Cartwheel (13 page)

“Even though he lives next door?”

“Maybe. Do you think his parents really were diplomats?”

“Sure,” said Katy. “Why not?” There was a minty bubble at the corner of her mouth, which somehow made Lily feel inordinately relieved.

“I don’t know,” said Lily. “The plane crash sort of makes you wonder.”

“What?”

“If they were CIA.”

“You’re
so
conspiracy minded.”

“I get it from my dad,” said Lily. “Anyway, I have never in my life even heard of a real person playing polo. Shouldn’t he be at Oxford by now, or something?”

“Well,” said Katy, sounding doubtful. “I guess you would sort of think.”

Lily waited three days to write back. When she did, she tried to ape Sebastien’s tone and style: employing absurdly inflated language she never used in real life, invoking belabored extended metaphors. Sebastien responded by inserting random French phrases into his emails, so Lily started doing the same—though he had to know that this did not count as sophistication, since, of course, you could Google anything you wanted to say. He moved on to Italian; she saw his Italian, and raised him Hungarian—the one phrase she actually did know:
Nem beszelek magyarul
, I do not speak Hungarian—but this, it seemed, was enough. He asked her to dinner.

“You have a date already?” said Katy.

“What do you mean, ‘already’?” Lily was wearing a ruched floral shirt that she’d decided communicated a sense of general fun, and plastering makeup on her face with both hands. She was afraid that her emails might have given Sebastien the wrong idea.

“Well,” said Katy. “I just mean, we just got here.”

“We’ve been here two weeks.”

“I just wonder if it’s going to be a problem with Carlos and Beatriz.”

“It’s a host family, not a juvenile detention center.”

“They’re conservative, I think.”

Lily leaned toward the mirror and embarked on the project of eyeliner. “I don’t think we can assume that. Carlos seems to know how to have a good time, at least.”

“There are crosses everywhere.”

“It’s dinner. Does the Vatican have a policy on dinner?”

“Don’t be sarcastic.”

“No, I am actually asking. I mean, they actually really might, for all I know.”

Katy climbed into her bed then and began to read. She’d managed to enroll in the only rigorous class on offer—something about economics in the post-Peronist era—and it seemed to require a vast amount of studying and note-taking and highlighting with markers in three different colors.

“I think it’s so cool that you’re taking a real class here,” said Lily, to apologize. “Everyone else has basically just dropped out of school for the semester.”

Katy studied her for a moment to see if she was serious, then seemed to decide she was. “I just think it makes sense to learn a little bit about the country we’re in, you know?”

Lily nodded vigorously. “Totally.”

Katy smiled. “You look nice. Don’t be nervous.”

“Thanks,” said Lily. “I’m not.”

At five past eight Lily once again walked up the winding path to Sebastien LeCompte’s mansion, which, in the falling light, suddenly looked dilapidated and underwhelming. Lily had told Katy she wasn’t nervous. But she was. For one thing, she was nervously wondering if she should have brought a condom. She didn’t know if that would have
projected some kind of unsexy premeditation, or else some kind of unattractive feminine wiliness, or else some kind of massively inflated sense of her own charms. She then remembered that she wasn’t supposed to care. Her parents had given her an enormous box of Trojans before she came here, alongside an earnest discussion about
making smart choices
. Poor old Andrew had blinked compulsively throughout the entire conversation; he’d poked himself in the eye (actually poked himself in the eye!) once, and his eyeball, he reminded everyone all the time, had simply never been the same. The condom box they’d given Lily was appalling, mortifying, industrial-sized—for cults, maybe, or university women’s centers. Lily was vaguely flattered, and then vaguely insulted, when she thought of how much sex her parents must think she was having. She was then vaguely disgusted to think that her parents thought about this at all.

Suddenly, Lily was on the porch. She knocked the weird knocker (what the hell was that thing, anyway?), and Sebastien answered immediately, as though he’d been standing there, right on the other side of the door, waiting for her—which, for all she knew, he had. He was wearing a jacket, even though it was about a thousand degrees out, and probably even warmer inside.

“Dearest Lily,” he said. “Do come in.”

