“Fuck Morgan,” Barry said, “check this out!” He came out of his closet wearing a Citi vest he had gotten at some golf thing.
Seema was sitting at her vanity with her red lips and her sharp gaze. Unlike white wives, she could wear many grams of gold around her neck, the miraculous hue of her skin catching its glow. She was, Barry sometimes noted in disbelief, a twenty-nine-year-old beauty with whom only one person in the universe had failed to fall desperately in love, that person being himself. And did Shiva love her? Would he ever be capable of love? The extracts Seema had messengered to his office seemed to suggest so, that his diagnosis was just another way of being. “This is not a tragedy,” she had written in her full-bodied handwriting across a memo sticking to the latest scientific study Barry couldn’t bring himself to read.
“So tonight is going to be a joke to you?” Seema said. Her angry voice lived in a deep whiskey register all its own. “You keep complaining about how we don’t know our neighbors. Well, here’s the chance to meet some really interesting ones. I, for one, want to make a good impression.”
He shrugged, took off the Citi vest, and threw it on the bed. “I’m going to pick out a watch,” he said, heading toward his watch safe where the implements of his true desire rotated smoothly in their winders.
* * *
—
LUIS AND Julianna Goodman lived in a much smaller unit on the third floor. Like a long-haul jet, their building was divided into economy, business, and first. The first eleven floors held several apartments, each of no more than three bedrooms apiece, and accommodated middling millionaires on the “sell” side of finance, Goldman managing directors and the like, the wives on their first or second child. The next eleven floors held a single apartment per floor and belonged to the principals of hedge funds and private equity firms and one Argentine model and her soccer player boyfriend who spent no more than a week out of the year in New York. The top three floors belonged to Rupert Murdoch.
The elevator zipped down from the twenty-first to the third floor, Seema in her finery staring straight ahead, Barry checking his Nomos Minimatik, a clever choice given that the product copy suggested it was a perfect watch for creative souls like architects and writers. The watch sat around his wrist like something from a gilded, well-engineered universe, and it telegraphed just what kind of man Barry Cohen was.
The Goodmans both greeted them at the door of their apartment. Luis Goodman was tall and as pretty as his book jacket suggested and he spoke mid-Atlantic English suspiciously well, perfectly in fact. He was wearing a big IWC Pilot’s Watch, nonvintage but vintage looking, the kind of thing that Barry could never pull off. He had on a white Brooks Brothers shirt opened at the neck. His wife was nearly as gorgeous, tall and compact. She had a vintage Jaeger-LeCoultre Reverso on her wrist, a watch British colonials used to wear while playing polo. The women hugged each other with delight. Seeing them made Barry realize how cooped up his wife was in their four-thousand-square-foot apartment with Shiva’s diagnosis and her emotionally vacated husband. Perhaps out of spite, Seema’s wrist was bare of the many timepieces he had bought her, including the 70K Cartier Crash, a watch that, on purpose, looked as if it had been mangled in a car accident. He noticed that the Hong Kong doctor was wearing jeans and a decent summer blouse, probably A.P.C. or something (that’s where Seema bought his sneakers), but her informality made a joke of Seema’s sinuous dress, her curved perfumed body.
The apartment was minimalist and strategically unlit, but the basics were there, all the Liebherr and KitchenAid stuff that denoted some measure of one-percenter stability. A small distressed-wood dining table was laid out with Pan-Asian and Pan-Latin foods to which Seema added her mother’s prized sambar, a lentil-based vegetable stew heavy on the tamarind that even an acknowledged carnivore like Barry could not resist. This was a caring move on her part, since bringing down a two-thousand-dollar bottle of wine would only accentuate the distance between the twenty-first and third floors. “Oh my God,” the Hong Kong doctor said (in the five hours they would spend together, Barry would never remember her name; he never remembered women’s names), “I made Hakka cuisine, salt-baked chicken. Seema, you’re not a vegetarian, are you?”
“I get the Brahman meat sweats, but I still eat the bird,” Seema said. The women and Luis laughed knowingly, and Barry felt like the only white guy in the room. He noted that Luis Goodman the supposed Guatemalan was far paler than he was and, given his last name, probably just as Jewish.
