The Dismal Science

by Peter Mountford

  Vincenzo had seen Cristina in the emergency room shortly after her heart stopped. Her blood was warm still and she almost looked alive, except that her mouth was open in a dreadful way, lip curled in an expression she’d never made alive. He opted for a closed casket, thinking he was sparing himself some agony. Only later did he realize that it was quite the reverse—that he’d be glimpsing her out of the corner of his eye for years to come; a quick double take and he’d see that it was just another woman of about the same height, with similar hair and posture.

  He accepted the two weeks off, but once Leonora had returned to Oberlin he found he couldn’t stand being alone at the house, so he went back to work early. He ended up working longer hours, up to twelve or fourteen a day, six or seven days a week. At night, he saw Walter often for chess and dinner. He played chess with strangers online, too.

  All of the work paid off. In less than a year, he was promoted to vice president of Latin America and the Caribbean.

  That was when he began driving to the office. His new position came with a parking spot on the red level, reserved for the most senior staff, and though Vincenzo wasn’t overly interested in the status boost that came with being the one in the elevator who said, “Could you please press the button for the red level?” he did find that continuing to ride the Metro twice daily alone was more than he could bear.

  This Monday would, in fact, be the first day since the promotion that he took the Metro to work. The previous night, over Korean takeout, Leonora—living in New York since she’d graduated from college last year, and visiting for Thanksgiving—had insisted on taking public transportation, because Vincenzo’s Mercedes had eight cylinders and was not, strictly speaking, eco-friendly. Maybe it was the cumulative effect of her repeated and early exposure to the unequivocal brutality and fragility of mortal existence, but she had mellowed prematurely, had become quietly persuasive, rather than brash. Whereas similarly aged children of Vincenzo’s colleagues were often petulant, Leonora expressed her displeasure subtly, calmly.

  “That car—I know you love it—but it’s kind of crass, Dad.” That was how she phrased it, but she grinned warmly at him when she said it.

  “It’s just comfortable.”

  “I know, but let’s take the Metro. For old time’s sake.”

  He nodded.

  The following morning, Vincenzo awoke an hour earlier than normal, took a shower, and knocked on Leonora’s door. Downstairs, he fetched the newspapers from the stoop, put coffee on, and opened the refrigerator. Yesterday, they had abandoned their three-day campaign to consume the Thanksgiving leftovers and had ordered the takeout; the aluminum trays were stacked up in the refrigerator beside the bowls of vegan stuffing, vegan cranberry sauce, and (not so vegan) whipped potatoes—Leonora, newly dairy-free, had managed to convince herself that what tasted like butter and cream in the potatoes was actually just olive oil.

  Vincenzo cracked only two eggs into the new skillet, because apparently vegans didn’t eat eggs either. When Leonora finally showed up, he had already finished his breakfast and was reading about the Bolivian election in the Journal. She poured herself a mug of coffee from the new coffeemaker.

  She opened the refrigerator, pulled out a box of rice milk, and said, “Did I mention that the Rainforest Coalition is going to be at the Bank today?”

  “You did, yes—thank you. They do incredible protests.”

  “You know them?”

  “Of course—the last time they came, I had to park in Georgetown and walk. I wore blue jeans and a T-shirt so that I could get through, but they had heard that we do that, so they all wore suits. You couldn’t believe it! Thousands of hippies in suits—it was amazing. That afternoon I went to their website and donated one hundred dollars out of respect for their techniques. The message, I’m afraid, is a little tiresome.”

  She rolled her eyes, put some granola into a bowl, and filled it with rice milk. She sat at the kitchen table, looking at him earnestly. “The thing is, Dad, I was thinking of stopping by before I catch the train.”

  “Oh?” Vincenzo shrugged. He’d suspected that that was what she was thinking about, but still it stung. Hoping to put the issue down lightly, he said, “I don’t know if I like that, but I suppose I could just tell the police to aim their fire hoses at the girl with the lip ring.”

  She mustered a dutiful smile, then said, “You wouldn’t really mind, would you?”

