“Dad,” Sebastien said to the picture. “I think I met a girl.”
He’d just begun summer orientation when the plane had crashed. His French aunt Madeleine called him at four in the morning. It was the middle of a heat wave; even the wood floor of his dorm room had been warm. He stood listening in the dark and then threw up into the fireplace. The smell of vomit mixed with the smell of dead ash from fabulous parties long ago.
Sebastien had known what his parents did for as long as he’d thought to be interested, which was admittedly not that long. It was probably sometime during his early adolescence that the long-standing patterns of their lives—the house, the vague explanations about his parents’ work, the suddenness of their move to Buenos Aires in 1994, right after the Jewish community center bombing—resolved into some kind of understanding. By then he’d been embarrassed to acknowledge he’d ever not known (and indeed, on some level, he surely always had). So the realization itself was layered under other information that was new and, at the time, more compelling—mostly about sex, of course. And, like sex, his parents’ work became a topic that was unmentionable among sophisticated people, among whose number Sebastien had counted himself back then.
Now he kept the secret for reasons both practical and personal. As a practical matter, Sebastien felt protective toward those Argentine nationals with whom his parents had had dealings. Naturally, he had no idea who any of them were, and naturally the fact of his parents’ death meant that somebody else—somebody important enough to crash a plane—already did. Nevertheless, Sebastien didn’t want the neighborhood knowing, if they didn’t already, and he didn’t want life to be any harder for the people who his parents had worked with, assuming any of them were still alive.
Underneath this, though, was something far less explicable: the sense that keeping a secret for the dead was a way of keeping a promise to the dead, and that keeping a promise to the dead meant allowing them to assert a claim on you, and that anything that came with obligations of that sort was still a kind of relationship. Somehow, Sebastien felt that his parents were a little less dead every time he was coy to a stranger in conversation.
“A girl, huh?” he imagined his father saying. “Well, what’s she like?”
“She’s really something,” he imagined saying back. “She’s really something.”
Was she, though? It was a reasonable question. Sebastien felt his broken and rococo heart crawling out to Lily Hayes, throwing itself around her in joy and relief, but why? She was, after all, only a parochial sort of beauty (curious-faced, slightly snub-nosed, pale almost to translucence), and she could veer in a sentence from beautiful to practical—bordering on plain, really, compared with the impeccable girls Sebastien had known at Andover, with their sleek hair and bubblegum-colored fingernails and outlandishly perfect bodies (the kind of perfect bodies that, forget genetics, could really come only with narcissism and money). You looked at those girls and felt that it was entirely possible to do everything in life very, very well. You looked at those girls and felt that there was plenty of time to get it all right. But nevertheless, Sebastien was still thinking of Lily Hayes: her angular expression, the way she’d looked out the window every time he spoke. The way she made it seem as though she had better things to be thinking about, and the way he was almost—almost—inclined to believe her.
Sebastien went to the computer and logged on to Facebook. He had a lot of Facebook friends somehow—almost all from Andover, almost all now off living on the distant planets of Ivy League education or corporate law indentured servitude or trophy wifedom—and every year on Sebastien’s birthday they enthusiastically wished him well. This was the weird prolonged false intimacy that the Internet created: These people—who mostly did not know that his parents had died and that he’d never gone to Harvard and that he’d retreated back to Buenos Aires to live in a falling-down mansion, and that there were termites coming through the floors and sapphire earrings rotting in the upstairs bedroom—these people (bless them!) all pretended to have actually remembered his birthday.
But then, the Internet was good for a lot of things. He typed in “Lily Hayes.” There were, predictably, hundreds of Lily Hayeses, almost all white and middle- to upper-middle-class, their lives lovingly Instagrammed. But he finally found her, his Lily Hayes: Her picture was of sun-flecked feet in strappy sandals, her profile was set to the insubstantial privacy settings characteristic of very young people of goodwill. This girl, thought Sebastien. He could write to her right now. Phenomenal. He hovered his mouse over the message box, came to his senses, closed it. He got up to fix himself a drink.
