Cartwheel (3 page)

“So,” said Maureen. “I have some not great news.”

“Oh, Christ,” said Andrew. Maureen was notoriously understated.

“It looks like they were maybe sleeping with the same man.” Maureen inhaled; it sounded like she was breathing through her teeth. “And that maybe they had a fight about it.”

“What?” Andrew stood up. “Who? That Sebastien character?”

“It seems so.”

Andrew walked into the bathroom and turned on the light. In the mirror, he looked abominable—flyaway hair, leaking red eyes. Coffee on his collar, though he couldn’t remember when he’d last had any. It seemed to Andrew that his eyes were sinking into his face; receding, somehow, like his hairline. Was this normal? His eye sockets were twin apses now, overshadowed by the dome of his forehead. “And they fought about it?” he said.

Maureen coughed. “Yes,” she said. “Or anyway, they fought about something.”

“How did they, ah, establish this?”

“The fight? They’ve got half a dozen witnesses. It happened at that bar she worked at.”

“And the other thing?”

“Emails.”

“Of course.” Andrew’s eyeball was throbbing. He took a tissue and dabbed at it. He didn’t know why his eyes were seeping quite so much; maybe he was having an allergic response to some South American
tree, the relentless fecundity of this awful city. He wasn’t crying. Like his daughters, he was not a crier. “Was there anyone else?”

“Down there, you mean?”

“Yes. Or, I mean, at home, too. How many total, do you think?”

“You’re asking me how many men did our daughter sleep with?”

“Trust me. It will be relevant.”

“Andrew. I don’t know.”

“You really don’t know?”

“I really do not know. You know how Lily is. I mean, there was this guy, obviously.”

“Yes.” Andrew approached the mirror and put his eye right up against it. Up close his eye was comical and a bit spooky, with cirrus strands of bloodshot threading out from the pupil. He could see no clear evidence of damage. He could not believe that something invisible could hurt so much.

“And the economist from Middlebury, of course.”

“The economist?”

“Andrew. You met him.”

“Did I?” Andrew turned on the faucet and ran his hands under the water. He splashed his face. He slapped himself on the cheeks, lightly.

“They dated for months. We had lunch at the Impudent Oyster. What are you
doing
over there?”

“The
Impotent
Oyster? What a name for a restaurant.”

“Impudent. Andrew. Don’t you remember? It was tremendously awkward for all of us.”

A vague, repressed memory came to Andrew. Maureen had insisted on arguing with no one about IMF loans to Peru; she had jabbed her fork in the air to make a point. What lifetime was this, when they had all met prospective suitors together for lunch? When the biggest challenge was presenting a sufficiently united front? “Okay,” said Andrew. “Okay. So that’s two. And anyone else?”

Andrew could hear Maureen thinking for a moment. “I imagine there were a few others,” she said finally.

“I see.”

“I mean, nothing outrageous, I’m sure.”

“What’s outrageous?”

“I just mean, she’s, you know. She’s of her generation. They have different ideas about sex.”

“I thought our generation invented all the different ideas about sex,” said Andrew. He didn’t know if he really thought this, but it sounded like the kind of thing he might once have thought.

“Well, sure,” said Maureen. “I just mean, you know. The girls now are like the boys. They sleep around. They expect not to be judged. I’m not saying I think it’s the right thing for her. I’m just saying it’s normal now.”

“Right.” Andrew flipped off the bathroom light.

“Not that the norm is what matters. I mean she could sleep with a hundred guys and it doesn’t mean she did this, right?”

“Right.” Andrew walked to the bedroom and drew the curtains. He sat heavily on the bed.

“Not that she slept with a hundred guys.”

“What—fifty?”

“Andrew!”

“What?”

“Don’t be absurd.”

“I have absolutely no idea what’s absurd.”

“No. No. Of course not, no. Like, ten maybe. Like ten would be a very, very liberal estimate.”

“I see.” Andrew sighed. “Didn’t you ever talk to her about this stuff?”

“About sex? What do you mean? We both did.”

“Well, I mean. About, I don’t know. About not having quite so much of it.”

There was a dark pause. “Would you have talked to a son about that?”

“No,” said Andrew reasonably. “Realistically, no. But then it matters more for her, doesn’t it? It doesn’t help our case.”

“Well, yeah, her entire personality doesn’t help our case. It doesn’t mean I wish she didn’t have one.”

Andrew closed his eyes. He didn’t understand why he couldn’t see it, the wound: why it didn’t appear against the backdrop of his swollen eyelid, lightning shaped, blood colored. “I really cannot believe this,” he said. He kept his eyes closed, afraid that if he opened them, he’d somehow see Maureen’s face. “Can you?”

