Lake Success

by Gary Shteyngart

  They went downstairs for a new course of drinks. Jeff Park was making them with ruby-red vodka and Seagram’s soda now. They sat at a table made from the cross section of a giant tree. Its height was also designed to seduce an average woman. Barry felt around the serrated bark of the edges. He liked his furniture slightly rustic with hints of the Arts and Crafts movement; that was supposed to be the motif of the Rhinebeck house, if he ever finished it. “Who made this table?” Barry asked. The vodka-and-soda combination was delicious.

  “It’s a Japanese eucalyptus,” Jeff Park said. “I bought it in Kokura. It reminds me of how lucky I am.”

  “Kokura?”

  “You never heard of ‘the luck of Kokura’? August ninth, 1945. An American bomber was headed to bomb Kokura in the south of Japan. But there was too much cloud cover over the city that day. So the plane was diverted. To Nagasaki.”

  “Wow. Lucky for sure.”

  “Right. Luck. If I were born in Bangladesh to a family of ragpickers, would any of this happen?” He gestured at his forty-five hundred square feet of property. “My mother worked as a maid in Buckhead when they got here. I still remember the food stamps with the drawing of the old whiteys signing the Declaration of Independence. I memorized the words on it. ‘U.S. Department of Agriculture Food Coupon.’ Where else could a maid’s son end up like this? That’s why I’ll always take care of my folks. Why I’ll always live in the same town as them. I’ve got to honor the luck that was given me.”

  Barry thought of his own relationship with his parents. He had not had the opportunity to take care of his mother, of course, but he thought he had been kind enough to his father, given everything. After he had secured his first billion under management, he had bought out Malibu Pools for four million dollars, about ten times what it was worth, so that his dad could finally retire. But after that gesture, and after his father’s openly racist behavior at his and Seema’s wedding, he mostly avoided the old man. He went out just once to La Jolla, California, where his father was living with his girlfriend Neta, whom he had found on an online Zionist forum.

  Neta was a former social worker and had two grown kids in LA. The moment she met him, she pressed Barry into her freckled décolletage and proceeded to give him a detailed tour of her beautiful garden, where she and Barry’s father spent most of their time, drinking coffee and looking at their laptops. Her house was a 1940s U-shaped ranch, the ideal of a California ranch with back-to-back fireplaces, wild beehives in the pepper trees, little gardens of shiso leaf and miniature roses, two box turtles, and a rabbit named Sylvester whose very presence almost brought Barry to tears, because it reminded him of his own difficult brown-eyed rabbit at home. There were Natal plums that Neta’s kids used to throw on the streets to watch them get run over, and blood-orange shrubs in the front yard, and mandarins and tangerines and green Romantica roses and pink peppercorns and magnolia trees and pretty-in-pink Indian hawthorn blossoms, and in the middle of what even the Holy Bible would have to acknowledge to be the true Garden of Eden sat two elderly people in their Make America Great Again caps silently scrolling through the latest outrage to their common gene pool in the dusty hills and valleys of another land.

  “I’m so sorry about your son getting autism,” Neta had said. “Did you give him vaccines? I’m sure that’s what did it.” “I told him not to get the vaccines!” his father hollered from his perch beneath a plum tree. “I sent him the link about how the Somalian Muslims were spreading it through their doctors in Minnesota.” Barry was out of there in less than thirty-six hours. Five months later his father was dead of pancreatic cancer.

  Maybe Jeff Park was just a better son. And maybe better sons made for better people, and that was why their mothers didn’t die in car accidents, their faces caked in blood.

  “But that’s not luck,” Barry said, returning to the theme of the conversation. “Sure, it’s helpful not to be born to ragpickers, but mostly your success was a result of your own hard work. And your parents’ gumption to move here.”

  “You don’t consider yourself lucky?”

  “Not for a minute,” Barry said.

  “You found yourself working in the right industry at the right time. No regulation. All the leverage you could eat from the banks. I’m not even going to mention the insider trading that’s just part of being in the old boys’ club.”

  “I don’t think we’re under investigation,” Barry said, which was to say the FBI hadn’t broken down their door yet. Jeff Park looked at him. What could he know?

