The Dismal Science

by Peter Mountford

  Now, waiting for the elevator in the World Bank’s basement, Vincenzo returned his attention to the conversation with Hamilton. Both of them had made mistakes, had overplayed their positions.

  Over the long weekend, Leonora had said that she thought the World Bank was “basically run by the US government,” which had bothered Vincenzo more than he could explain. It had kept him up at night formulating and editing counterarguments, which he’d never used, because the subject hadn’t come up again. But now, this morning, witnessing Hamilton’s swagger at breakfast—Vincenzo was more than a little dismayed by the way it dovetailed with her comment.

  They would not fire him, he knew, because to do so would only exacerbate whatever PR problems his conversation with the press would cause. The management would, instead, offer a large severance. Not that money was an issue anymore. This was one of the sadder things about hitting his middle fifties as a widower: suddenly the debts were all gone and the investments were pulling record returns, the house in Bethesda was worth five times what he and Cristina had paid. And yet, apart from his dinosaurian nest egg, he had no significant use for this money. He had begun eating osetra caviar casually, and drinking Barolo with his carryout from Obelisk. He had bought that stupid Mercedes-Benz and the new kitchen supplies. It was a mirage, of course, the shimmering apparition of newness. What he wanted was sad and predictable: a younger woman, not too much younger, but enough to be truly beautiful, with whom he could settle at his farm in Piedmont and pass his remaining years in peace, tending to the olive trees. He wouldn’t ask much from her, certainly not that she adopt the same pace of life. If she went out and didn’t return until late, he could live with that. Maybe he’d even feel okay if she had boyfriends. In theory, he could live with all that. He just wanted the company of someone beautiful and lively and carefree. During his free time, he could play chess, read, write, and pick up the other hobbies of the educated and indolent: gardening, watercolors, tennis, cycling, cooking, all the rest of that.

  Vincenzo stood in the elevator alone. Above the doors, the numbers lit one by one as he ascended.

  He grasped the wooden railing and stared at his blurry face, bisected by the crack in the brass doors. There were always finger smudges on the doors, he’d noticed, especially near the black space in the middle, as though someone had been trying to pry them open. Sometimes there were more smudges and sometimes there were fewer, but they were always there.

  He passed the rest of his morning anxiously, repeatedly checking his e-mail, waiting for the message from Wolfowitz requesting that he come in for a talk. The phone rang twice, but neither call had anything to do with the confrontation with Hamilton.

  When it rang a third time, Vincenzo saw from the caller ID it was Wolfowitz himself. He let it ring three times. He readied himself, and picked up. “Hello.”

  “Hello, Vincenzo, how are you?” He sounded light and friendly, even unaware.

  “Fine, fine.” He processed Paul’s tone and decided to move cautiously. “What can I do for you?”

  “It’s the protestors. I’ve invited their leader up to talk to you. Their complaint involves our Latin America program, and while it’s essentially meritless, it’s in our interest to meet with them briefly. Don’t spend a lot of time on it. I thought you’d be the man to talk to. His name is, let’s see—um . . . Jonathan Paris. Economics degree from Yale—good for him. 2002! Wow, he’s a child. Okay, let’s see: magna cum laude—and, well, you get the idea. A frisky guy, altogether, so I thought we’d try to mollify. Carrot is better than stick with these people; they live for the stick.”

  Vincenzo had spoken only a few times to Wolfowitz and didn’t know whether he was joking or not. Standing there, he pictured the face: jug ears and gnomish features, squinting eyes. Paul really wasn’t as bad as they said, but he was also hard to understand at times. And this was one of those times. Did this have to do with his conversation with Hamilton? It seemed likely. “Did you really invite him up to my office?” he said.

  “Absolutely. I’ve met with a number of protestors so far. With these ones—look, they’re just kids. You have kids?”

  “A daughter, twenty-four years old.”

  “So you understand. This is not as big a deal as people think it is. At the Pentagon, Don had a policy against even acknowledging protestors, but I always felt that if it’ll stop them spraying us with pigs’ blood every time we step outside, let’s hear them out. They’ll feel like they achieved something and we can get back to work.”

