Lake Success

by Gary Shteyngart

  “May I ask why?”

  “This is the Acela route,” the kid said, as if the answer were obvious.

  “Okay. But why are you drawing it?”

  “I just like it,” Jonah said.

  “What do you like about it?”

  “Last year, my dad took me on the Acela from Washington to Boston. He gave a lecture at Boston College. We sat together the whole way. We bought hot dogs even though they were five ninety-nine each.”

  Barry looked around. The room was spotless. The toys, which mostly consisted of high-speed train models, were squarely lined up next to one another on gleaming shelves, just as Barry’s watches were downstairs. The blinds were drawn against the El Paso sun. Everything felt ordered and familiar. Exact. Barry hadn’t realized that he had been smiling for several minutes now. What was making him so happy? In his father’s tropical basement, his prized possession had been a Commodore 64 computer, which he could program day and night. But there was something else, wasn’t there? Something having to do with maps?

  Jonah made an error around Medford and was smudging it away with a wet thumb, lost in concentration. Barry decided to try a new tack. He would approach this kid as if he were a potential investor. He would seek out a commonality. “I like trains,” Barry said.

  Jonah turned around. For the first time, he regarded Barry as something other than a strange, useless presence at the breakfast table. “I took the Shanghai-Beijing train two years ago,” Barry said.

  “The Jinghu High Speed Railway?” Jonah asked. His eyes were wide and alive. The whole room smelled like Shiva’s. Wasn’t nine too old to still have that too-sweet boy’s smell? “That’s the fastest scheduled train in the world,” Jonah said.

  “I sat in this pod,” Barry said. “It was surreal. Like 2001: A Space Odyssey.”

  “Did you know that ‘Acela’ stands for ‘acceleration and excellence’?” Jonah asked.

  “No truth in advertising, I suppose,” Barry said. He regretted it right away, given Jonah’s obvious love for the rail service, and hoped his sarcasm had gone over the kid’s head.

  “Did you know the Acela can reach a top speed of one hundred fifty miles per hour,” Jonah said, “but only in three small portions of Rhode Island and Massachusetts, which I’ve outlined in red here.”

  Barry leaned into the map. The detail was striking. It wasn’t just the deco font, the whole map had an early twentieth-century flavor, as if Jonah had apprenticed with a master cartographer. In its variations and gradations and charming, almost naïve use of color, the map gleamed with emotion. What some people didn’t understand was that the cleanliness of a room, the care for inanimate objects like watches, could also express a love of the world. A giant yellow star was planted by Chevy Chase, Maryland, likely where his absconded father now made his home. This map was the little boy’s inner life.

  And then Barry remembered his own thing with maps. How could he have forgotten for all these years? “When I was your age I had a map of Long Island,” Barry said, “and I would look at it every day.”

  “You did?” Jonah said. “Really?” There was a kind of tremor to his hands when he was excited. He moved his thumb along the rest of his fingers as if counting them or making sure they were still there.

  “Yeah. I was obsessed with this one town on Long Island called Lake Success.” Barry squinted, trying to make out the town, somewhere between Great Neck, Long Island, and his own Queens neighborhood, but maybe it was too small for the boy to have drawn in.

  “Why Lake Success?” Jonah asked. The two of them were close enough to be touching elbows.

  “I don’t know,” Barry said. “I just really liked the name. I wanted to be successful. I was living with my father. My mother had—gone.”

  “They got divorced?”

  “Something like that.”

  “And you couldn’t visit her twice a year?”

  “She had gone to a different country. The point was, I didn’t get along with my dad. He wasn’t as nice as your mom. So I wanted to move somewhere, and Lake Success had this shopping center and all the houses had these awesome backyards you could put a pool in. My dad cleaned pools, but we didn’t have one. And I kept that map under my bed all the time. It was an Exxon map from the gas station.”