“Yes, actually,” said Maureen. All of a sudden, she sounded old. “You know, I’m not sure anything could ever really surprise me again.”

Andrew spent the first full day in Buenos Aires learning that he could not see Lily until Thursday. On this, everyone—the police, the lawyer, the Internet—was firm. He could not see her until Thursday, and there was nothing to be done, even when Andrew snarled at the diplomatic representative from the U.S. embassy over the phone.

“I need to see her today,” he said. He felt that if he spoke very slowly and clearly, this would be believed. He understood faintly that this was making him sound nearly sarcastic, but he did not care. Anna was taking a shower. She had spent the first twenty-four hours in Argentina showering, or running, or stretching mutely before that car-sized television, her face bruise colored and alien in its light. Andrew was trying to have all the worst phone conversations while she was gone.

“I do understand, sir,” said the woman on the phone. She was professionally trained not to hear hostility. She also sounded about fourteen—Andrew pictured braces, he pictured a unicorn sweatshirt—and yet it was she, not Andrew, who had already visited Lily and was likely to visit her once more within the week. “But there’s nothing I can do.”

“
You
personally, maybe. Sure. Maybe there’s nothing you personally can do.” Andrew was picturing an international embargo, a land invasion. He was picturing a coup d’état.

“There is nothing more that the embassy can do, at this juncture,” said the woman. She was professionally trained to be firm. In theory, she was saying, the embassy was supposed to have been notified when Lily was detained, but in practice they often weren’t notified until the
detainee was transferred to a prison. In this case, they’d been notified when Mr. Hayes’s wife—his ex-wife? excuse me, ex-wife—had called, the moment their offices opened, the morning after Lily’s arrest. The woman assured Andrew that nothing had been lost in this delay. Andrew thought he could detect a slight lisp in her speech, something a little messy around the sibilants; she had a voice, at any rate, that was altogether too sweetly girlish to be relaying such information. Lily was still in the police holding cell, the woman was explaining. The protocol was to move a detainee after forty-eight hours, but in practice detainees often stayed in the holding cells for months. The prisons were sometimes too crowded for a timely transfer, as was now the case.

“How does she seem?” Andrew said.

“She’s well.” The woman sounded careful. “Quite well.”

Instead of yelling that “well” was a fucking relative term, Andrew let the woman explain to him that it usually took six to fourteen months for a trial to be arranged. Andrew had had this number quoted at him before, but he knew from Janie that getting mired in statistics, in averages, was the fastest way to despair. He also knew that there were plenty of slower ways.

“She’s seen a lawyer?” said Andrew.

“We understand that she declined public representation.”

“She
what
?”

The representative, accustomed to rhetorical questions, said nothing. Andrew felt a compression in his chest that he feared might be clinical. In the shower, he heard Anna drop the shampoo.

“You’re sure she was offered one?” he said. Maybe she wasn’t, and maybe that was the best of all possible news. Or the worst. It was very hard to say.

“We are told that she was,” said the woman. He thought she might be chewing gum. He was going to file some kind of formal complaint if she was chewing gum.

“Told by whom?”

“The police.”

“This is unbelievable. It is fucking unbelievable.” Andrew paused to
try to catch the woman in her gum chewing, but heard nothing—only the low-grade bureaucratic snufflings of some terrible office. “Did they offer her a lawyer in English?”

“That I don’t know, sir, though they usually have to bring in external translators. You’ve hired a private penal specialist, I understand?”

“Yes.”

“The public legal representatives are generally quite good.”

“We’re hiring a private representative.” The shower turned off, and Andrew could hear the wet slap of Anna’s inelegant distance-runner feet against the linoleum. Something was occurring to him, something so obvious that he was almost embarrassed to let himself think it for the very first time. “Did they interrogate her in Spanish?”

“She addressed them in Spanish.”

Andrew closed his eyes. Lily was vain—obnoxious, really—about her Spanish; you simply could not take the child to a Mexican restaurant. But it was college Spanish, suitable for verb conjugation quizzes, nothing worse. “I see,” he said. “Without a lawyer?”

The representative, unwilling to repeat herself, said nothing.

That afternoon, out of desperation, Andrew took Anna sightseeing. Buenos Aires, they both immediately agreed, was overrated; it had the sprawl and grunge of a major city, but none of the European charm he’d been promised nor—frankly—any of the high-spiritedness he’d imagined. Andrew had thought it might be like Barcelona—parties in the streets all night long, big tree-lined boulevards tumbling to the sea, generic Latin fun on every corner—but it was mostly just hot, and dusty, and people sweated through their synthetic fibers, and always looked like they were on their way to work.

