Lake Success

by Gary Shteyngart

  They passed into South Carolina, firework stores and adult-video emporiums. The land was both rural and industrial, sunburned and tired. Unlike North Carolina’s green streams, the rivers here were brown and murky, the shrubs by the side of the road looked like they had been dazed stupid by the sun. When Barry closed his eyes, he dreamed of fried chicken and banana pudding. He saw a fresh stream of Dasani water—they didn’t seem to have any Fiji or Evian in Greyhound Land—trickle into his mouth.

  They passed signs for Fair Play, Seneca, and Walhalla, cleared the Cherokee Foothills, and crossed over into Georgia. The acres of late-model BMWs, both shimmering on lots and glistening on the road, told them they were approaching Atlanta. They passed Jimmy Carter Boulevard. How Barry’s father hated that man, because of Israel or Iran or something. A billboard advertised HAIR TRANSPLANTS AT $2 A GRAFT, another ACTORS, MODELS & TALENT FOR CHRIST along with a photo of two saved hotties, a boy and a girl, rocking out to the Lord. Every other billboard was for Delta.

  An African cabdriver picked him up from the station and drove him from Downtown to Midtown and up Peachtree, Atlanta’s spine. After he paid him, he had $740 to his name. Barry could barely get out of the cab. His whole body was shaking.

  The concierge in Jeff’s building was an Ethiopian woman who might have been the most attractive creature on some top-shelf planet in Alpha Centauri. Every part of her body belonged in a better place. She looked at Barry with concern, her eyes as big as moons over a desert. He looked down at himself. His face itched with stubble. His body itched from the bus. His Vineyard Vines shirt was torn in such a way that one collar listed to the side. On the Greyhound you could look like that if you were a white meth head, but this was a luxury building called the Vantage on Peachtree.

  Barry tried to smile, but it came out as something else. He tried to raise his arms, feeling the billows of his once-crisp Vineyard Vines. The Ethiopian goddess was asking him a series of questions, but he did not know the answers offhand. He did not know whom he was visiting. He was not sure if he had come to deliver a package. And he did not know his own name.

  He leaned over her desk and felt the muscles knot in his shoulders. “Water,” he said. She couldn’t hear him. He tried it louder, but the effort was too much. Someone or something had smacked the back of his head and he was looking up at a tall, well-lit atrium, like a megachurch in heaven.

  SHIVA THREW a stapler into his nanny’s face. For someone little aware of his own body’s journey through space, his aim had been impeccable. Novie needed six stitches above her left brow, and while his nanny was proud of her looks, she took comfort in knowing her Christmas bonus would be tripled and Seema would deliver an hour-long lecture on how she should keep the money and invest it in low-cost index funds instead of sending it back to the Philippines.

  “Please don’t leave us,” Seema had begged her the next morning. “You’re all I have left.” The words were meant to be as melodramatic as anything Novie watched on her tablet, but even Seema herself did not expect them to sound so pathetic. She started sobbing.

  The nanny didn’t know what to do. Her boss never cried. “It will be okay,” she said. “He’ll come back.” Which was the opposite of Novie’s usual “You should call someone,” meaning a lawyer, but who cared at that point. Maybe it would be better if Barry came home. And then what? Every time the phone rang she sighed with relief when a string of numbers appeared on the screen. The last time the agent had called, it was a blocked number. She hung up as soon as she realized he was from the Bureau. She knew what he was going to say next. The video on her iPhone. Sardinia.

  “Tell Novie you’re sorry,” Seema told her son, not knowing exactly how that would work, but, for the first time in a while, the boy smiled brightly at both of them, or at least past both of them. Was he taunting them? She couldn’t hate him. No, she could not. None of this was his fault. None.

  Over the past few weeks, all Shiva’s therapists had begun voicing concerns that he was becoming increasingly “dysregulated.” Whatever progress had been achieved was being reversed. The one time last winter he had picked up his sippy cup and drank from it on his own was now relegated to the category of “miracles.” Even his pointing had stopped. Was it because Seema was seeing Luis? Could Shiva sense this? What did he know? An increasing body of literature on the subject, some of it written by adults on the spectrum themselves, told Seema that Shiva knew and sensed quite a bit.

