Social Creature

by Tara Isabella Burton

  It’s the happiest ending, Louise tells herself, that she ever would have had.

  7

  LAVINIA TURNS HER LIFE AROUND.

  She posts photographs of sunrises over the East River, of morning skies, of birds in Central Park. She uses ClassPass every single day (you can tell this because the app uploads it to Facebook, when she goes), mostly to go to different iterations of yoga class, and from time to time she uploads a picture of her ever-leaner body—always with her tattoo visible—although you generally cannot see her face. She posts pictures of healthy meals (they are mostly green; many of them are juice). She posts one status about how she’s going to give up drinking for a month or two, just to get healthy, just to prove to herself that she can. She updates her friends on her progress every day with an inspirational quote or two.

  Nearly everybody Lavinia knows Likes it.

  “I’m really proud of her,” Louise says, when people ask, which is not as often as you might think, given how many people Liked it. “Of course, I miss her at parties. But I think she’s doing the right thing, don’t you?”

  * * *

  —

  There are lots of places that Lavinia goes that you’d know about: if you look at Facebook (if you follow the paper trail). She takes out cash two or three times a week, always her max. If you were ever to go look at the camera footage, for whatever reason, you would always see a very beautiful girl in vintage clothes and sunglasses and wine-dark lips get cash out at the ATM. She goes every morning to her ClassPass classes, like every other rich blonde white girl in New York City nobody ever scrutinizes too closely, and the record of this attendance, too, is synchronized with the app and goes on Facebook. She goes to brunch, sometimes, and to bars where she orders seltzer (you cannot be too careful) and always, always, pays with a credit card, and always, always, leaves a memorable tip. She texts Mimi, from time to time, to say I miss you let’s hang out soon, and Mimi always says—immediately!—yes, when? but there’s always a scheduling conflict, and they say next week and then never make concrete plans.

  If you found her on Facebook, too, you’d know she made so many new, wonderful friends, many of whose profiles are locked or whose photographs are blurry, but who frequently check in with her at vegan bars or health-food spas or meditation centers on Jefferson Avenue in Bushwick and post long, thoughtful comments on her wall about how good it was to see her the other night, and how they can’t wait to hang out again soon!

  There are the photos of her on Facebook, too.

  These are, admittedly, not as frequent as they once were (Photoshop, it turns out, is actually very difficult to learn), and a lot of photos are blurry or vague, or involve her turned away from the camera at a distance while in a very elaborate costume (you can ascribe that to a natural flair for drama; even sober Lavinia wears the same clothes drunk Lavinia always did). But they come at intervals, and when they come everybody Likes them, and comments on how great she’s been looking lately.

  * * *

  —

  Lavinia tells her parents she is doing very well, too.

  Dear Mother and Father (she writes),

  I hope you’re well. You’re right. I think I’ll be ready to go back to school, soon. My novel is almost finished. If there’s any way I could have just a little more time, I’d love to be able to complete it and submit it to agents and I’m happy to supply pages of a sample chapter to show you to give you confidence in my abilities and dedication (Louise hopes Lavinia won’t have to do this, but she’s prepared to make it happen if she does).

  Lavinia points out very cleverly that a large gap on her collegiate CV will be much better explained by a sold novel than by nothing at all.

  This seems to mollify them. They tell her she can have one more semester, but that’s all.

  They tell her Paris is very pleasant, this time of year.

  They remind her, vaguely but firmly, not to embarrass them at parties. They hope she’s not wearing any of her ridiculous clothes again. They remind her how beautiful she is—too beautiful, they say, to waste that body and that hair and that face on outlandish and grotesque creations that will only have other people mocking her.

  They remind her how important it is for her to be a good influence on Cordelia.

  After all, they do not say directly, but heavily imply, Cordelia still has a future.

  * * *

  —

  Sure, there are challenges.

  Like the fact that Louise can only leave the house very early in the morning, or very late at night—times Mrs. Winters, or any other less-perspicacious neighbors would be less likely to open the door, or look down the hall. Lavinia has taken to ordering from Seamless with her credit card—a different restaurant every time—and opening her door just a crack for the delivery guy when he comes. Like the fact that a few times a week Louise has to take selfies where her face isn’t visible, and that means spending several hours with the curling iron, wrapping her hair into tiny strands around her fingertips and setting them so that they look long and savage and untamed. Like the texts Louise has to keep sending—to Mimi, to Cordelia—keeping things so wonderfully vague, coming up with such bohemian and adventurous reasons why she doesn’t want to come to Paris for the tail end of summer, or to Cordelia’s starring role in Antigone up at Exeter in September, or to this amazing taxidermy-and-wax museum hidden in a Brooklyn cinema that Mimi wants to go to in October. Or the time the pipe bursts, and Louise stays up all night to fix it herself, with instructions she has found on Google, so that Lavinia will not have to call the super.

  But Louise meets every single challenge.

