Lake Success

by Gary Shteyngart

  “Is the air conditioner on?” Sandy asked. “It’s so hot in here.” She picked up a nearby copy of a local magazine devoted to Richmond’s top high schools and fanned herself with it. “Do you want to hear about the redemptions?”

  “I don’t care,” Barry said. Which wasn’t entirely true. There was one investor the fund hinged on. “You came here because of Ahmed,” he said.

  “He’s flying in from Doha on Thursday,” Sandy said. “He pushed up his annual visit because of you. We can’t keep the Qataris in much longer. Think of all the people who count on you. Think of your family.”

  “What do you know about family?” Barry said. “You’re not even married.” He wanted to bring up his admiration for the institution of gay marriage very badly. He wanted to hurt her with it. After all the money he’d given in support of New York State’s Marriage Equality Act.

  “Seeing you and Seema actually encourages me,” his chief of staff said. “Maria and I have been talking. You guys are like an example to us.” Barry laughed. Sandy had met Seema once at a Robin Hood gala and, in her nervousness, had asked his wife, “So, do you work?” Seema wouldn’t let that go for weeks. She even threatened to get a part-time legal job at Planned Parenthood.

  “What has Akash been saying about me? Last time I saw him he said, and I quote, ‘You’re not very bright, you don’t do due diligence, and you like everyone.’ ”

  “That was way out of line. You’re a mentor to him. A father almost.”

  “But what if he’s right? Who needs guys like me anymore? It’s not about relationships. It’s all about the quants and their black boxes. And how does someone like me even pitch funds that are so quantitative that I don’t know what the fuck I’m pitching? Everything I’ve worked for is pointless. I should have stuck with my Commodore. I should have applied to CalTech. What is the point of me?”

  “Akash is worried,” Sandy said. “We all are. Your guys really miss you. Armen Kassabian got a Patek minute repeater at the Christie’s auction. They’re thinking of getting a plane and going to next year’s Baselworld. They’re being poached by Icarus Capital. I know you don’t want that. You’re a team. I’ve got a NetJets ready at RIC. We can be there in twenty, wheels up in twenty more.”

  “Sorry,” Barry said. “Not interested.”

  “And then there’s…”

  “What?”

  “You know.”

  “I don’t know,” he lied.

  “The other thing.”

  Barry waved her away. But she wouldn’t stop talking. “Herb Rabkin thinks it’s coming soon. A subpoena. How will it look if they subpoena you, and you’re on the lam, or whatever?”

  Randy decided that this was an optimal time to rear up on his hind legs and give Barry’s nose a long faithful lick. Barry and the dachshund looked at each other. Unlike Shiva, the dog lived for eye contact. Before the diagnosis, Barry would lie next to his son when he would get scared of the thunder and lightning and say, “It’s okay, Shiva. Because the thunder’s happening outside. And inside with Mommy and Daddy it’s safe. You see the difference? Outside and inside.” When Shiva was born, Barry thought he could just disappear into his wife and children. A lot of guys in finance said things like “I work hard to buy time to be with my kids.” But Barry thought he could actually pull it off, make his family the center of his life. Until that fateful meeting at Weill Cornell last September, a family had seemed a reasonable way to substitute for his failure as a titan of finance.

  A subpoena.

  Barry set the dachshund down. How much seed he had spilled thinking about Sandy and her large-assed Latina girlfriend in the months after he had hired her. Seema had rarely gotten that much sex, at least since the diagnosis, at least from behind. He went over to his chief of staff, bent down on his knee, put one hand on her cheek, and kissed her on the lips, his tongue briefly popping in to taste the coffee and Listerine pocket strips. He leaned back to examine his handiwork. Her pale Irish eyes were darting above his head, and her mouth remained open. She breathed desperately like a fish on a dock. “See,” he said. “Now you don’t have to worry. Now you can just sue me. And then you’ll have enough.”

  As he was getting up, she threw her arms around him and pulled him in toward her, her hands stroking his back wildly. He pushed her away. “For fuck’s sake,” he said. “Money! Money! Money! Money! It just never ends, does it?”

  He ran up the stairs. Sandy was shouting his name and Randy had started to bark ferociously.

