Returning, he said, “Were you in the military?”
Ben smiled. “Marine Corps. How’d you know?”
“You people often come from military backgrounds.”
“Black people?” He had one eyebrow up, neatly arriving somewhere between incredulous and amused.
“I meant the CIA—or whatever you are.”
Ben chuckled and crossed one ankle over his other knee; he was wearing argyle socks, those awful inexpensive black square-toed shoes. “It’s not like that. You didn’t ever serve, did you?”
“In the CIA?” Vincenzo said, hoping to be funny, and Ben obliged with another almost-smile. Then Vincenzo, wanting to continue steering for a while, disposed of subtext and said, “Do you kill people and, if so, is this how you do it—do you just walk into their hotel room and—”
Ben laughed warmly and shook his head. He had an incredible set of teeth, gleaming and perfect. “You think I’d just come in here and shoot you in the face?” He pointed an index finger at Vincenzo’s face to demonstrate the event. He kept chuckling, covering his mouth with his hand and shaking his head.
“Who sent you?” Vincenzo said.
Ben winced as if charmed by Vincenzo’s stupidity. Then, when Vincenzo’s own expression didn’t change, Ben said, “Look, nobody wants to censor you, but you must know that the US has a PR problem right now, generally, and more specifically in Latin America, and if you’re going to make it your personal quest to further undermine our image in that region, we’d like to know. If so, it’s no problem. Go for it. But we would like to know. And I want you to understand the kinds of things that might be in the pipeline for you in different scenarios. Like, I gather you’re interested in working at Lehman Brothers,” he said and pointed toward Midtown, “and that can happen. The others, too, Tellus and so on.”
Vincenzo pursed his lips at Ben and nodded. It seemed a bit difficult to imagine that this person could have any sway over whether Lehman made him an offer.
“You don’t believe me?” Ben said, reading his face.
“No, no, I do.” There remained the ominous question of how Ben knew that Vincenzo was considering those jobs in the first place. And if he was capable of reading e-mails, of finding his hotel room, could he not pressure the heads of organizations, even ones as powerful as Lehman Brothers?
“Have you read my e-mails?” Vincenzo said, hoping to reinforce his insistence on a strict no-subtext diet in this conversation.
Ben uncrossed his leg and then crossed the other leg, presenting another argyle sock, another square-toed shoe. As if he hadn’t heard, he said, “If you’re helpful, your visa will be extended indefinitely. If you apply for a green card, you’ll get one.” It had not occurred to Vincenzo before that this was how it could be done, too. No guns and no high-tech gadgets needed. James Bond didn’t stand a chance against people like this. “Your daughter’s here, I’m sure you’ll want more than sixty days per year in the country. If you were to want to be very helpful, as in, forthcoming with help, I can see how the rewards would grow in scope.”
Vincenzo had known people over the years who’d claimed to have had encounters like this, but there’d always been a kind of air of the improbable, a gauzy note of hyperbole. Now he saw how it was, and how it wasn’t. And it was hazy, yes. It was absurd, and maybe that was part of the plan, just to make it seem sufficiently unlikely. A man entered your hotel room and knew slightly more than should be possible; he encouraged you to approach things in a somewhat different way. He presented a menu of rewards and penalties, all relatively modest, maybe, but meaningful enough to you to make a world of difference.
Vincenzo, curious about the stick that’d accompany these carrots, said, “And what if I were to tell my friend at the Washington Post about you?”
As if annoyed by this foolishness, Ben glanced away and shook his head firmly. “He’s not going to write about this. That said, for the sake of argument, I’d see it as a very hostile way for you to behave. I wouldn’t want to talk to you anymore. Your life would become immediately annoying: US visa out, problems with credit cards, rumors—I don’t know, that kind of thing. It’s easy for us, and we find it is effective. My boss once said”—Ben affected a gravelly New York drawl—“‘If you ever meet someone who seems too fucking unlucky, some dickhead who’s got his own personal rain cloud on the sunniest day in June, chances are he pissed us off.’”
