He looked at his watch. It was a Nomos Minimatik with a champagne-colored dial. Nomos was his new thing. They were not expensive watches, they topped out at 20K, but they were made in the tiny German town of Glashütte, far from all that overpriced Swiss razzle-dazzle, and they stuck to a strict but playful Bauhaus aesthetic. The watch did its work. It calmed him. The creaminess of the dial, the great rushes of open space between the arabic numerals, and, most important, the tiny orange second hand, a child’s hand, really, elegantly, sweeping around its little subsidiary dial, as if life were easy and bright. The watch sucked up the inhuman glow of the space around him and substituted beauty and hope. He remembered three-week-old Shiva asleep in his arms, this sweet brown rabbit, and even then he whispered through all his agnostic lapsed-Jew bullshit, “Please, God, just don’t do anything to him, okay? My sins are my own.”
He breathed. And smiled. This was the crazy thing. A good watch made him smile in the way his son used to make him smile back when he was just a helpless, perfect little thing. The way Seema made him smile before they got married, when she argued with everything he said about life and politics and aesthetics. He thought it was cool for people of his stature to marry someone who disagreed with them across the board. The loyal opposition. “She’s the most beautiful and smart woman I’ve ever met,” he liked to tell his friends after they had stopped loving each other.
He could pinpoint the moment exactly. They had been at a birthday party at Eleven Madison, ten hedge-fund and private-equity couples, and she was talking to Joey Goldblatt and his new barely postadolescent wife of the moment. Seema had been spending all her waking hours since the diagnosis finding services for Shiva and hardly acknowledging Barry. Already he felt alone. But now he also heard her voice for the first time in weeks and it was too loud, too drunk for its own good, as she said to Joey’s young new wife: “Our only real indulgence is a personal chef.” That typical hedgie humble-brag. It sounded so false. So not Seema. Like an open confession to all of his friends: All we have left between us is our money.
But what friends? He had so few left. She had been his best friend. She used to read him Paul Krugman over breakfast and he would read her Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories under the covers, feeling virile and masculine all the while. She had been his best friend, and two hours ago she had announced that he had no imagination (or was it no soul?). An hour ago she had grabbed his face, impounded her fingers deep into the skin below his left eye, and thrown him off their screaming son. How do you come back from something like that?
“Are you Barry Cohen?” A middle-aged Latino man approached. He was wearing a thick mauve vest with some kind of pin that maybe denoted his high status in the Greyhound Lines priesthood. Even in the scorching nuclear afterglow of the Port Authority’s orange tile walls, he had managed to retain a perfect pompadour.
The man began to open the shutters to the ticket counters, he beckoned Barry to follow, then shuttered down again.
“Wait up!” Bunny Ears shouted as the gate crashed down in front of her and the Lay’s woman. “We need tickets, too! That ain’t fair!” The man walked up to a kind of monitor with a printer attached. The setup reminded Barry of the Commodore 64 he had loved to program in his youth.
“Do you know Wayne from downstairs?” Barry asked the Latino man. “He’s in the green vest.”
A ticket for Richmond came out of the printer. Barry looked at his watch. It had taken Sandy three minutes to rearrange the world for him. Bunny Ears and Lay’s were shaking the chains of the shutter, demanding respect, but the ticket man in the mauve vest had no respect to give them.
Once more, Barry dragged his suitcase down the broken escalator toward the gates. The Indian man on the escalator had fallen asleep, his head in his lap, a day’s sorrow behind him. Barry walked over to Wayne in the green vest by the Richmond gate. “I got my ticket!” Barry said.
“I knew it’d work out for you,” Wayne said.
“Can I use the bathroom?”
“Yeah, but it’s busted. So—”
“I know you gotta key me in to the third floor.”
“You catch on fast, Barry,” Wayne said.
