She was with a bespectacled friend who probably belonged to Terrace or one of the artsy clubs. The way Layla stuck out from the fratty beer-pong social scene around her, she might as well have been wearing glasses, too, perched low over her nose. He didn’t know if she was surly or sophisticated, but he felt her loneliness. Nothing was worse than being lonely at Princeton. She didn’t really know how to flirt, or maybe didn’t feel the need to, which shocked Barry all the more (around sophomore year, he had begun to think of himself as attractive). Later her friend, a Jewish girl from Brooklyn, got so drunk she threw up right in front of the Ivy, the one eating club that had rejected him and which Fitzgerald himself had called “breathlessly aristocratic.” Barry held up her head, and Layla moved her hair out of the way as she hurled. “Our first social protest,” Layla had called her friend’s purge on the lawn of the hallowed club. Barry had been looking for something different his entire freshman year, had even tried to start a book club at the Tiger Inn to bring some culture to his lacrosse, wrestling, and swimming bros, and now he had found it within the form of a dark, mysterious southern girl.
Barry breathed in the cool fragrant desert air. He brushed his hair back and pulled up his pants. He rang the doorbell, once, twice, three times, and waited.
Layla opened the door.
She was a cool woman. That was perhaps the best way to describe her. Cool in the way that Tina or Lina from Brooklyn could only aspire to be. Everything she wore was timeless, dusty denims and cowboy boots, simple tees bearing the name of some local business or attraction. She didn’t drive a truck, but she didn’t have to. And her face, her portrait-ready Virginian face, had been wonderfully preserved in the desert heat, though there was a tiny tinge of sadness around the eyes of blue. She had changed, and yet she hadn’t; her hair looked a touch more brittle but remained naturally dark. Her snub nose looked like Elizabeth Taylor’s. This was the kind of woman’s face he would see on rare occasions at hedge-fund parties, whenever he’d meet a fund manager who hadn’t remarried for some reason. The wise, older face, full of stories that actually made the woman sound smart, instead of merely flirtatious. The kind of face that would hold out for plastic surgery until the very last minute. And she was almost too skinny, her jeans constantly running down to reveal a heartwarming overflow of butt.
The first thing she said to him was “I do not want a crack rock in my house.”
She had been warned. The Hayeses obviously did not think much of his state of mind. “Of course not,” he said. “Rock gone.” But he snuck out in the middle of the night and buried it by the pool. The crack was a connection to a journey he had been proud to undertake and wanted to celebrate forever. Layla next recommended that he stay at the Camino Real downtown, and Barry had to explain his pennilessness. As expected, she still harbored ill will toward his profession and our nation’s financial sector. The fact that Barry was now destitute proved a mark in his favor. “I have three dollars and fifteen cents to my name,” he said. He had never been more proud to declare his net worth. All that time at Princeton she had wanted him to remain poor, and now, in a sense, he was. She was wearing a T-shirt bearing the name of the Chihuahuas, the local minor-league team. Everything here had a bilingual story.
“Barry,” she said. “I don’t want you to think of this as the start of anything. I’m exhausted. I really am. It’s been a tough couple of years. You can crash the night, or let’s say two nights, but that’s it. You’ve got to figure stuff out and I can’t help you. I’m not even your friend anymore.” He was sitting on a grandiose ottoman opposite her. The furniture was this oversize Stickley stuff. The house used to belong to a Jewish cardiologist, and there were mezuzahs everywhere, which was perfect given the all-Jewish cast of Layla’s romantic life. She was raising a kid on her own after her ex-husband absconded to DC to join the pundit class after publishing a successful volume on Alexis de Tocqueville. She sent her nerdy nine-year-old son, Jonah, to Hebrew school because she did not want him to miss out on half of his heritage. The Holocaust, all holocausts, formed one of her areas of study.
