Jennifer DuBois - Cartwheel

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.

March

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.