Options. Was this the sliver of society, the meaningfully affluent but not rich, that she had opted out of when she married Barry? If so, hallelujah! “I went to Michigan,” Seema said. “And I turned out all right.” Julianna stared at her, obviously not knowing what to say. Michigan, her eyes suggested.
“And I went to Yale Law from there. See, it all works out.”
Julianna smiled. “I know,” she said. “There are many”—she searched for the word—“paths. Thanks for taking the time out to talk to me. You’re very calming. We immigrant—” Unlike Luis, she stopped herself from proclaiming Seema an immigrant. “Those of us who come from certain backgrounds, well, you know it never ends, right? Parents.” A large Poland Spring truck had stalled at the intersection, and cabbies were leaning out of their vehicles to yell at it.
“Do you and Luis plan on having more kids?” Seema asked, even though the wrong answer would kill her.
“Ha,” Julianna said. “Like one isn’t one too many in New York.” Seema nodded in agreement. She could now sort of see why Luis liked her or, at least, the stressed-out version of himself that gave a shit about things like child-rearing. Seema needed to make more female friends, though maybe not her lover’s wife. She had this strange feeling that she could confide in Julianna about Shiva’s diagnosis, and that maybe this was a way for it to filter back to Luis. No, she had to tell him in person. She had to see his face. “Anyway,” Julianna said, “I’m doing a lot of epidemiological work in Brazil, so now might not be the best time to get pregnant.”
Seema chewed on the last of her fried Levantine chickpeas. Her new friend was working on Zika. She was on the front lines of a global crisis, just like Seema’s younger sister, that Doctor Without a Border, although Shilpa was just doing GP stuff over in Nepal. (“Great, Nepal, you’re almost back from where your grandparents started,” her mom had said when she was told of Shilpa’s posting.) And here was Julianna, worrying about her son’s ninetieth-percentile cognitive scores while working twenty-hour days to keep the apocalypse at bay.
Seema picked up her phone. I WANT YOU INSIDE ME 2MORRO, she texted Luis.
OK was the instantaneous reply.
And then: 8AM? GRAMERCY?
“Listen,” Julianna said, reaching for her own phone. “Before we get the bill, we are scheduling a playdate with our kids.” She started scrolling through her calendar. “They’re all girls in Arturo’s class, which is cute, but he needs to play with boys too. What do they call it? Roughhousing?”
Julianna scrolled through her machine. Seema didn’t know what to say, but knew she had to say something.
“Sure,” she said.
* * *
—
WHEN SEEMA got home, she threw off her blouse and just left it in the foyer for Jamilla or the new girl to pick up. Wearing only her bra and jeans, she went to the kitchen to find Shiva sitting by the dishwasher. He kept flicking through its modes by turning a knob, DRY, ECO DRY, FAST DRY, and then minute settings, 30, 60, 90, 120. Each beep of the machine, each change of the display, thrilled him. The eye contact between him and the LCD display was unwavering, the bond between him and the dishwasher so perfect that the rest of the world need not have existed.
Novie was in her own world, too, scouring Shiva’s sippy cups by hand, because she had some issues with the dishwasher when it came to her charge’s tableware. She filled them with milk and water, while singing what Seema thought might be a Christian hymn, the melody so familiar and yet not. Seema loved her. Novie could have found another job, with a less-fucked-up family, for similar pay, and yet she stayed on.
Seema dawdled there, her child and nanny oblivious to her presence. She held her naked belly in both hands, that foreign mass of cells, imagining what the four of them might be like: herself, Novie, Shiva, and maybe another boy on the spectrum, another Shiva. For a moment she was filled with this new love. And then she exhaled all that melancholy warmth and resumed her day.