“This is just a start,” he said. “This is just hello.” He leaned in. He was unshowered and smelled like the Hound. He wanted her to feel it, the depth of his folkloric travel. “At heart,” Barry said, “I’m a salesman. And right now you don’t want what I have to offer. I get that. But believe me, I’m going to make a damn persuasive case for myself. I’ve been thinking about it all through the ride down here. I’ve been meditating and plotting. The things I’ve seen. There was a one-eyed Mexican—”
“You were always this nostalgic person,” she said, “even in college. And I kinda loved you for it. But this is something else.”
“My life’s taken a strange turn recently,” Barry said. “Complicated stuff.”
“And you think my life turned out perfectly?”
“See, we’re meant for each other!” Barry said, and slapped his hands together. “I’m getting divorced, too!” Shh, she said. My kid. She tucked in her legs the same way she used to back in Princeton. Indian-style, they might have called it back then.
“Do you really want to make a life here?” she asked.
“Yes!”
“Why?”
He began to negotiate. “Because it’s real.”
“You just got here an hour ago.”
“But I’ve been on the road learning about America.”
“That sounds privileged.”
“I just want to change.”
“Nobody changes.”
“You’re too good to ever change.”
“Shut up, Barry.”
Eventually he was relegated to the little basement bedroom. There were two twin beds barely big enough to accommodate him, and each night he chose a different one to curl up in. It was a little like owning more than one watch. Now he’d just have to make her fall in love with him again. He hoped it would be neither too hard nor too easy, but something they could tell the grandkids about one day.
* * *
—
THE HOUSE nestled up against the Franklin Mountains. Their road was called Thunderbird, and you could actually see the shape of a red thunderbird etched into one of the hills. The house was surrounded by pink mansions with wrought-iron safety gates. According to Layla, the violence had sent in waves of rich folks from the neighboring Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez, including, at one point, that town’s police chief. Deer came down from the mountains into the arroyo by Layla’s house, and red-tailed hawks swooped overhead. At night, bobcats walked down the street like they owned the place. The rooms were low ceilinged and cluttered with the detritus of a failed marriage. It was huge, five bedrooms built in anticipation of a Modern Orthodox family, and in any normal metro it would cost two million dollars, whereas in El Paso a single-income full professor could afford it plus the full-time housekeeper/nanny who came courtesy of some southern Mexican state. Layla still kept their wedding photos and photos of all of them as a family so that Jonah would have some measure of stability, even though it likely hurt the shit out of her to see her husband’s chiseled face.
Two days had passed, and she didn’t kick him out. And then two more. And then a week. They said El Paso was built out of mud and dirt, and sometimes, like after a flash storm, it did look like it had just come out of a third grader’s kiln, but the mountains were beautiful and strange, and the dry desert heat agreed with him. He couldn’t get enough. He was reborn. He didn’t e-mail. He was off Bloomberg. He didn’t stay up for the Asian markets. Layla got him an old flip phone, and he texted on it like it was the turn of the century. He drove a 1999 Toyota Avalon, front-wheel drive, no Sirius.
Each morning was a blessing. Each morning he roared into his new reality. This! This is the life he should have lived all along, until Princeton had pushed him into the cult of Goldman, the sect of Sachs. He had to change.
Layla still d
idn’t let him share her bedroom, but his little room down in the finished basement was just perfect. Plus there was a fully stocked bar just down the hall; Layla was, he had to remember, a WASP by nature, even if she had married—and then divorced—a Jew. There was even a case of fifteen-year-old Balvenie if he wanted to plaster himself through the night. Being a full prof at the University of Texas at El Paso meant living like a managing director at Barclays. Barry had always wondered why people who were just upper-middle class in New York chose to stay there, given that they could live like minor dictators in the rest of the country. “You’re negative arbing yourself,” he used to say.
In the morning Layla took Jonah to his Hebrew school and then she would drive on to UTEP. Barry would get into the Avalon, slip in one of the old CDs moldering in the glove box—the Smashing Pumpkins!—and swerve and brake and honk through the neat urban desertscape. El Pasoans didn’t really recognize lanes.
