* * *
—
It takes Louise thirty minutes to get Lavinia into the back of the van.
There are moments, in those thirty minutes, when Louise doesn’t think she will be able to get Lavinia into the back of the van, when Louise heaves and gasps and strains. Her muscles ache and her tendons scream and still Lavinia’s weight is too much for her, and Louise thinks it is not worth it.
She thinks I will sit here until the police come.
When they come I will tell them there is a body in the trunk.
They will not believe me. I will show them.
They will take me away and then at last, at last, I will sleep.
Lavinia will win, she thinks.
So what? Let Lavinia win.
She sits like this on the steamer trunk for three, four, five minutes, hugging her knees to her chest.
Lavinia’s phone is buzzing in her pocket. Lavinia’s perfume is all over her hands.
Lavinia cannot win.
So Louise takes a deep, deep breath.
She practices that breathing: one more time.
She heaves.
She turns herself inside out, heaving. She vomits up acid and it burns her throat and her tongue and even her lips but that doesn’t make her stomach untwist.
She does not think she has ever been in so much pain before.
She gets the body into the back of the van.
* * *
—
Louise drives all the way up the FDR, along the flank of Manhattan, to where the East River meets the Harlem. She has Googled all of this. She doesn’t really know what she’s doing but she assumes that most people who are trying to hide a body don’t really know what they are doing, either.
She drives all the way up to Swindler Cove, hedging the projects over at 201st Street, in the shadow of the Con Ed station.
Louise has not been up so high, she thinks, since she and Lavinia went to Harlem that one time because Lavinia decided she liked gospel music, but she cannot think about that right now.
They have renovated much of the park, here; but so much is still undone. There are abandoned slats of wood over the marsh, forgotten Coke cans, rotting piers that collapse into the river, one by one.
Louise waits in the van until three. Just in case.
She drives as close as she can to the water.
* * *
—
The funny part is that there are people out—one or two—men smoking joints, or on their phones. She has always been so afraid of being alone, at night, with men. Not now.
She pulls her sweatshirt over her head. She has a cigarette. She waits.
They don’t even look at her.
* * *
—
When they go, Louise drags the trunk out of the back. It’s easier, going down than up; except for the sound it makes when it hits the cement (is that what it sounds like, Louise wonders, the rattling of bones?).
She drags it by the handle all the way to the waterside. It hurts, but by now Louise has gotten used to the pain.
Then Louise does a very stupid thing.
She opens the trunk.
* * *
—
Lavinia’s eyes are still open. They are still glassy. They are still blue.
Her hair winds all around her face, her neck, her broken limbs, like snakes. Her hair, which is long and loose and Pre-Raphaelite, and looked when Lavinia was alive like it, too, was alive, of its own will, that it would grow unfettered and strangle you if you got too close.
They say hair keeps growing after you die. Louise read that once. She doesn’t know if it’s true.
Louise slams the trunk shut.
She lifts the trunk, one final time, against the railing.
She lets it fall in the water. She lets the water carry it away.
By the time the current has closed over it, it’s like it never even happened at all. Maybe it didn’t.
* * *
—
It is dawn when Lavinia takes a picture of the sunrise over the East River.
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars until I die.
* * *
—
Lavinia takes out four hundred dollars from an Inwood bodega on her way home.
* * *
—
Louise leaves the van parked in Inwood. She takes the subway home.
Louise makes piles of things. Lavinia’s clothes. Hers. Lavinia’s. Lavinia’s. Hers. She makes piles of jewelry. She counts up all the cash in the house. Lavinia has left $450.42, in twenties and tens and crumpled dollar bills lying around and coins in the couch cushions.
She charges Lavinia’s phone. Lavinia has so many more messages. She sits at Lavinia’s desk. She opens Lavinia’s laptop. Lavinia is signed into everything.
She checks Lavinia’s email.
An invitation from Lydgate to the launch party of his new coffee table book Sex Toys: An Illustrated Secret History. Some links from Gavin to gossip-party stories in The Fiddler and a request to contribute a diary piece (you just have the kind of narrative voice that pisses people off and that’s great when it comes to engagement numbers). An email from her parents.
Dear Lavinia,
We are saddened to learn from your Dean that you would like to delay your return to Yale another semester. We believe that this will be detrimental to your future in the long term, and have jointly decided to cease paying to reserve your spot at the end of this academic year (2014–15). If you wish to complete your degree you will have to return in September at the very latest.
We have discussed our decision with the Dean and believe it is for the best.
Your sister is doing very well here and enjoying her summer school. I am sure you have heard she got a 2400 on her SATs—very proud. I think it important that you set a good example as she prepares her college applications as she is still insisting on applying to exclusively Catholic schools…
Louise slams the laptop closed.
