Cartwheel (11 page)

He could hardly believe it, then, the day that Lily showed up at his doorstep. Nobody ever came to his door anymore; even the Jehovah’s Witnesses were sick of him, having learned long ago that he’d do absolutely anything to detain them (he told himself that this was due to high-minded social experimentation, and not grave and crushing loneliness). So when Sebastien heard a knock at his door he initially thought he was hallucinating. But then it came again—stubborn and, he thought, just the tiniest bit harassed. He could still hope for a snake-oil salesman, he supposed; he could hope for some scam designed to bleed him dry on behalf of a fictional broken-down child or old person or car. He was up for it, he thought, as he walked to the door. He was up for anything. He peered out through the huge, baroque keyhole. There, framed by its jagged silhouette, was the unmistakable Lily Hayes from next door, her face like the sunny pistil in some strange-petaled flower. Sebastien opened the door.

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

“Are you?” he said. “Well, go ahead then.”

As it happened, he had no other plans. The night of the dinner, he was ready by six-thirty, wilting in his suit, one of his father’s better clarets—a 1996 Château Lafite Rothschild Pauillac—liberated from the cellar and cradled in his arms like a doll. At seven of seven he began the walk across the yard and down to the Carrizos’, taking stock for the first time in a long time of what his house might look like through the eyes of another person. The weeds were scabby and tall and vaguely lethal looking. He should get them taken care of, he knew; he had no excuse not to; he could certainly afford it. Why had he never bothered? Maybe he’d liked the idea of the weeds conveying some kind of desperation and disorder within; maybe, he realized with a flicker of self-disgust, they were meant to be a kind of cry for help. He comforted himself briefly with the thought that nobody would notice such a gesture, even if he were inclined to make one. But then he looked at the well-lit house at the end of the path, and he wondered grimly if perhaps somebody already had.

He reached the Carrizos’ porch at 6:56, then had to decide whether it was worse to be early or to stand creepily on the porch for no reason. After a moment or two of what he hoped was semi-plausible fiddling with his hair and tie, he rang the doorbell. It was 6:57.

Beatriz Carrizo appeared at the door, her décolletage glimmering with tan and sweat and good health, her black hair pulled back into a heavy braid. “Oh! Hello!” she said. She sounded surprised, although he did not know why she would be surprised. “You must be Sebastien!”

His initial reaction—
Must I be?
—ran through his head, before he reminded himself to try, really try, not to be maddening.

“Guilty as charged, I’m afraid.” He flashed a smile that he hoped was winning. He’d been thought winning once, in some misty past—
he’d been considered precocious, and charming, and all the young female teachers at Andover had touched their hair a lot when they called on him in class. But those days were over, and now he could only meekly hope that he was vaguely fit for the company of normal people. “You must be Señora Carrizo,” he said.

She smiled warmly. “Come in.”

In the modern light of the well-appointed kitchen, Sebastien felt ridiculous. Around him, the monstrous refrigerator buzzed and all the surfaces gleamed brutally white. Everything was new and shiny and unobtrusive, and Sebastien was ancient and absurd. Why had he worn a suit? He looked like he was dressed for a costume party.

Panicked, Sebastien handed Beatriz the wine. “I brought this,” he said. It was far too expensive, of course, and the wrong thing entirely, and Sebastien was struck by the realization, like a physical convulsion, that the evening was going to go very badly.

“I’ll open it,” said Beatriz, getting a corkscrew. Sebastien wanted to tell her she didn’t have to open it now—that she could save it for a better and worthier occasion—but that seemed potentially obnoxious, and Sebastien only liked being obnoxious deliberately. Mercifully, it was clear that Beatriz had no idea how expensive the wine was; she opened it and spilled a little on the linoleum and poured five glasses and took a sip of hers without even letting it breathe. Sebastien was relieved that this particular mistake of his had not been noticed. Others certainly would be. He was far too warm in his suit, and he began to feel feverish and anxious. He tried to remember the last time he’d worn it. It must have been in his final year of Andover, not long before the plane crash, when he was visiting Boston for an accepted students’ dinner at Harvard. He remembered being hot in it then, too—it had been unseasonably warm for May in New England, and the subways were coughing up that particular smell of theirs, that strange blend of steam and chalk—but there’d also been a lightness all around him, and a sense of life unfolding satisfyingly along its intended trajectory. Now, in Beatriz Carrizo’s terrifyingly clean kitchen, Sebastien almost thought that if he buried his head into his overdressed arm he might smell Boston,
and his father’s borrowed cologne, and his own youthful sweat, full of frightened happiness.

