Cartwheel (23 page)

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.

“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.”

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 suffered 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.