By the third floor, another landscape of orange walls and yellow barricades, Barry’s anger had given way to sadness. He shouldn’t have called Sandy! He couldn’t rely on Sandy for this trip. He had to assume full responsibility. No Sandy, no Seema, no Filipina nannies, no Estonian cooks, no Bangladeshi drivers. No one but Barry Cohen in charge of his fate. He took out his phone and shut it down. He looked around. The bathroom was empty. He opened the trash can and threw the phone in and stuffed in a bunch of paper towels after it.
He thought of throwing his wallet out as well, but then how would he pay for things? He walked over to a broken toilet and threw up instead.
* * *
—
BARRY’S BUS settled pneumatically outside the gate, a happy sound he distinctly remembered from his college trip to Richmond. Hanging near the gate was a black-and-white photograph of the Greyhound company in brighter times, a ribbon-cutting ceremony presided over by a real greyhound with the words LADY GREYHOUND written on her sash. The destination on the bus read AMERICA.
Many passengers were still asleep on the dirty benches, their ski caps pulled over their eyes against the glare of the Port Authority, their mouths open. Why were they wearing ski caps in the summer? Was it because of drugs? Did the drugs make them cold? There was something tender about poor people sleeping. The old woman ahead of him, with her heavy breathing and pink, unwell eyes, had a luggage tag that read CLARKSDALE, MS. That must be a journey of days. Looking around, Barry began to envision the Greyhound as a form of transport for African Americans, a way to stitch their families together across an inhospitable land. There were also a few ex-military Latinos in fatigues and people of all races wearing wristbands probably denoting discharge or escape from some facility, their shirtfronts damp with effluvia. He could still turn back. He could still feel the warmth of his wife’s granite-smooth back against his chest. But he couldn’t do that to Shiva, whose face, convulsing with terror, was the last thing he saw as the women tore him away. He reached instinctively for his pocket, but his phone was gone.
He was free.
Wayne was helping the woman bound for Clarksdale, Mississippi, with her considerable luggage. Before Princeton, Barry felt like he could understand more of what was being said out on the streets, but now he needed subtitles. Maybe Seema was right. More than twenty years in finance and his imagination was shot. He had to relearn the way people spoke in his country. Wayne was carrying the old woman’s bags clear across the hall to the bus. What if the rest of our country were as kindly as Wayne? “I just want to thank you for everything you’ve done for me,” Barry told him in passing, reaching out to shake his hand.
“What I do?”
“Just noticed me.”
“You be good to yourself, Barry,” Wayne said.
Barry pictured a down-lit urban bar where he and Wayne could get seriously hammered and, against the backdrop of a neon palm tree and a curvy barkeep in a Coors T-shirt, he could tell him about Shiva. I had a cousin like that, Wayne might say, stroking the fine mesh of his green vest. Wouldn’t say a word. Spun in circles. Now he works for the VA. Three kids. Don’t believe what they tell you. Nobody knows nothing. These doctors.
Outside the gate they had to give their tickets to the bus driver, a short black man in sunglasses and a leather jacket that read MARINES. Barry showed him the printout, expecting him to scan it, but the bus driver wanted the actual copy. “Sir!” he said. “I need to give the ticket to Greyhound.”
“I thought I could keep this copy for my files,” Barry said. “As a memento.”
“Sir! You need to relinquish me this ticket or you will not get on this bus.”
Barry hesitated. His drunkenness was fading, but the anger remain
ed. What the hell had happened to courteous people like Wayne? “Look, I don’t want to get into an argument over a piece of paper—”
“Sir! Are you gonna stand there wasting everyone’s time or are you gonna relinquish me the ticket? You gotta make up your mind.”
Barry looked down at the bus driver. He could do so because he had at least half a foot on him. But he no longer had his phone and he no longer had Sandy, so there was nothing to be done. He had to submit to this small, gnarled Vietnam veteran with a New York State commercial bus driver’s license. He had to give him the ticket, the only proof he had that he was allowed on this bus, that he could complete his journey to Richmond. He had to trust his counterparty, the bus driver, not to throw him off the bus at some point, the way his guys had to trust Barry at bonus season after a big year. Not that he was really having any more big years.