  Mr. Hayes was up in his office, reading the Oxford English Dictionary with a loupe. “A bit of a commotion down there,” he said.

  “I need you to drive me to the Greyhound,” Barry said. “Can we sneak out the back door?”

  “What happened? Is it that New York woman? We can call the police.”

  Barry apologized for the trouble and asked if he could quickly use the computer to look something up. Jeff Park lived on Peachtree Street like most everyone else in Atlanta. Barry scribbled down his address and went back to Layla’s old room to sling his watches into his rollerboard. He put the $320 Mrs. Hayes had returned to him under a Rainbow Brite pillow. He envisioned Sandy and Seema together, circling his money, living off his talents, his friendliness, his charm. How alike they were. How mercenary. Maybe it was better back in the day when you just married your secretary and got it over with. He took out his wedding ring from the baggie it shared with the crack rock and trashed it in the wastebasket beneath Layla’s desk. He felt nothing.

  * * *

  —

  THE CAR was idling outside the brutalist element of the Greyhound station. Mr. Hayes and Barry were staring ahead quietly as passengers were dropped off around them. “Well, that was quite a visit,” Mr. Hayes said.

  Barry was looking at his bare ring finger. “I’m going to come back,” he said. “And I’m going to bring Layla back with me. You can tell her that. And that she should start looking for houses in the West End.”

  Mr. Hayes put his hand on Barry’s shoulder. “I like you, son,” he said. “I always have. You’re smart. You’re basically decent. You’re kind when you want to be. But that’s not enough for a life. That’s only barely just a start.”

  “I’m going to bring her back,” Barry repeated. “And then you can be with your grandson all day long.” He had this image of Layla’s kid being basically brought up by the Hayeses, leaving him and Layla to their love.

  “I do have a job, you know,” Mr. Hayes said. “And we’re not completely alone. Celia’s just up in Lexington.” The whole time he had been keeping his hand on Barry’s shoulder. If only this moment would go on longer.

  “You’ll see,” Barry said. “You’ll see what I can do.”

  * * *

  —

  THE GREYHOUND ticket to Atlanta was $50 with a transfer in Raleigh, North Carolina. He was down to about $750. He had to be very careful with that sum. He might have to go out to some expensive dinners with Jeff Park before he could broach the subject of a bridge loan. At the Greyhound café, decorated like an old-timey saloon, a Caribbean-sounding mother and her fat son were guzzling Pepsis while Barry sipped a watery cup of Gold Peak arabica that had cost just a little over a dollar. There were no monitors here, but they had CNN blasting out of overhead speakers. The Republican convention was on and it seemed that Trump’s Slavic wife Melania had stolen Michelle Obama’s speech. Trump was complaining about the mainstream media. Without the visuals, he sounded like a genuinely sad older man from the outer boroughs. He sounded like Barry’s own dad, who had caught Trump fever from the start. “You had to marry the world’s darkest Indian,” his father had said after the tiny ceremony in judge’s chambers. “It’s not like I disagree with her right to exist,” he said after Barry had unexpectedly started to cry, the weight of having been his father’s son for four decades crushing him all at once. Barry was a moderate Repu
blican, and his father was a moderate Nazi. They were a moderate family. That’s how it went. And now one of them was at a Greyhound depot in Virginia and the other in a grave by the Pacific coast.

  They crossed the James River, and Barry caught sight of the old Lucky Strike smokestack up on Libby Hill. Richmond was neither striking nor ugly, and that made it more real than a bubble like Charleston or Savannah or a hipster makeover like Detroit. Here in Richmond there wouldn’t be this endless parade of hedge-fund and private-equity wives who had been tempted away from their high-flying careers. Here, he wouldn’t mind her working. She’d be Professor Hayes-Cohen and he’d run his watch foundation for black kids out of a converted industrial space. Facebook said she had some kind of university job at the university down in El Paso. Now she would be able to teach at VCU alongside her parents.

