“Yes,” the Flemish shepherdess says. “It is too late.”
You weren’t allowed to clap for other people’s stories, but Barry had, of course, secretly wished that the rule would be broken that one time, that the students, four of them men and hence his rivals, and three of them women, including Layla, would just give it the fuck up for him. You touched me, Layla would say, afterward. Don’t I always, he’d kid. This is different. This is a whole new level. You know yourself so well. You know me so well. I just wish you hadn’t shared it with others right away. I just wish you’d shown me first. Even the prof would ignore his imposed order of chastity and give him a serious Tiger hug after class. “Let’s have port at my house,” he’d say. “We’ve got a brideshead to revisit.”
But no one clapped. The other three men in the class read their stories. It was male night, as it frequently is behind FitzRandolph Gate. The three boys, one of them a fellow diner at the Tiger Inn and also an erudite swimmer, read pretty much the same story for their final submission. Their heroes were all complicated bankers in the first throes of middle age, stumbling upon a lost girlfriend, reconsidering their lives, wishing they had held on to their college loves. There were differences to be sure. At least one guy had plumped out for a vintage Porsche 356B instead of Barry’s S500, the same scribe who had gone full Fitzgerald and actually put in a dock at the end of his story. (The action took place in Japan, and his banker worked at Nomura Securities. His shepherdess was an oyster diver.)
“So,” said the professor after the last sensitive syllable had been rendered into the Ivied air. He was wearing a leather vest and his face was covered with rakish stubble. “What do we think about these stories?” He turned to the women in the class, including Layla. The women were silent. The professor was mercurial. This could go either way. But Layla’s normally engaged face was blank, her gaze directed somewhere above Barry’s head. “So,” the professor repeated, “the narrators of the stories we’ve heard today want us to believe one thing: That their lives were never about money. That their faults lay in neglecting their tender young selves. Ignoring the brief fires of whatever counterculture they experienced between their lovers’ imperfectly shaved legs. But the truth is this. Money defines their lives. It’s the only scorecard they have by which to measure themselves against other moneymakers. And the melancholy they experience is a precious good, one that they can also afford along with their vehicles and Kiton suits, their Vermont shepherdesses and Nipponese oyster divers. Even the volatility of their emotions is a financialized asset which can be traded between them at will.”
One of the women who took notes on everything the professor said had to know: “So does that make the stories good?” She positioned her pen for the answer.
“In a sense,” the professor said. “The best fiction is the fiction of self-delusion. It contrasts the banality of our self-made fictions against the hopelessness of the world as it really is. The worst thing that we can tell you at a place like Princeton is that you can have it all.” He scanned the small group around him and brushed the leathery buttons holding his vest tightly over his large body. “Well,” he said. “You can’t.”
Barry couldn’t help himself. “But which story was the best?”
The professor shrugged. “I don’t know, Barry,” he said. “Let’s say yours.” Then he sprang up, rather athletically for a man of his size, and walked out of the room. The semester had come to an end. Barry smiled at Layla, but she did not smile back.
They fought through the remains of that day and most of the night. They fought essentially for the next twenty-six postcollege weeks. “You just don’t want me to do IB,” he had said. “IB, you can’t even say the words,” she said. “In-vest-ment bank-ing.” “And then what else should I do?” he said. “Everyone I know is doing it. You want to starve together? I don’t come from money.” “And I do?” “We can’t break up. I’ve told you things I’ve never told anyone.”
She was the first person he had told about his mother’s death. Five-year-old Barry had been in the backseat of the Corolla coming back from the Douglaston Mall, where his mom had bought him a rare toy at the Toys“R”Us, a Han Solo action figure with a little gray detachable pistol (Star Wars had come out that year), when it smashed at full speed into a BMW that had drunkenly sailed across the median on its way into the city. Sometimes he could see his mother’s forehead, the steering wheel’s bloody indentation, black blood pooling over her face. Who knew how black blood could be. Sometimes he thought he remembered himself screaming for her help, trying to get out of the booster seat as the car lay crumpled by the side of the road, its cheap engine still turning, headlights pouring out over the Queens-Nassau border. Throughout the entirety of his childhood, his father never mentioned the accident, and if someone else did, he’d lift up one chlorine-bleached hand and say, the Bronx hard in his voice, “Enough.”
Mommy, help me.
Mommy, help me.
But she was the one who needed his help.
That same night he had told Layla about his mother’s death, he asked if they could try anal sex. She didn’t want to. This was before the Internet. But they had both read the professor’s books in anticipation of getting into his class senior year, and something about the ready combination of pain and intimacy excited Barry. He couldn’t control his erection while reading the prof’s first coming-of-age novel, especially the stuff about the notorious baths where faceless men just let you plunge into them. He wanted to do that to Layla. After telling her about his mother’s death, he wanted to be close to her, and to hurt her. “I’m so sorry,” he said afterward as she lay next to him, clenching and unclenching herself in pain. “In the book—” “Shhh,” she said. “We’re in this together.” He went to wash himself off, and when he returned she was still staring up at the ceiling, her hand on her side.
