The Dismal Science

by Peter Mountford

  “We’ll messenger it over. You’ll have it by noon. Call me once you’ve read it. The deadline is five o’clock today. In the meantime, don’t say anything to the press.”

  When Leonora called fifteen minutes later, she was rapturous, beginning: “Oh my fucking God, Dad, what did you do?!” He hadn’t heard her sound so pleased with him in years. In fact, he couldn’t remember a time that she’d sounded so pleased with him.

  He laughed and said, “I made some enemies.”

  “Fuuuuuuck!” she drawled and then laughed, before saying, “Wow, Dad, you are a badass! Wow. Wow. Really, I can’t believe you.” This almost made the whole thing worthwhile.

  “I just couldn’t—I couldn’t let him be like that,” he said, ebullient and struggling with his false modesty.

  She groaned in the way she did when she was impressed by something she had heard from one of her friends. “Jesus,” she said again. And then a certain stiltedness entered the proceedings, he could feel it, even in the silence—there was a stilted something, maybe just because she was so excited, but what did this burst of glee say about how she’d felt before? She exhaled. She laughed, sort of, and he sort of laughed too, but the moment was spoiling quickly from something that he couldn’t quite see. Really, he didn’t think it was funny at all, and maybe she knew that, maybe that’s why her joy was failing so quickly. Still, as misinterpretations went, this was one he was prepared to accept.

  “I should go,” he said.

  “I love you,” she said.

  “I love you, too,” he said and then hung up before it got any worse.

  The waves of shame came and went, interspersed by successful and semisuccessful campaigns to assure himself that he’d done an honorable thing for Bolivia, for the Bank, a thing that would, in the long run, also benefit his life enormously. He’d obliterated one version of his life, yes, one that had endured for a long time, yes, but in so doing had created space for something else. Something better than his previous occupation. He paced, didn’t answer the phone. He forced himself to stop reading the e-mails, reading the comments on the article. At the crescendo of one particularly bad wave of shame, he found himself groaning aloud, his heart racing, while the phone rang and rang and rang.

  Once it arrived, he read the agreement through as carefully as he was able, but his mind was addled by the panic and he found it too opaque to comprehend, so he called Eleanor Griffin, a lawyer who’d been close with Cristina—one of the few friends of hers he’d genuinely liked—and asked if he could drive it over to her office for a rush appraisal.

  Vincenzo explained the circumstances, broadly, and then Eleanor glanced through and told him that his interpretation of the document seemed to be correct. He could not speak or write about any specific individuals or particular conversations that he had held in his professional capacity, but was free to talk generally about his impressions of the Bank. There could be no tell-all memoir, but there could, in theory, be a lecture tour about the Bank’s rotten structures, she said. Eleanor was short, her head surmounted by a gigantic black mass of curls, which didn’t add height so much as draw a black mark over her shortness; her skin was waxy and pure white—she was a bit bloated from forever sitting in large comfortable leather chairs and peering at documents on her colossal desk. Despite her deathly appearance, she was a gloriously uncensored person, mordant and gaffe-prone, but smart enough to make it all quite winning, at least to Vincenzo’s tastes. The kind of person who could be counted on to blurt out an expletive far too loudly during a funeral, which is exactly what she did during the service for Cristina. And while she’d seemed mortified at the time, Vincenzo had always wanted to thank her and assure her that it was hilarious, really, even if he hadn’t found it in himself to laugh about it at the time.

  With two hours left before the contract was void, Eleanor let him use the Wi-Fi in her office. His laptop gaping up at him, he checked his e-mail one last time, just in case—saw, with a considerable dollop of dread, that there were thirty-seven new messages. None of the messages, at a glance, looked relevant to the issue at hand, so, with an hour and forty minutes left, he called up the article online and found that there were 209 comments. He groaned.

  “You good?” Eleanor said.

  “Yes,” he said initially. “Not really,” he then admitted. He clapped his laptop shut and stuffed it in its nylon carrying case.

  “You’ll let me know if I can do anything else.”

