Cartwheel (14 page)

She’d shown up right on time, dressed in some kind of straightforward floral getup that was exactly the outfit Sebastien himself would have picked if he’d been told to dress up as an American girl for a costume party. In the frantic cleaning, Sebastien had forgotten that he’d planned to elaborately hand Lily an already poured glass of wine; instead, he’d had to grab the first glass that was handy, which turned out, horribly, to have
SORBONNE 1967
etched into it. It wasn’t long after that that Lily had accused Sebastien of being boring. This was not an assessment that Sebastien necessarily disagreed with; nevertheless, he’d felt that the best approach was to treat it as an accusation so ludicrous that he could react only with benign and divested curiosity—which meant, of course, that he’d wound up sounding more boring still. To keep himself from talking, Sebastien had then kissed Lily. It had been a long time since he’d kissed anyone—years, in fact: long enough for him to have nearly forgotten the strange alchemy that brought one pair of lips to another. But in the moment, he wasn’t thinking of that; he was thinking only of the endless and undeniable whorls of Lily’s mouth. She had the most utterly perfect mouth he had ever encountered, of that he was sure; an entire planetarium moved through his head as they kissed. When he pulled back, however, he saw that it had not been the same for her; he saw that she had been oblivious—and
this, childishly, had made him want to be cruel in a way that would make him seem oblivious, too. He’d groped madly for some kind of blunt object and landed on a remark about Katy’s attractiveness, which had prompted Lily to observe that Katy was “insipid,” which had led Sebastien to reflexively counterobserve that he’d thought she and Katy were friends. In fact, he’d had no opinion on the matter—surely modern relations weren’t mapped by such metrics?—and he’d been sure that Lily would see how desperate this was. Instead, she’d seemed to take the question seriously; her face darkened, and Sebastien could see the lengthening shadows of New England guilt, the heartrending consideration of the most middle-class of values and virtues. “My friend,” she’d said. “Well, sure.”

Sebastien had kissed her again then. “You’re a wicked woman,” he’d said. He did not mean it. He did not mean anything, ever, and especially, maybe, he did not mean this.

He had not expected to see her again after that. And yet,
mirabile dictu
, she had texted the next day, and come back again a day after that, and now he’d seen her a half dozen times, perhaps, in ten nights. That morning, for the first time, she had actually called him.

“Do you know who this is?” she’d said. She had a certain quality to her voice—it was a bit raspy, a bit out of breath—that made her always sound like she’d just come from doing something wholesome and outdoorsy.

“I know who I hope it is,” he’d said.

“It’s not Beatriz Carrizo.”

“Hélas.”

“What are you doing tonight?”

Sebastien swallowed. “It so happens that my schedule just cleared.”

And now, racing up and down the aisles of Pan y Vino, Sebastien felt a sense of quickening, enlivening. He should not, he knew, be allowing himself to get quite so worked up about things. He should not be thinking of his and Lily’s as some kind of world-historical romance; it was not, he realized, even a terribly original one. The evenings they
had spent together so far had all been the same: French kissing, Italian cinema, talk of the most sophomoric and navel-gazing variety before retiring to the bed to paw at each other up to a point of stasis. Sebastien wasn’t sure of Lily’s history in this realm, though it was a pretty safe bet that she was overestimating his own. The bulk of Sebastien’s sexual experience came from one drunken evening with an anorexic premed during his Harvard accepted students’ weekend; her arms had been covered in silken hair, and their union had been perfunctory and un-memorable. Despite this early adventure, the years of solitude since had contributed to a sense of renewed virginity. Sex belonged to the world, to the living, if anything did, and Sebastien never felt this more acutely than on his nights in bed with Lily, when matters escalated to a certain pitch and then some decision—not discussed, and not mutual—was made, and she rolled over and thrust the cupola of her ass into his thighs and Sebastien, mute with cathectic longing, abandoned her to her even breathing and faraway thoughts.

And yet in a fundamental way it seemed to Sebastien that Lily had dragged him, just a little, back into the world with her. Isolation and proximity to mortality had made his life feel oddly timeless; it stretched out before him, flat and featureless as the African savannah. But tonight Lily was coming over, and Sebastien had to buy these things now to have them ready. There was a satisfying urgency to this—even if it was, as he realized, truly the most basic contour of a typical life. Tonight, he would try to find a tablecloth. He would bring up one of the better wines from the cellar. And he would also, he’d decided, try to give Lily a bracelet.