“So I started reading your book,” Barry said. “It’s extremely interesting.”
“I’d ask which of my books, but they’re all basically the same,” Luis said. “American colonialism, crimes against the indigenous, yada yada yada.”
“Barry’s reading The Sympathetic Butcher,” Seema put in, “a personal favorite of mine.”
They were seated around the cramped table coating their plates with a mixture of sambar and rice and slapping on mounds of yucca and fragrant chunks of the salt-baked chicken, which Barry knew immediately would be the star of the show. Julianna was a full-time doctor, but she still had time to celebrate her heritage in the kitchen. Barry looked sadly at his wife’s naked wrist. The doctor was at least a decade older, but her looks had kept. If she got tired of the writer, she could probably marry a short, heavyset man on the middle rungs of private equity.
They ate happily and talked about Trump for a bit, the men dividing the discussion between them, then ceding small portions of the conversation to the women who added their own worry about their nation’s future, framing it in terms of their children and the world they would inherit. The Goodmans had one boy, too, and he was the same age as Shiva. “Is the little guy asleep?” Seema asked. (That’s what Barry sometimes called his son too, “the little guy.”)
Barry looked at her cautiously. “Well, no need to wake him up,” he said.
As if on cue the Goodmans’ Filipina, a much older and clearly less-well-paid version of the Cohens’ own, trooped out a sweet Eurasian kid who appraised the guests for a second with his sly pale-green eyes and then hid behind his nanny’s skirts. He peeked out, smiling with every megawatt of toddler charm at his disposal, and then stuck out his tongue. “Arturo’s a real comedian,” Julianna said. “Today he saw a pigeon on a wire, and he said to him, ‘Pigeon, don’t fall!’ ”
“Sounds like I should replace my head of risk with Arturo,” Barry said. They all laughed, but Barry knew that the presence of this normal boy, this talking boy, would hurt Seema terribly. Arturo ran up to the radiator, hoisted his tall, stringy frame atop the cover, and, pointing at the moon, sang, “I love you, moon!” His nanny ran to pull him down, apologizing, but they all knew no apologies were necessary, everything had been scripted in advance, as it always was with perfect Manhattan children.
“Shiva loves the moon, too,” Barry said. Which was true, Shiva also climbed up on the radiator when the moon was full and looked at it openmouthed, his eyes blinking in rhythm as if he were an alien from Close Encounters of the Third Kind trying to make contact with an inferior civilization. But he never declared his love of the moon, like the three-year-old Arturo did. He had never said a word in his life.
The nightmare continued. The nanny got out a bumblebee hat and affixed it upon the little child’s head, his hair as light as his father’s, the supposed Latino. He ran up to the dining table and established eye contact with each diner. Once he knew they were his, he drew a deep breath, the kind of preparation that would last him through Collegiate and Yale and HBS and see him through the ranks of a fund like Barry’s until he had the track record to start his own fund and move up the seventeen flights to Barry’s apartment beneath Rupert Murdoch’s mansion in the sky.
“Okay, Arturo, maybe we don’t do the song tonight,” Julianna said. “We’re still eating, porcupine.”
But Arturo was taught that every drawn breath was precious and
must end in song.
IIIIIIIIIII’mmmmmmmmmmmm…bringing home my baby bumblebee
Won’t my mommy be so proud of me?
I’m bringing home my baby bumblebee.
OUCH! It stung me!
“That’s good, Arturo, thank you!” the doctor said as her breathless boy was about to launch into the second stanza. Perhaps she sensed something was not landing right with their guests.
“No, no, let him sing,” Seema said, her body clenched. “Let him sing. He’s so good.”
Arturo beamed his dimpled, chinless smile and, with a wild fleck of tender childhood drool popping out from between his gapped front teeth, launched into the second stanza. Barry looked at his wife. At her steely lawyer’s composure. At the uneaten Hakka chicken beneath her brown Brahman fingers. I want to love you, he thought.
