“Finance,” her husband corrected her. The fact that his career choice had been more or less responsible for his break with their daughter wasn’t mentioned.
“I hear Layla’s in El Paso,” Barry said.
“Oh, we didn’t know you two were in touch,” Mrs. Hayes said. Barry tried to catch a hint of hope in her voice.
He couldn’t very well confess that he had been Facebook snooping. “Some mutual pals told me,” he said. “How’s she doing? I was actually hoping to get out to El Paso myself.”
The Hayeses looked at each other. “She’s good,” Mr. Hayes said. “Loves her job. And of course our grandson is just gorgeous. Wish she could bring him around some more.”
Barry stopped breathing. His head turtled back into his shoulders. She had a kid. This whole trip. All he had been through. The Greyhound. She had a husband. Some middle-class doofus. A Texan life. The hanger steak was placed in front of him, but he couldn’t look at it. He poured himself a massive glass of wine, watched it flow over the rim. The universe wanted him to be alone. “Easy, son,” Mr. Hayes said. “Son.” That’s the word he had used with him the night of Celia’s wedding. The more the Hayeses drank, the more proper they became, and the more out-of-control Barry seemed by comparison. What had happened to the Mr. Hayes he had actually gotten stoned with once, senior year? Just the two of them down in the basement, the women of the house running errands, as Mr. Hayes and his ponytail blasted his favorite 1930s Creole and cowboy tracks from the Works Progress Administration.
“I’m just glad she’s happy,” Barry said.
“Well, the divorce was no picnic,” Mrs. Hayes said.
Barry returned to breathing. Divorce. That glorious word. So she was a single mother now. Could he work with that? He probably could. Learn to love her child and save her from a life of female sadness. But why didn’t her sparse Facebook posts show her kid hugging llamas or scampering over floats at ethnic festivals? Wasn’t that the whole point of Facebook, to demonstrate to your classmates that you were more than okay in the world?
“How about you, Barry?” said Mr. Hayes, taking a minuscule sip of wine. “Any family?”
“I’m getting divorced,” Barry said. There. He had said it. Even if drunkenly. So maybe it was true. It was over. Was there any grander way to say “I divorce thee” than getting on a Greyhound bound for El Paso? “No children,” he added.
The Facebook photos of present-day Layla had shown something remarkable, a forty-three-year-old woman who looked barely in her third decade, facing the sunset in a peasant blouse and jeans, just a hint of local turquoise around her youthful neck. Mrs. Hayes looked decades behind her God-given years, too. The whole family was investment-grade.
The Hayeses made reassuring noises about Barry’s divorce and childlessness, her mother’s hand stroking his, the smell of Ivory soap mingling with that of the three pieces of charred meat on the table. “Another bottle,” Barry said to a passing Virginia hipster. Mrs. Hayes reflexively put her hand on her glass. Mr. Hayes made a “just a pinch” motion. “May I tell you something?” Barry said. “Back in college, Layla and I were actually thinking of getting married!” The Hayeses looked down at the table. Was he being too loud? “Just like you guys wanted us to!”
“That was a long time ago,” Mrs. Hayes said. “Maybe it’s best—”
“I remember, Mr. Hayes, you told me this story, about how you skipped some important academic conference to spend a day with Layla. She was all of seven. And you asked her what she wanted to do all day. And she said, ‘I want to read with Daddy!’ Do you remember that? And you just spent the whole day reading together. Well, I never had a father like that!” Barry stopped for a big swig of wine.
“It’s awfully kind of you to say that, Barry,” Mr. Hayes said. “Awfully kind of you to remember.”
“Layla said I had to ask you for her hand in marriage,” Barry said to him. “She said it was the custom. She called it retrograde or reactionary or something, but she still wanted me to do it. And I suggested that I propose to the both of you. Well, she loved it. Sort of tradition plus feminism. She was so happy that I would ask you both.”
The Hayeses did not say anything. The noise in the restaurant was becoming deafening, but Barry spoke louder still. The hipster waiter, his key chain jangling, came over and asked them about dessert. “None for me, thank you kindly,” Mrs. Hayes said, and looked pleadingly into her husband’s eyes. He declined as well.