Vincenzo nodded, but he couldn’t tell how much exaggeration was at work here; the whole equation was tainted by possibly suspect variables. Maybe that was the point. Maybe once this conversation was over, no matter what he did, nothing would happen to his life. Somehow, that seemed unlikely.
“This is unfortunate,” Vincenzo said.
“Could be worse.” Ben pointed his index finger at Vincenzo again and smiled.
Vincenzo didn’t respond.
Ben winked, stood up, extended his hand again, but Vincenzo didn’t shake it. Eventually Ben shrugged, retrieved the hand. “I’ll see you soon. Have a nice trip,” he said, pulling a handkerchief from his pocket; he used the handkerchief to open the door, and then pushed it back in his pocket, before walking down the hallway in the opposite direction of the elevators.
Vincenzo got up and stepped out, watched Ben enter the stairwell at the end of the hall, again using his handkerchief to grip the doorknob.
Then he went back into his room and closed his door and bolted it. Looking around his room, he took a deep breath. He looked at the light fixture in the ceiling, at the mirror, the phone. He looked at the bedside lamps. There was no camera, not that he saw. Then again, he didn’t even know where to look, what to look for.
“How’s New York, by the way?” Walter said on the phone later that day.
“Fine,” Vincenzo said as he contemplated whether someone in some maze of basement cubicles in Langley was listening in.
“Don’t become a grumpy retiree—it’s the geriatric equivalent to the sullen teenager. Teenagers and retirees have it made, everyone in between is fucked. We’re the ones who should be complaining.”
“Grumpy? That’s absurd. And who’s old? Aren’t you older than me by two years?”
“It’s the other way around, you’ve held a steady two-year lead on me since we met.”
“Well, I’m in New York expanding my horizons.”
“How?”
He crossed his ankles, thought of those argyle socks, said, “I am staying at the W Hotel, flirting with the receptionists—I am visited by menacing CIA agents and I meet powerful investment bankers and still I find time to buy meals for my daughter’s boyfriend, a playwright who does not have a chin—this isn’t grumpy at all. I have a new eight-foot-long rainbow scarf—”
“CIA agents?” Walter said.
“I was joking,” Vincenzo said. Then again, maybe they weren’t listening? All good tyrants know that the threat itself, if convincing enough, should do the job of correcting errant behavior. The CIA didn’t need to actually listen to people’s phone calls, it just had to imply that it was listening and the people would dutifully go about censoring themselves.
There was silence on the phone because evidently Walter had not been appeased by Vincenzo’s response. The self-preserving thing to do, the sensible thing, Vincenzo appreciated, would be to head back to Bethesda and lay low for a couple of months. He could then pursue modest options once the CIA and whoever else was offended by him were content.
Vincenzo waited a while and then said, “What do you think the snowstorm will do next? I think it will go out to sea, pick up more water, and then come back and hit us with it again. That is what I think.”
Walter noisily, slowly, sucked in a breath and then blew it out. He sighed somberly, said, “You okay, Vincenzo?”
“Yes, of course I’m okay. I was joking before. My question is: Are you okay? You sound like you’re having trouble breathing.” Vincenzo didn’t want to make a big deal about Ben. After all, they might actually be listening, and Walter di
d have a habit of transforming his conversations into articles in a very conspicuous newspaper.
Walter grunted. “Did you say you bought an eight-foot rainbow scarf?”
“Yes.”
“Jesus. Next thing, you’ll be a line cook in that diner where she works.”
“Don’t pretend to understand. Look, I’m not sure Bolivia is a good idea,” Vincenzo said.
Walter paused for a while and then said, “Well, I believe you sent an e-mail to them yesterday saying that it was a good idea and you were looking forward to it.”
“Well, I wonder if we could do it quietly, sort of?” Vincenzo had a scenario in mind where, by dimming the volume on the story, he’d satisfy Ben, Lehman, Evo, and Tellus. The only person who would not be happy would be Walter, who’d be the one being muted. “Maybe if I didn’t say anything interesting?”
“Defusing the story by being boring?” Walter paused. “Maybe.”
