“You’ve got a month, I think, to make a move. If you play it right, you could be more influential in retirement than you were at the Bank. You could become an Italian Stiglitz, but maybe less of an esteemed idea person and more of a regular commentator on NPR. You have a great face for radio. And in the event that you do end up on TV, you look as comfortable in a suit as any politician I’ve seen.”
Vincenzo thought about the possibility that he might become a personality in that way and said, “There’s a lot I do want to say. The most frustrating thing for the last many years has been the way people misunderstand these things we work on.” He paused, realizing he had forgotten to put that in the past tense. “And there are so many idiots on the talk shows. If I—”
“Exactly,” Walter said, “but don’t commit to anything. You’re baiting them—best to chum the water a little, wait until it’s frothing with silvery fins, and then harpoon the living shit out of them!” He smiled grandly.
“Ha!” Vincenzo was not aware of having a profile that might attract people in such a way, but what Walter said made a kind of sense. A good gambit is a trap that takes a while to mature; if you’re impatient, and try to strike back too soon after your sacrifice, you threaten to diminish the gathering power of your loss.
There were other possibilities developing, too. He’d received an e-mail from a woman in Evo Morales’s office and he thought that maybe there was something there. She was Evo’s press attaché. She’d said that she and Evo appreciated what he’d done and hoped to meet him someday. “I could give the story a little extra fuel,” he said.
Walter’s eyes narrowed and he stared at Vincenzo. “How would you do that?”
“Go to Bolivia. Visit Evo Morales, and you could tag along and cover the story.”
Walter rolled his eyes at the dig, but nodded in approval at the idea. “Who would we contact in Bolivia?”
“I’ve already been contacted by someone in Evo’s office.”
At this, Walter perked up. “Who?”
Vincenzo showed Walter the message from Evo’s press liaison, Lenka Villarobles. After reading it, Walter appropriated Vincenzo’s laptop and opened a blank document and started drafting a response. They applied to the letter all the vim they could summon. Twenty minutes later they had a page, but agreed it could be more charming.
In broken Spanish, they’d agreed to let Evo host a reception for them the night before Evo’s inauguration in January. The party had been Villarobles’s idea, but they expanded on it, saying they’d come to La Paz, do a series of interviews. Walter would write another piece or two for the Post along the way.
Walter got up to use the bathroom and once he was out of the room, Vincenzo sent the message, flaws and all.
Walter returned a little later, and said, “Can you print out a copy for me, and I’ll look it over later today?”
“Yes, but I already sent it,” Vincenzo said. He was cleaning up the coffee machine now.
“You did?”
Vincenzo nodded but kept washing and didn’t look up.
“Why on earth did you do that? We could have improved it!”
“It was fine in that condition,” Vincenzo said.
Later, while Walter was outside with the hammer snapping a few tips off the fallen fence—from the kitchen, Vincenzo could see that he wasn’t putting nearly enough heart into it for it to be satisfying—Vincenzo wrote a quick e-mail to Colin at Lehman and said he was coming up in the next couple of days and would be happy to meet.
His official reason for fleeing DC, the one he told Leonora, was that he wanted to escape the sudden bright glare of celebrity—“My fifteen minutes,” he declared at one point on the phone, and indeed it was just that. But, really, he was also alarmed and enticed by the dangling possibilities; frustrated, too, at finding himself with only Walter to keep him company during his molting from caterpillar to—well, something else. So he said that he had to go to New York. He said he was annoyed with the paparazzi, even though there had been only one news van outside his house (for a Latin American television station) on the first night and none thereafter. He did, to be fair, receive a crushing amount of e-mail and he had been invited onto Democracy Now!, but Larry King was not exactly banging down his door.
The people most interested in his case lived in Latin America, particularly Bolivia, so the calls were mostly from Spanish-speaking journalists, which was awkward, because he didn’t speak Spanish well. When he tried to reply in Italian, they generally gave up.
