The Wangs vs. the World (16 page)

That was it. Andrew couldn’t stay. He picked up his bag in one hand and his laptop in the other, and ran for the door.

十八

THREE BIG MISTAKES.

But, of course, it’s never that simple.

Before we even got to the third one, we were down and done.

As much as our willingness to believe in the constant rise felled us, as much as our eagerness to conquer risk opened us up to more risk, as much as Greenspan stood by as Wall Street turned itself into Las Vegas, there was also Greece, and Iceland, and Nick Leeson, who took down Barings, and Brian Hunter, who tanked Amaranth, and Jérôme Kerviel and every other rogue trader who thought he—and it was always a he—could reverse his gut-churning, self-induced free fall with one swift, lucky strike; it was rising oil prices, global inflation, easy credit, the cowardice of Moody’s, the growing chasm of income inequality, the dot com boom and bust, the Fed’s rejection of regulation, the acceptance of “too big to fail,” the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, the feast of subprime debt; it was Clinton and Bush the second and senators vacationing with banking industry lobbyists, the Kobe earthquake, an infatuation with financial innovation, the forgettable Hank Paulson, the delicious hubris of ten, twenty, thirty times leverage, and, at the bottom of it, our own vicious, lingering self-doubt. Or was it our own willful, unbridled self-delusion? Doubt vs. delusion. The flip sides of our last lucky coin. We toss it in the fountain and pray.

十九
Helios, NY

SAINA SAT BEHIND the wheel of her parked car, a hand-me-down Saab that the house’s previous owner—a widowed theater director who couldn’t take the upstate winters anymore—had left behind along with an attic full of ancient furniture and a shed piled with buckets of unapplied weather sealant. Two cloth bags were balled up on her lap. She peered across the dirt lot, willing Leo not to materialize. Some weeks it was Gabriel, his assistant, who hauled the cartons of hydroponic lettuces to the market and explained to the aging dads with Mohawked toddlers riding on their shoulders that Fatboy Farm’s only crops were in the Asteraceae family, not the Cannabaceae.

What if Leo’s farm wasn’t there at all? Would that be because of her? She’d emailed, once, an apology that apologized for its own pointlessness, and texted, twice, with smaller, sadder apologies, but in the end, she’d allowed herself to be Graysoned into selfishness, reasoning that it was better, really, that Leo had seen things for himself. Better to rip off the bandage than let it grow into the wound.

But they were in the Catskills, and this was the only farmers market within twenty miles, and her father was coming. If she couldn’t gather up his lost world, then she had to at least welcome him with all the bounty this one could provide. Waxy Red Delicious apples trucked to the A&P from Mexico might have been okay for Grayson, but the Wangs deserved crisp, fragrant local Macouns, all rosy veins and bright white flesh.

The market itself was laid out like a cross, with a bluegrass band and trestle tables set up in the center. Children with faces painted like pandas and cows ran through the crowd, half of them barefoot. Saina hoisted one bag over her shoulder. It was full now, a spray of turnip greens spilling over the top, and she remembered, too late, that it had started life as a gift bag from Gucci’s UNICEF fundraiser, one of the endless roundelay of events that made up her New York life. The fashion label’s logo was printed on both sides, so she couldn’t even turn it around to hide the giant interlocked
G
s.

Saina was examining a bunch of multicolored carrots when she saw a movement, a series of movements—an arm, a twist, a shoulder, a lift—and froze, swallowed her breath, dropped the carrots. Not Gabriel. Leo. He was smiling now; she could see just the edge of his face, but she knew the folds and bumps of it so well that she could read them even through this scrim of carbon dioxide and chlorophyll. He was smiling and holding a bag of salad out to a white-haired woman in a draped sweater and red-framed glasses who faced Saina straight on. This is the person Grayson should have seen, this tall, sure man.

How good it made them feel, these well-meaning Upper West Side transplants, buying organic produce they didn’t even have to wash from a handsome black man who would greet them with an exotic fist bump! An attractive, articulate chap, not unlike the young senator from Illinois they had just congratulated themselves for nominating, who would show the world that slavery was behind us and that we could appreciate hip-hop. Yes! So many pretty boxes to check all at once!

