Cartwheel (15 page)

“Of course he’s boring,” Katy was saying. She got out of bed and adopted a yoga pose on the linoleum—it was the archer, the bow, something or other. Lily didn’t want to ask. “You didn’t know boys like that in school?”

“No,” said Lily. “An orphaned trillionaire in a haunted mansion? No. Did you?”

“I mean, you know he’s just a hipster, right? You know he didn’t invent sneering? If he lived in the U.S. he’d probably be a music blogger.”

“Katy, his parents were
spies
.”

“I’m sure he likes to tell you they were.”

Lily was agog; she had never heard Katy talk like this. “Isn’t your head starting to feel weird like that?” she said.

“Yeah, actually, it is.” Katy dropped the pose, then erupted into a startling backward arch. Her T-shirt rode up, revealing the demure mollusk of a perfect in-betweenie belly button. Lily averted her eyes. “So what are you going to do about Beatriz and Carlos?” said Katy.

“I’m just surprised they care so much,” said Lily.

“Well, I mean, they are getting paid to make sure we don’t get killed.”

“Who’s going to kill me? Sebastien? I’d like to see him try.”

“Or pregnant.”

“Again, I’d like to see him try.”

Katy laughed, and Lily felt a warmth with a sourness underneath. She didn’t know when she’d started to worry about whether Katy thought she was funny. But it was true that she’d always been willing to be a mercenary in conversation; she had never been enough in love to refuse to trade on a man’s quirks for good-natured laughs, and she was not, in this case, at all in love.

“He tried to give me a bracelet,” said Lily. She remembered how Sebastien had handled it—with a light disregard, like it was something somebody had asked him to hold for a moment. “A diamond bracelet.”

“He didn’t,” said Katy.

“He did.”

“A real one?”

“I didn’t let him do it.” Lily had been a little surprised, actually, at how quickly he’d taken it back. She’d expected more of a fight; she’d already been formulating the opening chords of a generous and reasonable speech in which she would gently, with exquisite care and responsibility, turn him down.

“Very noble of you.”

“I mean, I couldn’t. It was his dead mother’s or something.” Lily remembered the blank expression on Sebastien’s face when she’d asked about what had happened when his parents had died. She’d said “died”
as a courtesy to him—nobody in her family could stand people who said “passed away”—but as soon as the word was out of her mouth it had hung heavily in the air, like a slur.

“Yeah,” said Katy, “but he probably had a bunch. Of bracelets, I mean.”

“Even so.”

“Man,” said Katy. “I wouldn’t have turned down a present like that. That boy picked the wrong girl.”

The remark echoed for a moment, and even though she knew Katy didn’t really mean it, Lily found herself wanting to rotate the conversation somehow. “What did you love so much about Anton?” she said.

Katy maintained her pose a moment longer, then toppled. Even her toppling was graceful. “The thing that I loved the most about Anton,” said Katy, and Lily could tell that she’d already thought a lot about it. “Was the way he made everything bigger.”

“That sounds exhausting,” said Lily. She felt firmly that things were already big enough; she certainly didn’t need things to be any bigger.

“It was, sometimes,” said Katy.

“So are you ever glad to have him gone?”

Lily expected Katy to pause and then say yes, sometimes, but instead she shook her head and shot Lily a terrible look—of generosity born of cosmic and enduring pity—from her spot on the floor. “No,” she said.

“Do you think you should get over it, though? I mean, life is short.”

“It’s not short,” said Katy. “It’s terrifyingly long.” Katy got up and cracked her back. Lily could hear the delicate pincer sounds of each of her vertebrae aligning themselves. “And for me at least, it just got a lot longer.”

One night late in January, Sebastien awoke to a knock at the door.

He had been sound asleep, and he was surprised at how quickly he was flooded with joy—joy at the thought that Lily had been so eager to see him, that she’d been so bold on his behalf. Perhaps they had moved
past the horrid bracelet debacle after all, he thought, as he staggered down the stairs in his boxers. It was this, exactly this, that was wonderful about having a person in one’s life: As sociologists could attest, there was simply no knowing what people might do. Before Lily, Sebastien’s days had been mired in reticulated sameness—he could just as easily find himself eating expired canned spaghetti at four a.m. as four p.m.; he might be asleep at three in the afternoon or drunk at nine in the morning; he might go out for walks in the middle of the night or he might not leave the house for a week. But now there was Lily, and she might (who knows!) show up at his house at any hour of the day or night, gloriously unannounced.