  The Greyhound passed bucolic creeks, their rocks overgrown with moss. Signs promising ROAD WORK AHEAD yielded no such results. They abandoned the iconic I-95 for some dingy thing called 85. In the town of South Hill he saw a Walmart and wondered if that was the first one he had seen in real life. It would be fun to check out and maybe buy some cheap underwear, but the bus just rolled past it to a convenience store proudly selling Hermie’s Famous Fried Chicken. The passengers spilled quietly out of the bus, their children racing ahead in anticipation. Barry took in the premises, the “Trucker’s Lounge” filled with the genuine artifact, white men with ankle tattoos watching Fox. The selection of chips in the store was extraordinary. In addition to an extra-large bag of Lay’s dill-pickle-flavored chips, he could get a Hermie’s famous thigh-and-drumstick combo and one of her famous banana puddings and a famous ice tea for about twelve dollars. But, no. He could not. His money had to last. He had to channel the parsimony of his father and his father’s fathers, all those pennies and kopecks stacked from the Bronx to Belarus.

  The whole bus resounded with the ecstatic crunch of fried chicken. He imagined the smell must be like a southern church on Sunday, maybe even the one in which he and Layla would get married. He wished his father would be alive for his wedding to a white woman, but Barry was also happy he was not. Oh, how he wanted that crispy chicken and the creamy banana pudding a single mom and her three boys were slurping up across the aisle. He had never known what hunger felt like. It felt like the last exhausting stages of a panic attack, right before your consciousness let out.

  They crossed into North Carolina, THE NATION’S MOST MILITARY-FRIENDLY STATE, according to the welcome sign. Barry looked down at the Omega Railmaster on his wrist to try to take his mind off the hunger. This was the watch he had worn on last year’s visit to Cardozo High School, his alma mater, after the Young Investors’ Club had invited him to talk about a career in hedge funds.

  The Investors’ Club had taken a booth at a pizza joint on Springfield Boulevard, one Barry did not recall from his high-school days but bearing a familiar sticky outer-borough feel, the slices dripping with sauce and studded with oregano, the counter crowded with plastic containers of ancient red mystery juice (Hi-C? Hawaiian Punch?). Barry’s old high school was now overwhelmingly Asian, black, and Latino, but the Young Investors’ Club lacked the last two categories. It consisted of eight boys, one was Indian and one was probably half Jewish and half Chinese, both were a touch dorky and a touch outgoing, probably valedictorian/salutatorian material; a couple of protein-shake wrestlers who would do ROTC somewhere and then end up at a trading desk the moment they graduated; and some of the more polished dudes who would become lax bros at Colgate or Duke and saunter into his office Monday morn all full of fraternal cheer and stories about smashed Lambos and capsized Bayliners. Even here, on the far edge of Queens, these high-school kids already resembled a mirror image of This Side of Capital.

  The boys inhaled sodas and ate a Sicilian pie that Barry would graciously pay for, burning with quiet working-class smarts and testosterone ambition. They mostly wanted to know how much they’d get paid. One of the two dorky boys wanted to know why the first three years of the fund had posted returns of 6, 9, and 12 percent respectively, while the current year had seen a drop of almost 20 percent with about a third of investors already heading for the exits. And was Valupro really a smart trade?

  “I think your approach to the industry is counterproductive,” Barry said, fingering the remains of a thick Sicilian crust. “You want to know the first rule of running a billion-dollar-plus hedge fund? Don’t sweat the metrics. We’re not really about the numbers. Do you know what we are? We are a story. Hedge funds are a story about how we’re going to make money. They’re about being smart, gaining access, associating with someone great. You. You are someone smart enough to make others feel smart. You are bringing your investors something far more elusive than a metric. You’re bringing them the story of how great you’ll be together.”

  Two of the future lacrosse bros were nodding, but the future quants looked confused. “Take this watch, for example,” Barry said. “It’s an Omega Railmaster. You can find one on eBay for two grand. But the one I’m wearing? Twenty K. Why?” He took it off and pushed it into the young half-Chinese boy’s face. “Because it was one of the limited watches issued to the Pakistani air force. You see it on the back? PAF. And the ‘Railmaster’ markings have been switched to ‘Seamaster’ because on the subcontinent the railmaster is the guy who collects your train tickets and the British used to run all the trains, so ‘Seamaster’ sounded better for air-force pilots. My wife is Indian. See, I’ve already told you three stories just based off this watch. And its price just went up two thousand percent while its utility did not change one penny. If you want to be a hedge-fund manager, you have to be a storyteller first and last. That’s why my fund is called This Side of Capital. After the Fitzgerald novel. That’s why I have a minor in creative writing from”—he paused—“Princeton University.”

