Cartwheel (12 page)

“She’s young, you know,” said Katy.

“She’s your age.”

“Obviously that’s irrelevant.”

Sebastien had to concede it was; time, he knew better than anyone, was a myth. “Well,” he said. “I’m not plotting anything.”

“But she is.”

Sebastien could not bring himself to summon the depths of banality that were required here; to fearfully ask in a halting, tremulous voice,
Has she—has she said something about me?
The wine eddied around his head; Katy’s cigarette smelled rich and sapid. Sebastien shrugged and pointed to it. “Won’t they smell that out here?”

Katy looked back at him blankly. “I don’t think it’s really some big secret.”

Halfway across the lawn, Sebastien turned to look back at the Carrizos’.
Behind him, their house was like an enormous ship at sea, flooded with light. Did they know that they were shadow puppets in there? Did they know how vividly the details of their lives were conveyed? It was like staring into a stained-glass window; it was like staring into a Fabergé egg. What invincibility one must feel to offer oneself up to the night like that. Sebastien shuddered to think about their electricity bills. One of these days, he thought, jimmying his key savagely into the lock, those people were going to get robbed.

In the living room, Sebastien lit a candle. The smell of smoke always made his house feel churchlike and consecrated; he thought often of the Catholic cathedrals in western Europe that he’d visited with his parents on various trips. It had been a good life they had given him, if a brief one. One of the most consoling thoughts Sebastien could produce—and, during those first few months when he was alone in the house, pinioned by grief, it was nearly the only one—was that his parents must have thought very highly of him in order to have left him the way they did. At some point in the course of his childhood, they must have turned to each other and agreed that he could afford to lose them. They must have decided that he was strong and brave enough to endure it. And even though he knew now that they had misjudged him, he took a certain pride in their mistake.

Sebastien went to the mantel, to the picture of him and his father with the downed tapir. He’d been fifteen when it was taken, hunting for the first time at some awful Brazilian big-game preserve that his father had frequented. In the picture, Sebastien is wearing a wobbly, cross-stitched smile. He remembered that day and how scared he’d been. He remembered the strange elated revulsion of standing so close to a dead animal.

“This is something you need to know,” his father had said, pointing to the tapir. Sebastien still didn’t know what he’d meant by that. Maybe, in that sentence, his father had been lamenting all the things he could not tell his son. But maybe not. Maybe, after all, that moment with the tapir really
was
all there was to say, and see: white belly bleeding out,
blood black as an inkblot, eyes blanking from one kind of indifference to another.

“Dad,” Sebastien said to the picture. “I think I met a girl.”

He’d just begun summer orientation when the plane had crashed. His French aunt Madeleine called him at four in the morning. It was the middle of a heat wave; even the wood floor of his dorm room had been warm. He stood listening in the dark and then threw up into the fireplace. The smell of vomit mixed with the smell of dead ash from fabulous parties long ago.

Sebastien had known what his parents did for as long as he’d thought to be interested, which was admittedly not that long. It was probably sometime during his early adolescence that the long-standing patterns of their lives—the house, the vague explanations about his parents’ work, the suddenness of their move to Buenos Aires in 1994, right after the Jewish community center bombing—resolved into some kind of understanding. By then he’d been embarrassed to acknowledge he’d ever not known (and indeed, on some level, he surely always had). So the realization itself was layered under other information that was new and, at the time, more compelling—mostly about sex, of course. And, like sex, his parents’ work became a topic that was unmentionable among sophisticated people, among whose number Sebastien had counted himself back then.

Now he kept the secret for reasons both practical and personal. As a practical matter, Sebastien felt protective toward those Argentine nationals with whom his parents had had dealings. Naturally, he had no idea who any of them were, and naturally the fact of his parents’ death meant that somebody else—somebody important enough to crash a plane—already did. Nevertheless, Sebastien didn’t want the neighborhood knowing, if they didn’t already, and he didn’t want life to be any harder for the people who his parents had worked with, assuming any of them were still alive.

