“Amen,” said the man across the aisle.
“Greeks were the progenitors of the Europeans. Greeks and whites are the same people, almost. Do you know that word ‘progenitor’?” He was now preaching to both of them, his eyes darting between his congregants.
“No,” Barry said.
“It means they started it. Zeus. Apollo. The Morning Star. Jesus. It’s all the same thing. Different folks just call him different things throughout the years. Let me tell you something right now, the whole reason I got into drugs was that I couldn’t see my son.”
Out the window an oversize sign read WELCOME TO TEXAS. DRIVE FRIENDLY—THE TEXAS WAY. What if they learned somehow that he was a Jewish Wall Street guy? The Internet was all around them. What if Barry asked to get off the bus right here? The thought of being in the same state as Layla calmed him, but they were still eight hundred miles apart.
“Past three years I spent fifty-one thousand on drugs. I cajoled, I thieved, I took from my loved ones, including my daddy. Do you know how much drugs cost?” Barry still had the crack rock in the pocket of his jeans. “Well, neither did I. I watched Breaking Bad and all, but it’s even more than that. It’s three hundred for an ounce of heroin. Meth don’t come free either. That’s how it is. It’s called endorphins. Life goes into a life and then it goes into another life and eventually it changes the world.” He was looking at them as if he needed a response.
“That’s right,” the man across the aisle said. The black man next to him had fallen asleep again, his breaths gentle and light like he was skimming the surface of something in his dreams.
“That’s what I heard, too,” Barry said. He tried to look back into his New Testament coloring book, but the voice continued to boom at him.
“Anyway, I got sent to jail for something I didn’t do. I just grabbed her arm, told her not to walk away, and she got a bruise. I went to jail for eight days. My daddy posted bail. I was on suicide watch. This N-word threw a punch at me.” Barry winced. “I started yelling so loud, I got scared of myself. And then I met this guy, he was just twenty-two, but it wasn’t his first time in lockup, and he got me to go to church with him. He said, ‘You get out of this life.’ Then the woman I allegedly hit didn’t show up in court. I don’t even know where my boy is.”
Barry and the preacher were looking at each other now. It seemed to Barry that the man wanted both to cry and to punch him. “I have a son, too,” Barry said. “And I’m not allowed to see him either. My wife stopped loving me and I lost my child.”
The preacher stuck out his hand and Barry shook it. “Well, I’m sorry to hear that, my friend,” he said. “We’re all brothers in this world.” Something about Barry’s declaration of pain took the stride out of him. He slumped back into his seat and said nothing for the rest of the ride.
Barry was agitated. The man in front of him needed anger management and an associate’s degree in some trade. He and his traveling companions had so little, but they would give up some of that “little” to make sure Brooklyn had less.
The sun set in an apocalyptic pink over the Texas horizon, the redness of the star leaching into the darkening clouds. Hours passed, and they were into the night, approaching Dallas’s desperately colorful skyline. At the depot he watched the preacher disappear into a beat-up Ram truck, the person in the driver’s seat a grizzled man in an IRAQ WAR VETERAN cap, maybe the daddy who had bailed him out of jail. They said nothing to each other in greeting.
In the morning, Barry was happy to get back on the bus, but he was frightened, too. He was bringing someone to Layla, but who was that person? A failed businessman? A man who couldn’t close the deal with Jeff Park? A cheating husband? An unconvincing lover? There was a young trans woman in front of him who couldn’t afford the fare to San Francisco. She was eating an ice cream and crying. But even in her tears she knew who she was.
Texas went on for twelve hours, much of it featureless. The state had had to invent its own greatness. There were Mexican children in front of him admiring the scenery in precise detail. “Caballos!” they cried. “Mira! Caballos!”
