“Very well put,” Luis said. “I do a lot of private-slash-public toggling of my own. So, how do you handle shame?”
“Sorry?”
“Is there a Hindu mechanism for dealing with shame, or is it just internalized like Julianna’s Confucianism?”
Seema had to think about this. And also to consider whether or not Luis was dissing his wife. They were passing trickles of a lunchtime crowd on Broadway, the street jammed with Escalades without passengers. Being with Luis reminded her of a previous version of herself, the single girl, aware of her physical and other gifts, walking across the city with a boy, trying him on for size, talking about stuff she never did with Barry. She tried to picture the word “Confucianism” coming out of her husband’s mouth.
“I guess,” she said, looking up to Luis’s unknowable green eyes, “I’m always ashamed.”
“Hold that thought,” he said. “Cambodian pork sandwich or the best hot dog in New York?”
If she rejected the best hot dog in New York, she’d look stupid. They went to a place called the Old Town Bar on Eighteenth Street, which Luis explained in his twenty-thousand-dollar-per-reading voice was one of the grandest of New York bars, with a ceiling made of tin tiles and a fifty-five-foot mahogany-and-marble bar and the oldest, the oldest, dumbwaiter in New York City, and although the joint was known for its hamburger, the Times had once declared it the best in Manhattan, it was revered by aficionados for its crisp delicious grilled frankfurter, and, and, and—
As he talked, waving his hands in a way that her mother would describe as Jewishly, which maybe was wrong on her part, Seema had a thought:
I’m twenty-nine years old.
She was a twenty-nine-year-old with a man not that much older than she was in a bar in the afternoon. When she caught their reflection in the mirror with her arms folded against her breasts in a kind of shy twenty-something pose (when was the last time she had the luxury of being shy with Barry’s predator friends and their wives?), and the sunlight streaming in through the high stained windows, she thought, What if this is who I am?
She felt so guilty over this happiness, she quickly checked her phone and found herself relieved that Barry hadn’t called, which meant nine hours had elapsed since he fucked off God knows where with his watches. Her phone. Since what had happened in Sardinia, that other thing, as she had once overheard Barry and his chief of staff Sandy refer to it, her phone was an object of fear. It contained the video that could undo Barry’s life. That might destroy their entire family. Maybe it was too late already.
He ordered a Bushmills, which Seema remembered from her truncated dating career was what men with his profile ordered. She ordered a seltzer, but Luis said mock rudely that that wouldn’t do, so she asked the atmospheric old barmaid what was on tap and then accepted some kind of summer ale. Right, because it was summer. She had forgotten that, too, that it was her favorite season, had forgotten the New York stickiness that had first made her love the city and its people, her people, because Manhattan was not just for the winners, but the winners of winners.
He talked about himself for a long while. She caught bits of it, a beloved dead father, a teenage sojourn (brief but instructive) in the wrong part of Cambridge, Massachusetts, unchecked feelings of despair over never winning some prize, and a lot of passive-aggressiveness toward his perfect wife. She smiled, but he was sensitive enough to know he was losing her.
And then he said, “You’re a woman of purpose.”
“I don’t know what that means.” He told her that he watched her carefully the other night, knew that her life was not what it seemed, that she was suffering, but that something was driving her forward, that she had a purpose no one knew about.
“You’re being presumptuous,” she said, but not unkindly. She wasn’t going to take more than a sip or two of the beer, but even that small amount was going to her head. The frankfurter, so crisply grilled, so perfectly lean and smoky, was the best thing she’d had in a long time, her Brahman genealogy be damned. She was so present. But what the hell was he talking about? A woman of purpose? Had he seen her with Shiva? Did he know about the diagnosis? Or was this merely a riff on her unfortunate marriage? Her misfortune as a part of his seduction?
“Relating to other people’s suffering,” Luis said, “that’s what I do.”
“When it comes to the indigenous Maya of Guatemala,” she said. “Not to a rich man’s wife.”