He went to El Rincon for breakfast, a scene no matter which day of the week. The parking lot was full of Escalades and Range Rovers with Chihuahua plates, Mexican businessmen with their bilingual children, big dudes with tattoos and Hublot watches. Or maybe some real “Chuco Town”–looking guys would show up wearing humorous English-language T-shirts like STUPIDITY IS NOT A CRIME, YOU’RE FREE TO GO.
The beans were always ethereal at El Rincon, but the chilies fluctuated by the batch. “Today muy caliente the green sauce,” the large waitress would say, and Barry would order a plate of chilaquiles smothered in that.
Seema couldn’t shut up about how great South Indian cuisine was, well, fuck it. He was going to get a story of his own, a Mexican American story, which would dwarf hers with its significance. He only wished he had taken a Spanish class back at Princeton, instead of taking French after reading Tender Is the Night. The coffee at El Rincon sucked, but he drank cup after cup, looking at the Mexicans conducting business or taking good care of their abuelitas. Yes, he was picking up the language already. He stared at the giant hand-painted mural of an Aztec god carrying a princess with hot, thick thighs and flowery ankle bracelets up a mountaintop. Or he’d just meditate on the view of the minor mountains rilled with switchbacks out the window, a gorgeous two-assed woman getting out of a Durango in the parking lot.
He liked doing chores for Layla. He had all this energy and no place to put it. He went to Sprouts Farmers Market. The really big news around EPT (as he was starting to call El Paso, Texas) was that a Whole Foods was finally coming to town, but he loved Sprouts, which had long been the closest thing. He thought the bargains were crazy. You could buy two bottles of pretty good prosecco for $15.99. He got a whole thing of fresh potted herbs and a case of Diablo French soda and some nice deli meats. He made clumsy but heartfelt turkey sandwiches and brought them down to Layla at UTEP, so they could eat together in the campus’s Chihuahuan Desert Gardens. She seemed to really like that gesture, even though everything was paid for with her money. She had given him a bridge loan of a thousand dollars.
The drive up to UTEP really excited him. He would pass through a fairly upscale segment of the American Southwest, all those new cold-brew joints and vernacular tail-to-snout restaurants, then all of a sudden this other entity would appear on the passenger’s side. The other entity was called Mexico or, to be more specific, Ciudad Juárez, previously the locus of that country’s narco wars. And the way it came up was as this incredible blur of run-down cinder-block shacks painted in bright primary colors. Colonias, the neighborhoods were called, and one butted up directly to the UTEP campus. Barry loved the juxtaposition. He wanted to go across the border to Juárez, but he was roundly dissuaded from doing so by many of the people he met. A lot of the violence had abated as of late, but El Chapo, the Sinaloa cartel’s kingpin, was being held right across the border for possible extradition, and a wavelet of killings had returned, with one man being gunned down right over the international bridge. But it was the danger that excited Barry most of all. Hemingway had gone to Juárez, to a place called the Kentucky Club, back when it hadn’t been as dangerous to visit. Imagine if Barry went there now, into the heart of the danger, with Layla and his twenty words of Spanish in tow.
The UTEP campus was designed to mimic a series of giant Bhutanese temples, and the working-class campus had an Eastern sense of grandeur. Barry wondered what it was like to be one of the poor folks in the colonias who woke up daily to be confounded by these massive Buddhist monoliths towering above them. The few times he had picked Layla up at night, especially when the desert chill really set in and all notions of summertime disappeared, Barry noticed an acrid, burnt-plastic smell drifting off from the hodgepodge of houses across the border. “They’re burning tires to stay warm,” Layla had explained to him in the same no-nonsense social-justice voice he remembered from Princeton. Barry was mesmerized. The smell crawled up from one of the most desperate parts of North America to an attractive regional center of learning. Like most El Pasoans, the students at UTEP were heavily Latino and, in fact, 10 percent of them commuted from Juárez, though likely from neighborhoods far more salubrious than the colonia across the border. Barry was here, but he might as well have been there. He burned with the excitement of having been born on the right side of the fence, of having been lucky. He wished Jeff Park, that amateur scholar of luck, could see this place.
