The girl and the boy had stopped stalking the bird behind the gazebo and now, slightly bored, came to investigate Shiva and his grandfather, who were still shimmying their fingers, filtering in shafts of Central Park light. “What are you doing?” the girl asked Seema’s father, very loudly. “They’re like moving their hands in front of their faces,” she explained to her brother.
“Why?” the boy asked.
“I think they want to be left alone,” their mother said.
“That’s not for you to say!” her husband interceded. But she was right. The proximity of the two children was not helpful. Other than Arturo, Shiva’s peers provoked the worst in him, because, unlike adults, kids could be completely unpredictable, could dart and scream and push and hug unexpectedly, destroying his sense of balance and control.
“We should probably go anyway,” Seema said as Shiva closed his eyes and began to shake.
“You know what this boy likes?” Seema’s father said. “The letter W. He used to only like the letter C because ‘C is for cookie,’ but now he’s in love with W, which stands for ‘wow!’ among other things. So let’s do this.” He spread out his thumbs and fingers in a kind of Vulcan “live long and prosper” salute to form two Ws with his hands. The girl followed suit and helped her brother do the same. As soon as he heard W, Shiva’s eyes snapped open. And then Seema’s father gently made Ws out of Shiva’s fingers and slowly touched them to those of the children. “Double-u, double-u, double-u, double-u, double-u!” her father sang. And that’s how it went, the girl and her father lightly smacking Ws with her son and the girl’s brother, comparing the size of their fingers either by sight or by touch.
“Has he ever pointed to anything?” her father asked Seema on the day of his arrival. Yes, one thing: the W Hotel across the Hudson in New Jersey. As soon as her father heard that, he went to work. Now they would only get into cabs if there was a W on the license plate, and they would chart their way through Manhattan by following an endless series of signs with Ws, Walgreens being the ultimate beacon by which Shiva could navigate, although the McDonald’s arches also appeared to be an upside-down W as far as the young speller was concerned. Seema was torn. In some ways, her dad was normalizing the condition. Yes, everything in New York was an act, but if everything was an act shouldn’t Shiva have to learn the lines?
And yet, and yet. After her father had made a giant W on the refrigerator out of masking tape, Shiva would march up and point to it every time he wanted something to eat. “He’s pointing! He’s pointing!” Novie had shouted. This was his first truly useful gesture—he had always been scared to death of the fridge’s roar, its tumble of ice cubes—but soon he was marching up to it and pointing at the foods he loved; well, the one food, watermelon (which, yes, started with a w). And as they walked back through the Ramble toward Central Park West and spotted some lucky passing cab with a W on its license plate, she felt the spirit of the boy, with his hand in his grandfather’s, his stiff but fast walk carrying him across the minor hills built into the concrete city. For the first time since the meeting at Weill Cornell last September, she allowed herself to visualize him as a teenager, tall and handsome if more detached and, of course, silent than his peers, and then as an awkward but viable adult sitting in front of a computer, the screen covered with whatever he needed, a string of Ws perhaps. What if there was a future after all?
It used to be she would ask herself: Who is my son? What’s in his head? Well, now she knew. W was in his head. And the love of his grandfather. And the love of Novie. And scalable twenty-foot rock faces in the Ramble. And playdates with Arturo. She was certain that when he closed his eyes at night, for however short a time, he dreamed of all of these things. And she wondered: Did he dream of his father?
Back in their apartment, her mother was signing off Skype with Shilpa, her other daughter’s protestations that there was no “autism epidemic” like some quasi-medical hucksters were claiming, just better ways to diagnose it, were going nowhere. Of course there was an epidemic, according to Seema’s mother. An epidemic of old Barrys stalking beautiful young Seemas. She could see Shilpa’s wide nose framing the center of her mother’s laptop, behind her a spare, humid Kathmandu apartment, the opposite of her own. Having received no satisfaction from one daughter, her mother would now launch into an aria with the other. Perhaps today’s would be on the theme of how needlessly expensive Seema’s lifestyle was, how pointless it was to have hired a cook that didn’t know an urad dal from her ass while Seema did not have a real job herself, the waste of having three double-sided fireplaces that were never put to use, and the profligacy of having Novie full-time while her parents were here, as if Novie hadn’t rightfully been the child’s second mother for the last three years. “You!” Seema had shouted at her mother. “You wanted this money! It was you! The chart! Remember the chart?” “What chart?” “The one that had all the races plotted out, Jews and WASPs on top, us on the bottom. Well, here we are. Welcome to the top. Isn’t it lovely?” “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” “Seriously?” “It never happened.” That was one of the incredible things, too: her mother’s complete deniability. She was made for these times.
