She didn’t tell that little tidbit to Luis, nor the fact that after the Vogue thing she went home and Googled Barry’s net worth and found it comforting. A man that rich couldn’t be stupid. Or, Seema thought now, was that the grand fallacy of twenty-first-century America? In any case she vowed to never let him forget that Vogue and Anna Wintour were, in some ways, the reason for their meeting. But he forgot anyway. “We met at a private Michael Bloomberg party,” he’d say. “Bloomberg loved Seema. We were both checking her out.”
* * *
—
THEY TOOK in the permanent collection at the new Whitney by the High Line. Luis had a lot to say about Edward Hopper, not all of it positive. It turned out that all realism was reactionary. No exceptions. She hadn’t told him about her art history major at Michigan and decided to remain silent. When she Googled Luis, she found herself proud that he had a check mark on Twitter, though few followers, his pronouncements not gnomic enough for that medium.
Luis often sounded more like a professor than a writer. He adjuncted at Columbia, but they never offered him a full-time job, and he had no strategies for getting one. “I wouldn’t even know which dicks to suck up there,” he said, pointing in the direction of Morningside Heights. “It’s all political.” But he had ideas about everything. Like Palestine. And Monsanto. And Orange Is the New Black. (Who knew that show tacitly endorsed neoliberalism?) The one idea out of Barry for the last four years—other than the daily arias about horology—was his plan to launch a collection of billionaire trading cards for poor kids, with all the billionaires’ financial stats, such as net worth, Forbes list ranking, and liquid and paper assets, on the back (“And federal charges pressed and pleaded down to measly fines,” Seema had added), so that the “black kids could get inspired to do better at school.” He kept saying, “Oprah would have her own card, too.” His Miami billionaire friend seemed ready to throw down some funding—nobody loved poor black children more than white billionaires. At least Luis harbored no illusions about changing the world. He just wanted to write about it in his poorly selling books and tear it down for his nine hundred followers on Twitter.
* * *
—
SHE FOUND three hours during which Shiva was supposed to be comatose (good luck with that, Novie) and went to see her best friend, Mina Kim, in her apartment four L stops into Brooklyn. She hadn’t left Manhattan in so long she felt pathetic. She was after all still in her twenties. She needed to reconnect with her pre-Shiva self. She needed to laugh.
Mina lived in an archetypical five-story walk-up, the kind Seema had given up for Barry, albeit hers had been in much poorer Crown Heights. The stench of the vestibule floored her. What was it? Just garbage, traces of a soiled human being, New York City. Goddamn it, how had she become this scummy rich person?
“What’s up, wifey?” Mina said, grabbing her by the cheeks, then smacking her ass. Seema always felt better about being the child of immigrants when she hung out with Mina, her first-year roommate. The girl had no plans before, during, or after Michigan. She worked in graphic web design, which these days was simply a catchall category for anything not involving finance or escorting. Then again, her parents were so rich she didn’t even have to grow up Asian.
Mina banged a six-pack of Lagunitas on the West Elm floor rug that served as her living room couch. They sat down cross-legged. “So, let’s see pictures of the little muffin. I never get to see him, damn you!”
Seema had a whole photo gallery of Shiva not slamming his head into things which she sent out to family and friends. He was asleep in at least half of them. “Aww, he really looks like Barry, I hate to say,” Mina said. “But whatevs. He’s got your eyebrows. Cute.” Seema hated her eyebrows. She had spent one-third of her life keeping them in check. In any case, the topic of children was now closed. They spent four beers talking about Mina’s sex life. It was intense. Women receiving oral sex on a first date was now this big thing. “Guys are so locavore,” Mina said. “Didn’t you say Barry used to just live in your pussy?”
She couldn’t believe how much she had shared with Mina. What if their mothers could hear them talking like this? Mina couldn’t give a fuck about her Korean heritage, which made Seema feel better about her own lack of Tamil knowledge. She had once dragged Barry to Bombay, where most of her non-NRI relatives, handsome Uncle Nag included, lived. They mostly ate flaccid foreigner food at the Taj where they were staying, but Barry still managed to get the runs. And the way he recoiled from those little hands reaching into the carriage of their Ambassador asking for rupees, hands that might one day look like those of their own children, well, she had been embarrassed for the both of them. “Kind of how I imagined a really low-income third-world country,” he had said in the Air India lounge on the way home. “Developing world,” she corrected him.