  “Hey, I’m not knocking what we do,” Jeff said. “It takes smarts. But so much of it is luck. You execute one good trade, and people will listen to everything you say for the next five years.”

  “All I know is I never had any advantages,” Barry said. “I wasn’t even lucky enough to be born to immigrant parents.”

  Jeff Park laughed. “Now that’s funny.” They clinked glasses.

  * * *

  —

  BARRY WAS sprawled on his guest-room bed, the room spinning around him. He had found someone to talk to. The days without Seema’s chatter had taken their toll, but now he had a friend again, and a friend who wouldn’t talk about Shiva’s diagnosis 24/7. He took off his Georgia Aquarium whale-shark T-shirt and wondered if Jeff Park had swapped out his Vineyard Vines for it personally. The intimacy would be a little shocking, but it pleased Barry nonetheless. He was fine with his body.

  The whole thing about luck made him wonder, though. Barry considered himself entirely self-made. His father hadn’t collected food stamps like Jeff Park’s family, but he used to get all his towels cheap from a source at an upstate prison. Every raggedy towel Barry ever knew as an adolescent had been stamped with the legend HUDSON CORRECTIONAL FACILITY. It took three towels to dry himself after a shower. Frugality was the motto of the two Cohen men and the depressed sheepdog in their redbrick semidetached duplex on Little Neck Parkway, with the plastic chairs on the little green island of front yard and the thick security gates for the robbers that would never come. His father’s business servicing Nassau County pools was seasonal, and he could never squirrel away enough for the winter. Barry’s first crush must have been the blond mermaid on the Chicken of the Sea tuna cans his father bought four for a dollar at Waldbaum’s.

  Not that Jeff Park had had great luck in life either. Just six months into his tenure at This Side of Capital, probably a year shy of turning thirty, he had omitted a minus sign in an Excel spreadsheet and turned negative margins positive and a clear sell into a screaming buy. The trade was losing 30 million a day, and by the time he discovered the error, it was down 150 million. A simple error had cost the fund close to 10 percent of AUM. Barry hadn’t been there for the actual moment, but he heard that when Jeff Park had realized what was happening, he passed out, smashing his head right into a Starbucks on his desk. He had to be taken to the hospital with light burns and a moderate concussion. The hit to his reputation was even worse, and rumors soon spread that he was selling real estate down in Florida. Beyond the actual loss of money, it was a sad story, although it cracked some people up. Akash Singh wasn’t one of them. He said he had never expected such negligence from an Asian. And now Barry was lying around in Jeff Park’s guest bed in his underwear.

  There was a knock on the door. “Yeah,” Barry shouted. “What’s up?” Jeff Park wanted him to know that dinner would be at seven. “Can’t wait!” Barry shouted back, and he meant it.

  * * *

  —

  BARRY LOVED Richmond, but Hotlanta as they unironically called it was pretty incredible, too. They tooled around in Jeff Park’s Ferrari California, simple working-class people on street corners calling out their love for the car or whistling at it as Manhattan construction workers would after a curvy woman. “Uh-huh,” they said thrusting their hips. The Ferrari felt a bit much, like Jeff Park hadn’t gotten the “0.1 Percenter’s Memo” about experi
ences not objects being the shit, but then again Barry collected watches, so who was he to talk? Over time, the ceramic brakes on Jeff Park’s Ferrari had started failing from the lack of excessive speed, and the only solution, according to his dealer, was to go at least eighty miles per hour on an off-ramp and then brake like crazy. The thrust of speed and then its abrupt demise thrilled Barry. “This is like astronaut training,” he said.

  They were driving around hipster neighborhoods, passing acres upon acres of Craftsmen, some perched on little hills, others flush with the sidewalk, all with some kind of colorful expression of their owner’s taste, an appliqué of a butterfly on the front porch or the hulk of some magnificent seventies vehicle idling by the curb in a state of tasteful neglect. Jeff Park explained that this neighborhood was called the Old Fourth Ward and that the hip-hoppy music they were listening to was called OutKast, which was a local African American group or band or something.

