Cartwheel (24 page)

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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 acceptance 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.

Now Katy was talking to Ignacio the bartender, who was pointing to the alcove where Lily was standing. She looked down and busied herself with some silverware until she felt a tap on her shoulder.

“Oh, hey,”
she shouted at Katy, trying to look surprised.
“What are you doing here?”

Katy shouted something back.

“What?” said Lily. She really couldn’t hear over the music.
Me gusta
marihuana, me gustas tú
, sang somebody or other. The song was pretty old. Lily thought she’d heard it first in college, freshman year, at a frat party. Middlebury didn’t admit to having frats, but they did, and it was a frat where she first heard this song. Lily glanced around the club and noticed Ignacio staring at Katy with a frankly hungry look. When Lily caught his gaze he raised his eyebrows at her inquisitively and nodded his head in Katy’s direction. Lily made a face at him and pulled Katy farther into the alcove, where they were partially obscured. Katy said something else that Lily couldn’t hear.

“What?” Lily hollered again.

“I said, what?”

“The bartender is checking you out.”

Katy looked quizzical. Lily cocked her head in Ignacio’s direction and gave a cartoon leer. Katy peered around the corner and waggled her hand in a semi-thumbs-up.

“Ew,” said Lily, wrinkling her nose. “Really?”

“What?”

“What?”

“You are late,”
shouted Katy.
“Come home.”

“I can’t,”
shouted Lily.
“I am working till two.”

Javier came over then, suave in a blue tie, and pointed at Katy.
“Your friend can’t be back here,”
he shouted to Lily.
“Unless she wants to put on an apron.”

“Two,”
said Lily again, holding up two greasy index fingers. Katy turned to go, and Lily noticed Ignacio’s noticing her leaving. There was something strange about a look of such appetite on a face so reptilian—though, of course, poor Ignacio couldn’t help his face. Still, Lily felt a cold paranoia cauliflower along her spine for a moment before Javier clapped her on the back and suggested that now would be a good time for her to think about trying to at least pretend to do her job.

That night, Sebastien sent a text at four a.m. and Lily woke up to read it but forgot to answer. She forgot the next day, too, and the next day,
and by the third day responding seemed fake and forced, but she made herself do it, and she tried to sound as unself-conscious and breezy as possible—“Hey SLC, sorry I’ve been MIA, wanna hang out tonight?”—as though she was a very popular girl and he was one of her many, many, many friends, no less precious to her because he was one of so many. His response came a day later, flinty and stiff—“I’d hardly noticed. You know where to find me”—and Lily knew that she’d done the wrong thing again, that she always did the wrong thing. Sometimes Lily wished she could float along in the kind of lighthearted solipsism that prevented grudges and bad feelings and lingering entanglements, that made it impossible to take anything too hard. But things in Lily’s life never worked out this way. Sebastien’s attempted gift of the bracelet weighed on her heavily, as did the sex, though she hated to admit it. She felt somehow obligated to him now; she felt that she’d treated him carelessly, and though she knew she’d treated him no differently from the way that many boys had treated her—no differently from the way that Sebastien himself would likely have treated her, if she’d let him—she still couldn’t shake the acrid feeling behind her heart, the queasy sense of revolving guilt.

She called Sebastien the next morning and proposed dinner. She would bring it, she said. Her treat. He assented.

At least, Lily told herself, Sebastien was unlikely to bring up her recent absence. That was something she liked about him. Stoicism was not valued at Middlebury, where everyone wanted to endlessly talk and process and expurgate every little thing. If you hooked up with a boy he seemed to feel he owed you a real-time narration of his entire life, a live-blogging of his every emotional memory. If Sebastien LeCompte had been a Middlebury boy, he and Lily would already have agonized ceaselessly over the nature of their relationship, the question of monogamy, the issue of forward momentum, the prospect of looming distance and separation, the meaning of things, the meaningless of things. What a relief it was to be excused from all of that, anyway.

“I think old Sebastien’s mad at me,” Lily said to Katy that afternoon.
She and Katy talked about Sebastien a lot, partly because they couldn’t find much else to talk about. Katy’s family, apparently, was too loving and functional to merit discussion. On the question of politics, Lily sensed a level of conflict aversion in Katy that suggested that there might be conflict to be had if Lily pushed it, which, of course, she tried very hard to do—making flamboyant assertions, quoting outrageous statistics. But Katy proved impossible to rouse; she never agreed nor disagreed, only asked questions aimed at making Lily clarify whatever she’d just said. So Katy and Lily spoke most often of men, and they spoke of Sebastien most often of all.