I’m sorry things have been stressful lately, he says. Let’s do something special, okay?
Louise tells Cordelia she has a date with a guy she met online.
“He’s probably a serial killer,” says Cordelia, without looking up from her work.
* * *
—
Louise dresses up in the only dress she has that Cordelia will not notice belongs to Lavinia, which is too big for her now and also made of cheap polyester and which she bought at Housing Works for twenty dollars two years ago, and which at the time was the nicest thing she had ever owned.
Rex has texted her: an address, a time.
It’s a surprise, he says, with a smiley face so she knows he is not angry at her, this time.
* * *
—
It’s a secret cocktail bar in Williamsburg with only three chairs, one of which is for the bartender.
He has dressed up for her—his blazer is darker than usual, and less creased. He leaps up when she comes in (even though she is wearing such a frumpy dress, such an ugly and oversized dress) and when his eyes rest on her she wonders if it is because he thinks she is beautiful, tonight, or because he has finally figured out that this is just what she looks like when she is not being Lavinia.
“You look nice,” he says, which doesn’t clarify anything.
Louise has spent an hour looking in the mirror this evening.
I look thirty, she thinks, and it baffles her that he does not know this.
They don’t talk about Lavinia. They don’t talk about Cordelia. They talk about the weather and Rex’s seminar papers and some of the qualifying exams he’ll have to take, soon, and what he thinks of his professors and this amazing living-Latin program he wants to do in Rome next summer. They talk about Hal and how he’s dating India, now, and how he’s decided already that she is the girl he’s going to marry, without asking her what she thinks of it. They talk about Louise’s pieces for The Fiddler and how Gavin thinks she has a real shot at being one of The Fiddler’s Five Under Thirty, which Rex seems to find impressive.
They talk, Louise thinks, like any other boring couple in this city who only have sex two or three times a week.
They talk like Rex has never dated the kind of woman who sets shit on fire, or stands naked at the water’s edge at the dawn of the New Year.
They have Korean-Mexican fusion. They have red wine. Rex pays.
After, he asks her to take a walk with him. They do.
It is all very sweet. It is all very ordinary. They walk, hand in hand, through the snow, down Bleecker, then through Washington Square Park, then back down to Chinatown. The stars stud the sky and Rex’s ears get red when they are cold, as they do when he is nervous or embarrassed. All of a sudden Louise starts to feel intensely sure that the only reason they’re walking so romantically in the moonlight is because he doesn’t want to fuck her (not in that dress; maybe not ever).
He hums softly as they pass Doyers Street.
She takes his hand. She pulls him down the alley, which is unlit and dark and cobblestoned and where mobsters used to commit murder, once upon a time (Lavinia once said), because nobody could see you there.
He laughs. He follows her.
She pushes him up against the wall. She kisses him so hard she bites his lip.
She kisses him so hard he gasps.
He looks so confused when she pulls away.
He should not be so surprised, Louise thinks; he should be used to this by now. This is exactly what Lavinia would have done.
She kisses him again, harder this time, and slides her hand up the inside of his thigh, feels his cock (it is not yet hard; this is on her).
She draws away. She looks at him.
“What are you doing?” He’s laughing as he asks her, but he means it.
“Come on,” she says. “Nobody will see” (everybody wants to fuck the crazy ones, that’s the whole point).
“I want you,” she says.
And he’s still laughing, a little, like this part is ridiculous. Is it the dress? Is it because she’s thirty? Is it because Cordelia has said nobody will ever forget Lavinia and because she is right? Louise kisses him harder, so hard, she thinks, that she even means to hurt him, because if she can’t make him want her she can at least make him afraid of her, just a little, and because if she cannot be Lavinia she might as well be a whore (you’re not the woman I’m going to marry, Hal had said to Athena, so easily, like she’d ever fuck him if it weren’t for the Dakota), and she kisses him harder and harder and says I want you to fuck me in his ear. Finally, he gets hard, and it’s only when he grabs her wrist, when his breath gets ragged, that he moans in that sharp and desperate way that means she has power over him, when he gets rough with her in that way that means that she has power over him, that she pulls away.
He pulls her back.
She wants to savor him wanting her like this forever.
He pushes her up against a wall, hikes up her skirt and pulls aside her panties, and now Louise isn’t sure which of them is initiating it, whether she has tricked him into wanting her (she has gotten so good, now, at that part) or whether all along this is just what he wants because he’s a man. He feels her up underneath the skirt of her dress (this I have done before; Louise thinks; all this, all this I have done before) and Louise starts to whisper to him all the things that a woman you’d want to fuck would say, and she doesn’t know if she means them or she just wants to be the woman who makes men hear them but she tells him, right in his ear, that she wants him, that she needs him, that she is wet and needs him to take her home right now, and he is hers, now, hearing it; he gets rougher, hearing it, and then without thinking she tells him she wants him to fuck her in the ass.
