Social Creature Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblances to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 by Tara Isabella Burton

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Cover photograph by Antonio Terron / Trunk Archive

  Cover design by John Fontana

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Burton, Tara Isabella, author.

  Title: Social creature : a novel / Tara Isabella Burton.

  Description: New York, NY : Doubleday, 2018. | Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017046955 (print) | LCCN 2017058492 (ebook) | ISBN 9780385543538 (ebook) | ISBN 9780385543521 (hardback)

  Subjects: LCSH: Young women—Fiction. | Envy—Fiction. | Compulsive behavior—Fiction. | Women murderers—Fiction. | Psychological fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Contemporary Women. | GSAFD: Suspense fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3602.U77275 (ebook) | LCC PS3602.U77275 63 2018 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2017046955

  Ebook ISBN 9780385543538

  v5.3.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For Brian—who has been on this adventure from the beginning

  1

  THE FIRST PARTY LAVINIA TAKES LOUISE TO, she makes Louise wear one of her dresses.

  “I found it on the street,” Lavinia says. “It’s from the twenties.”

  Maybe it is.

  “Someone just left it there. Can you believe it?”

  Louise can’t.

  “They probably just thought it was trash.” She puckers her lips. She puts on lipstick. “And that is the problem with people. Nobody understands what things mean.”

  Lavinia fiddles with Louise’s collar. Lavinia ties the sash around Louise’s waist.

  “Anyway, the second I saw it—Christ! I wanted to—oh, I just wanted to genuflect, you know? Kiss the ground—do Catholics kiss the ground, or is that just sailors? Anyway, I wanted to put my mouth right there on the sidewalk on somebody’s chewed gum and say, like, thank you, God, for making the world make sense today.”

  Lavinia puts powder on Louise’s cheeks. Lavinia adds rouge. Lavinia keeps talking.

  “Like—it’s all so fucking perfect, right? Like—somebody’s grandmother or whoever, dies in some random brownstone in the East Village nobody’s even visited in twenty years and they dump all her shit out into the street and then at sunset—here I am walking across East Ninth Street and I find it. This old woman and I who have never met have these two beautiful, poetic, nights ninety years apart, wearing the exact same dress—oh, Louise, can’t you just smell it?”

  Lavinia shoves the lace in Louise’s face.

  “You could fall in love,” says Lavinia, “wearing a dress like that.”

  Louise inhales.

  “So you know what I did?”

  Lavinia gives Louise a beauty mark with her eyebrow pencil.

  “I stripped down to my underwear—no, that’s a lie; I took my bra off, too. I took off everything and I put on the dress and I left my other one in the street and I walked all night, wearing it, all the way back to the Upper East Side.”

  Lavinia does Louise’s buttons.

  Now Lavinia is laughing. “Stick with me long enough,” she says, “and I promise—things will just happen to you. Like they happen to me.”

  Lavinia does Louise’s hair. At first she tries to do it, like she’s done her own: savagely and exuberantly tendriled. But Louise’s hair is too flat, and too straight, and so instead Lavinia braids it into a tight, neat bun.

  Lavinia puts her hands on Louise’s cheeks. She kisses her on the forehead. She roars.

  “God,” says Lavinia. “You look so beautiful. I can’t stand it. I want to kill you. Let’s take a picture.”

  She takes out her phone. She makes it a mirror.

  “Let’s stand against the peacock feathers,” Lavinia says. Louise does.

  “Pose.”

  Louise doesn’t know how.

  “Oh, please.” Lavinia waves the phone. “Everybody knows how to pose. Just, you know: Arch your back a little. Tilt your head. Pretend you’re a silent-film star. There. There—no, no, chin down. There.”

  Lavinia moves Louise’s chin. She takes their photo.

  “The last one’s good,” Lavinia says. “We look good. I’m posting it.” She turns the phone to Louise. “Which filter do you like?”

  Louise doesn’t recognize herself.

  Her hair is sleek. Her lips are dark. Her cheekbones are high. She’s wearing a flapper dress and she has cat’s eyes and fake lashes and she looks like she’s not even from this century. She looks like she’s not even real.

  “Let’s go with Mayfair. It makes your cheekbones look shiny. Christ—look at you! Look. At. You. You’re beautiful.”

  Lavinia has captioned the photo: alike in indignity.

  Louise thinks this is very witty.

  Louise thinks: I am not myself.

  Thank God, Louise thinks. Thank God.

  * * *

  —

  They cab it to Chelsea. Lavinia pays.

  It’s New Year’s Eve. Louise has known Lavinia for ten days. They have been the best ten days of her life.

  * * *

  —

  Days don’t go like this for Louise.

  Louise’s days go like this:

  She wakes up. She wishes she hasn’t.