Saina stopped herself. She and Leo used to do this together sometimes—half jokingly turn everyone around them into the worst kind of self-congratulatory liberal, using that familiar colored-person shorthand to align themselves with each other. But it was unfair. It was just a step down, really, from her father telling her that Indians were nice to look at, and held beautiful festivals, but were not to be trusted under any circumstances.

For a minute, Saina let herself picture her father meeting Leo. His reactions to people were completely unpredictable—with Leo he’d either be moved to embarrassing displays of emotion or an ugly patrician prudery would rear up and he’d declare Leo and all he represented to be irreparably beneath the glorious Wangs.

No matter what, Leo would be a puzzle. His full name was Lionel Grossman. The Grossmans had a long Catskills lineage of Borscht Belt comedians, big band leaders, and the occasional heroin addict, men whose love of romance was equal only to their love of the road, resulting in a peripatetic lust that produced generations of illegitimate—but adored!—children and an ever-shifting backdrop of spouses. Leo was adopted into that family at age seven, brave and small, a ward of the state since he was two, already resigned to being unwanted. “It was the early ’80s,” he told her once. “We knew that nobody took little black boys. Celebrities weren’t scooping up bushels of chocolate babies from Malawi. It was a different time.” And then he joked that the big-living Grossmans thought they were lifting a pickaninny out of the ghetto, but really they were bringing him into a family of shiftless musicians. If they’d been black, they would have been trouble; as Jews, they were just bohemian.

Saina lifted her bag of produce over her head, shimmied past the folding tables, and ducked out the back of the booth, her eyes on Leo. He was still smiling.

She felt light-headed.

It seemed unfair to walk up behind him, to surprise him like that, but she couldn’t, didn’t want to, approach from the customer side, where flats of lettuces would be wedged between them. As she crunched across the gravel towards an unsuspecting Leo, a tiny piece of rock wedged itself between her toenails, red now. She leaned down to pick it out and felt the strap of her mint-colored silk dress, just a summer dress, nothing special, slip an inch off her shoulder.
Good.
Heart beating, she pulled her hair over to the opposite side, leaving her neck bare. Not that she was expecting Leo to even look at her, really, but it didn’t hurt to be worth looking at.

And then, before she was ready, there he was. Close enough to touch. Close enough to smell. Shoulder blades pulling on the fabric of his faded black T-shirt.

Saina meant to tap him lightly, but instead her hand laid itself on his warm back and felt its way down to the curve of his waist. He turned. She dropped her hand. Stepped back.

“Oh. Hi. Leo. Hi.”

He looked down at her, neutral.

She lifted up her bag. “I’m buying things. Vegetables. I got river trout from the fish guys. And cheese. Taleggio.”

A nod. His eyes flicked to the oversize logo.

“It’s from an event. I didn’t buy it. I wouldn’t do that—I wouldn’t buy a Gucci farmers market bag.” Saina remembered that Leo didn’t know about her father and his fall.

“You might.”

Now. Say it now
.

“Grayson’s gone.”

Leo froze, looking at her.

“He’s . . . I didn’t want him here anymore.”

He considered this for a moment. “Did he still want to be here?”

Hesitate and all is lost
.

“Yes,” said Saina, immediately.

And then Leo’s eyes got soft in that terrible, amazing way that only men who are supposed to be invulnerable can soften. He looked at her, full of hope, and Saina felt herself die a little bit inside.

Saina knew that twenty-eight was still young. In New York she had friends in their early forties, holding on easily to beauty, who met talented men ten years their junior or rich men twenty years their senior—all the ones who were their age seemed to be too preoccupied getting divorced to fall into marriage—met them, married them, and made families with them as if their lives weren’t decades out of step. But up here in Helios, anyone in their late twenties was obstinately coupled. It was as if they’d all stepped out of some home ec manual left over from the 1930s, the women with their vintage flowered aprons and pots of small-batch preserves, the men with their beekeeping ventures and T-shirt-design companies. It wasn’t that Saina didn’t like the idea of growing her own heirloom tomatoes, it was just, well, it was lonely to make a fetish of domesticity on her own.

