Cartwheel

by Jennifer Dubois

  “This is depressing,” she said to Sebastien, putting on her shoes.

  “Get used to it, is all I’m saying.”

  “I am used to it. I am used to nothing else.”

  “I can’t imagine,” he said. “My life’s been a laugh a minute.”

  · · ·

  Back at the Carrizos’, light was still coming from underneath the basement bedroom door. Lily glanced at her phone—it wasn’t even midnight. She opened the door.

  “Hey,” she said cheerfully. She felt sure her face was still flushed, and she did not really want to talk about it. “What are you reading?”

  “A chapter about resurgent protectionism,” said Katy. “Did you know that every year there are four million tons of maize that farmers can’t sell either here or abroad?”

  “I did not,” said Lily. For some reason, this came out in an overly jaunty, Sebastien LeCompte type of voice.

  Katy looked up. “You slept with him!”

  For some reason, Lily felt a momentary gaiety—she wanted to shriek, I did not!, like Anna might have done as a child in the face of a true accusation—but she forced herself to remain calm. “I guess I did,” she said. “It was fast enough that it’s a little hard to say for sure.”

  “You harlot.”

  Lily laughed mirthlessly. “I suppose.” The flash of gaiety was gone, and she felt a strange numbness in her chest, a mournful aching under her left flank. Perhaps she was developing pancreatitis from all the wine. Perhaps service industry work was disagreeing with her. Perhaps she was finally getting old, as everyone had always assured her she one day would.

  “So,” said Katy, closing her book with a decisive thump. “How was it?”

  “Okay, I guess. We got into a weird fight afterward.” Lily patted her hip bones through her thin skirt; they seemed to fit awkwardly into their sockets now, like jigsaw pieces put in wrong. “And he told me he loved me.”

  Katy’s perfect mouth fell open. “No,” she said. “He did not.”

  “He did.”

  “Holy shit.”

  Lily sighed. “I just wish he knew he didn’t have to try so hard.”

  “Is that what your fight was about?”

  “No.”

  “What was it about?”

  “Luck,” said Lily. “I think.”

  “So, I mean, what did you say?”

  Lily exhaled heavily. She was sobering up, which made her realize she’d been a little drunk. She wanted to hang on to the plucky sense of savvy she’d had when she’d responded to Sebastien’s declaration. She’d had things figured out then—only an hour ago—and Katy was mucking things up with her naïveté.

  “I mean, what was I supposed to say?” said Lily. “I said, like, ‘Oh yeah, uh-huh, I’m sure.’ Or something like that.”

  “Lily!”

  “What?”

  “You didn’t.”

  “I mean, really,” said Lily. “He doesn’t mean it. You’ve met the guy: He never means anything.” Lily already wished she hadn’t told Katy. It was so tiresome having to explain everything to her all the time. “Anyway, I’m not an idiot. I’m just kind of disappointed that he thinks I am.”

  “I don’t know, Lily.” Katy blew on her bangs; they puffed out like an animal projecting aggression. “What if he really does?”

  “Ugh, you’re such a romantic.”

  “Maybe. But we’re twenty-one! We’re supposed to be romantics. Who wants to be so cynical at our age? There’s something wrong with you if you’re so cynical at twenty-one.”

  “I’m twenty. I’m twenty-one at the end of the month.”

  “So there you go. That’s even worse.”

  Lily turned her back to Katy and began to undress. Normally she was pretty immodest—not because she thought so much of her body, but because she thought so little of it (what kind of vanity was required to think your body was so special it had to be protected from sight, when billions, literally billions of people, were built exactly like you?)—but it seemed strange to undress in front of Katy now, when she’d been with Sebastien only a few moments ago. She thought it might invite a new kind of evaluative scrutiny she didn’t care to consider too fully.

  “So what are you going to do for your birthday, do you think?” said Katy.

  “What?”

  “You just said you’re turning twenty-one soon.”

