The Dismal Science

by Peter Mountford

  “I would love to meet them,” Vincenzo said.

  She groaned and shook her head. She rubbed her eye vigorously. There was a problematically long pause as they approached the first traffic light within El Alto. She pulled to a stop, and before she could fall back asleep, Vincenzo said, “Would you like me to drive?”

  She nodded like a sleepy child, eyes closed. “Yes,” she said. She opened her door and stumbled out into the street and a car honked at her, almost hit her.

  Once he was behind the wheel and had adjusted the mirror, he looked over at her. “Where do I go?”

  “Straight. When you come to a place where the road goes into a circle, wake me.” She turned away from him and curled up. He took a deep breath. He looked back at her. She really was pretty. Maybe ten years older than Leonora, maybe less—it was hard to tell. On her back, he noticed a narrow strip of exposed caramel skin above the line of her jeans. A dimple in the small of her back was visible, as was the pink edge of her panties, which, from what he could tell (extrapolating from the glimpse), were very utilitarian: cotton, Pepto-Bismol colored, built to last. When he’d tried to think of the kind of woman he’d like to spend time with, the person who had come to mind was not this woman—she was outside of his experience—but he was grateful for her differentness. Living amid such machismo, and being ambitious, presumably, and being fierce and independent, she came off as very sober and sexy at the same time. DC didn’t have women like this, to say nothing of Italy. Or, he’d never met someone like this.

  He glanced down at the console and noticed that there was no speedometer or odometer. There was just the fuel gauge, its needle collapsed at E. There was nothing else.

  Then he took a deep breath and looked in the rearview mirror. A line of cars was slowing to a stop at the light ahead, so he put the car into gear and put the blinker on, pulled out into traffic. The muffler was probably damaged, judging by the way the underside of the car blared.

  At the roundabout, he nudged her awake, and she directed him through it, then fell back asleep, leaving with him parting instructions to remain straight for half a mile.

  That was how he made it, finally, to the Radisson.

  When he pulled up, he didn’t wake her.

  He approached a stern concierge who was reading something on the computer screen and grimacing thoughtfully. He wore a dark suit and a blue-on-gold tie. Looking up at Vincenzo, he blinked, but did not smile or speak. Vincenzo handed over his passport. While the man looked him up, Vincenzo asked if there was an extra room available for the woman who had picked him up, because she was too tired to make it home.

  The concierge paused, looked at him sternly, his head tilted to the side.

  “She’s asleep in the car right now,” Vincenzo said. “I had to drive halfway here from the airport.”

  “We can get a taxi for her,” the man said, and resumed typing in Vincenzo’s information.

  “Then how would she get her car tomorrow?”

  “She could take a taxi back tomorrow.”

  “Oh, yes, of course. That’s a better idea.”

  “Would you like me to call a taxi?”

  Vincenzo, thinking he’d just park her car in the neighborhood, assented. The concierge picked up the phone and dialed.

  Back outside, the valet had already unloaded his luggage and stacked it by the door. Vincenzo tapped the passenger’s side window of the car, but Lenka didn’t stir. He tapped it again. Nothing. He went around to the driver’s side and got in. She was snoring, a light snore that sounded only when she exhaled. He shook her gently. She groaned.

  “¿Señorita Lenka? Excuse me, it’s time to wake up.” He shook her again, more firmly.

  “¿Y qué pasó?” she said, coming to. She looked around. “¿Llegamos?” She blinked several times and looked back at him. “Are we—” She wiped her eyes.

  “I have ordered a taxi for you,” he said. “They’re going to put your car in the garage overnight.” He had a twenty-dollar bill in his hand. He held it out to her. “This is for the taxi tonight, and so you can come back tomorrow and pick up your car.”

  She looked at the money and then she looked at him and he noticed that she appeared confused, and then affronted. She shook her head. “I’ll drive.” She got out of the car and shut the door.

  He got out, too. “I don’t think that would be very safe,” he said. “Anyway, they’ve already called a taxi for you.” He held out the bill again.

  “You don’t have very good manners, do you?”