* * *
—
Louise tries to think of where she will go, when she runs. Anywhere but Devonshire, she thinks.
* * *
—
The phone rings.
It’s Rex again.
“It’s good to hear your voice,” he says.
* * *
—
Louise downloads a picture from Google Images of a sunset over a beautiful lake upstate. It’s the sort of place a person would go to—say, if they’d just found out their best friend was fucking their ex, and they had the money to just pick up and go upstate.
Lavinia checks in at Beacon, New York. She posts the photo.
Rebirth, she writes.
* * *
—
Rex meets Louise for afternoon tea at the Hungarian Pastry Shop, near the Columbia campus. His satchel is full of various Loeb editions. He has bags under his eyes.
“I fell asleep in a seminar today,” he says. He’s holding her hand. “Isn’t that something?”
Louise stirs the whipped cream into her coffee without drinking it.
“How did it go?” he asks, at last.
She shrugs.
“Lavinia, you know.”
“Did she set anything on fire?” He’s smiling. A little.
“No. She was calm.”
“Really?” he asks. “I can’t imagine that—somehow.”
“I mean—quiet. Not calm. Quiet.”
“You think she’s okay?”
Louise holds up the keys.
Like Lavinia would ever be that magnanimous.
“She said she needed space. She’s gone away for the week. Upstate.”
“And then what?”
; “And then…” Louise tries not to think about it. “And then she comes back.”
He sighs. He looks up. “Hey, Louise?”
She stirs her coffee. She smiles her slow, kind, sweet smile.
“We’re not bad people, are we?”
She pats his hand. She twines her fingers in his.
“Of course not,” Louise says.
“You’re right,” he says. “Of course you’re right. I’m being stupid. Let’s do something fun. It’s a beautiful day—I don’t have class until Wednesday. Let’s go to a museum.”
“There’s always the Met.” Louise thinks of places she knows a boy who always wears tweed blazers will like. “Or the Neue Galerie—they’ve got this whole Ferdinand Hodler exhibition on…” It costs twenty dollars to get in.
Rex doesn’t say anything.
“They do good Sacher torte at the museum café.” (There is not a body underwater; there is not a trunk at the bottom of the river; there is not blood in the shower drain.)
“Maybe—”
“What?”
She sees his face. His ears are red.
“Is it—her?”
How, she thinks, can one person matter so much?
“It’s stupid,” Rex says. “We should go—of course we can go.”
“But—”
He sighs. “I’ve been there before.”
“Okay?”
“I mean—we’ve been there before.”
“What?”
“Like—it was our first date.”
“Oh. Oh.”
“I’m sorry—that’s weird—I’m being weird.”
“No, I’m sorry. I should have—”
“It’s not like you could know!”
Louise can’t stop picturing them, the two of them, with Lavinia’s long and unbrushed hair, with her rapt smile, Lavinia so radiant on his arm, Lavinia in a steamer trunk with her ankle next to her ears.
“Let’s just go home,” Louise says.
They cab it to Rex’s place. Rex pays.
They have sex on the bed, and then again on the sofa, and then they cuddle and order Thai food and watch The Jewel in the Crown on Netflix. The weather is so nice outside and there is so much to do on a night like this one in New York but Lavinia has done all of those things, already, and so they just drink beer out of his fridge, because that, at least, Louise is sure that Lavinia has never done.
He is so careful when he has sex with her. He buries his face in her neck, and murmurs things between and underneath her breasts, and rests his head in the crook of her hips, and against her inner thigh.
“God,” he keeps saying, “you’re so beautiful.”
And Louise knows she doesn’t deserve it, but she thinks just one more day like this. Just give me one more day.
* * *
—
“Hey, Louise?”
He says it to her shoulder blade.
“Yes?”
“How much—on a scale of, say, one to ten—do you hate Hal?”
“Eight? Why?”
“He’s having a birthday party this Saturday. Like—a hybrid birthday–Fourth of July type thing, and it’s at his father’s house, and there will be, you know, people there. And drinks. And food.” He’s leaning on one elbow. “And if it wouldn’t be strange…” He exhales. “I told him about you. I hope that’s all right.”
“It’s fine,” says Louise. “It won’t surprise him.” She leans back on the pillow. “He’s been giving me shit about it long enough.”
“He doesn’t mean it. Any of it. When you get to know him…”
“He’s an angel?”
“You know how it is,” says Rex. “He’s my best friend.”
“Yes,” Louise says. “I know how it is.”