  He shrugged, looked out the window at the collapsing fence in the backyard. “Maybe, I—I don’t know.” It seemed remarkable that she didn’t know that he’d really mind. And it seemed remarkable that she could take his breath away like that. He put two slices of bread into the new electric toaster, pressed the button, and watched the slices slowly descend.

  “It’s nothing personal,” she said.

  “Oh?” Wishing he could resist, but finding himself unable, he said, “Well, yes, it is something personal.” He shrugged again. It had become a favorite gesture for him, the shrug. It was versatile, the implication open to interpretation. “My work means a lot to me.” He stared at the glowing wires inside the toaster.

  “You really don’t want me to be there.”

  As if thinking about this, he squinted and looked out the back window again, then said, “Could you come in for lunch?”

  “That would sort of defeat the purpose. You know, if halfway through the day, I put down my sign and went inside for a veggie burger with Dad.”

  “I see.”

  “Do you? I think you’re taking it personally. This isn’t about you.”

  “You think?”

  “Yes.” She stared at him, unblinking. After a moment, she pressed her lips into the tense smile that she used to indicate that she was ready to drop the subject, but was nonetheless sure that she was right, anyway. Then, seeing that his certitude matched hers, she said, “You know, there will be no other children of Bank employees out there today.”

  This seemed to support his argument. “Because they know better,” he said.

  “No—my point is that this isn’t something children do to get even with their parents. If it was, there’d be dozens of us. This really isn’t about you.”

  He just nodded slowly, and continued looking at her intently.

  At last, she said, “I’ll just go back to New York.”

  This was when he was supposed to assure her that it was fine for her to attend the protest, but he couldn’t bring himself to do that. So he said nothing. She sighed. He looked at the toaster.

  “I like the new kitchen supplies,” she eventually said in order to squash the blooming awkwardness.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “Why did you buy it all?”

  He shrugged. “It was just a shopping spree,” he said.

  She nodded. Did she really believe him? Did she not know him any better than that? No, probably not. How would she? He turned back to the toaster. He could hear the wires buzzing inside.

  The shopping spree had taken place on a Sunday, a day that had begun innocuously enough: over a slow brunch at the Four Seasons in Georgetown, he read an inch or so of the Sunday Times. Then he drove home the long way, along the canal, his window open, cold air numbing his ears. It was a bracing morning, autumn at its dazzling zenith, the oaks a nearly industrial yellow, while the maples ran fuchsia and the poplars deepened to dirty umber. Down in the woods by the canal he caught the faintest traces of smoke from the fireplaces burning the season’s first fires. He cruised up Nebraska and crossed over to Western, and saw the great white facades of Mazza Gallerie. Soon, he was corkscrewing too fast through the concrete tunnel and screeching onto the lowest level of the parking garage where he parked near the elevators, the only car that had ventured so low. Up at Neiman Marcus, he spent $461.08 on a pair of burgundy pajamas and calfskin house slippers. It was an odd whim for a man who, in spite of his vanity, had always been as frugal as any economist. But this was fun in a surprising, almost explosive, way—in a way that he ha
dn’t felt in a long time. Like being drunk and careless when everyone else was still sipping their way carefully through the cocktail party.

  Strolling through the mall afterward, he decided to stop in at Williams-Sonoma, where he browsed for a while and three women, all of them attractive and in their thirties or forties, approached him separately to ask if he wanted anything. He felt like telling them that he did want something, he definitely did—but he just shook his head. They had spotted his Neiman Marcus bag, of course, and thought he was in a buying mood, which he was.

  Everything in the store was pristine, just so—exactly like the catalog. He liked that about it. He liked it all a lot. He went back to one of the women, a voluptuous one with the wary expression of someone acquainted with the kind of loss that can disfigure a person.

  She asked if he had changed his mind, and he told her that he had.

  “Let me help you then,” she said and he was struck by the urge to kiss her, right there and then, but he resisted. She was just doing her job, after all.

