“Okay,” Barry said. “Let’s just do what we were doing. Up and down, up and down, but now Mommy and Daddy will both hold you.” They resumed the old rhythm, lifting the child out of the water and then letting him splash back into it, Barry loving the feel of Seema’s hands on his own, until equilibrium was restored, the child looking up at the ceiling with a smile on his face.
Barry was adding zero value to the proceedings. This family felt as lonely as the one he had known in Queens after his mother died. No one wanted or needed him, not the beautiful woman with the cantaloupe weight of her bosoms dipping into the water, not the voiceless child in the ridiculous crab swimsuit and diaper. “Okay,” Barry said to Seema, “you can let go now.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes!” He had spoken loudly enough to stir the lifeguard out of his reveries. “Yes,” Barry repeated softly as Seema surrendered the child to his grip. “See, this is fun. Fun with Daddy. Daddy the swimmer.” He started to sing: “We’ll have fun, fun, fun, until someone takes something away-yay.” He continued to dip Shiva in and out of the water, Baptist-style, noticing that the child was actually quite tall and heavy for an almost-four-year-old. Barry’s shoulders were starting to cramp some; how did Seema and Novie take care of this big boy all day long? With every dip he realized just how apart he was from the whole specialized universe that had been built around Shiva Cohen. The room smelled of salt water, clean and pure, and, if he leaned toward Seema, some of her honeyed essence. It was time to set things right.
“Okay, Shiva,” he said. “Rome wasn’t built in a day. You’re not going to be Mark Spitz in an hour, but I want to communicate to you the basics of swimming. That’s all we’re going to do today. No pressure. So I’m just going to slide my hands down to your belly and gently tip you over to about three-hundred-thirty degrees.”
“I just want to point out,” Seema said, “that he doesn’t understand you. I’m not sure I understand you.”
“Just going to hold him in a slightly different way, and then tip him slightly into the water,” Barry said. “What’s the big deal?”
He moved one hand out from under Shiva’s armpit and put it on his hip. He moved his other hand to Shiva’s warm belly. The child made a small sound based on some form of the letter E, but not one Barry had heard before. Eeeeee, he exhaled.
“Don’t worry, sweetie,” Seema said. “Daddy’s got you.” She moved closer and began to brush his arm with the smoothness of her palm. Barry continued to tip the child over, one degree at a time, trying to position him as he would a swimmer, head first, arms ready to paddle, feet ready to kick. Eeeeeeee. In addition to the sound, the child’s inner mechanics began to thrum like some overheated car part. “Maybe let’s pull him up,” Seema said. “Maybe that’s enough for now.”
“This is how you learn,” Barry heard his father talking through his mouth and past his lips. “Just a tiny bit more. You got to take risks.” As Shiva’s head approached the water, his legs began to kick out in desperation. “That’s right,” Barry said, “that’s exactly how you kick.”
And Shiva did kick, his haunches churning through the water, as the rest of him squirmed out of Barry’s grasp, the letter Eeeeeee hanging in the air like some forgotten mystery vowel, the child flying out of Barry’s arms and into the unforgiving tile edge of the pool marked by the marble legend 5 FEET DEEP.
The unnatural hollow sound of Shiva’s head smashing against the tile rang through both Seema and Barry, but only one of them moved. Barry stood there, his arms still outstretched as if they contained a Shiva within them as Seema grabbed their child and the lifeguard ran toward them, leaped into the air, pushed Barry aside. The vowel sound was gone. Only Seema was screaming. His son lay immobile in her arms, his usual twitches and inconsistencies now a distant, welcome memory.
* * *
—
THEIR LAST meeting was in Stuyvesant Square two days later. Shiva was being held for observation at Beth Israel, the nearest hospital. Barry had tried to make noise about moving him to a better hospital, throwing more money at the problem, but the problem turned out to be less consequential than they had thought. Shiva had been lucky enough to avoid a concussion. The main difficulty was the new hospital surroundings, the fact that he had to undergo frightening tests and deal with new people. Seema asked in her calmest voice that Barry should leave the hospital tasks to her and her father and Novie.