Sebastien was not sure how this was going to go. He did not want it to seem grasping or desperate or, far more devastatingly, like some sort of bribe. And yet he had so many things he could not use, so many things he would very much like to give to her. He had spent the afternoon going through his mother’s jewelry—touching her emerald brooch, holding her sapphire necklace up to the light and letting it splash cerulean on the floor. He tried to imagine the parties where she must have worn these things. As a child, Sebastien had been patient
with his questions, certain that all the answers would someday be forthcoming. And now he was grown up, and he looked back and found all the questions right there where he’d left them: gathering dust, perhaps, but remarkably well preserved. The questions were more durable than anything, really—the questions and the objects. Everything else trended toward annihilation. Sitting on the floor, Sebastien had fingered his mother’s diamond bracelet; the opal ring that she’d always been superstitious about wearing, though he’d never known why. He imagined all of them transformed by proximity to Lily, and to life.

That night, Lily didn’t show up until nine, a bit later than she’d said she’d be.

“Hey,” she said, when Sebastien opened the door. She was wearing long and overly involved earrings. Her hair was slightly damp and brushed back behind her ears.

“Dear Lily,” said Sebastien, and kissed her. He could smell the implausible scent of her down-market perfume—freesia, wisteria, cyanide, whatever—that she’d probably bought at a pharmacy somewhere. When he pulled away, he saw that she was looking at him patiently. He glanced over at the table, where an oily epidermis was growing across the top of the mauve casserole and bleeding out onto the paper plates. He had set the food out too early.

“Sit down,” he said. The words came out too soft: Somewhere during the kiss his voice had dissipated along his sternum, it seemed, and become a kind of effervescent fizz. “Sit down,” he said, more loudly. “I have something for you.”

“You do?” She sat.

“Here,” said Sebastien, producing the bracelet from behind a lamp and dangling it before her. It was heavier than it looked. He had not wrapped it because he did not want Lily to feel that she could not decline it. “Do you want this?” There was more Sebastien might have said, but he had vowed to talk less.

“What is it?” said Lily. Her eyes widened, so he knew she already knew.

“A bracelet.” Sebastien’s mouth was so dry that he was sure Lily would be able to hear something wrong in the way he was talking, but she didn’t seem to notice.

“I see that. Is it real?”

At this, Sebastien felt something within him collapse; something fragile that was holding back a floodgate. She was being crass. She was being, he thought grimly, American. Did she think he would try to give her some sort of toy jewelry? How little she must think of him. How little she must think he thought of her. He cocked his head to the side and laughed. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “Is anything?”

“Where did you get it?”

“It was my mother’s, if you really want to know.”

“You can’t give me something of your mother’s.”

“She hasn’t registered any protest, actually.” Sebastien’s despair was a rhizomatic root now, digging its stems into his heart. He would manage not to show it. He would manage to keep his gaze even.

“You can’t,” said Lily. “I won’t take it. I’m sorry, thank you, but you can’t.”

“All right,” said Sebastien. He took it back. What did she think he was going to do—beg her to accept an heirloom? Even his devotion had its limits. “All right. I’ve got all kinds of this stuff lying around. And it doesn’t look like much on me—my wrists just aren’t delicate enough. But all right.”

Lily looked stricken and sorry, which Sebastien loathed. He had a vertiginous sense of observing this tableau from the outside in, and he could imagine how pitiful it would look.

“You don’t have anyone else to give it to?” said Lily.

“Apparently not,” said Sebastien. “I mean, there are elderly aunts off
en France
somewhere, but I wouldn’t want to give them heart attacks. I suppose there’s always eBay.”

“No one helped you clean out the house? No one came for you when they died?”

Sebastien took a deep breath. He did not deserve to be angry that
this had not occurred to her already. She did not owe him this kind of consideration. She did not owe him, in the end, anything at all.

Carefully, lightly, he said, “Who would possibly have come?”

Somehow, when Lily wasn’t looking, Buenos Aires had become ugly.

