Cartwheel

by Jennifer Dubois

  “Thank you, Lily. That’s very good. Now. Can I get you a glass of water?”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  January

  Because she could not bear to ask Katy about the lawsuit, Lily began looking around the house for clues. She tiptoed past the Carrizos’ bedroom and paused there, listening for revealing snatches of conversation, but somehow only ever heard the TV. She gazed at Carlos’s face searchingly during dinner; she tried to use words like “corruption” and “fraud” and “disaster” to see if any of them stuck. She realized that she was half-hoping to be able to bring some kind of treasured bit of information back to Katy—to drop some spectacular revelation casually into conversation as though it were common knowledge and then widen her eyes in shock when Katy expressed surprise. “What?” she’d squeal gleefully. “You didn’t know?” But in spite of her best efforts, often enough Lily forgot to spy and missed the best opportunities—when the mail came in, when the phone rang, when Beatriz and Carlos spoke in hushed murmurs in the kitchen.

  Around Lily, the city flashed from spectacular to hideous to ordinary, like a sky in a fast-motion video. In a strange inversion of what she’d experienced when she first arrived in Buenos Aires, Lily found herself lost in extended reveries about New England. She remembered the brutal wheels of white light coming off the rivers; the snarl of lemon-colored leaves in the fall, making crisp fragile sounds like dead insects underfoot. She remembered the celestial whiteness of winter mornings, the clean searing smell of apocalypse. She remembered the languor and contingency and drama of the summer: the heavy sulfur smell before thunderstorms; the understated nodding of the leaves, like they were acquiescing or drifting off to sleep. She remembered the way the light tongued the bark of the trees on summer late afternoons, the heartbreaking sense of time passing, time passing, time passed.

  She had been away, she realized, only a month.

  And when she turned her thoughts back to Buenos Aires, Lily found that the city no longer seemed so exotic. She caught herself effortlessly riding the Subte, confident in all transactions and maneuvers, without secretly feeling very independent and proud. She knew which restaurants were overpriced and which buses had pickpockets and how to avoid them both. She knew to expect sloppy cheek kisses from perfect strangers, and she had learned, finally, not to look so surprised when they came. On the weekends, she watched the tourists carrying around their cameras, timid and admiring, and felt a certain scorn. Lily was different from them now, and better; she had more in common with the porteños than the tourists. And when she saw a HELP WANTED sign at a Belgrano café/club called Fuego, she felt breezy enough to go in and apply even though she didn’t have a work visa. She walked out fifteen minutes later with a job.

  Lily’s boss at the café was Javier Aguirre, a Brazilian with incredibly black skin. Lily was not sure she’d ever seen a person with skin so black—there was almost a purity to it, she thought: This was how people were supposed to look, before they began migrating north to snowy climes and growing pale and dumpy. Lily broke a wineglass her first night on the job and her drawer came up short the second—but Javier seemed to believe that this was a failure of competence, not of honesty, and he kept her on. Both times, Ignacio the weeknight bartender gave Lily cigarettes and told her dirty jokes to cheer her up afterward.

  “What do you want a job for?” Beatriz said one night, rinsing cucumbers at the sink. “Don’t we feed you enough?”

  Lily frowned. She didn’t know how to explain it. “Of course you do,” she said. “This is just for spending money.”

  But it wasn’t, really. Lily actually liked working at Fuego. She liked the banter with the waiters and the customers, and she liked the happy noises a table made when she brought them a tray of drinks, and she liked watching the strange people she would never otherwise meet—Javier, with his impish, impossibly white grin; Ignacio the bartender, with his sleepy eyes and his face like a tortoiseshell; one very fat regular who came in with a rotating array of very thin girlfriends. It was hard work, and Lily always felt harried—but she found she sort of liked feeling harried: Sometimes she caught glimpses of herself in the bathroom mirror, looking young and tired and put-upon, and was surprised at how satisfied she was with the sight. She didn’t look her most attractive in these moments, certainly. But she did look the least like herself she ever had in her life.

  “For the weekends,” Lily added.