When he sat back down, to keep himself from logging back into Facebook, he went to vagrantorscenester.com. This was a dull website, briefly popular in the mid-aughts, where players were invited to judge pictures of people snapped anonymously on the street. Sebastien hated this game, and the reason he hated it so much was that he’d actually invented it, back when he was in the ninth grade at Andover. He’d arrived there scrawny, young, and—having skipped a year—already living under a cloud of presumed academic earnestness. All of this had required Sebastien to pioneer brand-new methods of social cruelty in order to survive; his primary tactic—then and now—was to make remarks that sounded cutting but that nobody could ever be totally sure they understood. Adolescent Sebastien had never bothered with mocking his peers for the usual reasons (you were fat, you were or seemed unattractively sincere or striving, you were or seemed gay). Those were the vulnerabilities that children knew they had and had properly strategized for. Instead, Sebastien invented entirely new categories of social evaluation, and soon found that by referring to these categories, he could actually erect them. (He remembered this now through the prism of Hannah Arendt’s observation about totalitarianism: Convincing people things are true is much more difficult than simply behaving as though they are.) Young Sebastien could crack his classmates open like lobsters, it turned out, revealing new areas of self-loathing they didn’t even know they had yet. The sociopathic Vagrant or Scenester game was part of all of this, though back then it was called Cool or Crazy (by the other kids—even as a child, Sebastien had found alliteration tiresome). Sebastien had invented it during his first term at Andover. He’d usually played it with CJ Kimball and Byron “The Box” Buford on Saturday outings to Harvard Square, chaperoned by noticeably resentful intern teachers, in those first few yellow, surreal, cinematic weeks after September 11th. U.S. flags were everywhere, even in Cambridge; at home, Sebastien’s parents told him, everything was in economic and political chaos—inflation was in the double digits, there was a looming default on some important loan. All of it was terribly dry to Sebastien then—and anyway, he was usually too busy to talk for long, run ragged, as he was, by the demands of mocking Harvard students and homeless people in a judicious 1:1 ratio. That’s how he’d actually thought of it then: as equal opportunity derision. As though he were extending some important leveling force. As though he were animated by the spirit of blindfolded lady justice. If he’d been left unmolested on the trajectory he was on then, Sebastien saw now, he probably would have wound up heading straight for the editorial page of some conservative college newspaper to write portentous, bloviating opinion articles he could never disown because they would live forever on the Internet. Maybe it was just as well, then, that he’d never gone to college. Sebastien laughed and took another sip of his drink.
The way CJ and Byron played Cool or Crazy was straightforwardly, unimaginatively sarcastic: guessing Cool for a muttering, emaciated woman with meth-brown teeth, Crazy for a college boy with expensive jeans and exquisitely mussed hair. But Sebastien had never played that way; instead, he’d always picked less obvious targets and designations. A middle-aged woman in a gray sweatshirt drinking straight from a two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew was deemed Cool, a well-muscled young man wearing a Puka shell necklace was pronounced Crazy. Sebastien never tired of how nervous these pronouncements made CJ and The Box; when they asked f
or explanations, Sebastien always told them that the game was an art, not a science, and that he had the soul of an artist, and that that’s why he always won.
And now here was his beautiful, idiot game, all grown up and online. Sebastien liked to check on it sometimes, in much the same way he liked to check on the Facebook profiles of half-remembered classmates from grade school; he liked to know that it was basically doing okay. It was, after all, his brainchild—in a more reductive and palatable form, admittedly, though was this not the universal fate of the ideas of great thinkers? Truly, Sebastien had always had his finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist. He laughed again and hiccupped and got up to pour himself another drink. When he sat back down at the computer he found that he was once again, somehow, on Lily Hayes’s Facebook page.
