The whole idea of marriage now seemed insane. His fund had an initial lockup period during which investors couldn’t withdraw their money no matter how much of it Barry lost, but that period was a mere two years. Marriage was supposed to be a lifetime. At one point Barry thought he could handle it, but what if he couldn’t?
The sky above Barry was endless. There was an intense clarity to everything, as if he were surrounded by holy truth.
In the near distance across from the bus terminal, a large building that could have been the library of a state college was festooned with the words HORSESHOE CASINO and attached to it was a Holiday Inn Express. Barry could rest his tired head there, and soak off the rest of the hangover that was sure to come.
Outside the station, exhausted-looking black men were standing at a local bus stop, wearing bags across their shoulders, their caps turned backward. At least three of them were on motorized wheelchairs jerking around the broiling tarmac. Barry trailed his rollerboard past them until he found an entrance to the Holiday Inn Express amid some unwell shrubs.
The two black men behind the desk were dressed in Orioles T-shirts. “Checking in,” Barry said.
“Say that again?” one of the men said.
Barry repeated himself.
“There’s some kind of altercation on the third floor, room three fifteen,” said the other man with deep indifference.
A short yellow-skinned black man ran into the lobby. The ridge of his nose had been broken and spurts of blood webbed his freckled face. A taller black man walked behind in languid pursuit. “You do not disrespect me!” the short man screamed back at him, his face bleeding all over his Ravens V-neck and his tight blue shorts. “You do not disrespect me! Call the police!”
The men behind the desk in the Orioles T-shirts did not seem to warm to the idea. One of them made half the motion of shrugging.
“He disrespected me!” the first man shouted.
His friend called him Sean. “Sean, calm down,” he said. “Calm down, Sean.”
Barry put down his heavy black Amex with its unlimited purchasing power, but he got the sense that nothing would impress the Baltimorean hotel clerks. A middle-aged white woman next to him was checking in with nothing but a hair dryer in her hand. Sean, the short, bleeding man, left the hotel lobby still screaming about being disrespected, and his larger friend followed him out, asking him, with great fortitude, to remain calm.
Barry’s room on the third floor had an unbroken view of the monolithic immensity of the Horseshoe Casino and of the sliver of downtown skyscrapers beyond. In the shadows of the Horseshoe, Sean chased his assailant. Then they would stop for a while, pant heavily, and his assailant would chase him back.
Barry laughed. It was all so fucking ridiculous. His first laugh in private in as long as he could remember. Nobody cared about his black Amex and nobody cared about Sean’s bleeding face and nobody cared that his son was severely autistic and nobody cared that his marriage was over and nobody cared about the Valupro fiasco and nobody cared about what would befall the woman checking in with only a hair dryer in her hand as the morning rolled into day. The immensity of the land was too big for any of these concerns.
Barry had broken free of the surly bonds of his own life.
He had been granted refuge in America.
BY THE time they put Shiva down it was already 5:00 A.M., and his first therapist of the day—the occupational therapist whose job was to help Shiva “locate his own body in space”—came at eight, so what did that give her? Three hours? Without a proper Xanax-Ativan smoothie, she would never sleep. And so much for benzos, now that a second boy lay in her womb.
It was 6:00 A.M. The building had a proper marble lobby, but she couldn’t face the possibility of running into Julianna or Luis, not after what had happened last night. She left through the service entrance and walked briskly to a coffee shop on Third Avenue, whose name she had forgotten. She forgot the names of places the way Barry forgot the names of women. It was the most nothing place in the city, bad omelets, bad coffee, but it reminded her of the suburban diner near her childhood home in Cleveland Heights, where her parents had settled in the seventies, almost a decade after America started welcoming Asians by the planeload.
She ate a bowl of despicable oatmeal in silence, her head thrumming in her unwashed palm. She wanted a cigarette, too. And the benzos, oh, God, the benzos. She got a text from their chef, Mariana, asking her what time she wanted her egg whites. Nothing from Barry. And if he thought she would send him a message, well, he knew better than that.