“So listen,” she said to Mina, “things with Barry are not so hot right now.”
“Yes!” Mina said. “Woo-hoo!” Mina, of course, had always thought Barry was a tool, even though she had “borrowed” five hundred bucks from Seema here and there to meet her rent payments whenever her folks temporarily disowned her, which meant, in effect, borrowing from Barry.
“There’s this guy,” Seema said.
“Hell, yeah!” Mina tucked her legs under her and shrieked in delight. So this is what it would be like to still be a twenty-nine-year-old without a special-needs child.
“You would actually like him,” Seema said. “He’s a writer. Very formal. He only holds hands with me. Nothing more.”
“Was he airlifted out of the nineteenth century?” Mina asked. “Steampunk is kind of dead, ya know.”
Seema remembered a short story about adultery she had read in a Russian lit class back at Michigan. She couldn’t recall the name of it. It didn’t end well, obviously.
The beer started talking for her. It said: “I don’t know, Mina. I don’t know. I’m feeling something strong, something real. No, I wouldn’t use the term ‘love.’ I wouldn’t. I’m just so lost. There’s so much I can’t tell people.”
“You can tell me,” Mina said, offended.
“I am telling you. Are you listening?” Seema started to cry.
Mina’s rail-thin arms were around her. “You look so beautiful when you cry,” Mina said.
“Maybe I should cry for Luis,” Seema said. “Maybe then he’ll kiss me.”
This was starting to sound like grade school. “Fuck you, girl,” Mina said. “You’ve been married to that douchebag too long. Him kiss you? You have to kiss him.” And for the next three hours on the crappy West Elm rug they strategized on how to make that happen. Seema cried some more, but she was also unbelievably happy. At least one of her secrets was out. At least she was being listened to and held in someone’s arms.
* * *
—
IT HAPPENED on a day when lightning broke out all over the city followed by peals of super-loud thunder, scaring the shit out of Shiva and Novie, who thought that Jesus’s Dad had finally had enough of the sinful city. They were in a cab on their way to see the play Hamilton, for which Luis had somehow snagged two-thousand-dollar front-row tickets. He was preparing himself for how much he was going to hate the play. He had seen an interview with its creator and was now full of anger. Seema agreed with him, although a part of her, no, most of her, wanted to be emotionally moved, to replace her fears of Trump with the love of country that Hamilton so implicitly promised.
They were stuck in traffic around the elevated road that bracketed Grand Central and the Met Life Tower, when her phone rang with an unfamiliar 917 number.
“Ms. Cohen, I’m really sorry to bother you.” The voice was ingratiating and acidic: Barry’s chief of staff, Sandy. Barry clearly sweated the deranged young woman, but she was a committed lesbian, a fact which had always calmed Seema. She listened to snatches of Sandy’s monologue as her hand found Luis’s. “H
aven’t seen him…An important meeting…Qatar Investment Authority…Baltimore…Greyhound…Redemptions coming in…Richmond, Virginia…”
Seema stopped her. “What’s in Richmond?” she asked.
“I don’t know, Ms. Cohen. But he asked me to buy a Greyhound ticket there.”
“Don’t fucking call me Ms. Cohen.” There was a pause. The chief of staff was recalibrating, like a computer rebooting after a fatal error. “Sorry,” Seema said. “Barry’s first girlfriend in college was from Richmond. Layla.” She couldn’t think of the last name, but she and Barry had once laughed over its Waspishness. “Hayes. Layla Hayes. They lived in the bad part of town.” Luis raised an eyebrow. “Although I think that’s most of Richmond.” She was not the person saying that. No, she wasn’t.
“That’s enough for me to start on,” Sandy said. “I’ll call you the moment I find something.”
“Don’t bother,” Seema said, disconnecting. She looked out of the window. The rain was brutal, the light weak, one art deco skyscraper was weeping on the shoulder of another. So. Maybe Barry hadn’t just run off into the night. Maybe he was—what? Marching across the country in search of Layla Hayes? On a Greyhound? Nice. Probably some fat southern housewife with three buttermilk children by her side. She would most certainly not try to look her up on Facebook. That would require her to still love Barry. And here she was, in this cab with another man.