Sebastien stared at her sandals, her toes. This girl. What would become of her? He hovered his mouse again over the message box. This girl. Were people really this open? Were their lives really this lucky? He opened the message box. He hesitated. But then: really. What did he have to lose? He had literally nothing to lose. Few people experienced the pure liberation of having absolutely nothing to lose, but Sebastien had the particular blessing and curse of this kind of freedom—he had zero claims on the attention of anyone, anywhere; he had the totally unsullied indifference of the universe. He could crawl into the bathtub and slit his wrists and nobody would care. He could torch this entire house and all of its treasures and nobody would care. He could certainly message this girl and confidently expect that nobody would care about that, either.
“Gilded Lily,” he began.
CHAPTER FIVE
January
The day after the dinner, a message from Sebastien LeCompte popped up in Lily’s in-box. “Gilded Lily,” it began, and things went downhill from there.
Lily was surprised. Sebastien LeCompte was not the kind of boy—Lily could not think of him as a “man,” really, and certainly not as a garden-variety “guy”—who usually liked her. Over dinner, it had become clear that Sebastien had lived in that mansion for most of his life, that his parents had been American diplomats (this explained the accent) who died in a plane crash when he was seventeen, and that he was fabulously wealthy. He didn’t say this last part, but it was apparent: There were references to playing polo, attending Harvard, summering in the Alps—things that Lily had never fully realized that actual people actually did out in the actual world. If Sebastien was going to like anyone, Lily figured it would have been Katy. He’d spent several minutes talking to her on the porch after dinner, when he’d only passed Lily a business card—an actual business card!—that read SEBASTIEN LECOMPTE, SLOTH, in both English and Spanish.
“Are you going to write him back?” said Katy, while Lily was brushing her barely adequate teeth.
“Maybe.”
“Even though he lives next door?”
“Maybe. Do you think his parents really were diplomats?”
“Sure,” said Katy. “Why not?” There was a minty bubble at the corner of her mouth, which somehow made Lily feel inordinately relieved.
“I don’t know,” said Lily. “The plane crash sort of makes you wonder.”
“What?”
“If they were CIA.”
“You’re so conspiracy minded.”
“I get it from my dad,” said Lily. “Anyway, I have never in my life even heard of a real person playing polo. Shouldn’t he be at Oxford by now, or something?”
“Well,” said Katy, sounding doubtful. “I guess you would sort of think.”
Lily waited three days to write back. When she did, she tried to ape Sebastien’s tone and style: employing absurdly inflated language she never used in real life, invoking belabored extended metaphors. Sebastien responded by inserting random French phrases into his emails, so Lily started doing the same—though he had to know that this did not count as sophistication, since, of course, you could Google anything you wanted to say. He moved on to Italian; she saw his Italian, and raised him Hungarian—the one phrase she actually did know: Nem beszelek magyarul, I do not speak Hungarian—but this, it seemed, was enough. He asked her to dinner.
“You have a date already?” said Katy.
“What do you mean, ‘already’?” Lily was wearing a ruched floral shirt that she’d decided communicated a sense of general fun, and plastering makeup on her face with both hands. She was afraid that her emails might have given Sebastien the wrong idea.
“Well,” said Katy. “I just mean, we just got here.”
“We’ve been here two weeks.”
“I just wonder if it’s going to be a problem with Carlos and Beatriz.”
“It’s a host family, not a juvenile detention center.”
“They’re conservative, I think.”
Lily leaned toward the mirror and embarked on the project of eyeliner. “I don’t think we can assume that. Carlos seems to know how to have a good time, at least.”
“There are crosses everywhere.”
“It’s dinner. Does the Vatican have a policy on dinner?”
“Don’t be sarcastic.”
“No, I am actually asking. I mean, they actually really might, for all I know.”
Katy climbed into her bed then and began to read. She’d managed to enroll in the only rigorous class on offer—something about economics in the post-Peronist era—and it seemed to require a vast amount of studying and note-taking and highlighting with markers in three different colors.
“I think it’s so cool that you’re taking a real class here,” said Lily, to apologize. “Everyone else has basically just dropped out of school for the semester.”
Katy studied her for a moment to see if she was serious, then seemed to decide she was. “I just think it makes sense to learn a little bit about the country we’re in, you know?”