Beatriz was looking at him with concern. “Are you all right?” she said.

He flashed another diamond smile. “I simply could not fathom being any better.”

“Would you like to sit down?” said Beatriz.

Sebastien swallowed. “Sitting down is one of my favorite things to do, if you can believe it.”

In the dining room, Lily was already at the table and Sebastien gave her a courtly, overstated nod. She was pale in the bluish wash of the evening light; her dark eyebrows were slender isthmuses against the milky sea of her forehead. Next to her sat Katy Kellers: beech-colored hair; marble, nearly kaleidoscopic eyes; small, symmetrical features etched with what seemed like obsessive fineness. Lily watched Sebastien watching Katy and gave him an appraising look.

“You made it,” she said flatly, and shot him a dubious smile that somehow employed exactly one-half of her mouth. Her eyebrows, it seemed, were eternally convex, giving her an expectant sort of look that could seem intelligent or erotic—or both, Sebastien figured—depending on your prejudices.

“Last-minute cancellation,” he said. “Though the commute was atrocious.” Sebastien waited to be introduced to Katy. When nobody ventured to do this, he introduced himself.

“Hello,” he said, reaching his hand across the table and being careful not to disturb the butter dish. “I don’t believe we’ve met.”

Katy nodded. “Katy Kellers,” she said. Sebastien wasn’t used to women who said only their names by way of introduction—but then, he reminded himself, he wasn’t used to women in general, or people in general, for that matter, anymore.

“Sebastien LeCompte,” he said.

Katy nodded. “I’ve heard.”

Silence ballooned between the three of them then, punctuated only by the sounds of Beatriz bustling in the kitchen. Sebastien was tempted
to remark on the bustling—how the sound of high-quality bustling was really the
capstone
achievement in the domestic arts, or something—but he forced himself to stay quiet. The tense energy between Lily and Katy felt like some kind of subverbal bristling; Sebastien did not flatter himself that he was the cause of whatever this was, but he did ruefully see that neither Lily nor Katy was interested in making the evening any easier on anyone. It was apparent, then, that Sebastien was going to have to be the one to break the silence. Since he wanted to say something to Lily, he decided to speak to Katy. “Katy Kellers,” he said. “Where are you from?”

She waited a beat too long to answer, as though she’d had trouble registering that he was actually talking to her. “Los Angeles,” she said.

Sebastien glanced at Lily. She was looking out the window, and he felt a throb of bittersweet attraction. She did not look back.

“I wouldn’t have thought,” he said to Katy.

“Nobody ever thinks.”

This line of conversation was mercifully euthanized by the appearance of Carlos in the doorway.

“Good evening, girls,” he said, and looked at Sebastien, who felt suddenly overwhelmed by the tedium of having to keep reconfirming his own identity. “You must be Sebastien.”

Yes, he thought, a thousand times yes! “Yes,” he said.

The evening disintegrated predictably from there. Over dinner, Sebastien forced himself to ask questions for which he already had all the answers—how long have you lived here, how long have you been married, and what did you do, and when precisely did the lovely young ladies arrive? He ran out of pretend questions halfway through dessert. Then the questions started coming at him from all quarters—though not, notably, from Lily’s.

“Where are you from originally, Sebastien?” said Beatriz, stealthily trying to foist a second piece of cake onto his plate.

“Here. Oh, no, thank you, I simply couldn’t. It’s been so long since I had such a fine meal. I fear another bite would put me in the hospital.”

“Buenos Aires?” said Carlos.

“Here, precisely.” Sebastien pointed out the window and across the lawn, toward his moldering house. “There. Since I was four, anyway. And I’m told that before that I wasn’t terribly interesting.”

