“He’s getting forty hours of therapy per week.”
“I don’t mean that. I mean from family, friends.” Seema wanted to tell her it wasn’t any of her business, but that would be childish. “Because if you need help,” the doctor said, “I’m just an elevator ride away.”
* * *
—
SEEMA WAS lying in her bed, all the lights off, a hand over her eyes. She should have been happy. Shiva hadn’t exactly made a “friend,” even in the three-year-old sense of the word, but a boy had held his arm and helped him bounce and actually wanted to share in the sad things that he owned like that brush and that ball.
Three days ago Luis had slipped himself inside her. It was at the Gramercy, the day after her lunch with Julianna in the Beiruti place. She couldn’t believe how strong he was, probably the strongest man she’d ever been with, and how he both held down her shoulders and said, over and over, that he loved her. “Can I come inside you?” he had whispered.
The answer was yes, but she begged him to keep it going for just another minute or two. She wasn’t about to orgasm, she rarely came unless she was alone, but that pressure, on her shoulders, on her arms, on her belly, that could continue forever. When he pulled out, he shifted down to watch his semen flow out of her, which was odd, but Luis did a lot of odd stuff. He touched her lightly, enjoying his handiwork. “I want to have a baby with you,” he said.
There was so much unexpected charm in that statement. Seema touched his prickly jawline with tenderness. “Look,” she said. “I’m pregnant.”
He didn’t seem concerned. “Barry’s, I suppose,” he said.
“Well, duh.”
“It’s okay,” Luis said. “I’ll wait for my next chance in nine months. Or whenever.”
She laughed. “Seriously?”
“I work fast. Latin and Jewish sperm. Instant pregnancy.”
He swooped up to her and they kissed desperately, painfully. “But you would be okay with two previous children?” she asked.
“I’m fine with kids,” he said. “Someone always takes care of them. Plus you’re a woman of means.”
“I thought you said I was ‘a woman of purpose.’ ”
“Jesus, you don’t forget anything. You’re like a writer.”
“I listen to everything you say. Because, you know. I love you.”
His refractory period was under twenty minutes.
* * *
—
SEEMA OPENED Barry’s watch safe. A good dozen watch winders, square cubes of dark tropical wenge wood, were humming the tune of an advanced civilization, slowly rotating the watches in a series of loops and reverse loops to keep them perpetually wound. Barry had once compared it to a prenatal unit. His prized watch was the Patek perpetual calendar in platinum, a watch Barry never wore, but which he worshipped daily. It was supposed to accurately keep the day and date and time until the year 2166. The only way it would ever falter was if it were not regularly wound or placed on a moving wrist or entombed inside a watch winder. Seema took the watch out and laid it facedown on Barry’s night table. Within seventy hours or so, the watch would lose its spring energy, and the miraculous march toward 2166 would end, and there would be no near-eternity for Barry.
Seema breathed in and out, in and out, with great force, the way she had been taught by a meditation app she had abandoned a few months ago, because it had only made her more anxious. So now what? She had made a new friend and was sleeping with that new friend’s husband. Her disabled child had made friends with the woman’s son, also her lover’s son. Her lover who wanted to have a child with her. Goddamn it. Where would it all end? And where the fuck was Barry? Her entire life had been made up of concrete plans, and now she was in limbo. She had done the unhealthy thing and looked up Layla Hayes on Facebook. She looked good for an old white woman, but El Paso? And no children? It was hard to believe this scrappy old scarecrow was supposed to be Barry’s intellectual mate.
