Social Creature

by Tara Isabella Burton

  “He was joking—you know how he is.”

  “I do know! He’s an asshole!”

  “You have to get to know him.” Then: “You don’t just go around slapping people.”

  “Why not?”

  “I—” Rex sighs. “People just don’t do such things.”

  “Lavinia would!”

  Louise doesn’t mean to say that, either.

  She hasn’t said Lavinia’s name out loud in so long.

  It feels good, strangely, to say it.

  Rex looks like she’s hit him.

  “I’m sorry,” Louise says. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

  How stupid are you, she thinks, to make him think of her right now.

  * * *

  —

  “You’re right,” Rex says. He says it like it chokes him. “She would.”

  He hails a cab. He doesn’t invite her in it.

  “When you get home, tell her.” He swallows. “Tell her I say hi.”

  He leaves her alone on the street as the cab drives away.

  * * *

  —

  Louise walks home through Central Park.

  * * *

  —

  And Louise thinks: if Lavinia were here, we would laugh at everybody—at Rex and his cowardice, at Athena with the lipstick on her teeth and her disappearing accent and her two Ds, death and death, at Hal (“a mental Habsburg!” Lavinia had called him), just like the night at the High Line, where they set everything on fire, where they shouted names, when they were gods.

  Louise hates how much she misses her, sometimes.

  * * *

  —

  Louise and Rex make up, via text, but it’s one of those stopgap let’s not fight about this texts that nobody feels good about sending or receiving, and Rex has finals for this semester so he’s pretty booked up that week, and Louise is almost relieved.

  She doesn’t do a lot that week.

  She gets up early to go to 6 a.m. ClassPass classes—yoga, strength training, barre. She peers down the hall. She avoids Mrs. Winters.

  Or she doesn’t get up at all and stays in bed, answering Lavinia’s emails, telling Cordelia not to worry about AP Latin because she’s so clever she’ll pass with flying colors, anyway, and that she’s sorry she won’t make it to Paris for Christmas break, either, but she hopes Cordelia has a wonderful time and enjoys the stained glass in all the Gothic churches on the Left Bank, around St.-Germain.

  Or she reads and rereads Rex’s letters, in bed, in Lavinia’s powder-blue dressing gown (Rex writes about this, too; one time, he tells Lavinia how beautiful she looks in it).

  Or she answers the calls of her own parents. They’re proud of how beautiful she looks, and how thin. They tell her they photocopied the Fiddler piece that ran in print and Louise’s mother took it to book club, and Louise’s mother grunts and says, “Everybody’s real surprised.”

  Still, Louise’s mother reminds her, she can’t do this forever. At some point she should probably come home, before it’s too late to start over.

  “You’re almost thirty,” Louise’s mother says, and reminds her that her fertility will soon decline.

  * * *

  —

  Athena sends her a text that week.

  Hey hunny, she says.

  Turns out I’m a little short on rent this month.

  I know you’ve got such a good thing going maybe you can Venmo me like $200 maybe?

  Just to help a friend out!

  Xxx

  Louise does.

  * * *

  —

  A few days later Louise runs out of Lavinia’s perfume.

  She tells herself that she needs it. She can’t leave anything to chance.

  So she goes down to the East Village, one night, to East Fourth Street (she thinks about calling Rex, asking to come over, but that is a thing desperate, clingy girlfriends do and Louise is neither of those things), to the little fragrance shop where Lavinia keeps her recipe, which she has named Sehnsucht, on file.

  The woman behind the counter shuffles through a stack of index cards, down to the Ws.

  “Wilson?”

  “Williams.”

  She takes out the card. She gathers up the oils: lavender, tobacco, fig, pear. She mixes them.

  They are so much stronger, here, than they are at the bottom of Lavinia’s vial—aged, distilled. Every jar is overpowering.

  “Give me your hand,” the woman says, because the whole point of the fragrance shop is that you’re supposed to mix them on your skin. She dabs droplets of oils against Louise’s wrist, shakes the mixture and then rolls it against Louise’s palm, and then her neck, and when she does this the smell is so overpowering that for a second Louise thinks that this has all been a trick, that Lavinia must be behind her, with her hand on Louise’s hand and the MORE POETRY!!! tattoo against hers. She has not realized until now how strongly it smells, and how she must have been smelling it all the time. Maybe now she is just inventing it, but Louise bursts into tears in the middle of the store. The woman puts down the beakers and the eyedroppers and asks if she should call a doctor, and it is all Louise can do to shake her head, and close her eyes, and sob.

  She doesn’t call Rex that night.

  She is afraid to go home until she is sure Mrs. Winters is asleep, so instead she walks all the way home up First Avenue, and tries not to think about the fact that this, too, is something she and Lavinia used to do.

  * * *

  —

  She doesn’t leave the house the next day. She locks the doors. She starts drinking at noon. She has worked her way through most of Lavinia’s liquor cabinets, by now, but there is some cheap gin left, and Louise drinks that, straight. She is hungry but she doesn’t even order in because now she is afraid to open the door. She is drunk and loses track of what time it is (she was supposed to write a piece for The Egret today, but she hasn’t done that, either).

