He grew out of it.
We’ve never seen anything like this.
Maybe ten percent of the kids beat this thing, and he’s one of them.
Instead, he was about to share the Karuizawa with a man he despised.
Shiva was standing in the middle of the sunken penultimate living area, his long, reedy body gently humming with either anxiety or excitement; it was always hard to tell which. “See”—Novie sighed—“he heard you and he got exciting that Daddy was home.”
“Daddy has to go,” Barry said, which is what Barry said almost every time he saw Shiva. The child’s eyes brimmed with what seemed like sadness and intelligence, beguiling those who met him. Shiva grabbed the watch on Barry’s wrist with his clammy hand. Watches clearly excited him.
“What’s that?” Barry asked, in the manner he would address a dog, the only manner he knew with children. “Watch. Say it, little rabbit! Wa-wa-wa-wa. Tch-tch-tch. Watch. Daddy’s watch.” But Shiva just kept pulling on the watchband. Barry ruffled his wet hair, smelling Johnson’s baby shampoo and that too-sweet child sweat, a combination that always made him wonder how a child with such a magical scent could have anything wrong with him. “Say it, Shiva, and I’ll let you hold the watch.”
“Mr. Barry, he has to go to sleep,” said Novie.
“Wa-wa-wa-wa-wa,” Barry kept modeling for his son. “Watch. Daddy’s watch. What a nice watch. My watch.”
The nanny gently pulled him off his father’s timepiece, and the child began to expel a series of screeches that Barry felt had no business coming out of a human’s mouth, the sounds of a village slaughter that had taken place several centuries back in his genetic history. There was an unfairness to this. To how hard he had worked for his family. To how carefully he had waited for the right woman, the right young woman with young perfect eggs. They would have three children. Some banker guys had four from each wife, but he would just have three from one wife. There were bathrooms already built in the apartment here and in their house in the country with three sinks side by side, so that growing up all three of the children would be able to brush their teeth at the same time, occasionally splashing one another in mirth. Barry was an only child and his mother died in a car accident when he was five. He had never really wanted kids, but the image of the three of them together in this miraculous bathroom with three Duravit bowls one after the other, that was the image that made him cry when the doctor told him that after God knows how many mishaps, the in vitro had finally worked, and Seema was pregnant. Three kids, one hugging another’s warm body as water flowed from three taps, the smell of young hair and cut grass on their shins; three perfect lives.
* * *
—
THEY HAD figured it out in Venice last September. Shiva’s “delays” were weighing on them, but there was no call to action just yet, and so they decided to leave him with the nanny and spend four days on the Venetian Lagoon, the kind of romantic getaway that had seemed almost commonplace during their courtship. The city was disgusting with tourists, British girls in VODKA & DÖNER T-shirts, last-breath seniors in wheelchairs crowded onto the vaporetti as if reenacting Death in Venice en masse. They had a suite at the Gritti Palace overlooking the Byzantine silver dome of the Salute. Seema preferred the much more expensive Aman hotel, where George Clooney had married someone, but Barry liked the Gritti because he could sit on the deck outside, where Hemingway had once sat, and have an Aperol spritz just like the man whose prose he had tried to imitate at Princeton. Also, in the drawing room they had lots of heavyweight books on watches, including a fifty-pound tome on early vintage Omegas.
He hired a private water taxi to zip them around the canal city, and within a day both of them looked appropriately dazed and sun-fucked. For the first time in ages they had sex, mostly avoiding each other’s face, treating their orgasms as separate “work products.” They fucked for three jet-lagged hours straight in the middle of the night, and when Barry peeked into the bathroom and saw Seema wipe herself over the toilet, so much of him still inside her, he felt for the first time in a long time that everything might be all right.