Back at home, she opened the door of her new Smeg refrigerator, specially powder coated in a bright yellow, and pushed aside containers of truffled Israeli couscous and goat’s milk yogurt to make room for a farmers market bounty of summer fruit, knobby cucumbers, ears of white corn, fresh mozzarella wrapped in asphodel leaves, and two overflowing bags of Fatboy Farm greens that Leo had handed her before they parted.

Outside, a car door slammed shut.

Her first thought:
Grayson came back!

Her next:
Leo really forgives me!

Who was this girl, yo-yoing between boyfriends, heart expanding and contracting based on how well she was loved? Not Saina. Certainly not. She was an artist; she was autonomous. Could someone’s base impulses usurp their better nature, making them forever into someone they didn’t recognize?

Footsteps sounded down the slate path and headed towards the side door. In a second the person would pass by the open kitchen window. Now was the time to duck down and slip out to the unfinished studio, where she should have been working all along, trying to recast the double-barreled disgrace of her betrayal and fall.

Curiosity kept her upright.

She watched as an asymmetrical haircut strode purposefully past her window, perched on top of a gangly body dressed in a hipster riot of neon-pink skinny jeans and a loose V-neck so deep that a nipple threatened to peek through. Billy Al-Alani. He spotted her through the window.

“The queen in exile!”

Saina sighed. “Friend or foe?”

“Knight-in-waiting and biggest fan.” He spread out his arms and dropped out of sight. Reluctantly, she stepped outside where he grabbed her up in a sweaty hug and kissed at her cheek. She pushed away from him, forcing a smile.

“What are you
doing
here? How did you even know where I live?”

“How can you
live
all the way up here? Don’t you miss Manhattan? Here, I brought you something.” He thrust a paper sack at her.

Saina opened it and looked inside. “There are bagels in the Catskills, Billy.”

“New York water, baby, there’s nothing like it!” He looked past her into the open door. “This place is pretty rad, though. I bet you’re really getting shit done here, right?”

Instinctively, she blocked his view. “If by shit you mean going to every estate sale on the Hudson, then totally.”

“Aren’t you going to invite me in?”

The hostess in her reared its well-bred head and she swept Billy into her refuge, putting a white wine spritzer on the weathered handcart turned coffee table in front of him—“My love of wine spritzers is fully un-ironic,” he declared—and settling herself on a Moroccan pouf underneath a pair of Marilyn Minter lips. He was the first visitor she’d had besides Grayson. All of her New York friends seemed to be locked in some perpetual work/party circuit that ran from Sundance to TED to Spring Fashion Week to Fire Island weekends to Burning Man to Fall Fashion Week to Art Basel Miami, with interludes of detox in Tulum or Marrakesh. When she first arrived in Helios, she’d been too wounded to speak to anyone, then she’d been too wrapped up in Leo, and after that, she had to hide Grayson’s return from all those loyal friends who had vowed to excommunicate him but, Saina suspected, continued to put out their faces to be kissed whenever they happened to meet.

“Okay, Billy, seriously, what are you doing here?”

“Can’t I just come visit an old friend?”

She tilted her head and took him in. He played with the piece of bone that hung from a leather cord looped around his neck and tipped one canvas shoe against the coffee table.

“Am I an old friend?”

“Of course. Absolutely. You’re actually one of the first people I met in New York.”

“I remember. At that group show I was in. You were, like, brand-new. Straight out of—”

“Compton, yo. Yup. And you were doing those tiny sculptures. And then in Miami, remember?”

She did. The first time they’d met, almost five years ago, he’d been a sweet-faced, small-town boy in a dead man’s suit, hanging on the edges of conversations, downing flute after courage-building flute of Taittinger. Six months later, when she’d seen him again, he was manning a booth in the publications ghetto at one of the ancillary fairs at Art Basel—NADA, maybe, or SCOPE—and looked so like a disaffected ex–prep schooler that she’d doubted her own memory of him. That is until he’d pumped her awkwardly for invites to all of the week’s parties and recounted the art world luminaries he’d seen: Robert Rauschenberg in a wheelchair having a caipirinha! Jeffrey Deitch rocking to the Scissor Sisters! Tobey Maguire watching Terry Richardson watch Amanda Lepore!

“When you started writing for the party pages. What are you up to now? Are you still the Army Archerd of the art world?”