* * *
—
A VOLVO pulled up. Was it them? He had been meditating on the yellow-hued church across the street, across from the Hayeses’ row of 1899 salmon and ocher Italianates, their porches united by rows of columns and ironwork. A large old bus was parked outside. SHARON BAPTIST CHURCH, REV. PAUL A. COLES, PASTOR, it read on one side. Jackson Ward had once been known as the Black Wall Street. The Hayeses had moved here in the eighties, at which point they had probably been the only white people in the neighborhood. Barry shook himself out of his reverie. As the Hayeses opened the doors of their twenty-year-old sedan, he slipped off his wedding ring and dropped it into the baggie with Javon’s crack rock for safekeeping.
The Hayeses looked at the middle-aged man sitting on their stoop, hunched and tired looking in his Citi vest. A bank clerk who just got off work? “May we help you?” Mrs. Hayes asked. The “may” part of it. And the “we.” Always together. The Hayeses smiled at their interloper.
He rose and straightened out his sweaty Vineyard Vines shirt. “Mr. Hayes, Mrs. Hayes,” he said. He had never referred to them by their Christian names. Had forgotten what they were.
The husband recognized him first. They approached gingerly, perhaps confused by the fact that now all of them had grown into adults.
“Barry,” the wife said, a sad statement of fact, as if they had expected him to turn up all along. She hugged him, then stood up on her tippy-toes and kissed him on the cheek, as was the custom. They were both in denims and T-shirts. His T-shirt was plastered with a cover of the B.B. King Live in Cook County Jail album, a favorite even back during the Barry years. Hers read THE NOTORIOUS RBG. Barry didn’t know what that meant, but below the headline there was a face of a familiar-looking old lady in thick glasses. He shook hands with the man once slated to be his father-in-law. Unlike their five-foot-ten daughter, the Hayeses were short people, but, much like their collection of dachshunds, they themselves did not know it. Oh, how her mother resembled Layla. The dimpled chin and the snub nose and the crinkled eyes. “Hi,” Barry squeaked,
the present collapsing before the past.
They warned him about Randy, the new doxie’s name, but once inside the house Barry immediately grabbed the furry hot dog and slung him over his shoulder. “Now you must have known Jeff Dave in your time,” Mrs. Hayes said. “Randy’s much kinder, because he’s a long-hair. He’s got some spaniel in him.” Randy buried his chocolate snout in Barry’s cheek as he locked eyes with him, as if worried that Barry would disappear as quickly as he had come. Barry found a sweet spot in the white-gray tuft of hair beneath Randy’s collar and massaged it. Lacking a human face, the dachshund nonetheless smiled.
“Well,” Mr. Hayes said, “you still got it with them weenie dogs.”
The house was brilliantly proportioned. There was a modest but wide sitting room flowing into a living room of almost equal size, bracketed by an unreformed kitchen without so much as a center island, each room with a granite fireplace but lacking in the ostentation of new construction. The bookshelves were lined with Joan Didion and Flannery O’Connor, a small, unexpected collection of musicalia, essay collections on Leonard Cohen and Neil Young. There was a framed poster of an exhibit of romantic landscape paintings in Dresden. Intellectuals had their own thing going, that was for sure. If only Barry’s Rhinebeck house could look so effortlessly fussy, especially his Hudson River View Library. Layla’s grandmother’s plain, jowly face stared down on all of them from above the mantelpiece. As a first-year at a boarding school up near Roanoke, she had had to lie about being born on February 12, a birthday she shared with the hated Abraham Lincoln.
“So I came on a Greyhound bus!” Barry announced. “I felt like I needed to see the country as it really is.”
“While it’s still here,” Mr. Hayes said. Barry assumed this was a reference to the election. Also, a pair of black motorists had just been shot by cops in Minnesota and Louisiana, and five policemen had been killed in Dallas. Barry hated gun violence, but felt it was a cost priced into living in America. There was a chance—a small but not-insignificant chance, a “three-sigma event,” as the quants in the office would say—that if you lived in our country, someone would shoot you or your family. Japan had earthquakes, Australia brush fires. America had guns and people willing to use them on one another.
Randy was now burrowing into Barry’s neck. “Well, if you’ve been traveling by bus, you must be aching for a shower, you poor thing,” Mrs. Hayes said. “Would you mind staying in Layla’s old room?”
He wouldn’t mind in the least. He was nineteen again, being loved by two parents of the kind he never had beyond the age of five. A complete family. Ogre-free. Even their choice of dachshund had improved with age. All that was missing was their sweet daughter.
They had kept Layla’s room just as it had been, almost as a memorial, as if she had never survived college. All those posters of the stuff they used to listen to, Aphex Twin, Lead Belly, Sonic Youth, Pavement. All those CDs they bought with their summer-job money down at Plan 9 Records in Carytown still stacked on a night table. Posters of the bluegrass festival they had gone to in Boone, North Carolina, Amnesty International, Smash Racism, Mandela. She had kept her childhood Rainbow Brite sheets through college, because she didn’t want to be wasteful with new ones, and now Barry couldn’t help himself, he bent down and sniffed them, but there was nothing of her, just the damp of an unused bed in an old house. He peeked into her younger sister Celia’s room. It had been converted into an office crammed with sociology texts, the discipline both Hayeses taught, VCU mugs scattered about, and several of Layla’s line drawings from high school. Layla was the beloved daughter and Celia the merely loved one. If their parents had one clear fault, it was favoritism.
