Cartwheel (31 page)

“Are you okay?” she said.

“Are
you
okay?” said Lily. “That’s the question.”

“What are you talking about?”

Somehow Lily couldn’t remember exactly why she’d brought Katy
into the bathroom, but she knew there was something important they needed to discuss. “We need to talk,” she said.

Katy looked solemn. “Okay,” she said.

“We really need to talk,” Lily said, and then stopped. She careened around her own brain for a moment before tripping on the sharpest object. Suddenly she was filled with the piercing confidence that comes from unraveling a conspiracy. “Why didn’t you defend me?” she said.

“What?”

The toilet flushed and a girl came out, staggering and fawnlike on her high heels, and washed her hands without using soap. Out of a strange retroactive sense of propriety, Lily waited until she left to continue.

“From Beatriz.”

“What? When?”

“When she found me looking at that paper.” Yes, that was what it all came down to. Katy had betrayed her, and now it was time they finally discussed it.

“Defend you? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Beatriz just doesn’t like me,” said Lily. “That’s all. It’s just not fair.”

“Well, Carlos likes you,” said Katy. Lily knew then that Katy was a little drunk too.

“Carlos likes everybody,” said Lily.

“No. He doesn’t like me. He thinks I’m boring because I’m quiet.”

“He doesn’t.”

“Isn’t that what you think, too?”

Lily mulled this. It was so obviously true that she did not know what to say. She’d thought this was the kind of truth that had been so thoroughly tacitly acknowledged as to be well beyond mention—like when a thin girl complains ceaselessly about her body to a fat friend, and the flagrant cruelty of this is both mutually understood and mutually unspeakable.

“Did you ever think about how it might make Beatriz feel that Carlos likes you so much?” said Katy.

Lily felt a blank cotton taste in her mouth. “It’s not like that,” she said.

“I know it’s not. But don’t you think it might feel like that to Beatriz? All the drinking and laughing and debating? And you’re so young and gorgeous?”

Lily shook her head. Katy should really not have said “gorgeous.” She really should have opted for a smaller word. Lily’s mouth was twitching with real heft and persistence now; she kept waiting to lose it entirely and begin crying, and she kept not quite doing this—but neither could she get the twitching under control, and she knew she must look like a waiter trying so comically hard not to drop a platter of dishware that you just wish he’d go ahead and throw the whole thing on the floor.

“I’m not saying she thinks anything’s happening,” said Katy, who was watching Lily’s face with some alarm. “Of course not. I just think that if you want Beatriz to like you better you might think about toning it down some with Carlos.”

“Toning
what
down?” Lily nearly wailed. She could not figure out what Katy was referring to. It wasn’t how she dressed. It wasn’t what she and Carlos talked about. It certainly wasn’t the way she acted—she did not touch Carlos’s arm, she did not bat her eyelashes coquettishly, she did not tilt her head back and laugh, she did not twirl her hair. She knew she didn’t; she wouldn’t like herself if she did.

“Just,” said Katy. She bit her lip. “Your personality.”

“My personality?”

“Just, you know. The things you do.”

“
What
things?”

“Well, like, answering the phone is a perfect example.”

“That was only polite! What are you talking about! You wouldn’t have answered the phone?”

“Well, think about it. They have an answering machine, right? So it’s not like they’re going to miss this once-in-a-lifetime phone call telling them they’ve won the lottery and never find out.”

Lily gaped. Another gaggle of girls—shiny-shirted, shiny-haired—
entered the bathroom and spilled together into one stall, where there was shuffling and shushing and sniffing and then, finally, giggling.

Katy lowered her voice. “Then also, Carlos is running a business, right?” she said. “And you know they’re having legal troubles—”

“As if I even care about whatever is going on with that stuff! As if I could even
fathom
anything more boring!”

“So a message anyone might give would probably be pretty technical. And you know, your Spanish isn’t that good—”

“It is good! I understand everything they say!”

“They talk slower to us. They talk way slower to us. Do you understand everything strangers say? And on the phone you can’t see the person, which makes it a ton harder.”

The shiny girls exited the stall, wiped their noses, straightened their hair in the mirror, and left.

