“Ha! Twenty people would be a good number. I did one at Ohio State the other month, and no one showed up except the Jewish studies faculty and a Guatemalan janitor.”
“Well, then it’s socialism!” Barry said.
The doctor and the writer laughed. Seema stared Barry down. “I suppose it is,” Luis said.
“And you’re not even Latino!”
“Oh, God, I think it’s time we leave,” Seema said. “I’m really sorry about that. When Barry gets stressed out at work, he drinks.”
“No, no,” Luis said. “He’s right to explore questions of identity. What is a Latino exactly? Who qualifies? These are just the kinds of questions we ask at my university readings.”
“Which no one attends,” Barry said. “At twenty thousand dollars a pop.”
“Exactly,” Luis said. He looked at Barry with cheerful malice. “You do fifty of those a year, and, well, a million bucks ain’t a lot in New York these days, but you’re at least welcomed into the anthills of the one percent.” Now he turned to his wife and they both smiled at each other.
And then Barry realized what had happened. He had been had. The whole thing had been a setup between the writer and the doctor. He needed material for his novel about finance. She ran into Seema in the lobby, learned whom she was married to, arranged this dinner. He needed a hedge-fund character and now he had one, screaming about poor people and socialism and demanding to know the size of his host’s salary and ancestral wealth while swinging around a thirty-three-thousand-dollar bottle of whiskey. The writer had been taking mental notes the whole time.
Seema’s hand was around his elbow and she was all but lifting him up while still apologizing for his behavior, to which the Guatemalan Tolstoy was laughing his pretty, tall boy’s laugh, saying, No, no, no, he found Barry charming, just charming, and, per the doctor, they should all do this again next week. For the first time Barry took note of the living space’s artwork, which was, basically, nonexistent, except for a Spanish-language vintage James Bond poster. James Bond, el espía 007, el más extraordinario espía de la ficción. It didn’t have the uniqueness or value of Seema’s Miró or the neglected Calder in their library, but it was a found object that signaled that the writer had an identity. It didn’t matter if it was invented. He had invented it. He was the fucking writer! That’s what he did.
Oh, and that IWC skillet of a watch to casually demonstrate his taste and masculinity.
And that child, safely asleep in his bed next to his bumblebee hat, his oft-praised mind full of fine-tuned words and thoughts and dreams.
Seema still had him by his elbow and was leading him out through the kitchen. The cabinet and consoles looked like they were etched out of a single rock and inlaid with LEDs. It was, actually, a duplicate of their kitchen. Were all the kitchens in their building the same? He was drunk. He was so perfectly and completely drunk. Did the writer even have anything to drink that night, or was he like the strippers at the clubs he used to go to with colleagues during his very early years at Morgan who would get you to order overpriced drinks for them and pretend to drink them, or else have a complicit bartender water them down. And then, when you were barely standing and they were perfectly sober, they’d pounce on your black card while flicking away your impotent whiskey dick.
Barry felt the sweat gathering at his temples, the flop sweat he expected on the morning after a night like this. He looked at the feminine lugs of his watch in desperation. They were at the front door, in a gray hallway of some sort. The hallway was so featureless it could have been a part of the Goodmans’ apartment. The Goodmans were so featureless, they could have come with the hallway.
He felt the first flicker of it. Get out of here. Escape from Seema. Escape from Shiva. Escape from the SEC. Richmond. El Paso. Layla. The Greyhound. The open road.
Seema was still apologizing for him, when would she stop apologizing already? All he had done was question the faux Guatemalan Latino-ness. In his office, this would be a joke you could utter first thing in the morning, before the farm and payroll numbers came in, and nobody would take offense. But she was still apologizing like some rube, like some Michigan humanities major, like some lawyer, the kind that they always had at meetings, sitting in the outer circle behind the real players.
The writer was still flashing his watch at him, and the women were talking, talking, talking. He tuned in, if just for a minute, because even in his drunkenness he seemed to catch a glint of his wife’s extra sadness, a preset frequency on his dial. “You know what we have to do,” the Hong Kong doctor was saying, and now he was catching on to the thickness of her fobby accent, which she had hidden all along until 1:30 A.M., or whatever the Nomos Minimatik said it was, the l’s and r’s not quite replacing each other but flirting with the possibility. “We have to get Shiva and Arturo together for a playdate.”
