They complained about the inauthenticity of Curry Hill but still ended up there, at a Pakistani place full of cabdrivers and small-time merchants. “Would it offend you if I ordered quail?” he asked. They were able to summarize their backgrounds in fifteen minutes, merely talking about the diets with which they grew up. She ate meat sometimes. He drank all the time, but didn’t eat pork. Not that he was religious. Not that she was religious. Okay, so no one was religious. It was amazing. Zameer understood more about her background by the end of the night than Barry had understood in five years. So this is what her few Indian friends meant when they talked about the pleasures of being with their own kind. Although, obviously, they were from different religions. But they were from the same place. They were from Victoria Terminus.
He asked her uptown that night. Before they left the overlit deliciously greasy Pakistani place and after she agreed to go up with him, she said, “Big piece of intel right here. I have an autistic boy.”
“Well,” he said, “I know enough not to say ‘Sorry to hear that’ or ‘Sometimes I feel like I’m a little autistic myself.’ But, honestly, it’s not a big deal. And I like kids. I’m number one uncle to like a thousand of them.”
Yes, he lived in Columbia housing, which actually proved pretty amazing, ceilings every bit as high as her apartment’s, although the cab ride felt long enough to have taken them to Westchester, and shortly after their arrival she was kissing his big ears in the magisterial bed, and neither of them had a condom, but they had to do it anyway.
She was shocked when three months later it was her father who objected on religious grounds to their announcement of marriage, although probably he was representing her mother as well. “I’m worried about the gulf in your backgrounds,” he had said, looking down at his new orthopedic shoes. She asked him why no such issue had come up when she had married Barry. When he couldn’t find a proper answer, she instructed him to never bring up her future husband’s religion again.
And he never did.
BARRY’S NEW fund took off right away, and he was thrilled and vindicated. It had been three years since This Side of Capital had dissolved, and a lot of people were willing to stake Last Tycoon Capital, especially after he got a nice write-up in Bloomberg. Barry knew that people knew that he had learned from his mistakes. His investors hadn’t cared about the Sardinian yacht and Sammy Yontif and all that shit. After all, they had made money off his insider trading. They just wanted better returns and Barry was poised to deliver them. And so he leased a new space, this time in Midtown, and hired a lot of Princeton wrestling guys who could snap the unicorn off their competitors. They were almost a complete replica of his crowd back in the Tiger Inn days. They buddied around and did all kinds of crazy things, buying every dip, surviving macro events, at one point building a short position in Dell. Once again, Barry found himself in the role of leader and moralizer. He tried to start another book club, this one entirely devoted to nonfiction, and constantly pointed out the lessons he had learned while traveling across country by bus, especially the hidden dignity of lower- and middle-class people, the Javons and Brooklyns and Jose the Gardeners of the world.
Eventually he and his new buddies found themselves heavily overleveraged in cryptocurrency, and Last Tycoon Capital fell apart, but this time Barry kept the lawsuits to a minimum and came out with an additional forty million, bringing his total net worth just north of seventy-five with appreciation.
Barry knew he was good at making and losing money and getting paid for both handsomely. Yet this knowledge made him a little sad. He didn’t want to be the villain of Seema’s last words to him. He wanted to be respected and loved by his peers, but was running a fund the only way to get that approbation? Should he cash out and start a charity? And yet hedge funds were the only thing he knew that could consistently generate bottomless wealth for him. Not to mention take care of Seema’s fantastical alimony. So after a little while, he decided to start yet another fund. It was not too hard to find backers. The consensus was that this time he had really learned his lessons. Balance Wheel Capital was a reference to the spinning part of a watch movement, roughly the analogue to a clock’s pendulum. It was supposed to indicate forward momentum and also the fact that this fund was fundamentally balanced, hedged to the nth degree, and stocked almost entirely with quants in Dockers pants. It was time to stop being the “friendliest guy on the Street” and embrace his Jonah-like inner nerd. Even his old frenemy Akash Singh joined the board. Balance Wheel failed about two years in, but not before Barry came away with another thirty million, bringing his total to one hundred. No one in his industry had ever told him, “You should quit while you’re ahead,” but Barry decided to impose that advice on himself. He was going to take it easy, maybe try out those charities he had always dreamed of starting.