“What?”
He says it like this isn’t something every single straight man dreams of.
He pulls away to look at her.
“Nothing,” Louise says, “never mind.”
“But—”
“Keep going,” she says, and they start to stumble over each other and get in each other’s way and their bodies don’t fit, and then Rex says “Fuck it, let’s get a cab” and they cab it back to Rex’s place (Louise pays) and Rex fucks her, just like every other time he’s fucked her. He burrows into her shoulder and buries his face into her hair like he’s hiding from something, like the crook of her arm is his harbor. She clings to him, too, and thinks this has to be enough, and he starts getting so rough with her that she thinks I have driven him mad and she half-wants him to get rougher, still, just to prove that this is a thing she is capable of doing to a person, but he’s not even looking at her—he’s thrusting so hard it hurts but he’s not even looking at her—and maybe because she means it or maybe to shock him or maybe to make him notice her Louise says I love you, I love you, just as he comes.
He kisses her forehead.
He rolls off her.
“I need you,” he whispers. He kisses her shoulder.
Louise doesn’t sleep that night, either.
* * *
—
“Did you have sex with him?” says Cordelia, when Louise gets home the next day. “Your serial killer?” She’s fully dressed at nine in the morning, in a dowdy little skirt and a turtleneck. She’s reading.
“That’s none of your business,” says Louise.
“Why?”
“Because you’re seventeen.”
“The age of consent in plenty of places is sixteen,” says Cordelia. “Anyway, I waited up for you.”
“Why?”
“I was worried. In case he was a serial killer and he’d chained you up in a basement.”
“How would you know?”
“Well, you wouldn’t have come home.” She raises her chin. “Was that the first time you met him?”
“I’m taking a
shower,” says Louise.
“I’m not trying to intrude,” says Cordelia. “I’m just curious. Can you really have sex with somebody you’ve just met?”
She follows Louise to the bathroom door.
Louise closes the door. She takes off her clothes.
“Aren’t you afraid?” Cordelia’s voice is muffled through the door.
“Of what?”
“I don’t know. Diseases? Getting hurt?”
Louise steps into the shower. She turns up the heat so it scalds.
* * *
—
Cordelia spends her days studying, and texting Lavinia, who rarely responds.
“You don’t have to worry,” Cordelia says, three days before Christmas. “I mean—about leaving me alone. I don’t drink and I don’t do drugs and I don’t do anything, really. So you can go home, if you want to. I’ll just stay and wait for Vinny. I’m not going home.”
“Why not?”
There is such a great space in the living room, where the steamer trunk once was.
“Why aren’t you going home?”
“I don’t like my parents very much,” says Cordelia, so simply.
“Well, I don’t like my parents very much, either,” says Louise.
“Why not?”
Louise shrugs. “I don’t think they really like me.”
She says it like it’s a joke.
“Why don’t your parents like you?”
Back when Louise went to therapy (she ran out of money for therapy, and also didn’t really trust her therapist), she spent a lot of time developing mantras like people express love in different ways and concern can sometimes translate into criticism and letting your children go out in the world is a difficult process, but now that she thinks about it that’s probably bullshit.
“I don’t make enough of an effort,” Louise says.
“That’s what Mother always says about me, too. But she likes me.” She swings her legs up onto the divan. “That’s why I don’t like her. She likes me better than Vinny—and that isn’t fair. You should love all people equally.” She winks. “It’s really the only Christian thing to do.”
“Are you really religious?”
Cordelia plays with the tassels on the throw pillow. “At the beginning,” she said. “Maybe I just liked to annoy Vinny. When she was a very terrible pagan I used to tell her I’d pray for her soul.” She considers. “But I think I believe it, now.” She leans her hand on her cheek. “The more I read,” Cordelia says, “the more it’s the only thing that makes sense to me. If God doesn’t exist—this world would be too terrible for words.”
* * *
—
“Look at this!”
She shows Louise her phone.
Lavinia is at the Grand Canyon. Her shadow fades into the rock.
“Have you ever been to the Grand Canyon, Lulu?”
“No.”
“Me neither.” Cordelia blows up the photo to make it bigger. “I’m not really very adventurous. Do you know—I’ve never even disobeyed my parents, before this week? I’m the good daughter, you see. Look—isn’t it beautiful?”
“Lovely.”
“I tell Vinny all the time—it’s not good to be so frivolous. She should go back to school. She’ll regret it when she’s older, if she doesn’t. Only, Lulu?” She takes a deep breath. “How long does it take to drive to the Grand Canyon?”
“Five days” (Louise has Googled this). “Why?”
“You don’t think…”
“No.”
“We could rent a car! And we could go and surprise her! Or we could fly—if we flew, we could be there by Christmas!”
Louise keeps her eyes on the photo, so she doesn’t have to look at Cordelia’s face.
“We can’t do that,” she says.