  Chances are: Louise hasn’t slept much. She works as a barista at this coffee shop that turns into a wine bar at night, and also writes for this e-commerce site called GlaZam that sells knockoff handbags, and is also an SAT tutor. She sets an alarm for at least three hours before she has to be anywhere, because she lives deep in Sunset Park, a twenty-minute walk from the R, in the same illegal and roach-infested sublet she’s been in for almost eight years, and half the time the train breaks down. When they call her, once every couple of months, Louise’s parents invariably ask her why she’s so stubborn about moving back to New Hampshire, say, where that nice Virgil Bryce is a manager at the local bookstore now, and he won’t stop asking for her new number. Louise invariably hangs up.

  She weighs herself. Louise weighs one hundred fourteen and a half pounds on a period day. She puts on her makeup very carefully. She draws on her brows. She checks her roots. She checks her bank balance (sixty-four dollars, thirty-three cents). She covers up the flaws in her skin.

  She looks in the mirror.


  Today, she says—out loud (a therapist she had once told her that it’s always better to say these things out loud)—is the first day of the rest of your life.

  She makes herself smile. Her therapist told her to do that, too.

  * * *

  —

  Louise walks the twenty minutes to the subway. She ignores the catcaller who asks her, every morning, how her pussy smells, even though he’s probably the only person in the world she interacts with regularly. She spends the ride into Manhattan staring at her reflection in the darkened subway windows. Back when Louise was sure she was going to be a go-down-in-history Great Writer she used to take a notebook and use the commute to write stories, but now she is too tired and also she probably will never be a writer; so she reads trashy Misandry! articles on her phone and sometimes watches people (Louise enjoys watching people; she finds it calming; when you spend a lot of time focusing on the things wrong with other people you worry less about everything wrong with you).

  * * *

  —

  Louise goes to work as a barista, or at GlaZam, or to give an SAT lesson.

  She likes lessons best. When she speaks with her very carefully cultivated mid-Atlantic accent and puts her very carefully dyed blonde hair into a bun and alludes to the fact that she went to school in Devonshire, New Hampshire, she gets $80 an hour, plus the satisfaction of having fooled somebody. Now if Louise had actually gone to Devonshire Academy, the boarding prep school, and not just the public Devonshire High, she’d get $250, but the kind of parents who can pay $250 are more assiduous in checking these things.

  Not that most people ever check these things. When Louise was sixteen, she took to leaving her house early and eating breakfast and dinner at the Academy’s dining hall. She made it a whole three months, watching people, before anybody noticed, and even then it was just her mother who found out, and grounded her, and by the time she was allowed out of the house again she’d started AIM-chatting Virgil Bryce, who didn’t like it when she went anywhere without him.

  * * *

  —

  Louise finishes work.

  She looks in her phone-mirror, a few times, to make sure she’s still there. She checks Tinder, even though she hardly responds to anybody she matches with. There was one guy who seemed really feminist online but turned out to practice relationship anarchy; and another who was really into kink in ways that she was never entirely sure were not abusive; and one guy who was really great, actually, but he ghosted her after two months. Sometimes Louise considers going out with somebody new, but this seems like just another thing to potentially fuck up.

  * * *

  —

  Sometimes, if Louise has been paid cash that week, she goes to a really nice bar: on Clinton or Rivington, or on the Upper East Side.

  She orders the nicest drink she can afford (Louise can’t really afford to be drinking at all, but even Louise deserves nice things, sometimes). She sips her drink very, very slowly. If she doesn’t eat dinner (Louise never eats dinner) the alcohol will hit her harder, which is a relief, because when Louise gets drunk she forgets the invariable fact that she is going to fuck everything up one day, if she hasn’t already, whether it’s because she loses all her jobs at once and gets evicted or because she gains twenty pounds because she is too tired to exercise and then not even the catcaller will want to fuck her or because she’ll get throat cancer from all the times she has made herself throw up all her food or because she will get another kind of even rarer and more obscure cancer from all the times she obsessively dyes her hair in a bathroom without ventilation or she will fuck up by unblocking Virgil Bryce on social media or else because she will get into another relationship in which a man who seems nice on Tinder wants to save her, or else to choke her, and she will do whatever he says because the other way to fuck it all up is to die alone.

  Louise waits until she sobers up (another very certain way to fuck up is to be a drunk woman alone in New York at night), and then she takes the subway home, and although Louise no longer writes in her notebook, if she is still tipsy enough to feel that the apocalypse is no longer imminent she tells herself that tomorrow, when she is that little bit less tired, she will write a story.

  * * *

  —

  They say if you haven’t made it in New York by thirty, you never will.

  Louise is twenty-nine.

  Lavinia is twenty-three.

