“Oh?” said Katy. She was sitting on her bed and rubbing silver-dollar-sized globs of sunscreen around her eyes and chin and onto her breastbone. The smell of coconut filled the room. “And why’s that?”
Lily shrugged. “I think he’s on his period.”
Katy nodded. “How’s the sex these days?”
Lily was surprised that Katy would ask, but did not want to seem surprised. She wobbled her hand. “So-so,” she said. “Are you going to the beach or something?”
Katy looked embarrassed. “It prevents wrinkles.”
“Aren’t you twenty-one?”
Katy hung her head. “I’m paranoid.”
“Oh,” said Lily. “Can I have some?”
“Sure.” She tossed the bottle to Lily. “You want to do your hands, too.”
Obediently, Lily rubbed the lotion into her hands.
“Do you think you guys will keep up after you leave?” said Katy, and Lily felt the flicker of nervousness that always came when Katy was inquisitive about Sebastien. It was possible that Katy still felt bad about calling Sebastien a bore, now that it was clear that Lily was going to keep seeing him. But somehow Lily suspected that there was more to it than that—that these conversations were Katy’s way of being elaborately careful with her, as though Katy had decided that Lily was a person who required special handling, or special patience—and Lily did not like the thought of this one bit.
“Oh, who knows,” said Lily. “Probably not, I guess.”
Above them, Lily could hear the satisfying whir of Beatriz running the vacuum cleaner. This was one of Lily’s favorite sounds of domestic life, alongside the sound of coffee brewing: It made her think of mornings, of getting the house ready for company. She closed her eyes for a moment to listen.
“No?” said Katy.
Lily opened her eyes. “I mean, let’s be realistic.”
Upstairs, the phone rang.
“He could visit you,” said Katy. “It’s not like he can’t afford it.”
Lily shrugged and scrunched her nose. The phone rang again. “I think I’ll grab that,” she said. She ran up the stairs, Katy following behind her.
Upstairs, the living room was flooded with light; the red curtains were waving slightly in the breeze, revealing and then obscuring a faint weal of cloud in the sky. The vacuum cleaner stopped, and Lily heard the distant, plangent sound of cathedral bells. The life these people had! She could stay here forever. She took a breath. The phone rang a third time.
“Sí?” said Lily, nearly breathless.
There was a pause.
“Ah, is Carlos Carrizo available?”
“I’m sorry, he’s not here right now,” said Lily. “May I take a message?”
There was another pause, and Lily reached down to the side table drawer to find a pen. When she opened it, she saw an ominous pile of paper: heavy documents and folders covered in what looked like some tedious bureaucratese. She didn’t recognize the words, but something about them seemed heavy, resonant. Spanish, she decided, was too lovely a language for such matters. She shrugged the phone into the crook of her neck and motioned for Katy to come look.
“What?” Katy mouthed, but she didn’t come over.
The man on the phone was giving his name and number, and Lily scrambled to grab a pen. She was writing the number on her hand as
Beatriz appeared at the top of the stairs, a basket of laundry on her hip. The man hung up.
“What are you doing?” said Beatriz. Her face was frozen, her eyes lightless, her hair pulled back very tight. Lily was still holding the phone, and she placed it back in its receiver overly carefully, as though she might now earn some belated credit for conscientiousness.
“I was just taking a message for you,” she said.
Beatriz began to descend the stairs slowly, and Lily knew that the coming conversation was not going to be a good one. She wanted to turn around and catch Katy’s eye, but she was somehow afraid; there was something so uniquely awful about the anger of an adult you did not know well. When did adult strangers ever get mad at you? Never in real life—only on the road or on the Internet. Lily flashed to an image of herself as a small child, being yelled at by a friend’s mother for some infraction that was too abstract to be comprehended at the time. She remembered her terror; her strange distorting sense that the universe was actually aligned against her, and that maybe it always had been and she just hadn’t noticed until then. Beatriz reached the bottom of the stairs and put down the laundry basket.
“Why did you answer our phone?” she said. She was not yelling.
“You weren’t answering it.”
“I was vacuuming.”
“I was just taking a message for you.”
“Do not answer our phone in the future. Do you understand? I assure you, the calls coming in are not for you.”