* * *
—
Louise goes back to the apartment (it feels so good, so strangely good, to unlock it, to fling open the door, to switch on the light). She puts all of Lavinia’s clothes back in the closet. She puts all her clothes on the shelf.
She puts on Lavinia’s powder-blue dressing gown.
It smells of Lavinia’s perfume.
She stares at the hole in the living room where the steamer trunk used to be.
* * *
—
Lavinia posts another photo from upstate.
Everybody Likes it.
Lavinia texts Mimi.
Been having a Crisis of Faith. Long story. Gone upstate to clear my head. But I miss you! LET US GO TO THE ICE CAGE AGAIN SOON yes yes yes?
Mimi responds with an emoji of a spider trying to hug you with all its arms.
* * *
—
Rex texts Louise a photo of the view from his window.
I miss you already, he says.
* * *
—
And Louise thinks he does, he does.
She tries not to think about his face when she asked to go to the Neue Galerie (she should have known—it was one of those places Lavinia insisted they go all the time, in Lavinia’s opera cloaks, in Lavinia’s furs).
* * *
—
She thinks: there are so many things I should have known.
* * *
—
She goes through Lavinia’s drawers. She throws all of Lavinia’s clothes (her lingerie, her thigh-high stockings, her silk blouses, her handkerchiefs) on the floor. She looks through Lavinia’s bookshelves. She throws volume after volume on the floor. She looks under the bed, under the Persian carpet; in the little jewelry boxes on the vanity. She strips the sheets.
She claws out the desk drawers. She throws staplers and glue sticks and pens and gets ink on the duvet.
Then she finds it. A stained wood box at the back of Lavinia’s bookshelf.
An envelope.
A pack of letters.
* * *
—
There are things it is better for a person not to know. The day and the manner of your own death, that’s one, or whether or not you’re going to fuck your mother and kill your father. What people say behind your back. The names somebody you love has called somebody else. There’s a reason people are able to function, in this world, as social creatures, and a good part of that reason is that there are a lot of questions intelligent people don’t ask.
* * *
—
Rex wrote Lavinia two hundred letters in four years.
Most of them are from when they were sixteen, seventeen, eighteen—before they went off to school. He wrote them with quill pens, green ink. He sealed them—the wax is still there, if broken, on some of the edges.
They are awkward. They are pretentious. They are filled with literary allusions Louise already knows, many misquoted. He doesn’t even write well.
They are the most beautiful letters Louise has ever read.
She tells herself she will only read one: My dear Lavinia, what a pleasure it was to see the Klimt exhibit at the Neue Galerie this afternoon—she doesn’t know why she’s not laughing, but all she can think about is walking through the Devonshire woods with Virgil Bryce, holding his hand, smoking American Spirits, staring blankly ahead, until he turns to her and says well if you want it so goddamn badly…
I didn’t know, Rex wrote to Lavinia, the night after they lost their virginities to each other in a Flatiron fleabag, that people could feel as strongly as this.
* * *
—
I’m scared, Rex tells Lavinia, the night before he went off to college, that the real world is going to destroy us.
I’m scared nothing in the world will ever mean as much to me as this.
Louise stays up all night, reading them.
He wrote her about the places they will go, that they will never go to, and Louis
e cannot see Lavinia’s answers but she can imagine them—they are written on her heart, and in the lines on the palms of her hands.
I want to really live, Lavinia says, in every letter that Louise cannot read. All I want is to live.
She falls asleep at dawn, on Lavinia’s floor, with the letters spread out in all directions: like a mandala, like a halo.
* * *
—
Lavinia posts a Facebook status about how much she loves the countryside.
Lavinia withdraws another five hundred dollars from her bank account, at a sketchy bodega in Inwood, near the van.
She’s wearing sunglasses.
* * *
—
Louise gets through the week.
Lavinia is having the most wonderful time upstate. Lavinia is doing yoga. Lavinia is going to the contemporary art museum in Beacon and posting all about Louise Bourgeois’s spider and how it made her think about anger in a new way. Lavinia is learning to embrace what she cannot change. Lavinia is discovering inner peace.
Louise sits in the apartment, reading letters, trying not to throw them across the room.
* * *
—
The night of Hal’s Fourth of July party, Rex texts Louise to tell her that the party is black-tie.
Sorry, he says, Hal only just decided.
All Louise has are Lavinia’s clothes.
* * *
—
Lavinia has so many dresses. Louise knew this already, of course, but she has never quite appreciated how many. She has never gone into Lavinia’s closet and rubbed her face into the silk and the damask and the velvet of every single one. There’s vintage and there’s black-tie and there are elegant conservative cocktail dresses. Louise has never, ever seen Lavinia wear short and well-tailored dresses, the kind you wear with pearls.
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