  He kissed Eleanor on her baby-soft cheek before hurrying out to the elevator.

  Arriving at the World Bank headquarters, he parked in his spot on the red level and marched briskly over to the elevator. In the blurry brass doors, he could see how bizarrely his yellow trousers clashed with his sweatshirt and his coat, and he almost managed to feel embarrassed about that, too.

  Teresa, the human resources woman he’d talked to earlier, stood when he entered. “Thank you for coming,” she said wearily, her thin-fingered hand extended. She had frosty blue eyes, long flaxen hair, and a feline languor in her movements. A tremendous scar ran the length of her jaw, as if to preemptively quash any doubts about her battle-readiness.

  She offered him a seat, but he just pulled the signed document out from his bag and extended it to her.

  “Thank you,” she said and sat down. She put the document on her desk and he stood there while she flipped through the boilerplate, scanning for addendums, he guessed. Then, seeing his signature on the last page, she looked up at him, said, “Well—we appreciate your understanding.”

  She signed, in duplicate, and gave him one copy.

  Then she stood up and they shook hands again. He was about to leave when she said, “We’ll need your badge, actually.”

  “Oh—of course.” He unclipped it from his breast pocket and handed it over.

  She smiled a little drowsily, smugly, blinking too slowly, and looking at her grinning face, lovely as it was maimed, he wanted to punch her out.

  “Fuck you,” he blurted, incapable of stopping himself.

  She was taken aback, at first, and then her expression returned to where it was before as she apprehended, no doubt, that this was just who he was: it was why he’d done what he’d done. And it all made sense to her now, which only made him hate her more. She shook her head and did one of those oily smiles where the sides of her mouth were downturned, like a frown. She was enjoying this, in a way.

  “No really, fuck you,” he said again.

  She appeared startled, and he could see that he’d disrupted her day, at last. “Uh—” she stammered.

  He shook his head, at once satisfied and sick with himself, then turned and left.

  Vincenzo spent the better part of five hours poring over the e-mails, erasing the dreck, which came mostly from wacky fanatics. He glanced at the comment section of the article, but didn’t venture too deeply into it. No denomination of political preference came off as particularly more sensible; only a few, fortunately, seemed genuinely insane. The frothy-mouthed ones left messages anonymously, and the passionate but reasonable sent e-mails. Most of the rest occupied that great succulent midsection of misconception that had assembled the impression that he thought the World Bank was rotten and should be abolished. Most of them agreed wholeheartedly with him.

  At its most basic, the allure of fundamentalism, whether religious or ideological, liberal or conservative, is that it provides an appealing order to things that are actually disorderly. As a bonus, one that shouldn’t be underestimated, members of an ideological camp, especially one exclusive enough to sit well outside the mainstream, come to feel a strong sense of belonging. “Circle dancing is magic,” wrote Kundera in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and he then went on to describe a group bound together by ideology joining hands and dancing and laughing until they ascend heavenward. Cristina had adored Kundera’s novels, and Vincenzo had always been jealous of whatever part of her embraced the sensuality of his stories. It was worse than infidelity, it was as if he had s
imply never met that part of her. Still, he read the books, each one, once she was done with them, always searching the pages for dog-ears and any trace of where she had lingered.

  For Kundera in Laughter, all spiritual and ideological movements are circle dancing and the circle, crucially, is a closed shape, one that creates magical love between members, but if you leave the circle it will close behind you. Whereas, if you leave a row, you can return to it, because it isn’t a closed shape, but a row isn’t magic, does not induce levitation or love, does not solve the problem of not belonging.

  Of course, to the great inconvenience of everyone, few issues in life are actually as straightforward as circles—so skilled at killing loneliness, but not good for much else. In the end there is no vast conspiracy. Most people are too disorganized and insufficiently odious, in the necessarily horrifying way, to mount large-scale conspiracies. The reality is brutally humdrum. There are just a bunch of people, each one as helpless and baffled as the next, most battling against loneliness by swearing allegiance to vivid gods and vivid ideologies, and assembling—hands joined—in churches and outside office buildings, to dance in unison. In a passage that Vincenzo would have asked his daughter to memorize if she’d been capable of hearing it clearly, Kundera wrote: “The best of all possible progressive ideas is the one which is provocative enough so its supporters can feel proud of being different, but popular enough so the risk of isolation is precluded by cheering crowds confident of victory.”