  * * *

  —

  She tells herself, at first, that this arrangement is only temporary. She saves almost all of the money she takes out of Lavinia’s account. She buys a fake ID from a bodega near NYU that gives her name as Elizabeth Glass (twenty-three) and has a photo of a middling-pretty white girl with red hair she could almost look like, and keeps it, along with a duffel bag and a change of clothes, at the foot of her bed, for the day that everything goes wrong. But here’s the thing: that day doesn’t come.

  * * *

  —

  In fact, Louise has never been better.

  She is writing for The Fiddler again (she has so much free time to write, now that she does not have to worry about teaching, or ghostwriting, or tending bar, now that she takes so much of Lavinia’s money). She writes book reviews and essays about Devonshire. Gavin talks her into writing about the time she faked being a student, because it was such a hit at Hal’s birthday, and she does, and everybody on the Internet thinks it’s hilarious, too. And then she starts writing for print because after Hal’s party Louise goes with Gavin to India’s birthday at Soho House and that’s where she meets the print editor who is actually India’s father, as it happens, and he gives her his card and says “email me, sometime.” She is writing for both The New Misandrist and Misandry!, even though the editors don’t speak. She writes a short story about an art thief who steals a painting but becomes convinced it’s a forgery, which is an idea she and Lavinia talked about, one time, while blasting Wagner, and Louise can’t remember whether it was she or Lavinia who came up with the idea, or maybe both of them, but she supposes it doesn’t really matter now. She sends this short story to a literary magazine called The Egret, where Beowulf Marmont interns.

  She tries not to think of the nights she and Lavinia decided to cowrite on the divan; the nights Lavinia grabbed her wrist and said “we will be great, Louise, both of us” and Louise said yes, yes, and believed it.

  Louise starts reviewing opera for The Fiddler, because she asks Gavin if she can, and so she gets free press tickets.

  * * *

  —

  Sometimes, it’s like Lavinia isn’t even dead.

  Sometimes, Louise forgets.

  Sometimes, in Rex�
��s arms, with Rex kissing her and inventing new, sweet names for her, Louise lets herself believe that everything Lavinia posts is true.

  Now Lavinia is reading Edna St. Vincent Millay, she thinks.

  Now she is making chocolate-hazelnut-coconut-saffron tea and spilling it.

  Now she is out with her wonderful friends, not-drinking at a wonderful party.

  Now she is smiling: that beautiful and world-destroying smile.

  Louise can see it when she closes her eyes.

  * * *

  —

  In the mornings, if Rex doesn’t have class, they go to Mud down the street for breakfast and eat enormous plates of eggs and hold hands and talk about their plans for the day. Louise invents some SAT clients and they walk through Tompkins Square Park and point out all the dogs they think are adorable and Rex talks about what he’s studying. She spends at least four nights a week at his place (of course, he can never come to hers), and she frames it as giving Lavinia space but the funny thing, or maybe not the funny thing but the thing that shakes her most, is that he believes her.

  * * *

  —

  There’s just one little thing.

  Rex never mentions the voicemail.

  In fact, he never brings up Lavinia again.

  Louise goes to great syntactical lengths to avoid saying her name, and often says things like oh, you know when describing her day. Rex never asks.

  She thinks that it is so strange he would not mention it, after how guilty he has felt, even though sometimes she tries to bring up the subject without bringing up Lavinia. “Getting closure is so good, don’t you think,” she says, after she tells the actually-very-funny story of this guy who ghosted her, once, only for her to stand him up at Prospect Park two years later, and he smiles and nods and squeezes her hand but doesn’t say what she wants him to.

  Come to think of it: the only time Lavinia comes up at all is when Louise is riffling through her purse, one night, and the keys fall out.

  “She let you have them?”

  The way he says she frightens her, a little, because it’s so reverential. Even now.

  “She finally copied me a set,” Louise says, like it’s nothing, like Lavinia is just an ordinary normal slightly flawed somewhat-neurotic human being who has gone to a lot of therapy, lately, and who cannot hurt them.

  * * *

  —

  There’s another thing, too. Also very small.

  Rex has unblocked Lavinia on Facebook.

  He hasn’t friended her, but he shows up on the People You May Know sidebar, which means he’s taken her off his banned list, so she could see him, and add him, if she wants to.

  She doesn’t want to.

  * * *

  —

  Louise isn’t jealous. She doesn’t need to be. She and Rex are so happy. She is the perfect girlfriend. She knows because she has read every single letter Rex has ever written Lavinia that Rex loves picnics, and they have gone on so many picnics that summer, and in September, too. She knows that he loves jazz and so they have gone to the Jazz Age Lawn Party, and to Zinc Bar in the West Village every couple of weeks. She knows he loves Korean food and she surprises him for his birthday in October by taking him to this wonderful high-end place in Hell’s Kitchen. She even pays, even though the place is very expensive—she insists on paying—in cash, as it happens, because it has been so long and Louise thinks probably she will not have to run tomorrow, or this week, or the next.