“What’s the fucking difference in the end?” he said. The Bushmills had clearly gone to his head and to the warm red tuft of neck atop his small-case-letter-m-on-top-of-a-mysterious-tractor T-shirt. They were sitting at a bar with two plates of franks and fries before them, and it was very clear to her that she was being desired.
This actually made her sad, because she knew that when the frank was gone, she would have to say to him, I’m sorry but I have to go home. And she would disappear up their glass skyscraper, seventeen floors above his, and then have to pray for another chance encounter, but mainly she would have to be Shiva’s mom again.
And when she did eat the last bite of the hot dog and when she did tell him, he put his hand on her arm, and he said, “Can we hold hands just for a couple of minutes?”
Yes, he was so much like her uncle Nag in Bombay. He could say whatever came to mind. And he could get the desired results. And like everything else about this afternoon, his touch was perfect. Skin like dry parchment but brimming with the heat that she knew extended to the rest of the body. The three sips of beer rising up through her tired, two-months-pregnant body, she found herself rubbing his knuckles counterclockwise, and as she did so, he unspooled himself farther over his tiny barstool, a big stupid smile on his face. What she missed most about dating men was that small, disconcerting time frame when you thought that maybe you could change them.
She had a seductive voice of her own, but it had gone flat from disuse. She had a smart-ass voice, too, one she had sort of modeled on an Indian comic actress on TV, and she thought maybe she’d try to bring that one out as she said, “So this is what you do? Hold hands with married women in low-rent bars?”
And instead of denying it he said, “Yes. And this is my only pleasure.”
“Not your son?” she said. “Not your wife?”
“I’m going to ask for your number now,” he said. “And you can say no, and I would understand. But if you said yes, and every afternoon we could come here, or somewhere else, and just hold hands, I would be the happiest man that has ever lived.”
* * *
—
LATER SHE tiptoed into Shiva’s animal-stuffed room, even though this was against the rules. When a kid “with his profile” finally fucking went to sleep, you lined up all your gods on a shelf and prayed to each in turn. But she stood there over his crib as he clawed and jerked his way through what she assumed was a medium-sad dream. At times like these, he had exactly her father’s bony, inquisitive face. Her parents. They came to the States in 1973 to attend college at the ages of eighteen and nineteen. Teenage immigrants. They adapted, lost 83 percent of their accents, and bled into the cracked soil of the Midwest. But Shiva would be a permanent immigrant. His encounters with the world would always contain the unexpected. Even his young mother’s love would need subtitles.
Her phone beeped with a text message. An unfamiliar number. His number. TEST, it said.
IT HAD been only one day since Barry had been set loose on the country, but already he felt young and bold and ready for anything. He was finally doing his junior year abroad, the one his father wouldn’t pay for. He was backpacking through his own version of Europe. That mythical thick woman with the crablike walk and many stories to tell who would bring him a plate of vinegary beans and pulled pork, she was somewhere close at hand. Any minute now, he would meet her, and she would say to him, Hush, child. Don’t be so hard on yourself. Everyone gets to start over again. Th
is America, hon. One dream dies, you get another.
He had left the Holiday Inn Express as soon as he awoke, walked past the immense Horseshoe Casino, which even this early in the morning was blasting Billy Joel’s “You’re Only Human” from its outdoor speakers, and then through a low-rise housing project where, unlike in Seema’s favorite show about Baltimore, nobody was dealing drugs. What a delight it was to float through the world without a phone pinging at you with the latest news on Valupro’s cratering stock price. How lovely to see a young man of drug-dealing age sitting on a stoop at seven in the morning with only a bottle of Gatorade by his side, his Ravens cap backward. “Morning,” Barry had said to him, to be rewarded with a curt nod.
He was getting close to downtown. The public housing had run out, and he now found himself in a regular marginalized neighborhood. A blue storefront read THE BOOK ESCAPE. A bookstore? That could be a treat. How long had it been since Barry visited a bookstore? He had to think about it. Ten years?