Her eyes were tinged with black, which they often were, but now they were deep set and exhausted. “Whatever you’re about to say, I think you should rest up and give it some time,” Barry said. A procession of Filipina nurses from Beth Israel, each of them looking every bit as fatigued as his wife, trooped out of the hospital and through the park.
But she wouldn’t wait. She said horrible things, but she said them gently. She didn’t speak of Shiva, not really. She said, in essence, that she didn’t like what Barry was. Not who, but what. We lived in a country that rewarded its worst people. We lived in a society where the villains were favored to win. There was a direct line between Barry getting off with a slap on the wrist and Trump’s victory. Maybe, in her own way, she had tried to tip the scales when she sent the Sardinia video to the government. But what had that accomplished? The system was wrecked. She felt it on election night. How could people who didn’t live in a Central Park West penthouse believe in anything anymore? Why would they even bother voting for Hillary?
He couldn’t believe her line of argument, or how personal this had become. Seema was the Democrat. At one point, he was going to bundle for Hillary to get a job for her. How could Donald Trump cost him his marriage?
She looked at him sadly. There was no mistaking that look. The tired law-school eyes. Won’t you please leave us alone, the look said.
“I know this isn’t about Trump winning,” Barry said. “I know this is about what happened in the pool. I’ve apologized a million times, and I’ll apologize a million more. Here’s the thing. Here’s the takeaway. I’m more like Shiva than you think. Yes, I gave him his awful genes, and I’m sorry for that. But I’m just like him in so many ways. I don’t want to talk to people either most of the time. I make myself do it. I practice.”
“He can’t talk,” Seema said.
“Because he doesn’t want to,” Barry said. “Because he’s like me.”
“No, Barry,” Seema said. “He can’t talk because he can’t coordinate his fine motor movements to produce what we recognize as speech. That’s why he can’t talk. Not because he doesn’t want to. Don’t you see the difference?” She looked at his bewildered face. “Oh, honey,” she said, “can’t you see what’s around you? You’re not Shiva. You don’t have his excuses. You’re a man who makes tons of money while the world goes to shit around you. You make money because the world goes to shit around you. In the end, that’s who you are. And if you want to change, change. But if you can’t, please stop taking away whatever chance I still have of being truly loved by someone. My father, for starters. And my son.”
* * *
—
THE DIVORCE was brutal. She knew every asset by heart. Her lawyers chopped him up while his were playing defense. “Never marry a lawyer if you’re going to get a divorce,” Joey Goldblatt had cautioned him ages ago, and he was right. The settlement was pretty monstrous. After the divorce and after all the lawsuits against This Side of Capital, Barry came away with about thirty million, roughly the price of Joey Goldblatt’s Central Park West apartment. He knew he had to regroup, but he was so stunned by the loss of his family and the majority of his fortune that he spent months doing nothing but watching his country disintegrate and the markets rise on his laptop.
He needed a place to live, and the Gramercy was too close to the heartbreak Seema had caused him. Joey Goldblatt invited him into the Troubadours Society, which rented him a small but high-end apartment directly above the club. The idea behind t
he Troubadours was that you could stay in Midtown, close to your fund, and the rest of the world would come to you from Brooklyn or Berlin or wherever. Those artists and chefs and writers and thinkers were the Troubadours, and their presence led to lots of very carefully curated cultural events, which was sort of like having a hedge-fund wife at your disposal. This is where Joey Goldblatt had met his girlfriend after his own brutal divorce, and where he hoped Barry would find someone to cauterize his heart as well.
Which is exactly what happened on his first week there.
Her name was Lyuba and she was of “Israeli and Russian heritage,” which was a little bit confusing. In any case, she had grown up in Miami, spoke unaccented English, and had hair that felt to the touch either like the Platonic ideal of Brillo or like a perfect version of a Jewfro (although sometimes she intimated she wasn’t really Jewish), beneath which sat an angelic well-cheekboned face which Barry consistently failed to identify as Slavic.