Lily nodded vigorously. “Totally.”
Katy smiled. “You look nice. Don’t be nervous.”
“Thanks,” said Lily. “I’m not.”
At five past eight Lily once again walked up the winding path to Sebastien LeCompte’s mansion, which, in the falling light, suddenly looked dilapidated and underwhelming. Lily had told Katy she wasn’t nervous. But she was. For one thing, she was nervously wondering if she should have brought a condom. She didn’t know if that would have projected some kind of unsexy premeditation, or else some kind of unattractive feminine wiliness, or else some kind of massively inflated sense of her own charms. She then remembered that she wasn’t supposed to care. Her parents had given her an enormous box of Trojans before she came here, alongside an earnest discussion about making smart choices. Poor old Andrew had blinked compulsively throughout the entire conversation; he’d poked himself in the eye (actually poked himself in the eye!) once, and his eyeball, he reminded everyone all the time, had simply never been the same. The condom box they’d given Lily was appalling, mortifying, industrial-sized—for cults, maybe, or university women’s centers. Lily was vaguely flattered, and then vaguely insulted, when she thought of how much sex her parents must think she was having. She was then vaguely disgusted to think that her parents thought about this at all.
Suddenly, Lily was on the porch. She knocked the weird knocker (what the hell was that thing, anyway?), and Sebastien answered immediately, as though he’d been standing there, right on the other side of the door, waiting for her—which, for all she knew, he had. He was wearing a jacket, even though it was about a thousand degrees out, and probably even warmer inside.
“Dearest Lily,” he said. “Do come in.”
“Hi,” said Lily. “How’s it going?” She knew she wasn’t going to be able to keep up the email tone in person, and he might as well know it now. She followed Sebastien into the house. Inside, the living room was dusty and ornate, dominated by an enormous grandfather clock and some kind of ancient painted cloth on the wall. At the center of the room stood a grand piano that Lily felt sure was woefully out of tune.
“Pretty piano,” she said. “Do you
play?”
“Only ‘Chopsticks,’ ” said Sebastien. “Would you care for a glass of wine?” He handed her one before she could answer. SORBONNE 1967 was etched, in flamboyant swirls, on the glass.
“Oh, thanks,” said Lily. “I can’t drink out of anything from a state school.” With the first sip of wine pain flooded her mandible. She swallowed hard. On the mantel, there was a picture of Sebastien and an older man with a smallish hoofed animal that looked like a first draft of a zebra. She pointed.
“You killed that?”
“I had to, sadly.” Sebastien stood behind her. “It owed me money.”
Lily looked more closely at the picture. The man Sebastien was standing with looked exactly like him; he had greenish eyes and wavy brown hair and a jauntily cocked head. The animal’s neck appeared broken; it was twisted at an odd angle that made it seem as though more violence had been done to it than was strictly necessary. Its belly was white and looked soft. “Where was that?” she said.
“A resort in Brazil. You pay to enjoy your dominion over the beasts.”
Lily wondered what it would have felt like to kill that thing. As a child, she and her good friend Leah had once murdered a banana slug. They had found it in the tree house—Andrew had built Lily and Anna a tree house because Janie had died, which was also why their parents had sent them to art camp, and given them music lessons, and allowed them to be far too present and assertive at adult dinner parties—and she and Leah (who had grown up to be a lesbian at NYU, and who even as a kid had always wanted to play the boy) had taken a fist-sized piece of basalt to it just to see what would happen. They’d been learning about the scientific process together in the second grade—about making observations, and recording data, and making hypotheses, and forming theories—and Lily had convinced Leah, or Leah had convinced Lily, that this was science. There’d been an underwhelming squish; the slug had oozed, relinquished a yellow substance that neither Leah nor Lily could identify, and then died, silently. And Lily had felt something odd then, a guilty but nearly gleeful sort of power—an edginess, somewhere between nausea and euphoria—and of course she’d gone to her mother later, and of course she’d cried, but it had been a complicated sort of cry.
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