  “Oh. Yeah. On the seventeenth. I don’t know. Nothing. Go out somewhere, I guess.”

  “You should see if your boss will let you have a room at Fuego.”

  “He won’t,” said Lily. In the low light, she could see the fans of blue veins skirting her upper thighs. She had a hard time believing she was actually warm-blooded sometimes—her blood was just so visibly blue; it looked Arctic in origin. She could feel the vaguely unpleasant dampness and stinging from where Sebastien had been. Her face was slightly raw from his; Lily always felt that she was being vigorously sanded down when she kissed a man.

  “You never know,” Katy was saying.

  “Sometimes you do. My boss doesn’t like me that much. I drop things and my drawer comes up short.”

  “You drop things?”

  “Well, I dropped one thing. A glass. Not like a whole platter of things. But trust me, is the point, about the party idea. It’s not going to happen.”

  “Fine.” Katy took out her textbook again. “You’re awfully dour.”

  “I’m not dour,” said Lily, wincing at how much she sounded like her parents. “I’m just a realist.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  February

  One night, amid all the rolling around, it finally happened. That beat of lulled momentum—the point at which Lily usually turned over, or lightly took Sebastien’s hand, or asked him some jejune question, or got up to get a glass of water—came and went, and she continued to kiss him, with more urgency than she ever had before. In Sebastien’s head, constellations, luminous and slow moving, were created and destroyed. His hand crept slowly, and then faster, to the side table to produce an atavistic condom. Afterward he said, “I love you,” matter-of-factly. He meant it. He did not mean anything, but he meant this.

  “Uh-huh,” said Lily. She was trying to sound savvy and cold, or maybe she really was. Years of reflexive mordancy had left Sebastien with few tools to assess other people’s emotional states. All communication was maneuver. And he felt oddly alone in the bed afterward, with the sheets now twisted into knots and the room growing dark in the evening chill, and Lily only a foot away from him.

  Then she’d asked him something about his parents. (What kind of criminally banal pillow talk this was! He blamed the American movies.) She’d said that she was sorry about them—and she did look sorry, though frankly she also looked a little annoyed at having to be sorry—and remarked that the loss must have been “shocking.” And this—not earlier, let the record show, not out of any sense that he was entitled to love (hers or anyone’s), and not from any wounded pride (he had no pride to wound)—was when Sebastien had become angry. Shocking? His parents’ deaths were shocking? Yes, shocking, of course, though expectations being wildly subverted was not, in the end, the most challenging aspect of that whole ordeal. He’d thought of the picture of his father on the mantel; his father had been young in that photo, Sebastien realized, only a little over forty. Surely one still wanted things at forty. Shocking? Sure. But primarily devastating, shattering. Life ending, as Lily surely had noticed. The wrongness of the word made Sebastien bellicose, and he’d led them into a stupid fight—transparent, pitiful, composed of serious nonsense—in which he condescended and dismissed, offering dark prophecies about Lily’s future and his own. He monologued about all the bad luck she would one day have, all the medium-sized difficulties that would one day befall her. He didn’t really believe any of it, of course—he didn’t really believe anything—and he could feel the mood in the room darken: first with Lily’s anger, then with her pedestrian defensiveness, her need to let him know that she had suffere
d enough already. That’s all anybody wanted anyone to know about them—how hard it all had been, how valiantly they had tried, how much unseen credit they were due. Sebastien was tired of it. Sebastien was tired of everything. With every twist, Sebastien could feel the conversation taking him further away from Lily, but still he could not stop. He could have reached out then and touched her, he knew, except somehow it wouldn’t have mattered. It would have been the same as not touching her. It would have been the same as getting up and closing the door and never touching her again.