  Vincenzo saved twenty-some e-mails, mainly from journalists wanting to talk to him, including two producers from cable news shows. The rest were from friends or acquaintances inquiring after his well-being.

  Among the e-mails from people he knew, most just said some version of, “Wow, I can’t believe you did that!” but there was one that stuck out. Colin, who’d left the Bank eleven years before for a job at Lehman Brothers, hadn’t been in touch in eons. But Colin wrote: You’re stepping out? Hope you’ll visit us. I’d love to talk about your plans. If this is of interest, I can arrange to bring you up to NY for a talk.

  He hadn’t expected any overtures from the private sector. It especially hadn’t occurred to him that a company like Lehman would come calling, let alone so aggressively. They did that for outgoing chief economists, he knew—such people were poached actively—but he hadn’t been an intellectual icon at the Bank; he’d been a career bureaucrat. After a minute, he determined it was a superb idea at least to explore that opportunity. If nothing else, the trip would give him an excuse to visit Leonora.

  He wrote: This sounds good. I’m on my way up there soon to see my daughter.

  6

  MENDING FENCES

  The following morning, there were two dozen more e-mails, including one from someone he’d never met with the subject line You decapitated yourself? And another from Cynthia, and one from Jonathan Paris, the boy from the Rainforest Coalition. He read them all, more or less, erased most of them, and replied to a couple, but not Paris’s. Cynthia kindly didn’t ask any questions, perhaps she knew he would be overwhelmed with questions. Instead, she wrote: That Peruvian delegate will be proud of you. (: Meanwhile, someone had anonymously, creepily, left a vase of flowers outside of his house with the note: Well done! Vincenzo set the flowers on the kitchen table along with the paper. He made his oatmeal and stirred in the raspberries, made his coffee, and then went upstairs, put on jeans and a sweater. In the garage, he collected several metal brackets, a hammer, a pocketful of woodscrews, and the power screwdriver. Everything was garlanded with cobwebs and powdered with dust. Wearing his new overcoat and a cashmere sweater, along with his ratty and paint-splattered loafers, he stomped into his cold backyard. He went down to the stand of dogwoods at the back of his simple lot, a miniature forest that carried on into the more commanding swath of jungle in his rear neighbor’s impressive yard.

  There, he took stock of the fallen fence, not sure where to begin. Walking across the face of the fence, he entered his neighbor’s yard and then turned and reassessed it. He tried to hoist it up, but it was too heavy. He’d thought to pin it to his next-door neighbor’s sturdy new fence with the brackets, but now he grasped that it was too warped and rotten to be salvaged. He tried to hoist it up once more, digging his loafered feet into the leafy ground. Nothing moved.

  Thinking he might break it up and cart the broken sections away, he jumped up and down on the fence, but it just jiggled.

  Taking the claw hammer from his pocket, he tried to pry apart the braces from the slats, but he couldn’t get the claw into the gap, and anyway, he wasn’t strong enough for that task. Finally, a little winded and starting to sweat, he drew a long breath and swung the hammer at the brace nearest him. The hammer thocked against the wood, shooting a bolt of pain up through his arm, but leaving only a small dent. Furious, he swung again and hit it hard, gripping the hammer harder. That felt better. So he swung again. And again. He hoped this would somehow produce visible results, but the wood was too moist and pliable. He swung twice more and his arm, now plangent with ache, compelled him to release the hammer. He bit back the urge to scream.

  Appraising the fence again, he realized that he could, at least, break the slats. Or, at least, he could break the pointed tips, above the upper brace. Picking up the hammer, he swung for one tip and heard a crack as the old wood snapped at the nail. He swung again and the loosened tip snapped off the top of the fence and spun to the ground.