“I’ll have the soufflé,” Barry said. “How long does that take? Twenty-five to thirty minutes? Great!” He burrowed into his uncomfortable chair. “The thing about Layla—”
“So tell us more about how this bus trip idea came to you,” Mrs. Hayes said. “You just got on a bus?”
“I just got on a bus!”
“I have to say, that’s very courageous,” Mr. Hayes said. Any residual bebop had gone out of his voice. There was a slight sheen of perspiration on his forehead. They were all getting old.
“Mrs. Hayes, didn’t you once do a longitudinal study on long-distance bus ridership?”
“University of South Carolina Press,” Mrs. Hayes said. She looked at a text coming in on her phone. Was it from Layla?
Barry finished another glass of wine, and poured yet another. So many good things were happening inside him. The marriage to Seema, the heartbreak with Shiva, all that was Act 1, and whatever Fitzgerald said about second acts did not apply to him. Not that he was going to completely leave Shiva. They would still be…What was the word? “Associated.” “Well, I’m doing something similar, except maybe more anecdotal,” Barry said. “Average American folks are so welcoming! A Mexican man with one eye fell asleep on my shoulder. I’ve had pimp juice in Baltimore and I met a young drug dealer who has a lot of potential. I guess I saw him the same way you saw Jackson Ward back when it was a dump. Oh, and he gave me this!”
He took out his crack rock and put it on the table. He was ready to offer an explanation, but the Hayeses knew exactly what it was. “Barry!” Mrs. Hayes said. “Now you put that away!”
“Son, that’s not appropriate,” Mr. Hayes said. Again with the “son.” What was Mr. Hayes trying to tell him?
“You know what that did to this neighborhood,” Mrs. Hayes said. “You were here in the nineties. You saw.”
Barry was being reprimanded by the people he loved. The soufflé was maybe twenty minutes away. He grabbed the rock and squeezed it back in his pocket next to his wedding ring. “Let’s just get the check,” Mrs. Hayes said. “Barry needs some rest.”
“I’m sorry,” Barry said. “I’m just. It’s very emotional seeing you.”
“It’s okay, Barry,” Mr. Hayes said.
“This whole trip, I’m trying to find my way back to the man I was with Layla. Please don’t tell her I said that. Or—I don’t know.”
“It was so long ago, Barry,” Mrs. Hayes said. “We’re all such different people.”
“You’re exactly the same! Well, maybe the pearls. See, when you’re good inside, you don’t have to try to change so much. You just keep going through life. Layla’s the same way.”
“Layla’s had some tough years,” Mrs. Hayes said. Her eyes were glimmering. Barry reached out for her hand, but upset a water glass. Mr. Hayes proved very gentlemanly with his napkin.
“Is her kid normal?” Barry slurred. The Hayeses once again looked at each other. They were still so in love. How was it done? The check arrived and Barry reached for it.
“Barry, you’re our guest,” Mr. Hayes said. But Barry shooed him away. He wanted to show off his black Amex, but it was now living in a garbage can in Baltimore, maybe floating on some barge to a state far poorer than Maryland. He looked at the check again. It was over three hundred dollars. Seriously? In New York with his black Amex that would be nothing, but that much for a meal in the depth of Virginia? What the hell was
happening to this country?
And then Barry did the math. He would have less than a thousand dollars to his name. He was approaching insolvency. Every dollar suddenly mattered. He laid out sixteen twenties and, despite the protestations of his nonparent-in-laws, polished off the acidity and vanilla of the Chardonnay. They walked out of the white restaurant and into the black neighborhood. On the way back, he fell over a minor tree branch and needed the Hayeses’ assistance.
* * *
—
BARRY WOKE up in the night’s middle darkness and he knew he was not alone. A slender figure in a negligee, her hair a moonlight halo, stood over his luggage. “Layla,” Barry whispered.
“Shhhh,” the figure said. “Close your eyes.” He did as he was told. A comforter was drawn over him. He luxuriated under its weight. A door was shut. The silence of a small city returned.