  Beatriz shook her head. “God knows what kind of characters you’ll meet.”

  She was imagining alcohol consumption, no doubt, illicit drug use, various unnamable and unknowable extravagances at the home of Sebastien LeCompte. And so Lily added, “This is just for extra money. For books. For travel,” even though it hadn’t occurred to her until that very moment to travel anywhere farther than she’d already gone.

  After starting at Fuego, Lily began to see less of Sebastien. He often texted her in the evenings—oblique and faux-literary missives that seemed to always begin mid-conversation—and she’d glance at them while working and somehow feel that she’d already responded even when she hadn’t. After coming home late she’d scroll through all the communiqués she’d missed, shielding the light from Katy’s sleeping face, and resolve firmly to answer them the next day. But in the morning she’d be racing to her classes, guzzling the dregs of the instant coffee that Katy had made, and she would forget again. Finally, one Friday night—after some negotiating and bidding and counterbidding—Lily agreed to go over to Sebastien’s for a drink. It had been nearly a week since she’d last seen him.

  They had planned for ten, but Lily did not begin walking across the lawn until ten-thirty. Underneath her flip-flops, the grass smelled vernal and sweet. She knew Sebastien would never mention her lateness, and she took a terrible delight in knowing this fact and exploiting it. It was the kind of thing a boy would do.

  At the house, Lily knocked on the door with her knuckle—using that gargoyle thing seemed to be a concession to affectation that she did not wish to make—and Sebastien opened the door quickly. Behind him, the house smelled musty, and Lily wondered when he had last left it. The must, the dark, the unnerving declivity to the floors—why had all of this seemed so tragically romantic once?

  “Well, hello,” said Sebastien. “You’re a vision for sore eyes.”

  “You look nice,” said Lily. He did. He was wearing a jacket. And sometimes Lily liked to irk Sebastien by saying dull things. It was a habit she found herself falling into—the more he wanted to talk in the abstract, the more she found herself commenting on the softness of his hair, the radiant greenness of the trees. Was she trying to get him to like her less? She had to wonder.

  But to her surprise, Sebastien actually blushed lightly and tugged at the ends of his coat. “Well. I do try. And how have you been filling the many hours since I saw you last?”

  “Oh, you know,” Lily said, wrinkling her nose and stepping into the house. “This and that.”

  “The rigorous demands of the intellectual life, I suppose.”

  “Yes.” Lily leaned in and kissed him, feeling the warmth of his cheek, the sturdiness of his clavicle. He would be so lovely if only he would stop talking. “It’s all very draining. As you yourself know, of course.”

  “Of course,” said Sebastien. He retreated to the kitchen, returning a moment later with two glasses of something amber.

  “And as it happens,” Lily said brightly, taking her glass, “I got a job.”

  “A job!” Sebastien set down his drink. “How adorably plebeian of you!”

  For some reason, Lily had not wanted to tell Sebastien about Fuego. She’d thought he might see through it somehow; after all, a person as fake as Sebastien had to have some otherworldly insight into other people’s vagaries. But as soon as Lily walked in the house she’d realized, with a gnawing anxiety, that she had not thought to generate any backup topics of conversation, and could not quite think what else they would manage to discuss.

  “A job!” said Sebas
tien again, clinking his glass against Lily’s. “Workers of the world, unite!”

  Lily had known he would react this way; provoking this exact mockery was the conversational favor she was doing for both of them, and the fact that it had worked made her both pleased and sad.

  “It seemed like a good way to get to know the city better,” she said, taking a sip of her drink. Whatever it was made her feel like a very old man.

  “A plucky young lass, just trying to make her way in the world?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I certainly hope you haven’t resorted to selling your rare charms on the street.”

  “I’m a hostess at Fuego.”

  “How very prerevolutionary France of you!”

  “I think they’ll make me a waitress after a bit.”

  “Well, shoot for the moon and you’ll land amongst the stars, you know. People were always telling me that in high school, and just look at me now. Am I not a truly serious and substantive adult?”

