ON THE opposite end of America, in New Jersey, a party was under way. Bill Ferris, the host, guessed he didn’t know a quarter of the partygoers; and most of those partygoers didn’t know that they were here to celebrate his retirement from the world of entertainment law. Some were confused by the fact that this was Father’s Day, and even wished their childless host a happy one, while others—neighbors, mostly—had come solely for the free booze. Not that this bothered him. He and Gina were social creatures; they had spent decades gathering around themselves a menagerie of artists, actors, gurus, and agitators of a smorgasbord of races because this was what they most enjoyed witnessing: the descendants of Trotsky engaging one another on neutral ground.
Children were safely jailed inside a screened trampoline, while the sharp aroma of skunkweed came and went along with snatches of conversation: rising unemployment in the heartland, the latest corporate mergers, the recent acquittal of a Newark cop who’d shot and killed a black man in front of his wife and daughter, a congressional money-laundering investigation into Oklahoma City’s Plains Capital Bank and Frankfurt’s IfW, or Investition für Wirtschaft, and, as ever, POTUS #45. A voice on the warm breeze: “Fuck this, man. I’m moving to Canada.”
When David and Ingrid Parker arrived, Bill was on the front porch, signing for an emergency half keg of Shiner Bock. He kissed Ingrid’s permanently flushed cheeks and asked after her health—she’d just crossed into her second trimester. “The food’s staying down,” she said, pushing back the long walnut hair that she’d been growing out for a year; once it was long enough she was going to donate it to make wigs for cancer patients. “What’ve you got to eat?”
“Everything,” he assured her.
Bill had met the Parkers ten years before, back in 2007, during a month-long stay in Berlin to negotiate the minutiae of a studio buyout, and they had remained friends ever since. Ingrid had been writing grants for the Starling Trust, while David had wallowed in the dissolute life of an expat novelist. His debut, Gray Snow, a story of concentration camp survivors making their way home to Yugoslavia through the apocalyptic landscape of postwar Europe, had garnered impressive reviews back home, and by the time Bill met him he was working furiously on his follow-up, Red Rain.
David’s audience had been small, but he was living the romantic exile’s life, which, until 2009, was enough for him. Early that year a terrorist bomb went off in an apartment building as David was passing on the street, and his brush with mortality changed everything; all he wanted now was success. The first step was to move back to Manhattan, to the nexus of American publishing, where all doors would be open to him. At first Ingrid resisted, but David eventually wore her down. She got a transfer to the Starling Trust’s New York headquarters, and they moved into an Upper East Side rental, where David spent his days hunched over a laptop, putting everything he had into his masterpiece. He was poised for success.
Which was why, after five years of hard work, he was dumbfounded when his editor unceremoniously rejected all eight hundred pages of Balkan America. Then Ingrid learned she was pregnant, and money became an issue. Her salary just covered their exorbitant rent, and as they ate their way through their savings they tried in vain to plan for the expenses of parenthood.
In the backyard, David stationed himself beside Bill, who was keeping an eye on some Kobe steaks. Though the rest of the party was being catered, Bill had insisted on manning the grill. They gazed down the arc of the yard to the trampoline, where a hired clown had just arrived to terrify the children of the Left, and Bill opened up about a fight he and Gina had been waging. “She wants to move south. Florida. Just contemplating a life in that cultural wasteland makes me sick.”
David gave him an appreciative smile, but his mind was clearly elsewhere.
“What about you and Ingrid?” Bill asked.
The smile faded. “She’s giving me a month.”
“What?”
“To start pulling my weight.”
“You still have savings, don’t you?”
“We’ve eaten up too much.”
Bill didn’t say anything.
“Teaching,” David said.
“The horror.”
David drank again, looking out at the busy backyard. “Maybe we should just throw in the towel and move back to Berlin. Every time we turn on the news we talk about it. This country’s a mess.”
“Don’t watch the news, then.”
“Ingrid doesn’t watch anything else,” he said. “You know where she was after the last election? In the streets, marching around with her NOT MY PRESIDENT sign in front of Trump Tower. Screaming like a banshee. Then last week? Ran off to Newark to protest that Jersey cop who killed that guy … what’s-his-name.”
“Jerome Brown.”
A shrug. “She came back filthy. I think there was blood in her hair.”
“She wasn’t the only one protesting,” said Bill.
“Did you go?”
Bill shook his head.
“My point exactly. You and me—we’re grown-ups.”
Bill checked the steaks. While he wasn’t looking, they had burned.