  The restaurant they went to for dinner was outfitted with a bunch of hunting trophies along the walls, deer mostly, but also a cow and maybe an impala. “I like Hemingway,” Barry said. “One of my life goals is to learn to hunt like him.” There were also jars of pickled stuff—okra and string beans, it looked like. He had never seen so many stunning black people gathered together in a single restaurant. In Richmond, a place like this would be all white. He could already imagine sharing this experience with Layla.

  “So I’ve developed a spreadsheet on the best restaurants in Atlanta, and this place is number seventeen,” Jeff Park said. For someone whose career was almost done in by a spreadsheet, Jeff Park certainly kept store by them. Maybe this was his attempt at Excel redemption. “The food is great, but I had to take off points for the service,” he said.

  “I’ve been on the Greyhound for days,” Barry said. “I’ve survived on pork rinds and off-brand coffee.”

  “It’s like you’re suffering for all of us,” Jeff Park said. Barry wondered whether many Chinese people were Christians.

  The food—salad garnished with buttermilk, bacon and potato, and catfish sausage with fermented lemon—practically gleamed off the tableware and tasted both southern and progressive, kind of like how Barry imagined Layla tasted right about now. He couldn’t be happier. They had ordered the most expensive wine on the menu, a $136 blend of grenache and Syrah from God knows where, which both deemed acceptable if a little aggressive. Barry wanted a second bottle, but he knew he had to pay for the meal and was down to around seven hundred dollars. He was glad he had starved himself on the Hound. Every penny mattered now. He wished he still had accounts he could tap in a Wells Fargo–type bank, like normal people, but his whole life was on the black Amex, the rest funneled through This Side of Capital and some reinsurer on the Caymans. The bill came out to three hundred, or half of Barry’s new net worth.

  “This place is moving up two spots on my spreadsheet,” Jeff said. “Although, maybe it’s just the company.” He smiled at Barry.

  Barry could feel himself blushing. In Arab countries, you were allowed to hold a male friend’s hand. He had learned that from Qatari Ahmed during a very long and confusing night of drinking at the St. Regis. “Let’s put on more of that OutKast music,” he said, when they got back in the Ferrari. “It’s very smart.”

  They drove to a mall in a former industrial building called Ponce City Market, which was like Chelsea Market in New York, only it was in Atlanta. They climbed up the elevated tracks to a new park called the BeltLine, which was just like the High Line in New York, only it was also in Atlanta. As they started down the railbed, two women with thick southern accents asked Jeff Park to take a photograph of them with their phone. He said he would be “dee-light-ed,” his own accent reverting to what it must have been before Cornell sanded off the edges. The women wore very little and were almost beautiful. One of them, a tall blonde, had a cast on her leg, which was attractive for reasons he couldn’t fathom, but the other one was younger and had a goofy smile.

  “Now the one with the cast, she’s a classic example of the southern belle,” Jeff Park said after the women had left them.

  “That’s your type!” Barry said. “Should we go back after them? You could offer them a ride in your car. They would love that.”

  Jeff Park shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “Probably not.” The sun was setting and the humidity was unpleasant, but Barry wanted to walk deeply into the night. There were trees and grass all around them, and sometimes a clump of skyline would come into view. Barry had counted at least three skylines in Atlanta already.

  “So,” Jeff Park said, “a part of me has to ask. And I know this may not be your favorite topic.” Barry got this idea that somehow Jeff Park had found out about Shiva and the diagnosis. He did not want to have to lie to his new friend.

  “Ask away,” Barry said.

  “What the hell happened with Valupro?”

  “Oh,” Barry said. “That.”

  Valupro, RIP, had been a pharmaceutical company that Barry fell in love with many years ago; in fact, right after Jeff Park had been canned. He wasn’t the only one, of course, half the hedgies he knew had gone nuts for it, but Barry’s erection was more pointed than the others, and it entailed, at one point, about half of his book. Valupro had promised value—or, per its name, “valu”—but not to its customers who would see their pharmacy bills explode if they happened to be ill with some exotic but deadly disease of the tailbone or pudendum. No, the company promised mad valu to its shareholders, and the phrase “shareholder value” was Barry’s favorite.