She took out her phone and started scrolling through the videos. There was Barry holding Shiva in the so-called Beyoncé Suite at Lenox Hill. He had one of those I-can’t-believe-life-can-be-this-good smiles some of her former Jewish boyfriends sported after something incredible had happened to them, acing the GRE or having Seema go down on them for the first time. There were more videos of Barry holding Shiva, love and wonder lighting up his eyes, or burping Shiva on the little bagel-like Boppy where he had spent his nursing days. First-time mothers sort of knew what was coming, could feel it in their genes, but the fathers looked as delighted and scared as the first human to see the northern lights or the eternity of an ocean. The more she scrolled back through the phone’s timeline, the more she knew what was coming up. Sardinia. At least a half-dozen videos of that miserable yacht trip, but only one fateful one. Well, nothing to do about that now. It was out of her hands. She had to make peace with what it portended. The end of Barry. The end of everything. Rage and fear tore at her, but also a sense of excitement. Instead, she went into Contacts and hit her mother’s number.
“Mommy!” she said.
“I’m driving, Seema.” Her mother’s voice warbled off some sad Ohioan cell tower lost in a fake wood by the side of a near-empty highway.
“Mommy, Shiva is very sick!” Seema said.
“What? What did you say?”
“He’s very sick, Mommy.”
“I’m pulling to the side of the road.” She could feel her mother’s accent grow as her daughter’s worry became her own.
“I’m off the road. Seema, what’s happening to Shiva?”
“He was in a hospital.” The lie felt strange, but there it was. “It was something in his lungs.”
“We’re flying over there,” her mother said. “Right away!”
“I miss how Daddy says ‘hut!’ ” Seema said.
“What? What are you talking about? What’s in his lungs?”
Seema made herself calm down. She sat at the edge of the bed and let her body crumple into the kind of sad older body Layla Hayes surely possessed. “It was something bacterial,” she said, “but now he’s out of the hospital.”
“He’s in the hospital and now he’s out of the hospital? What are you telling me? I don’t understand you. What is wrong with you?”
“He’s okay. They’re going to make him okay. You don’t have to come. He made his first friend.” Maybe that’s what she wanted to tell her mother all along. She would send all those snaps of Shiva and Arturo playing to her parents. So what if Shiva was bouncing on a ball in most of them? He was a fucking three-year-old. She could maybe edit out the horsehair brush.
Her mother was screaming so incomprehensibly now, that Seema could barely tell if some of it was in Tamil. “I want to be nearer to you and Daddy,” Seema found herself saying.
“Well, of course you do,” Seema’s mother yelled from the side of the highway. “This is unnatural, how far away you live. We have only one grandson. And as for your sister.” That line of thought would take up another three minutes, allowing Seema to regroup. “So now you want us to move to New York?” her mother was saying. “I have a life here.” Her mother was the official All-Hindu Empress of Northeastern Ohio. There wasn’t a wedding or a puja she hadn’t attended in forty years. Even the Bengalis and Gujaratis deferred to her. “Or do you want to come back home? Is it over between you and Barry?”
“What?” Seema said. “Where did you get that?”
“He’s just not as smart as you. So you tried marriage, but now you can get a divorce. You’ll find someone else. You’re good at that.”
“Mommy, please.”
“You have to send us all the doctor and hospital notes on Shiva’s lung thing. And copy Shilpa. Not that she gets any damn Internet in Nepal. Such strange daughters. Such a mess all the time. But Shiva’s okay, right?”
“Oh, Mommy,” Seema
said, “I wish you could say a nice thing right now.”
“Try to be a better daughter,” her mother said.
“That’s not a nice thing.”
“Nice is not my specialty. Call your father if you want to hear something nice.”
“Can you tell me you love me?”
“That you should know already.”
“What if I don’t? What if I got bonked on the head and had amnesia or something? Like in that Tamilian movie. Whatever. Something.”
Seema could hear her mother start up her car again. “Is that what happened to you, Seema-konde? Because that would explain a lot.”
“That’s what happened to me.”
“Then fine,” she said. “Then I love you.”
THEY HAD driven past a sign that read WELCOME TO SWEET HOME ALABAMA in seventies cursive and, a little while later, passed through a downtown graced by art deco but unmarred by the presence of a single human being. This was Birmingham. They stopped for half an hour, and Barry got a Reese’s Pieces ice-cream sandwich. His funds were low, but he didn’t want to pass out from hunger again.
