Park laughed. “Ouch,” he said. “I guess I struck a chord with Valupro. I’m sorry, man.”
“You know what a Veblen good is?” Barry asked.
“Sure.”
That was too bad, as Barry longed to explain it to him. Why was it so hard to mentor this slender younger man? The world was full of young Javons and Jeff Parks who were impervious to the wisdom of their elders. “All I’m saying is that you should be projecting your taste to others of your stature. Not to a southern belle in a leg cast.”
“What’s on your wrist?” Jeff asked.
“This is an F.P. Journe Octa Automatique. Journe makes nine hundred watches a year. Rolex makes close to a million.”
Park held Barry’s hand by the wrist and examined the watch. His hand was warm and dry, just like Seema’s. “I like how the yellow-gold hour and minute dials are lost in all the negative space around them,” he said. “That’s very cool.”
“Thanks,” Barry said. He smiled. “You have very promising aesthetics.”
“But the southern belles we just saw, they would know exactly what a Rolex is. But they would have no idea about your watch. They might even think you bought it at the airport. A Rolex of this size and weight merely announces the scale of my ambitions. I want to represent my value.”
“But you must also own a Patek. You get their magazine.”
“I got a 1518 perpetual in rose gold.”
“Wow.” Barry sighed. That rare watch was probably worth as much as Jeff’s Hotlanta apartment. He wanted to feel good for this young man who was helping him out so much just when he needed it. Instead, he felt envious. No angry wife, no autistic child, no possible subpoena, no Wells notice on the horizon, just two good cars, a seven-figure watch, and time to read as many books as he pleased.
“I have a different takeaway from that Valupro story,” Jeff Park said. They were circling back to the former industrial building that now served as a mall. “You tried to make a friend who turned out to be a bad person. And when he fell, you stood by him.”
“Yeah, but that’s the kind of life lesson I should have learned by high school,” Barry said.
“Believe me, you’re not as stunted as some of the other people I’ve met over the years.”
“Thank you,” Barry said. “I appreciate that.” The Ferrari had been parked in a special VIP zone, and now a young man ran to retrieve it. “Do you want to try that 1518 on for me tomorrow?” Barry asked. “I’d love to see it in the metal.”
* * *
—
SEVERAL HAPPY days ensued. Barry enjoyed sharing his timepieces with Jeff Park, and his Patek 1518 in rose gold was indeed sumptuous. The date and month were in French, and the moon phase glowed so brightly it looked like the first drawing executed by a perfect child. Jeff Park also kept a watch log in the form of an Excel spreadsheet, and he and Barry spent a morning poring over each other’s results. Barry’s were not good. The Pakistani air force–issued Omega Seamaster/Railmaster had gained four seconds instead of the usual two. The Patek 570 in white gold had gained twenty seconds a day, nearly twice the usual. But the old Tri-Compax was the really sad story. It had lost over three minutes a day. Maybe it needed an oil change, or maybe it was just slowly lapsing into a coma. He could look up a good watch guy in Atlanta on the Bloomberg, but he didn’t know how long he would be staying.
He wanted to stay just a little shy of forever. But it was a question of money. Another meal like the three-hundred-dollar one they had had would ruin him. He looked up some of This Side of Capital’s positions on Bloomberg. It was a massacre. How much of a dent would this shit make in his own net worth? Dudes who were about to belly flop often signed everything over to their wives, but he couldn’t do that if he was going to divorce his.
Jeff Park had lent him his other car, which was a Bentley something or other, informing him that the rich interior leather had cost the lives of six cows. The whole thing smelled like a feedlot, and the worst of it was that it had mileage of maybe nine miles to the gallon, so that Barry had to shell out forty bucks at a Sunoco. Thank God for cheap gas. On the other hand, wherever he parked in Atlanta, a young black man would run out and say something complimentary about the car before slotting it in the VIP section right out front. Also he liked listening to the OutKast song where the lead singer (rapper?) was apologizing to Ms. Jackson because he was for real. This was the kind of knowledge he could use on the Greyhound to spark a conversation.
