strange, slow smile spreads across Lavinia’s face. “That’s not—”

  “Please, Lavinia.”

  All she wants is to go. All she wants is to never see this street or this apartment or any of these bodegas with their loose cigarettes and their hanging rosaries and their uniform packs of knockoff microwave meals again.

  Lavinia stops the van.

  She is a terrible driver, and Louise lurches forward so violently bile rises in her throat.

  “How dare he,” Lavinia says. “How fucking dare he?”

  “I just want—”

  Lavinia’s already out of the van.

  “Hey!”

  She gets in his face.

  “Hey! You!”

  “What do you…”

  “You—you—catastrophic piece of shit!”

  Louise can’t breathe.

  She sits there, strapped in the passenger seat, and she knows she should get up or do something or say something or stop it but her heart is beating so fast that she can’t stop it, and Lavinia looks so ridiculous—in her cream-colored palazzo pants that are already gray (for God’s sake, it is only April), and the scarf wound around her head, shouting at this man with a black eye and a bruise over his upper lip.

  The funny thing is: he looks so confused.

  Louise almost feels sorry for him.

  “Lady, I don’t know what you’re…”

  “You ought to be—drawn and quartered. You ought to be hanged!”

  He looks up at her.

  * * *

  —