  It wasn’t very satisfying, but it would do. He swung for the middle of the same slat, thinking it might be weakened, but it was like hitting a tire.

  Not willing to just head back inside, not after all this effort, he swung again at the next fence tip, which also snapped. He drew a lungful of that scalding cold air and swung at the next, but it didn’t crack. He swung much harder and it snapped off completely and spun into the brush. He swung at the next tip, even harder.

  When Walter came around the side of the house an hour later, Vincenzo paused to catch his breath—he’d forgotten Walter was on his way over and was a little embarrassed to be caught smashing the fence. One of the flying shards of wood had hit him in the face and cut him slightly. Hot sweat beaded on the top of his bald dome; he could feel it steaming in the cold air.

  “Well, I rang the doorbell but there was no answer. I thought you might have done something rash.”

  Breathing heavily, Vincenzo shook his head. He wiped sweat from his forehead with his forearm.

  Walter frowned, pointed at him, and said, “Your cheek is bleeding.”

  “A piece of wood hit me.”

  Walter smiled. “It hit you? Vicious wood.”

  Vincenzo just grunted.

  Walter kept smiling. “How’s retirement otherwise?”

  Vincenzo was down to his mucky loafers and jeans and his white T-shirt—his coat and sweater had been flung onto the fallen fence. He had broken at least twenty of the fence’s tips. He put the hammer down and rubbed the stubble on his jaw. “It’s fine. I’m okay.”

  “Good. Well—try not to fall apart. I don’t want that on my conscience.”

  “There is nothing wrong. I came out here to fix this fence. It has been like this for a year. And this is a problem. Do you agree?”

  “I agree it’s a problem.” And then, smiling again, he added, “And you’re fixing it!”

  “No, I’m breaking it up so that I can take it away!” He swung and broke another tip, to demonstrate it, and then he held the hammer up to Walter and said, “Do you want to try?”

  Walter looked at the hammer and frowned, unconvinced. For all his bluster, Walter wasn’t a very emotionally available person, or not expressive, anyway, and probably needed to smash some fence tips fairly badly, whether he knew it or not. “Thanks,” he said, “but not just now. I think I’m going to go inside for some coffee. I have no coffee at home.”

  Vincenzo inhaled deeply, felt the cold air like shards of glass in his lungs. “Make enough for me. I’ll be inside soon.”


  Twenty minutes later, Vincenzo settled in at the kitchen table while Walter refilled his mug, though the initial volley of coffee seemed to have done the job of sparking all available synapses to life. Walter’s small expressive hands whipped up the storm, conducting the torrent of his own monologue. Vincenzo, in his dirty jeans and T-shirt, sipped from his mug and scanned his raft of e-mails, sometimes shooting off a short response, while Walter sat opposite, his right foot slapping against the kitchen floor’s tiles. At cocktail parties, Walter liked to face off against taller men, especially, braying up at them with his shoulders hunched and his normally active hands tame at his sides—a maestro baiting the orchestra by refusing to pick up his baton. Vincenzo had watched this often. Once his interlocutor finally took the bait, Walter would be on him with the savagery of a wolverine trying to fell a bison, dismantling every point the man had made since they met. “Should’ve been a litigator,” he’d said more than once, while basking in the glow of a particularly gruesome bout. It was, understandably, exactly what his ex-wife had loved and hated most about him: his over-energetic intellect and how that mind laid asunder every conversation they tried to have. This morning, the subject of his focus was nothing combative, only Vincenzo’s “astonishing” options:

  “You’ve got Lehman Brothers attempting to pull you into bed over here, and the fucking think tanks”—Vincenzo had received an offer to come visit Tellus Institute, and according to Walter other liberal think tanks would have, by now, realized that he might make a good mascot for their causes, too—“and God knows what else.” No doubt Walter’s enthusiasm was, at least in part, a way of sublimating any lingering guilt he felt over his part in Vincenzo’s flameout. Under no ordinary circumstances would he express enthusiasm for what was clearly a questionable decision; only guilt could elicit such an outpouring of optimism.

  “I should draw them out more,” Vincenzo said.