  “Well, Paul, I’ll let you know what this boy says.”

  “Good. Thanks. Please feel free to call me whenever.” And, with that, Paul hung up.

  Vincenzo barely had time to recover from the surreal phone call when Jonathan Paris himself, escorted by a lanky North African security guard, knocked on his open door. Vincenzo stood, told the guard he could leave, and beckoned the young man inside. Jonathan had a freshly shaved face and an ill-fitting suit, possibly on loan from his father. He was maybe about Leonora’s age—out of college, but not yet acquiescing to the realities of full-blown adulthood. He shook Vincenzo’s hand and flashed a future-politician’s smile, toothy and hollow and curiously beguiling.

  “What can I do for you?” Vincenzo motioned for him to sit.

  Jonathan ignored the chair. He turned and walked to the window, put his hands behind his back—it was an affected gesture, but Vincenzo sympathized. He often interviewed young men like this for positions at the Bank. They were often handsome and boasted fresh degrees from legendary institutions; they felt, in short, like destiny was in their favor, but they were always the most conspicuously insecure candidates. Jonathan Paris wore his nervousness a little proudly, as if the reticence were itself a product of his morally superior position.

  “You can’t hear us from up here,” he observed glumly. He leaned toward the glass, peering down. “You can’t even see us, can you?”

  Vincenzo squinted, put his fingers into a steeple, as if this were a very weighty matter.

  While sitting at the desk he had occupied since the promotion, he could see the corner of the International Monetary Fund’s top floor and a tidy rhombus-shaped swath of sky. “If you were a block away, I could see you when I stood at the window,” he explained. “If you rented a hot air balloon, I could see you when I sat at my desk, but I’m guessing that the propane isn’t”—he shrugged, winced—“it doesn’t burn very clean, does it?”

  Jonathan turned and smiled at Vincenzo, but kept his hands still latched together behind his back. There was a confidence—affected or not—that felt off-putting in someone so young. Vincenzo was tempted to ask if Jonathan had seen his Leonora down there. Any green combat boots? He had pictures of her in frames on the shelf. But no, it wouldn’t be appropriate.

  “Do you want a cappuccino?” Vincenzo said, wanting to make him feel more at ease. “We have a coffee shop on the mezzanine level. We could talk there.”

  Jonathan nodded.

  In the elevator on the way down, Vincenzo talked about Leonora. He explained that she had tattoos covering her arms, and that she supported the Rainforest Coalition. He said that she was beautiful and bright, that she lived in New York. He managed to resist the urge to say that she might be out there. He didn’t know why he was able to manage that one piece of self-control, but gave so much on other fronts. She had majored in something called media studies at Oberlin, he explained. When they arrived at the mezzanine level, he realized it sounded like he was trying to set Jonathan Paris up with his daughter. And then, walking across the buffed travertine lobby, he realized he was trying to set Jonathan Paris up with his daughter.

  “Oberlin is a good school,” Jonathan said.

  “Well, yes.”

  They arrived at the café and Vincenzo glanced around but saw no one he knew. “Oberlin is also an expensive school,” he said. “And I told her that if she went to a state school, I’d give her the difference. That is, I would give her the money that I saved.” />
  Jonathan shook his head, amused. “Well, you’re definitely an economist.”

  “True. But she could have made a hundred thousand dollars if she’d gone to Maryland. She said no. What does that tell you?”

  A small pause. “It tells me that people have a difficult time seeing the long-term consequences of their actions. We prefer to burn our resources now, deal with the consequences tomorrow.” He smiled at Vincenzo, understandably satisfied.

  Vincenzo smiled back. “That was nicely done,” he said, and patted the boy on the shoulder. “That wasn’t what I had in mind, but it was nicely done.” Since they were apparently switching from banter to business, he said, “I think the Bank understands quite well the long-term consequences of its actions. What would you like to drink, Jon?”