But when Sebastien opened the door, he could see—even in shadow, even in silhouette—that it wasn’t Lily. It was Katy.

He was so surprised that he forgot to be ironic. “What are you doing here?” he said.

“I need to talk to you.” In the dark, Katy’s face was luminous. Sebastien could never quite shake the feeling that her eyes were somehow medically too big for the rest of her body.

“Does Lily know you’re here?”

“Why should Lily know I’m here?”

“Okay, then. Fine.” It was only when his heart began to slow down that Sebastien realized it had been racing. “What do you want?”

“I have a question for you.”

“There are telephones, you know. There’s the Internet. There’s the daytime.” Sebastien’s mouth felt swampy, his mind still solidly lodged in some uneasy dreamscape, but he was beginning to wonder if it was perhaps earlier than he’d first thought. He ran his tongue along his teeth. It was, he realized shamefully, perhaps as early as midnight.

Katy cocked her head. “I need to know what’s going on with Carlos.”

“What are you talking about?” Sebastien leaned against the doorframe, suddenly aware of the cool night air and his boxer shorts. Well, and what should he be ashamed of? If Katy Kellers didn’t want to see a sybaritic young gentleman with pale and blue-veined bare legs in his nightclothes, then she should have called ahead.

“He’s in some kind of financial trouble, isn’t he?” said Katy. “Isn’t that what you said?”

“Is this a matter of some urgency? Are you being struck mad or insomniac by curiosity? Some of us have work in the mornings, you know. Not me, of course, but some people.”

“I didn’t want anyone to know I was over here.”

“Well, I don’t see how it’s any of your concern what’s going on with the Carrizos.” Sebastien sounded cross, and he was further cross with himself for caring—privacy was such a bourgeois value, after all. “And I also don’t know why you think I’d know.”

“Of course you know. What else do you do besides sit there and watch everybody all day long? And there’s that thing you said at the dinner.”

“What thing?”

“About whether they were feeding us well. About the lawsuit.”

“That was just a joke.”

“I know Lily thinks that everything you say is a joke, but I don’t think anything you say is really a joke. So—what, the Carrizos are being sued? Why?”

Sebastien rubbed his hair fretfully. “Something untoward with money,” he said. “I think. Why does anybody get sued?”

“How do you know that?”

“I just told you I don’t know that.”

Katy looked at him sharply. “How do you
think
you know it?”

“It’s gossip and hearsay,” said Sebastien. “Truly mediocre intelligence. Do with it what you will. Which will hopefully be nothing.”

“What could I possibly do with it?”

“I’m sure I don’t know. I haven’t had even a glimmer of imagination since approximately 1996.”

“You’re a strange boy.”

Sebastien only hoped that the blankness on his face communicated the resounding unoriginality of this observation.

“I should be getting back,” said Katy.

“So soon? A pity.”

Katy retreated down the steps. Her beauty was so austere, so forbidding; there was something hard about it, as though she’d been chiseled from some rare mineral—whereas Lily seemed somehow organic, naturally arising.

“Might I ask,” he said, as Katy was walking away, “whether you’re going to tell Lily you came over here?”

“Why? Afraid it’ll give her the wrong impression?” Katy turned her head away from him and kept walking. “Don’t worry. There’s a lot I don’t tell Lily.”

One day while Lily was out walking in San Telmo, a woman with a collapsing face shrieked at her.

The woman came from nowhere. Lily had been listening to her iPod, and all of a sudden the woman was right in front of her, yelling in Spanish too fast and distorted for comprehension. Lily tried to listen and pick out words even as she walked away—faster and faster, though she was careful not to break into a run—but it was useless: Listening to the woman was like listening to somebody talk in a dream, or through aphasia. Lily retreated into a doorway. The woman followed her there, still shouting. Her skin was leathery, and something about her eyes seemed wrong—the ratio of whites to iris was off somehow, maybe. She reached out and Lily fumbled in her pockets for coins. But when she looked down she saw that the woman wasn’t holding her hands out to receive something; instead she was pointing at Lily, her hands like twin claws, and Lily was reduced to saying she did not understand, she was sorry, she was sorry, she did not understand. At this, the woman—seeming somehow satisfied, though Lily could not guess why—turned and dematerialized into an alleyway.