“Imagine what it’s like for her,” one of Shiva’s therapists had said to Seema. “Remember what your grieving period was like? And your mother is someone from a pretherapeutic society.”
“She came here when she was eighteen.”
“Just give her time.”
But how much time? Each day was an obstacle course. Everything her father did for Shiva was counterbalanced with the pain her mother brought upon her, screaming about Shiva’s care or “the absconded one,” as she called Barry. Seema’s dream for Shiva was that each morning he would greet her, if not with the words “Good morning,” then at least with a flap of the wrist that signified a “Hi,” followed by the approximation of a hug. Why couldn’t she expect the same of her mother?
“Seema,” her mother called out. She had made a point of wearing her most ridiculous, non–New York clothes, a baggy OSU sweatshirt and pink sweats. “I think the toilet in the guest bathroom won’t flush.”
“You think, or it actually won’t flush?”
“Don’t be short with me. If I treated guests the way you do, I’d be all alone.”
“I’ll go to Walgreens to get a plunger.”
“I would have thought you’d have someone to fix it.”
“Waste not, want not.”
“Can we come with you?” her father asked. “Somebody around here likes Walgreens.” But the thought of her son staring at the giant white-on-red W in cursive for minutes on end, his fingers a-flicking, was just not how she wanted the day to proceed. Imagine if she went all by herself to that bar where she and Luis had had a hot dog? Or checked in to the Park Hyatt for a spa treatment? Or took a NetJets to El Paso, walked up some shitty suburban block, and slapped Barry across his surely sunburned idiot face? Unproductive thinking! she sang to herself. Blah, blah, blah! Their elevator was so fast it didn’t even register Luis and Julianna’s apartment. But the existence of Arturo calmed her down, too. If she had to see the world as being either in service to her son or not, then that’s how she would see the world. She should put up the Internet ad right away: “Not-yet-divorced wife of missing husband seeks man to be peripheral to her disabled son. Must be at least five foot ten.”
Out amid the postwork hubbub of Twenty-third Street, she could at least acknowledge that it was a perfect September day, a 9/11 day, as Mina called them. She breathed in the surprising coolness, as if the boiling planet itself were reminiscing of better times.
There was a hand on her shoulder. At first she thought it was a hand that had been there before, maybe even belonged to Luis or some past intimate, but no. The hand belonged to a man in an ill-fitting black suit, a pallbearer from the outer boroughs, his sleek aviator glasses somehow belying a general sweatiness.
“Mrs. Cohen,” the man said. “My name is Anthony Perelli, I’m with the FBI.”
She moved so quickly the hand remained floating in the air, unsure of itself, a large pink thing beset by a ruby-colored class ring. “I’m sorry, ma’am, I didn’t mean to blindside you.” The mention of blindness brought up the boy from earlier, the thought that maybe, if the universe would just tilt a certain way, she could be his mother in Phoenicia, packing simple lunches.
She was visibly shaking now, as dysregulated as Shiva had ever been. All her animal instincts for flight were kicking in, yet somehow she had to produce a human voice. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I—”
“You’ve been ignoring my calls.”
“You will have to speak with me through my attorney. That’s all I have to say.” She turned around and headed back for her building, past a granite outcropping of Credit Suisse and then the duo of Schnippers, whatever that was, and Charles Schwab (“own your tomorrow”) and Shiva’s beloved Met Life Tower clock, but the agent continued behind her, a floating paunchy form.
“Mrs. Cohen,” he said. “Do you know your husband’s whereabouts?”
“Attorney,” she said.