Because he had won on the hotel, Seema got to see all the art museums she wanted. Before her parents had forced her to go to law school, Seema had been an art history major at Michigan. He urged her to collect, but other than a Miró and the obligatory Calder sitting unloved in a corner of the library, they did not own much in that asset class. Venice was supposed to rekindle her passions, and so, after a morning fuck, they went on the great Venetian Tintoretto Trail with a brief flyby of Peggy Guggenheim’s collection.
Barry dreaded a visit to the Galleria dell’Accademia the most, because it wasn’t a church where you could at least enjoy the grandeur and the coolness of the marble and stone. A friend of his who ran a macro fund out of Miami had boomeranged from his divorce into about a billion dollars’ worth of impressionism with which to dazzle some young future wife, but after all the sex last night, Barry was entirely secure in his marriage, zooming two or three rooms ahead of Seema and then coming back to check on her glowing form in tight T-shirt and tighter jeans (having a kid had somehow improved her figure, made all the good parts fuller), parked in front of some Madonna and Child with the requisite sexy display of thoughtfulness. But as he walked toward her, he saw the tears curving down her chin. He almost backed away—what if this was a private moment? One of the few you could have when you were married, even with ten thousand square feet of property between you? No, this was something else.
“Seema?” He took her elbow.
“Look,” she said. It was the Virgin and Child, one of Tiziano’s.
He couldn’t understand what was happening exactly. He looked. He looked closer. “What?” he said, and then he saw it. The Virgin was gazing into her Son’s eyes, that obscenely mournful Italian gaze that the Venetian women on the streets still seemed to carry between bursts of cell-phone conversation. That wasn’t the issue. It was the Child, looking up at his Mother. It was his eyes. His eyes were locked with his Mother’s. This was what being a child was about. Seeking out your mother’s gaze and mirroring it. Learning to connect now and for the rest of your life.
Barry felt a sob building from somewhere deep inside him, an unarticulated, unmanly place. At first, his grief was for himself and the mother he’d never really known, the eyes he could never remember. There was no way to pinch and expand the Polaroids of the time the way he could with an iPhone image, no way to really see her face up close and to intuit what kind of person she had been. But it was Shiva, really, who made him want to cry alongside his wife. Shiva, who at age two had still never looked either of them in the eye. Shiva who wasn’t merely delayed, but in some terrible way broken.
She screamed at him that night. Screamed about their fucking hotel, because the one thing, the one thing, she had asked him was to stay at the Aman with its unmarked back door, its breakfast rooms splashed with ontological paintings from mythology, its fucking privacy. Didn’t she deserve something special once in a while? Well, didn’t she?
Barry recoiled. This was exactly how he pictured his banker buddies’ marriages, ungrateful women screaming at stupefied men over absolutely nothing. Once, when he was still huffing his way up the VP-MD axis at Goldman, he had gone to a party at a Greenwich manse, and the architect who had designed the house was there on the veranda completely shit-faced. Barry asked him the secret of his success, and the architect had pointed at the lawns full of glimmering couples beneath them and said, “I have the easiest job in the world. Bankers. The same four houses, the same four cars, the same four wives.” He took another drunken look at Barry in his loafers and Moncler sweater and said, “Here’s my card.” Barry decided right then: No Upper East Side, no Greenwich, no S500, no hundred-and-ten-pound white wife with the knuckly shoulders and the retroussé nose. And here he was in Venice at the wrong hotel, with his brown wife’s face contorted into pu
re pain like some poor Lucchese or Pisan or Florentine soldier spiked through the gut in one of those interminable Renaissance battle paintings.
They still had two days of this nightmare left, and the next morning, sexless but civil, she took him through the rainy streets and canals to the Audemars Piguet boutique on St. Mark’s Square and bought him a twenty-eight-thousand-euro pink-gold Royal Oak for which he had absolutely no use. Her version of an apology. The gorgeous young woman whose job it was to arouse the wallet of the kind of man who wanted a watch shaped like a porthole was clearly overjoyed by the effortless sale but could not understand why the man and the woman did not celebrate their new purchase. The salesgirl had repatriated the umbrella embossed with their hotel’s crest inside a tasteful umbrella stand, offered them espresso, which they duly drank, and chocolates which they nibbled, and, when Seema’s black Amex had cleared, had shouted: “Congratulations!”