He now had a hundred million dollars. This was neither a little nor a lot in his world. Few people would stop making money upon reaching a hundred mil, unless they were fundamentally unambitious like Jeff Park. Barry was living in his house up in Rhinebeck and not seeing anyone romantically. International start-ups were a big thing now, so he began traveling around the world trying to help out in Rwanda and Myanmar, places where he thought the locals were especially entrepreneurial. But traveling to poor countries was even more exhausting than he had remembered. All he did was sit in conference rooms, chat with midlevel functionaries at the Ministry of Finance, and then travel out to the hinterland in a Nissan truck to see the peasants. He lived this way for about nine months.
One day he landed at JFK, bone weary, and spent a day at the terminal, standing there with a cup of coffee, looking at the new destinations as they popped up on the screen. As night fell, a security guard walked up to him and asked him if everything was okay. “I think I’m having a stroke,” Barry said, very slowly. An ambulance was summoned, and he was taken to a sweaty public hospital in Jamaica, Queens, but it was nothing. It was really nothing. He was just okay. He would always be just okay.
The nonstroke was an epiphany. He decided that whatever he was doing with his life wasn’t enough. He had to tell his own story to the world somehow. He had to reconnect to the literary person he was back at Princeton. Layla had been a dead end. Having a family hadn’t panned out. None of his few remaining friends wanted to be in any kind of book club. And he would never make the mistake of trying to be in a relationship again. So what was left? The writing. The inspiration. What if he wrote a memoir about his Greyhound experience?
There was a scenic trail called Poets’ Walk about ten minutes north of his estate, where Barry sat in a little gazebo by the Amtrak railbed, watching the trains swoosh by as he reread The Sun Also Rises over and over and over, just as he had as a teen in Queens. Simple sentences were key. A character might feel “lousy” or whatnot, but you as the author would never really delve into the complexity of feeling. Instead you let the actions speak for themselves. Barry wrote:
A broad-shouldered man walked into the Port Authority. He was drunk and rich and he strode through the main hall like he owned it. The nanny of his autistic kid had just hit him and he was bleeding from the brow.
He looked that over. Pretty good, but he took out “autistic.” Then he took out “nanny” and “kid.” He stared at the computer screen trying to figure out a way to tell the story without mentioning the abandonment of a child with a severe disability. Just forward motion all the way. The One-Eyed Mexican. Javon and the Crack Rock. The Passion of the Hayes Family. Jeff Park and the Luck of Kokura. The Black Girl Who Loved Me. Tales from the Mapparium.
After a few weeks, Barry abandoned the project. Now he understood why he hated Luis Goodman and other writers so much. He was a damaged person, but not damaged enough to make a life out of it.
But he had to do something. Time was passing. He missed the quiet of Jonah’s room in El Paso. He needed to rediscover a peaceful hobby that would consume all of his time.
Writing was a nice attempt in that direction, but one morning, sitting at a local diner, he noticed a hot Bard student wearing an iconic Cartier Tank Arrondie from the seventies on her slim, tanned wrist. Three bites of shredded hash browns later, he found himself typing “Tank Arrondie prices” into his phone’s search engine. Watches. He had not thought of them obsessively since his luggage was stolen off the Greyhound. The watches he had left were prosaic and obvious. He clearly needed more.
Barry began to go to auctions. That was the only way to get the best stuff. He had a car service drive him down to the city, where he darted in and out of Christie’s, afraid of running into any investor he had burned in his former life, quite a few of whom had been watch geeks. He had not aged well. He had long given up on swimming in his pool, and although he was not fat by any means, his jowls were loose, his tone slack, and he looked like he was renting space within his own body. The hair had grayed but had not become distinguished, rather had faded to something dirty and worn like a piece of nougat left out in the rain. Only when he took up the bidding paddle at Christie’s did he become a formidable presence.