He was in a state of turmoil. His wife had said he had no imagination. His government wanted to slap him in cuffs. And now Jeff Park, a man he had mistaken for a friend, had accused him of taking money out of people’s cushions. No one knew who he was. No one. Misunderstood, accused, humiliated. Back in his thirties, he had put in eighteen-hour days, hundred-twenty-hour weeks, to build his own business. And here he was on a Greyhound, wearing another man’s whale-shark T-shirt, with two hundred dollars in his wallet. No matter. He would get through this. His Act 2 had begun.
New passengers boarded the bus. One of them was unlike the others. If Greyhound ever needed to advertise its services, they could use a fifteen-second roll of this young woman climbing onto the bus and reaching up to stow a Puma duffel bag. She was black and her hair was blond. She wore jeans and a dark tank top, nothing special, but all of her shimmered in the stuffy air, as if she was bringing youth itself onto the bus. This was the feminine ideal of fun and freedom America celebrated, only in black form. Barry thought of the double, triple, looks Seema got from strangers trying to figure out what she was, before allowing themselves to register that she was beautiful.
As soon as she boarded, people had stopped talking glumly to one another or staring hopelessly into the middle distance. Everyone was paying attention now. Everyone was asking themselves the same question: Where would she sit? There were four or five empty seats, two of them occupied by larger older gentlemen and two more adjacent to men of reproductive age. The final seat was next to Barry.
The young woman lowered herself into the seat next to him, her light blue jeans scrunching gently into the rigid Hound fabric. It wasn’t so much that she smiled at Barry; it was that her smile was never ending. Who smiled on the Greyhound?
He kept trying to think of a word to describe her. A tiny band of belly ribboned between the jeans and her tank top, and he could see the imprint a pair of underwear had made right above her hip bone. Her teeth were professionally white, and every finger was a sculpture. “Trim,” that was the word. Almost athletic. Barry tried to remember the black girl from game theory back in Princeton, the one he had dreamed about when his relationship with Layla was on the rocks. She had had a white name, something like Brenda or Wendy. When she raised her hand in class during the warmer months, Barry had tried to catch a glimpse of her armpit. He had desperately wanted to write a story about a banker falling in love with a black girl from the projects for his creative writing class, but Layla had been in that class, too, hence the white shepherdess.
Barry knew he had to represent his value immediately, just as Jeff Park had said. “Do you want to use my jack?” he asked.
“Thank you,” she said and plugged in her phone, which was a classy late-model iPhone. “I’m always running out.” Her voice was breathy and low, an ancient southern timbre overwritten by YouTube. Yes, he had found her. This was the fantasy of his whole trip. Forget the thick woman with the crablike walk. Forget the vinegary plate of beans and pulled pork. This was the side of the road. This was the woman who would understand him. He needed to talk to her. How could he become her friend?
Men whipped out their phones hard. “You’re not going to believe this, fam,” a man in a hoodie across the aisle said into his Galaxy, “but sitting right by me is like the baddest girl in the world.”
The young woman pretended she didn’t hear the compliment. Barry imagined she spent most of her life pretending not to hear compliments from men like that. She had reached over to plug her phone into Barry’s jack, and a small warm part of her touched his knee. Barry’s brain desperately tried to process this information. None of this was happening. “I’ll make sure it doesn’t fall out,” he whispered.
“Thanks,” she said. What was she, in her midtwenties? “Do you mind if I eat this?” She had taken out an Oscar Mayer Lunchables box.
“Of course not,” he said. The Lunchables consisted of little pale disks of turkey or ham that you could scrunch up and place on a cracker, also included. “I think I had those growing up,” Barry lied.
“Do you want one?”
“No, thank you,” he said. “Looks good, though!”
The young woman ate the processed food with great concentration. “You got to check this girl out, fam,” the man across the aisle was saying into his phone. “She’s like damn. She’s eating Lunchables now.”