Barry awoke again. He was thinking of a word and that word was “trombone.” Randy was snoring at the foot of the bed. A woman had been leaning over his suitcase in the middle of the night. He padded over to the suitcase to find a wad of cash had been tucked in between two pairs of underwear, next to the passport made out in Bernard Conte’s name. Barry counted it off. Three hundred twenty dollars. Where did that amount come from? He played the evening backward, finding mostly blank spaces in the cinematography, eventually remembering the dinner bill that he had covered with his own cash. Three hundred and twenty dollars. Mrs. Hayes had returned his money! Did they think he was lying about his hedge fund? Did they think he was broke? A broke and broken drunk traveling across the country on a bus searching for their daughter?
Barry fell back on the bed as the sun rose over Jackson Ward. People cared enough about him to return his money, him with his 2.4 billion AUM. How kind and insulting of them. The Rainbow Brite sheets no longer had Layla’s animal scent, but they had made love on them back at Princeton. He could never understand who Rainbow Brite was, only that she rode on a sarcastic horse, which, itself, rode over a series of rainbows. Layla had explained this to him once when they were both high, and it was all very mind-blowing. Barry’s breath was shallow and he could feel his right hand traveling down his thigh. He fell back asleep right after he finished, the steady inhalations of the dachshund at the foot of the bed reminding him how blessed he was to be here.
* * *
—
NO ONE spoke of the previous night, but he was given a potent green brew from the Vitamix. The Hayeses were grading papers at home. He borrowed their Volvo and took 195 over to Carytown, the sort-of-hipster district where he and Layla used to hang out. He stopped outside of the variety store called Mongrel, which always had quite a bit of custom. On a shelf near the cash register, he saw a toy called Peter Rabbit Jack-in-the-Box. It was a jack-in-the-box, but instead of the scary clown this plush gray rabbit popped out holding a bright orange carrot. And instead of “Pop Goes the Weasel,” it played “Here Comes Peter Cottontail” when you turned the crank. Cottontail. Rabbit. Shiva. It was the perfect toy. It was thirty-two dollars, way over his new budget, but he couldn’t help himself. The rabbit popping out was still likely to frighten Shiva, but maybe if he played it gently, holding the rabbit down with one hand, so that it wouldn’t just pop out but would emerge with his carrot slowly, maybe Shiva wouldn’t melt down. This is what he meant about being associated with Shiva. He wouldn’t live with him, but he would visit quarterly and constantly send him perfect gifts. Daddy’s here! the Filipina nanny might say on one of his visits. And look at the toy he bring you!
Barry got back into the Volvo. He hit the posh West End, drove around what looked like miles of Gothic Princeton houses. This is where Layla had gone to parties as a high-school kid. In college, she hadn’t wanted to be a writer like Barry had, but she had a memoirist’s vibe going, remembering her city and her childhood block by block, and telling Barry her own mythology with relish. He never said it, but he had also been envious of Seema’s connection to her heritage when they went to Bombay. She had gone there for no more than three summer vacations when she was a teenager, but every corner elicited a memory. “They used to sell the best chaat over there!” “My uncle Nag lived behind the Shroff eye clinic.” “Oh my God, I used to go to that study corner when it got too noisy at my aunt’s.” This is how you became a writer, by having a past.
Barry stood at the top of Libby Hill, storied old homes to his back, old industry and the James River at his feet. So much of the city was swaddled in green from this vantage point, it looked like one of those 1970s apocalyptic movies where the earth had reverted to its natural state and was overrun by hairy men and apes. He glanced down at his watch. He was wearing his Omega Railmaster today, a sturdy, handsome piece with PAF, or Pakistani air force, engraved on the back. It had cost him nearly what a year at Princeton used to cost when he and Layla attended.