“Fuck you,” Barry said right into her fobby face. “Just fuck you.”
And this time no one laughed.
* * *
—
They didn’t know how to fight. This was the upshot of twenty marriage-counseling sessions at the feet of a fat older Jewish woman who looked like half of Barry’s relatives from the Bronx, the Cohens’ ancestral seat before his father had struck out for Long Island with its burgeoning collection of pools in need of cleaning.
They held things in. They were never honest with each other. They never engaged. Well. Tonight they unburdened. Tonight they were honest. Tonight they engaged.
“He’s a fraud!” Barry screamed.
“You’re a fraud,” Seema answered. She didn’t scream back. She was better than this. She had inherited from her mother a deep, husky fighting voice that Barry could only dream of matching with his father’s high-pitched Jewish hysteria.
“He gets twenty thousand for a reading nobody needs! Just because he’s put out a shingle saying he’s an intellectual! This is why our country hates the elites.”
“He gets twenty grand a reading. You lose six percent of your clients’ money a year while taking two percent for yourself. And on what? Valupro? I could have told you that was a dog. You’re down eight hundred million over three years. Your lifetime P&L is negative. So which one of you is the bigger fraud? And I’m not even going to mention, you know. The other thing.”
Barry stood there. He looked over at the watch winders in the closet, like incubators full of intensive-care children at the Lenox Hill ward where Shiva had spent his first week on earth. The papers and CNBC couldn’t shut up about his losses on Valupro, how Barry had been the last true believer in that obvious scam, but how the hell did she know what his lifetime profit and loss was? How the hell did she know about the other thing? He discussed business with her in the broadest, most upbeat terms, the ones he reserved for his Qatari Ahmed investors, never mind the pensions and endowments. But she had been monitoring him all along. Evaluating. Were there already divorce attorneys in play? He had done the crazy love thing and never asked for a prenup. He thought he had married his best friend.
Their bed was raised, thronelike, over the negative space of the vast bedroom. This didn’t seem like the right venue for this kind of discussion. But where else would you have it? In a hotel room in Venice? At the Gritti Palace? They fought best in tubercular lagoon cities. That’s where this fight belonged, not six rooms away from Shiva.
There was something he needed to tell her.
“I want you to have an abortion.”
“Ah,” she said. He had half expected her to put her hand on her negligible stomach, but she didn’t. “Because you can’t handle another imperfect son.”
“You know it’s a boy,” Barry said. “You know what the odds are of another boy with—” He couldn’t say it either, not even in the drunken heat of the night. “The diagnosis.”
Seema came up to him so close he could smell every decaying fiber of Hakka chic
ken on her breath, and it disgusted him. “You never loved Shiva,” she hissed with that shitty sarcastic middle-class immigrant smile her grandparents had carted over with them from Tamil Nadu. “Before the fucking diagnosis. Before any of that. He was just another luxury good to you. One child to put in front of one of your three fantasy sibling sinks. Check mark, check mark, check mark. And now, how about that, an old man’s sperm gives rise to a kid with problems.”
“Your eggs!” he said. “Your twenty-nine-year-old eggs can’t even bind with my fucking sperm! How much money did we spend on IVF? Two million? And yes, that was the clients’ money, the clients’ money you think is so fraudulent. And I was going to bundle for Hillary for you. That treasonous bitch. I was going to bundle money to get you a job with the attorney general when she won. So you would have something other than Shiva to live for. Fraudulent? It’s your insides that are fraudulent. It’s your genetics.”
She didn’t cry. She never cried. Only once, when they got the letter with the diagnosis stated in print. Goddamn it, what kind of woman never cried? Barry cried every few weeks, cried about his son, his failing business, his dead parents, the fact that he didn’t really know who he was. When he could sense the tears coming, he put on an old Omega Speedy with the patinated brown dial and the ghosted arabic numerals on the subdials. But she just stood there, ready for whatever he had to give her, which apparently wasn’t much.