He found her on a stool at the bar after a lecture by some imposing Oxford professor who had told them that Western civilization was “essentially over.” Usually super-tanned women in red dresses hit on him at the bar, but this time around it was slim pickings, and so he focused on the edgy-looking girl with the sheep hair. She was fighting with a man at least four times her age, with a high dry forehead but a surprisingly wet nose. When the geezer skulked off, Lyuba looked at Barry with bored bedroom eyes and soon they were sitting on cracked leather chairs in the boozy “library.” “I don’t need him,” Lyuba declared of the older gent she had been with. “I come from real estate.”
“He’s too old for you anyway,” Barry said.
“You don’t have to worry, I like older men,” the young Floridian said. “You want to touch my hair? You’ve been staring at it like forever.”
One of the interesting things Barry learned about Lyuba, after he took her up to his little one-bedroom on the floor above, was that she liked to “freebase” cocaine, which meant putting it on a piece of foil, lighting it up from below, and then drawing the smoke through a Pyrex pipe, like the kind Bentley had used back in Phoenix. “I don’t do sex on the first date,” she said primly while sitting cross-legged on the weird mohair couch in his living room. “You can go down on me or I can suck you off.”
Barry was excited but a little sad. Was this the kind of woman he would have to date now? The kind who liked Barry because he made money while the world went to shit around him, to paraphrase Seema? And then there were the practicalities. The last time he had tried to perform oral sex while using a coca-leaf-based narcotic had not worked out well for anyone. But what if he couldn’t get it up while she pleasured him? Which was worse?
After a few minutes of work, they managed to figure it out. Despite the fine, sheepy hair Lyuba wore on top, she was entirely bald down under and sported a bunch of tattoos in Russian and Hebrew. Maybe she was one of those “alt” persons or something. Whatever the case, she tasted young and wonderful. Barry was kind of excited about her political leanings. He felt like he had been brutalized by Seema and her politics, and Lyuba was a form of revenge.
They had a date the next week when one of the Troubadours, David Chase, the creator of the Sopranos, came to give a talk to a full house. It was unclear if Lyuba was a member of the club or not, but her presence seemed welcome by the male attendees. Barry was super excited to get her upstairs, even though it was Shaved White Truffle Night down at the club, but he was about to learn something interesting. Lyuba was a Trump supporter. Not so much the social stuff, but definitely the simplified tax plan. “It’s because I’m from real estate,” she said.
And now Barry felt the full weight of his abandonment. He saw Shiva only once every two or three months, even though he supposedly had joint custody, which his lawyers had fought for, even if he didn’t particularly want it. What were you supposed to say? That you didn’t want joint custody? There was no way he could take care of Shiva by himself, so he just met him at his sensory gym with Novie, and then he’d swing him around some kind of autistic swing while trying to maintain eye contact. “Astronaut training,” they called it. Barry wanted to tell his son that he was lonely, but he had no idea how to communicate that to any person, let alone a nonverbal one. In the end Barry had no idea who his son was, except that he had his mother’s eyes, and Barry could not bear to look into them.
Lyuba and Barry dated on and off for the next month. She even took him to Brooklyn once, although she seemed as disoriented by the borough as he was. He was half hoping they would run into Seema’s best friend, Tina, out there, so he could show off his edgy new girlfriend. Not that it mattered to him much at this point, but equities were doing great after Trump’s win. “The markets are basically a middle-aged white man,” Barry liked to explain to people outside the industry. In any case, by the start of the next summer Lyuba dumped Barry. She had gone back to the geezer. Maybe Barry wasn’t staking her enough, maybe she had found out he was only worth thirty million, maybe she had only been using him to bait the old gentleman back under better terms. It turned out that the old guy also came from real estate.
The house up by Rhinebeck was nearly done, and so he moved up there for the solitude and the Hudson views, the rumble of the Amtrak along the riverbank his greatest nightly comfort.