  “But what about the recent wave of redemptions?” the kid asked. “Pension funds pulling out.”

  “What did I just say about metrics?” Barry said.

  “Okay, then what about rumors that the SEC is investigating you for using MNPI on the GastroLux trade. That a Wells notice is imminent.”

  Barry dropped his crust. MNPI. Material nonpublic information. The world shimmered at the edges like some bad college acid trip. Who the fuck was this kid? That look. Nerdy, but not an outcast. How the hell did he know about Wells notices? Did his parents work in finance? Why weren’t they living in Manhattan or Brooklyn? Did they think their progeny would have a better chance at the Ivies applying from a nongifted public high school?

  “You sure know a lot about what’s going on,” Barry said. Big smile.

  “My uncle works for the U.S. Attorney’s Office,” the kid said. He had probably gone to Ethical Heritage or one of those liberal rich schools before his parents moved him to Queens for a chance at Dartmouth.

  “Well, then you know that rumors are just that. Our compliance measures are super robust.”

  “I heard your chief compliance officer doesn’t even have a finance background. He’s just a comp lit major from Middlebury.”

  “An excellent school. You should be lucky to go there.”

  “Are you worried?”

  “Do I look worried?” But the two boys were still not satisfied and wanted to know what plans he had to turn things around. Barry claimed a pressing meeting with a made-up pension fund back in the city and got the fuck out of there.

  He had done nothing wrong. Even if this went beyond the SEC, even if the Department of Justice and the FBI came down on him, they had no proof. He was not going to prison.

  * * *

  —

  BARRY HAD to transfer at Raleigh. Once again he was the only white man waiting for the bus. Overhead, the CNN was showing the GOP convention in Cleveland. On the bus line, some dudes in camo shorts and hoodies and a woman in a complex red headdress were riffing off of Trump.

 
“That man ain’t gonna win. He just having fun running.”

  “But if he do win, we gonna burn this shit down.”

  “His wife stole Michelle Obama’s speech. Probably wrote it down in crayon.”

  “I didn’t vote for Barack the second time. He hurt my feelings. He didn’t do nothing for us.”

  “Yeah, he was just a show president.”

  Barry wanted to get in on that one. “He leaves behind a complex legacy, that’s for sure,” he said. The woman in the red headdress stared at him, but not for long.

  It was going to be one of the urine buses this time, but that was okay with Barry. Someone broke out a paper container of early morning grits with hot sauce and that delicious smell filled the bus. Barry felt the hunger overwhelm him. He was growing dizzy. His teeth vibrated, his stomach knotted, his feet tingled numb. What if he asked the person with the grits for a bite? No, he was too proud to beg from a poor person.

  They rolled through Charlotte, the skyline all new angles and condos with predictable names. The Vue. Barry watched an Asian woman and her grandson doing their morning condo walk. He was going to be Jeff Park’s friend in Atlanta. And he was not going to prison. His whole body itched from being on the bus. If he had to describe poverty in one word, it would be “itchy.” Material nonpublic information. What did that even mean? He had done nothing wrong. Yes, his fund had shorted GastroLux, a pharma with a new GERD medication in Phase II trial that was supposed to have cured the esophageal difficulties of stressed-out yuppies belching up their Acela coffee and egg-and-sausage rolls. And, yes, he was a major shareholder in Valupro, which had almost bought GastroLux and whose management knew the drug would fail. And, yes, they had made about two hundred bucks on the trade, their last really successful trade. Their AUM had just dipped under three billion, so the two hundred million was welcome. But it had all been a great big coincidence. Everyone else had piled into that trade anyway. What proof did they have that he used his relationship with Valupro to make money off the demise of GastroLux? It was like the whole of society was positioned to make sure Barry didn’t make money off anything. It was socialism. He didn’t want Trump to win, but he was glad the Obama years were sputtering to an end. Even the black people on the bus didn’t like him. And no matter what she said, Hillary seemed copacetic with high finance. Her daughter had married a hedgie. Barry scratched at himself terribly, tearing the seam of his Vineyard Vines.