Cartwheel (10 page)

“I think it’s really despicable to pretend to believe in it if you don’t.”

“But if you don’t believe it, why do you care? If there is no God, it’s not like He’s gonna know.”

“But
you’re
gonna know,” said Lily. She rapped her tweezers against the sink conclusively and then went to stand at the window. All the windows in the basement looked out at ground level, which made Lily feel like she lived in the steerage section of a ship. She looked up and
across the yard. Next door, all the lights in the mansion were out. “Do you know who lives over there?”

“A young guy. Our age.” Katy joined Lily at the window. Lily could smell her citrus shampoo. “Haven’t you seen him?”

“No.” Lily squinted. “His lights are never on, are they?”

“You’d think he could afford lights. Beatriz says he’s very rich.”

Lily was about to ask
how
rich, exactly, when a spectacular crash—echoing, multidimensional, seeming to involve many kinds of different materials—issued from somewhere upstairs.

“Jesus,” said Katy.

“Is it a robbery?”

“Did you lock the door when you came in?”

“Shit.”

“Did you?”

“We should go up there.”

They crept upstairs, their cell phones casting neon squares of light onto the stairs. Lily tapped Katy on the shoulder and pointed questioningly to the light switch; Katy shook her head. When they reached the top of the stairs, Lily flung the door open, ready to scream. But in the living room, it was only Carlos, and he was, it seemed, only drunk: He was staggering about, his center of gravity askew, pantomiming the kind of exaggerated inebriation that would be comic in a movie but was somehow frightening—then sad, then frightening once more—in real life. In the corner of the room, one of Beatriz’s potted plants had been knocked over, leaving an escarpment of dirt on the rug.

“Girls,” said Carlos, issuing a bipolar laugh that turned into the first fragment of a sob. He grabbed at the wall, and one of the framed photographs—of Beatriz in a graduation gown—fell to the ground and shattered. “Girls.”

“What should we do?” hissed Katy.

“What do you mean, ‘do’?” said Lily.

“Should we call someone?”

“Call someone, please. We should go back to our room.”

“What if he hits his head or something?”

“He’s not going to.”

“What are we going to tell Beatriz?”

“We’re not going to tell her anything.”

“What about the picture?”

“What about it?”

“Should we try to fix it, or what?”

“Just leave it.”

They went back downstairs, the crashing continuing above them. Lily felt a minor, untraceable thrill with every bang, but Katy seemed not to want to listen. Instead, she pulled out her iPod and sanctimoniously turned up the volume until the bass lines began rattling around the room, like the skeletons of songs. Lily, who could never bear to tell anyone to turn down music, said nothing.

After a while, the sounds stopped, and Katy got up and produced some Neutrogena from her bag, even though Lily could have sworn she’d already washed her face. “You need to remember to lock that door,” she said on her way out of the room. Lily stared at her: She was standing in a bedroom doorway, holding a domestic object, and issuing a directive. Did she not realize how weirdly old, how fussily maternal, she seemed?

“It was only Carlos!” said Lily. “He lives here!”

The next day over breakfast, Carlos was swollen-eyed and chagrined; Katy chattered about her classes, her voice a half an octave higher than normal, until he went to work early. Beatriz had not emerged by the time Lily left for class. But when Lily came back to the house at lunch, she was standing in the kitchen, as though she’d been lying in wait.

“Lily,” said Beatriz. She looked serious, but then she always looked serious. “I want to talk to you about last night.”

“It’s okay.” Lily laughed—an indulgent, knowing sort of chuckle—to show Beatriz that it was not a big deal. “Don’t worry about it at all.”

“Lily,” said Beatriz. She wasn’t smiling. “Do you understand the word ‘depressed’?”

Lily felt a sliver of cold in her sternum. She was doing the wrong
thing, the exact wrong thing, by laughing. “Oh. Yes,” she said. “I’m sorry. Yes.”

“Do you understand?”

“I’m sorry. I do understand. Yes.”

Beatriz nodded as though an agreement had been reached, then bent and began unloading the dishwasher. “We’d like to have a dinner Friday night,” she said. “To welcome you girls properly. We thought maybe you’d like to invite the boy next door? Katy was asking about him.”

