Jennifer DuBois - Cartwheel

“Well,” said Lily, wiggling her toes. They were spectacularly, bafflingly dirty and she had no idea why. “He’s interesting, anyway.”

“You think so? I think he’s hideously boring.”

“Really?” Lily had told Sebastien he was boring on their first date, though, of course, she didn’t actually mean it. He was, quite tragically, possibly the most interesting person Lily had ever met; he was so interesting that she’d figured that accusations of tedium could only goad him into being more interesting still. Lily didn’t necessarily want to sleep with Sebastien; she did not think her fascination with him was sexual as much as anthropological, maybe, or zoological—but there was certainly no question that it was a fascination of some kind. And yet here was Katy, dullest of all possible humans, living at the precise center of all of the world’s modest expectations for her, moving in confident strides toward the exact mean of her upper-middle-class life, saying that the most interesting boy in the world was boring.

“Of course he’s boring,” Katy was saying. She got out of bed and adopted a yoga pose on the linoleum—it was the archer, the bow, something or other. Lily didn’t want to ask. “You didn’t know boys like that in school?”

“No,” said Lily. “An orphaned trillionaire in a haunted mansion? No. Did you?”

“I mean, you know he’s just a hipster, right? You know he didn’t invent sneering? If he lived in the U.S. he’d probably be a music blogger.”

“Katy, his parents were spies .”

“I’m sure he likes to tell you they were.”

Lily was agog; she had never heard Katy talk like this. “Isn’t your head starting to feel weird like that?” she said.

“Yeah, actually, it is.” Katy dropped the pose, then erupted into a startling backward arch. Her T-shirt rode up, revealing the demure mollusk of a perfect in-betweenie belly button. Lily averted her eyes. “So what are you going to do about Beatriz and Carlos?” said Katy.

“I’m just surprised they care so much,” said Lily.

“Well, I mean, they are getting paid to make sure we don’t get killed.”

“Who’s going to kill me? Sebastien? I’d like to see him try.”

“Or pregnant.”

“Again, I’d like to see him try.”

Katy laughed, and Lily felt a warmth with a sourness underneath. She didn’t know when she’d started to worry about whether Katy thought she was funny. But it was true that she’d always been willing to be a mercenary in conversation; she had never been enough in love to refuse to trade on a man’s quirks for good-natured laughs, and she was not, in this case, at all in love.

“He tried to give me a bracelet,” said Lily. She remembered how Sebastien had handled it—with a light disregard, like it was something somebody had asked him to hold for a moment. “A diamond bracelet.”

“He didn’t,” said Katy.

“He did.”

“A real one?”

“I didn’t let him do it.” Lily had been a little surprised, actually, at how quickly he’d taken it back. She’d expected more of a fight; she’d already been formulating the opening chords of a generous and reasonable speech in which she would gently, with exquisite care and responsibility, turn him down.

“Very noble of you.”

“I mean, I couldn’t. It was his dead mother’s or something.” Lily remembered the blank expression on Sebastien’s face when she’d asked about what had happened when his parents had died. She’d said “died” as a courtesy to him—nobody in her family could stand people who said “passed away”—but as soon as the word was out of her mouth it had hung heavily in the air, like a slur.

“Yeah,” said Katy, “but he probably had a bunch. Of bracelets, I mean.”

“Even so.”

“Man,” said Katy. “I wouldn’t have turned down a present like that. That boy picked the wrong girl.”

The remark echoed for a moment, and even though she knew Katy didn’t really mean it, Lily found herself wanting to rotate the conversation somehow. “What did you love so much about Anton?” she said.

Katy maintained her pose a moment longer, then toppled. Even her toppling was graceful. “The thing that I loved the most about Anton,” said Katy, and Lily could tell that she’d already thought a lot about it. “Was the way he made everything bigger.”

“That sounds exhausting,” said Lily. She felt firmly that things were already big enough; she certainly didn’t need things to be any bigger.

“It was, sometimes,” said Katy.

“So are you ever glad to have him gone?”

Lily expected Katy to pause and then say yes, sometimes, but instead she shook her head and shot Lily a terrible look—of generosity born of cosmic and enduring pity—from her spot on the floor. “No,” she said.

“Do you think you should get over it, though? I mean, life is short.”

“It’s not short,” said Katy. “It’s terrifyingly long.” Katy got up and cracked her back. Lily could hear the delicate pincer sounds of each of her vertebrae aligning themselves. “And for me at least, it just got a lot longer.”

One night late in January, Sebastien awoke to a knock at the door.

He had been sound asleep, and he was surprised at how quickly he was flooded with joy—joy at the thought that Lily had been so eager to see him, that she’d been so bold on his behalf. Perhaps they had moved past the horrid bracelet debacle after all, he thought, as he staggered down the stairs in his boxers. It was this, exactly this, that was wonderful about having a person in one’s life: As sociologists could attest, there was simply no knowing what people might do. Before Lily, Sebastien’s days had been mired in reticulated sameness—he could just as easily find himself eating expired canned spaghetti at four a.m. as four p.m.; he might be asleep at three in the afternoon or drunk at nine in the morning; he might go out for walks in the middle of the night or he might not leave the house for a week. But now there was Lily, and she might (who knows!) show up at his house at any hour of the day or night, gloriously unannounced.

But when Sebastien opened the door, he could see—even in shadow, even in silhouette—that it wasn’t Lily. It was Katy.

He was so surprised that he forgot to be ironic. “What are you doing here?” he said.

“I need to talk to you.” In the dark, Katy’s face was luminous. Sebastien could never quite shake the feeling that her eyes were somehow medically too big for the rest of her body.

“Does Lily know you’re here?”

“Why should Lily know I’m here?”

“Okay, then. Fine.” It was only when his heart began to slow down that Sebastien realized it had been racing. “What do you want?”

“I have a question for you.”

“There are telephones, you know. There’s the Internet. There’s the daytime.” Sebastien’s mouth felt swampy, his mind still solidly lodged in some uneasy dreamscape, but he was beginning to wonder if it was perhaps earlier than he’d first thought. He ran his tongue along his teeth. It was, he realized shamefully, perhaps as early as midnight.

Katy cocked her head. “I need to know what’s going on with Carlos.”

“What are you talking about?” Sebastien leaned against the doorframe, suddenly aware of the cool night air and his boxer shorts. Well, and what should he be ashamed of? If Katy Kellers didn’t want to see a sybaritic young gentleman with pale and blue-veined bare legs in his nightclothes, then she should have called ahead.

“He’s in some kind of financial trouble, isn’t he?” said Katy. “Isn’t that what you said?”

“Is this a matter of some urgency? Are you being struck mad or insomniac by curiosity? Some of us have work in the mornings, you know. Not me, of course, but some people.”