BARRY WAS trying to focus, but at what? Shapes began to materialize. Circles. Triangles. Three panels in outrageously bright colors. It was that squiggly AIDS painter guy from the 1980s. A figure fell into his head. Something he had once discussed with Seema at a gallery. One-point-eight million. Okay. He was on a bed. He was hungry, but at the same time beyond hunger. He turned his head. There were magazines displayed on a nightstand: a Bentley mag and a Patek Philippe mag and a Nat Geo. He scanned the room quickly. The rollerboard with his watches and Shiva’s rabbit toy and the passport were neatly placed at the foot of the bed. There was also a glass coffee table topped with a bottle of Fiji water, a jar of salted almonds, and familiar-looking bars of 70 percent cocoa Chocolat Madagascar. Barry crawled the length of the bed to the coffee table. He began stuffing the food into his mouth, the nuts and chocolate crunching sweet and bitter over his tongue, pouring the water into his mouth. He burped ferociously, his whole being coming back to life.
The lights and blinds were all Lutron and a small closet concealed the obligatory Crestron rack for the audiovisuals, scattered among boxes of Lanvin sneakers. He peed his heart out into a Porcelanosa. The hand soap was by Molton Brown. He was definitely off the Hound and back in hedgeworld. This guest room, if that’s what it was, was far better curated than the guest room Seema had put together. Jeff Park must have married well.
Barry was wearing a T-shirt with the words GEORGIA AQUARIUM across the chest and the photograph of a whale shark. Someone had changed him out of his Vineyard Vines. The Park wife again? Barry pressed the Lutron button to raise the blinds, and Atlanta appeared before him, the customary Wells Fargo and BB&T Tower, but also some old-fashioned RKO-style antennas and a deeply undistinguished 1970s edifice that scanned as Coca-Cola HQ. He could see the city still brimmed with underused space, acres of lots that called out for condos and hotels. Barry looked around for his sneakers, but they were not there. He had been in Asian households before and was familiar with their war on shoes.
A corridor of chilled marble emptied into a huge living space, and there Barry felt a burst of old pre-Greyhound hedgeworld jealousy. The living room was as palatial as the entrance to a modest New York museum. Enormous golden lights hung from the ceiling, which was at least twenty feet high—he knew the company that made them, Seema liked their work, but their ceilings back in the city were not high enough. Judging simply by the measurements of the great room, he would size the apartment at forty-five hundred square feet, minimum. This from a guy Akash Singh had fired from This Side of Capital, a guy who had to clear out his desk within an hour, a security guard hulking in the corner, watching his every move. He tried to console himself with the fact that Atlanta property, even at its gilded peak, would still cost a third of New York’s. Okay, let’s say forty-five hundred square feet at five hundred a foot, that would be what, just two bucks and a quarter? In New York, anything below five million didn’t even qualify as luxury.
Lost as he was in his real-estate reveries, he failed to notice the sporty exhales of the property owner himself performing an impressive bout of push-ups in the middle of the light-filled space. Jeff Park still had his thick Asian hair, if not more of it, and he was clothed in some kind of black athletic gear that maybe would allow for scuba diving or travel to Mars. Eventually Jeff Park noticed his former employer casting a shadow over him. He hopped up from the floor in one youthful, thirty-something motion. “Barry,” he said, “you’re alive!”
Barry shook his host’s hand eagerly. Full head of hair, gums that didn’t recede, push-ups in the middle of the day. Jeff Park had gone to Cornell, if he remembered correctly, but had not played lacrosse. A fit striver with good, casual taste. He was to be approached just like a potential investor. Barry was ready to do a little Princeton two-step with a perfectly calibrated friend move.
“Jeff, right off the bat, thank you,” he said. “You didn’t have to welcome me into your home.”
“I’
m just glad we didn’t need an ambulance,” Jeff Park said. “Although I did call for a house visit from my family doctor.”
“Cancel it,” Barry said. “I’m feeling better than ever. Just low blood sugar is all. Hey, seriously. You’re a peach of a guy. Where’s your better half?”
“Still looking for that perfect girl, I’m afraid.”
“And you decorated this place yourself?”
“Guilty as charged. Come, let me make you a corpse reviver.” They walked to an area flanked by a shelf of Ciroc bottles that denoted general recreation. Jeff Park poured a glass of fizzy German mineral water. “You’ve got to hydrate,” he ordered. “I want to see you finish this H2O before you hit the hard stuff.”
Jeff Park’s corpse reviver was, as the name promised, a ridiculously potent blend of cognac, calvados, and vermouth served in a martini glass. “Jesus,” Barry said as he finished his drink. Some vague memories of Downtown bars returned: Jeff Park could hold his own with the alcohol.