“Hi,” said Lily. “How’s it going?” She knew she wasn’t going to be able to keep up the email tone in person, and he might as well know it now. She followed Sebastien into the house. Inside, the living room was dusty and ornate, dominated by an enormous grandfather clock and some kind of ancient painted cloth on the wall. At the center of the room stood a grand piano that Lily felt sure was woefully out of tune.

“Pretty piano,” she said. “Do you play?”

“Only ‘Chopsticks,’ ” said Sebastien. “Would you care for a glass of wine?” He handed her one before she could answer.
SORBONNE 1967
was etched, in flamboyant swirls, on the glass.

“Oh, thanks,” said Lily. “I can’t drink out of anything from a state school.” With the first sip of wine pain flooded her mandible. She swallowed hard. On the mantel, there was a picture of Sebastien and an
older man with a smallish hoofed animal that looked like a first draft of a zebra. She pointed.

“You killed that?”

“I had to, sadly.” Sebastien stood behind her. “It owed me money.”

Lily looked more closely at the picture. The man Sebastien was standing with looked exactly like him; he had greenish eyes and wavy brown hair and a jauntily cocked head. The animal’s neck appeared broken; it was twisted at an odd angle that made it seem as though more violence had been done to it than was strictly necessary. Its belly was white and looked soft. “Where was that?” she said.

“A resort in Brazil. You pay to enjoy your dominion over the beasts.”

Lily wondered what it would have felt like to kill that thing. As a child, she and her good friend Leah had once murdered a banana slug. They had found it in the tree house—Andrew had built Lily and Anna a tree house because Janie had died, which was also why their parents had sent them to art camp, and given them music lessons, and allowed them to be far too present and assertive at adult dinner parties—and she and Leah (who had grown up to be a lesbian at NYU, and who even as a kid had always wanted to play the boy) had taken a fist-sized piece of basalt to it just to see what would happen. They’d been learning about the scientific process together in the second grade—about making observations, and recording data, and making hypotheses, and forming theories—and Lily had convinced Leah, or Leah had convinced Lily, that this was science. There’d been an underwhelming squish; the slug had oozed, relinquished a yellow substance that neither Leah nor Lily could identify, and then died, silently. And Lily had felt something odd then, a guilty but nearly gleeful sort of power—an edginess, somewhere between nausea and euphoria—and of course she’d gone to her mother later, and of course she’d cried, but it had been a complicated sort of cry.

She turned to Sebastien. “Why do you have a French name?”

“Pourquoi pas?”

“How many languages do you speak?”

“I don’t remember.”

“You’re boring, you know.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Am I?”

“You are.”

“Say a little more about that,” he said, refilling her glass.

Lily took another sip. “You’re boring because I know exactly how you’re going to react to every single thing I say. You’re going to look for the least sincere response possible, every time. You’re like an algorithm.” Sebastien gave her a look of incredulous amusement. “So all I would suggest—if you’re open to suggestions—”

“Please. Humility is a virtue.”

“I would suggest that you mix it up a little. You should occasionally say things that have an unexpected relationship to reality. You could even throw in some things you mean, from time to time. Nobody’s going to know. It will make you more interesting.”

Sebastien’s eyebrows were still raised. He did have beautiful eyes—so green and humane and, weirdly, so expressive. He’d get far with those eyes, she thought. Then she told him so. Then he kissed her.

His kiss was more vigorous than Lily would have expected—not that she’d expected him to kiss her, necessarily, though then again here she was, drinking wine, in his house, so really, what did she think? She was grateful for the swiftness of his approach; she thought with chagrin of many an awkward windup, staggeringly embarrassing advance-and-retreats, faces too close to do anything else, and then not quite, and then finally the clink of tooth on tooth, the tepid warmth of another person’s mouth. Awful. She felt confident enough once the whole business was under way, but the first kiss gave her pause. It was just so odd, when you really thought about it.

Sebastien pulled back and looked at her gravely. “Thank you for the suggestions,” he said.

“See?” said Lily. “You’re doing it. I have no idea what you mean. You’re more interesting already.” She’d meant it teasingly, but it came out a little flat, a little mean, she thought, though Sebastien didn’t seem to care. He smiled.