  This is how they meet:

  * * *

  —

  Lavinia’s sister, Cordelia, is sixteen. She’s at boarding school in New Hampshire—not Devonshire Academy but one of its rivals. She’s home for Christmas break. Their parents live in Paris. Lavinia found one of Louise’s SAT TUTOR? AVAILABLE NOW! flyers at The Corner Bookstore on Ninety-third and Madison, which has a free Christmas champagne reception Louise has been crashing for three years, even though she lives so far away, just to drink for free and watch rich, happy families be happy and rich.

  “I’m afraid I don’t know a damn thing,” Lavinia says over the phone. “But Cordy’s brilliant. And I know I’ll corrupt her—unless somebody else is there to stop me. You know what I mean. A good influence. And anyway she’s here for a whole week before she goes to Paris for Christmas and we’ve watched every single Ingmar Bergman DVD in the house and now I’m all out of ideas to keep her off the streets. I can pay. How much does a person pay for these things? You tell me.”

  “One fifty an hour,” says Louise.

  “Done.”

  “I’ll start tonight,” Louise says.

  * * *

  —

  Lavinia lives in a floor-through brownstone apartment on Seventy-eighth Street between Park and Lex. When Louise arrives on the stoop, there is opera blaring from an open window, and Lavinia is singing along, off-key, and this is how Louise figures out that Lavinia lives on the second floor without even having to check the buzzer.

  Lavinia has flowers in all of her window boxes. All of them are dead.

  * * *

  —

  Lavinia answers the door in a sleeveless black dress made entirely of feathers. Her hair comes down to her waist. It is wild, and coarse, and she has not brushed it in days, but it is the hue of blonde Louise has spent many hours experimenting with drugstore dyes to achieve, only it is natural. She is not tall but she is thin (Louise tries to calculate exactly how thin, but the feathers get in the way), and she fixes her eyes on Louise with such intensity that Louise instinctively takes a step back: half-knocking into a vase filled with dead lilies.

  Lavinia doesn’t notice.

  “Thank God you’re here,” she says.

  Cordelia is sitting at the dining-room table. She is wearing her hair in one long thick braid, coiled and pinned. She doesn’t look up from her book.

  There are antique hand fans all over the walls. There is a gold-embroidered caftan hanging on a wall, and a powdered wig on the head of a mannequin whose features are drawn in lipstick, and there are several illustrated tarot cards—the High Priestess, the Tower, the Fool—in rusty art nouveau frames on all the surfaces in the room. The walls are all a regal, blinding blue, except for the moldings, which Lavinia has made gold.

  Lavinia kisses Louise on both cheeks.

  “Make sure she goes to bed by ten,” she says, and leaves.

  * * *

  —

  “She does that.”

  Cordelia finally looks up.

  “She isn’t really that oblivious,” she says. “That’s just her sense of humor. She thinks it’s funny to tease me. And you.”

  Louise doesn’t say anything.

  “I’m sorry,” says Cordelia. “I started studying already.” Her smile twists at the edges.

  She makes Louise a pot of tea.

  “You can have chocolate-vanilla or you can have hazelnut-cinnamon-pear-cardamom,
” she says. “Vinny doesn’t have any normal tea.”

  She serves it in an intricately patterned teapot (“It’s from Uzbekistan,” Cordelia says. Louise doesn’t know if this is a joke). She sets it down on a tray.

  Cordelia forgets a teaspoon, although there is one in the sugar pot, but after the second cup Louise realizes if she stirs the tea it will wet the spoon and then ruin the sugar. If she keeps the spoon dry the sugar will settle in the cup.

  Louise sips her tea without any sugar in it. She briefly considers asking for another spoon, but the thought of doing this makes her nervous, and so Louise doesn’t say anything at all.

  They do SAT words: What is the difference between lackluster, laconic, and lachrymose? They do math: all the 3-4-5 triangles, surface areas of different shapes. Cordelia gets all the questions right.

  “I’m going to Yale,” Cordelia says, like that’s a thing people just decide. “Then I’m going to a pontifical university in Rome for my master’s. I’m going to be a nun.”

  Then: “I’m sorry.”

  “For what.”

  “I’m trolling you. I shouldn’t. I mean—I do want to be a nun. But even so.”

  “That’s okay,” says Louise.

  She drinks another cup of sugarless hazelnut-cinnamon-pear-cardamom tea.

  “I feel guilty,” says Cordelia. “Keeping you here. I don’t really need a tutor. Don’t feel bad—I mean, you’re doing a very good job. Sorry. It’s just—I know all this already.” She shrugs. “Maybe Vinny really does want you to be my babysitter. Only—she won’t be back by ten.”

  “That’s okay,” Louise says. “I trust you to make your own bedtime.”

  “That’s not an issue.” Cordelia smiles her strange half-smile again. “Vinny’s the one with the cash.”