Social Creature

by Tara Isabella Burton

  They climb on top of each other. They annihilate each other. Rex gets his scarf tangled in Louise’s tacky, ridiculous sequins and although she doesn’t even realize that she’s crying at first her tears stain his face. He keeps kissing her despite this and he keeps whispering it’s not your fault; it’s not your fault; I’m sorry. They kiss in front of his apartment building and they kiss again in the lobby and they kiss again on the stairs and on every landing, which is a lot of landings, as it happens, because it’s a walk-up and he lives on the fifth floor, and they kiss again by his front door and Louise hasn’t even been drinking but she feels drunk. Or maybe it’s Lavinia that is drunk—Lavinia who is still alive, Lavinia who is having the greatest night of her life with Mimi, Lavinia whom Mimi only just now has tagged in another incoherent status with every word misspelled about Baudelaire and wine and virtue, Lavinia who is going to get mugged tonight, Lavinia who is going to die—and maybe they are still tethered together because of that one night by the sea and Louise feels everything Lavinia feels and so she is drunk, too, or maybe it’s just that somebody is warm and kind and kissing her and whispering her name, her name, into her ear, and telling her just how good she is.

  “I’m ruining everything for you,” Rex whispers, “I’m ruining everything; I know; I’m sorry; please make me stop.” But they just cling to each other harder, and he takes off her sequined top and that ridiculous cunt-high miniskirt and then her bra (she realizes, too late, that it is one of Lavinia’s, but he doesn’t seem to notice). He runs his hands up and down her body and looks at her, I mean really looks at her, and says Jesus Christ you’re so beautiful like he means it.

  “Tell me to stop,” Rex says. Louise doesn’t. Not even when he kisses her neck; not even when he goes down on her; not even when he asks if she has a condom and she says “don’t bother” because the risk seems so insignificant now.

  * * *

  —

  She closes her legs around him and her arms around him and he’s on her and around her and against her and inside her. But here’s the thing: all Louise can think about is this one time in January that Lavinia decided they hadn’t had one of those nights in a while, so Lavinia locked all the doors, turned off all the lights, and lit all the candles in the house. She put on Liszt’s third Liebestraum, which Louise had never even heard before, and in the candlelight explained that the song was all about love in death, how der stunde kommt, der stunde kommt where everybody dies. Lavinia was leaning back on the divan with the moonlight on her breasts. But maybe Rex is the only reason Lavinia listens to that song in the first place, Louise thinks yes, that part was real, and she doesn’t know, now, kissing him back, whether anything will ever be real again. Louise doesn’t know whether she’s terrified or terrible or triumphant, whether she is in love or just surviving. All she knows is that the world has ended but that it is also still turning.

  All Louise needs to know right now is this: Rex is inside her, and she needs him to stay inside her; she clings to him, too, tightly, so tightly, still breathing, because if she does not hold on, if she stops holding on for a single second, Lavinia will sweep her out to sea.

  6

  LOUISE WAKES UP HAPPY.

  This surprises her.

  She can’t remember the last time she’s woken up like this: with somebody’s arms around her; with somebody pressing his chest against her, or stroking her hair, or brushing her forearms softly with his fingertips. She’s not sure she ever has.

  Not with somebody kissing her neck. Not with somebody’s lips on her shoulder. Not with this much light streaming in.

  It streams through the shutters. It makes a lattice on the wall. She marvels at it, and although she’s seen a thousand shadows in her life just like it this one is the one she presses her fingertips to, because she is half-asleep enough to think she can catch it.

  “Morning, beautiful,” he says.

  It astounds Louise that he has spent the night with her—the whole night—and never once suspected the kind of person that she is.

  “Want to know a secret?”

  He’s kissing her shoulders quickly, now, it tickles and Louise laughs without meaning to.

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t want to get out of bed.”

  He blinks a lot without his glasses.

  “Don’t tell anyone.”

  “I won’t,” she whispers.

  * * *

  —

  The phone rings.

  Then Louise remembers.

  “Shit—shit!”

  “What’s wrong?”

  He smooths her hair back from her face. He is so sweet with her.

  It’s Lavinia’s phone. It blasts the prelude from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde all through Rex’s apartment.

  She is afraid he will recognize it but he reaches into her purse for her and hands it over.

  It’s Mimi calling. Five missed calls.

  Louise sends it to voicemail.

  “Is everything okay?”

  Lavinia has fifty-six Facebook notifications.

  “Nothing.” Louise turns the phone off. Louise has just killed somebody. “It’s fine. Everything’s fine.”

  “Was it…”

  “No.”

  She takes a deep breath.

  “Just Mimi,” she says.

  “Have you heard from her?”

  “No.”

  Now he exhales.

  “It’s probably fine,” he says. “She’s probably at Mimi’s. Or—you know—dancing on a table. Or in Paris. You never know.”

