The Wangs vs. the World(37)
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 Jér?me 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 Gs.
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.