Three fortyish women in gym clothes came in and sat down with their back to Seema to have their shit-bowls of coffee before their workouts, because all the decent places with the Intelligentsia beans were still closed. Seema tried to keep track of their conversation, but their voices merged into one urgent, caffeinated din. “Modern dance at Morris for a year but it kind of sucked…Anytime the girls walk in there, they have tons of friends…Stephen liked to hunt…SoulCycle…Jackson Hole…We should do something else fun with Barbara…Kid looks just like him, but shorter and chubbier…Stephen’s under a lot of stress…We had Nutcracker tickets…Barbara made fruit salad, whipped cream from scratch…Stephen didn’t mean to…We went from the Nutcracker straight to LaGuardia…He thought he left his backpack in the cab, but it was at school…Thoroughly exhausted…And with Stephen yelling like that…It was like a socialist country, everyone gets on the plane at the same time…What a clusterfuck…Poor Barbara, one of her kids is autistic, and the other goes to BU.”
Seema laughed loudly and, to her surprise, genuinely. The women didn’t even notice. They just kept at it. A small New York mercy. She sat there for what might have been hours listening to their song of anger and surprise, which could have been subtitled “We Have No Idea Whom We Married,” and which, despite all that she had let herself believe for the last four whirlwind years, was now her song as well.
* * *
—
SHE WENT back up through the service entrance. A morning fog hung around Madison Park, which felt like an unwelcome reflection of her own mind. Only Shiva’s beloved Metropolitan Life clock tower stood tall through the miasma.
“He had trouble sleeping last night,” she told Bianca, the occupational therapist, a pretty young girl from the Bronx whose care for Shiva rivaled her own. Novie rolled her eyes, but Seema shook her head to quiet the nanny. “Nightmares,” she said, hopefully imbuing Shiva with the inner life the literature now unanimously said he had.
“Poor pumpkin,” Bianca said, softly brushing the darkness beneath Shiva’s eyes. She sat him on a ball that had tiny ribs and indentations, designed to stimulate his sense of touch, and bounced him up and down, increasing the tempo as they went. Shiva smiled and flapped his arms. Bianca smiled back. Novie smiled. And Seema smiled, too. Here was this twenty-eight-pound kid, surrounded by three lovely smiling women, bouncing in the air.
With that image as her fuel, Seema went to her office down the hall and began to figure out some next steps. Every morning was a series of next steps. There was a special swimming pool at NYU for kids “with his profile,” and a sensory gym at a school nearby. Barry had hired her a personal assistant, some twelve-year-old who just popped out of Wesleyan, but Seema wanted to handle Shiva on her own, and so the assistant had been set free. She looked through the stacks of reports from the last week. The continued lack of speech was highlighted. On every single sheet was the word “Noncompliance.” Shiva would not do what he was told. He could not follow basic directions, possibly could not understand such instruction. Noncompliance. Like father, like son. She really needed that cigarette.
What would Luis’s face feel like beneath her plush palms, the warm scrub of it, that richly endowed chin? She knew Barry had failed to notice every single sideward glance Seema had cast his way, the silent smile they exchanged in the perfect forty-seven heartb
eats it took Julianna to show Barry to the bathroom. The only time Barry would get jealous is when a richer man entered the room and took full libidinous stock of Seema, like his friend the Miami billionaire with the impressionist collection, as if she would ever touch that walking carbuncle of a man.
Novie knocked. “Sorry to disturb,” she said, “but I just feel like I have to say.”
Seema sighed. She pointed to the papers on her desk to indicate that she was slammed with work.
“Mr. Barry, he’s not right,” Novie said. “I think, maybe you should call somebody.”
The prow of the Flatiron Building floated through the fog several hundred feet below Seema’s office. How she used to love this view, possibly the best in New York, the very reason she had convinced Barry to live here and not in some aircraft hangar in Tribeca.
“This is something I can take care of on my own,” Seema said.