She let go of Luis’s hand. He looked at her, surprised. He tried to read her eyes. Failed. She put both of her hands on his cheeks and leaned in. How wonderful his lips tasted, how surprising his dry tongue, how sad his immediate expression, how happy just a second later when he realized what had happened. He started stuttering cutely. Julianna was in São Paulo for a quickie medical conference, and Arturo and his nanny were spending the night with friends in the Hamptons. They turned the cab right around.
His bedroom. Okay, their bedroom. Fortunately, no photos of Luis and Julianna together, just lots of framed snaps of Arturo being Arturo, performing in a nursery-school play in a pirate’s outfit or dressed like Abraham Lincoln. What goddamn nursery school put on Presidents’ Day plays for three-year-olds? Her face hurt from all the scrub-bearded kisses. His shirt was wet from the rain. “Seema,” he said. “Please.”
“Please, what?” she whispered.
Mina had been right about this one. He wanted to go down on her. Begged to go down on her. “Let me take a shower first, honey,” she whispered. That “honey” surprised them both. But he was very aggressive about eating her out right that minute, and just the feel of her jeans and panties sliding down around her legs made everything glow at the edges of her vision, and she saw this imaginary mirror on the ceiling, which showed these two beautiful people who loved each other.
It lasted for five minutes or it lasted for an hour. It kept going and going, her legs bracketing his head and then doing these strange aerobic moves she had never done before, pumping and cycling in the air. The storm raged outside. Peals of fresh thunder broke out. She knew that seventeen floors above her, her son was afraid. But she couldn’t move.
“Just stroke me,” he said, when she had finished whispering his name. “I don’t want you to blow me. This isn’t quid pro quo.” She sighed. Men didn’t know what they wanted anymore. It was sad for them. Ten minutes later she was blowing him. She cringed when she felt the acid in the back of her throat, it did not taste good (when did it ever?), but she kept him inside her mouth until the last spasms subsided. When she ran into the bathroom to spit it all out, she saw herself in the mirror, her lips wet, a triangle of want at her neck. She smiled at her reflection. She was perfect. She would never be this perfect again. She locked the bathroom door, sat on the toilet, and put her hand in between her legs. She ignored his calls for her immediate return.
Finally back in bed, she slipped on her panties and bra. He crept over and cupped the fullness of her ass. “Honey,” she said, “we can’t do this anymore.” She just wanted to say that. She just wanted to say the most painful thing in the world and see if it would break his heart. He let go of her ass, fell back on the sheets, and covered both his eyes with his hands. Was he crying? No. He was still erect.
“My son,” Seema said. She was about to say more. But she didn’t. “Hold me,” she said instead. He did as he was told. “Wait,” she said. “Put on your underwear.”
They went into the living room, she in bra and panties, he in his Jockeys, and sat there on the couch, watching the rain curtain Madison Square Park. After a while, he turned on MSNBC. Trump was howling about how people were doing him wrong. He looked hurt and delighted at the same time. She buried her head in the safety of Luis’s slightly gray chest hair.
The world was magnificent.
BARRY SAT on the stoop of Layla’s parents’ house. It had been a long ride. They had passed the National Security Agency in Maryland, then stuttered through DC’s egregious, socialist traffic, which finally let out to Virginia proper, a series of low Confederate fields bracketing the highway. They passed a particularly fragrant southern skunk and entered the town of his first love.
Lightning lit up the sky. Was it pouring and thundering up in New York too? Shiva would be scared. Seema should give him one of his watches to hold for comfort. Though not one of the terribly expensive ones. The Max Bill, for example, which was accessible Bauhaus.
The last time he had seen Layla’s parents was right after senior year. Layla’s sister Celia, all of twenty, had gotten married to some boy just out of Davidson. He was from a rich local family, and she was dropping out on a partial scholarship at William & Mary. Both those things had driven the Hayeses nuts. They had wanted to see Barry and Layla married instead. But despite their misgivings about the rich boy and Celia giving up on her education, the wedding of their younger daughter was glorious. The Hayeses were still so young, him with his flamboyant ponytail, her with her horsey laugh, cutting it up on the dance floor to “You Can Call Me Al.” The reception was at the Jefferson Hotel, which on a weekend had the feel of an eternal Dixie high-school prom. The groom’s family was straitlaced and Jesus fearing, but everywhere you turned there were the Hayeses’ people, VCU professors on their ninth bourbon screaming about Chaucer and Bill Clinton and “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” a woman with a Snoopy tattoo on the underside of her arm talking to some bearded rock guy. Actual black people.