  It took half an hour to decide that he would like a set of Belgian copper cookware; two Le Creuset cast-iron pots; an array of stoneware serving dishes and mixing bowls; a hand-carved olive-wood salad bowl; a full set of bubbly lime-green Biot glassware; eight full settings of dinnerware; designer pot holders; an unremarkable coffeemaker and an attractive toaster; a mighty roasting pan; an industrial-strength blender; a full set of Wüsthof knives; and a diamond-dusted sharpener. Taken together, the items presented a fearsome, if improbable, arsenal of blades and blunt instruments. The other saleswomen watched on, wide-eyed, as he kept going, kept picking up more and more things and the boxes started to pile up in the space beside the checkout counter. Eventually, it stopped. The grimacing woman spent a long time tallying it all and once she finally finished she seemed apologetic and flustered when she said that the total was $6,107.21. She worked on commission, no doubt, and he had just made her month, so he stared at her for too long, wanting to find some lightning bolt of connection, some paroxysm of uninhibited humanity to slap them both awake. But it was not forthcoming and—though she was clearly being as polite as she was able—he eventually looked away.

  With the help of a second saleswoman, she and Vincenzo hauled everything down to his car in two trips.

  Back at the house he spent hours replacing the old with the new. He unloaded the new supplies onto the counters and floors, took all of the old supplies and loaded them into the Williams-Sonoma bags, and carried them out to the car. Then he started unpacking the new things and putting them in their places. It was hard work, hauling it all to and fro, and by the time he was done it was three in the afternoon and he was exhausted. It was the most manual labor he’d done in years.

  Styrofoam peanuts and pills had escaped and touched down on the floor gingerly and now dashed away from him when he hurried past to fill one of his new glasses with water. He called Walter, his closest, if not to say only, friend. They met occasionally for lunch and lightning rounds of chess in the pocket park beside the World Bank, the café on the Bank’s mezzanine when the weather was hostile to chess. Walter had never stocked up the kitchen of his post-divorce apartment; he ate cereal out of his disintegrating Teflon sauté pan in the morning, drank everything out of the three mugs he’d picked up at recent conferences. The open maw of the baking soda container at the back of Walter’s refrigerator appeared, to Vincenzo, to be cackling at the overlit emptiness.

  “Walter,” Vincenzo said, “I have something in my car that I think you will want. Will you be there in half an hour?”

  “Half an hour?” Walter said and moaned slightly under his breath. “I’m trawling chess chat rooms for single women. It’s safe to say I’ll be here for the rest of my life.”

  The city’s Metro system was built by forward-thinking people and had barely changed since the 1970s. Nor had many of its passengers, apparently. When Vincenzo and Leonora boarded the southbound red line at Bethesda that morning, he saw a number of familiar faces. Some glanced at him and smiled weakly before averting their eyes. He and Leonora stood in silence until Dupont Circle, where Cristina would have debarked. The doors opened and some people got off, a few others boarded. The doors chimed twice and slid shut. Vincenzo watched this intently. He was wondering if he’d ever see it again when Leonora leaned over and whispered, “Hey Dad?”

  “Yes.” He swallowed the lump in his throat, looked at their feet.

  “Will you do me a favor?”

  “Of course.”

  “Will you tell Paul Wolfowitz to go fuck himself?” she said, and laughed exactly like her mother, slightly too loud for the setting, which shattered something else he’d been guarding.

  “I don’t think Paul would like that,” he whispered, and made himself chuckle. He looked up at her. No one spoke on the train except for them, and it was crowded enough that, whispering or not, people could overhear. He wondered if any of them were Bank employees.

  “Do you think he cares?” she said.

  “Oh,” Vincenzo said. He shrugged. “Yes, definitely. He’s not inhuman.”

  A woman he did not recognize looked up, stared blankly at him, as if he weren’t even there, and then looked down again.

  They said nothing else until the train pulled into Farragut North. Metro Center was next and if she got off there, she could walk to the protest and he’d never know.

  He leaned in, kissed her on both cheeks. “Stammi bene cara. Mi chiamerai presto?”

  “Sì Papi. Ciao.” She squeezed his arm and he felt the lump return to his throat.

