Jennifer DuBois - Cartwheel

“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.

“She’s young, you know,” said Katy.

“She’s your age.”

“Obviously that’s irrelevant.”

Sebastien had to concede it was; time, he knew better than anyone, was a myth. “Well,” he said. “I’m not plotting anything.”