Jennifer DuBois - Cartwheel

“You know.” Lily shrugged, trying to think of the right word. She couldn’t. “Huge.”

“It was the ambassador’s quarters.”

“Your father was the ambassador?”

“You and your internalized misogyny.”

“Okay. Your mother was the ambassador?”

“No, I don’t think either of them were, as a matter of fact.”

“You don’t think either of them were?”

“But they were building a new ambassador’s house, I believe, and the ambassador at the time didn’t have a family.”

“Wow,” said Lily. It was strange to think of Sebastien in the context of a family—a little solemn, towheaded boy, world-weary at the age of three. “That must have made your parents pretty happy.”

“Happy! What a bourgeois concept. I can see why old Andrew and Maureen are so badly off, if that’s the standard they’re holding themselves to.”

Sebastien knew Lily’s parents’ first names because that’s what Lily called them, but she realized now—too late—that she didn’t much care for his using them. “And they let you keep the house?” she said.

“As it happens, yes, they did. In their enduring gratitude to my parents’ ultimate sacrifice. Dulce et decorum est , and all. There are rumors, it’s true, that they were building a new house and this one was going to be condemned anyway. But I’m not sure I believe it, since I try never to believe in metaphors.”

“What were they like?”

“The metaphors?”

“Your parents.”

“It’s very hard to say for sure,” said Sebastien after a moment. “I don’t think we actually got the chance to know each other all that well.”

“That’s—wow,” said Lily again, and cringed. She could not believe she had said “wow” twice in the space of a minute, but there was nothing she could do about that now. “That’s hard to imagine. I know my parents too well. There’s nothing they do or say or think that wasn’t prophesied by Freud a hundred years ago.”

Sebastien was silent, and something about what Lily had just said started to sound wrong to her.

“I’m really sorry about your parents, you know,” she said gently. She really was. Maybe she should have said that earlier, but there was never a normal time to say something like that. “That whole thing must have been so shocking for you.”

“Shocking?” said Sebastien. “Well, it wasn’t philosophically shocking, of course.” His tone was didactic. “When you’re this rich you’re smart to expect some catastrophe. Have I mentioned to you how absurdly rich I am?”

Lily blinked. “What do you mean?”

“Oh, surely you know. If the universe grants you some favor, it’s going to remember it and eventually make you pay it back. With interest. With criminally predatory interest, quite often. You don’t believe that?”

“Of course not,” said Lily, trying to sound soothing. She had the feeling Sebastien was angry with her, though perhaps it was only grief that she was hearing in his voice. Grief, she knew all too well, could make people savage. “I just think there’s good luck and bad luck and that’s it.”

“I suppose you’re better off not believing it,” said Sebastien dryly. “You’d probably have a lot to worry about if you did.”

“Well, I don’t know,” said Lily. She was trying not to sound offended. “My family had a baby die before I was born, and then they were basically grumpy paranoiacs for my entire childhood, and then they got divorced, so I guess if I subscribed to your totally unsupportable worldview, which I don’t, I’d feel like now nothing really awful is in the offing.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t be so sure,” said Sebastien. “I mean, that’s pretty small potatoes, don’t you think? No offense, as the kids say. But you didn’t actually know the baby in question, correct? No offense, again, il va sans dire .”

Lily thought of Janie’s scowling face, the grim determination of her rocking-horse rocking in the photo above the mantel. “Correct,” she said hesitantly.

“And your parents getting divorced, I mean, that’s just statistics. Nobody’s going to even buy you a sandwich over that one.”

“I suppose not.”

“And that’s it? No other calamities, no other disasters?”

“Well, my grandfather—”

“Please.”

“Okay. No. No other calamities.”

“And none of the things that have happened to your family were in the context of an elaborate system of morally redeeming societal oppression?”

“Well—no. No oppression.”

Sebastien frowned like a doctor about to deliver terrible news. “Then I’d say you’ve got at least one relatively dreadful thing ahead of you.”

“Do I?”

“Some sort of medium catastrophe in your future, if my powers of prognostication do not deceive me.”

“Like what?”

“Well, maybe your husband will have an affair, but not just any affair. He’ll be a very public official and have a very public affair and you’ll have to stand with him in the rain at a press conference.”

“Okay, I can handle that,” said Lily, then shook herself. “I mean, what? No. I’m never attending some douchewad’s press conference.”

“Or you’ll contract some kind of cancer that’s eventually curable but permanently disfiguring.”

“That would be sad.”

“But you’d feel lucky to be alive.”

“Of course.”

“Of course. Your type of person is always so embarrassingly glad to be alive.”

“What type of person is that?”

“I mean, really, what’s in it for you? That’s my question.”

Lily stood up and grabbed her tank top and her skirt. She faced the wall as she put them on, then sat back on the bed.

“Or maybe you’ll have a child who will be limited in some emotionally and financially exhausting way,” said Sebastien. “Profoundly disturbed, you know.”

Lily was suddenly seething with a palsied rage. She was sick of her parents’ pain, but she was also defensive of it, and she hated that it was regarded as so morally neutral, so meaningless. They had been lucky in a lot of ways, of course. But it was one thing to know that your privilege was unearned; it was another thing entirely to feel that your sadness was, too—to have to be so pitifully glad, so pitifully sorry, for the modest perks of a dull and diligent middle-class life (TV, and Target candles, and a trip to Six Flags every year). Maybe that’s why the whole family was so repressed. Maybe deep down they believed—as Sebastien apparently did—that, on some level, at the end of the day, they’d had it coming.

“This is depressing,” she said to Sebastien, putting on her shoes.

“Get used to it, is all I’m saying.”

“I am used to it. I am used to nothing else.”

“I can’t imagine,” he said. “My life’s been a laugh a minute.”

Back at the Carrizos’, light was still coming from underneath the basement bedroom door. Lily glanced at her phone—it wasn’t even midnight. She opened the door.

“Hey,” she said cheerfully. She felt sure her face was still flushed, and she did not really want to talk about it. “What are you reading?”

“A chapter about resurgent protectionism,” said Katy. “Did you know that every year there are four million tons of maize that farmers can’t sell either here or abroad?”

“I did not,” said Lily. For some reason, this came out in an overly jaunty, Sebastien LeCompte type of voice.

Katy looked up. “You slept with him!”

For some reason, Lily felt a momentary gaiety—she wanted to shriek, I did not! , like Anna might have done as a child in the face of a true accusation—but she forced herself to remain calm. “I guess I did,” she said. “It was fast enough that it’s a little hard to say for sure.”