Lily felt the strange cresting behind her nose that sometimes meant she was about to cry. “I didn’t think they were,” she whispered. She didn’t understand why she felt so terrible. She hadn’t done anything wrong. “I was only trying to help.”
“And those?” Beatriz pointed to the disordered documents, still poking out of the open drawer. “What did you think you were doing with those? Helping?”
“Nothing!” Lily slammed the drawer shut. “I was just looking for some paper. I didn’t see anything, I promise.”
Beatriz moved back a step and took a deep breath. Lily could tell from her expression that she must look terrified, and she watched Beatriz decide to take things down a notch.
“In the future, please be respectful of our privacy and our home.” Beatriz’s voice was softer now, but Lily could hear how hard she was trying to make it that way, which was almost worse than if she’d sounded as angry as she actually was. Lily finally turned and looked at Katy for backup, but Katy’s face remained open and neutral, ready to believe and be believed. If Beatriz had come down thirty seconds later, she would have found both of them looking at those papers. Katy would have come over to look. She would have. Lily was sure of it.
“You have a very lovely room downstairs,” said Beatriz, picking up the laundry basket. “You should have everything there that you need. If you require something else, please ask me first.”
With that, Beatriz took the basket down to the basement, and in a moment Lily could hear the washing machine.
Katy made a whistling sound. “Yikes,” she said. “That was bad luck.”
Lily dragged her thumb along the table near the phone. She wished there was some dust to pretend to brush off, some minor disorganization to feign absorption in, but the Carrizo house was always so spotless.
“What did those papers say?” said Katy after a moment.
“That’s the thing,” Lily said. “I don’t even know.”
By the time Lily hurried up the path to Sebastien’s that night, pizza wedged on her forearm, she was already in a terrible mood. She had disappointed Beatriz, and now she was bound to disappoint Sebastien. It was a simple inevitability. She rang the doorbell and waited.
But really, she told herself, it was okay to try a little less hard for a boy. Sometimes when she thought about all the work she’d done in her life to make sure the men she knew were having a comfortable enough time—the vast amounts of effort she’d spent on this!—she had to cringe. With boys who were particularly recalcitrant on the phone,
she’d sometimes actually written out questions to ask them before calling them up. Had anyone ever gone to such lengths for her? Would she have even wanted them to? Lily had earned a certain amount of disregard, she figured, and now was the time to extend it.
Sebastien appeared at the door after a moment. He was wearing a chestnut-colored waistcoat, the kind of thing you saw on academics in movies though never, in Lily’s experience, in real life. His hair was appealingly mussed—it was growing out a little, which she loved, though she didn’t dare tell him that for fear he would cut it out of spite. She smiled her friendliest smile. “Hello,” she said. “Aren’t you warm in that coat?”
“It’s the mythical Lily Hayes! Goodness gracious!” he said, throwing his arms up and pretending to fan himself. “To what do I owe this rare honor?”
“I brought pizza,” said Lily, still smiling. “Do you like pizza? You were an American teenager once.”
“I was never an American. Nor, in the strictest sense, a teenager.”
Lily gritted her teeth. “Can you forgive me nonetheless? And could you let me in, maybe? I want to set this down.”
“Forgiveness is tedious,” said Sebastien, ushering her through the door. Inside, the house was sweltering, lit by a bunch of candles that seemed now to have mostly burned down, making the room look wavering and medieval. Lily set the pizza on the dining table.
“You and your proto-Christianity, your Neoplatonism,” Sebastien was saying. He opened the box and eyed the pepperoni skeptically. “Ah, and your pork products. Well, I guess living in a constant state of smug forgiveness is fair compensation for the freedom to consume unclean animals on your pizza. That’s the great and central trade-off of the Abrahamic faiths, I’ve always thought.”
“We can pick them off if you don’t like them. And I already know you’re angry with me, so you don’t have to make quite so many allusions. And, I mean, you’re not even making sense, even in terms of just your own internal logic, right now.”
“Angry with you, my jonquil! Perish the thought.”
“I’m sorry I was so out of touch this week,” said Lily carefully. “I was busy.”
“I understand. I’ve been swamped with a million and ten things myself. The kids and their interminable soccer practices, don’t you know.”
“Sebastien. I said I was sorry.”
“And I said I was indifferent.”