He showered in a bathroom that also felt like it was 1992, a piece of Ivory soap stuck to the sink from disuse. Rivulets of Greyhound rolled off of him. He needed to buy a razor, but having stubble made him feel good, too. He wanted to look nice for Layla’s parents, but the best he could come up with was his hated Citi vest.
“I hope this thing doesn’t offend you,” Barry said, when he had clambered down the stairs, pointing at the Citi logo.
“You work for Citibank now?” Mrs. Hayes asked. “I remember Layla said you got a job at J.P. Morgan.” Her memory was unerring.
“I do customer service,” Barry said. It pained him that they didn’t get his joke.
They walked to a restaurant in the perfect humidity, the Hayeses in front of him, Barry following like a child twice their height. Mr. Hayes had put on an inexpensive blazer for the evening, and Mrs. Hayes’s T-shirt was now draped by a string of store-bought baby pearls. All of this was terribly new for Barry. The college radicals had settled down a bit. They were dressing up for dinner.
Jackson Ward had gotten a little bit fancy, too, like one of those formerly “urban” parts of Brooklyn he had heard about but never got around to visiting. So many of the once-boarded-up buildings had been renovated. There were now Korean barbecue restaurants and French coffee places and elderly black couples dressed as if for Sunday services (what day was it anyway?) strolling along arm in arm. One church was being converted into a condominium named the Sanctuary, while another promised its parishioners “THE YEAR OF ORDER” ISAIAH 38:1. Living in Jackson Ward had been an act of rebellion back in the day, but now it had turned into a wise investment decision. Folks had draped strange flags over their iron porticoes with drawings of pineapples and the word WELCOME. The South was like that, festive but impenetrable. Still, the streets could have used more people, and he could feel a quiet desolation emanating from the Gilpin Court projects north of the highway, a feeling that the new parts of the neighborhood were just grafted onto the violence of the past.
Barry remembered how scared he would be to walk down the street with Layla back in the nineties, when the place was still years away from Korean BBQ and slow drip. They’d spend hours drinking whiskey sours at Babes, the lesbian place down in Carytown, which was still a big deal for Richmond back then. When they got back, they would park in an alleyway behind the Hayeses’ house and all but scramble inside, Barry making sure the path was clear, the ADT alarm flashing its promise of safety, the two of them tiptoeing up the stairs to have a last kiss and fondle without waking up her parents, before Barry self-exiled himself to Celia’s empty room. Celia was widely considered the more beautiful daughter, but Barry praised himself for not finding her attractive. “I’m in love with your intellect,” he’d say to Layla, only to be met with her patented cold stare. The wide floorboards creaked just the way they should in a century-old house, making each move all the more illicit. The Hayeses knew their daughter wasn’t chaste, but despite their liberalism there were laws built into the soil of this part of the country, some of them ugly, but others that made Barry wistful for something warmer than his own life back in eastern Queens. When he thought of his patrimony, all he heard was the incessant rumble of his father’s house, a complaint du jour here, a Yiddish-laced insult there, mixed in with the solipsistic mourning of his dead wife and the demand that as soon as Barry graduated from college he get a job at a “lore office.”
The noisy restaurant the Hayeses had chosen looked like it had been tractor-trailered in from the part of Brooklyn where Seema’s funny Asian friend (Tina?) lived. There were gilded Victorian mirrors, drawings of horses, and a giant, pointless map of Latin America. Bearded bartenders were slinging tiki drinks, and the young clientele was in full possession of their looks. They were—and it was hard to miss this after eight hours on the Greyhound—white. Every single one of them. The prices were white, too. A bit of cornbread with a pat of foie gras butter was five dollars, a hanger steak twenty-seven, a gin fizz twelve.
“Customer service for Citibank sounds like an interesting job,” Mrs. Hayes said. “You must get all kinds.” They had ordered a bottle of Chardonnay and three hanger steaks, although Barry felt he deserved two martinis to start. He tore through the both of them in no time, h
is voice getting louder and friendlier.
“I was kidding about that!” he said. “I run a hedge fund. It has an AUM of two-point-four billion. Down from three-point-nine, but still.”
“That sounds very impressive, Barry,” Mrs. Hayes said. Her accent was so graceful. Barry would pay good money to hear her say the word “time” (“tahm”) or something really regional. Looks like the devil is beating his wife with a frying pan. That meant it was raining and sunny at the same time. Or It won’t rain if there’s enough blue sky to make a sailor suit.
“Very impressive,” her husband echoed. “So you’re a billionaire.”
“I wish!” Barry said. “It just means I have two-point-four billion of assets under management.”
“Well, that’s still very nice,” Mrs. Hayes said. “As I recall, you were very determined to work in business.”
Lake Success Page 11