The Book Escape was full of books. This shouldn’t have been a surprise, but their sheer number made Barry breathless. How he had loved books in high school and in college. They were his ticket out of eastern Queens. As early as ninth grade, his body a mess of natural chemicals and desires, the Pool Man’s Son would pack a knapsack full of books and take off for a stretch of Long Island Rail Road track between Little Neck, the working-class Queens neighborhood where he lived with his father, and fancy Great Neck, which, Barry didn’t know yet, was the West Egg in The Great Gatsby. Before he went nuts over Fitzgerald at Princeton, Hemingway was his man. Pretending it was some exotic Pamplona shrub, he’d sit beneath a dogwood tree by the railroad tracks right on the borderline between New York and its richer suburbs (where the sky seemed endless and opulent), mouthing the lines of Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley and Robert Cohn, who had a last name much like Barry’s and who was, in his own mind, also detestable, as the Sun Also Set over Queens and the rest of the country to the west. Within Hemingway’s sparse prose, he sensed an unbridled romanticism, a way for men to slyly broadcast their love. With Seema and Shiva, he had the opposite problem. He didn’t know how to harvest love out of sorrow.
The books at the Book Escape were ordered by categories, but there was a freewheeling aspect to them, as if they had been walking around on their own accord, finding new homes and families for themselves. The Strand in New York offered books for sale by the yard, and Barry planned to take advantage of that service for the summer home he had almost finished up by Rhinebeck. He was building what he called his Hudson River View Library; his estate also overlooked a set of railroad tracks, reminding him of the silver whoosh of the LIRR trains of his childhood, a way for his successful self to wave to his youthful self across the back channels of time. But the Book Escape was a more personal shopping experience. He poked around the fiction section. There were lots of new writers he had never heard of, along with dusty examples of his favorites, Hemingway and Fitzgerald.
Weathered couches and ottomans were scattered around for atmosphere and comfort, and the books smelled old. He remembered Chop Suey, the bookstore in Richmond, Virginia, where Layla and he had gone to kiss in one of the back rooms. She had taken a few creative writing classes with him at Princeton, and although she was a sociology major, she read fiction like a maniac. The memory of those kisses made Barry pause and consider the watch he was wearing today, a Patek Philippe Calatrava 570. He had chosen it this morning because its white gold would feel just heavy enough for a brand-new adventure, and it would glint blindingly in the summertime urban sun. A watch blog had once described this model as “pure sex on the wrist,” and he found that apt. It had been a gift from his guys at the fund, Akash Singh and his team. When the Valupro fiasco was fully under way, Barry would hide in the office bathroom and turn the watch over to console himself with the inscription on its back: TO BARRY COHEN, A LEADER OF MEN.
Barry could feel his hand under Layla’s blouse caressing her back, the first real woman’s back he had ever encountered, hot to the touch, fragrant, and taut, and how scared she was, like a good southerner, that somebody would discover them necking in the back of Chop Suey, friends of her family, maybe, even though her family was as progressive as it got in Richmond back then. Their first night together in Virginia, the parents out for a Clinton-Gore fundraiser, he had tried so hard to please her, but Layla had grabbed him by the forehead wedged between her legs and said, “Baby, I’m all out of juice.” That became a little private joke between them all the way through graduation, when she did Teach for America and he went to Morgan, then Goldman. “I’m all out of juice,” she’d write him in the long summertime letters traveling back and forth between South Dakota, where she did her teaching stint, and Queens, as they tried to hold on to the last sweet beats of their love.
“Hi,” Barry said to the sole proprietor, who was a shy, tall liberal-arts type with an ancient graying corgi sleeping at his feet. “I was wondering, how many books do you stock by the writer Luis Goodman?”
The man disappeared into the comforting dust of his store to search for the quasi-Guatemalan jerk. When he had been due-diligencing Seema on Facebook five years ago as a potential wife, Barry encountered a lot of “friends” like this gawky shop owner, some of their profiles leading back to photos with Seema that could be misconstrued as romantic, lots of entwined arms, summertime taco stands, a trip to Tanglewood. She had had three serious boyfriends before him, which seemed like a lot for a twenty-four-year-old.