  Startled, he said, “I’m sorry, I thought—”

  “That’s twenty times the cost of a taxi,” she said. He watched as a taxi pulled up behind her and the bellhop motioned in Vincenzo’s direction. Lenka shook her head. It was chilly and she crossed her arms, frowned at him sleepily. She was even more attractive when she was grumpy, he thought. “What taxi driver is going to have change for that? Anyway, I don’t need your money.” She opened the door to her car and was about to get in when the taxi pulled up alongside her car and said something to her. She got out of the car and went over to him, leaned down and talked to him. They talked for a minute.

  Vincenzo put the money away. What, he wondered, would have happened if he’d tried to put her up in one of the hotel’s two-hundred-dollar-a-night rooms? She’d probably have slapped him in the face.

  Once her conversation with the driver was done, he drove away and she came over and looked at Vincenzo wearily.

  “I’m sorry I got angry at you,” she said. “That was nice, what you offered, and you’re right that I’m too sleepy to drive. It’s not safe.”

  She agreed to stay for a coffee and then take a taxi home. She handed her keys to the valet, took her ticket, and they went inside. They sat in the window of the café in his hotel and talked—he drank coca tea and she had café con crema. She was magnificent, and he wondered whether there was a chance that she might overlook his frailties: his baldness, potbelly, and over-long beak, to say nothing of his ineptitude with her language and the fact that he was unemployed. That she had a boyfriend did not help his case, he knew. He asked about the boyfriend and she just shook her head, as if thinking about something else.

  “Is he from here, too?” Vincenzo pressed.

  She kept shaking her head, and then said, “Do you know anything about hedge funds?”

  “Yes, I do. Does he work for a hedge fund?”

  She shook her head some more. “Not really. But why would a hedge fund want to invest in Bolivia?”

  “It wouldn’t. Well, maybe, in passing, for corporate or sovereign debt. Or maybe with one of the larger companies outside of Bolivia that has a significant interest in Bolivian gas or minerals. It is just not a very substantial economy.”

  “This is what I hear from people. But don’t we have something to offer?”

  “Of course. Bolivia has a lot to offer. There’s just not much money here.”

  “And money is everything?”

  He shrugged. “No. It can be helpful, but it depends on what you’re trying to do.”

  She had a sip of her coffee. “What are you trying to do?”

  “Money is not part of it.” But this wasn’t true for a variety of reasons, mainly because money had everything to do with his former job, and also because his own monetary situation—the lack of financial pressure—surely informed his decisions.

  “That is good to hear. Why did you say you wanted to come to Bolivia?”

  He sighed. “I’m not sure that I did want to come here.”

  “Then why come?”

  The truth, that he had nowhere else to be, that he didn’t know quite why he did many things these days—he didn’t want to say that to her, not yet.

  After a while she nodded. Neither one of them spoke. She seemed to be waiting for something and maybe he did, too. Eventually, he said, “Should we call you a taxi?”

  “I’ll just walk—I have a friend nearby.”

  Wondering if she meant her boyfriend,
he said, “I’ll walk you.”

  She smiled at him sympathetically, and said, “Then I’d have to walk you back here.” He smiled, somewhat, and she said, “I’ll be back here tomorrow morning for my car. We can have breakfast if you want and then I will explain what the plan is. Evo wants to meet tomorrow. He’s going to be busy afterward for a couple days, and I am going out of town, too. The reporter comes tomorrow afternoon, yes?”

  “Walter? Yes, that is my understanding.”

  “Evo wants to meet you both. The party is next Wednesday, so you have time to explore the city. I will go, but will be back in La Paz on Monday. Okay?”

  “I’m sorry if I offended you earlier.”

  She put her hand on his shoulder, leaned in, and kissed him on the cheek and he held steady—it was all he could do to resist the urge to pull her to him and kiss her on the mouth, to grope her with two hands. She patted his jaw lightly. He almost kissed her hand, but stopped himself there. “Sleep well, Mr. D’Orsi,” she said.

  “I won’t,” he replied.