Professionally, he’d only had the e-mails from Tellus and from Colin at Lehman. Lenka Villarobles had written to say that she was thrilled that he and Walter had suggested coming to Bolivia for a function hosted by Evo. She was going to talk to Evo about it, she said, and already Vincenzo regretted bringing it up at all. She wrote that she and Evo wanted to thank them for outing Hamilton’s plot to coerce the Bolivian leadership. That Vincenzo hadn’t intended strictly speaking to save Morales’s hide gave him pause. Still, it was so, of course. Vincenzo had put such a bright spotlight on the Bank’s Bolivia policy that it would be difficult, if not impossible, for the Bank or any other aid organization to withdraw aid to Bolivia for a while unless there was a very good reason to do so. Vincenzo had given Bolivia immunity, for the time being.
Her message had been vague, though, and left room for some interpretation. She hadn’t, for example, tried to hammer down a date, so he was optimistic that the whole thing might go away, if left unbothered.
The more important question was whether, in the next month, he could decide what he’d be doing with the rest of his useful years. For the first time in his life, he was something like a minor celebrity, and so Walter’s point made sense, that if Vincenzo wanted to do something substantial, he needed to act while the glow was still upon him. That he couldn’t be both a fellow at Tellus, which was as strenuously lefty a think tank as existed, and a consultant to Lehman Brothers at the same time was clear. But he’d already been hasty, so he decided to defer the decision for the time being, see what happened.
“Why do you really want to come, Dad?” Leonora said when he called to tell her that he was fleeing the media onslaught.
“I’ll stay out of your way,” he said. “I’ll be miles away from Brooklyn. I plan to stay at the W Hotel in Midtown. Do you know the one? I hear it’s nice.”
“Don’t be weird, Dad,” she said. “I can’t wait to see you. It’ll be fun. And really I’m so thrilled that you’ve quit. I’ve been telling all my friends and they’re so impressed. They’re like: ‘That was your dad?’ because they’ve heard about it and they can’t believe you’re so punk rock.”
“Punk rock?!” he said and laughed.
“Yes, punk rock!” she yelped, in her unfortunately effete imitation of his voice, and then she laughed hysterically, because he was still just her dorky dad, the unhip bald man in a dark suit and expensive neckwear, the man whose most casual look was when he wore a button-down shirt tucked into pleated slacks. And then, settling into a more serious tone, she said, “I just don’t want you to be shocked by the fact that I’m living with Sam.”
She had told him about this new arrangement over the Thanksgiving weekend, and he’d been quietly trying to assure himself since then that it was less than completely true. Maybe she was there for a while because rent was so expensive? That made sense. It was temporary. But the demise of her relationship with Sam had been imminent for a year in his mind, and he had to admit it was starting to seem a little less preordained than he had hoped. He was surprised that the thought of her moving in with Sam had filled him with such dread. It wasn’t that he was a prude, or believed his daughter to be sexless. He’d seen how she could lose herself in other people—her mother, her friends—how easily she could put miles between him and her, and he was terrified of losing her, too.
Still, Vincenzo refused to intervene. It was her life—he believed that adamantly. “I’m not shocked,” he said. “You’re a grown-up. People live
together. It’s normal.”
“But you hate Sam.”
“No, no, how could I hate him? He’s a little annoying, but I like him. Or, I don’t hate him. There’s nothing there to hate.”
“Thanks Dad, that’s really nice,” she said. Like her hair-dyeing, which was also supposed to be a phase, she still hadn’t managed to outgrow this habit of flinging sarcasm around whenever she was displeased.
“No, really, I like Sam. He’s interesting.” He was on his third glass of wine, a perk (and danger, he could see) of the unemployed life, and he was tempted to say too much, but resisted. Instead, he said, “I’m glad you care about him and that he cares about you, but you are young.”
“Dad. I’m older than you were when you married Mom.”
“No. Is that true?” he said, although it obviously was.
Vincenzo thought of Sam primarily in metaphors that insinuated a kind of comforting wisdom, but were also pleasantly abstract: Sam was an apartment his daughter would rent for a few years when she was in her early twenties and look back on fondly; he was training wheels on her bicycle; he was a summer job at Denny’s.