  Lily kissed him again, just to make him stop talking. His mouth tasted clean. “No,” she said. “Even if we are drinking brandy. Are you trying to be?”

  “Not often,” he said, and kissed her back, more earnestly. Sometimes Lily could almost feel his heart beating through a kiss, though that was probably impossible. She pulled away and stuck out her tongue at him.

  “Do you even know what you mean half the time?” she said.

  “I do not,” he said regally. “And that, I like to think, is part of my own rare charm.” This made Lily kiss him one more time and take his hand—which was rough and boyish and vaguely callused, though she couldn’t think what he might possibly do to make it feel that way—and lead him toward the bed. She suddenly knew that now they would sleep together. She had never decided to, exactly, but she had also never decided not to, which was, under the circumstances, a kind of decision. And he was, after all, a very dear boy, if only he wouldn’t say so much nonsense.

  On the bed, they wrestled for a bit until the moment came when Lily usually put the brakes on things; this time, she did not, and Sebastien pulled her hand to him. She gave a tentative stroke. She always forgot how hard these things were, and how quickly they got that way—she felt a little startled, every single time. She was still holding her brandy with the other hand. She put that down. Her heart was hammering out its fear now—forget the bravado, okay, she admitted it, she still got nervous about this stuff. This was going to happen, she realized. She was young and single and living in Latin America, and she had an outstanding collection of condoms. This is what she was here for. Her teeth were nearly chattering. Sebastien was kissing her. He took off his pants and his shirt and he started in on hers, all the while looking deeply grave. Lily wished he knew that he didn’t have to look that way. He was on top of her, then inside her. His entry was unremarkable. Afterward he looked at her with that wondering, faltering gaze of his and said, “I love you.”

  Lily had been weaving her fingers through his chest hair—she secretly liked it, though she knew she had to pretend to other girls that she didn’t—but now she stopped. This theater—this feigned vulnerability of his—made something within Lily go stony and sour. She did not want or expect him to love her, of course, but she did not understand the use of this phrase as performance art, either; it made her feel uneasy and a little insulted, though she could not think quite why.

  “Uh-huh,” she said. “I’m sure.” She laughed wryly to give herself a moment to figure out what to say next. She would have to settle for something idiotic. “So.” She sat up and began twisting her hair into a ponytail. “I’ve been meaning to ask you. Why is your house like this?”

  “Like what?” said Sebastien. Lily was not looking at him—she was busying herself with her hair—but she could hear in his voice an emptiness, an echoing distance, like he was speaking from the bottom of a canyon.

  “You know.” Lily shrugged, trying to think of the right word. She couldn’t. “Huge.”

  “It was the ambassador’s quarters.”

  “Your father was the ambassador?”

  “You and your internalized misogyny.”

  “Okay. Your mother was the ambassador?”

  “No, I don’t think either of them were, as a matter of fact.”

  “You don’t think either of them were?”

  “But they were building a new ambassador’s house, I believe, and the ambassador at the time didn’t have a family.”

  “Wow,” said Lily. It was strange to think of Sebastien in the context of a family—a little solemn, towheaded boy, world-weary at the age of three. “That must have made your parents pretty happy.”

  “Happy! What a bourgeois concept. I can see why old Andrew and Maureen are so badly off, if that’s the standard they’re holding themselves to.”

  Sebastien knew Lily’s parents’ first names because that’s what Lily called them, but she realized now—too late—that she didn’t much care for his using them. “And they let you keep the house?” she said.

  “As it happens, yes, they did. In their enduring gratitude to my parents’ ultimate sacrifice. Dulce et decorum est, and all. There are rumors, it’s true, that they were building a new house and this one was going to be condemned anyway. But I’m not sure I believe it, since I try never to believe in metaphors.”

  “What were they like?”

  “The metaphors?”

  “Your parents.”

  “It’s very hard to say for sure,” said Sebastien after a moment. “I don’t think we actually got the chance to know each other all that well.”