His favorite auctioneer at Christie’s was half Swiss, half Italian, and fully dapper. Barry could hear the European’s voice in his sleep, needling, cajoling, declaiming, pressuring, encouraging, hamming, navigating the waterways of international wealth with the finesse of a Venetian gondolier. “Still holding at one hundred and forty thousand. Make no mistake. It’s selling, ladies and gentlemen. Sir, fair warning. It’s selling above you. Make no mistake. I have a hundred fifty thousand. Hong Kong, come back to me. A hundred sixty thousand from the Czech Republic. Thank you, Czech Republic, for your passions. Asia, are we interested in this Patek? Last chance. The gavel is up. Come back to us, Florida. Are we all done? Make no mistake. Sorry, Denmark, you have to be quicker. Sold to the gentleman in the room.”
And Barry was frequently that “gentleman in the room,” the one who sighed every time he lifted his paddle, as if some terrible force of nature was imploring him to hand his money over to the auction house, as if the universe was robbing him of control, a feeling of euphoria and dread he couldn’t live without.
His collection grew, as did his reputation. Upstate, the room he had intended to become his Hudson River View Library instead became the Watcharium. It was a thousand-foot spread fit for a ballroom done up in folksy cedar. Barry had taken out all the furniture and arranged for glass cases to be installed, behind which his new collection could be displayed for an audience of one. The room was hushed; only the cleaning lady was allowed to disturb its peace. This she did at precisely 3:00 P.M. and precisely for one hour. Barry spent the rest of the day soaking up the silence of the Watcharium while talking to an imaginary Jonah. “So. You’re wondering what this is? Well, let me tell you. It’s a Patek 2438 in yellow gold. What makes it so unusual? It’s waterproof! A waterproof midcentury perpetual calendar. Did you know that? Did you know?” That had been Jonah’s favorite phrase. “And this? Oh, you’ll love this, Jonah. It’s a 3448 in white gold. Here. Hold it. Careful. Oh, look at those thick, beefy lugs. Never been polished. And that creamy dial. Ah.”
He had tried to follow Jonah on the map forums, but the boy had apparently lost interest in cartography a few years after Barry’s visit, which disappointed him. Further Internet searches showed that Jonah attended UTEP, which either meant his mother was broke or that she was sticking to her ideal of sending her son to a local, public college. Barry was sure that Jonah could have made it to Princeton.
In any case, when the lights of the Watcharium were dimmed, when he sat there hunched over a piece with his loupe, humming softly into his beard, as nearly five hundred watches ticked in tandem, Barry could convince himself that his secret son was beside him, sharing, learning, ticking his way through their own little world. Barry’s greatest pleasure was lining up all of his perpetual calendar watches at midnight as a new month approached and watching their day, date, and month apertures all register the change with a swift universal click. He would feel a surge of excitement as the movements coiled and tensed for the switch, and then after that satisfying click, he would relax, turn to his phantom son, and say: All done now, Jonah, another month dispensed with, and here we are still, alive.
In the ten years since his Greyhound trip, he had spent over 60 million dollars on watches, mostly Pateks, and bled away the majority of his net worth. Despite not being a fan of the Rolex brand, he had bought the famed Bao Dai Rolex, once the property of the last emperor of Vietnam, for 7.2 million dollars, which was one of the most expensive watches ever sold. After his winning bid, Barry threw up in the Christie’s bathroom, right into the Kohler fixture which reminded him of something else, another bathroom in Phoenix, Arizona, a bus station, a journey, a careless night, a tiny burst of happiness, all of it so long ago.
Barry took off his loupe. He had been sitting at his desk in the Watcharium allowing the weak sunlight of an upstate spring to trickle onto his desk. There was a problem with the Bao Dai. The problem with the 7.2-million-dollar Rolex was that it was one of the ugliest watches he had ever seen. It was made of shiny, intemperate yellow gold, Floridian gold, if you had to call it something. It was studded with four ridiculous diamond indexes. The last emperor of Vietnam was, by many accounts, a silly man, an “amoral opportunist,” to quote one publication, who had squandered part of his nation’s patrimony on things like this pointless watch. Barry had blown 7.2 million dollars during his trading career, had blown many multiples of it, but that was never his money. This was his money. And, if you thought about it, his son’s money, too.