He wondered what it would take to become Jeff Park’s mentor again. Sandy had said that Akash Singh still considered him a mentor, “a father almost.” He would sometimes take out his Patek 570 and trace the LEADER OF MEN engraving with his fingertip. Maybe some of those guys did still believe in him, despite the Valupro fiasco. He had come of age with them at Goldman, then plucked them off to form a team at Joey Goldblatt’s Icarus Capital, years before he spun off to start This Side of Capital. They would eat together, go to the gym together, vacation together, and also indulge their carnal sides together.
At Icarus Joey Goldblatt used to keep a map of Manhattan with all the rub-and-tug joints clearly marked. The guys did a lot of business over at FlashDancers, and Barry was not immune to the delights of a really dirty lap dance. He was single, after all. But he dreaded the rub-and-tug joints. There was one night in particular when he found himself with his team in Oriental Touch or Seoul Cycle. The dinginess of the place shattered him. There was a decoration for some kind of Asian bird, a crane stenciled cheaply over a body of water, and a Korean Air calendar. The airline calendar was especially depressing, because it made him believe that these girls really wanted to go home to their families. He wouldn’t remember the face of the woman he was assigned, she was mostly eye makeup, but he couldn’t have a physical encounter with her. Instead they lay on a bunch of towels on a mattress in their underwear looking out onto an air shaft. They talked about art history, which the woman had been studying at one of Seoul’s lesser universities. She made it clear that if you weren’t “on the A-team” in Korea, you ended up here. She asked him which part of finance he worked in. She got a lot of guys from the European banks. She advised him to collect the works of Yayoi Kusama, a Japanese artist Joey Goldblatt was oddly enough wild about. He must have come here a lot.
The allotted sixty minutes expired chastely, the two of them lying on the towels in their underwear. It was painfully clear how much this woman didn’t want to have sex with him. This just wasn’t how he pictured free markets. He tried not to hear his boys climaxing next door, especially Akash Singh, who was very, very loud. The next day he gathered his team and told them he didn’t think going to these kinds of places was good for them. They were going to conquer the world! One day they’d each have AUMs of over ten billion. They didn’t need dirty brothels. His boys were mostly a bunch of lax bros from Duke and Cornell, with a smattering of friendly Princeton overlords-in-training and two Indians from CalTech. He was, at most, five years their senior, but that counted for a lot when you were as young as they were. The boys heeded his call, and many began to explore the world of artisanal hookers and the burgeoning new pay-for-play field of “sugar daddies.”
Over the years, Barry took his capacity as a moralizer seriously, steering his boys away from paid girlfriends and into the worlds of watch collecting and moderate Republican politics. He encouraged them to date ladies from good women’s colleges and acted as something of a matchmaker, even as his own bed lay cold. By the time he had formed This Side of Capital, all the boys were married, except for the incorrigible Akash Singh. On the first anniversary of his hedge fund, a week after the Qatar Investment Authority signed on and their AUM topped two billion, the boys all came together to give him the classy Patek Calatrava with the engraving he now saw before him. Until Shiva was born, it had been the proudest day of his life.
Barry hadn’t had sex with Seema in three months. At night, he oft
en dreamed of Layla. In one dream, they were in a Wells Fargo branch, and she was entirely naked. The bank had a coffee shop in the back where he and Layla were just sitting at a banquette, sipping Americanos. People passing them by with deposit stubs hardly noticed Layla’s long, bare body, the hollowness above her pubic bone, the unreformed pelt below, the fine teardrop shapes of her small breasts. Her nakedness was only for Barry. She was giving herself to him. He kissed her dry mouth and cupped one warm breast, and the people just walked past them on the way to the tellers. Barry awoke in a state of horniness he had not experienced since his first nights with Seema. His mouth was coated with lust, and his hands shook.
* * *
—
ON THE night Trump was scheduled to speak at the convention he and Jeff Park thought of a place to go and watch it. “It would be funny to just go to Buckhead,” Jeff said. “See the rich crackers. Get jiggy with the GOP.”
They drove around Buckhead in the Ferrari California listening to the “I’m sorry, Ms. Jackson” song. On a busy avenue, they parked in front of the Beer Curve, where a sign prohibited hoods, baggy clothes, and PANTS BELOW THE WAIST. “Looks racist enough,” Jeff Park said. Barry laughed, feeling high on the complicity. Could he imagine doing something like this a few days ago when he was still the chief desk jockey at his office?