“Mrs. Cohen,” the man was saying into her back. “If we could just sit down for one quick coffee, or just on a bench in the park. Mrs. Cohen!” He had run up alongside her. Based only on his accent, she pictured a dense ethnic New Jersey life, a hike through Fordham, maybe a second-tier law degree, the kind of man they bred for just a little taste of power, but nothing too corrupting. The Bureau guys she had known in her former life were sleek and smart. They didn’t even bother to send their best after her.
“I really have the feeling that we’re not adversaries,” the agent said. “That our interests coincide.”
“Attorney,” she said. “I’ll just keep repeating it.”
He took out his phone. “Are you familiar with this video?” He pressed PLAY. Yes, she was familiar with the video. She knew it by heart. She kept walking. The agent padded after her, trying to keep the phone in her face. There it was. The painful blue of the Mediterranean, far beyond the ocher dwellings of Cagliari and a stretch of mountains that blended in with the sky so well you had to squint to know where one ended and the other began. To the left side of the screen, a boisterous, drunken conversation had broken out between two shirtless men, one of whom was Barry, that boyish, goofy, preprogrammed, backslapping, Tiger Inn, let’s-be-friends, one-of-the-guys bullshit Barry. Or maybe it was the desperately struggling, scared-of-getting-it-wrong, always-on-the-lookout-for-hurt Barry. Or maybe they were one and the same. Barry was talking to a fat man on the yacht’s foredeck, both of them with flutes of prosecco welded into the confluence of their stomachs and chests, and then Seema’s iPhone panned away to the slowly approaching Sardinian capital. The strum of excited conversation, the sounds of boys trying to be men, nothing to see here, except that every couple of seconds one of the men would hungrily utter the word “GastroLux!” as if expelling gas, and the other would repeat it.
“You sent this video to us,” the agent was saying. “Isn’t that true?” That’s how they talked. A declarative statement followed by “Isn’t that true?” or “Isn’t that correct?” Seema was now waiting for the light to change. Ugly commuter buses heaved their way up Madison. She wanted the world to change along with the light, maybe come to a spectacular end. She wanted light everywhere and then soft white heat. Barry was always talking about how his generation feared the bomb. At this moment she would welcome it. The agent kept manufacturing words like some Aspergerian automaton. “We can’t ascertain who else was on that boat other than Samuel Yontif, or ‘the Nebbish,’ as we’ve heard him described on several wiretaps, his companion Slavenka Babic, the crew, your husband, and yourself. Isn’t that true?”
“That sounds like a lot of people,” Seema said. “Are you sure you got the right yacht?” Which was the wrong approach. The only word she needed right now was “attorney.”
“We traced the e-mail with the attached video to a cybercafé in Davao City. Your nanny, Novie Bontuyan, left for Davao City, through Dubai, then Manila, three days before the video was sent to us. Is that correct?”
So there it was. Why had she been so sloppy? She might as well have sent the damn video herself. Some fucking cover-up. The traffic light finally changed in Seema’s favor. “Attorney!” she screamed and made a dash for it.
“Mrs. Cohen! Why did you have your nanny send us the video? Mrs. Cohen!” She reached the other side of the street and aimed herself squarely at her building’s service entrance. “Mrs. Cohen! This isn’t my purview, but it brings up your nanny’s legal status.”
She was about to swipe her card to the service entrance, but she turned around instead. “Please,” she said. “Leave her out of this.”
“I want to. I just need you to tell me why you sent us this video. You’re an officer of the court.”
“Please,” Seema repeated. “My son is autistic.”
“I’m sorry,” the agent said.
“Don’t be fucking sorry!” she screamed. “I’m so sick of you people. That’s his nanny. He loves her. She loves him. Leave us alone!”
“I’m not here to penalize anyone,” the agent said. “Her legal status is not my jurisdiction. I think you did something brave and honest. And we want to bring it to completion.”
Seema thought of her son, how beneath all the screaming and fussing, all he wanted was a world of order and logic, a world where everything was completed, a world of beginnings and ends. “Attorney,” she said. It was more like a whisper. And then she ran inside.