  The memory was so unbidden, it moved Barry to sit down fast on the kid’s slim bed. “I imagined I had a whole set of friends there,” Barry said. “Relatives, too. Really nice ones like on TV.”

  “I don’t like friends,” Jonah said.

  “Everyone likes friends,” Barry said. “You just have to know how to make them.”

  “Well, I don’t,” Jonah said. He looked at his map, as if he wanted to go back to working on it. “I don’t have any shared interests with my peers.”

  Barry laughed. The boy was obviously quoting Layla. Or a school psychiatrist. “I didn’t either,” he said. “You know what’s right above Lake Success? Great Neck and Port Washington. One day when you’re in high school you’ll read a book called The Great Gatsby. There are these towns in the book called East Egg and West Egg, and that’s them.”

  “I’m going to look up Lake Success,” Jonah said. “I’ve used up all my computer time for the week, but next week for sure.”

  “Whitey Ford grew up there,” Barry said. “He was a baseball player.”

  “Is it okay if I go back to my cartography, Mr. Barry?” Jonah asked. “You can watch me do it.”

  “Sure,” Barry said. “But can I tell you just one more thing?”

  “Mu-hum,” the kid said.

  “That book The Great Gatsby is about a man who wanted to improve himself. And when I was your age I wanted to improve myself, too. So each day I’d practice my ‘friend moves.’ Like, what are ten things kids in school can ask me, and what are ten things I can say back? It’s like drawing a map or knowing all the train systems in the world. Except instead of facts, you have to memorize what they call small talk. People who aren’t smart like us, they love small talk. ‘Did you hear about this?’ ‘Oh, what about that?’ ‘So-and-so got hurt in gym class.’ ‘That’s cool.’ So I worked my friend moves real hard, and then by the time I graduated from college, I was the friendliest guy in my profession. And it made me hundreds of millions of dollars.”

  Jonah was thinking this through. “You made money by being friendly?”

  Barry looked at the little boy. His heart was beating fast in the silence of the darkened room. If only he had had a friend like Jonah when he was nine. If only someone had told his younger self that he would grow up okay, that his father was wrong, that he wasn’t a schnorrer or a shegetz or a gonif.

  Layla opened the door. “So,” she said, “you’ve become acquainted with the Mapparium.”

  “Barry likes trains and maps, too!” Jonah shouted.

  “I thought Barry would be more partial to expensive cars,” Layla said. But she also gave Barry the first real smile of the last week.

  “Nope,” he said. “Don’t care for them at all. Train man, always have been. Choo-choo, as we say in the industry.”

  “Did you practice your aleph-bets?” Layla asked her son.

  “Please, Mom,” the kid said. “Just twenty more minutes of cartography with Barry.”

  “You know your father will ask you how you’re doing in your Hebrew classes.”

  Barry let the conversation flow over him. They were standing there in a clean, well-ordered room, just as his had always been on Little Neck Parkway. A gifted son, a father-in-training, a mother who was still alive.

  * * *

  —

  THE NEXT night Barry really didn’t want to go to the basement to sleep by himself. He had in fact tried to teach Jonah to swim earlier that day, but when he put his hand on the boy’s warm belly and tried to gently dip him into the water, as if performing an impromptu baptis
m, the boy’s screams were as piercing as Shiva’s. “Okay,” Barry found himself saying in the same voice he used with his son back home. “Not now. I get it. Not now. We’ll try later.”

  He climbed the stairs and peeked into Layla’s bedroom. She was at her desk furiously typing something on her laptop. It looked like Twitter. He saw a lot of small green frogs and what seemed like a swastika on the screen. It was probably something for her class. She looked so serious and sad, and when he touched her shoulder, her body jerked straight up. “Sorry,” he said.

  “It’s okay, Bar,” she said. Bar is what she used to call him in college, especially before sex. She touched his hand and smiled. But her hand was shaking and her skin glistened with sweat, even in the air-conditioned room.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Nothing. Work.”

