Lake Success

Hush, child. Don't be so hard on yourself. Everyone gets to start over again. This America, hon. One dream dies, you get another.

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.

Being a full prof at the University of Texas at El Paso meant living like a managing director at Barclays. Barry had always wondered why people who were just upper-middle class in New York chose to stay there, given that they could live like minor dictators in the rest of the country. “You’re negative arbing yourself,” he used to say.

Folks had draped strange flags over their iron porticoes with drawings of pineapples and the word WELCOME. The South was like that, festive but impenetrable.

Virginia proper, a series of low Confederate fields bracketing the highway.

It was clear to him, suddenly, that she was educated in an international school, and Luis probably went to a prep school in the States. Old money. Laughing at new money.

When things are tough with my family,” she said, “I like to watch Trump, because he just takes my mind off stuff. No matter what happens personally, there’s this much greater disaster taking place.

Leo was a fifty-something Athenian intellectual who had tried to convince Barry that the Greek gods were better, or at least more curious and interesting, than the main Judeo-Christian one, whom he saw as a collector of sorts, never happy with his last acquisition, always too busy to maintain the pieces he already owned.

It was the one time in my life I did something without thinking it through. People like me, people like you, all we think about is consequences. Practically from the day we're born. And look at our fucking lives.

After he had taught himself to be friendly, everything else became harder. He had to let go of his nerdy passions. He couldn't do both at once.

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.

A man that rich couldn't be stupid. Or, Seema thought now, was that the grand fallacy of twenty-first-century America?

What she missed most about dating men was that small, disconcerting time frame when you thought that maybe you could change them.

The Ferrari felt a bit much, like Jeff Park hadn't gotten the "0.1 Percenter's Memo" about experiences not objects being the shit, but then again Barry collected watches, so who was he to talk?

Barry had always wondered why people who were just upper-middle class in New York chose to stay there, given that they could live like minor dictators in the rest of the country.

In old age, their interests bent toward each other’s like never before. Gardening, complaining, looking things up on the Internet.

They drove to a mall in a former industrial building called Ponce City Market, which was like Chelsea Market in New York, only it was in Atlanta. They climbed up the elevated tracks to a new park called the BeltLine, which was just like the High Line in New York, only it was also in Atlanta.

Wasn’t that the whole point of Facebook, to demonstrate to your classmates that you were more than okay in the world?

Seema agreed with him, although a part of her, no, most of her, wanted to be emotionally moved, to replace her fears of Trump with the love of country that Hamilton so implicitly promised.

THE HAMBURGER scent of Shake Shack had made the southeast corner of Madison Park a Brahman nightmare for Seema.

There was a Filipina woman named Gina, who was super cute and a professor of microbiology. Barry had heard of her. She was apparently Layla’s best friend. Her fiancé, Jimmy, was the dean of the engineering school. There was this other guy, Judah, who taught in the Jewish studies program and, incredibly enough, shared Barry’s love of watches. He wore a very under-the-radar vintage Longines with a coveted 13ZN movement, the dial patinated beyond legibility, real Watch Idiot Savant stuff. He had brought two guys from the Jewish studies program faculty with him, both small dudes dressed in overly hot sweaters, whose names Barry kept forgetting. This Judah was as tall as Barry and had some of the same swagger Barry used to have when he was at Princeton, only his came more naturally. He called Barry “a real New York macher,” Yiddish for a guy who gets things done, which totally charmed Barry. His father had used that term with great awe. This guy had friend moves up the ass.

This was the upshot of twenty marriage-counseling sessions at the feet of a fat older Jewish woman who looked like half of Barry’s relatives from the Bronx, the Cohens’ ancestral seat before his father had struck out for Long Island with its burgeoning collection of pools in need of cleaning.

Shiva wouldn’t have to accomplish as much as Arturo. He was a rich man’s son. He could go to Skidmore or launch a clothing line made out of hemp, but his parents needed a sign that he knew he was a part of their tight, illustrious family.

If she got tired of the writer, she could probably marry a short, heavyset man on the middle rungs of private equity.

The next eleven floors held a single apartment per floor and belonged to the principals of hedge funds and private equity firms and one Argentine model and her soccer player boyfriend who spent no more than a week out of the year in New York.

She’s the most beautiful and smart woman I’ve ever met,” he liked to tell his friends after they had stopped loving each other.

The night was warm and windy, a perfect Manhattan I-don’t-want-to-die kind of night,

These kids would already be in college by the time Trump left office. If he left office. No matter what they did or whom they became, Donald Trump would dominate at least a part of their lives. He would try to drag them down to his level. That's what he did.

Or was this merely a riff on her unfortunate marriage? Her misfortune as part of his seduction?

Like a long-haul jet, their building was divided into economy, business, and first.