They left Venice a day early and, through the good work of his chief of staff, were at Weill Cornell less than a week later. He remembered the date, September 23. Seema, dressed as if for work in a blazer and pearls, legs crossed, wrote down everything she saw, everything she observed, as if she herself were a doctor and not a lapsed attorney. She had brought daily logs of Shiva’s development, his food intake, and his bowel movements since the day he was born; weight, height, and head-circumference graphs from the pediatrician; a page entitled “Questions,” another, written in shakier script, “Options.” There were two doctors and a speech therapist, and from the moment they saw Shiva, it was over. He didn’t speak, of course. But he failed at everything else, too. He was given a baby doll, but instead of holding it or feeding it Play-Doh, he merely flicked its scary blue eyes open and shut, open and shut, open and shut. “I would’ve done the same thing,” Barry said, “the eyes are the only interesting part,” but Seema gave him a kohl-eyed stare, and he said nothing for the rest of the session. Shiva was given a toy car, but instead of using it “functionally,” he spun its wheels again and again and issued a sly smile. Then he dropped the car without ceremony, went over to the light switch, found a screw right beneath it, and touched the screw while breathing deeply in and out. He spent the rest of the session caressing the fascinating screw.
If he were a novelist like the neo-Guatemalan and he had to write a chapter in a novel about what it was like to get the diagnosis, he would say it felt like being young again and being told for the first time that someone you loved didn’t love you back. He wasn’t thinking of anyone in particular, there were so many girls in his middle school that didn’t respond to the awkward advances of the Pool Man’s Son, as he was then known, and not until he excelled on the swim team and his shoulders filled out and he had finally mastered his friend moves did he start to find a tongue or two to entwine his own. But that’s what hearing the diagnosis was like. This feeling that the future you imagined with someone would, in all actuality, never exist.
They didn’t use the A-word anymore either. It was “spectrum” this and “spectrum” that. And “kids with Shiva’s profile.” Yes, there was a lot of “kids with Shiva’s profile” talk and all the therapies that could benefit such a class of children, nearly fifty hours of behavioral, speech, and occupational (whatever that was) therapy per week. Seema and Barry were too stunned to cry, too stunned to cry for several weeks, until a printed report arrived that said, in no uncertain words, that Shiva was not just “on the spectrum” but on the “severe” end of it.
Later at home, Barry held Seema for a small eternity, while, in the corner of his room, Shiva, in perfect calmness, looked past them, out the window, at the giant clockface of the Met Life Tower, the gears of his own mind either turning rapidly, or not.
* * *
—
“I LOVE what I do,” Barry was saying. “I think of it as an intellectual exercise.” They were twenty-three thousand dollars into the Karuizawa, which Luis had deemed “a little too rummy” for his tastes, but which he continued to drink avidly, often scratching his nose in pleasure after each inhale of booze.
“So in your own way, you add value,” he said.
“Exactly.”
“Enough to justify your compensation.”
“I find that people get hung up on the compensation part,” Barry said. “Okay, sure, we earn a lot by comparison, but the money is there as a scorecard. We don’t have the book awards, the Pulitzers, or whatnot, and we can’t keep track of our sales”—he paused meaningfully as if to remind the writer of his Amazon numbers—“so the money tells us who’s winning.”
“But couldn’t that wealth be better redistributed? How about after your first thirty million we give you a medal and tell you, ‘You won!’ And the rest goes to poor people.”