  It’s dark. That’s all Louise knows. It’s dark outside and she hasn’t even bothered to turn the house lights on. She hasn’t even bothered to turn Lavinia’s phone on. It’s easier to pretend it doesn’t exist.

  It’s dark outside and then the buzzer goes off.

  Louise ignores it.

  If it’s someone else’s delivery guy, or a package guy, a Con Ed guy, or any other kind of guy, really, he’ll go away eventually.

  * * *

  —

  The buzzer sounds again.

  “Jesus Christ.”

  Again. Again. Again.

  She goes to the video screen.

  It’s Mimi.

  Her hair is unbrushed. Her lipstick’s smudged. She’s sobbing.

  “Lavinia!” she’s shouting into the intercom. “Lavinia—please, please, let me in!”

  It’s eight o’clock at night. Prime time for neighbors to come and go.

  “Lavinia!” Mimi screams.

  “Fuck.”

  Louise lets her in.

  * * *

  —

  Mimi is even worse up close.

  Her mascara is all over her face.

  “I’m sorry,” she sniffles. “I’ve been calling for hours—I can’t get through.”

  “Lavinia’s not here,” says Louise. “I’m sorry.”

  “Out with her cool new friends, huh?”

  “Yes,” says Louise.

  “Can—” Mimi swallows. “Can I come in anyway?”

  She hops from one foot to the other. Her fishnets are torn.

  She makes too much of a spectacle in the hallway.

  “Sure,” Louise says.

  * * *

  —

  It’s Beowulf Marmont.

  Mimi has been sleeping with him since the night of the Roméo et Ju
liette premiere, when he took her home, even though she was passed out, and had sex with her (“I mean,” she says, so brightly, “if I were conscious I would have had sex with him, anyway, so it’s not like I didn’t consent!”). He’d write her the sweetest texts. At Burning Man, Mimi explains, they even gave him the playa name “Hemingway,” that’s how good a writer people thought he was. He’s dating the girl with the fragile eyes, and he’d been up-front with her about that, which was so good of him all things considered, but, he’d said, it’s like that Fitzgerald quote, what was it, he climbs highest who climbs alone, and Beowulf Marmont had an Alpine peak to scale. If anyone was at his side, he’d said, it should be someone like Mimi—someone smart, who was beautiful in that rare, feminine way.

  “It was stupid,” Mimi says. “I’m stupid.”

  “You’re not stupid,” Louise says.

  Mimi is getting mascara all over the couch cushions.

  Louise has poured her ginger-turmeric-pineapple-champagne tea. Mimi drinks it with shaking hands.

  “He didn’t mean it.”

  Louise doesn’t know whether Mimi means he did not mean I was special or he did not mean to fuck me while I was unconscious but she nods, anyway, and rubs Mimi’s back while she cries.

  “I don’t know why I keep doing this,” says Mimi.

  Louise sighs.

  “You don’t have to,” Louise says. “You don’t have to put up with it—from anyone.”

  “Why not?” Mimi says, and Louise doesn’t really have an answer for her.

  * * *

  —

  Mimi swallows. Hard.

  “I know what everybody thinks of me.” She wipes her eyes with the back of her hand. “But what’s the alternative? Not loving the people you love?” She laughs a little. “Is that really what we’re supposed to do?”

  “I don’t know,” says Louise.

  “I thought, you know, that there was something beautiful in being the one left behind. Isn’t that how the poem goes? Let the more loving one be me? That’s not how it works here, is it? Whoever cares least, wins.” Mimi gulps. “Does she care about me?”

  Her eyes are so wide, and they are glassy with tears.

  Louise has the strangest compulsion to hold her.

  “No,” Louise says. “Probably not.”

  Mimi blinks.

  “What?”

  “Lavinia doesn’t care about anybody,” says Louise. “That’s why everybody who loves her, loves her.”

  “She cares about you.”

  “Lavinia cares about Lavinia,” Louise says. “That’s all.” She tries to find some kindness in that. “You deserve somebody who cares about you,” she says. “You deserve somebody who treats you like you treat them.”

  “So does everybody,” says Mimi. She shrugs. “I’m not, you know, added value. I don’t optimize anyone’s experience—Gavin told me that, once. That I wasn’t optimizing Lavinia’s experience, and that’s why she didn’t want me around. I’m sure he thought he was being helpful. Gavin usually thinks he’s being helpful.” She takes another sip of tea and laughs. “I’m not like you, Lulu” (nobody has called her Lulu in so long). “I’m not smart. I’m not a brilliant writer.”

  “I’m not a brilliant writer.”

  “But you are!” Mimi spills a little bit of tea into the saucer. “Believe me—I wanted you not to be. I remember when your first piece for The Fiddler came out I bookmarked it just so I could hate-read it. I thought I could at least enjoy you being bad at something. But that piece about the runaways—it was beautiful! And the one you wrote for The New Misandrist about polyamorous men—I loved that one.”

  “You read it?”

  Louise cannot remember Lavinia reading a single one of her stories.

  “I read everything you write.”

  Mimi is beaming.