  She gave him a simple smile, free of any decipherable innuendo—one more gesture for him to adore—and then she turned and left. And as he watched her go his heart sank, fearful that he was already mishandling this, too.

  In his room that night, Vincenzo showered and then flipped through the dreadful television channels. It was all badly dubbed cowboy movies from the seventies, or bizarre Bolivian game shows—half advertisement, half entertainment—on brightly colored sets covered in the logo of some dish soap. Otherwise, there was one slick telenovela set on a farm in the 1800s, and there were the obligatory mirthless newscasts from the BBC or CNN. He turned it off, remembered Lenka sleeping in the car, the sight of the top of her pink panties and how that color had contrasted with the flawless skin on her back. He tried to put his mind elsewhere, but the headache was no better and he felt exhausted now, too, the kind of weariness he associated with the flu. He glanced at the books he’d brought along: Stiglitz’s The Roaring Nineties and his new copy of Purgatorio, but neither would hold his attention. Lenka’s skin had been light brown and he had noticed the downy hairs on her forearm, the wrinkles at her knuckles, and how her earring holes drooped from too many rings and too much gravity over too much time. On her chin she had the strangest birthmark, like a splash of inverse freckles. And her dark eyes emitted, even in that sleepy stupor, such ferocious intelligence that, when he thought back on meeting her, he could see that that was what had done it. She must have had that effect on all men, he supposed, and it stung him already. Her boyfriend was—but how could he be jealous already? Well, he was. Or—it wasn’t jealousy, exactly. To be jealous you must possess, there needs to be a claim. This was envy. It was covetousness.

  When Dante and Virgil made their way to the second terrace on the mountain of purgatory, envy, he remembered, they found the inhabitants whose eyes had been sewn shut. There, Dante had a difficult time—having already worried through the first terrace, where he confronted his own pride. Now he had to recognize, with dread, his own weakness for envy. Yet, succumbing once again, he placed himself sixth among the poets he found there, above Ovid and Lucan. Like so much of purgatory, the sin was slippery; it sneaked in, even with the vigilant. The pride and the envy, in all of these cases, came from a desire to measure one’s worth, upon death. A measuring of the value, the imprint, of what had elapsed.

  Before dropping off to sleep that night, Vincenzo checked his e-mail once more. There were a dozen new messages, mostly junk. But there, among the dross, he spotted one from Hamilton. He wanted to delete it outright, but couldn’t bring himself to. Instead, he opened it, hoping to find within it someone else sharing in this experience—some variation on the flinty but strangely warm camaraderie that can occur between two men jilted by the same woman.

  Vincenzo,

  As you probably heard, I’m stepping down “voluntarily” in the next month or so. And against the advice of my wife, and having already had one too many glasses of vodka, I’ve decided to write to you and see what you think about all this shit that you heaped onto our plates. Do you have any regrets? I’m dying to know.

  In any case, I want you to know that I will never forget what you’ve done to my life.

  —Will Hamilton

  It could not have been more unsatisfying and he immediately wished he hadn’t read it. But he had, so he replied, writing:

  Happy to hear you’re being pushed out, too. No regrets here.

  —V

  Then he closed the browser and shut down his computer. He put on his pajamas and brushed his teeth. Sitting up in bed, he looked around the ugly little room and felt surprisingly great. Elated, even. Could he really take pleasure in vandalizing another man’s life? Yes, it appeared so.

  12

  PHANTOMS

  After his morning shower, while dressing, Vincenzo noticed an envelope had been pushed under his door.

  He opened it and found a handwritten note on hotel stationery:

  Vincenzo!

  I was passing by and just wanted to stop in and see how you’re enjoying La Paz.

  Your old friend,

  Ben

  Vincenzo’s mind flickered on and off as he reread the note; then the knowledge of this spread in him, staining everything it touched. The wretched feeling souring within him, he shuffled over to the phone and called down to the front desk and asked, despite his reluctance, to speak to the person who’d taken the note.

  When asked to describe who left the note, the woman on the phone told him there had been a black man, a foreigner.

  Vincenzo thanked her and hung up.