Vincenzo heard nothing in Walter’s tone, no innuendo at all, and it worried him. If he had to guess, he thought it might mean that Walter was lying, or scheming the situation in some other way that hadn’t occurred to Vincenzo yet. He was out of his depth, here.
Then Walter sighed heavily and said, “Look, call me on the bat phone if you want to talk off the record.”
Was that code for something? Some kind of way they might avoid the detection of eavesdroppers? Maybe not? “I don’t know what you’re talking about—I have to go,” Vincenzo said and hung up.
A good game of chess isn’t a war of attrition. It’s not about standing a short distance apart and blasting each other to bits. A great player coaxes his opponent into troubling dilemmas less by taking pieces from him than by constricting the number of attractive options available. In the best games, the most artful games, each player has to see an exponentially expanding array of moves ahead. But the options don’t really expand exponentially, if you know how to spot trouble brewing. A good player eliminates all the bad moves quickly, spends his time envisioning all the dozens of options branching down a few genuinely good paths; the options bloom and offer fruit, and a player’s job is to locate the most attractive of all the branches—the one with the best fruit. Then he explores the next branch, the next, et cetera, until he isolates the most promising branch. But as the game proceeds, the branches gradually become fewer and fewer, their fruit less and less plentiful. The loser is starved subtly, an inch at a time. A player finds that with those branches that remain, he has to travel farther and farther before he can see something worthwhile. There are fewer flowers, virtually no foliage at all. When a player searches all of the available branches and sees nothing blooming, sees no fruit, no petals at all, he gives up—he resigns.
10
THE WORLD’S GREATEST FATHER
Vincenzo stayed in New York for another snowbound week, during which time he did not hear from Ben again, but did see his daughter on three occasions. Also, he went to the Guggenheim, MoMA, ate dinner at Daniel, and saw a movie, all alone. In e-mail and on the phone, he was cautious. Or, if not cautious, he was aware that he might be speaking to a wider audience. Otherwise, he believed he was approaching a kind of equilibrium. And he wasn’t always alone: he ate at several great restaurants with people whom he’d known for ages but didn’t quite count as friends.
Strangely enough, or to his own surprise, he ended up agreeing to see Jonathan Paris for lunch.
Maybe it was Jonathan’s proximity to Vincenzo’s undoing, maybe it was Vincenzo’s brush with Ben, who seemed somehow tied to Jonathan in Vincenzo’s mind, but over lunch Vincenzo found himself speaking in oddly personal terms with the young man. After admitting that he was a widower—Jonathan had merely asked if Vincenzo was there with anyone—there was the usual lull. More mature people often tried to fill the space that followed the widower confession with something, anything, but Jonathan was so out of his depth that he remained mute, stunned by Vincenzo’s humanity. That was when Vincenzo, veering off of the lines of their script, said, “I would like to meet women. The Internet, I understand, it has—”
“Sure, I guess there’s, like, Match.com and whatever,” Jonathan said helpfully. He was still looking at the table. This table-gazing reflex had been going on for a while. “There’ll be something for someone your age, too. I don’t know what it’s called.”
“How do you meet women? Is it on the Internet?” Vincenzo asked.
Jonathan laughed uncomfortably and shrugged and glanced up quickly, as if unsure what to do with Vincenzo’s bluntness. He looked out the window at a wall. They were at a Thai place near Union Square.
“Or, do you like men? I’m sorry—I just—”
“No, no, I do not like men, I like women. But I don’t know. How do I meet them? I guess I’m sort of shy—I don’t ever go on dates.”
“Shy? You stormed the fucking headquarters of the World Bank.”
“Yes, I guess, but I don’t know how I meet them. I know them already, usually—friends of friends, or something. It’s not easy to meet girls.” He looked at Vincenzo and Vincenzo saw another little glimpse of that confidence from that day in his office. “But I definitely don’t go on dates with girls who I’ve never met. If it doesn’t arise organically, I don’t want to deal with it. It’s just too difficult. What about you? You don’t date at all?”
Vincenzo shook his head. “I plan to.”
“How are you going to meet them?”
“That was my question.”
