Lake Success by Gary Shteyngart

Author:Gary Shteyngart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House LLC
Published: 2018-09-03T16:00:00+00:00

THEY HAD driven past a sign that read WELCOME TO SWEET HOME ALABAMA in seventies cursive and, a little while later, passed through a downtown graced by art deco but unmarred by the presence of a single human being. This was Birmingham. They stopped for half an hour, and Barry got a Reese’s Pieces ice-cream sandwich. His funds were low, but he didn’t want to pass out from hunger again.

He was in a state of turmoil. His wife had said he had no imagination. His government wanted to slap him in cuffs. And now Jeff Park, a man he had mistaken for a friend, had accused him of taking money out of people’s cushions. No one knew who he was. No one. Misunderstood, accused, humiliated. Back in his thirties, he had put in eighteen-hour days, hundred-twenty-hour weeks, to build his own business. And here he was on a Greyhound, wearing another man’s whale-shark T-shirt, with two hundred dollars in his wallet. No matter. He would get through this. His Act 2 had begun.

New passengers boarded the bus. One of them was unlike the others. If Greyhound ever needed to advertise its services, they could use a fifteen-second roll of this young woman climbing onto the bus and reaching up to stow a Puma duffel bag. She was black and her hair was blond. She wore jeans and a dark tank top, nothing special, but all of her shimmered in the stuffy air, as if she was bringing youth itself onto the bus. This was the feminine ideal of fun and freedom America celebrated, only in black form. Barry thought of the double, triple, looks Seema got from strangers trying to figure out what she was, before allowing themselves to register that she was beautiful.

As soon as she boarded, people had stopped talking glumly to one another or staring hopelessly into the middle distance. Everyone was paying attention now. Everyone was asking themselves the same question: Where would she sit? There were four or five empty seats, two of them occupied by larger older gentlemen and two more adjacent to men of reproductive age. The final seat was next to Barry.

The young woman lowered herself into the seat next to him, her light blue jeans scrunching gently into the rigid Hound fabric. It wasn’t so much that she smiled at Barry; it was that her smile was never ending. Who smiled on the Greyhound?

He kept trying to think of a word to describe her. A tiny band of belly ribboned between the jeans and her tank top, and he could see the imprint a pair of underwear had made right above her hip bone. Her teeth were professionally white, and every finger was a sculpture. “Trim,” that was the word. Almost athletic. Barry tried to remember the black girl from game theory back in Princeton, the one he had dreamed about when his relationship with Layla was on the rocks. She had had a white name, something like Brenda or Wendy.

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