A moment passed, and Lily stepped gingerly into the street. With the woman gone the square was quiet, the sunbeams gathering into little pools on the concrete. A diagonal slash of light in front of Lily was bristling with dust motes, moving in a silent frenzy. Across the square, two young guys were drinking beers at a cervecería; they looked at Lily
and laughed, and one of them raised his glass in a toast. Lily suddenly noticed an eggy wetness on her cheek, which, she knew immediately, was spit. That woman’s spit was on her cheek. Lily wiped her face with the sleeve of her sweater—once, twice, many times—and she was halfway back to the Carrizos’, still wiping, before she understood that that part of her face was just going to feel weird for a while.

For the rest of the afternoon, Lily felt the edgy weariness of ambient guilt. This had been coming in waves, between the Borges and the wine—the worrisome knowledge that she was basically on vacation in a country that was basically poor, at least by U.S. standards. She could not figure out how to regard her presence here. Was it good that she was in Buenos Aires, pumping her modest summer savings into the ridiculous exchange rate and coming out wealthy and dropping money into the economy? And trying—you could not deny that she was trying, and certainly she was trying harder than Katy—to learn the language, and make international connections, and foster cross-cultural understanding, and all that? She should be volunteering somewhere, perhaps. She should be suffering somehow. But then that seemed like it might be shallow, too, and maybe even worse, in a way that she had trouble unraveling. The whole study-abroad program had gone to an orphanage for an afternoon of work, and it had been so painfully clear how useless they all were—that small surmountable problems were being made for them to overcome, that tiny doable tasks were being left undone so that they might all line up and do them. And that everything was going more slowly because of all the translating and the extra explaining. That they’d basically made these people’s jobs harder by their presence. That the real favor would have been to stay home. There was a particular kind of uneasiness that came from recognizing the profundity of your own uselessness. It was all so morally exhausting. Lily worried about it, and then forgot to worry about it, and then worried about the fact that she’d forgotten. She recognized this as perhaps the second stage of culture shock, after elation.

Back at the house, Katy wasn’t home, so Lily dug out her international calling card. She wanted to talk to someone about these things,
and if that meant talking to a member of her own family, then so be it. Lily tried Maureen first, but she wasn’t home. She could call Anna, she supposed, but she never called Anna. She honestly forgot about Anna sometimes—not the fact of her, of course, nor her role in almost all of Lily’s childhood memories. But sometimes, it was true, the idea that Anna was living her own life at Colby felt less than totally real to Lily. This feeling was compounded by the legendarily ascetic hours Anna kept—going to bed and arising incomprehensibly early, which had always seemed to Lily like a conscious rejection of the world and its inhabitants. Sometimes at Middlebury Lily had woken up at one p.m. in time for her first class and thought of the terrifying fact that Anna had been awake for six and a half hours already, and the even more terrifying fact that this was nearly all Lily knew about her life. The things that Lily did
not
know about Anna’s life were legion. Most important, perhaps, Lily did not know whether Anna was still a virgin. Worse, she did not expect to be apprised of any developments on that score, when and if they occurred. Lily had told Anna about her own first time, of course, and Anna had seemed both grossed out, which Lily understood, and also uninterested, which Lily did not understand—not only because sex was an objectively interesting subject, but also because Lily found it unfathomable to be repulsed by something and not also fundamentally curious about it. To Lily, those were essentially the same feelings. With Anna, it was not so. When it came to conversations about the really compelling, vulgar, transfixing realities of life, Anna was maddeningly equanimous; neither overtly interested, nor so prudishly avoidant as to acknowledge those subjects’ power. She would talk about such matters when it was necessary, and what she would say about them then was inevitably practical. When Lily had told her about losing her virginity, for example, Anna had immediately asked if Lily was going to get on birth control.