  Seema knew she had to let go of the idea of a perfect, “normal” child. To find strength. To develop, as one book urged her, a sense of adventure and wonder. But what if she wasn’t qualified to be the parent of an autistic child? What if the fact that her nanny almost lost an eye did not inspire adventure and wonder, but anger, helplessness, and shame? What if she was, in some horrible, selfish way, just not a great person? Maybe, if she had gone to Cravath after her clerkship like she had planned and not met Barry, she could have been a great lawyer, but not necessarily Sidd-fucking-hartha at the end of his fat boy journey.

  But this was all just self-involved nonsense. The real news was that she was two months pregnant and she was working overtime to find extra love for the little boy inside her. And what if there wasn’t enough? Plus her body was changing. After Barry stopped loving her and Shiva’s problems became clear, she actually lost more weight, a whole range of downtown boutiques suddenly opening up to her black card. But now her belly looked like a half-empty fanny pack.

  Luis noticed. They had started taking a room at the Gramercy Park Hotel, an unspectacular, overpriced room in which they would go down on each other and then use the keys to private Gramercy Park to complete some midday fondling behind the privet shrubbery. The Gramercy was his idea, even though she picked up the considerable check. It was a storied, slightly musty boutique hotel, and it felt old, almost European.

  The lack of actual intercourse was scorching, in ways both good and bad. There was something to look forward to, something still left for her twenty-nine-year-old self to enjoy, and when it came to oral sex, he just cleaned her out. One day he brought up “rimming,” and she had to look it up on her phone. “What kind of millennial are you?” he asked, before commencing. It tickled and wasn’t much fun, and was actually kind of embarrassing. But right after, without even bothering to use the mouthwash in the old Gramercy bathroom, he reached over and cupped her stomach. “You’re getting a little quinoa belly,” he said.

  She threw his hand off and turned away, the heat rising up to her forehead. “What?” Luis said. “It’s cute! Come on, you’re the last person I’d expect to have body issues.”

  “What the fuck does that mean?”

  They fought for a bit, but it died down fast enough. He told her his wife’s lack of breasts and ass always made him sad and, losing all the female solidarity Michigan and Yale had bestowed upon her, Seema let those words elbow out her own sadness.

  “I want to celebrate your belly,” Luis said, and he bent down and kissed the small tapered form that held Barry’s second child, and that was just too much. She ran to the bathroom.

  In bed, over the next few days, she tried to tell him who she was. Sometimes he listened. But only when it seemed like he needed a detail to go into some giant file labeled “Women, North American, Asian & Pacific Islander, wealthy.” Perversely enough, he perked up whenever she talked about Barry, about her relationship with his money, about his relationship with money, about their relationship with money together. It was as if he pictured this giant mass of money floating on the horizon, and two ill-defined shapes were sticking out of that mass, and they were named Seema and Barry. What if, without Barry, she just wasn’t interesting enough to care about? Still, she kept trying, hoping her family’s immigrant roots would make her more fascinating to him.

  She told him the best thing about growing up was watching Indian grandmas rock out to Jay-Z’s remix of Panjabi MC at weddings, this perfect cr
ash landing of one culture onto another. And the worst thing was that caricature of a Gujarati shopkeeper, Apu, on The Simpsons (“Do Apu!” Her friends would beg her to imitate his accent), who made her treble her efforts at being cool, begging her mom to buy her a crop top at the Great Northern Mall and blasting “I don’t want no scrub” from her father’s Dodge, the windows rolled down, when he dropped her off at school. She told him the way her father always said “Hut!” which was this British thing, perhaps, and was both loving and scolding. Oh, and “level best,” as in “Just do your level best.” She loved her mother just enough; she loved her father ninefold. She talked about taking all those bharata natya dance classes for girls at the temple over in Parma, and how, even though she sucked at them, the camaraderie of fellow desi girls, their out-of-control hair all tied up with fresh flowers, because one of the fathers was a florist up by Great Northern, was so nice. “We were all trying so hard to assimilate back then; I just wish Shiva would have more Tamil heritage,” she said, before stopping herself.