  “You never know,” says Louise.

  He gets up and goes to the window.

  He is thinner than she expected, now that she sees him without clothes on. His chest is waxy, and a little concave. She can see his ribs. He is so handsome to her, anyway.

  “So,” he says. He rubs his eyes. “What do you want to do?”

  “About what?”

  “About Lavinia.”

  “What about Lavinia?”

  “Do you want to talk to her, or should I?”

  “About what?”

  “About us.”

  Maybe Louise is still dreaming.

  “What about us?”

  You’ve fucked me, she thinks. What more is there to say?

  He sits at the edge of the bed. “I mean—if we’re going to keep doing this—we can’t keep it a secret.”

  It has never occurred to Louise that Rex would want to do this more than once.

  People want to fuck you, sometimes. This is natural, if you’re pretty; or if you’re not pretty, then at least if you’re blonde. People want to fuck you once. Then they leave early for work, and tell you they’ll text you in a few days, and they don’t.

  “You want to do this again?”

  (This is not the relevant point, maybe, with a body in a bathtub uptown, but Louise can’t think about that right now.)

  “Don’t you?”

  “Of course I do,” Louise says, before she can even think about what she’s saying. “But—I mean—we—we can’t.”

  “Because of Lavinia?”

  “Yes,” Louise says. “Of course because of Lavinia.”

  He sighs. “Maybe, you know—maybe it won’t be so bad. I mean—maybe, you know, it’ll be hard, at first, but—”

  She marvels at how stupid he is.

  “She burned your handkerchief.”

  “Christ,” he says. He laughs—just a little. “Of course she did.”

  He says it with something like admiration, and Louise hates that even now, even now, this gnaws at her.

  “Look—Louise.” It has been so long since someone has called her by her actual name. “I know it’s selfish.” He is so quiet. “How much I like you. I know that.”

  Instinctively, s
he reaches out. She puts her fingertips on the back of his neck.

  “It’s not selfish,” she says, “to want to be happy.”

  It is automatic: how she does it. Touching his shoulders. Massaging them.

  “I should do it,” says Rex. “I’ll talk to her. This is on me. I’ll explain that you said no, at first, that I pursued you. I’ll be the bad guy. I don’t mind…”

  “No!”

  She is so loud.

  “No—no, I’ll talk to her. When she comes home.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “I can wait outside?”

  “I’ll be fine,” she says.

  “Look—if you need somewhere to stay for a couple days…”

  “What?”

  “Like, if you need some space. I mean—it’s a studio, you know. It isn’t much. But I do have two sets of keys.”

  He kisses her knuckles, like she is precious.

  That’s when it hits Louise.

  This part would have been true no matter what.

  If she’d called him at the P.M.—in tears, hysterical—it all would have happened the exact same way. He’d have kissed her. He’d have taken her home. He’d have let her stay.

  Lavinia has died for nothing.

  “What is it?” Rex asks her.

  Louise can’t stop laughing.

  The tears run down her face and still she can’t stop laughing.

  Louise takes the bus home from Rex’s place. She wears his Columbia sweatshirt over her sequined top, her skirt. It’s a long, slow route up First Avenue, but Louise doesn’t mind. When Louise gets home, there will be a body in the bathtub, and, she will have to decide how to kill Lavinia.

  It is summer. The sun is out and the sky is a deep and inimitable shade of blue and were it not for the body in the bathtub, Louise could almost be happy.

  * * *

  —

  This cannot last forever.

  Louise knows this.

  She will have to find a way to kill Lavinia. She will have to get out of town before they realize that whatever a mugger uses to brain you isn’t a sink at a Chrystie Street nightclub; she has no money, anyway—once they cancel Lavinia’s cards she will have nothing, because she doesn’t have Paul or GlaZam or the bar and she definitely doesn’t have bottle-girl shifts at the P.M. any longer, but how much is a one-way bus ticket back to Devonshire, anyway?

  * * *

  —

  She turns on Lavinia’s phone.

  Forty-three new Facebook Likes on the selfie of her and Mimi.

  Twelve texts from Mimi. A Facebook message from Beowulf Marmont, asking her for a drink (it is, Louise notices, uncannily similar to the Facebook messages he sent her, asking for a drink).

  An email from Cordelia about an upcoming history test at summer school.

  * * *

  —

  She checks her own phone. Nothing.

  Then, when the bus passes Seventy-second Street, a text from Rex:

  I’ll be thinking about you today, he says. Good luck. Whatever happens.

  And Louise thinks: if only, if only, if only.

  And just a small part of her thinks: what if?

  * * *

  —

  The smell is so much worse than she expects.

  She is sure that she remembered to close Lavinia’s eyes, before leaving, but she is here and they are open and glassy and they stare straight up.

  Louise sits on the toilet for a while, staring at the body.