  “That’s—wow,” said Lily again, and cringed. She could not believe she had said “wow” twice in the space of a minute, but there was nothing she could do about that now. “That’s hard to imagine. I know my parents too well. There’s nothing they do or say or think that wasn’t prophesied by Freud a hundred years ago.”

  Sebastien was silent, and something about what Lily had just said started to sound wrong to her.

  “I’m really sorry about your parents, you know,” she said gently. She really was. Maybe she should have said that earlier, but there was never a normal time to say something like that. “That whole thing must have been so shocking for you.”

  “Shocking?” said Sebastien. “Well, it wasn’t philosophically shocking, of course.” His tone was didactic. “When you’re this rich you’re smart to expect some catastrophe. Have I mentioned to you how absurdly rich I am?”

  Lily blinked. “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, surely you know. If the universe grants you some favor, it’s going to remember it and eventually make you pay it back. With interest. With criminally predatory interest, quite often. You don’t believe that?”

  “Of course not,” said Lily, trying to sound soothing. She had the feeling Sebastien was angry with her, though perhaps it was only grief that she was hearing in his voice. Grief, she knew all too well, could make people savage. “I just think there’s good luck and bad luck and that’s it.”

  “I suppose you’re better off not believing it,” said Sebastien dryly. “You’d probably have a lot to worry about if you did.”

  “Well, I don’t know,” said Lily. She was trying not to sound offended. “My family had a baby die before I was born, and then they were basically grumpy paranoiacs for my entire childhood, and then they got divorced, so I guess if I subscribed to your totally unsupportable worldview, which I don’t, I’d feel like now nothing really awful is in the offing.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t be so sure,” said Sebastien. “I mean, that’s pretty small potatoes, don’t you think? No offense, as the kids say. But you didn’t actually know the baby in question, correct? No offense, again, il va sans dire.”

  Lily thought of Janie’s scowling face, the grim determination of her rocking-horse rocking in the photo above the mantel. “Correct,” she said hesitantly.

  “And your parents getting divorced, I mean, that’s just statistics. Nobody’s
going to even buy you a sandwich over that one.”

  “I suppose not.”

  “And that’s it? No other calamities, no other disasters?”

  “Well, my grandfather—”

  “Please.”

  “Okay. No. No other calamities.”

  “And none of the things that have happened to your family were in the context of an elaborate system of morally redeeming societal oppression?”

  “Well—no. No oppression.”

  Sebastien frowned like a doctor about to deliver terrible news. “Then I’d say you’ve got at least one relatively dreadful thing ahead of you.”

  “Do I?”

  “Some sort of medium catastrophe in your future, if my powers of prognostication do not deceive me.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, maybe your husband will have an affair, but not just any affair. He’ll be a very public official and have a very public affair and you’ll have to stand with him in the rain at a press conference.”

  “Okay, I can handle that,” said Lily, then shook herself. “I mean, what? No. I’m never attending some douchewad’s press conference.”

  “Or you’ll contract some kind of cancer that’s eventually curable but permanently disfiguring.”

  “That would be sad.”

  “But you’d feel lucky to be alive.”

  “Of course.”

  “Of course. Your type of person is always so embarrassingly glad to be alive.”

  “What type of person is that?”

  “I mean, really, what’s in it for you? That’s my question.”

  Lily stood up and grabbed her tank top and her skirt. She faced the wall as she put them on, then sat back on the bed.

  “Or maybe you’ll have a child who will be limited in some emotionally and financially exhausting way,” said Sebastien. “Profoundly disturbed, you know.”

  Lily was suddenly seething with a palsied rage. She was sick of her parents’ pain, but she was also defensive of it, and she hated that it was regarded as so morally neutral, so meaningless. They had been lucky in a lot of ways, of course. But it was one thing to know that your privilege was unearned; it was another thing entirely to feel that your sadness was, too—to have to be so pitifully glad, so pitifully sorry, for the modest perks of a dull and diligent middle-class life (TV, and Target candles, and a trip to Six Flags every year). Maybe that’s why the whole family was so repressed. Maybe deep down they believed—as Sebastien apparently did—that, on some level, at the end of the day, they’d had it coming.