Barry got drunk and then fought with Layla over nothing at all for most of the night, until her father took him into the white marble tomb of the bathroom and told him, “Son, you ought to calm down. This isn’t the night for it.” Barry remembered that first sentence with shame. The “son” and the “ought to,” both so uncharacteristic, and that ponytail slapping against the dark blue suit of his almost father-in-law, the men behind them plastering the urinals with bourbon steam. What a fool he had been to lose her. To lose them.
A dog was barking inside the otherwise-empty house. Remembering the Hayeses’ ancestral preference for dachshunds, Barry knew that’s what it had to be, that absurdist long woof, the sound of a sausage trying to assert itself in the world. The dachshund in charge of the household during their college years had been called Jeff Dave, because he had been as savage as Jefferson Davis. But Jeff Dave warmed immediately to Barry, who had grown up in love with dogs. Barry’s father, a Bronx transplant to the quasi-suburban reaches of Queens, had always wanted a large canine with which to fill the backyard of their semidetached house on Little Neck Parkway. He kept a kindly half-blind sheepdog for a few years, until she died from the melancholy of being a working-class Jewish pet. Jeff Dave treated Barry like the owner he never had, his head bent submissively beneath his fingers, eyes crossed with the pleasure of being petted. “See, Dad, Barry’s a real country boy at heart,” Layla would say, the southern twang she had kept repressed at Princeton coming on full tilt.
Her parents both taught sociology at Virginia Commonwealth. Being liber
al professors who didn’t hunt prey for dinner made them half southern at best, but Barry’s blue-collar background was always welcome. “She’s from Virginia, and your daddy actually works for a living,” Layla’s mom would say, “unlike some of those other Princeton brats. So you both got to look out for each other up there.” “Gotta look out for each other up thur in Yankee-land,” Layla drawled. The whole family would laugh. Sometimes it felt like it was culturally more difficult for Layla up in Princeton than it was for Barry.
The two of them were in the same senior-year creative writing class, taught by a pretty famous gay writer in his fifties, his rotor-blade honesty an object of adoration and fear among all budding Princeton writers. The final story Barry had submitted was, he thought, the best one he had ever written. In fact, he had to hide under a blanket as he was writing it, or else Layla would see him cry, that’s how moved he had been by his own work. The story, which he read aloud in the last class, was about a forty-something partner at Goldman Sachs who is driving through Vermont in his S500. He’s the kind of banker who’s completely misunderstood by others, because he alone sees no contradiction in the need for both a vocation and an avocation. The vocation is banking, which may seem abstract but actually uses a lot of his imagination. The avocation is writing, which helps him connect to his younger self. Banking keeps him alive, but writing reminds him to love. And there’s the only problem in the banker’s life: he hasn’t loved anyone since college, since he broke up with his girlfriend Sheila (pronounced like “Layla”).
This changes during the course of the drive in Vermont when the S500 overheats and the banker walks out into a kind of “prelapsarian paradise.” There’s a hill covered by sheep followed by another followed by another, forming “a city of sheep.” The banker scrambles under the wire fence and, as if in a trance, walks through the ranks of sheep, who part before him amiably. He confronts a sheepdog named Luna (the name of Barry’s dead pet), who nearly chews his leg off, but finally succumbs to the dog-whispering advances of this gentle banking creature. And then he sees a woman by a stream. She looks as if she’s painted into the landscape like some Flemish peasant, but as the banker and Luna approach, she is revealed to be Sheila, his college ex. As much as he immediately knows who she is, she can’t, for the life of her, recall his face or name. “But who are you?” she keeps asking. “Why have you come here?” Her life is so simple and beautiful that merely the intrusion of this man with both a vocation and an avocation, with his overheated Mercedes by the side of the road, throws her into confusion. Eventually, she begs him to sit down and be still. She takes off his Kiton Carracci cashmere/vicuña sports coat and washes his hands and feet (Barry had just taken his first religion seminar). “I wish none of my life had ever happened,” the banker says. “But it’s too late.”
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