For some reason, Lily didn’t want Sebastien to know how tiresome she was beginning to find him. She didn’t want to admit it entirely to herself, either; she felt premature nostalgia (already!) for the way she’d felt about him in those first few weeks, and she still held out some slim hope that the feeling might return. There were moments, after all—there was a certain way Sebastien had of looking at her when she first arrived at his house, his face open and unguarded and so beautiful in its architecture and its youth—that still made her stomach flip. But then he’d begin to talk; invariably at length, invariably ironically, and Lily would feel herself drifting off somewhere. One time Katy had compared Sebastien to a dead fly frozen in the amber of his house, and this image, worryingly, had stuck with Lily.
She found two dusty plates in the cabinet, rinsed them, and put them down on the table. She put slices of pizza on each of their plates, then took a bite of hers. Sebastien did not.
“Are you on a hunger strike?” she said. He looked shiny and a little unwell, and Lily felt—acutely, momentarily, and for the very first time—the paucity of her attraction to him. “Would you care to state your demands?”
For once, Sebastien LeCompte said nothing.
Later, after a fitful and underwhelming round of intercourse, Lily was restless. She sat on the edge of the bed, facing away from Sebastien, and put on her bra. It was still early; the stars were dim topazes in the sky, only beginning to leak their modest light. The fight with Beatriz crouched on Lily’s sternum like the pressure of an oncoming heart attack.
She sighed heavily. Sebastien said nothing. Lily wanted to go somewhere. They never went anywhere. She sighed again.
“Something troubling you, my sweet?”
“I’m bored,” said Lily, ferreting into her tank top. “Can we go out?”
“Where would you like to go?” Sebastien was lying on the bed, still naked. He was exotically non-shy about nudity. Before sex, Lily always liked this quite a lot about him; afterward, she liked it a little less.
“I don’t know.” Lily rotated her shoulders in their sockets. They cracked audibly, and she was glad when Sebastien flinched. “Just somewhere. Out. You pick.”
Sebastien sat up and looked at her with an expression of intense mock-seriousness. “Lily Hayes, are you perhaps not your very best self tonight?”
She spun her shoulders again, though this time they didn’t crack. “Maybe not,” she said.
Sebastien sat up. “What’s wrong?”
The straightforwardness of this took Lily by surprise—she’d expected him to maintain his usual tone—and made it seem possible, all of a sudden, to tell him what had happened. Not that it could help—you might as well talk to a Magic 8 Ball about your problems. But she supposed it couldn’t hurt much, either.
“I got in trouble with Beatriz,” she said.
“Again?”
“Yes, again.” The situation seemed monstrously unfair somehow—bigger and more serious than a mere misunderstanding—though Lily still couldn’t quite pinpoint why. Sebastien stood up, put on his boxers—finally!—and came to sit next to her, resting his head on her shoulder. Lily knew he meant it ironically—it was a commentary on, a parody of, such gestures—but his hair was soft, and his skin was warm, and she hoped that he would stay there for a minute, anyway.
“I certainly hope
I
wasn’t responsible,” he said.
“Not this time, you’ll be relieved to know.” Lily’s fingers wound their way into Sebastien’s hair and stroked his skull lightly—he was so well made, really. “She freaked out because I answered their telephone.”
“The gall!”
“I know! I mean, in general, I understand why Katy never gets in trouble. Katy never sneaks out at night, for one thing.”
Sebastien’s eyes flickered lightly. “Doesn’t she?” he said, and Lily felt again the fleeting, uncomfortable suspicion that everyone around her knew more than she did.
“Well,” she said. “I guess I don’t know. I mean, I do sleep in the same room as her, though. She’d have to be a pretty good sneaker to sneak out all the time. And she doesn’t really seem like the sneaking type.”
“Hmm,” said Sebastien. Lily stopped stroking his hair and patted his shoulder so that he’d sit up.
“But I mean, getting in trouble for stuff I actually do wrong is one thing. Getting in trouble for something like that while Katy is standing
right there
is just dumb.”
“It’s the principle of the thing, you’re saying? Abstract notions of justice and right?”
“It’s that Beatriz just hates me no matter what I do. It’s like, if Katy and I are both doing the
exact
same thing, Beatriz attributes benign intentions to Katy and malign ones to me. But maybe I have benign intentions, too. Sometimes, at least.”