Novie shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “All I care about is Shiva.”
“And I don’t?” This came out much too loudly. But then again, she was being given life advice by a woman who had twice declared that you could get HIV from a banana.
“Sometimes the wife don’t see things because she still loves so much.”
This from someone who thought their alcoholic doorman would make a perfect life partner.
“Let’s put a pin in that,” Seema said, leaving her nanny to look up the expression on her tablet. She walked into some minor bathroom, splashed water under her armpits, went back to the office, put Shiva’s paperwork into the monogrammed satchel her mother had bought her for L1 at Yale, changed her T-shirt to something from the swag bag of a Robin Hood Foundation gala, took the elevator down, and walked out of the service entrance onto Twenty-third Street.
* * *
—
THE HAMBURGER scent of Shake Shack had made the southeast corner of Madison Park a Brahman nightmare for Seema. Lately she had cut down on the red meat, and even the chicken. Recently she had been seeing a lot of young desi couples, and while the idea of marrying her own kind had always revolted her, in times of trouble it made an awful kind of sense. Barry’s Judaism was a nothing. He supported Israel with great bouts of inarticulate noise, the way some of her relatives still held a candle for the lost Tamil cause in Sri Lanka. She had picked up more on his religion from her past Jewish boyfriends—yes, there had been several—than he had in years of being a Jew. She remembered his genuine surprise upon hearing from her the concept of tikkun olam, or “repairing the world.” “Neat,” he had said, whereas when her first boyfriend at Michigan explained it to her at a Hillel soup-kitchen event, she had found herself so moved, she couldn’t figure out if she was in love with him or the immovability of his past. There had to be a Hindu equivalent to tikkun olam, but she had been too busy with her 4.13 average and charity work and law-school applications to figure out what it was.
She avoided the part of the park where the Filipina nannies all gathered, Tagaloging among themselves with cries of “Loco loco!” and engaging in an endless competition over who had raised the fattest baby. Novie had once proudly told her that the nannies compared all their households’ net worths on the Internet, and that for at least a month she and Barry had come out on top. The second-worst part of that was how proud she had been of Barry. And the worst part? How proud she had been of herself.
She settled in among a gaggle of Caribbean nannies. The paperwork was soothing. The feel of her mother’s folio against her bare knees calmed her. When she had told her mother about Barry, her mother had treated their engagement like it was her due. Like it was one of two acceptable choices, a white-shoe law firm partnership being the other one. Holding the leather folio, probably scored at the sad Dillard’s at Cleveland’s overblown Tower City Center, was almost like none of this had happened. She hadn’t met Barry, had gone on to Cravath after the Eastern District, was living in Fort Greene with her friends, Netflixing away the first half of the night, snoring heavily through the second, working the daylight hours silly. She couldn’t believe that Barry was considering bundling for Hillary to get her a job with the AG. “So you would have something other than Shiva to live for,” he had said. Were all men separated from their children and wives by an invisible ribbon of cluelessness?
Seema reviewed the checklist for Shiva. He was ranked for everything from engagement to mobility to speech to fine motor skills to just fucking breathing and being generally alive. Next to each box, the physical, occupational, and speech therapists had written down his age of development. He was three years and one month, or thirty-seven months, but most of his metrics were scored at fourteen, ten, sometimes seven months, basically at the level of a half-year-old infant. Only his gross motor was age appropriate. Shiva ran across the apartment faster than Novie. You could close your eyes and he’d cover half the floor-sized apartment in one tormented screech.
Seema looked up from the checklist. What if Barry was right? What if the immensity of her task pleased her? What if she was like him, except, instead of four monitors blasting the Hang Seng and the Baltic Dry Index, she needed this challenge to feel like she mattered?
The classical, almost Venetian proportions of the park were dwarfed by their own tower and a similar glass pile going up next door, but this was New York, not Paris. This was the vitality of their class, and a part of her loved it. Jesus Christ. All these thoughts. How to stop them? Would one cigarette, something slutty and mentholated, really kill her second baby boy?
