Social Creature

by Tara Isabella Burton

  “You’re going to kill yourself, doing that.”

  Rex is standing with his hands in his pockets, away from the water.

  Louise doesn’t care.

  She rubs her skin until it’s raw.

  “Look—we’ll just call Lavinia,” Rex says. “It’s not hard. It’s not complicated. We just—we call Lavinia and we ask her to explain to her own fucking sister—”

  “That’s not going to happen,” Louise says.

  She is knee-deep in the water. She doesn’t understand why she is still so fucking hot.

  “Of course it will,” says Rex. “Lavinia’s not a bad person, she’s not going to try to fuck with us; she’ll tell Cordelia—”

  “Lavinia’s dead,” Louise says.

  * * *

  —

  Here’s another funny thing: Rex doesn’t believe her.

  He just stands there, so stupidly, gaping at her, opening and closing his mouth, like a fish.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” he says. “Of course she’s not dead.”

  “Believe me.” Louise gets deeper and deeper into the water. “She’s dead.”

  “She’s in California.”

  “No, she’s not.”

  “I just talked to her!”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “We just—”

  She turns around to face him. Her pantyhose are drenched. Her lipstick has smeared halfway down her chin.

  “No,” she says. “You really, really didn’t.”

  * * *

  —

  Rex still doesn’t get it.

  Louise marvels—she can’t stop marveling—at just how stupid he is.

  “Lavinia’s been dead since July,” she says.

  “That’s crazy,” Rex says. He says it a few times, as if repeating it will make it true. “Jesus—Lou—are you on something?”

  “We had a fight at the P.M. I killed her.”

  “What did you take?” It’s like he hasn’t even heard her. “Jesus Christ, Lou—tell me what you took! I’m—Christ—I’m calling an ambulance, okay?”

  It feels so good, how cold the water is.

  “We had a fight. Put your phone away.”

  It astonishes her how confusing he finds this.

  “What happened?”

  “I told you. We had a fight. She hit her head. I dumped her body in the East River.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  He’s stammering. “People don’t do things like that.”

  It’s almost funny, Louise thinks, how she could love someone so stupid.

  * * *

  —

  “It’s very simple,” Louise says. “I dumped her body in the East River. I’ve been posting on her Facebook every day for six months.” It gets easier and easier to say these things. “I get money from her ATM every week. I left you that voicemail. I can do her voice.”

  “Jesus!”

  Rex finally puts his phone down.

  Rex finally, finally believes her.

  “Jesus.”

  “Christ,” Louise says. “It’s freezing out here.”

  * * *

  —

  Louise is up to her hips in the water.

  She lets herself sob.

  She lets herself scream.

  * * *

  —

  Here’s, no here’s, the thing:

  All Rex has to do is understand her.

  All he has to do is say yes, I love you, I know why you have done this, you are not a bad person; you tried; what matters is that you tried.

  I love you. It’s so easy. That’s all he has to say. He’s said it before.

  * * *

  —

  “Fuck,” Rex says. It’s the first thing he says in a minute. “Fuck!” He looks at her so helplessly. “What do we do?”

  Louise doesn’t say anything.

  “For Christ’s sake—tell me what to do, Lou!”

  “Nothing,” Louise says. “There’s nothing to do. It’s done.”

  Rex takes so many deep breaths.

  Rex can’t speak. Rex can’t deal.

  “Look,” he stammers, when he can finally get out words. “We’ll go to the police, okay? Both of us. We’ll go and tell them it was an accident—Jesus—it was an accident, right?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “It wasn’t an accident?”

  Louise isn’t even sure anymore.

  “Christ, Lou, tell me it was an accident!”

  His eyes are so goddamn wide.

  Louise doesn’t.

  * * *

  —

  Rex is hyperventilating.

  He can’t even look at her.

  “You need to turn yourself in.”

  “There’s no point,” Louise says. “It won’t change anything. Lavinia’s dead.”

  “It’s the right thing to do!”

  “So?”

  He’s looking at her with such horror.

  He’s looking at her like he really, really knows her.

  * * *

  —

  Louise keeps her eyes on the horizon, on the point where the water is black and it meets the blackness of the sky. She has not noticed, before, how much salt water stings where somebody has clawed you, or slapped you, or yanked out your hair, how it feels like you are being flayed alive.

  It’s just nice to feel something.

  “I’m sorry,” Louise says. “I know you loved her.”

  * * *

  —

  Louise doesn’t know when she started crying. Maybe she’s been crying this whole time.

  “Come out of the water,” Rex says.

  He takes off his jacket. He takes off his watch, his phone. He puts them on the sand.

  “You loved her so fucking much.”

  “Please,” he says. “Please—just come out.”

  “Didn’t you?”

  “No—Christ, Lou.”

  “Don’t fucking lie to me! Please—please—don’t lie to me.”

  “I love you,” Rex says.

  It feels so fucking good to hear it.