“Oh,” said Lily. “I suppose so, sure.”

Beatriz frowned. “We’ve been meaning to ask him around since we moved here. But it’ll be more fun for him, anyway, now that we’ve got young people around.”

Later, in the bunk beds, Lily asked Katy if she thought the dinner offer was an attempt to get them not to tell the program about Carlos’s drunkenness. Katy was reading some punishing textbook by flashlight; outside, Lily could hear people laughing on the street. They were probably headed out to dinner. It was only eleven o’clock.

“Like a bribe,” said Lily. “Maybe.”

“No,” said Katy. “I think they’re probably just trying to be nice.”

“It’s odd timing, though, don’t you think?”

“You’re so conspiracy minded.”

A bar of weak light flashed up the wall and onto Lily’s comforter. She could hear the whisk of Katy’s pages, the efficient squeak of her pen.

“I had no idea this was going on with Carlos,” said Lily a little while later. “I mean, they seemed so happy. Their lives seemed really perfect.”

“Well,” said Katy. “I guess we don’t really know that much about them.”

Lily went over to the mansion the next afternoon, right after classes ended. The path to the house was overgrown with some kind of
scrubby grass that looked potentially poisonous. The knocker was heavy and shaped like the head of a mythical beast that Lily couldn’t identify. She stood back a few feet away from the door and waited for the rich boy, he of the perpetual darkness, to emerge.

The door opened, and an implausibly young-looking person appeared. His eyes were beautiful in an obnoxious sort of way, and he had freckles, which made him seem tremendously unserious.

“Hi,” said Lily in Spanish. “I’m Lily. I’m staying next door with the Carrizos, and I’m supposed to invite you over for dinner.”

“Are you?” The boy answered in English. It was flat, American English, not the vaguely British kind that most people who learned English as a second language seemed to sport (as if it weren’t enough to speak a second language fluently, you had to speak the classier version, too). “Well, go ahead then.”

“You’re invited for dinner,” said Lily dumbly.

“What a delightful surprise.”

Those eyes! You got annoyed at him just for having them. Lily knew that it was technically her turn to speak again. “I didn’t know anyone lived here,” she said.

“Well, someone does. After a fashion.”

In addition to being beautiful, the boy’s eyes were extremely, outlandishly tired. Lily was not sure she’d ever seen a young person look as exhausted as this boy; everything he said seemed all the more impressive because he appeared to be on the verge of narcolepsy or coma. Lily wanted to be rude to him, a little, just to wake him up. “How old are you?” she demanded.

“One never asks a lady her age. How old are you?”

“Twenty. You live here by yourself?”

He mimed looking around. “It would seem so.”

“How long have you lived here?”

“Excuse me, how long have
you
lived here?”

“You speak English very well.”

“Yours is tolerable.”

Suddenly, Lily felt exhausted, too; you couldn’t talk to someone who wanted to win every single piece of dialogue. Maybe that’s why he looked that way; the horrendous drain of being the funniest person in the room, in every room, in this enormous horrifying house. “Seven o’clock, tomorrow,” she said. “If you want.”

The house next door had been dark like Sebastien’s until the Carrizos moved in. They came in March, during his second year alone, though he tried never to think about those years in term of years. When the Carrizos came, the evenings got brighter, and Sebastien sat watching their yellow kitchen lights and the soft blinkered hysteria of their television; the house was ablaze, like a forest fire on a hill. People don’t think about how much you can see through a window at night in a house that’s very well lit—this was not why Sebastien kept his so dark, though it was certainly an auxiliary benefit. He tried not to stare at the Carrizos’ house once they moved in. But it was impossible sometimes not to gaze a little longingly at all that light.