  She has never seen a dead body before, but she imagined it would look more like a dead body than it does. It just looks like Lavinia, only less so, like somebody has made a prop of Lavinia for a play.

  She opens a private browser (she knows Law & Order; she knows your search history is the first thing they check).

  She Googles what do I do with a dead body.

  She doesn’t really expect a useful answer, but she scrolls through the results anyway, because she can’t think of what else to do.

  Turns out, Urban Foxes did a listicle on it, once, as a joke. Turns out, there are a lot of bodies in the Gowanus Canal.

  This doesn’t surprise Louise, thinking about it.

  * * *

  —

  Louise continues to stay very, very calm.

  She runs through her options.

  She has sixty-four dollars. She has a set of keys. She has a driver’s license.

  She has an ATM card with the PIN 1-6-1-9 and a hundred thousand dollars in it. But she cannot think about that right now.

  * * *

  —

  She can leave Lavinia in a park, somewhere, late at night (she is never home; she never finds Lavinia; somebody finds Lavinia in Sheep Meadow; she comes back to Rex worried, so worried, she hasn’t found her). Maybe it is a mugging. Maybe, maybe it is a suicide (maybe she is found in a paddleboat on the Lake in Central Park, like Ophelia, like she always wanted). She can leave Lavinia in an alley.

  On TV, they can always tell the time of death.

  Louise isn’t sure how that works in real life. She Googles this, too. Apparently there’s a window of a couple of hours, which means she is probably safe, but then again, you are never, ever safe.

  Maybe it is better, she thinks, if they never find the body.

  * * *

  —

  Another text from Mimi.

  I had the best night with you last night.

  Let’s do it again soon!

  Two capybaras holding hands.

  * * *

  —

  And Louise thinks you can’t fool all the people all of the time.

  And Louise thinks maybe you can.

  * * *

  —

  It wouldn’t have to be for very long, she thinks. Just long enough for her to get a little more money together out of Lavinia’s account. Just long enough for her to come up with a plan.

  There is a plausible story, now: Lavinia is brokenhearted over Rex. Lavinia doesn’t want to live, knowing Rex is dating somebody else. Lavinia takes too many pills. Lavinia writes a brilliant suicide note. She posts it.

  Everybody misses her. Nobody is surprised.

  Maybe, Louise thinks, this is exactly what Lavinia would have done, anyway. Maybe Lavinia was always supposed to die, and Louise has done nothing but help Fate along.

  * * *

  —

  I had the most wonderful night with you too, darling!

  Lavinia writes texts in very long and elaborate and letter-like sentences. Louise knows this.

  Sorry to do an Irish goodbye I got mesmerized by the music and then instantly collapsed.

  Did you have fun?

  * * *

  —

  It is so easy.

  * * *

  —

  Louise puts Lavinia’s body into the steamer trunk.

  That’s the hard part.

  It turns out you can’t just make a person smaller by arranging them. You have to break their bones. You have to take a hammer or an axe, or if you’re in an apartment like Lavinia’s, an antique nineteenth-century neo-Gothic mallet that’s lying over the plastered-up mantelpiece, and crush a person’s elbows and their kneecaps until they fit. The sound is a little bit like a cantaloupe. The smell is like nothing Louise has ever smelled before.

  When you are done breaking their femur, their forearm, in two or three different places, they look even less like a person than they did before.

  * * *

  —

  Louise will never forget the sound of snapping bones.

  * * *

  —

  She spends thirty minutes with a curling iron, curling and recurling and recurling her hair.

  *
* *

  —

  Lavinia rents a moving van.

  She wears the exact same thing she wore last time she rented a moving van, the same halter top and palazzo pants, the same scarf in her hair, the same sunglasses. She goes to the same place. She shows her ID.

  Lavinia says lots of very memorable things about how she’s going on a very great adventure, a pèlerinage, even, and the woman behind the counter rolls her eyes and slams down the keys, just to get Lavinia to shut up.

  Lavinia posts a photograph of First Avenue, of the summer sky, of the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge. She quotes that song by Simon & Garfunkel, which is all anybody thinks about when they see that bridge, anyway. She checks in there.

  Lavinia is having such a peaceful Sunday in New York.

  * * *

  —

  Any news? Rex texts.

  We’re talking tonight, says Louise.

  She heaves up the steamer trunk by one handle. She scratches those gorgeous hardwood floors, sliding it out the door.

  * * *

  —

  It is almost midnight. The trunk makes so much noise on the landing, down the corridor. Louise does not understand. Lavinia is so skinny—she’s paid so much attention to how skinny Lavinia is. How does a person that skinny weigh so much? The trunk scrapes the walls.

  Louise almost pulls her arms out of her sockets, moving the trunk into the elevator.

  Down the hall, the apartment door opens.

  Mrs. Winters watches as the elevator doors close, and Louise and Lavinia descend to the ground floor.