  “We are a nation of shareholders,” he had said more than once to Seema, trying to articulate his brand of no-nonsense but compassionate capitalism. Once, before the diagnosis, walking alongside Novie as she pushed Shiva’s stroller down the street, he stopped both of them, pointed at some sweaty creatures emerging from the local Charles Schwab, and repeated that phrase to Shiva, who was sucking on his pacifier and didn’t seem to care either way if ours was a nation of shareholders or not. Several times during his Greyhound trip, Barry had paused to consider that, although he loved his fellow passengers deeply, he could not trust them at the voting booth because they were not shareholders. They did not understand the thrill and the pain and the obligation of owning a part of their country.

  In any case Valupro was run by a charming alcoholic nebbish named Sammy Yontif. “Wait a second, what’s a nebbish?” Jeff Park asked. Barry explained that it was a Yiddish term denoting a timid, submissive man. His father had hated nebbishes even more than he hated schnooks or schnorrers.

  Yontif wore triple-thick frames and not so much cargo shorts as cargo pants and cargo shirts, the better to hide his pouches of fat. He twitched a lot and came across as the bad-breath chemistry teacher you sort of had to love back in high school if you were at all generous with your teenage heart. “You’re a smart guy,” Sammy Yontif had mouth-breathed the first time he met Barry. “You know value.” Barry hadn’t been called smart since high school. He was intrigued and wanted to hear about Valupro’s business model. “Here’s our business model,” Yontif said. “Fuck R and D. Fuck it. We’re not going to cure cancer, we’re not going to save the world. We’re going to deliver value to investors like you.”

  Delivering value meant buying foreign drug companies for cheap and then using them for tax-inversion purposes. Barry loved this part. His hatred of our nation’s tax regime was absolute. Why not pay taxes in Ireland instead? Or why pay taxes at all? Barry adored how Yontif cared so little about appearances, this fat fiery Rutgers-graduated nebbish in a cargo shirt who would probably have been forced to hang himself at Princeton. He and Seema and Yontif and Yontif’s sumptuous Seema-grade Croatian girlfriend whiled away three days on a yacht together off of Sardinia. The nebbish and the Croat spent their time drinking caseloads of prosecco and amiably throwing up starboard. Seema, pregnant with Shiva, was not amused, and at one point demanded a helicopt
er evacuate her from the carnage. “This is a business of relationships,” Barry kept whispering to her.

  Valupro’s value rocketed throughout the rest of the summer. Qatari Ahmed looked ready to give Barry a serious hummer. And then it all went to shit. Someone squealed. Most of the profits were an illusion that came from buying other companies and then using every accounting trick known to man. A roll-up straight out of the Enron manual. The media and the politicians pounced on the way Valupro had hiked up prices on some lifesaving diuretic or whatnot, and the next thing Barry knew his fiery nebbish friend had checked in to rehab with a fifteen-million-dollar severance package. Barry’s chief of staff, Sandy, had done the impossible and actually got him on the phone in rehab, but all he managed to croak out was the single word “value.” Barry wanted to stand by his friend, this guy who had accomplished so much with, socially speaking, so little. He held tight to his position, and a month later the stock had plunged from five hundred to fifty. Another month later, there was no stock.

  “I would never trade Valupro,” Jeff Park said. “There was a lot of hair on that company. In fact, to be honest, I shorted it.”

  “Oh,” Barry said. “I thought all your trades were long-term.”

  “I couldn’t help myself. That was low-hanging fruit. It was the opposite of value investing.”

  “Don’t get all Warren Buffett on me,” Barry said.

  The men walked along in silence. They were in a deeply forested part of the BeltLine where the sounds and circumstances of city life were few, and for a second Barry felt they had left humanity entirely. “Can I offer you just one piece of advice?” Barry said. “As an older person?” He knew the Chinese revered their elders. Wasn’t that why Jeff Park had moved down to this semisuburban city to be with his parents? “You can get a better watch than a Rolex Sky-Dweller. It looks like a Russian oligarch died on your wrist. That’s not the image someone as smart as you wants to project.”