The first and only time Vincenzo met Sam was a few months ago, when she brought him down to DC for a weekend. Vincenzo took them to dinner at Tosca that Friday. Sam spoke with a Bob Dylan affectation, and looked like an unhappy rodent, with his wispy beard, upturned nostrils, and squirrelly overbite. Genetics had denied him a chin, and his fingers, which pawed Leonora casually, constantly, were stained ochre by the unfiltered cigarettes he smoked. At times he seemed folded in on himself, legs crossed, arms crossed, head bowed. A nostalgia addict, he claimed to be a playwright, listened to old records, was fond of Camus, Brecht, Stravinsky—everyone he admired was long dead. Sam was also a self-described “activist,” which seemed to mean that he was able to formulate strong positions on issues that he did not understand. In his hazy grasp of these things, for example, the World Bank was in some kind of insidious collusion with the George W. Bush administration. He said as much at that dinner at Tosca.
“Well, no, that’s not how it works,” Vincenzo had explained. Leonora looked at him intently and he knew she doubted him, which was ludicrous—like taking the advice of a witch doctor about your heart arrhythmia when your father is a cardiologist.
“They have veto power, though, right?” Leonora had said, tentatively. She had rarely attempted to discuss these matters with her father. At dinner she wore a long-sleeved top, in order to hide her tattoos. The tattoos were—Vincenzo had to admit to himself, if not her—quite beautiful, though he was terrified of what they’d look like in twenty years. Her skirt was long, too, to hide her leg. So, apart from her raven hair, streaked with strips of crimson, and her dramatic eyeliner and her facial piercings, she looked strangely modest, as if the head of a punk had been transplanted onto the body of a Mormon.
“The US has veto power on many decisions, yes. So does Europe. So does the Third World. A lot of things are decided by committees or teams of people. A small fraction of my coworkers are from the US, and apart from the American executive director, none have any kind of relationship with your government.”
“That’s what they say,” Sam said, as if Vincenzo didn’t know how these things worked. Like any good fundamentalist, his outrage was not dimmed in the least by his ignorance.
Vincenzo made himself cough; he sipped his wine, as if to clear his throat. “Do either of you have room for dessert?”
It was no good. They persisted.
Finally, when he could take no more, Vincenzo said, “You don’t seem to grasp how, or to what end, the World Bank functions.”
“You’ve been brainwashed!” Leonora said, and the irony was so rich that Vincenzo was rendered mute with awe.
“I’m going for a cigarette,” Sam said and stood. Leonora followed him out.
Despite its steep prices, Tosca did not have the best Italian food in DC. Still, it was his favorite restaurant in the city. It was serene and elegant, the service far warmer than at other high-end restaurants in DC. He used to take Cristina there every year on their anniversary, and continued to take Leonora there every time she returned home.
The maître d’, a lanky Frenchman named Denis, came around and folded the napkins that had been tossed onto the chairs. He replaced them beside the bread plates. “How is your dinner?” he asked, in heavily accented Italian.
“Wonderful, thank you. My daughter, she has her mother’s temper,” he said, in case Denis had overheard. But when he said this, it reminded him of the times when Cristina had hissed angrily at him in restaurants, including Tosca, and how he would try to get her to be quieter because her rage embarrassed him. And when he thought of that he felt a pinch of pain in his chest—that dull hollow ache that comes from wanting something impossible for too long. Sometimes, he was self-conscious about the feeling, and how quickly tears came to his eyes, and he wondered if people could see how heavily the dead were with him.
“I’m sorry for the disturbance,” he said to Denis.
Denis smiled warmly. “It’s not a problem, Mr. D’Orsi.”