“Why not? Vinny’s always doing crazy, impulsive things—why can’t we? And look—it’s beautiful out there!”
“Because she’s with her friends, Cordelia.”
“So? Vinny likes me better than any friend she’s ever had—I’m sorry, Louise, but it’s true—there’s no way she wouldn’t want me there! She’d be thrilled to see us both!”
* * *
—
Louise closes her eyes.
“We can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because.”
“Because why!”
“Because she doesn’t want you there!”
Cordelia looks like Louise has just slapped her.
Cordelia doesn’t say anything.
She puts her hands in her lap. She folds them. She is very quiet for a while.
“Hey, Lulu?”
“What?”
“Do you want to get a Christmas tree?”
* * *
—
Their first and only Christmas in New York, Virgil and Louise bought one of those potted-plant firs they could keep on the kitchen counter, which was the apartment’s only real surface, because they didn’t have space for anything bigger, except they kept arguing over who would take care of it and the thing died without either of them noticing even though they’re supposed to be evergreen and that, Virgil said, was proof that Louise should never be a mother.
* * *
—
Cordelia and Louise go to the guy on Seventy-ninth and Third.
They jack up the prices, so close to Christmas Eve, but Louise pays, anyway, with one hundred of the eight hundred or so dollars she has left.
Louise offers to pay for the guy to deliver it, but Cordelia insists that you haven’t earned a tree if you haven’t at least dragged it with your own two hands and so the two of them lug it all the way back to Lavinia’s house.
They spend the afternoon decorating it. They don’t have ornaments so they decorate it with detritus of Lavinia’s: tarot cards, crystals, peacock feathers, erotic statuettes.
“I suppose it’s not really sacrilegious,” Cordelia says. “Christmas trees are pagan, anyhow.”
Cordelia puts Lavinia’s present under the tree.
“I want it to be waiting for her when she gets back,” Cordelia says.
* * *
—
That night, after they go to bed, Cordelia calls Lavinia.
She calls her four or five times, and Louise huddles up in bed and watches the phone go off, and go to voicemail, and lets it go, and doesn’t say anything either.
Cordelia leaves so many voicemails: pleasepickuppleasepickuppleasepickup.
Louise can hear them through the bedroom wall.
On the sixth call, Lavinia answers.
Louise has gone out the fire escape. She’s gone all the way up to the roof.
“What is it, darling? Is it catastrophe?”
Louise is shaking, doing it, even though she’s been doing it so long.
“Vinny!”
Cordelia’s voice trembles.
“Vinny—I’ve been trying to call for days!”
“Darling, tell me you’re not still in New York. I’m so sorry, Cordy—you should be furious with me; really, you should; it’s just that Nerissa wants to make it all the way to Big Sur and I really, truly, think we could—”
“I need you!”
Louise can hear Cordelia three flights up.
“Cordy, please, be reasonable—”
“Just come home, okay?”
“I’m sorry, darling, you know I’d love to, but—”
“Please!”
“I’m so sorry. Look, Cordy—the others are all here—”
“Please!”
“I have to go.”
Louise hangs up the phone.
She tiptoes so quietly downstairs. She sneaks so quietly in back through the window.
She gets so quietly back into bed.
She can hear Cordelia in the other room, quietly sobbing.
* * *
—
Cordelia doesn’t mention it to Louise.
She is impeccable, the next morning, which is Christmas Eve. It’s like she hasn’t even been crying at all. She gets up before Louise does, cleans the house, makes breakfast.
* * *
—
“I’ll probably go back to Paris soon,” Cordelia says. “You must be quite sick of me.”
“Not at all,” says Louise.
She forces down some coffee.
“I suppose we should do something for Christmas. Maybe Midnight Mass? There’s one I want to go to at St. John the Divine—I know it’s Protestant, but I really like the music there…”
“I’m sorry,” Louise says. “I have plans.”
She and Rex planned it weeks ago. Henry Upchurch is throwing his annual Christmas Eve party. He’s rented a room at the Yale Club, like he does every year. She and Rex have not gone to a party in so long. They’re getting so dull.
“Oh,” says Cordelia. “Of course you do. You probably have a lot of friends.”
She shrugs. “That’s fine. I don’t mind going by myself. It’s a religious holiday, anyhow. It’s good to focus on, you know, God and things.”
“I’m sorry,” says Louise. “I said I’d go before you even got here.”
“Of course,” says Cordelia. “I mean—you don’t owe me anything.” She swallows. “You hardly even know me. It’s Vinny who—” She stops herself. She turns back to her book. It’s Hildegard of Bingen, this time.
Louise can’t stand this.
“Look,” she says. “Why don’t you come?”
“Where?”
“It’s a party. At the Yale Club. It’s—it’s Henry Upchurch’s Christmas party.”
“Oh,” says Cordelia. “I don’t think his books are very good.”
Louise has actually never bothered to read any of Henry Upchurch’s books.
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