  “Can you do that dance now?” Luis said, breathing hard, his brow still glistening from that afternoon’s exertions.

  “Um, I’m naked,” Seema said. “I don’t think that would be right. It’s, like, a ritual. A spiritual one.” He looked so disappointed, she added, “Maybe if I put on some clothes, I can try.” He showed no interest.

  She asked him about his own “heritage,” but he told her Cambridge, Mass, was not a heritage. What about his Guatemalan stuff? “You can read my books for that.” She turned away from him. “I miss my dad.” He said this whenever he knew he was being a jerk, because she put her arms around him and kissed his neck.

  She decided to try something bold, getting Mina and Luis together. Wasn’t that a part of being young, introducing your secret beau to your friends? Nothing would signal more to both Mina and Luis how much she wanted a new life for herself.

  Luis was not receptive to the idea, especially of going all the way out to Brooklyn, which he said was just lousy with trust-funders (as opposed to what, Manhattan?) and had overrated restaurants. Fine, she would let him choose the venue for their “sit-down.” He chose a place right off Tompkins Square Park, a bar that exclusively served canned Basque seafood. “Okaaaay,” Mina said when told of Luis’s selection.

  Luis was forty minutes late. Forty minutes. Not that he was trying to make a point or anything. Seema found her forehead again overheating and every muscle in her face striving for composure as if she were about to take the New York State Bar all over again. She owed Novie a couple of nights of trying to put Shiva down by herself, and here she was trying to impress her best friend with her lover, or maybe the other way around.

  Of course, he didn’t apologize for being late. “Hey,” he said to Seema and kissed her chastely on the forehead.

  “We were going to order for you, but we didn’t know what you wanted,” Seema said with prosecutorial anger. “Canned seafood. Yum. Everything looked so good.”

  “Touché.” Luis shrugged.

  “I can already tell, you guys are hilarious together,” Mina said.

  Luis ordered sea cockles, razor clams, and bonito tuna out of a can. “I think this is from Galicia, not from the Basque Country,” he said after his first few bites of fish. He seemed genuinely concerned.

  The conversation was terrible. They talked about the election, and Luis suggested that no matter who won our country would continue to serve as “the roast beef in a global shit sandwich.”

  Mina’s cheeks had turned a brilliant red after just one Basque beer. “You can afford not to freak out about Trump because you’re a white male,” she said.

  “How do you know what I am?” Luis said.

  “Yeah, whatever, Luis. I’m calling bullshit on you, cracker.”

  Luis laughed. They were perched on these backless barstools. Seema could feel two serious indentations building into the curves of her ass. She was constantly checking her phone for messages from Novie, but either Shiva was at his best or the Christmas bonus was going to be in the mid–six figures. Mina and Luis continued to talk at each other about identity politics, taking turns calling each other racist, their voices rising and falling, falling and rising, and Seema felt excluded, even lonely. But when they walked out of the restaurant, Mina whispered to Seema, “Now that’s more like it.”

  “What?”

  “I lurve him,” Mina said. That probably meant “love” in Williamsburg.

  “Are you kidding me? I was drafting an apology text to you in the bathroom.”

  “He’s brilliant.”

  Seema kissed her friend’s scarlet cheek. Later she texted Luis about Mina, and he replied, SHE’S OK, which was, from him, the highest of praise.