The change had been gradual but unmistakable, she decided, as she walked back across the lawn from Sebastien’s house. The city’s light, previously so luxurious and elevating, had become brittle and harsh. Her bug bites had healed but had not disappeared, and she was beginning to fear she might be scarred for life. The wine made her sluggish; she struggled to stay awake in classes, she dragged her feet through ever-longer afternoons. So many thoughts in her head these days were “I feel” statements—actually phrased that way,
I feel tired, I feel lonely, I feel dusty
, little declarative sentences, like her own consciousness was some kind of barely mastered second language.

And this night with Sebastien—with that awful, incomprehensible offer of the bracelet—seemed to confirm Lily’s worst suspicions somehow. Over the past couple of weeks, Sebastien had developed an interest in Lily that was sustained and unlikely and, entirely possibly, completely faked. He texted her almost every night now to invite her over for “nightcaps”; about half the time she went, and they’d banter twitchily on the couch for a bit before making out in the dark. It was always dark in that house, no matter the time of day. The living room had French windows overlooking a mangy overgrown garden, but what little light came through them was somehow always dusty; the clock and collectibles cast strange shadows, even during the afternoons. Sebastien LeCompte, it seemed, had a very tenuous relationship with lightbulbs.
I feel sorry
, Lily thought. She could hear the dry grass snap underneath her feet.
I feel bored
.

She was back at the Carrizos’ at five past midnight, which was, she thought, a depressingly reasonable hour to be home on a Friday night. But when Lily walked into the kitchen, she found Beatriz sitting at the
counter, reading a women’s magazine and looking annoyed. Katy was already downstairs—studying beatifically before a wholesome eight-hour sleep, no doubt—and Lily knew, with a vestigial childhood certainty, that she was in trouble.

“No more of this, okay, Lily?” Beatriz sounded tired, even though she was still dressed. Lily remembered how early Beatriz got up—around five, to make Carlos breakfast before he commuted to the City Porteña—and Lily realized she’d been waiting up for her, and she was sorry. Still, Lily wished that it were Carlos, not Beatriz, who was waiting up. He’d probably wink at her about the late return. Beatriz was not the winking type. “You don’t know that boy very well,” she said.

“He’s my friend.”

“He’s your friend? You’ve known him two weeks. We brought him over here two weeks ago, exactly.”

“I think he’s lonely.” Lily said it as an excuse but realized immediately that of course it must be very true.

“Well, sometimes people are lonely for a reason,” said Beatriz. “And anyway, I can’t imagine your parents would like to think of you sneaking out nights to spend time with a boy.”

“They wouldn’t mind. My parents respect my autonomy.”

“When we invited him over, we just thought it might be nice for you to know someone young. We thought you all might be friends. The three of you.” Beatriz nodded her head toward the bedroom, where Katy was likely now dreaming of sustainable microloans.

“I’m sorry.”

“And you need to remember to lock the door when you come back in the house. Other people live here, too.”

“Okay. I’m really sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. Just stop it. Okay?”

Lily was surprised that Beatriz was going to make her lie. “Okay,” she said.

In the bedroom, Katy was still up reading. She looked up when Lily walked in. “Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” said Lily, sitting heavily on the floor.

“Are you in trouble?”

Lily maneuvered her right sneaker off with her heel. “A little, I guess.”

Katy sat up and stretched. “Hope he’s worth it.” She ran her fingers through her hair—her sun-dappled hair, Lily couldn’t help thinking, though on anyone else it would have just been dirty blond. What was it about Katy that made you search for lyric descriptions?

“Well,” said Lily, wiggling her toes. They were spectacularly, bafflingly dirty and she had no idea why. “He’s interesting, anyway.”

“You think so? I think he’s hideously boring.”

“Really?” Lily had told Sebastien he was boring on their first date, though, of course, she didn’t actually mean it. He was, quite tragically, possibly the most interesting person Lily had ever met; he was so interesting that she’d figured that accusations of tedium could only goad him into being more interesting still. Lily didn’t necessarily want to sleep with Sebastien; she did not think her fascination with him was sexual as much as anthropological, maybe, or zoological—but there was certainly no question that it was a fascination of some kind. And yet here was Katy, dullest of all possible humans, living at the precise center of all of the world’s modest expectations for her, moving in confident strides toward the exact mean of her upper-middle-class life, saying that the most interesting boy in the world was boring.