  Jonathan did not try to refuse when Vincenzo offered to pay for their coffees. They sat at a table in the corner, and Vincenzo listened to Jonathan talk about the problem of prioritizing short-term economic growth over the long-term welfare of the planet. He could not have done it better himself, and enjoyed especially Jonathan’s ability to whip himself into an emotional climax that corresponded with the sharpest points of his argument. Not quite Bill Clinton, but definitely impressive. This part of the conversation was painstakingly choreographed, he knew. The edginess from before, when their conversation had been improvised, was replaced by a frosty certainty.

  Vincenzo wasn’t really up for a battle, though it probably would have been easy enough to hand the boy his own head. Instead, he offered a few halfhearted counterexamples, because it would be unseemly not to. Jonathan’s argument was sound, in a sense, although it hinged on a critical misunderstanding of the World Bank’s role. It was like critiquing the rules of a game, or not understanding the rules . . . To Jonathan, the World Bank wasn’t fair, as if being fair was something they set out to be.

  Still, doing his part, Vincenzo said that the Bank welcomed new ideas. He then went on to explain that they were continually adapting their policies; specifically, he said, they had been softening their policies since the seventies. He deliberately used that word, softening, although it wasn’t politic to do so. Then, rushing toward his conclusion, he said, “We are gravely concerned about the deforestation in the Amazon and elsewhere, and we are doing what we can to address that, but we also have a population there that is desperately poor. Our principal goal, at this point, has to be to alleviate the human suffering.”

  “Brazil is one of the richest countries in Latin America, by your measure,” Jonathan said.

  “There are persistent problems with inequality.”

  “Are you trying to fix that? Are you pushing for fiscal reform? Are you asking for an increase in taxes on the rich?” Jonathan was hitting his stride now.

  “That kind of thing is really a domestic political issue. At best, it is a question for the IMF territory, but I don’t think they would want to insert themselves that deeply into a country’s fiscal policy,” Vincenzo said. The truth was more complicated, but there was no point in trying to explore it with Jonathan Paris. He had finished his cappuccino and was eager to get back to his office to await any fallout from his argument with Hamilton, or maybe there had been a message from Leonora. When he was at his computer, he sometimes hit refresh on his e-mail again and again and again, as if trying to draw up something new that couldn’t be drawn up. “Anyway,” Vincenzo said, aiming to deal out a quick coup de grâce, “I thought your position was that we should interfere less in their governance?”

  Jonathan shook his head and pursed his lips. “Where did you learn how to make a conversation into a game of dodge-ball? God—is there a special school for people like you?”

  “Yes, there is.” Vincenzo stood up. “I think you went there.”

  When Vincenzo called Wolfowitz’s office the assistant patched him through.

  “Vincenzo,” Wolfowitz said, “did you talk to the kid from that rainforest group?”

  “I did.”

  “And what was his position? That we shouldn’t favor development over ecology?”

  “More or less.”

  “But we’re the World Bank, not the World Rainforest Preservation Organization.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Good,” he chirped.

  A pause. Vincenzo looked at his vanilla pudding phone, the butterscotch pudding console. It was awful how little a person had to be concerned, how little a person had to awaken before the whole event—what was now underway—was understood to be useless. As a rule, it was all useless. Every conceivable way of being upset, that was useless, too. Every form of sorrow, confusion, fury—each one a small thing pretending to be something big, each masquerading as another feeling. But life was more astonishing and terrestrial than the great gestures that seemed to be occurring here.

  “By the way,” Vincenzo said, sensing with some certainty now that this mission he’d been sent on had been a cover for something else, something to do with Hamilton. It was too convenient a coincidence. So instead of playing the innocent, he thought he’d put Wolfowitz on the spot with a direct question. “Have you spoken to William Hamilton today?”

  “No. Why do you ask?” That sounded honest and Paul wasn’t going to lie, after all, not like that. And this was not what Vincenzo expected.