Wind turbines, maybe a thousand of them, clustered on a distant ridge. They looked like friendly giants, and the children certainly took them as such. One of them, a girl, started singing “Old MacDonald” in a tragic monotone. A diorama of cotton, oil, and cattle rolled by. A giant balloon Elvis was hoisted atop a KIA dealership. They stopped by a Subway, and Barry bought a large Italian sub full of enticing meats. The bathroom floor was covered in dead roaches. He ate his daily bread while keeping his feet hovering over the floor tiles.
The topography around them was changing. The hills were ocher. Cows clustered around high-tension wires. The scrubland was the opposite of lush, but it was humble and honest. “Man, I love the West,” a man behind Barry said. “Why live anywhere else?”
Three gorgeous Mexican women got on at a place of great abandonment called Big Spring, their arms straining with laundry packed into Children’s Place bags. Barry was hoping the odd one out would sit next to him, but it didn’t happen that way. The sun dropped like a rock. “This is Odessa,” the bus driver said. “Watch your eyes, here come the lights.” He snapped on the lights, and everyone groaned. They came up hard on Pecos and then a place called Van Horn. In the convenience store, they were playing a song Barry remembered from his youth, from the time he got his learner’s permit and drove down the Cross Island Parkway in his father’s pool van. Carry a laser down the road that I must travel. Or that’s how it sounded to him. The band might have been called Mr. Mister. His father was okay with him playing pop music loud when he was driving, but he kept the radio off when he was behind the wheel himself. When you got old, the facts about your past bounced around your consciousness like heads of lettuce in a sack.
Outside, the desert wind chilled him. A new driver came to relieve the old one. “No cruise control, but she runs good,” the old driver said to the new. “As soon as we leave Van Horn, we switch to mountain standard time,” the new driver declared over the PA. Tomorrow he would have to change the time on his watches. That would be a treat. He hadn’t thought of Shiva since yesterday.
And yet he was happy. He still had his rabbit-in-the-box. He still had the Tri-Compax, which, one day, he would gift to his son. Watch. Say it, little rabbit! Wa-wa-wa-wa. Watch. Daddy’s watch. What if he wasn’t a bad father after all? There were portfolio managers at his shop that worked such long hours, they never got to see their kids. The daughter of his head of Asia had once asked, “Daddy, where do you live?”
His Act 2 was really about to begin now. His brief romance with Brooklyn had been a mistake, but an honest, heartfelt one.
What if Layla had a perfectly curated child, devilishly funny and smart, and a perfectly curated southwestern life and was willing to share both with him? What if there was enough room in the bathroom for those three side-by-side Duravit sinks? He’d need two more kids. Layla was forty-three, and his own sperm was faulty, but there was always adoption. What if each moment at the dinner table would be one of learning and loving and mirth? What if, for once, he would let the woman he loved race ahead of him? He had spent so much time trying to mentor others, but what if he could learn from Layla instead? As a professor, she was herself a professional mentor.
A sudden sleepiness overtook him. In the headlights of passing trucks, he could see the silhouettes of mountains, but he would never know their beauty.
ON JULY 30, FiveThirtyEight gave Trump a 50.1 percent chance of winning the White House. Seema fell into despair and found herself crying at breakfast. Shiva started screaming and poking at his face, trying to blot out his own eyes, perhaps out of sympathy. “Mommy’s okay.” Novie started soothing him. “She got a bug in her eye.” She caught Mariana, the chef, staring her son down from behind the kitchen island. In her country they would probably throw someone like Shiva off a cliff. Right now is when she
could have used Barry at her side. He had a way of talking about the country that seemed definite and true, even if he was, in his own words, “a moderate fiscal Republican.” Luis was still on some kind of meta-riff about both candidates being sleaze, even though he said it was costing him Twitter followers.
I NEED YOU TO BE NICE TO ME TODAY, she texted him.
OKAY, he texted back. GRAMERCY?
She tried to remind herself that she was in love, that tenderness awaited her, and that she would be a fool to let it slip by. But she needed him to know her thoughts about that 50.1 percent. She kept seeing a world in which Shiva was bullied and mocked, in which nice kids like Arturo were few and far between, a world in which even Barry’s money would not protect him. If there would be any money left.