  She tries not to think too much about the expression on his face when she asked him to go to the Neue Galerie with her, or the way he looked at her when she came to Hal’s party, wearing Lavinia’s dress.

  * * *

  —

  It’s just that sometimes—not often, just sometimes—Rex will do something or say something that makes Louise wonder if he is still thinking about her. He’ll say something idle—like at the Chelsea Market, one time, he mentioned he liked peach jam—and then Louise will get to thinking (because she has read every letter he has ever written) that he and Lavinia once had peach jam at a French café called Bergamot in Chelsea, sometime, and Louise will wonder whether right now, with his hand in hers and his mouth on her cheek or forehead or shoulder, he is thinking about her.

  * * *

  —

  Like this one time, in early autumn.

  It’s a beautiful Sunday in October and Rex has just started the second year of his degree. They are sitting in Rex’s apartment, and they are being boring (they have already had sex, and drank beer, and watched The Third Man on Netflix), and Rex is looking out the window and half-working on a seminar essay, and Louise is flipping idly through records for something to put on.

  They listen to classical music, because Rex likes classical music, and Louise has started to appreciate it, too.

  They listen to La Traviata and Berlioz and Chopin. Louise does the dishes in Rex’s sink. Louise wipes their take-out kimchi off his kitchenette counter.

  She isn’t even thinking about Lavinia. If she lets herself think she lets herself think only of Lavinia the way everyone else thinks of Lavinia (into her fourth month of sobriety, now, getting really into the mystical writings of Simone Weil). She is so good at not thinking about what she has done.

  So when the music comes on, and it is slow and dark and mournful and romantic, and there are those sustained three notes which sound a little like a wail, Louise thinks at first that the song sounds familiar without remembering what song it is, and even when she realizes, slowly, more certain with each bar, that it is Liszt’s third Liebestraum, she does not panic. The piano stumbles higher, and lower, and softer, and darker, and Louise does not think Rex and Lavinia lost their virginity to each other in a Flatiron motel, thinking about this song (or maybe, maybe, maybe she does), but she doesn’t think it out loud until she sees Rex’s face.

  He is very, very pale. He is biting his lip.

  He looks, Louise thinks, like he has seen a ghost.

  “Hey, Louise?”

  He does such a good job pretending it doesn’t bother him. Louise can see right through him.

  “Do you mind turning that off?”

  “Sure,” says Louise.

  * * *

  —

  She stands in the kitchen doorway. She watches his face. She watches him fidget and stare down at his laptop and his Loeb copy of Medea and then look up again at the speaker and turn paler, and even though Louise feels the adrenaline so sharp in her she thinks she may never sleep again, she doesn’t move.

  She feels a strange, sick power in not moving. She feels like she’s proving something to him.

  “For Christ’s sake!”

  It is the only time Rex has ever been annoyed with her.

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing. Nothing. It’s just—I’m trying to work, okay?”

  Louise is impeccably swift, sailing to the speakers.

  “Okay,” she says. She kills the music.

  * * *

  —

  Of course, Rex does not love Lavinia. Rex has spent so much time not loving Lavinia, escaping Lavinia, moving on from Lavinia.

  That is precisely why he has chosen Lavinia’s roommate, who has nothing to do with Lavinia, to love.

  “Thank you,” says Rex, when the music stops.

  He kisses her forehead.

  “You’re wonderful,” he says, and she says, “You too.”

  * * *

  —

  You’d be surprised how easy it is for time to go by: just like this. When you don’t work, except for your pieces for The Fiddler and The Egret and the various iterations of Misandry! When you spend your nights holding someone. When you take early morning fitness classes in the name of the girl you’ve killed.

  Except that you know, you know the thing about Louise. It�
�s this: she always, always, fucks it up.

  Here is how:

  * * *

  —

  Louise uses Lavinia’s credit card, sometimes. You know that part. She goes to the places Lavinia goes and makes her presence known, there, in Lavinia’s clothes (just in case), in makeup, in sunglasses.

  But one night in December Louise gets lazy. She is tired and she wants a drink and she is upset because Rex has asked her to watch Brideshead Revisited even though he must know Lavinia well enough to know how much she loved it, and so instead of going to a vegan bar or a place that does very expensive tea Louise goes to Bemelmans, again, to wait until it’s late enough that she doesn’t have to worry about Mrs. Winters seeing her come in, and slides Lavinia’s credit card to Timmy (it has been four months, remember, and nobody has even noticed that Lavinia is dead, so maybe, maybe, nobody cares at all).

  Louise sits alone at Bemelmans. She drinks a glass of prosecco, and then another. She wears Lavinia’s 1940s dress, the little black crepe one, the one she wears with a little ’40s velvet bolero with gold embroidery on it and angular shoulder pads, and a black wicker fascinator with a daffodil on it, and Lavinia’s burgundy lipstick, which looks so beautiful on her, and also Lavinia’s perfume—even though there isn’t an alibi in the world that necessitates smelling like a dead person, even though the bottle is running out. She drinks until she’s drunk enough to face going home.