* * *
—
SEEMA WAS doing no better. All her friends were saying the election results had made them feel like someone close to them had died. She found herself waking up in the middle of the night worried about the fate of the Paris accord. But every time she saw her Instagram feed, all the globalized lives her so-called friends were living, the weekend jaunts to the Caribbean, the full-month fuck-offs to Marrakesh or Rangoon, she felt guilty in front of all the people who would never know the fruits of the global order. She tried to visualize the hatred of the Trump voting class for herself and people like herself, all those brown and yellow faces on Instagram peeking out of the coolest café in the newest city at the latest hour, once-hard-won lives now spent in merriment and ease. But was it really their fault that they were coming up while white Trumpists were coming down? She remembered the story Barry had told of being on the Greyhound, the white supremacists railing against the Jewish bankers of the world. It was terrible, of course, but all the people she knew, Jews, Indians, Koreans, everyone was feeding at the trough, none more so than her ex-husband, while many of the people who hated them had nothing. So who was right?
With her country dying, she found herself wanting to be a little less American and a little more Indian, to search for her roots the way her mother had her whole life. She needed to nail down who she was. Barry wasn’t the only one who could pursue that privilege. She tried to learn Sanskrit for the millionth time, attempted to memorize her father’s favorite slokas, and took a car service out to Flushing once a week to feast on upma at the Ganesh Temple Canteen. One day, she went to a lecture at the Asia Society on Indo-Saracenic and Mughal-Gothic architecture. The lecturer was an assistant professor at Columbia named Zameer Jarwar who had roots in Bombay and had just published a well-received book about that city. He was a short but kind of cute big-eared fellow (he must have been called a “half ticket” in Bombay slang when he was growing up, Seema thought) who knew how to hold a crowd. The lecture was really about Bombay’s main train station, once known as the Victoria Terminus, and how the station reflected postcolonization, the rise of Maharashtrian nationalism, the decline of the Congress Party, really the whole history of India’s premier city. Seema thought she had learned more about Bombay in forty minutes of hearing this small man speak than in all the time she had spent there as a young woman.
Afterward, Zameer was mobbed by very fashionably dressed Pakistani women and some Indian Muslims. She had deduced from his name that he was, of course, not Hindu, and a crazy part of her was almost sad over that fact, in case she ever had to introduce him to her parents. Her parents? What the hel
l was she thinking? Maybe she should just run out of the room and return to the routines of her life, the caring for Shiva, the drinks with Mina, the fights with her mother. She waded through the perfume of the young professor’s middle-aged admirers and noticed that he was tracking her progress through the room with his entertainer’s eyes, even as the crowd was thinning in favor of the suspect Subcontinent-themed desserts the organizers had put out. “Hi, I’m Seema,” she said.
“Hiya,” he said. That’s probably how he started every student conference, with an informal “Hiya.” He was wearing Rag & Bone jeans and an A.P.C. shirt like an advertisement for his social class. He was only an inch or two taller than she was, but he hummed with energy and intelligence. She had this weird thought from the very beginning: Please, God, don’t let him come from a wealthy family. What was that even about? It’s like she wanted him to have come by whatever money he had honestly.
She envisioned the professor living in a small one-bedroom apartment, Columbia academic housing, indecipherable framed stuff on the wall, maybe a vintage Indian family-planning poster warning women not to get pregnant all the time, “Mother Must Have Complete Recovery Between Two Children.” Mercifully he wasn’t wearing a ring. Mercifully she was as beautiful as ever.
And then Seema began talking to Zameer Jarwar. Not in the manner of the comic Indian actress that her white friends told her she resembled, because he would see right through that, but in a more natural voice. She talked about the station. About how every trip to India since she was a little kid involved endless trips from South Bombay to Shivaji Park via Victoria Terminus. She had a mental map of every vada pav dealer near the station, the formation of the trains, the ladies’ cars, the cars for invalids marked, against all good taste, with a crab for cancer, how her uncle Nag had made her jump off with him as the train was grinding into the station, per the usual custom, and she had skinned her knee something ridiculous. And being the consummate talker, Zameer matched her stories one by one, until they had both gone through a long litany of every uncle in greater Bombay, and they were all alone in the large lecture room, the older admirers long having waved a sad goodbye to their hero who was being monopolized by the talkative Tamil girl.
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