She paid for their room in cash, as always, ponying up the extra three-hundred-dollar deposit for incidentals. Paying in cash used to make her feel transgressive; today it made her feel like an adulterer. They usually went straight to the bedroom and took off their clothes, but this morning she wanted it to be different. He sat down next to her on the green velvet couch and sighed. “So,” he said.
“I’m worried about the future,” she said, “and I don’t want you to delegitimize how I feel. You think I’m just like floating on this cloud of money and nothing can touch me. Well, you’re wrong.”
“What are we talking about?” he asked.
“The election.”
“Oh.” He was eyeing her breasts, and she didn’t like it. She shifted away from him. She was beginning to appreciate Shiva’s fear of others. “It does look very close now.”
“I want you to appreciate how I feel before you speak,” Seema said.
“You’ll be fine,” he said.
“That’s exactly the opposite of what I need to hear.”
He reached over and put his hand on her belly. She was wearing a peasant blouse, which she hated for its contrived rusticity but which fully concealed her bump. “This is what you’re really worried about,” he said.
“No, that’s not what I’m really worried about. I’m worried about Donald fucking Trump becoming the motherfucking president of this cocksucking country,” she said.
“But we’ll be okay,” he said. “You, me, Shiva, the baby.”
“And Arturo?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “Why not?”
“And Julianna?”
“I guess.”
Seema looked at him.
“She’s got her work. Seriously, I’m the last thing she needs.”
“But someone like me, without a job, without dreams. I’m perfect for you.”
“Where’s all this coming from?”
“Did Julianna tell you she and Arturo came over yesterday and met Shiva?”
“Yeah, Arturo said Shiva’s got some kind of super hairbrush made out of horsehair. You people live quite the life.”
“And what did Julianna say?”
“I don’t know. They didn’t release the transcript yet. Why are you being so pissy? What the fuck did I do? You want me to hate Trump, I’ll hate Trump. Done.”
“Did she tell you what the hairbrush is for?”
“Brushing his hair?”
Seema took his hand off her belly and turned toward him. Starlings were flying outside, headed for Gramercy Park, which they could access without the coveted keys. Even in the middle of this, a part of her wanted to have sex badly. Would he still love her? More to the point, why did she love him? Because he was closer to her age than her husband? Because he had soft eyes, decent breath, and easy style? Because he fucked better? Because consequences meant less to him, as if he were native born and her husband the immigrant? Because society insisted he had stature? Because he wrote about people with challenges, migrants, the Maya, the indigent? The goodness was in his work, and that meant there was a wellspring of it somewhere inside him, too. Didn’t it? In the social chart her mother had drawn for her in high school, Luis would hover near the top. Although Barry would be the top.
“Shiva’s on the spectrum,” she said. “He has autism. He’s autistic.”
Luis blinked and put his hand on his throat. “Like Asperger’s?” he said. “Because I’ve always felt like I’ve had a touch of that.”
Now she wanted to hit him.
“It’s not Asperger’s,” she said. “He’s nonverbal. He’s never said a word.”
Luis got up from the velvet couch. She looked sadly at the large imprint he had left. “Huh,” he said. “Well.” He walked over to the window and tapped on the glass. He didn’t exercise at all, as far as she knew, unless he was on top of her, but he always looked fit. “You know what I’m angry at you for,” he said.
“I’m sorry?” she said. “Did you just say you’re angry at me? Did you just say that right now?”
He turned around. “I’m angry that you hadn’t told me.”
“What?”
“I’m angry that I’ve never met your son.” He had gone from being Shiva to being your son. “It’s like you hid him from me.”
“Okay,” she said. She slapped her thighs, a gesture from her mother. “Let’s all go to the park together. Right now. You, me, Shiva.”
“Don’t be like that,” he said. “I’m not accusing you of anything. We’re just talking.”