Underneath this, though, was something far less explicable: the sense that keeping a secret for the dead was a way of keeping a promise
to the dead, and that keeping a promise to the dead meant allowing them to assert a claim on you, and that anything that came with obligations of that sort was still a kind of relationship. Somehow, Sebastien felt that his parents were a little less dead every time he was coy to a stranger in conversation.

“A girl, huh?” he imagined his father saying. “Well, what’s she like?”

“She’s really something,” he imagined saying back. “She’s really something.”

Was she, though? It was a reasonable question. Sebastien felt his broken and rococo heart crawling out to Lily Hayes, throwing itself around her in joy and relief, but why? She was, after all, only a parochial sort of beauty (curious-faced, slightly snub-nosed, pale almost to translucence), and she could veer in a sentence from beautiful to practical—bordering on plain, really, compared with the impeccable girls Sebastien had known at Andover, with their sleek hair and bubblegum-colored fingernails and outlandishly perfect bodies (the kind of perfect bodies that, forget genetics, could really come only with narcissism and money). You looked at those girls and felt that it was entirely possible to do everything in life very, very well. You looked at those girls and felt that there was plenty of time to get it all right. But nevertheless, Sebastien was still thinking of Lily Hayes: her angular expression, the way she’d looked out the window every time he spoke. The way she made it seem as though she had better things to be thinking about, and the way he was almost—almost—inclined to believe her.

Sebastien went to the computer and logged on to Facebook. He had a lot of Facebook friends somehow—almost all from Andover, almost all now off living on the distant planets of Ivy League education or corporate law indentured servitude or trophy wifedom—and every year on Sebastien’s birthday they enthusiastically wished him well. This was the weird prolonged false intimacy that the Internet created: These people—who mostly did not know that his parents had died and that he’d never gone to Harvard and that he’d retreated back to Buenos Aires to live in a falling-down mansion, and that there were termites
coming through the floors and sapphire earrings rotting in the upstairs bedroom—these people (bless them!) all pretended to have actually remembered his birthday.

But then, the Internet was good for a lot of things. He typed in “Lily Hayes.” There were, predictably, hundreds of Lily Hayeses, almost all white and middle- to upper-middle-class, their lives lovingly Instagrammed. But he finally found her, his Lily Hayes: Her picture was of sun-flecked feet in strappy sandals, her profile was set to the insubstantial privacy settings characteristic of very young people of goodwill. This girl, thought Sebastien. He could write to her right now. Phenomenal. He hovered his mouse over the message box, came to his senses, closed it. He got up to fix himself a drink.

When he sat back down, to keep himself from logging back into Facebook, he went to vagrantorscenester.com. This was a dull website, briefly popular in the mid-aughts, where players were invited to judge pictures of people snapped anonymously on the street. Sebastien hated this game, and the reason he hated it so much was that he’d actually invented it, back when he was in the ninth grade at Andover. He’d arrived there scrawny, young, and—having skipped a year—already living under a cloud of presumed academic earnestness. All of this had required Sebastien to pioneer brand-new methods of social cruelty in order to survive; his primary tactic—then and now—was to make remarks that sounded cutting but that nobody could ever be totally sure they understood. Adolescent Sebastien had never bothered with mocking his peers for the usual reasons (you were fat, you were or seemed unattractively sincere or striving, you were or seemed gay). Those were the vulnerabilities that children knew they had and had properly strategized for. Instead, Sebastien invented entirely new categories of social evaluation, and soon found that by referring to these categories, he could actually erect them. (He remembered this now through the prism of Hannah Arendt’s observation about totalitarianism: Convincing people things are true is much more difficult than simply behaving as though they are.) Young Sebastien could crack his classmates open like lobsters, it turned out, revealing new areas of self-loathing
they didn’t even know they had yet. The sociopathic Vagrant or Scenester game was part of all of this, though back then it was called Cool or Crazy (by the other kids—even as a child, Sebastien had found alliteration tiresome). Sebastien had invented it during his first term at Andover. He’d usually played it with CJ Kimball and Byron “The Box” Buford on Saturday outings to Harvard Square, chaperoned by noticeably resentful intern teachers, in those first few yellow, surreal, cinematic weeks after September 11th. U.S. flags were everywhere, even in Cambridge; at home, Sebastien’s parents told him, everything was in economic and political chaos—inflation was in the double digits, there was a looming default on some important loan. All of it was terribly dry to Sebastien then—and anyway, he was usually too busy to talk for long, run ragged, as he was, by the demands of mocking Harvard students and homeless people in a judicious 1:1 ratio. That’s how he’d actually thought of it then: as equal opportunity derision. As though he were extending some important leveling force. As though he were animated by the spirit of blindfolded lady justice. If he’d been left unmolested on the trajectory he was on then, Sebastien saw now, he probably would have wound up heading straight for the editorial page of some conservative college newspaper to write portentous, bloviating opinion articles he could never disown because they would live forever on the Internet. Maybe it was just as well, then, that he’d never gone to college. Sebastien laughed and took another sip of his drink.