  “I want to go to one of your classes one day,” he said. “It’s so awesome that you became a prof. You said you would and you did.”

  A new post came up on the Twitter. What kind of work was she doing? Holocaust studies? She snapped the laptop shut, got up, and kissed him. Her body was tense, but that’s how he remembered it. She was a tense girl. Both of their lips were so cracked and dry it struck him immediately that their last kiss happened twenty-one years ago when everything about them was young. The pessimism of the world around them abated for a minute, and Barry realized what was about to happen.

  It was funny how their generation didn’t bother with the preliminaries. They quickly found each other’s sour places. Then she bent over and he raged for a bit. He moaned into her dark, brittle hair and she moaned into the pillow. When it was over, both of them looked at the ceiling for an eternity.

  “I want to keep being just a little emotionally detached, if you don’t mind,” she finally said.

  “Not me,” Barry said. “I’m done with that.”

  “Is that right?” They were nose to nose now. He looked at her mother’s eyes inside her father’s face. She was what every middle-aged man absent a midlife crisis would want. He could be that man.

  “I have this image, but it’s very special,” Barry said. “If I tell it to you, do you promise not to laugh?”

  “I can try.”

  “Well, I picture you, me, and Jonah and maybe two other kids. I don’t know. Adopted kids. A boy and a girl. Maybe Mexican kids from Juárez. And so we’re this family. And I build this large bathroom with three sinks next to each other. And these very high-end bowls. And the kids all wash their faces together before going to bed.”

  “Why do they need three bowls?” Layla asked. “Why can’t they all just take turns?”

  “Well, the idea is they don’t have to. Because this is a large enough bathroom where they can all wash their faces together. Brush their teeth. And have fun, splash each other. Kids’ stuff.”

  “It sounds like it’s a way for you to show off your wealth,” Layla said. She saw the hurt on his face. “But, yeah, it would be great for Jonah to have siblings. It would take him out of his shell and his restricted interests.”

  “Okay, so no on the three-bowl bathroom, but maybe yes on adoption?”

  “Let me ask you something,” Layla said. “When do you talk to your boy? In the mornings? I never hear you on the phone with him.”

  “He’s just three.”

  “Three-year-olds talk. They talk a lot. Doesn’t he miss his daddy?”

  “I’m not like your ex-husband, if that’s what you mean,” Barry said. “It’s different with us.”

  “How?”

  “Do you mind if I keep that little bit to myself for now?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Oh, and by the way, you’re beautiful.”

  “Okay, Barry,” she said.

  “It was really hard for us to get pregnant,” Barry said.

  “I said okay.”

  Her hand rummaged through his chest hair. He remembered being in Bangkok on business when he and Seema were first trying to get pregnant and all the fertility stuff at NYU was falling through. He was sweating around town between meetings and came across a temple with this gigantic golden phallus, a bow wrapped around its shaft as if it were a present. The phallus was supposed to be a fertility god or something. And these young women who had trouble getting pregnant were praying to it very intently, just bowing and prostrating themselves before this big golden dick. Then these European tourist girls walked in and they started taking a photo of themselves in front of the phallus with a selfie stick. And they were all laughing in Nordic and being smug, like the whole thing was hilarious. And Barry just ran over and knocked the camera off their stick.

  Barry told Layla the story. She was not impressed. “Why did you do it?” she asked.

  “Because I was angry.”

  “Angry why? Because the tourists were hurting the feelings of the women who were infertile or because you couldn’t get the desired result from your own wife?”

  Barry shrugged. “I just wanted to share something with you,” he said.

  “You go around and you do things and you don’t know why you do them,” she said. “And that’s the story of your gender writ large.”

  She picked up her phone and started scrolling through a site called FiveThirtyEight. What the hell had happened? How did lovemaking and talk of family building turn into this. “Listen,” Barry said. “I’m sorry if that offended you. I know I have to learn to be more sensitive.”