  That night, Seema lay in the bed she used to share with her husband with a glass of the forty-thousand-dollar-a-bottle Japanese whiskey she had liberated from Barry’s whiskey cave. She deserved it. Since meeting Luis, she had been very careful with where she allowed her imagination to roam, but tonight was go time. He would leave his wife, that was obvious. He would see Shiva as just a part of the human condition, “different, not less,” as Temple Grandin, the world’s most famous autistic person, had said, and Arturo, that three-year-old extrovert, would do his best to be a good brother to his challenging new sibling. She would have a child with Luis, his relatively fresh thirty-something sperm would bind with her eggs without problems. They would each have one child from previous marriages, and one together. Seema brushed her tongue against her teeth. She had to admit that even the sea cockle, or whatever the fuck it was, had tasted delicious, like sex in a San Sebastian hotel. She might start working again, but she would definitely need the best divorce lawyer to have ever graduated from one of the T14 law schools. Whatever Luis earned would not be enough, and she just couldn’t picture the lifetime of suffering and worry required just to cling to the upper-middle class in New York City. God, what was wrong with her? Her hand found its way to the muddle of cells atop her pubic bone. Yes, and there was that.

  Seema had always wanted to have a husband and a child she could hold. Family was about physical closeness. When they were kids, her younger sister, Shilpa, loved having her sister’s arms around her. Seema loved to cling to her father’s musky neck as they played horsey in their small University Heights cape. She spent her high-school summers in Bombay, where the proximity of others felt like instant sisterhood. Barry was always deathly claustrophobic when she tried to embrace him. The couples therapist Seema had once dragged them to, a heavyset Jewish woman in a Central Park West basement, had suggested that could be a sign of Barry’s own diagnosis. He actually kept a log of the seconds each watch in his collection lost and gained every day. How was that not on the spectrum? As for Shiva, the only thing you could touch him with was a soft horsehair brush that was used to regulate him upon waking and before bedtime or anytime he had a meltdown. Seema desperately wanted the simple pleasure of feeling her boy in her arms. If she could, would she even need Luis? She quashed that question and finished her whiskey. I’m sorry, she whispered to the unfortunate creature within her.

  * * *

  —

  THE NEXT day, she ran into Julianna in the lobby. Arturo was hopping all around her with a handmade turkey puppet. “Hi, Aunt Seema!” he cried. How could he possibly remember her name from just one meeting? When the Goodmans’ nanny came down to pick up Arturo, he actually threw his arms around her like in the movies. His eye contact was perfect to the point of being creepy.

  “Do you want to go grab lunch?” Julianna asked her. She looked stressed out, maybe from work, as her bland Theory clothes seemed to suggest. Shouldn’t a doctor be wearing something more medical?

  Against all common sense, they decided to eat outside at this Lebanese wrap place that sat at the intersection of Broadway and Fifth, right outside the tristate hubbub of Mario Batali’s Eataly. Julianna took off he
r jacket and threw it over her cheap metal chair. Her body was minimalist. Was that what Luis preferred? He had claimed otherwise when they were in bed.

  “I’m worried about Arturo,” Julianna said.

  “Are you kidding me? He’s a dream child. He knows all the words to the bumblebee song.” That was passive-aggressive. They had ordered Beiruti chickpea salads and water. Tourists would stop three feet away from them and break their necks looking up at the Flatiron Building, which seemed transported from a different and better time. Yellow cabs and double-decker sightseeing buses honked at one another, and the air smelled like grilled meat in summer. “He’s sociable. And that’s important. But he’s lagging cognitively. Well, not lagging, but he’s only in the top ten percent.” Seema tried hard not to hate her, but it was impossible. The Beiruti chickpeas tasted inauthentic.

  “You know how hard it is,” Julianna said. “If he doesn’t do well, forget Hunter, forget Ethical Heritage, we’re talking maybe Bright and Happy Schoolhouse. And their HYPMS is what?”

  “PMS?” Seema asked innocently.

  “HYPMS. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Stanford. The good schools can already tell you what percentage of their kindergarten class will get into one of those five. Brearley’s is thirty-seven percent. Of course, that’s an all-girls school. You know, I don’t want to sound like one of those Manhattan moms. I just want him to have options.”