  He goes into the water. He goes up to his waist. He takes her by the shoulders.

  “I love you—just please—come out of the water.”

  Here’s the thing: he doesn’t.

  * * *

  —

  Rex tries—God, he tries—he tries to pull her out; he grabs her by the forearm, harder, maybe, than he means to, or should—it’s forgivable, maybe, if you’re trying to bring a murderer to justice; it’s the right thing to do, maybe, if you’re a hero, or playing a hero, or need to be a hero no matter fucking what; it’s not a terrible thing—even if you are playing justice, it isn’t the sort of thing you kill a person over.

  But it is so stupid of him, to grab her like that, when she is sobbing, when she is screaming; it is so stupid of him to lie to her, when all she has asked of him is to stop lying to her.

  * * *

  —

  He wraps his arms around her, and he bales her up, but here’s another thing: Louise is so much stronger than he is, or at least, she’s been in the water longer, and she’s been in the cold before, and she’s used to being cold or wet or just plain in pain, and she can stand pain so much better than he can, so when Rex goes numb he goes weak, and that is enough for her to get her hands around his neck, and that is enough, too, for her to get her legs on his back, and that is enough for Louise to hold him under the water which is so cold that it stuns him and Louise is not sure—she never will be sure—if it is the water, or the cold, that gets him.

  He goes under.

  He bursts back up.

  He screams and his
lungs fill with salt water and he kicks and Louise has to push him down again, and deeper, with a strength that sickens and thrills her at the same time.

  He goes under.

  He bursts back up.

  He flails and he writhes and he elbows Louise in the face so violently her nose breaks; he cries out half of her name and Louise has to shove her hand over his mouth until he bites.

  He goes under.

  He doesn’t come up.

  Then it is just Louise, in the water, shaking, by the light of a full moon.

  10

  LOUISE KNOWS WHAT TO DO NEXT. Louise has done it all before.

  Louise has Rex’s phone.

  Once, a girl, by a full moon, took a fistful of pills and said if the world is not what it should be I want to die, and Rex did not die with her. Not now. Then.

  Now there is a man who has had too much to drink facedown in the water; this happens all the time.

  Louise knows how to create an alibi (there’s a whole trick to it: getting the right combination of check-ins and time stamps and specificity because that’s what people respond to most and if they respond to you that means they think you’re alive but also leaving things vague enough that you never have to explain a discrepancy). She knows how to move a body. She knows how to write a frenetic, late-night text from one phone to another, that says please don’t make me live without you.

  Louise gets through things. She always gets through things.

  She can take a cab back to the MacIntyre with the cash in Rex’s wallet. She knows, she knows Mimi will still be dancing there, and she can say that she and Rex had a fight after Cordelia found them; he stormed off (how likely is it that they will ever find that same cab driver again; she paid in cash—she hadn’t meant to pay in cash but she has gotten so used to paying in cash when she is not Lavinia, just in case); they might not find his body for days.

  Everyone will feel so sorry for her at the funeral.

  Rex has killed himself over Lavinia (everyone will hate Lavinia, more), and maybe if Lavinia vanishes somewhere in Big Sur, everyone will think they know why.

  Louise can probably move in with Mimi.

  Louise sits on the sand, alone, soaked, so cold she can’t breathe, and she stares at Rex’s body bobbing up and down where the shore meets the sea and thinks I can do this.

  I can do this.

  She can get another tutoring job, or two. Tomorrow (today, oh God, today) is the Five Under Thirty party at this loft space in Bushwick that is constructed entirely with reclaimed wood from shipwrecks. Niall Montgomery will be there and so will so many other people she could potentially impress, by telling the story of the time she pretended to go to Devonshire Academy when she didn’t, which is a great story but by this point it’s barely true.

  She can convince everybody that she is the injured one (Hal likes her; Mimi likes her; everybody, everybody likes her); she can be a martyr; she can write a really moving personal essay about the time her boyfriend and her best friend killed themselves, over each other, and about what it feels like to always, always be the one left behind. Gavin Mullaney would probably publish it.

  * * *

  —

  The stars are like nails hammered in the sky.

  The sea is just so unrelentingly black.

  Once, Louise stood naked, facing it, with the sand in between her toes, screaming that which we are, we are, but that is not now, either.

  You can do this, Louise keeps thinking. You can do this.

  She can borrow money from Mimi. She can make five hundred dollars, writing a good Fiddler online piece, more for print. She can find a way to get Athena Maidenhead off her back (she has only to think). She has the keys to Rex’s apartment (she never wants to go to Rex’s apartment again). She can fix everything (Louise can always fix everything).

  Except, of course, there’s Cordelia.