SEVERAL WEEKS later, Barry sat in a drab, sparse government conference room downtown. The fluorescent lights and the drop ceiling were bearing down on him, filling him with nausea. Right out of Princeton, he had once tried to take the GMAT in a room with a similar lighting scheme and ended up running out midtest to vomit in the bathroom. In the end, he hadn’t needed a business degree; his charm and his luck had carried him along. And now his life was coming to an end in a sad government space.
Gone the beauty of La Jolla, the Indian hawthorn blossoms of Neta’s back garden, the crying of the seals in the morning light. Gone his father’s unremarkable grave in the Home of Peace Cemetery in the middle of San Diego, the inscription on the tombstone bearing the legend MAURICE COHEN, BELOVED HUSBAND OF RIVKA. His son’s name did not even receive a mention. “He wanted it simple,” Neta had said with a shrug.
The SEC guys were not as schlumpy as he had imagined. They were all wearing decent suits. Maybe they had worked for law firms before switching sides. Somewhere behind them, in the outer ring of cheap black chairs, he pictured his sun-glazed father in the fresh pastel shirts he had adopted in La Jolla just before he died, looking neither pleased nor angered, just nodding along at all of the charges rendered against his son. That’s right. He had promise. He could program the Commodore thing. Queens All-County Swim Champ. Princeton. But he never should have taken that job at Goldman. He should have worked in a lore office.
“Mr. Cohen, is it true that in 2013 your fund was losing money—”
“Based on the Fifth Amendment…,” Barry began.
The SEC guy spit out some more data about This Side of Capital’s shitty performance. The upshot was that Barry’s fund had been doing so poorly he had used material nonpublic information on the GastroLux trade to try to save it.
“Based on the Fifth Amendment…,” Barry began once more. His lawyer tugged on his monogrammed cuffs. Pleading the Fifth was not the smoothest move, but what choice did they have?
“Is it true that your chief compliance officer had no relevant experience in the financial industry? That his sole educational credential was a bachelor’s in Russian studies from Middlebury College? That you met him at a party thrown by your friend Joseph Moses Goldblatt at the FlashDancers Gentlemen’s Club?”
&nb
sp; “Based on the Fifth Amendment…”
It dragged on. Different questions, the same answer. He wished he still had his Patek 570 in white gold to look at for comfort. TO BARRY COHEN, A LEADER OF MEN. Finally, the videotape was produced. Seema’s videotape. Sammy Yontif on the foredeck, Sardinia in the distance, a slam dunk for the government in the conference room.
He remembered his first feelings upon seeing the video in his lawyer’s office. The complete clarity of the morning’s first espresso, followed by the same devastation he had had upon hearing of Shiva’s diagnosis, the shock of being told for the first time that someone you loved didn’t love you back. Which was exactly what Seema was telling him through the release of the videotape. But immediately after clarity and loss came the feeling of social self-preservation. Barry had been ratted out by his own wife.
The tape was clear proof that Barry had discussed GastroLux with Sammy Yontif, who knew the company’s GERD medication was about to tank, and that the discussion likely influenced Barry’s very profitable short of the stock. What would his friends think of what Seema had done? They would probably close ranks around him. Everyone had been through at least two divorces; they knew that hedge-fund wives were capable of anything. Well, except for maybe this. After all, Seema stood to lose money, too. So why had she done it? She had sent the video to the authorities even before Barry had fled across the country. Did she hate him from the get-go? Then why get married? Why have a baby? Why smile across the breakfast table as they argued so charmingly about Paul Krugman’s latest assault on free markets?
Barry felt his lawyer’s elbow. A question must have been posed. “Based on the Fifth Amendment…” The testimony had been going on for over three hours, and Barry was exhausted and dysregulated, and somehow his mind had landed on a memory of one of his early days with Seema.
Six months after they had started dating, she had thrown a surprise birthday party for him. They hadn’t even moved in together or bought the place on Madison Park; he was still living in the unreformed, furnitureless Tribeca loft Seema had dubbed “the aircraft hangar.” Upon returning home from work at a late hour, he found all of his friends—his business associates, a couple of bros from his Tiger Inn days at Princeton, their sparkling wives, probably a hundred people in total—yelling “Surprise!” just like in the movies.
Lake Success Page 31