  · · ·

  Somehow, Lily’s days were beginning to trace the same emotional arc, over and over again. She’d wake up in the mornings feeling jaunty and electrified, thrilled by her own life. She was young and nothing was really nailed down yet: It was true she was no longer a virgin; it was true she was no longer undeclared—but really, in the broadest sense, anything was still possible, and what a wonder that was. She walked around the city in the afternoons, watching herself in the third person—alone at cafés, at museums—and she mostly saw the person she had always wanted to watch herself be; a person for whom all the best things were still ahead. This feeling came back to her at nights, as she walked back to the Carrizos’ from Fuego or from Sebastien’s, the lights of the city shimmery and seductive all around her. There was absolutely nothing like a city at night. It was so easy to believe that everything that could possibly happen was happening somewhere right around her—just behind a closed door, just beyond her field of vision. And for all she knew, it was.

  But between the mornings and the evenings, something was going wrong. A feeling came pricking at Lily in the late afternoons, when the sun turned a certain sickening rubescent color, casting light that made all the buildings look like glowing cinders. In those hours, Lily felt that she was kidding herself—that some central fiction of her life was growing worn with overuse, and that one day it would tear through completely. She would fall into a shaky melancholy then, as though coming down with a strange late-in-the-day hangover, and would have to go somewhere bright and capitalist and unreal to try to cheer herself up. Sometimes she’d find herself at a Changomas, staring at the children’s cereal, or at the movies, watching dubbed American films that seemed to always use the same voice-over actors. She generally tried to stay away from email—it made her life in Argentina feel contingent and small and less urgent somehow; she was on the other end of the world, and she wanted to feel like it—but sometimes in these afternoon moods she’d succumb to a kiosko, where she’d spend a couple of hours reading blogs devoted to badly written expressions of widely held opinions. She’d watch the irradiated lobes of the computers grow brighter and brighter against the falling darkness.

  Then evening would come, and she would walk out into the streets and gulp the still-warm air. She’d remember that she was so far away from home that she could actually wear a tank top in February. She’d take off the sweater she’d worn against the air-conditioning in the kiosko or the theater or the store. There would be a mild breeze against her shoulders, and she would feel it creakily cantilever her into the evening. Her old innate optimism would return. She would sense, with the tender and turbulent joy of a granted reprieve, that her life was not yet over. And she would begin to feel much better.

  Sebastien did not see Lily again for a time. She began to bob maddeningly in and out of availability: Texts went unanswered for days; plans were made and canceled and made yet again. When she did materialize, she was abstracted, distant, always smelling slightly of burned chorizo. All of this, she fervently attested, was due to that infernal newly acquired job of hers. She would have Sebastien believe, apparently, that she had truly become absorbed to distraction in the minutiae of utensils and tips and the wrangling of emotionally abusive customers. She would have Sebastien think, apparently, that his palpably diminishing relative claim on her attention meant nothing.

  One Sunday night, after watching an Antonioni film they’d both pretended to like, Sebastien and Lily lay together in silence. Lily’s head was on his torso and he was stroking a strand of her hair with his thumb, admiring its multidimensional shininess. He was acutely aware of the rising and falling of his chest.

  “So,” said Lily abruptly. “What are you going to do?”

  Sebastien kept trying to slow his heartbeat down and found it galloping ever faster nonetheless. “When, my peach?” he said.

  “Now.”

  Through the window, Sebastien could see the gathering blueness of late twilight. He hadn’t yet thought to get up and light candles. “Likely kiss you some more,” he said. “If you’re amenable.”

  “In general, I mean.” Lily rolled over onto her back. Sebastien could see a cuneate piece of flattish pale stomach right above her jeans; he could see the knobby handle of her hip bone. “In your life.”

  “I can’t imagine what you’re talking about,” said Sebastien, even though he could.

  “I mean, are you just going to stay here forever?” Lily stretched elaborately. Sebastien could not get over the outrageous, unfussy healthfulness of her body. You could just see her frolicking in some creek somewhere; catching little frogs and crayfish and things with her bare hands because she hadn’t yet been socialized to think those things were disgusting.

  “You’ve got all this money,” she was saying. “I mean, what do you want to do with it?”