“I see the perfect kids coming out of the Flatiron Montessori,” Seema said, quietly. “I see boys like Arturo, singing that bumblebee song. I don’t want Shiva to be any of them. And I would never trade him for any of them. My love for him is so clear. And the road ahead of him is so tough. Oh, Barry. It’s so tough. And the toughest part of it all is that he doesn’t have a good father. That’s the toughest part, isn’t it? Forget your sperm, forget my eggs. He doesn’t have a good father. His father is not a good man. His father is not a good anything.”
Barry sat there crying, the tears dripping off his chin. But that wouldn’t last long. The anger was coming. He could feel it. Sometimes it thundered in the office when the motherfucking worthless PMs motherfucking fucked up again, sometimes it thundered at the Equinox as he cut across the pool as furiously as he could, him and a bunch of other finance guys in the adjoining lanes, beating the water as if it were their father’s face. What had Seema said to the Guatemalan? He had no imagination. He had no soul. He sprang up. For the first time in their relationship, Seema backed away, as if, like the proletarian she must have always assumed he was, the Pool Man’s Son, he would strike her.
He was out of the room. He was out of the room, into the hallway, then another hallway, then another, the bulk of his own apartment forming an unfamiliar Ottoman market around him. But he knew where he was going. Novie’s face was lit up by some Tagalog action movie, her own way of putting herself to sleep in the cold, sleek city of her indenture. Barry was past her as she began to stir, and into the inner sanctum, Shiva’s room, with its carefully stacked Loro Piana clothes in the closets, because “like many kids with his profile,” Shiva had skin sensitive to all but the softest fibers. Barry tore past all the stuffed giraffes and giant FAO Schwarz doggies that meant nothing to Shiva but an obstacle on his way to his beloved light switch, which he could flick on and off for the duration of a day.
Before he knew what he was doing, the child was in his arms, Barry crushing him, holding him tight. “Just talk,” Barry said. “Just talk, my sweet, sweet rabbit. I love you so much. Please talk. I know it’s in you. I know it’s in you. I’m your father. Don’t you see that? Don’t you see that I’m your father? Daddy’s here.”
The child’s scream formed a funnel of its own, reaching upward into the ceilings and drilling straight into Rupert Murdoch’s triplex. The room was nothing but the sound of his scream and the flapping of his maddened pigeon arms. And then they were on him. His wife and Novie, these two brown, long-nailed women, scratching at his face, punching him, slapping him.
He found his way back to his own watch safe and dumped six of his beauties into a rollerboard along with a fistful of underwear and a bottle of Veraet watch spray. He couldn’t do this without the watches. He couldn’t live without their insistent ticking and the predictable spin of their balance wheels, that golden whir of motion and light inside the watch that gave it the appearance of having a soul. Each timepiece told a story of physics and craftsmanship and countless hours of someone else’s exacting toil. The watches would help Barry stay in control. Even as he fled from everyone he knew, he would retain control. He grabbed the passport he had gotten with Joey Goldblatt from Icarus Capital, the one made out to Bernard Conte, a name Barry pictured as a more aristocratic version of his own. He tried to open the tiny safe hidden beneath the watch winders—his safe-within-a-safe—where he kept stacks of hundreds bundled together in their standard-issue mustard bands, but was too drunk to remember the code. He put on the hated Citi vest.
Shiva’s screaming continued, punctured by the sound of at least one woman crying, but not the right woman, not the one he wanted in tears, his best friend, the smartest and most beautiful woman in the world.
* * *
—
“ARE YOU okay, sir?” Someone seemed to be shouting at him. He opened his eyes to catch a billboard floating by.
HEY, NEW JERSEY, LLAMA A LATIN AMERICA POR 5C A MINUTOS, SPRINT.
The cars all around them were honking into the blue-black darkness.
“Are you okay, sir?” The shouting and honking continued. There was a warm, clean-smelling presence by his side. The woman screaming wasn’t screaming at him. She was screaming at the bus driver in the marines jacket, who was weaving from one lane to another erratically. “Sir, wake up, please!”