  She can make it so Cordelia is crazy. Everybody already knows Lavinia is crazy; maybe it runs in the family. She can make such a big deal about how poor Cordelia, poor troubled Cordelia attacked Rex in the apartment—if it ever comes to that—how this sweet well-meaning kid with a narcissist for a sister is growing up just like her, because if the Greeks taught us anything it’s that we can’t control Fate. She can make it so nobody believes whatever Cordelia says about her sister and the steamer trunk and Rex and Big Sur and the phone calls; people don’t do such things; they don’t even believe you when you tell them straight-out you’ve done such things.

  She can’t make Cordelia believe her.

  She doesn’t want to.

  * * *

  —

  A ping on Rex’s phone, on the sand. Hal. I need to talk to you.

  Please.

  Please.

  * * *

  —

  Louise has such pity for everyone.

  She has such pity for everyone in the whole, wide world.

  * * *

  —

  A ping on Louise’s phone. Gavin.

  Get ready to ACE tonight!

  * * *

  —

  A ping on Lavinia’s phone. Cordelia. Twenty missed calls.

  They all sound so fucking loud.

  Louise thinks the stars will fall from the sky, shook loose by that sound.

  * * *

  —

  So here, here, is what Louise does next:

  She dyes her hair.

  * * *

  —

  She leaves Rex’s body on the beach. Mimi posts a photo of Rex and Louise at the MacIntyre, kissing, and it must be the moment he told her he loved her because the confetti is streaming down all around them.

  She leaves Rex’s phone there (drunk, lonely Hal, won’t stop calling him).

  She gets on the subway. (Gavin is posting a lot of promotional material about Five Under Thirty and reminding everyone on Facebook it’s the closest thing to an anointing you can possibly have and if you’re important enough to edit for The Fiddler you can get away with saying shit like that and nobody will roll their eyes at you in public and he tags all of the five people who are Under Thirty and announces the winners formally on all social media channels but he writes something extra nice about Louise Wilson and calls her “the one to watch.”) She takes the Q from Coney Island. (Beowulf Marmont is drunkenly ranting about how some people think that they’re the shit because they’re Five Under Thirty but actually it’s just like a giant racket meant to appease a certain kind of emotive, feminine aesthetic and has nothing to do with real literature, anyway.)

  She takes it all the way to Forty-second Street. (Athena Maidenhead has just gotten engaged to Mike from the opera and she is showing everybody her ring, and she posts the video and it sparkles so gorgeously in the MacIntyre lights.)

  Everybody is drunk. Everybody is loud. There is vomit and confetti everywhere, and glitter and tassels and discarded 2016 glasses and street preachers with signs. (Now Cordelia is posting a long public Facebook post that begins “When you read this, you will think I have gone insane. I am not insane. My sister is dead. Louise Wilson has killed her.”)

  The police horses are being loaded, one by one, into their vans. Australian tourists are singing “Auld Lang Syne.”

  (Now Hal is messaging Louise and Lavinia, both, to tell them that Cordelia’s had a typical Williams breakdown and probably swallowed a fistful of Mommy Williams’s Xanax, too, and maybe everyone in that whole fucking family should deal with their shit, already, okay?

  And if Lavinia says “okay,” it will buy Louise more time.)

  * * *

  —

  Hey? Mimi hasn’t even noticed Louise isn’t still dancing. Where did you go?

  Are u still here?

  Dancing flapper emu.

  * * *

  —

  Louise goes to
a 24/7 Duane Reade near Bryant Park.

  She gets hair dye, whatever clothes they sell—black leggings, a plain white T-shirt, the sort of anonymous things nobody notices anybody wears.

  She doesn’t have any money left, so she just shoplifts.

  Nobody even notices this, either.

  * * *

  —

  Louise walks right into the public bathrooms at Bryant Park, the nice ones, the ones that there are even flowers in. She locks the door.

  She takes off her wet clothes.

  She washes off the salt, the blood.

  She washes her hair in the sink.

  She opens the box. She puts on the gloves.

  The water is so red, through her hands.

  People are knocking (of course they’re knocking; it’s New Year’s Day, and she’s in midtown, and people who have been standing in line all night need to pee) and their knocking is so loud but Louise ignores them; Louise doesn’t care; Louise keeps her gaze focused on the mirror, and thirty minutes go by and Louise just stands there, naked, staring at herself, and at the fake ID of some twenty-three-year-old redhead called Elizabeth Glass who probably never existed in the first place.

  * * *

  —

  Louise looks so different with red hair.

  She looks paler. Her cheekbones look higher. She is not as beautiful as she was, when she had Lavinia’s hair. She is no longer the kind of girl you’d stop, when you saw her. You wouldn’t check her out, or turn around, or stare.

  You might see her on the street, and not even know her.

  * * *

  —

  Louise should be horrified. Maybe she is horrified, because Lavinia is dead and Rex is dead and Rex’s body is bobbing up and down on the water and Lavinia is rotting in a steamer trunk at the bottom of the East River but there is no justice on earth that can make this right, any longer, so the only thing to do now is not be who you are, and that is the best and the worst thing in the world, and also all Louise has ever wanted.