  Sebastien had known this would come eventually, but he was sorry it was coming already. “Support a revolving cast of lovely women, I suppose,” he said. “Until I age into impotence, at least.”

  “No, really,” said Lily. “You’re a smart guy.” Sebastien winced at this. Nobody felt the need to remark upon intelligence that they actually believed in. “You’ve got to go back to school at some point, right?”

  “Not really.”

  “You could get a job, you know. Have you ever thought of that? I mean, I know you don’t need to. I know you don’t need the money. But it might be good for you. It might be good for you to get out once in a while.”

  “I’ve been out plenty. I’m retired now.”

  “It might make you less depressed.”

  Sebastien turned his back to her and stared at the cracks in the wall. Maybe, in a way, this bossiness was a good sign—maybe instead of reflecting grievous disappointment, it suggested a certain proprietary concern. “Who’s depressed?” he said. “Depression is for the middle class. I’m having the time of my life.”

  “So you’re just going to sit here and rot then?”

  “Well, I’ve got to sit somewhere and rot. It might as well be here.”

  “That’s awful.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and stood up. He could hear his knees crack, and it made him feel old. You had to live so terribly long to actually be old, but Sebastien was starting to wonder if people began to feel that way quite a bit earlier, and spent their lives waiting for their bodies to match their souls. “Could you tell me more specifically what you’re imagining? Some kind of a start-up? Socially conscious investments? Venture capitalism? Get involved in the what—dot-com boom? I assume that’s still happening? Or maybe it’s not too late to cash in on the tail end of the Gold Rush.” Lily was visibly waiting for Sebastien to stop talking, but he could not. “Or should I set my sights lower, perhaps? Start taking in washing from the neighborhood? What are we thinking here? You tell me.”

  “You mean to say your plan is seriously to just sit here and order takeout until the day you die.”

  “This is everyone’s plan, broadly.”

  “You’re just like my family.”

  “I have to suspect that’s meant unkindly.”

  There was a long pause in which Sebastien could sense Lily circling around what she wanted to say, thinking better of it and then veering back toward it again, each time getting a little closer. “You just want to wallow—” she finally began.

  “Wallow! Who doesn’t want a good wallow?”

  “You want to wallow in the passive acceptanc
e of death.”

  “As opposed to what? The active rejection of death? Or the active acceptance of death?” Sebastien grinned to show her that it was not too late for them to stop it. “The passive rejection of death, perhaps?”

  Lily laughed a little. “You’re impossible.”

  “I just want to know what my options are here.”

  “You are. Impossible.” She kissed him again then, hard, but it was a complicated kind of kiss, a little bit vicious and fierce, and when he peeked halfway through he saw that her eyes were still open.

  Her second weekend at Fuego, Lily picked up an extra shift and forgot to call Carlos and Beatriz to tell them. Halfway through the second shift she remembered, but the club was slammed, and she didn’t even have time to pee until her break. At ten-thirty, as she maneuvered a tray of cocktails over to a tableful of Belgians, Lily spotted Katy standing at the bar near the door. It was strange to see Katy here. From a distance, she looked shy and beautiful and wide-eyed—like some sort of nocturnal jungle creature, a baby ocelot or something—and Lily could see that she’d already attracted the vulture-like attentions of several tables’ worth of inebriated young men, as well as Ignacio, the tortoise-faced bartender. Katy did not seem to notice any of this. Lily looked down at her hands, bald and raw from the scalding hot water, smelling like the stewed detritus of the sink where she had, moments ago, despaired of ever dislodging an especially despicable layer of grime from a pan. Looking at Katy, Lily realized that she felt strangely self-conscious, as though Katy had caught her wearing a costume for a performance she’d hoped would stay a secret. Once Lily had been cleaning up puke in the men’s room and a man had come in and smirked at her and said, in English, “I bet you wish you’d gone to college.” And along with her indignation, Lily had experienced a sliver of pleasure at being mistaken in this way. This was a costume, of course. She didn’t really need this job.