  Layla laughed, but not very nicely. “So you swap your wife and kid for me and Jonah,” she said. “And then what’s next on Barry’s incredible journey of self-discovery? How do we know this is it? How do I know I’m not just the shepherdess in your story? What does the banker say to her at the end? ‘I wish none of my life had ever happened. But it’s too late.’ ”

  Barry couldn’t believe that she had remembered the last lines of his story twenty-two years later. He had really hurt her. But it also meant that she hadn’t forgotten him.

  “Anyway, if Trump wins, we’re moving to British Columbia,” she said. “I have a lead on a job there.”

  “Where you go, I will follow,” Barry said. “But he won’t win.”

  “And what about you?” she asked. “Think you’ll ever hold down a job again?”

  Barry had no idea what he would do. After meeting Jonah, his Urban Watch Fund was starting to turn into a map-drawing program for shy suburban kids. “I’m going to repay that bridge loan for starters,” he said.

  “That’s a yes?”

  “I don’t know,” Barry said. “Right now I just want to hang out with Jonah and have sex with you twice a day. What did you always say back in school? ‘I’m all out of juice!’ ”

  She put down her phone and put her head on his chest and kissed his chin with a college girl’s innocence. “One of us is making a mistake,” she said.

  * * *

  —

  BARRY STARTED swimming again. He had brought with him a sexy new Tudor Heritage Black Bay watch, just thirty-six millimeters across, which was completely waterproof. He loved to take showers with the watch on, just his naked flesh and the timepiece. At night, he swam beneath the moonlit Franklin Mountains, and in the morning to the chirp of the grackles in the cottonwoods. One ridiculously hot day in the middle of August, with Layla napping in the house, as she did with increasing regularity, he saw Jonah sitting shyly at the edge of the pool and was inspired to impress him. He cannonballed into the pool and started doing the butterfly so fast he nearly smashed his head into the gunite.

  “Wow, you’re fast,” the boy said.

  “I bet you’ll be even faster,” Barry said. “Come on, we’ll give it another try. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. Zero pressure.”

  “Ma-hum.” The boy took off his T-shirt. He had taut but tiny biceps just like his mother. His swimming trunks looked like a pair
of old man’s shorts that billowed around him when he reticently got into the water.

  “Okay,” Barry said. “We’re going to do it just like last time. I’m going to hold your belly gently and then tip you into the water. And I’m not going to let go. I’m never letting go. The chance of your drowning is less than zero.”

  “That’s mathematically impossible,” the kid said. But he let Barry put his hand on his belly and tip him over until he was horizontal. “Please,” the boy said. “I’m scared.”

  “I got you,” Barry said. “Relax. Relax all your muscles. You’re just going to float. It’s easy.” Barry’s own father had not bothered with any of these preliminaries. He had driven seven-year-old Barry to one of his customer’s pools and then thrown him into the deep end. But the end result was good, no? Swim champ, Princeton, Goldman. His whole life had begun with being thrown into that pool.

  He held the boy by his warm scared belly and told him to keep his arms out straight. He would start with the breaststroke. There was a feeling of safety to that stroke. The regular breathing, the descent and the ascent, using one half of your body to propel yourself and then letting the other half take over. He would not let Jonah quit. The boy wanted so much to please a father. Finally, Barry let go of his belly and Jonah propelled himself in quick froglike bursts across the length of the pool. “Holy shit!” Barry shouted.

  The boy was smiling in a way he had never seen a Hayes smile. Normally their pale lips looked like they might crack from the strain. Barry swam and put his arms around him and squeezed. “Ouch,” the boy said, “let go!” But he was happy.

  When Layla finally woke up from her afternoon nap and came out, Jonah yelled, “I swam across the whole pool!”

  “Seriously?” Layla said. She looked at Barry with warm sleepy eyes, the setting sun haloing her hair. “Oh, my God, I’ve got to get my video camera. Do you think you can do it again?”