The bar was kind of a dive and, per the prohibitions outside, entirely white. There were white men of all ages here, some dressed in pink shirts like private-equity guys, others in baseball caps and lumpy denim jeans or Dickies. Some had brought their women, who all looked like the same woman, both highlighted and nondescript. “Here’s to diversity,” Jeff Park said, and they clinked Miller Lites. Barry throttled his down. I’m drinking a Miller Lite!
The barmaid was in her twenties, and she was gorgeous in a way that suggested maybe she hadn’t been fully apprised of just how gorgeous she was. She had eyes darker than the delicious Maker’s Mark chocolates Barry had found in Jeff Park’s fridge, and her skin was as olive as Barry’s. “So who are you voting for?” Jeff Park asked her, his rose-gold Rolex Sky-Dweller lighting up a patch of bar around him.
The barmaid opened her gorgeous mouth. Barry thought he knew what her answer would be. But he was wrong. “I despise Hillary Clinton,” she said. “I just don’t trust her.”
“But come on!” Jeff Park said. “Trump.”
“Socially I’m a bit more liberal,” she said. “But Trump’s going to rebuild the economy to where it should be. The condos around here aren’t being built fast enough under Obama.”
Barry thought that was an odd thing to say. It wasn’t like she was going to Emory or anything. She was a bartender at a lousy racist bar. Barry was as trickle-down as any guy, but what did the building of Buckhead condos have to do with her lot in life?
A filthy old homeless guy walked into the bar and said something in Spanish to the barmaid. He gave her a pair of sunglasses he had apparently found in the parking lot. “You want water or a Coke?” she asked him.
“Coke,” he rasped, and then made a smoking motion with his hand. She produced a handful of cigarettes. He stood there for a good five minutes savoring his free Coke, each sip punctuated by a burp that made his eyeballs tremble, then lit up a cigarette with a wet book of matches that took another five minutes to spark.
“That was very nice of you,” Jeff Park said to the barmaid.
“Eduardo comes in here all the time,” she said. “He used to sweep up all the bars in Buckhead, and people took care of him. Now it’s just me.”
“See,” Barry said to his friend, “this is the thing about America. You can never guess who’s going to turn out to be a nice person.”
The guys wanted to know if there was anything to eat at the bar, and the barmaid gave them a Domino’s Pizza menu. “You got to try the Philly cheesesteak pizza,” she said. “I could eat it every night.” Jeff Park said something to the effect of wanting to eat it every night with her. They had a nice flirt going on.
Most of the young people in the bar were talking about sports and their own bygone athleticism, but then a trio of pink shirts came in from the heat and clustered around the screen with Barry and Jeff Park. “Can you believe this election?” Park asked them. He wasn’t shy about talking to people at all. Did that come naturally, or had he spent his childhood practicing his own friend moves? A Chinese dude in the South. It must have been hard.
“Trump’s going to win by a landslide,” the leader of the pink shirts said. He was the kind of guy Barry had gone to college with, only Georgian. “Everyone knows Hillary’s a liar. The folks up in Ohio and Pennsylvania, they sure know.”
“I agree completely,” Barry said. “Lower taxes and less regulation, that’s my middle name. I’ve voted only Republican since I’ve been eighteen. I think Obama’s been a nightmare for this country. But I’m from New York, and honestly, Trump scares me.”
As soon as Barry had said the last sentence, the pink shirts turned around in unison and left the bar. They just walked right out of the place without a word. “Nice going,” Jeff Park said. “You scared away the Trump Youth.”
“I’ve never had people walk out on me,” Barry said. “They say I’m the friendliest guy on the Street.”
“Maybe don’t announce that you’re from New York and scared of Trump in one go.” Jeff Park looked flirtatiously at the barmaid who slapped them with two more Miller Lites. The Domino’s Philly cheesesteak pizza arrived via a gray-haired black gentleman who had difficulty breathing. Barry dug into it with the same insatiable hunger he now brought to the rest of his life. His mouth these days was mostly about salt.