“And then,” Katy went on, “what do you think it seems like for some random young girl to be answering the phone at their house in the middle of the day? Do you think it might seem strange to someone? Do you think it might be the kind of thing that could make Beatriz a little bit embarrassed or uncomfortable?”

Lily’s lip was quivering again.

“And then, finally, you’re so upset that Beatriz is mad at you, you’re creeping around the house all the time seeming
so
sorry, but did you ever actually tell her you were sorry? I mean, you explained, but did you ever actually apologize?”

Lily was silent. She had not.

“See, it’s not that you’re actually
doing
anything,” concluded Katy, with the air of finally finishing a speech she’d long been anxious to deliver. “It’s just that you don’t think about these things.”

Katy was right. Lily didn’t think about these things. She didn’t want to have to. She didn’t want to tiptoe through her life—she wanted to act impulsively; she wanted to be understood and, if need be, forgiven. She wanted everyone to know that she meant well. She wanted everyone to fucking
relax
. Her ears were ringing, her nostrils filled with a lethal silver smell, and for a moment she thought she might pass out.
But then she recovered, and refocused, and straightened her shoulders. She was going to be herself, and she was going to say what she meant, and she did not care what anyone else thought about it.

“I don’t mind about you and Sebastien,” said Lily. “Whatever it is.”

Katy took a step back, her eyes wide. “There’s nothing with Sebastien.”

“Ignacio, though, is
seriously
gross. Really, you could do better than either of them.”

“What are you talking about? There’s nothing with Sebastien. You’re being nuts.”

“No, I really don’t care.”

“There’s nothing to care about. You want to call him and ask?”

“Exactly.” Lily felt a strange twisting despair, an aloneness shocking in its completeness and profundity. She wondered if this was because she was drunk or if she sort of always felt this way but was so repressed that being drunk was the only thing that could bring it forth. “I’m sorry,” she said, lunging at Katy with a sloppy, ill-advised hug, and not at all sure what she was sorry for. She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror and saw that her eye makeup had smeared. She licked her lips and tasted the sodium of her sweat alongside the blunt chalky taste of her makeup.

“That’s okay,” said Katy, patting Lily’s shoulder, obviously surprised at the shape the evening had taken. In the mirror, Lily looked garish, cartoonish. What the hell was she trying to prove? Who the hell was this for? Sebastien wasn’t even here. She had the kind of headache that came from crying, even though she hadn’t been. And Sebastien wasn’t even here. Sebastien didn’t even know it was her birthday.

When Eduardo went to Sebastien LeCompte’s house again, it seemed as abandoned as it had on his earlier visits. For the fourth time, Eduardo walked up the dusty unkempt path, for the fourth time he knocked the heavy knocker, for the fourth time he brushed away cobwebs from one of the first-story windows and squinted into the house’s interior. It was mostly dark, as usual, but this time Eduardo could see what he thought were candelabras in the corner, partially obscuring an uncurtained western window, casting hand-shaped shadows on the floor. The furniture was draped in white sheets, looking like sand dunes.

It was strange to Eduardo that a house like this could exist in Buenos Aires—or, really, anywhere. It was so glaringly a relic of another time—a time when dapper intelligence men in other parts of the world spent their time warring with their counterparts over cocktails and tennis, though down here they were mostly focused on making inadvisable military hardware sales—and if it had been cared for, it would have been lovely. It had fallen apart through neglect, though,
and Eduardo could not fathom why a boy with so many other options would want to stay in it—or, for that matter, why a house like this had been relinquished to the ownership of a spoiled teenager in the first place. Eduardo could only assume it was a murky form of payoff for whatever unpleasantness had befallen Sebastien LeCompte’s parents; and perhaps, after all, this was a fair trade.

Eduardo walked to the side of the house and tried to peer in the windows there, but those, arbitrarily, were hung with heavy green velvet curtains. He walked around to the back of the house and stared into the copse of woods behind it; he had not gone there on his previous visits. He was about to turn around and investigate the undefended back window when his eye landed on a small patch of feverish green. A garden. Eduardo moved closer. He saw sprigs of plant life, newly watered, alongside the hanging bulbs of some kind of vegetable Eduardo did not recognize. Could this be the work of Sebastien LeCompte, playboy and layabout? Perhaps the house had squatters.