Libby Hill is where they’d had their very last fight on his final visit to Richmond, crack vials crunching like candy beneath their sneakers, their eyes glancing back to the safety of her parents’ car every few seconds. They were talking about their writing class. “You think that story made me look heroic?” she said. “I looked like an idiot. Like I threw my whole education away.” “What’s wrong with being a shepherdess?” he asked. “That’s how you think of me? As this noble savage? Remind me, was I even wearing clothes in that story? At least a loincloth? A loin-bra? Just because I didn’t grow up on the Upper East Side like Myra Brennan.” This was a girl who had fancied Barry. Barry actually liked an athletic black girl from his Applied Game Theory class, a fellow econ major, but back then he did not think he could bridge the racial gap. Every time he saw a black person he pictured those no-go zones his father had drawn across a map of Queens. “No,” Barry said, “I was saying that the banker hadn’t forgotten his first love over all those years.” “Right, but he still broke up with her.” “You’re the one who’s breaking up with me.” “Just go. Go to New York. Do what you want, Barry. You’ve planned everything already.” “And that’s so wrong, to have plans? My father never had any plans. There’s a well-put-together human being.” “Nothing more boring than being a reaction to your parents, Barry.” He looked at her, trying to be hurt. “I know, Barry,” she said. “Parent, not parents. Yes, I get it. I feel your mother’s death every day, I swear, sometimes I feel it more than you do. And where do we go from here? Who am I supposed to be? Mother? Shepherd? Savage lover?”
He hated how well she fought with him. At first he loved having a brilliant sparring partner, but now he despised the agility of her mind. They must have driven home afterward, but the last thing he remembered of Layla Hayes was her crooked look of disgust and victory up on Libby Hill. She had taken the sweetness of his fictional shepherdess and used it as fuel for her own spite. And now it was too late to try to make it with the athletic black girl in game theory. School was over for good.
He parked the car outside her parents’ house. What was he going to do next? He would take the Greyhound to El Paso. He would make a passionate case for moving back to Richmond. He would tell Layla about his encounter with Javon to seal the deal (This kid let me hold his murdered cousin’s watch). He took out his wallet. He had roughly eight hundred dollars after today’s expenditures. He tried to think of all the people he might know between Richmond and El Paso. One of his protégés had famously ditched Wall Street for Atlanta to be close to his parents. An Asian guy, Jeff Park. He had been fired from This Side of Capital after a trade had blown up spectacularly. Barry couldn’t remember if he had personally fired him. It must have been the mercenary Akash Singh. He would have to ask Jeff Park for a little bridge loan, “no big” as people Jeff’s age liked to say. The whole thing would be funny. And then, on to Layla.
Barry shut down the Volvo’s engine. He looked at the package from Mongrel next to him, the hipster socks and Shiva’s rabbit-in-the-box. Anything with the word “rabbit” on it made him smile. One of the nice th
ings about having a child, even a malfunctioning one like Shiva, was that you were constantly surrounded by plush animals and your own lost sense of innocence. He often dreamed that that innocence could rub off on Shiva. That he could ask his father, Daddy, why do you call me a rabbit? And Barry would say, Because you’re sweet and cuddly and you hop around the room when you’re happy. Of course, Barry knew that none of those things was true.
As soon as he rang the Hayeses’ doorbell, he could hear Randy flinging his weenie body at the door, desperate for a belly rubdown from his newfound friend. Mr. Hayes came out in a denim shirt and a collegial sports jacket, looking ever the host. “We have a visitor,” he announced. “A friend of yours.”
* * *
—
THE HAYESES had politely left them alone. Barry sat there with Randy on his lap, and on a couch opposite sat his chief of staff in full battle regalia. There was a smell of New York about the room, fresh tar on her fringe sandals, Yankee heat on her V-neck zip dress. It was weird to see Sandy without the Bloomberg monitors behind her, a bottle of La Colombe cold press in her hand. What was she doing here amid Neil Young and Joan Didion and the Dresden romantic landscape paintings?
“You spoke to Seema,” Barry said. “How else would you have known where I’d be?”
“I’m sorry,” Sandy said.
“What right do you have to come down here and stalk me?”
“None. I just want to make an observation.” Sandy and her observations. “Nobody faults you for Valupro.”
“Why not? What kind of fund are we if people don’t fault me for losing a billion dollars?”
The motor in her head was running so hard he thought he could hear it. “In the grand scheme of things, what’s a billion?” she said. “You made us who we are. You’re a rainmaker. I left politics for you.”
“That’s on you,” Barry said.
Lake Success Page 12