“Won’t my mommy be so proud of me?” Arturo was wailing. Why did that lyric hurt Barry the most? They wanted to be proud of Shiva the way their own parents were never proud of them. The way the Hong Kong doctor and the faux–Central American writer were hopelessly proud of every stupid hammy thing Arturo would ever do. Shiva wouldn’t have to accomplish as much as Arturo. He was a rich man’s son. He could go to Skidmore or launch a clothing line made out of hemp, but his parents needed a sign that he knew he was a part of their tight, illustrious family. This could be acknowledged with hugs and kisses and words, but the moon seemed to mean more to him than his closely orbiting mother and Barry, the falling star occasionally streaking across his nighttime sky on its way to Teterboro and “wheels up” to beg some client in Baton Rouge not to ask for an early withdrawal from This Side of Capital.
“This is going to bring us closer together,” Seema had said when they got the diagnosis. They held each other close in the crowded Weill Cornell hospital elevator, and he had said, half in jest, “Us against the world!” But the Internet had said the opposite, that they would fall apart like most couples in these circumstances. Well, fuck the Internet. Now they had something beyond his money and her looks and credentials. A normal son would not have been a project. The nannies and the tutors and the schools would raise him. But getting Shiva off the spectrum would demonstrate just how exceptional their marriage had been from the start. It would erase all doubts that Seema and Barry Cohen were meant for each other.
“You’re so good, Arturo,” Seema said as the kid once again reenacted the bee landing on the milky flesh of his arm and screamed, with practiced hysteria, “OUCH! It stung me!”
“What do we say when someone compliments you?” Luis said.
“Thaaaaaank you,” the child said, rolling his eyes at the imposition. But then he took off his stupid bumblebee hat and bowed on cue, and the Filipina began herding him back to a chorus of “Sleep tight, Arturo” and from Luis “Buenas noches, pequeño abejorro.”
“A horrible Manhattan question,” the doctor said, pouring out another bottle of Priorat, a full-bodied two-hundred-dollar imposition that spoke of her husband’s funky midmarket tastes. “What are you guys doing for preschool?”
Seema and Barry afforded each other a one-millisecond look, as if simultaneously downloading that single scene from a year ago, Shiva standing there, motionless, screeching, in what was deemed a “movement class” at the local prenursery, one of the seven that failed to accept him, as monstrous bright-eyed children bopped around him to their parents’ delight.
“Oh, we’re not even thinking of school yet!” Barry said, flicking his arm, catching the brief bright glow of his Nomos. “Who needs this crazy rat race? Let the kids be kids.”
“Shiva has some delays,” Seema said. She held up her hand as Luis tried to pour her more Priorat, which she had barely touched.
“I’m a doctor, and let me tell you, we all have delays,” the Hong Konger said. They laughed at her medical opinion in stereo. “And Arturo hates the Flatiron Montessori.”
That was the first school to have rejected Shiva, and arguably the best one in their neighborhood. His meltdown there had been so epic Seema was surprised they hadn’t called the cops.
“I want him to go to Ethical Heritage for K to six,” Seema said. “It’s such a diverse place.”
“Is that true?” the doctor asked.
“Some of the dads aren’t even hedge-fund guys. They’re just doctors or lawyers.”
Luis and his wife smiled, and Barry did a fake little laugh. Seema never let her pain color what left her mouth; her gating was perfect. This was the first time in five years of courtship and marriage that he had felt pity for his wife. “I mean—” Seema said. “It’s just good to have some economic diversity.” She pretended to take a long sip of her Priorat, but it only coated her lips. It occurred to Barry, out of nowhere, that she was the smartest person at the table and the only one who didn’t work.
“Luis is writing a novel about hedge funds,” the doctor said.
“Why?” Seema said.
“Well,” Luis said, rotating his wineglass with the hammy flourishes of his performative toddler son, “if aliens invaded and took over the earth, wouldn’t you want to know who your new overlords were?”
“Luis!” the doctor admonished. “That doesn’t sound nice.”
“Oh, I meant that in a harmless way,” the writer said as Barry did another of his “friendliest dude on the Street” laughs to show he was in on the plutocrat bashing.
“Half of the people I know work in funds,” Luis said. “We’re in Manhattan, for God’s sake.”