  Moreover, Paul’s question was framed with a distinct forward momentum, which demanded a true and clear answer, so Vincenzo made room, saying, “We had breakfast today.” Then he added, “He wanted to talk about Bolivia.” And by now he was starting to wonder if he shouldn’t have just kept his mouth shut.

  “Bolivia?” Wolfowitz sounded circumspect. “Did he want to know whether we would be cutting aid in response to Morales’s election?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you told him to get lost?”

  “That is exactly what I did.”

  “Well done.” Neither of them said anything for a while. Vincenzo was baffled. Was Paul not so friendly with Hamilton, after all, or was he just not going to put that friendship in front of his duties? Vincenzo, having lost sight of his understanding of what was happening here, said nothing for a moment. So Paul said, “Is that it?”

  “Yes, that’s it,” Vincenzo said, and then he saw that it would be better to clarify this all with Paul now than let Hamilton, who now would be roped into the conversation, do the clarifying, so he added, “Except that I told him that if he managed to get me fired over this, I’d go to the press. I said I’d talk to the Washington Post.”

  “You did?” A firm pause. “Why did you say that?”

  “I was concerned about my job.” This was how things disintegrated.

  “Well. Then let me be clear: Bill Hamilton has absolutely no control over your job. None at all. But for you to threaten to go to the press—that’s not very sportsmanlike. I appreciate your position, he was trying to bully you, but I hope you don’t feel like talking to the press about sensitive issues is a parachute for you. It’s not going to save you. If anything, it’s got more in common with a kamikaze’s strategy.”

  “I understand.” He looked at the phone, aware that something was shifting in the conversation, and in his understanding of his situation. This wasn’t new information, it was old information seen anew. “But you are saying you support me in this?” he clarified, although already he sensed that Wolfowitz wasn’t interested in working out détente.

  “I support you as long as you don’t make a goddamn scandal out of it, yes,” Wolfowitz said. “Hamilton is a friend of mine, but he had no place threatening your job.”

  Half an hour later, Vincenzo called Walter and told him that he wanted to go on the record about something that had happened that day at the Bank.

  Walter was silent for a moment, then cleared his throat. “You aren’t trying to put me into a difficult position, are you?”

  “No,” Vincenzo said. “But I am serious.” If the moment he’d made the decision had to be pinpointed, he’d say it happened while he was talki
ng to Paul. Or maybe just after. Or there was no specific moment, really, just the entire circumstance, just everything about the year, too, and the year before, and the one before that. It was time to drive the boat ashore. In case Walter was still vacillating, he added, “I’m just going on the record about something.”

  “You’re kidding?”

  “Not at all.”

  Walter laughed nervously and then sighed. A little silence ensued while Walter thought it through. “Is this something where I have to weigh your interests against my interests? That’s not something I want to do.” He was a barker on the phone, unnecessarily loud all the time. Even in person, he tended to be argumentative and brash and unnecessarily loud.

  “No, we have the same interests.”

  “Oh, I doubt that.” There was another long pause while Walter groaned, mulling it over. Walter verbalized, perhaps unknowingly, his harsher emotions: groaning under his breath (but nonetheless audibly) at boring people, sighing loudly at exasperating conversations and also, evidently, at friends steering themselves into the weeds. At last, he said, “Fuck it. Okay. Go on.”

  Much of the rest of the conversation was a blur, as are most of the truly important moments in life. Those great events always seemed to be formalized in interactions that, when recalled, appeared bright and blurry—like an iridescent watercolor left out in a rainstorm. The memory of his proposal to Cristina was like that, as was the conversation when she told him that she was pregnant. Leonora’s birth: the only remaining image was of the thick dark blood seeping slowly from the freshly cut umbilical cord—and later, in Italy, when Leonora lost her leg, he remembered only huddling with Cristina, her nails digging deep into his wrist, while the electric saw screamed in the next room. Of the conversation with the doctor who told him that Cristina was dead, he remembered nothing whatsoever, just a hand on his shoulder. And, of this latest incident, telling Walter about the conversation with William Hamilton, Vincenzo would remember mainly that Walter offered him several opportunities to back out, but he continued.