“I will posit that most poor people wouldn’t know what to do with substantial sums of money,” Barry said, much too loudly, the liquor stirring him up. “They’re very low information, and wealth can be confusing. In a sense, you have to train yourself to be wealthy.” Seema gave him a look from the opposite end of the couch, where she had been talking with the doctor about child-rearing. He knew Seema would never reveal Shiva’s diagnosis, just as she hadn’t to her parents or to her college friends, most of whom were still working in Internet sales while dating Brooklyn losers, and he wished she had someone other than Novie to confide in. It was easy for Seema’s parents to pretend that nothing was wrong. Einstein didn’t start talking until he was three, and Shiva was clearly going to show Einstein a thing or two. “Indian genes, Jewish genes, how can this boy be stopped?” her father had more than once remarked.
“Why don’t you cool it, Barry,” Seema said.
“My wife, the Democrat,” Barry said. “But of course, she’s way smarter than I. She’s the smartest and most beautiful woman I’ve ever met.” He looked around the room seeking their approval of his magnanimous declaration. The women went back to their hushed conversation.
“You were saying,” Luis reminded him, “that the poor wouldn’t know what to do with additional funds.”
“That was very inelegantly said and I take it back.”
“But do you know what to do with your money? We’re drinking two Hyundai Sonatas’ worth of whiskey tonight. But the only reason this whiskey has that price tag attached is that men like you can afford it.”
“And who does that hurt?” Barry said. “Who doesn’t win from this situation? The Japanese distillery? The whiskey merchant? You?”
“I just worry that the new signorial class distorts the picture for the rest of us. You create a world where anything but the utmost in wealth is seen as a moral failing.”
“But isn’t it?” Barry asked, quietly so that Seema wouldn’t overhear. “A moral failing? Maybe not in your Guatemala, where, as I’ve read in your book, there is absolutely no hope for anyone, but here in America. Half of the portfolio managers in my fund, half of them, are either immigrants or the children of immigrants. My wife’s an immigrant. Your wife’s an immigrant. Heck, you’re an immigrant. Of sorts.”
“But we’re different kinds of immigrants. We’re not the traditional arrived-by-steamer-with-three-suitcases or scampered–over–the–Rio Grande kind of immigrants. Our parents came here with college degrees.”
Aha! The Zillow price was about to be explained. “So your parents were wealthy.”
“Not at all. They were schoolteachers.”
“Both of them?” Luis nodded. Barry looked at the Hong Kong doctor. “And—” He still couldn’t remember her name.
“Her dad worked as an accountant at the Fulton Fish Market and her mom was a nurse.”
“And still, you can afford all this,” Barry said, sweeping his arm around the living area, which was half the size of his own and faced not the majestic clock of the Met Life Tower and the whole of the glowing Midtown skyline behind it, but rather something ill lit called Schnippers, which he didn’t know what
it was despite passing it every day, maybe a deli or something. Still…“SOLD: $3,800,000. Sold on 11/23/15. Zestimate: $4,100,000.” “Your books must be doing very well,” Barry said.
Luis and the doctor both laughed. “I think Seema is the only person I’ve met who has randomly read Luis,” the doctor said. “I almost couldn’t believe it!”
“It’s true,” Luis said. “I’m what they call a ‘writer’s writer.’ ” He took a long drag of the rummy Karuizawa. “This bottle cost about half of my last advance,” he said, thoughtfully.
Barry was confused. “So how do you, uh, monetize your art?”
“Well, here’s the thing,” Luis said. “I do have some admirers in university departments, Latino studies, Jewish studies, multicultural studies. My peg fits a few holes. And so they often ask me to do a reading for the students and the community.”
“And they pay you for it,” Barry said.
“Yes, quite handsomely.”
“How handsomely?”
“Barry!” he heard from Seema. “Shut up about money already. We’re not on your trading floor.”
“Obscenely handsomely,” Luis said, his green eyes sparkling in the reduced, urbane light. “Up to twenty thousand dollars for a twenty-minute reading.”
“I see,” Barry said. “I see.” The whiskey now tasted sour and pointless in his mouth. “So you must be very popular for that amount of money. Twenty thousand people must come to your readings.”
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