  Alone at his breakfast table, Vincenzo swallowed three paracetamol and then stared drowsily at a woman who looked ineffably, uncannily, like Cristina. But “like” would not be sufficient. She was nearly identical and nearly didn’t do the issue service, either. Doing his best not to seem like he was staring, he watched her as she stood near the bar. From her beige pantsuit and gold name tag, the burgundy kerchief erupting from her neck, the polite posture of her shoulders, he surmised that she was some kind of manager at the hotel. He was tempted to ask the waiter about her, but decided against it. There’d been other doppelgängers before, none quite so convincing, but he’d seen many. Once, in a three-star hotel in Florence, several months after her death, he’d seen one nearly this convincing, also during breakfast. This wasn’t the sort of thing you talked to waiters about, of course. No more than you harassed the front desk about the CIA agent who was leaving you jaunty notes, or confessed your lust/love to the PR person who’d invited you to her country. These were all just specters, he assured himself, shady phenomena haunting the periphery of his life, each too improbable to hold much weight, really. Too improbable until they were sitting directly opposite him, that was.

  The waiter refilled his glass of water and asked what he wanted.

  Vincenzo sighed, picked up the menu, and scanned. He got the idea. It was hotel breakfast, a genre notable mainly for its non-variety, so he just ordered coffee, fried eggs, potatoes, and fruit. There was a buffet option that he’d smelled but not viewed; as a rule he never went for the buffet, not unless the hotel was genuinely five-star. Non-five-star buffets were mostly hideous: hollandaise the texture of a melted Barbie doll, a faint essence of butane gas in the desiccated potatoes, scrambled eggs the color and consistency of foam packing material. The way the industrial metal trays hovered, slightly, in their baths of warm water. This hotel was nice enough to have a polished stone lobby, but not nice enough to have a vast floral arrangement in that lobby. It was bathrobes and slippers nice, but not pricey fixtures in the bathrooms nice—the breakfast buffet was not advisable.

  When the waiter returned with his coffee, Vincenzo gazed at him, a mostly gray-haired gentleman with a face that appeared to have been buffed to a high polish; the hair, too, was unusually shiny, so it looked as if he’d dunked his head in shellac. “¿Qué es su nombre?” Vincenzo said and gestured at the woman. />
  “¿La señora? Se llama Luz Elena Guerriera,” the man said. He was a stern person, grim as the concierge from last night, the inner tips of his whitish eyebrows slammed gravely into the center of his forehead.

  “¿Es Italiana?”

  “No, no—Boliviana.” The severe eyebrows didn’t budge. “Gerente de servicios alimentos y bebidas por el hotel.”

  Vincenzo nodded, having not entirely understood that last part (she was something of something and drinks for the hotel, he approximated), but he did capture that she was Bolivian, not Italian, and that her name was Luz Elena. Could he go over and talk to her? No, of course not. What would he say? This might sound morbid, but you remind me of my dead wife, and I was wondering if you wanted to go on a date?

  No. Preferably not.

  There were, of course, some differences between her and Cristina. She had the same sunken cheeks beneath dramatically, nearly haughtily, high cheekbones, the steeply arched eyebrows, like she was perpetually suspicious of the quality of what stood before her. The hair was almost identical, thick and wavy and umber, worn at the most unremarkable length possible: some vague area just past the shoulders. This woman had slightly more frizz and her bangs held themselves somehow differently—it was not a thing that could be described, but he was certain of the difference. Her body, likewise, was Cristina, if Cristina shaded a few centimeters one way or another—Cristina had been very lucky and had never really grown fat or haggard like many women did. Luz Elena, the doppelgänger, was slightly shorter, he guessed, maybe an inch or so, and a fraction more slender. Of all the doubles, she was by far the closest. The others, often glimpsed out of the corner of his eye, were mirages that vanished with proximity. Sometimes, he had to cross a street and chase the woman down to get a close enough look to dispel the impression. This was different, though. This woman was not Cristina, obviously, but she was so close, even after another look, that he didn’t know what to do, but felt something had to be done. She looked at him, no doubt aware that he’d been staring at her, on and off, since he’d sat down, so he looked away.