And then she saw him. Just like that. Sitting on a bench across from her, a steady stream of orbital Bugaboos and lesser Maclarens separating them. He was pretending to read a book, its cover replete with dollar signs, a downward sloping graph, a title filled with invective, something about Wall Street. He smiled at her. He was wearing shorts that exposed the Barry-like furriness of his legs and a T-shirt with the lowercase letter m atop a tractor. Mina Kim, her still sort of best friend in Williamsburg, would probably know what that meant. Seema should probably smile back, point at her watch—a five-dollar Timex she kept at the bottom of her vanity when she wanted to truly fuck with Barry—and run back to Shiva and his therapists, the predictable stylish sweep of her floor-through, and the Flatiron Building beneath them, where it belonged.
He was sitting next to her in an instant. His gross motor skills were apparently as good as Shiva’s. And her fine motor skills? She shuddered and actually covered one half-naked leg with the other. Breathe!
“Hey, what’s up?” Luis said. Of course, that’s what he’d say. Why couldn’t he be living in farthest Brooklyn with the rest of his social class, away from her and her ruined family? He smelled darkly of cigarettes.
“Hey,” Seema said.
“Damn, it’s hot,” he said.
She quickly hid the pages relating to Shiva’s diagnosis, then made a show of fanning herself with a sheet of blank paper.
“Hey, thanks for coming down to dinner last night. I know you guys are super busy.”
“Are you kidding?” Seema said. “I can’t believe you would even want to speak to me after what happened.”
“You mean the ‘fuck you’?” he said.
“For starters. Poor Julianna. I was going to write her a letter of apology.”
“Oh, she can take it,” Luis said. “She did her residency in St. Louis. She’s seen it all.”
“Well, it was a shitty thing to question your identity,” Seema said.
“You can’t blame Barry,” he said. “You either get it or you don’t. He’s not an immigrant like us.”
“I was born in Ohio,” Seema said. Assuming that she was born abroad because she was Indian was a major faux pas, the kind of thing that Barry’s white colleagues were habitually guilty of.
But Luis just shrugged. “Do you mind if I smoke?” he asked. He took out what looked like a Nat Sherman with a honey-scented clove tip
—did they still make those?—and lit up with a filmic gesture, as if he were the Spanish James Bond on the poster above his living room couch.
“I’ve got to go home,” Seema said. “This is really embarrassing, but I need a shower.”
Luis leaned in closely. There was honey and clove on his breath along with the disgusting life-taking tobacco. There was an Uncle Nag in Bombay she and her sister adored, who briefly flirted with a film career and actually had a small role in a commercial for a skin whitener. He was handsome, but his real strength was that Nag looked like he could do or, more important, say anything. This was Luis. He owned his words.
“You smell really great to me,” he said. His eyes were upon hers and hers were in flight. “Let’s have lunch,” he said.
“I really have to get going,” she said.
“I haven’t showered either,” he said, quite proudly. “Come on, two huddled smelly immigrants, yearning—”
“I’m not an immigrant!”
“Sure.” His large hand was upon her elbow, and they stood together. His wrists were thick and veined, and she knew what an IWC Pilot’s Watch was, and how Barry wished he had the circumference to wear one.
“Let’s invite Julianna,” Seema said. This was a strategy she usually used with grosser men.
“Are you kidding?” Luis said. “With her schedule? I see her like once a month. I’m basically the put-upon house husband. Have you seen Mad Men? I’m Betty Draper.”
They left the park chatting about Trump. Seema liked that Luis had to bend down at least half a foot just to talk to her. It wasn’t only that he was tall, it was that his height made him a bit clumsy, and that was sweet. They continued to talk about Trump on autopilot, the way people were doing that summer. All of a sudden, Seema wanted to say something real. “When things are tough with my family,” she said, “I like to watch Trump, because he just takes my mind off stuff. No matter what happens personally, there’s this much greater disaster taking place.”
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