He gave him the ticket. “Thank you!” the bus driver said, his eyes rolling visibly behind his sunglasses, in a way that was supposed to remind the other people in line to behave or face humiliation. He hadn’t even noticed that Barry was hurt, that he was bleeding.
Inside, the bus was dim and neon lit like a secret nightclub. It also stank of urine. It stank of urine and also disinfectant, which, in its own cloying way, made the urine smell worse. Barry didn’t want to ask if this was standard operating procedure or if something was wrong, but he noticed most of the passengers clustering away from the bathroom. He was learning another rule of Greyhound. You sat up front.
He also realized that the overhead compartments such as they were would never accommodate his rollerboard and the six precious watches inside. He could check the rollerboard in to the bus’s hold as others were doing, but the idea of the watches down there, being jostled by the rude luggage of others, was too much to bear. He could surrender, he could submit, he could open up his nostrils to the Greyhound Empire of Smells, but he would let no harm come to his watches. He squeezed his luggage into the seat next to him.
The bus driver had climbed on board. “My name is [something unintelligible] and I’ll be your motor-coach operator to Richmond. Are the outlets working? A simple yes or no.”
There were a few sleepy yeses as people plugged in their electronics. The driver turned on the woman sitting in the front row.
“Ma’am, that seat is reserved for the handicapped.”
A gentle Latino croak: “I handicapped.”
“You’re handicapped? What’s wrong with you?”
“I alllways sit up fron’.”
“Ma’am, if you talk back to me, you won’t travel on this bus. That’s a fact. Now I asked a question and you’re going to answer me. How are you handicapped? What’s wrong with you?”
“My knee, it hurt.”
“Well, my knee hurts, too. Now what’s really wrong with you? How are you handicapped? Ma’am. Don’t talk back now. Ma’am! Answer the question: How are you handicapped?”
Barry followed the conversation to its logical conclusion, as the weak-kneed woman shuffled back to the more urinary part of the bus still muttering about her knees. It was amazing to witness. In Barry’s world you could not exercise complete control over your wife or child or even many of your employees without repercussion. There were safeguards built in. Lawyers. Social workers. The media. But the bus driver’s authority was complete. Barry began to suspect something about our country. That we were, at heart, heavily regimented and militaristic. Despite our cowboy ethos, we were really all under orders, and anything we said or did in protest could be construed as “talking back,” and we could all be thrown off the bus. The Greyhound was like a branch of our armed forces. And Barry was a buck private.
The engine ground to life. Barry looked at his Nomos, its creamy Bauhaus dial lost to the darkness, but the gentle feminine shape of its lugs unmistakable. He knew something. Unlike his friend Joey Goldblatt’s many tabloid divorces, he would end his marriage with unusual grace. Even in failure, he would set an example, and one day, many years hence, Seema would say to him: “I’m glad you had the courage to end it. I’m glad you knew when it was time to run away.”
And now the great thing was going to happen, the great thing that he had dreamed of all those days looking out the window of his Astor Place office building at the lively young NYU late-afternoon girls in purple sweatshirts milling about the felaferies of St. Mark’s Place. The bus was going to twist around some dark, dangerous corners and then, full speed ahead, shoot out into the light and glimmer of a steep Manhattan overpass, the city beneath him, fading, then gone.
But it didn’t happen this way. They passed a dispatcher booth with a sign that said SAFETY FIRST, and then they were immediately outside on lifeless Forty-first Street, past a Yotel, whatever that was, and a sign that read SUNSPIRE. ADDICTION TREATMENT YOU CAN TRUST. Right away, they were zooming through the empty fluorescent tube of the Lincoln Tunnel.
On the other side of the Hudson, at 4:00 A.M., Manhattan was mostly dark, like a pre-Dutch version of itself. For once, it looked powerless. Awaiting some unknown fate. He glanced over his shoulder, trying, in vain, to catch the transparent dark glass of his residential skyscraper, of Shiva, who would have been screaming through the night, unspooling his sequence of tortured gasps, Seema and the nanny patiently by his side, taking turns squeezing his son’s little body to give him the sensory stimuli he needed to know he was still afloat in the world.