Eduardo made another lap, banging on every window, saying loudly and methodically, “I know you’re in there. I know that you are in there.” When he rounded the corner to try the front door a final time, there, standing barefoot on the footpath, was a disheveled postadolescent in striped pajamas.

“Hello,” said Eduardo. “You must be Sebastien LeCompte. I’m Eduardo Campos.” He produced and flashed his ID, but the boy was not looking. “I work for the state.”

“You’re finally here,” said Sebastien. “I’ve had the table set for days.” There was a frisson of domestic haranguing in his voice, which Eduardo took to be some kind of grim joke. But then the boy gestured into the house, and through the open door Eduardo could see that the table was indeed dustily arranged—arrayed with plates and knives and dull pewter goblets, place settings for a family of depressed ghosts.

“I want to talk with you about Katy Kellers,” said Eduardo, pocketing his ID. “Might I come in?”

“What kind of a host would I be if I said no?”

Inside, the room was populated with perhaps a half dozen large
objects—more than Eduardo had been able to see from outside—all obscured by muslin sheets, making the house feel like a winter residence of a rich family away at the shore. On the mantel crouched a wizened, arabesqued clock that had stopped working some late afternoon—or early morning—a very long time ago. Eduardo was somehow quite sure that it had been a very long time ago. Next to the clock was a photo of a young Sebastien, standing next to a man who was obviously his father, presiding over a dead tapir. In the center of the room was a teetering, moldering Steinway. Here, indisputably, was true status wastefulness; it was too bad the eternally shouting students weren’t around anymore to shout about this.

“Care to sit down?” said Sebastien. He pulled a sheet off of one of the objects, and looked surprised when it turned out to be a sofa. He patted it invitingly for Eduardo, then unveiled a different couch for himself. Eduardo sat.

Eduardo pointed to the piano. “That looks like it used to be expensive.”

Sebastien turned to it with an expression of mild interest, as though being directed to remark on a minor museum piece. “Oh, appallingly so, I should think,” he said.

“Do you play?”

“Yes. I’m fabulously talented but, alas, intensely private and protective of my gift. Do you? You really ought to favor us with a number.”

“Another time, perhaps.”

“I’d offer it to you as a present if I didn’t fear it might feel a
tad
too snug in your car.”

Eduardo ignored this. He pointed to the picture of Sebastien and the tapir on the mantel. “He’s a beauty,” he said. “You shoot that fellow yourself?”

Sebastien turned around to look at the picture. “That? Oh, that’s not me.”

Eduardo looked again. The older man was exactly identical to the person Eduardo was currently sitting across from; the child had his every feature in miniature. “Your brother, then?” he said.

“No relation. I picked the thing up from a flea market. Why, you think you see a resemblance? How strange—I never noticed.”

At this, Eduardo made a pretend note on his pad. It was curious that Sebastien would lie so early, and for so little. Often people who knew they were planning to lie tried to establish as much credibility as possible ahead of time: They volunteered extensive and accurate information about themselves, they made disclosures, they answered the vast bulk of verifiable questions with showy and elaborate detail, they readily admitted ambiguity wherever they could spare it—as though any of this mattered in the slightest. As though the law had come to investigate their general characterological deceitfulness, not the very specific issue at hand—what they saw, where they were, what they did, on a very particular day or night. Given this widespread tendency, Eduardo normally commenced interviews with a series of straightforward questions to which he already knew the answers and to which most people were more than willing to truthfully respond—name, age, occupation, various other publicly available contours of their lives—in order to establish a pattern and a rapport and, sometimes, to allow the person to relax. An interviewee’s relaxation tended to work in Eduardo’s favor, though few people understood this. A person who was terrified throughout an entire lie detector test—for the true statements as well as the lies—would be impossible to read; it was the relative relaxation that provided the gauge, which was why Eduardo usually tried to create it in his interviews.