At La Recoleta Cemetery, Andrew and Anna walked desultorily among the tombs. They stared at Eva Perón’s grave, with its chintzy flowers, its interminable fleurs-de-lis, dizzying in the broad daylight. Nearby, bleached angels held eternally theatrical poses. Anna snapped
some pictures. Off in the distance were small trees, stark and terrible as crosses, but Anna didn’t take pictures of those.

Afterward they sat at an outdoor café and drank beers, even though it was only three o’clock. Andrew read aloud from Eva Perón’s
Wikipedia
entry, which he’d printed out and brought along, for edification.

“She was born out of wedlock in the village of Los Toldos in rural Buenos Aires in 1919, the fourth of five children,” he said.

Anna stared dourly into her beer and did not speak.

“In 1951,” Andrew announced, “Eva Perón renounced the Peronist nomination for the office of Vice President of Argentina.”

“Dad,” said Anna. She touched him lightly on the hand. “You don’t need to do that.”

Andrew folded up the pages and put them under his empty plate. They hadn’t ordered any food. “How are you doing, Old Sport?” he said. He kept forgetting to ask. “Are you hanging in there?”

Anna shrugged. “I’m tired. I’m hot.”

“How are you doing, you know, emotionally?” Anna had a tendency to respond to queries about her well-being in only the most literal terms. Try as he might to dig into her inner life, she usually only offered him reports about new records broken, or shin splints suffered, or exams taken—as though this would tell him all he needed to know.

“I want to see Lily.” Anna squeezed her lemon into her beer, even though she’d already drunk most of it, and then stared at it, blinking. “What do you think it’s like there?”

“It’s probably not so bad, Old Sport,” said Andrew, which he hoped was reasonably true. Lily’s holding cell wasn’t really equipped for long-term detention—there was no exercise yard, Lily had told Maureen, and no separate quarters for women, and the guards could see her when she peed (she apparently returned to this issue frequently)—but then this wasn’t going to be a long-term detention. And a little compromised privacy was a worthy trade, Andrew felt, considering what he’d read about the prisons—about the open sewage, the meningitis, the tendency of prisoners to burn themselves in order to get medical
attention. “I mean, it’s probably not the Ritz or anything,” said Andrew. “Not a five-star hotel situation. But probably not so bad.”

The reason Andrew did not know more was that he had spoken to Lily only once on the phone. She was allowed to make fifteen-minute calls once a day with her own phone card, and someone—some guy, Andrew figured—had brought her a whole bunch. Still, she had called Andrew only once, thirty-six hours after her arrest and twelve hours before his flight. Every other time, she had called Maureen.

“Lily said it was okay on the phone,” said Andrew. “She said it was manageable.” What she’d actually said was “endurable,” but “manageable” seemed to convey the same thought without the troubling connotation. Andrew did not mind his child managing, not really. After all, everyone had to manage.

“Dad.” Anna was shaking her head, looking amazed at Andrew’s stupidity. Her lemon was a little yellow buoy in her beer. “Don’t you know that she’ll say anything?”

They left the café, and Andrew, not ready to return to the hotel, cajoled Anna into going to the modern art museum, where they walked with joyless thoroughness—Anna squinting gravely at the art, Andrew squinting gravely at Anna. He couldn’t understand any of the art. He was too old for all of this; everything challenging was for the young. He sat down on a bench in the middle of the room. He could see the bobbing of Anna’s scapula through her T-shirt when she adjusted her purse; running had made her wiry in a feral cat kind of way. What, he wondered, would this moment come to mean to Anna? Maybe it would become merely one episode in her crazy sister’s crazy life—something to talk about in bars, on dates, or to tell Lily’s wide-eyed, ruddy-haired children one day (“Your mother,” she might say, “was
wild
”). Maybe this hour at the modern art museum would be merely one of the narrative’s many surreal asterisks, something decorative that did not appear in every single telling. Or maybe, Andrew thought, this moment would become something else. Maybe Anna would remember it as the very last second that they were still trying to
pretend that their whole lives hadn’t gone fully to shit. Maybe she would talk about it in therapy one day—recalling how they’d gone through the sad little self-conscious motions of enjoying the city, as though they were on fucking vacation, and how this was the
exact
kind of pathological WASP repression that had motored them all through everything, always. Which story were they in right now? Andrew was not sure he wanted to know.