Sometimes he imagined that they could see him, too. This fantasy kept him busy and decent, dressed, up at reasonable hours, engaged in activities that were arguably fruitful. He had employed a similar strategy toward his parents, back when they were recently dead and he was first learning how to live this way. He’d imagined that they were watching
him—stern, censorious, though not entirely without sympathy for his plight—and this had saved him, he was sure, to the extent that he could be said to have been saved at all. He realized he was inventing gods for himself—false gods, at that—but he also knew he was not above it. Though he hoped to take the secret to his grave, he really was a pragmatist at heart. And it could be argued that pretend-believing in the occasional surveillance of the neighbors—the indubitably literal neighbors, with their gleaming car and their showy appliances and their honorable recycling habits—was marginally healthier than pretend-believing in the constant surveillance of ghosts. At any rate, it seemed to have some of the same salutary effects. In the backyard, Sebastien grew flowers, effeminate hobby though it was. On the Internet, he watched his investments go up and down; he followed every twitch and flutter of the New York Stock Exchange, and London, and Tokyo; he was a compulsive reader of the news. It was not impossible, after all, to still be witness to the world. He played online poker, too, which would be a vice, he knew, for a person with less money and time. As it was, both money and time were abstract curses, and Sebastien could not reproach himself much for a habit that squandered either of them.

He thought often of selling the things. The house was overrun with expensive and oppressive objects—his mother’s jewelry, his father’s antique weapons, all manner of treasures plundered from all corners of the globe—and it would not have been hard to get rid of them. He could have sold them online—Sebastien vacillated between an intense solitude-compounded agoraphobia and a loneliness so clawing and vast that it was like vertigo—and he could have donated the proceeds, of course. (He could not bear the thought of acquiring any more money; he’d never live long enough, or have enough of a populated life, to spend what he had already, and this felt like a particular brand of bitter reproach in a newly capitalist society.) But somehow he never got around to it, just like he never got around to going over to the Carrizos’ house and introducing himself. The objects kept sitting there,
accruing talismanic qualities and dust, and Sebastien himself kept sitting there, accruing only dust.

In spite of his close observation of the Carrizos, the arrival of Katy and Lily was a surprise—and perhaps it was the fact of the surprise that moved Sebastien more than the girls themselves, at first. Though he’d barely met the Carrizos, he had not expected them to make any sudden moves; he’d known when they were going to buy the new car, for example, and he had not been shocked when the rumors emerged of Carlos’s shady business dealings (you had to only look at the man’s leisurely hours and unlikely acquisition of exponentially more expensive household goods to know that something was amiss). But the girls—one light haired and delicate, as lovingly formed as a deer, the other pale and inquisitive looking in a way Sebastien rather liked—were a mystery. Were they far-flung—and hopefully wayward—young cousins? But then, they looked too different to be related, and their closeness in age could not be entirely coincidental. They were foreigners, it was clear, though they were both lacking the slouchy sexuality of the European girls he had known; they were attractive, but there was a frankness and—he thought at first, before he knew them both and before he loved one of them—a kind of dumbness to their beauty: It was so sincere, so unreconstructed, so unapologetic. It was being subverted by nothing. It was just there, flapping about in the wind, like a flag.

Basic questioning of the women at Pan y Vino bodega revealed that the girls were Katy Kellers and Lily Hayes—what a fussy, old-fashioned, Edith Whartonish name that was!—and that they were study-abroad students from the States. Sebastien watched them for a few days—their comings and goings, their outings, and occasionally, though not often, their evenings—against the shining backdrop of their breathtakingly well-lit house. He found himself continuing to like Lily the better of the two, though not for her appearance, particularly. She was pretty enough—with reddish hair and high-arched eyebrows that made her look
extremely
wide-awake—but pretty girls were like flowers: astonishing
and utterly common, both. Instead, what drew him to Lily was what appeared, at least from a distance, to be her strange solitude—a solitude much less complete but, he had to assume, far more elective, than his own.

It had been a long time since Sebastien had had a crush on an actual girl. He watched a lot of pornography, though he didn’t really like things quite so mechanized and denuded; there was something about the clinical insertions and withdrawals that always reminded him a bit of the dentist. He was aesthetically though not ethically opposed to prostitution. There were women at Pan y Vino, where he went to buy his toilet paper and cereal and shittiest wine (almost everything else was ordered from online gourmet shops, though he bought mostly condiments and liqueurs and actually, he realized, ate very little by modern standards). But those women were purely no-nonsense (how he longed for some nonsense!), and rough with him in a way that suggested vast reservoirs of matronly concern. They often stuck extra candies in his bag, as though he needed them. As though, really, he needed anything.