“So, what’s up, Barry?” Jeff Park said. “Just passing through? Decided to look me up?” He had brought out a bottle of Yamazaki twenty year and was serving it straight up, quite decadent for 1:27 P.M. What the hell did Jeff Park do for a living? He had cashed out of This Side of Capital with zero.
“All of this is going to sound crazy,” Barry said.
“Uh-huh.”
“I’m on a journey. A journey by bus.” Barry knew that he would eventually have to explain his flight from This Side of Capital to people in his bracket. He knew that news of his “meltdown” would immediately form the latest bulletin in the incestuous, bloodthirsty world from which he had sprung. But he doubted it would really surprise anyone. The people in his world could be nuts. One fund was essentially a cult with its own bible, ritual mind control, and feats of strength. A fellow at another fund, a quant billionaire-in-training, played piano at a third-rate bar while passing around a tip jar. Like your first ankle monitor bracelet or your fourth divorce, the occasional break with reality was an important part of any hedge-fund titan’s biography.
“The things I’ve seen,” Barry said, and he told Jeff a few of his adventures so far.
Jeff Park seemed interested. He poured more drinks, although he insisted Barry chase his with water. “It sounds a little bit like you’re doing a version of On the Road,” Park said. “The one-eyed Mexican guy who fell asleep on your shoulder.”
“That’s exactly right!” Barry shouted. “That’s exactly what I thought when that happened.” No wonder he had picked Jeff Park to host him, the man had literary sensibilities beyond most of his colleagues. They really did a good job of educating up at Cornell.
“I used to take the Greyhound to visit my uncle’s family in Savannah,” Park said. “Everyone there looked at us like we were freaks.”
“Everyone looks at me like I’m a freak!”
“You kind of are a freak, Barry.”
Barry took that as the highest of compliments. He was bonding with this former employee. They were going to be friends. “Are you from around here originally?”
“Yeah. I moved back down to take care of my parents.”
“Your parents are, I want to say, from China?”
“Close enough.”
“My wife is Indian.”
“Rock.”
“You ought to get married!” Barry said, completely forgetting that his own marriage was but a team of seven lawyers short of kaput, to borrow his father’s favorite word. Maybe this nice Jeff Park couldn’t find a woman to marry away from New York. He had given up on finding a partner just to take care of his parents. Immigrants. Barry wanted to tell him that his own mother died when he was five, but they weren’t there yet. He eyed his glass of Yamazaki as Atlanta blazed cruel beyond the tinted floor-to-ceiling windows. His instinct to help Jeff Park was overwhelming. He remembered Seema’s friend, the Asian woman from Brooklyn. Tina? Lena? “I threw away my cell phone,” Barry said.
“Now that’s amazing,” Jeff Park said.
“Can I check something on your computer?”
A laptop was provided. The world of the Internet felt so far away from who he was at this point. Still, he brought up Seema’s profile. No new posts in forever. Seema was not an avid social media person, a fact he loved about her. “Is that your wife and kid?” Jeff Park asked.
The profile photo in the corner of the screen was of Seema with her arms almost around Shiva, behind them the neo-Georgian shell of the six-thousand-square-foot Rhinebeck house in progress. Shiva was looking away, but in a super-intelligent way, which made the whole thing look like a portrait in normalcy, maybe precocity, and, anyway, Seema’s best Bollywood smile lit up the landscape better than any sun. Her cleavage was open and ready and golden.
“What a gorgeous family you have,” Jeff Park said. “When I worked for you I think you were just about to get married. That kid. Those eyes.”
“Yes,” Barry said, his hand frozen over the keyboard. A Sesame Street song started playing in his head. C is for cookie, that’s good enough for me. “But here’s what I wanted to show you,” he said. He scrolled through the list of Seema’s friends, looking for an Asian. He thought he hit pay dirt with one of them, but it turned out to be that horrible Hong Kong doctor, Luis’s wife, Julianna Yang-Goodman, a photo of Rio’s Christ the Redeemer statue behind her for some reason. He scrolled some more and finally found the right one.