“That roommate of yours,” he said.

“Yes?”

“She’s quite pretty.”

“Yeah.” Lily giggled, then hiccupped. “She has a face you sort of want to keep looking at. I think she’s really insipid, though.”

“Insipid?”

“Yes,” said Lily severely.

“But she’s your friend, isn’t she?”

“My friend? My friend. Well, sure.”

Sebastien kissed her again. “You’re a wicked woman.”

And because she wasn’t wicked—because she wasn’t wicked at all, in fact, she didn’t think—but it was terrific to make someone wonder, she said, “Maybe so. Maybe so.”

Sebastien hurried along the aisles of Pan y Vino bodega. From behind the checkout, the cashier eyed him with amusement; it was obvious that she suspected from what he was buying that he was going to try to
cook
, and he understood why such a prospect might seem hilarious. As it happened, he was
not
going to try to cook. He was going to try to order Ethiopian takeout and then arrange the spices from the store in such a way that it looked like he had cooked. He wasn’t going to pretend he’d cooked, necessarily. But he did want to present the
feeling
of having cooked; he wanted to fill up the house with a sense of domesticity and competence; he wanted to give the impression of being someone who lived an actual life—with ups and downs and commitments, with a vocation and an avocation or two, and a population, and some kind of a cosmic deadline. And all of this was because Lily Hayes was, somehow, coming over for dinner tonight. Again.

Sebastien was surprised she was willing to repeat the experiment; their first evening together had not gone entirely smoothly. An hour before she’d been due to arrive, Sebastien had made the fatal mistake of idly considering what his house might look like to a stranger, and the deeply vexing results of this exercise had thrown him into a panicked
despair. He was already bewildered that Lily was coming at all. It was scarcely believable that—through some arbitrary and uncharacteristically magnanimous intervention of the deities—she hadn’t been terrified by his original message, or by the epistolary theatrics that followed; that she’d been willing to treat familiarity with idioms in a variety of languages as some kind of sophistication—even though, after the Internet, familiarity with anything at all could be faked and did not really count; that she’d put up with a week of this nonsense before Sebastien could find the courage to ask her over and had actually said yes when he did. All of it, all of it, was astonishingly good luck.

But an hour before the appointed time, Sebastien saw that his luck had run out: The house would never, never do. Suddenly he could see how odd and empty it looked; how loneliness seemed to clutter around the corners of the rooms, how desperation was a thing you could almost smell. The house was a monstrosity. The house was a horror. And Lily Hayes, he’d realized with startling and growing anguish, was going to see it in an hour.

He was going to have to torch the place, he’d decided. He was going to have to make it look like arson. But no, no. He’d looked at the clock sorrowfully. He had no time for that. Instead, he was going to have to try to clean it. Sebastien never really cleaned in earnest (though neither did he engage in the activities that necessitated the most cleaning—cooking, child rearing, hosting other human beings). Nevertheless, he’d spent an anxious and sickening twenty minutes making ill-advised attempts at tidying. He’d swiped limply at the tables and mantel; he’d found some candles in a cupboard in the kitchen. Lighting them, he’d hoped, would make the place look romantic and European—tragic in the way of widowers and heirs to mysterious fortunes, and not in the way of serial killers or animal hoarders or the mentally touched. He’d wasted a quarter of an hour considering the picture of the felled tapir. His parents had put up the picture—maybe, he thought now, because he and his father looked so very much alike in it—and Sebastien had never really thought about what having it on display might say about
his character (to whom? being the salient question, of course). But suddenly Sebastien saw that a stranger would think he’d selected the photo with solemn care—as the representative image of his time with his parents (bad) or else the proudest triumph of his short and underwhelming life (worse). He’d considered hiding it, but he worried about the time, as well as what unspeakable horrors he might find behind the picture if he moved it. Instead, he’d reached behind the grandfather clock and dislodged a nest of dark gray dust. He did not know why he was doing this; he did not think Lily was likely to inspect behind the clock. Perhaps he had seen the overarching futility of the project and was willfully undermining himself. It wouldn’t be the first time, he’d thought, as he went to light the candles.