His son. There would be occasional updates from Seema, meant not just for him, but for the vast reach of Shiva’s extended family from University Heights, Ohio, to Chennai, Tamil Nadu. More often than not, Barry would trash the e-mails, but sometimes he would take a reluctant peek at the photos of a young man who looked surprisingly “normal,” who seemed no different from any other gawky youth about to stumble out of adolescence. A tall boy who—no, he could not glance at him for more than a second. And, he surmised, his son could still not speak. He likely went to a special school where few spoke. So what could transpire between them?
Three weeks after the purchase of the Bao Dai, he got a call to appear on The Consummate Collector, a webcast in which the gentle young host in vintage professorial garb brilliantly discussed your watches in front of about half-a-million unique visitors. Most watch nerds he knew spent their entire lives waiting for that call. The Consummate Collector people wanted to see his entire collection, but the big draw was the awful Rolex. Barry couldn’t sleep for a month. He rehearsed his lines, his friend moves, he delved deep into the minutiae of watch knowledge, keeping imaginary Jonah constantly at his side. As the day drew near, there were more practical concerns. He didn’t know what to wear. A lot of the dudes on the show, in particular the rich Silicon Valley collectors, wore T-shirts and jeans, and he thought of getting something a little more Brooklyn to make himself look younger. But in the end he just strapped himself into the Kiton vicuña stuff, figuring they were going to mention he had worked in finance anyway. But just as the film crew and the terrifically bearded young host were driving up to Rhinebeck, Barry felt sick. At first he thought he might be having a real stroke this time, but then he realized what it was.
If he went on The Consummate Collector, that would be the final step of his life. His last achievement. If you were a Watch Idiot Savant, where could you go from there? The Consummate Collector was the end of the line. His story would be told, watched by the half-a-million unique viewers, followed up by two hundred snarky comments—7.2 million for that crap? No wonder our country is in the state it’s in. Didn’t that guy have three funds that blew up?—and soon there would be nothing left of Barry’s collection but a string of poisoned footnotes. Barry picked up his phone. The Bao Dai glowed its awful yellow glow. The world was spinning in place. He dialed the producer’
s number and told him he had to cancel because he was having a stroke. Oh, my, the producer said. “Nah, I’ll be okay,” Barry said and hung up.
And six months later Barry put his entire collection up for sale at Christie’s. As he was scouring the built-in drawers of the Watcharium’s displays for stray timepieces, he ran into an unexpected one. The Universal Tri-Compax, the one he had journeyed across America with ten years ago. It had been stored ingloriously in a Ziploc sandwich bag. The watch was broken, but as he sat there at his desk looking at it, he realized exactly what time it was. It had been nearly ten years since that trip across the country. Shiva had been three when he got on the Greyhound to Baltimore. Ten plus three.
His son was about to become a man.
* * *
—
SHIVA DECIDED he wanted to have a Bar Mitzvah. He had not grown up particularly Jewish, but maybe it was just the influence of living in New York where it seemed like everyone had a Bar or Bat Mitzvah. In any case, he insisted on it, and Seema and Zameer obliged him. Somehow Joey Goldblatt had gotten wind of this through the Hamptons summer grapevine and he duly reported it to Barry. And so Barry rang Seema. His first call to her in almost a decade.
He spoke with a shaky voice and kind of blathered on about stuff that she didn’t understand. Auctions. Emperors. A “Universal watch,” whatever that meant. Finally, she got the upshot. Barry knew about the Bar Mitzvah and he wanted in. He wanted to do this for his son. To quote him, this was going to be “the most insane Bar Mitzvah ever!” They’d do the service at Temple Emanu-El for as long as Shiva could stand the noise of the davening (if they even bothered to pray at an agnostic place like Emanu-El), and then all the autistic kiddos from Shiva’s school would get carriage rides around Central Park (because autistic people and horses went well together, according to Temple Grandin and the spectrum-friendly events planner Barry had hired), and then the party would end at the Mandarin Oriental, where there would be special spaces set up for the kids who couldn’t handle an excess of noise and other stimuli. When he told his plan to Seema over the phone, there was a long silence. “I don’t mean to overstep my boundaries,” he said. “Especially with your husband.”
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