  “I even put a Google Alert on your name,” Mimi says, “so I can read them as soon as they go up. Sorry. That probably makes me a stalker.”

  It probably does, but Louise doesn’t mind.

  “Do you think you’d ever write a novel?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Because I’d read it. If you ever did. I bet it would get published, too.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “Oh, it would!”

  And the way Mimi’s looking at Louise, with such wild surety, with such dog-like love, is exactly like Louise once looked at Lavinia, and Louise doesn’t know whether or not this means that Mimi is lying, now, or whether Louise was telling the truth, then, but didn’t know it.

  “You’re a better writer than Beowulf Marmont,” says Mimi. She finishes her tea. “I’m not saying that because he raped me. It’s true, either way.”

  * * *

  —

  “Come on,” says Louise. She slams the cup down on the saucer. “Let me buy you a drink.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. Let’s have one of those nights. Okay?”

  Mimi’s smile spreads like honey. “Okay.”

  * * *

  —

  Louise suggests that they go to this swing-dance night over in Hell’s Kitchen, because she remembers how much Mimi loves to dance and truth be told she hasn’t danced in ages, not since Lavinia, and Urban Foxes has an article in this week’s edition about a bar themed after the London Underground during the Blitz where they serve cocktails in repurposed pea cans, but Mimi doesn’t want to go near Times Square, not so soon after the Paris attacks, and so Louise takes Mimi down the block, to a boxy little gay piano saloon called Brandy’s halfway down a Yorkville side street, where they have wood paneling and ten-dollar well drinks and the guy at the piano plays Frank Sinatra. A stark and lonely sadness has branched into Louise’s spine tonight and she wants to be somewhere where there are other people singing.

  They sneak out of the apartment.

  “It’s like we’re secret agents,” Mimi whispers, when Louise explains about the co-op board, and then: “I remember. We used to have to sneak me all the time.”

  They take a selfie outside the bar.

  Out with my girl, Mimi captions it.

  Two dancing bears dancing with each other.

  * * *

  —

  Brandy’s isn’t really a Lavinia place. It’s not elegant or exciting. The only interesting thing that happens to them is that when the waiter pours Mimi and Louise two glasses of house wine there’s a little left over in the bottle, and the waiter tells them they can have it for free if they drink it straight from the neck, and everybody applauds them when Mimi does.

  “Do you miss her?” Mimi asks. “I mean—with her new friends. Her sober friends.” Mimi laughs. “Her successful, sober friends.”

  “All the time,” Louise says.

  “So do I,” says Mimi. She downs a little more wine. “Only—”

  “What?”

  “Sometimes, like—it’s like a relief, sometimes, you know, I miss her so much. But at least, you know, I don’t have to try so fucking hard anymore.” She orders another glass of wine. “I remember, when we were friends, I was so scared she’d figure out I was just, like, this nobody. That she might as well have, like, drawn my name out of a hat. If we hadn’t been at the same audition…”

  “Audition?”

  “She was an actress, when we met.” Mimi grins. “She didn’t tell you that, did she? Before she was a writer. She’d taken time off from Yale to pursue her stage career.”

  In the corner the pianist is singing “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.”

  “Who was I to her? A fat failed actress? Every time we went out, we had an adventure, I thought: tonight’s going to be the night she gets sick of me. And now I have nothing left to be afraid of, I guess.”

  Another round. Another toast.

&nb
sp; “I didn’t care about the money. She made you feel so special. Until she didn’t. I mean—as long as you played the game, right?”

  “Right,” says Louise.

  “It’s stupid. Sometimes I still feel that way—I mean, no offense. But I feel, sometimes, if I’d just, like, done better, been better, she’d have let me stay. If I’d just—played the game.”

  She starts to giggle.

  “Of course, the funny thing,” Mimi says. “Is she’s the one who fucked it up.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “No!” Mimi clasps a hand over her mouth. “I can’t.”

  “What is it.”

  “She’d kill me.”

  “I promise you,” says Louise. “I’ll never, ever, tell another living soul.”

  “It’s awful.” Mimi’s laugh sounds like little hummingbird noises in her mouth. “God—it’s so embarrassing. I can’t even.”

  “Say it.”

  Mimi takes a deep breath. “Okay. So you know—you know Lavinia’s big thing about Rex?”

  Louise just stares at her a second.

  “Of course—of course you do. But I mean, before. Lavinia’s whole thing—I’ve never had sex with another man.”

  “I remember.”

  “I mean—there’s a lot of loopholes, there. If you think it through.”

  “You mean—”

  “I think that’s why she liked us—sometimes. Maybe that’s mean. I mean—I think that’s an awful thing to say. But—I did wonder, sometimes. If she just uses us to, you know—fill a need, so that she never had to be, like, the person who wasn’t so special and so wonderful and so magical and so in love that she never let another man fuck her, again.”

  “The two of you—”

  “I don’t know,” says Mimi. “I don’t know what you call it. Maybe it was sex. For me, it was sex. But—I mean—I haven’t been straight since I was twelve. For her—maybe it wasn’t.”

  Louise hates that she’s a little bit jealous, even now.