An inveterate dilettante, Leonora was very interested in art, literature, sustainable ecology, music, knitting, natural and locally sourced foods—all of which shared only one common denominator: they were pursuits that weren’t likely to result in a gainful career. If she’d been casually interested in computer programming, he’d be less worried, but she did not seem especially interested in making a living. He blamed Cristina for this. Cristina had nudged Leonora into summer classes, summer camps, a lot of enriching, but not especially difficult, summertime activities. Then again, he blamed himself for not pursuing the issue, for not demanding that Leonora get a job, for not choking off her cash supply. To her, money was boring. It came and it went and it didn’t matter, really. What mattered were things like yoga and art. That she couldn’t understand that yoga and art were also about money, that summer camp was about money, that every aspect of her life was about money—he blamed himself for that, and he blamed Cristina, too.
Having graduated from one of the most mind-bogglingly pricey colleges in the world, Leonora waited tables at an overpriced diner in Brooklyn, where she took the graveyard shift. She was vexed, above all else, by loiterers, inebriated batches of hipsters—as she called them—seeking a few hours of coffee and conversation late at night, maybe some fried eggs, before they wandered homeward. During their phone calls this was what she talked about: loiterers and their illegible tip tallies, their splashing vomit, and the time she watched a famous musician doze off and urinate in his jeans after a long tour and too much heroin.
Of course, everyone talks too much about their job, regardless of how uninteresting it is, and now Vincenzo, abruptly deprived of this cornerstone of conversation, found himself having to work harder at small talk in general. The thought of this void, the void he’d created, filled him with terror, something that he felt in his chest, a constriction.
While Leonora was just about to begin learning how much money would matter in her life, in his case, money wouldn’t be a concern again. Per his agreement with the World Bank, he’d be coasting indefinitely. Coasting, though—that word harried him, the lifelessness implied. Coasters were cork pads upon which people rested their moist drinks. To “coast” was to idle, which was one thing when you had a car full of brilliant people to keep you company, but quite another if you were alone.
By the time Walter finally returned from attacking the fence, Vincenzo had determined that he needed to start researching his options. The Tellus Institute’s website had been unhelpful: a healthy and reassuringly sane blue predominated and the slogan “For a Great Transition” sounded either invitingly apropos, or menacing. So he surfed away, started reading more online articles about his case. The Wall Street Journal had something short. So did Bloomberg. Unfortunately, his life was forever abbreviated by the same dependant clause, “a vice president and twenty-four-year veteran of the Bank,” which was dep
loyed, in one form or another, in almost all of them, as in: Mr. D’Orsi, a vice president, and twenty-four-year veteran of the Bank, has no plans but looks forward to coasting in the approximate direction of oblivion.
Walter proceeded directly through to the kitchen, saying, “You Italians, you really do a better job of even making pasta. How is that? I put pasta into boiling water, you put pasta into boiling water, but yours is better.”
“Will you check in on the house while I’m away?” Vincenzo said.
“I can invite women over and tell them that it’s my house?”
Vincenzo nodded. “Wear my suits, too. Or, maybe I’ll leave my passport and you can simply take over.”
Walter frowned sharply at the thought, and then slopped a herculean portion of pasta into what was meant to be a serving bowl. Walter had the metabolism of a hummingbird, and seemed immune to the deleterious effects of excess carbohydrates, lipids, salts. Energy crackled like an electric field around his body. He sat down at the kitchen table and began forking the rigatoni into his mouth and shaking his head in admiration.
“Are we really going to go to Bolivia?” Vincenzo said. The more he thought about it, the less he liked the idea.
“Don’t wilt, Vincenzo—that woman’s serious. For Christ’s sake, we suggested it.” He laughed a little, eyes widening, as he did when excited about something he was going to say, some point he was making. “You can’t decline an invitation to your own party!”
“I am not wilting, Walter. I’m wondering if it’s a good idea.”
“Of course it’s a good idea!” Walter turned the kitchen television on and started flipping channels, marching toward CNN. Whenever he was over, he relentlessly flipped between CNN and Fox News, a two-step channel dance he referred to as “taking the temperature.” So that, if they were watching a film and Vincenzo paused to open some wine, Walter would ask if he could quickly “take the temperature.” Once he settled on CNN, he glanced over at Vincenzo. “How would it be bad? Bad, like, it might annoy your new friends at the Cato Institute?”
The Dismal Science Page 8
