Barry was trying to focus, but on what? Shapes began to materialize. Circles. Triangles. Three panels in outrageously bright colors. It was that squiggly aids painter guy from the nineteen-eighties. A figure fell into his head. Something he had once discussed with Seema at a gallery—1.8 million. O.K. 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 Rollaboard with his watches and Shiva’s rabbit toy and his passport was 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 seventy-per-cent-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, then poured the water into his mouth. He burped ferociously, his whole being coming back to life.
He had fled New York. Fled his wife and his son and his son’s autism diagnosis. Fled his hedge fund, This Side of Capital, and all its troubles. Not that he had done anything wrong. Yes, his fund had shorted GastroLux, a pharma with a new gerd reflux medication in Phase II trial that was supposed to cure the esophageal difficulties of stressed-out yuppies belching up their Acela coffee and egg-and-sausage rolls. And, yes, he was a major shareholder in Valupro, which had almost bought GastroLux and whose management knew the drug would fail. And, yes, they had made about two hundred million on the trade, their last really successful trade. But it had all been a great big coincidence. Everyone else had piled into that trade anyway. What proof did the feds have that he’d used his relationship with Valupro to make money off the demise of GastroLux? It was like the whole of society was positioned to make sure Barry didn’t make money off anything. It was socialism. He didn’t want Trump to win, but he was glad the Obama years were sputtering to an end, even as they coincided with his own potential demise.
Barry had fled, with nothing more than a Greyhound bus ticket, six hundred dollars (he had had to ditch the Amex black card for security reasons), and his Rollaboard of watches. And now he was in Atlanta, having stumbled into Jeff Park’s condo straight off the Greyhound, dehydrated and barely alive.
The lights and blinds were all Lutron, and a small closet concealed the obligatory Crestron rack for the audiovisuals, among scattered 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 was 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, along with a photograph of a whale shark. Someone had changed him out of his Vineyard Vines. The Park wife again? Barry pressed the button to raise the blinds, and Atlanta appeared before him, the customary Wells Fargo and the B.B.&T. tower, but also some old-fashioned R.K.O.-style antennas and a deeply undistinguished nineteen-seventies edifice that scanned as Coca-Cola H.Q. He could see that 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 the high ceilings of their New York apartment were not high enough. Judging simply by the measurements of the great room, he sized 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’d had to clear out his desk within an hour, as a security guard hulked in the corner, watching his every move. Barry tried to console himself with the fact that Atlanta property, even at its gilded peak, would still cost a third of what it cost in New York. O.K., 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 reverie, he failed to notice the sporty exhales of the property owner himself, who was performing an impressive bout of pushups 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, thirtysomething motion. “Barry,” he said. “You’re alive!”
Full head of hair, gums that didn’t recede, pushups in the middle of the day. Jeff Park had gone to Cornell, if Barry 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. He shook his host’s hand eagerly.
“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 Cîroc bottles denoting 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 twenty-year Yamazaki 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 that it would really surprise anyone. The people in his world could be nuts. The world’s largest hedge fund, Bridgewater, of Westport, Connecticut, 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 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 Park a few of his adventures so far.
Jeff Park seemed interested. He poured more drinks, although he insisted that Barry chase his with water. “It sounds a little bit like you’re doing a version of ‘On the Road,’ ” Park said.
“That’s exactly right!” Barry shouted. “That’s exactly what I thought.” No wonder he had picked Jeff Park to host him—the man had literary sensibilities beyond those 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,” Jeff 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 only 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 in order to take care of his parents. Immigrants. Barry wanted to tell him that his own mother had 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 was 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 thing 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.
“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-size couch. “This sofa is the perfect height for a five-foot-six woman,” Jeff Park 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, blushing. He was not unhandsome; his face was chiselled 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 A.U.M. of thirty-five million, which in the best of worlds brought in, what, a couple of 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 near-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 G.O.P. 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.”
They went downstairs for a new course of drinks. Jeff Park was making them with ruby-red vodka and Seagram’s soda now. They sat at a table made from the cross-section of a giant tree. Its height was also designed to seduce an almost average woman. Barry felt around the serrated bark of the edges. He liked furniture that was slightly rustic with hints of the Arts and Crafts movement; that was supposed to be the motif of the Rhinebeck house, if he ever finished it. “Who made this?” Barry asked. The vodka-and-soda combination was delicious.
“It’s a Japanese eucalyptus,” Jeff Park said. “I bought it in Kokura. It reminds me of how lucky I am.”
“Kokura?”
“You never heard of ‘the luck of Kokura’? August 9, 1945. An American bomber was headed to bomb Kokura, in the south of Japan. But there was too much cloud cover over the city that day. So the plane was diverted. To Nagasaki.”
“Wow. Lucky for sure.”
“Right. Luck. If I had been born in Bangladesh to a family of ragpickers, would any of this happen?” He swept his arm around his forty-five hundred square feet of property. “My mother worked as a maid in Buckhead when they got here. I still remember the food stamps with the drawing of the old whiteys signing the Declaration of Independence. I memorized the words on it. U.S. Department of Agriculture Food Coupon. Where else could a maid’s son end up like this? That’s why I’ll always take care of my folks. Why I’ll always live in the same town as them. I’ve got to honor the luck that was given me.”
Barry thought of his own relationship with his parents. He had not had the opportunity to take care of his mother, of course, but he thought he had been kind enough to his father, given everything. After he had secured his first billion under management, he had bought out his father’s pool-cleaning company, Malibu Pools, for four million dollars, about ten times what it was worth, so that his dad could finally retire. But after that gesture, and after his father’s openly racist behavior at his and Seema’s wedding, he’d mostly avoided the old man. He had gone out just once to La Jolla, California, where his father was living with his girlfriend, Neta, whom he had found on an online Zionist forum. “I’m so sorry about your son getting autism,” Neta had said. “Did you give him vaccines? I’m sure that’s what did it.” “I told him not to get the vaccines!” his father had hollered from his perch beneath a plum tree. “I sent him the link about how the Somalian Muslims were spreading it through their doctors in Minnesota.” Barry was out of there in less than thirty-six hours. Five months later, his father was dead of pancreatic cancer.
Maybe Jeff Park was just a better son. And maybe better sons made for better people, and that was why their mothers didn’t die in car accidents, their faces caked in blood.
“But that’s not luck,” Barry said, returning to the theme of the conversation. “Sure, it’s helpful not to be born to ragpickers, but mostly your success was a result of your own hard work. And your parents’ gumption to move here.”
“You don’t consider yourself lucky?”
“Not for a minute,” Barry said.
“You found yourself working in the right industry at the right time. No regulation. All the leverage you could eat from the banks. I’m not even going to mention the insider trading that’s just part of being in the old boys’ club.”
“I don’t think we’re under investigation,” Barry said, which was to say that the F.B.I. hadn’t bashed in their door yet. Jeff Park looked at him. What could he know?
“Hey, I’m not knocking what we do,” Jeff Park said. “It takes smarts. But so much of it is luck. You execute one good trade, and people will listen to everything you say for the next five years.”
“All I know is I never had any advantages,” Barry said. “I wasn’t even lucky enough to be born to immigrant parents.”
Jeff Park laughed. “Now that’s funny.” They clinked glasses.
~~未完待續~~
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