“And full disclosure,” she said, patting her stomach. “This kid, he’s a boy. Statistically there’s a pretty decent chance that he might be autistic, too. Just like his brother. Just like my son. Shiva. Whom I love.”
“Okay, this is ridiculous,” Luis said. “This is a witch hunt. I’m being accused of things I haven’t said. I’m sorry Shiva’s autistic.”
“Well, I’m not,” Seema said. That sounded like a lie, but maybe it wasn’t. She didn’t know. She tried to picture her child in this room with them, the Shiva who loved the letter W, the true acolyte of the Cookie Monster, the boy who could be soothed by a bouncing ball and a horsehair brush. How could anyone be sorry he wasn’t someone else?
“Is that why Barry left you?” Luis asked. “Because if he did, he’s an asshole.” Luis was trying to redeem himself.
“You don’t know what it’s like,” she said.
“Are you defending him?”
“Aren’t you the guy who rails against black and white? No one’s a saint. It’s all relative.”
“Your husband’s not a saint, that’s for sure,” Luis said. “Do you know what Valupro is?”
The air conditioner wasn’t doing its job properly. Or maybe it was the heat racing through her body. “So,” she said, “now that we’re at it, tell me more about what you think of me and Barry.”
“I didn’t say ‘you.’ ”
“I married him.”
“And now you want to unmarry him. Wherever he is.”
Seema looked at her sneakers at the entrance of the junior suite. How carefully she had stacked them one next to the other. What a good daughter, what a good student, what a good person. “Let me ask you,” she said. “When I leave Barry and it’s me and you and Arturo, and, possibly, two autistic boys, how does it work? Whose money do we use?”
“I never wanted your money!” Luis shouted. “It’s blood money! Money from patients who can’t afford lifesaving drugs, thanks to your husband. I wouldn’t take it. And neither should you.”
“What a despicable woman I am,” Seema said.
“Don’t feel sorry for yourself,” Luis said. “You bitch about Trump, but you and Barry are half the reason we’re in the mess we’re in.”
“An ambitious monster. Living off others. No interests of her own. Can’t keep a husband, can’t mother her child.”
“Sounds like you’re enjoying this dialogue,” Luis said. “Sounds rehearsed.”
His cruelty oddly appealed to her. The reckoning was here. All
of her stupid little sins. “Tell me more,” she said. “Tell me more how you hate me.”
“I don’t hate you,” he said. “But I can’t trust you. You lied to me.”
“Ah,” she said. She got up. She smoothed the pleat of her blouse. “No one likes an untrustworthy woman.”
“Here comes the Hillary comparison,” he said.
And after all he had said about her, it was the Hillary line that moved her. She walked up right to his face, she could smell the folds of his chin, the sweaty aroma that sometimes lived there. “Luis,” she said. “Luis Goodman. A noted Guatemalan American author with his thousand followers on Twitter.”
“You know what you need,” Luis said. “It’s very simple. You need a job. You need to do whatever those hundreds of thousands of dollars of education trained you to do. And then you wouldn’t have to be up here fucking someone else’s husband in the middle of the day.”
But she was already walking out of the room.
She walked past the privacy of Gramercy Park. One life had just been canceled and no replacement ordered. She was tired and sleepy and unfucked, but her feet carried her into one of those perfect New York summer days, the air sultry but crisp. She thought of calling Mina, but what good would that do? Another wasted evening of talking shit about men. And she would have to tell her about Shiva’s diagnosis, tell her that she and her son had been rejected in tandem by another heartless human being.
A nexus of high schoolers had clogged up an intersection. They brushed past her, shouting at one another in pairs and trios, flashy new high-tops and buoyant hair. How confident they sounded. This was their city and their world. Seema stood there at the intersection letting the humanity coil around her. Suddenly she longed for her father. Nearly thirty years of life and she still had only one true friend in the world. She had tried to replace him with Barry, to be her “own person,” as they said, but look how well that had turned out. She dialed Novie and told her she would be gone for at least two days and that Shiva would be hers.
Lake Success Page 22