“In my humble opinion,” Seema said, “you should stick to your beautiful portraits of Central America. Write about the voiceless.”
“But to do that,” the writer declared, “you have to start at the metropole and then expand your way out to the peripheries. Where does power really originate?” He lifted up one hand as if to imply it originated in the floor-through apartments and giant triplex above him, in apartments like the one owned by the Cohens.
“Well, I, for one, think a hedge-fund manager would make the perfect hero,” Barry said. “And I volunteer to be your muse!”
“I disagree,” Seema said. “People in finance have no imagination. They have no soul.”
For the third time in as many minutes, Barry smiled stupidly. What did she say? He actually had to reconstruct the two sentences. He reached for the empty wine bottle, shook it, put it down.
“Present company excepted, of course,” said the doctor, pointing at Barry. It was clear to him, suddenly, that she was educated in an international school, and Luis probably went to a prep school in the States. Old money. Laughing at new money.
“Just put four screens in front of him,” Seema said, “and that’s all he cares about. No allegiances to anyone.”
“I love how you guys can poke fun at each other,” said the doctor, looking down at her lap.
“Yeah, we’re much, much too formal,” Luis said. Then in one of the cruelest acts of the night, he leaned in across the table to kiss his wife’s bright forehead and to be rewarded with her teenage-shy smile.
“The sambar was excellent,” said Julianna, “better than I’ve ever had in India,” and one could read the finality of that compliment as an attempt to draw the evening to a close, but Barry couldn’t leave at this point, with their own social profit-and-loss statement clearly pointing toward the latter. “I got a batch of the forty-eight-year-old Karuizawa single cask whiskey,” he said, “thirty-three thousand dollars a bottle, if you can find it.”
“A little gauche, Barry, to mention the price point,” Seema said. After all, she was the one who insisted on bringing the homemade sambar instead of some statusy bottle of wine. But maybe she, too, felt the need to win back some of the night. She was, in her own way, no less competitive than he.
“I can’t say no to Karuizawa,” the writer said, pronouncing it perfectly, which meant the bastard knew what it was.<
br />
* * *
—
THE SOLO elevator ride was momentary, but Barry managed to flip through his phone and Zillow the Goodmans’ apartment. “SOLD: $3,800,000. Sold on 11/23/15. Zestimate: $4,100,000.” The layout showed two bedrooms, three bathrooms, and the same hangar-sized closets as theirs. It was a little less than a fifth the price of their apartment, but, still, how did they afford the place on her NYU-assistant-professor-of-medicine salary and his 1,123,340 Amazon ranking? It had to be family money. It had to be! He would get to the bottom of this.
Barry stumbled into the dimmed foyer and made straight for his whiskey cave behind the kitchen, when Novie popped out from behind some Viking implement. “Shhhhh,” she hissed. “Please be quiet, Mr. Barry. Shiva, he just go to sleep. He was very hard to put down tonight.”
Barry and Novie had started out on good terms, lots of smiling, almost coquettishness, on her part, but since the diagnosis she clearly began to perceive him as irrelevant at worst and a hindrance at best. She was a throaty young woman dressed perpetually in Gap sweats and tight T-shirts and those Lulu pants Seema bought her in bulk. She spent her non-Shiva time on three activities: watching Tagalog soaps on her tablet, Skyping back to Davao City where her relatives were milking her for their gambling debts, and, most offensively to Barry, praying. She maintained that Shiva was absolutely fine, that the diagnosis was nonsense; it was just a question of getting Jesus to watch out for him. But she also understood that Seema now needed her a great deal more than she needed her husband, and that this home truly belonged to Shiva, the vacant boy-king.
Barry plucked the deceptively humble-looking bottle of Karuizawa from its perch in his whiskey cave, banging it, almost smashing it, against the center island as he stomped back to the foyer. What the hell was he doing? Karuizawa was a so-called silent, or defunct, distillery, meaning only a handful of such bottles still existed in the world, many being kept as investments. Barry had earmarked this particular bottle for a special occasion, like when Shiva had to undergo his next testing at Cornell, and the doctors there would tell them the diagnosis no longer applied.
Lake Success Page 3