Jonathan nodded resolutely. “I’m not going to go on dates with girls I don’t know. Why make it more awkward than it has to be?”
“Why?” Vincenzo repeated. “Maybe desperation?” He smiled mischievously and Jonathan smiled too, but hollowly.
Later in that meal, in another somewhat memorable moment, Jonathan confided that he was terrified of failure, which was not surprising in itself, but it was comforting to hear him admit it. Evidently, he’d spent the previous day with a bullhorn, whipping an audience of hundreds into a fury in front of the United Nations, and yet he was afraid he wasn’t doing enough with his life. What would Jonathan think of Leonora, whose current aspirations involved finding a better way to store the margarine at the diner where she worked?
When Vincenzo asked Jonathan to define failure, he embarked on a diatribe, cataloging an exotic collection of ways in which a person could experience failure before concluding, at last, after a momentous pause, “Insignificance—I think that’s it. You want to leave your mark on the world. You want to be of value.”
“Maybe you should have children?” Vincenzo said. “I think that is the most simple way to take care of that feeling.”
“You have kids?”
“I have a daughter.”
“Oh yeah, I remember. Oberlin?”
“Yes.”
“What does she think about all this?”
“She’s pleased, more or less.”
“She hated that you worked at the Bank?”
Vincenzo shook his head. “She didn’t hate it. It became an inconvenient feature of her own biography.”
Jonathan tilted his head in a certain way, down to the left, which Vincenzo was starting to recognize as the gesture he made when he felt he had a good line of attack. “You didn’t just do it to make her happy, did you?”
Vincenzo squinted. “The thing—my scandal?”
“Yeah, you weren’t just trying to appease your kid, were you?”
“No,” he said, shaking his head slowly. “I hope not.”
“Jesus.”
“No, there were many reasons,” he said. It was striking: he didn’t remember Leonora being part of the decision, but now it seemed clear that she was.
Jonathan’s face remained frozen in astonishment, something like horror. Then, at last, the expression broke off and he smiled, laughed a little, shaking his head. “Yikes,” he said.
Then Jonathan said, “I guess that’s the thing about having kids—they almost inevitably end up hating you. Seems mi
serable. Why do that to yourself?”
“You don’t hate your parents, do you?”
“No, I guess I don’t, but it’s—you know—it’s not easy.”
“But life is difficult,” Vincenzo ventured. “The best things are very difficult.” He knew that idea wouldn’t quite resonate with Jonathan, who had that Ivy League attitude that assumed further waves of greatness were blossoming out on the watery horizon, then approaching hard and fast. He was the kind of person who, in his midtwenties, bullied his way into the office of one of the World Bank’s vice presidents, and then presumed to give that vice president a lecture. The kind of person who had been informed, from the moment that he first spoke, that he was “incredible” and “gifted”—even if he was just drawing a circle a bit prematurely. When he was young and impressionable, many people had, no doubt, assured him that he could achieve anything he set his mind to, and then, as he breached adulthood, this myth still rang true for him; it rang loudly, deafeningly, this extraordinary notion that he could achieve anything he set his mind to.
“Parenthood is difficult, but it’s kind of fun, sometimes, and you do it because it’s important,” Vincenzo explained. “Don’t you like doing things that are important?”
Jonathan nodded, his mouth bunched up contemplatively, and said that this sort of made sense to him. It wasn’t enough to make him run out and impregnate someone, but he seemed to accept that there was something there. “You know, parenthood does sort of appeal,” he said. “It’s not where I am right now though, it’s a different kind of project.”
Vincenzo snorted. “Yes, it’s a different kind of project.” Now, he was starting to regret agreeing to this lunch. Somehow, he had hoped to see some new information here, some flash of insight into his own decision that day, but this wasn’t helping.
After lunch, Vincenzo ambled into the Barnes & Noble on Union Square and found a copy of W. S. Merwin’s translation of Purgatorio. He’d read a glowing review in the Financial Times. Among English-speaking Dante aficionados, it was the first meaningful advance in decades, maybe more.
The Dismal Science Page 12