“You were born in the States?” said Beatriz kindly.

“In the awful state of Virginia, according to my biographers.”

“And you went to school there, too?”

Sebastien shifted in his seat. “Prep school,” he said lightly. “In Massachusetts.”

“Did it prepare you?” said Lily, rousing herself momentarily.

“It did. For unemployment, principally, and drinking during the day.” Sebastien kept his eyes on Lily in the hope that she’d say something in response, but instead she busied herself with pouring a grotesque amount of milk into her instant coffee.

“When were you there for school?” said Beatriz.

Sebastien squinted. “It’s very hard to say,” he said. Could it really have been five years ago? That was simultaneously preposterously long ago and bafflingly recent; no amount of linear time, small or vast, could properly capture the experience of moving from then to now. It was a lateral skitter across the universe, a drop into a rabbit hole or acid trip or nightmare. Talking about time, in a conventional sense, was really not relevant in this case. “I mean,” he said. “It just seems like a very long time ago now.”

Lily’s face, Sebastien noticed, was squinched into a sour contraction of disapproval, and everyone else was looking nonplussed. Sebastien would, he knew, have to try to be more normal. He was just about to begin, but Beatriz immediately followed up by asking him if he’d liked living in the States—and this, it turned out, was another very difficult question. It often seemed to Sebastien that the entirety of his actual existence had already taken place, and he was now living in a dull and fitful afterlife—that he had not been damned so much as completely forgotten. The time in the States had belonged to his life, and so it was wholly incomparable to anything afterward—it was a qualitative, not quantitative difference—and this made it impossible to talk
about the AP classes and the cocaine in the dorm bathrooms and the sleeplessness and the way the snow caught red streetlights when he was up late and lonely, and certainly it made it impossible to talk about the political implications of living in a capitalist and corrupt society, an empire reaching the edge of itself, whatever. It had been reality, merely, and as such it was both more complicated and vastly simpler than anything language could capture. There was no way to properly answer this question; he could only answer it improperly. This was why he was so often insufferable, he knew: The real answers were unutterable and strange and upsetting, so he had no choice but to give fake ones. He issued a jaunty smile.

“As much as one can be expected to like anything, I suppose,” he said.

“Well,” said Beatriz brightly. “Let me wrap up some leftovers for you.”

Moments later—after giving Lily a painfully abstruse hug and passing her his business card, both of which moves had seemed like better ideas in his head—Sebastien stood on the Carrizos’ porch and tried to get his bearings. The night had been, quite obviously, a disaster. The only question was whether this spoke to the overarching futility of ever interacting with other people again, or whether the trouble was specific to these people. To Lily, more precisely. The smell of smoke billowed suddenly from behind him.

“Is that you, Satan, come for me at last?” said Sebastien, turning around. But it was only Katy, pinching a cigarette between her forefinger and thumb. The moonlight caught the flat edge of her bare shoulder.

“Well, you were very rude,” she said.

Sebastien was clinically incapable of taking any real offense at anything, and he usually staved off the strangeness of this by often feigning vague offense at everything. But tonight, he found he could not summon the energy. “I didn’t know you smoked,” he said wearily.

“Why would you know I smoked?”

“I wasn’t being rude,” he said. “That’s just how I talk.”

“Well, how you talk is rude.” Katy ashed her cigarette off the porch. “Have you ever considered that?”

“I am almost wholly unsocialized.”

“That is quite obviously untrue. You are socialized half out of your mind.”

Sebastien wished Katy would offer him a cigarette so that he could grandly decline it, but she did not. “It was a lovely dinner,” he said, nodding to the house. “Is that a pretty typical meal?”

“What?”

“They manage to feed you two well, in spite of their troubles?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Nothing, nothing. Neighborhood gossip, that’s all. I’m afraid I can’t repeat it. Rumors of a lawsuit or some such. It would be wrong of me to spread them.”

Katy rolled her eyes, then shook her head. “You like Lily,” she said sternly.

“What an accusation.” Normally, he would have said more—something about the insubstantiality of affection, the transience of love,
et al., ad infinitum
—but his mouth felt cottony and he was suddenly exhausted. He did not want to talk any more tonight.