He had met Seema at a Bloomberg party for a cultural art thing, back when the little guy was still mayor of the city. Barry had always felt shy around Bloomberg and not just the way he felt shy around billionaires in general, his own net worth somewhere between 60 and 135 million, depending on how you were counting. Bloomberg was someone who actually added value, who had created his own bespoke piece of technology, the terminals that made Barry’s world go round, that kept track of everything from the Thai baht to the latest Argentine default to cargo vessels full of terrified Filipinos plying their way around the pirated Horn of Africa.
The roof garden was divided into roughly two demographics: capital on one side, and cultural capital on the other. It wasn’t quite as split as a Hasidic wedding, gender-wise, but it was close enough, and Barry worked up the gumption to leave some of his Wall Street bros behind and wade into the more dangerous territory of feminine culture-meisters. Seema wore a pantsuit, a nearly Clintonian one, that made it clear she had just escaped from work. So she worked! And probably in a field more serious than culture. That was titillating in and of itself. She also laughed a lot, but looked super intelligent and credentialed. Only rarely had Barry seen women combine humor with success. And Seema’s creamy pantsuit contained a plush young body he could picture himself drowning in forever. Yes, three seconds into meeting her he was already dropping the F-word in his mind.
“Uhhhhhhhh,” Seema said as he eye-sodomized her belly over a plate of tuna tataki hors d’oeuvres being bandied about by another hottie. The first word she had said to him wasn’t even a word. “Hello?”
“Sorry,” Barry said. “I do this thing where I just space out.”
“While staring at my navel.”
“I can’t really see your navel. Because you’re dressed.”
“Okay, weirdo,” Seema said.
Weirdo! She sounded so young. The suit made her look older than her twenty-four years. She had an actress’s way of stretching out her words.
When he found out that she clerked for the Eastern District, he could already see the three beige babies they were going to have together right after her small, bittersweet going-away party in judge’s chambers. When she found out he had just started a hedge fund, she lit into him, rather cutely, he thought, about how hedge funds transmitted risk and screwed the economy. Barry couldn’t get enough of her erudite outrage. Our nation’s financial crisis was already three years behind us, and
people were still going on about that. She was like a smarter version of that Indian comedian woman he liked on TV.
“Well, that’s what Paul Krugman wrote,” she said.
“Who’s that?” he said, bending down over her, rearing up the bulk of his swimmer’s shoulders.
“Seriously?” she said. “Nobel Prize winner? New York Times columnist?”
“I’m a Wall Street Journal kind of guy.”
“You don’t read the Times?”
“Can’t stand their line on Israel.”
“Well, we’ll have to fix that,” she said. Did she really say that? He imagined she did. The takeaway being…We.
A few minutes later they had found themselves standing next to Mayor Bloomberg and, if Barry’s memory served at all correctly, some kind of old woman wearing some kind of thing. He couldn’t remember her name, but Seema later told him she was the editor of Vogue. They were talking about This Side of Capital. “Is that a new shop?” Bloomie asked, looking up at him with his inquisitive little face.
“Started last year. We’ve got almost a billion AUM. But plenty of room to grow. I’d love to pick your brain someday.”
Bloomberg smiled kindly as if to say, There will be no brain-picking, my friend. He then directed his golden gaze appreciatively at Seema. It was as if their relationship was already sanctified by America’s eighth-richest man.
“Wow,” she said after they had descended from the roof terrace and found themselves deep into the halal-kebab stench of Midtown. “You really just walk up and talk to people. I wish I could do that.” The seriousness of her expression made Barry believe that she really did yearn after something he had besides money. They would complement each other. Their kids would have her intelligence and his bravado. Princeton plus Yale equaled Harvard? Two flutes of Four Seasons Moët later, she consented to give him her number but not to go home with him. He went back to his empty Tribeca loft and found himself too excited to even masturbate with her in mind. He emptied a bottle of thirty-year-old Balvenie, cried for a few hours about an indeterminate female image that was not of his dead mother, no, no, it was not, and slept through the incoming weekend and two conference calls with investor relations. When he woke up, he knew what he had to do.
Lake Success Page 7