“Now this girl is spunky,” Barry said. “She called me a tool to my face! And I think she’s pretty intellectual like you. Oh, one night, in Brooklyn, she made these great Chinese dumplings for us. I bet your folks would love her.”
“Mina Kim,” Jeff Park read off the screen. “Not really up my alley.”
Barry was heartbroken. “But she’s Chinese!”
Jeff Park stared at him. “I’m more into the southern-belle type,” he finally said.
“Oh.” Barry sighed.
“But thanks for looking out for me. You’re like that woman from Fiddler on the Roof.”
Barry sort of knew what he was talking about. Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match. Jeff Park had a wide cultural reach. “Well, I’m going to make it my mission to get you married,” he said. “Nice guy like you.”
“I’m not averse to the ladies,” Jeff Park said. “I’ve designed this place with them in mind.”
“How so?”
Jeff Park took him on a tour, starting with a massive glass-topped dining table. “You see these lights?” he said, pointing out a trio of Sputnik-style globes hanging over the mirrored surface. “The average girl I date is five foot six, or an inch taller than the national average. I have a spreadsheet that lists the attributes of each girl I’ve ever dated. It’s super granular. So if I’m making her dinner, and she’s standing here, waiting for me, talking to me, maybe having a drink, the light from these lamps is directly level with her eyes. She can see better, and I can enjoy her glow.”
Barry was impressed by Park’s thoughtfulness. A spreadsheet. The rap on guys in finance was all wrong. They cared too much. He knew he did. If you looked at it a certain way, he had abandoned his family because he didn’t have the emotional bandwidth to accommodate their special needs. He examined a frigate-sized couch. “This sofa is the perfect height for a five-foot-six woman,” Jeff said. “When she sits down, the sofa waterfalls at the back of her knees.” He invited Barry to sit down. “You see, there’s a gap of at least three inches between the back of your knee and the couch, because you’re tall. But if you were a five-foot-six woman, you’d be completely snug.”
“So you only date women of that height?” Barry asked.
“Well, there’s some variance,” Jeff Park said. “Maybe half a sigma. I don’t want the tail wagging the dog. But, yeah, mostly.”
“You’re a romantic,” Barry said. Jeff Park shrugged and blushed. He was not
unhandsome; his face was chiseled and tanned to a dusky perfection. The black athletic gear made him look like a glossy seal in human form. Only the Rolex Sky-Dweller on his wrist did not appeal to Barry’s taste.
Upstairs Park had an airy office with a full view of the awful Coca-Cola tower. Barry felt a twinge of passion at the sight of a Bloomberg up and running. Jeff Park had only one screen going, which was cute. On a glass board, he had sketched out some trades that appeared exceptionally long-term and cautious, making some kind of play around Alcoa and Dow. Just scanning the numbers on the board, Barry assumed an AUM of thirty-five million, which in the best of worlds brought in, what, a couple million a year? He probably had a net of ten to fifteen. And he could live on it. And be happy. And buy couches that waterfalled the legs of median women.
“I trade maybe two hours in the morning, and then I spend the rest of the day working on myself,” Jeff Park said as they passed a formidable wall of books, most of them new and clearly not bought by the yard. “I read at least a hundred books a year, and if I’m at, let’s say, seventy by November, I’ll take the rest of the year off from work to catch up. I like reading books to the girls I date, Beckett plays, Chekhov stories, Shakespeare sonnets. Believe me, they need it around these parts.”
“Wonderful, just wonderful,” Barry said. “This is what I’m talking about. Real self-improvement. A vocation and an avocation.”
“So many guys say ‘I want to die at my peak net worth,’ but not me.”
“Clearly not.”
Jeff now led him into a bathroom. They were looking at the double mirrors that functioned as TVs in the rain-shower tub. The GOP convention in Cleveland was in full blaze. Ted Cruz was saying he would not be voting for Hillary, but he wasn’t going to endorse Trump either. “I used to stay at the Trump Hotel on Columbus Circle whenever I visited New York,” Jeff Park said. “Never again.”
“I’m a moderate Republican,” Barry said. “Socially liberal.”
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