* * *
—
THE DINNER had been his wife’s idea. Hers and the Hong Kong doctor’s. The elevators in their building were all keyed in to the residents’ individual floors, so you rarely met your neighbors, but Seema and the Hong Kong doctor had met in the lobby and started chatting, as women tend to do. Now, that wasn’t precisely a dig at women on Barry’s part. Chatting was his primary activity. The office was overrun by quants and other assorted math geniuses, half their staff now seemed to flow from MIT or its less-endowed counterparts from around the world, while wide-shouldered, charming Princetonians like Barry were left to handle the big picture of yearly separating guys named Ahmed of the Qatar Investment Authority from 2 percent of the assets Barry managed. He did that by talking to them in the broadest, most backslapping former-athlete way possible. All of those hours practicing his “friend moves” in front of the mirror back when he was at Louis Pasteur Middle School had finally paid off. “Friendliest dude on the Street,” some young bro had once called him. No one else could lose money three years in a row and still have the Ahmeds of the world come calling. He was very proud.
The dinner. It was Seema’s way of forgetting Shiva’s diagnosis for a while and going back to doing what hedge-fund wives did best, building a carefully curated life for the family. As it turned out, the Hong Kong doctor was married to a writer whom Seema had read and admired. A writer? In their building? Where even the one-bedrooms with a view of the back side of a taco joint started at three million? Something about that didn’t sit right with Barry, but he let it go.
Seema was a reader, which was one of the artsy things about her that had always attracted him to her. She read the kinds of books most people in their right mind had long abandoned. The writer, a favorite of hers, was a Guatemalan, who wrote in a kind of fantastical way about the political situation there, which wasn’t good. Barry looked up the writer’s Amazon ranking—1,123,340—and after reading one page of his novel, Barry could see how the ranking came to be. The prose was impenetrable. There were dozens of acronyms of local political parties and organized gangs and tons of Spanish terms and words that had been left untranslated for no good reason other than to taunt Barry’s whiteness. It wasn’t that Barry was a philistine. He had a minor in writing from Princeton’s excellent writing program. His hedge fund, This Side of Capital, was named after Fitzgerald’s first novel, set among the Gothic quads of his alma mater. He had rented his offices in a new Astor Place monolith overlooking storied, once-bohemian St. Mark’s
Place as a way of acknowledging his own brief creative spark. Even his dreams of crossing our country by bus were supplemented with the possibility of one day setting his journeys down on paper. On the Road but in thoughtful middle-aged prose.
“You told me this wasn’t going to be formal,” he said when he saw Seema putting on a dress that he knew was reserved for occasions when she had to impress. One of the many things on his marriage checklist was to marry a woman too ambitious to ever become fat. Seema, barely a year out of Yale Law when he met her and clerking her way to the pinnacle of whatever was left of the legal profession, certainly satisfied that requirement. Still, the dress brought out every inch of her body and clung with great emphasis to her large, magnificent bottom. This bothered Barry further. Why was she dressing up for this writer and his wife?
Across their bedroom’s private sitting room, across the hallway with its sparkling herringbone floors, over the three linked living areas separated by double-sided fireplaces, and across the nanny’s snug bedroom, Shiva’s shrill little cries were drilling through the air, puncturing the timeless scene of two well-bred people, one powerful, the other beautiful, preparing for an evening of culture and wit.
“You can’t put on something better?” Seema said. “Vineyard Vines is fine for a pool party in Westport. It looks like you’re still selling bonds to old ladies at Morgan.”
Since the diagnosis, Seema had said things like this. A little fountain pen, its nib soaked in cruelty, always seemed to be at her disposal. She was exhausted, he knew. Exhausted because he had contributed nothing to Shiva’s care, and while she loved their nanny, having a child with the diagnosis meant in essence being the CEO of your own small business. Not like she has a real job, he thought with his own brand of cruelty. Not that it was entirely her fault. Marrying an accomplished woman and taking her off the job market was a way to telegraph success among Barry’s peers.
Lake Success Page 2