Trump came on. “I humbly accept,” he said. A bunch of college-age Republican boy-hipsters had gathered around Barry and Jeff Park to cheer on their nominee. They all had thick beards and were going bald. Barry was scared to say anything, lest they walk out on him, too. “I’m not voting for Hillary,” one of them said to Jeff Park who was gently teasing their opinions out of them. “It has nothing to do with her being a woman, it’s that she’s proven she can’t run the country.”
“That sounds like it has a lot to do with her being a woman,” Jeff Park said.
When Trump mentioned his support of “the great state of Israel,” the most bearded of the Trump boys said, sarcastically, “Well, that just got you some votes,” and the rest of his cohort laughed. Who were these people around him? Barry wondered. These barmaids who gave free Cokes to itinerant Mexicans but wanted to vote for a man who would make fun of his disabled Indian son?
The convention ended, and the hipster Trump supporters left to “turn it up a notch” elsewhere. Barry drank sadly. The bar was now filled with a bunch of guys in cargo shorts holding their beers at weird angles and girls in Daisy Dukes. A giant roach crawled by. This part of Buckhead was somehow at once wealthy and down-at-the-heels. The band looked like the two hairy white guys from ZZ Top. They were singing a rocked-out version of the song Barry had just heard. It was OutKast’s “Ms. Jackson.” “First Melania cribs Michelle Obama’s speech,” Jeff Park said, “now this.”
Once again, Barry felt a generalized boredom around him, the boredom of a martial country without a proper war. Isn’t that what Trump was promising his followers? An all-out conflict of their own choosing?
“I’m depressed,” Barry admitted.
“Let’s go back to my place and get some drink on,” Jeff Park said.
They walked out into the night, which smelled of bad pizza and gasoline. When they got to the Ferrari, a drunk bro in a backward cap stumbled up to them. “I’ll give you forty dollars for a spin around the block,” he said to Jeff Park. His southern-belle girlfriend made pigeonlike noises behind him.
The guy actually took out two twenties. Jeff Park smiled sadly and shook his head. “I don’t need it,” he said.
“I can see that,” the drunk bro said, gesturing
at the Ferrari. They left it kind of amiably.
Barry and Jeff Park revved off toward Midtown. Jeff Park remained silent. “You okay?” Barry asked.
“That guy didn’t even care about ogling my car in front of his girlfriend. I wasn’t a threat to him, because I’m an Asian man.”
It took a while for Barry to unpack that statement.
“In this town, you’re either black or you’re white,” Jeff Park said.
Barry said some positive things about the inherent masculinity of Jeff Park and his automobile. He didn’t get a response for a while. “The top on this thing used to go down in fourteen seconds,” Park finally said, “but now it takes eighteen. Everything’s a scam.”
Barry burped out some Domino’s and beer and then reached over and put his hand on Jeff Park’s shoulder. He wanted to add, It’s going to be okay, but decided to let the gesture speak for itself. Jeff Park’s shoulder moved unsubtly beneath his hand, the linen of his shirt slipping out of his grasp. Barry should have tried to give a friendly athletic shoulder massage, just like how his guys at the office used to do partly for laughs and partly because it felt good, but now it was too late. They drove the rest of the way in silence.
Back in the apartment, Barry pulled out some glasses and whiskey at the alcohol station to make them both “something to wash out that Miller Lite taste.”
“You go ahead,” Jeff Park said. “I think I’m going to turn in for the night.”
“You sure?”
“Gentex announces premarket. My biggest position. Been long all month.”
In his bed, Barry breathed hard, sniffing up the sweet alcohol of the Yamazaki in front of him. Fuck it, fuck it, fuck it. What had he done? But maybe it wasn’t the hand-on-shoulder gesture. Maybe it was the earlier stuff about the guy in the baseball cap trying to get a spin in his Ferrari for forty bucks. Barry kept reconstructing the timeline over and over again. Ahmed had put his hand on his shoulder so many times. The Mexican man had laid his one-eyed head on his shoulder, and he hadn’t flinched. It really didn’t mean anything. It really didn’t. Nothing at all. He just liked being close to his friend.
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