Barry ran his finger over her iPhone charger to make sure it was still plugged in. What should he say to her? It felt like this whole Greyhound trip rested on him getting it right. “So, do you attend university in Birmingham?” he asked. He hated how old he sounded.
“I got kin there,” she said, chewing. She covered her mouth with one hand, her nail polish starry and purple. “I just finished school.”
“And what was your area of study?” Worse and worse.
“Leisure studies. I got a bachelor’s at Grambling State.”
“How wonderful. And are you employed in that capacity?”
“I guess?” the young lady said in the form of a question. “I work at the Marriott in Jackson. Uhm, in the back office. Like accounts.”
He was sweating, and now he needed to pee. “And how do you find that line of work?”
Barry finally understood the problem. He had never talked to a black person before college, and his industry did not employ many African Americans. His conversations with the black girl in game theory were entirely in his head or on the screen of his Macintosh Color Classic II. No wonder he had been unable to fully bond with Javon. He had to relax. He had to be the friendliest guy on the bus.
The young woman seemed to respond well to his interest in her welfare. “The problem with Jackson,” she said, “is that it’s real small.”
“Uh-huh,” Barry said. He wasn’t even sure where Jackson was, but it was his great fortune to have a ticket bound for exactly there. He thought about the best way to mention his love of the rap band OutKast.
“I need to live in a bigger city,” she said. “Dallas would be awesome.”
“I’ve been to Dallas,” Barry said, by which he meant the Grand Hyatt DFW. “I thought it was awesome, too.”
“Totally,” the young woman said. “There are so many people and things to do.”
“Great airport. Lots of flights. It’s a hub.”
“I’ve never been on a plane,” the woman said, “but I really want to go.”
Barry’s heart was in pieces. In her midtwenties and never been on a plane. He pictured this sweetheart on a NetJets bound for Antigua or somewhere really special. “I’m very adventurous,” she said. “I want to travel the world. Yeah, I’m going to fly eventually.”
“Girlfriend wants to fly, fam,” the guy across the aisle was narrating for his friend.
Now it w
as all falling into place. He could be her mentor. He had almost mentored Jeff Park, and he had tried with Javon. Although, let’s face it, Javon had been a drug dealer. But this young person had it all. She was charming and smart and spoke near-standard English. She just needed to be taken out of the back office of a Jackson Marriott and put to real use, like in marketing or investor relations. He could imagine that honeyed voice talking to the dicks down at the Louisiana State Employees’ Retirement System. He would never have to deal with another redemption from the South.
“Flying’s fun,” Barry agreed. “But it’s also kind of fun to take the bus. Kind of lovely.”
“Yeah, a bus puts you into a different state of mind,” she said. “It’s very relaxing. You just look out the window. Last time I talked to a Mexican woman whose son was in Afghanistan. And once I talked to a professor.”
“Do you want to switch places with me?” Barry asked. “So you can be near the window?” He wanted to hem her in. Keep her all to himself. “You can be closer to the outlet, too.”
“You’re sweet,” she said. “But I can see all right from here.” They were passing a Waffle House.
“I’m Barry,” Barry said. He stuck out his hand.
The woman smiled. “My hand’s all greasy.” She reached down into her purse and took out a baby wipe, as she ingested another Lunchable. She wiped her fingers carefully, then shook Barry’s hand. It felt to Barry that she shook it for at least three seconds beyond what was required. Every square inch of her was warmer than the chilled Greyhound air around them. “I’m Brooklyn,” she said.
“Brooklyn her name,” Fam-Man said across the aisle.
“What a cool name,” Barry said. “Did your parents meet in Brooklyn?”
“Tell you the truth, none of us ever been,” Brooklyn said. “But that’s like the top of my list. What about you?”
“Well,” Barry said. “I live in Manhattan. Right across the river.”
Lake Success Page 19