  The doors parted and he was swept up in the current rushing toward the escalators.

  Once on the escalator, the pace slowed and he rose steadily toward the day, listening to the baritone sax. The musician had been there for fifteen years and his dreadlocks were like long tubes of cigar ash—Vincenzo’s hair, what was left of it, had also gone gray. The nakedness of the musician’s emotion as he played there every morning provided an amazing contrast to the waves of commuters who rushed past him. Most people who emerged from the K Street exit at Farragut North were in the thrall of their professional mission, whatever that might be.

  When they moved to the United States, Cristina didn’t have any trouble learning the word “commuter,” which she employed often, teasingly, to describe her husband. The word was only a few letters away from the Italian commutatore (commutator), but bore no resemblance to their word for someone who traveled a great distance to and from work: pendolare, from their word for pendulum. Still, “commuter” seemed amusingly inapt to them. It turned out that the usage emerged in the 1800s. Before that, to “commute” simply meant to change or substitute one thing for another; often it implied substituting a penalty for one less onerous. In the nineteenth century, people used “commutation tickets,” good for multiple rides on the railway. And, for a brief time, the people themselves were called “commuted,” as in: “I’m commuted; my ticket is worth ten rides.” Maybe it was the passivity of that construction, or its criminal hues, but by the early 1860s the word was “commuter.”

  As he walked down K Street amid the swarm, he thought about an article he had seen in the Wall Street Journal that morning. According to a new poll, Evo Morales was all but certain to win the Bolivian presidential election. Evo was the antithesis of these people crowding downtown DC, and the opposite of most politicians. Although Vincenzo had been an economist at the World Bank for most of his adult life, he considered himself an outsider, too, and empathized with Evo. The election was still weeks away, but, according to the Journal, Evo had a double-digit lead. A former coca farmer, he was a charming and handsome bachelor who never wore suits or ties, seemed gleefully oblivious to such things. His complexion was like desert clay after a rain, his hair full and ebony. He was, it seemed, never photographed without a guileless grin on his upturned face.

  Once elected, the article said, Evo would be a hero of the new populists—a saner Hugo Chavez, a younger Fidel Castro. P
undits were surely already talking, Vincenzo guessed, about a new kind of domino effect whereby formerly friendly Third World states followed Bolivia’s example and elected leaders who were openly hostile to the interests of the United States. Brazil was already halfway there with Lula. They were right to be afraid, Vincenzo thought, and he was also sure this movement was, all in all, a good thing for the world. The stonier think tanks would say that George W. Bush had been too quick to embrace democracy as the cornerstone of his version of post–Cold War policy. The Chinese had the right idea, they would say: capitalism needed to precede democracy.

  Vincenzo knew he would hear about the results of the poll at work. The American executive director, William Hamilton, would want to know if Vincenzo intended to cut Bolivian aid in response to Morales’s policies.

  The protestors from the Rainforest Coalition were gathering on Nineteenth Street, between the IMF and the Bank. The Bank had installed a temporary security kiosk by the service entrance for the cafeteria in the back on Seventeenth, so Vincenzo entered that way. He could smell bacon and chlorine coming from the kitchen as he rushed down the hall toward the elevators.

  In his office, he removed his Armani overcoat and put it on the hanger behind the door, was about to settle in at his desk when he noticed the pink Post-it on his new flat-screen monitor. With dread, he leaned in to look at it:

  Can you meet me at the IMF’s cafeteria for breakfast?

  —W. Hamilton

  8:27 AM

  Less than ten minutes ago. That time stamp indicated that he, Hamilton, was at work already and Vincenzo was not. Not that they were competing for any professional territory, but the number implied something about their differing degrees of enthusiasm.

  Hamilton had already spoken to his bosses at the State Department, no doubt. The board’s annual review of Bolivia had come and gone without incident recently—Hamilton had not said a single word during the entire meeting—and the Bank’s policy in Bolivia wouldn’t be up for review by the executive board for another ten months. In the meantime, Vincenzo was the only person who could change Bank policy toward Bolivia.