“Wake up! Wake up, sir!” Some of the other passengers picked up the cry in their kaleidoscopic accents.
The driver must have awoken, because the Greyhound straightened out, found one lane to call its own, plowed from one darkness into another.
There was a man with his head on Barry’s shoulder, his legs twisted around his rollerboard, a small Mexican man. Barry gave him a kind shove. The man stirred. “Sorry, in the back it fucken stink,” he said. “I think the bathroom explode. You see everybody moving up.” He pointed at the filled-up front seats to justify his presence next to Barry.
“That’s cool,” Barry said, now fully awake. “Hey, how do you get the seat to go down?”
The man reached over him and pressed a little lever. The seat went down maybe five degrees. Barry was lonely and wanted to talk some more, to suss out some commonalities, but the man was asleep and snoring in no time, his arm warm against Barry’s own. His dark hair smelled like hair gel and kept out the affront of the urine-and-bleach odor, which stung Barry’s eyes. He was beginning to see that to ride the Greyhound was to be a part of someone else’s life. If this were On the Road, and he were Neal Cassady or Allen Ginsberg or whoever, he and the little Mexican would probably end up fucking. That wasn’t going to happen, but the fact that he could ride on this stinking bus with this Mexican guy was appealing and broadening. It required imagination. It required a soul.
At ten minutes to five, light was becoming a thing. People were snoring like they had entire planets up their noses. The light was getting stronger. They were somewhere near Trenton. In his four years at Princeton, Barry had never been to the violent nearby capital of New Jersey. At thirteen minutes past five, daylight was complete. How quickly the world filled with light! In his new life, he vowed never to miss the break of day again. The PA system didn’t work, but it emitted a staccato ghostly sound, a sound that only grew in volume the farther south they went. Perhaps it came from the souls of former passengers who were still trapped aboard. It was an awful sound, but no one complained, and most of the passengers stayed asleep, until the bus began to swerve again and they had to beg the driver (“Sir! Sir! Are you okay? Wake up, sir!�
��) to not drive off the road.
Around 6:00 A.M., they quit the New Jersey Turnpike and, with a flicker of bayside industry, made their way into Delaware. He was beginning to see how the states all fit into one another. Tankers were rolling into Delaware Bay, beckoned by gusts of refinery smoke. They continued on until Baltimore snuck up on them. It seemed to have no sprawl, but appeared out of nowhere like a walled Tuscan town, guarded by nothing but cell-phone towers. For a while it appeared to be a lovely greenbelt city, with billboards extolling its crab cakes and baseball team. Then the bus off-ramped onto a street filled with boarded-up houses. This was just like the HBO show Seema used to like, the one about the drug-dealing gangster types and the drunk Irish cop. He reached into his jeans pocket to fish out his phone, but realized, with a chill, that he was phoneless. He couldn’t call Seema. Couldn’t send her a photo of boarded-up Baltimore.
He had to get off the bus. He would take a little breather here before continuing on to Richmond. He had never been to Baltimore. The Maryland state retirement plan was an investor, but its staff always insisted on coming up to New York to yell at Barry in person.
When he stepped off the bus, the summer humidity struck him right in the pits. He looked at his Mexican companion unloading his luggage from the bus’s hold and realized that the fellow was missing an eye, that he just had this hollowed-out hole with a little bit of skin flap around it.
Running away had been a smart move. He didn’t know who his wife and son were. One hated him and the other seemed incapable of feeling. Which wasn’t his fault, the poor rabbit. It was the Diagnosis. It was his Profile. But what could Barry offer them? How could he assuage his wife’s hate and be a role model for his son? And what if she went ahead and had a second son with the same problems? Shouldn’t he just start all over again? Starting over was what half of the country seemed to desperately want. There was a great boredom that coursed through Barry’s body and, he imagined, through that of his countrymen, rich and poor, but all it took was getting on a bus and getting the hell out of town. It wasn’t America that needed to be made great again, it was her listless citizens.
Lake Success Page 5