The way CJ and Byron played Cool or Crazy was straightforwardly, unimaginatively sarcastic: guessing Cool for a muttering, emaciated woman with meth-brown teeth, Crazy for a college boy with expensive jeans and exquisitely mussed hair. But Sebastien had never played that way; instead, he’d always picked less obvious targets and designations. A middle-aged woman in a gray sweatshirt drinking straight from a two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew was deemed Cool, a well-muscled young man wearing a Puka shell necklace was pronounced Crazy. Sebastien never tired of how nervous these pronouncements made CJ and The Box; when they asked for explanations, Sebastien always told
them that the game was an art, not a science, and that he had the soul of an artist, and that that’s why he always won.

And now here was his beautiful, idiot game, all grown up and online. Sebastien liked to check on it sometimes, in much the same way he liked to check on the Facebook profiles of half-remembered classmates from grade school; he liked to know that it was basically doing okay. It was, after all, his brainchild—in a more reductive and palatable form, admittedly, though was this not the universal fate of the ideas of great thinkers? Truly, Sebastien had always had his finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist. He laughed again and hiccupped and got up to pour himself another drink. When he sat back down at the computer he found that he was once again, somehow, on Lily Hayes’s Facebook page.

Sebastien stared at her sandals, her toes. This girl. What would become of her? He hovered his mouse again over the message box. This girl. Were people really this open? Were their lives really this lucky? He opened the message box. He hesitated. But then: really. What did he have to lose? He had literally nothing to lose. Few people experienced the pure liberation of having absolutely nothing to lose, but Sebastien had the particular blessing and curse of this kind of freedom—he had zero claims on the attention of anyone, anywhere; he had the totally unsullied indifference of the universe. He could crawl into the bathtub and slit his wrists and nobody would care. He could torch this entire house and all of its treasures and nobody would care. He could certainly message this girl and confidently expect that nobody would care about that, either.

“Gilded Lily,” he began.

The day after the dinner, a message from Sebastien LeCompte popped up in Lily’s in-box. “Gilded Lily,” it began, and things went downhill from there.

Lily was surprised. Sebastien LeCompte was not the kind of boy—Lily could not think of him as a “man,” really, and certainly not as a garden-variety “guy”—who usually liked her. Over dinner, it had become clear that Sebastien had lived in that mansion for most of his life, that his parents had been American diplomats (this explained the accent) who died in a plane crash when he was seventeen, and that he was fabulously wealthy. He didn’t say this last part, but it was apparent: There were references to playing polo, attending Harvard, summering in the Alps—things that Lily had never fully realized that actual people actually did out in the actual world. If Sebastien was going to like anyone, Lily figured it would have been Katy. He’d spent several minutes talking to her on the porch after dinner, when he’d only passed
Lily a business card—an actual business card!—that read
SEBASTIEN LECOMPTE, SLOTH
, in both English and Spanish.

“Are you going to write him back?” said Katy, while Lily was brushing her barely adequate teeth.

“Maybe.”