* * *
—
DURING THOSE weeks Barry had also developed an unexpected soft spot for scrawny, friendless Jonah, schlepping around math books two grade levels beyond his own like some future quant. The little guy needed a father.
One afternoon Jonah was crouching over a dead lizard in the backyard while Barry sat by the pool watching nature play itself out, rainbows appearing at will, lending their color to the monochrome humps of the Franklins. The boy did not know how to swim, a situation Barry was going to remedy for sure, and Jonah’s stick legs in his dry swim shorts made him look somehow much younger than his nine years. He was entirely white, even though he lived in a land dominated by the sun.
“Bury him in the arroyo, otherwise we’ll have a million ants,” Layla said. She was dressed in khaki shorts with a tight black swimsuit that made Barry aware of the contours of her small breasts and the new heaviness of her bottom. He remembered the dream he had had back at Jeff Park’s, the dream in which he and Layla were having coffee naked in a Wells Fargo. He longed to shoo the boy away, strip down her shorts, move aside the crotch of her one-piece, and taste her.
Jonah had flipped the dead lizard over and was now carefully pressing his stomach. “He was just alive, honey, so you have to treat him with respect,” Layla said. “He’s not a toy.”
“I’m examining him,” the boy said gravely.
“Well, he’s not a research subject either. Bury him in the arroyo.”
Jonah looked up with his father’s dark hooded eyes. Just like the quants at his office, the kid had a ferocious concentration. Anytime it was broken, he would blink up a storm as if he were new to this world. He spent most of his time doing God-only-knew-what in his room. “What’s that bird, Mom?” Jonah asked, pointing to an angry-looking specimen in the bushes.
“That’s a grackle.”
Grackle. Arroyo. Just alive. The Southwest was full of lovely language like that. The fact that Layla was raising a kid in a moral way stirred something in Barry. His father had fucked up that task so completely after Barry’s mother died. Bury a pool lizard with dignity? He’d probably have tried to make a wallet out of it. Layla wasn’t all alone like his dad had been; she had help from the Mexican woman maybe seven hours a day, but still. The Mexican woman was easygoing and made killer chilaquiles of her own. She and Barry rapped briefly about buses. She knew something on the subject, as she took a thirteen-hour bus into the heart of Mexico once every month. One day he came home and found Jonah and the Mexican woman playing on a slide Layla had put up by the pool, yelling and squealing as if both of them were young
. It was such an outrageously American scene he wished he owned an iPhone with which to take a video. They had once put Shiva at the top of a slide in Central Park, and he had started crying desperately, and an old Israeli woman waiting in line with her grandchild admonished him to be braver. Barry had slashed his donations to the Technion in Haifa by 80 percent that day.
“Hey, buddy,” Barry said to Jonah. “You want me to teach you how to swim?”
“Barry was a swim champ back in college,” Layla said.
“Only in high school,” Barry corrected her magnanimously. “Queens All-County Swim Champion 1989. So how about it, big guy?” He immediately felt bad about calling the undersized boy “big guy.”
“I’ve got to do cartography in my room,” the boy said.
“Well, why don’t I join you?” Barry said. Cartography? The kid looked at his mother with despair, but Layla thought it was a great idea.
“I call my room the Mapparium,” Jonah said. True to the name, the entire room was covered in maps of the world, along with some posters of the world’s high-speed trains, the TGV, Germany’s Intercity Express, Japan’s high-speed Shinkansen. At first Barry had mistaken the maps for actual vintage ones from the twenties or thirties, but when he got closer he realized they had not been professionally made but rather drawn by a careful hand in a combination of graphite and watercolor wash, the place-names rendered in an old-fashioned art deco font kind of like the one on his Tri-Compax. An incomplete map of the mid-Atlantic states and New England took up a single wall.
“Did you draw this?” Barry asked.
“Ma-hum,” the kid said, without any pride in his voice. Jonah had two stock phrases. “Ma-hum” meant “yes,” and “Did you know?” meant he was about to tell you something you didn’t really want to know. The boy picked up a brush and began to apply himself to the upper reaches of Massachusetts.
Lake Success Page 24
