The Dismal Science

by Peter Mountford

  Two hours later, at the Sheraton’s vast bar, he and Cynthia parked on a pair of stools, the afternoon light gloaming at the distant window, and she told him about Brazil, her residence, and so on. She’d been pushed out of her last job, sort of, but her boss had been a lunatic, so it’d been for the best. Neither of them mentioned their families. It was a full hour before she finally brought up the thing that she had sought him out to discuss.

  The Bank had tried a series of partnerships with mobile phone companies throughout Latin America to get more cell towers built in poor, underserved areas, but the companies had not been incentivized properly and the rural customers hadn’t understood how to partake. With no existing infrastructure, the phone companies hadn’t been able to market the program, weren’t even sure where to sell their products. Ultimately, it was still too expensive to figure it out. They’d hoped to get the Internet to tiny schools in the Amazon, mobile phones to doctors far from hospitals. It could have been great, but it wasn’t great. The tranche was small and the debt soft, so Vincenzo had cut everyone’s losses and killed it. In each country, the money was rolled into the general project fund—a bureaucratic purgatory for failed ideas.

  Cynthia wanted to try it again in Brazil through the UNDP, but Vincenzo had been so adamant in mothballing it that no one, especially the mobile phone companies, would be interested in taking it up again. He’d done the same thing with a housing subsidy, and with a partnership between microbanks and water treatment companies. Elegantly drawn projects that he’d clipped. She wanted to revive all three grants in Brazil through her office. Thanks to her own nonperforming grants, she’d had budget overruns, and now it was clear that if she didn’t allocate money by the end of the fiscal year, they’d cut her budget accordingly.

  Fair enough, but no. It would be one thing if she had just wanted his leftovers. Instead, she wanted to plagiarize the Bank’s work on the defunct programs and then contradict their assessment of the programs. And in order for her to do this, he’d have to publicly endorse her reinvention of these programs.

  “I have ideas for how to fix them,” she said. She had begun to lay out her ideas for how to fix them, when he stopped her.

  The fact was that there was no way he’d agree. It was a nice idea, in theory, but it was unseemly on so many levels. If it worked, the Bank would be drawing attention to the fact that the UNDP succeeded exactly where they’d failed. If it failed, they’d all look foolish to their Brazilian counterparts. In any case, he’d be letting a different organization plagiarize the Bank’s work. Still, it was a nice idea, in theory. In a better world, maybe.

  “Where are you staying while you’re here?” he said.

  “Vincenzo, I remarried.”

  “Then why aren’t you wearing a ring?” he said and cast an eye at her hand.

  “I could ask you the same.”

  He nodded.

  Later, back at her hotel room, they had sex, and it was about as exciting as running on a treadmill before breakfast. She had put condoms on the bedside table, as if there were any danger of pregnancy, or STDs. They didn’t use them, thank God. Still, his mind wandered as he stared at her body beneath him, her breasts spilling over her rib cage, sloshing like half-filled sacks of water. She had insisted on leaving the lights on, which was a terrible idea for people like them. Despite her best efforts, the whole thing was just carpentry. There had been more passion between them when they hugged earlier. But he had to see it through. Her milky belly, the familiar but foreign manner that she had with him, her feeble groans—he observed it all from the far side of a very great chasm. Eventually, just as he was about to fake an orgasm, something happened. The depleted hormones, or synapses—or was it a dormant part of the soul?—whatever had been absent so far came back to him, lit up all at once. He grabbed her hips and she squealed.

  Finally, when he finished and collapsed beside her, panting, his pulse throbbing in his skull, she gasped, and burst out laughing. “Wow,” she said. He grunted, nodding in agreement. “That was impressive,” she said. He nodded again. It was impressive—life, again, had just been hiding somewhere, waiting for its invitation.

  Afterward, once he had recovered, they put on the hotel bathrobes and opened a bottle of pinot grigio. There was little left to discuss.

  She again talked about her career, now more philosophically. She talked about being a woman with power in Brazil, of all places. He kept waiting for her to suggest that she should come back to the Bank, but she didn’t. And then she gave updates on her new husband, her old husband, and she even told him about her kids. She didn’t, fortunately, show him any pictures. The marriage was in trouble, she admitted, but she thought they’d get through it.

  Later, they embraced quietly and he breathed in her hair, the smell of that sugary perfume, her coconut shampoo. After a while, so much skin pressed together became uncomfortably warm, so he let go and got up to pee.

  Sitting at the table by the window, he said, “Look, you know those tranches are dead for a reason. I understand you need to earmark that money, but I can’t encourage something I know doesn’t work. I made enemies closing those programs.”

  She stared at him for a long time. “They have potential.”

  “No. We have evidence that they’re terrible. I have reports, I have so many reports, you won’t believe. Look, I understand why you want to play Frankenstein, but why can’t you try to revive your own corpses?”

  “You killed them prematurely.”

  “And what if you succeed? What if you make them work? Can you imagine?”

  “No one is watching, Vincenzo.”

  He shook his head, sighed. He wished he were home. Wished he weren’t home, too. What he wished, in fact, was that he were in a different home, someone else’s home, with someone else’s life. “They failed,” he repeated.

  “Things change,” she said.

  He groaned. The half-finished bottle of wine was open on the table, losing its chill. They’d never finish it now.

  “When are you going to retire?” she asked.

  “I plan to die at my desk.”

  Then she said, “Your wife. I was sorry to hear—”

  He nodded. No one ever liked to say it, so they left it incomplete. The absence of the absence. Maybe they thought it would sting him to speak of her death, but no, this was worse—everyone working together to erase her. And of course Cynthia had known. Everyone knew. There had been enough meetings by now, enough gatherings of this jet-lagged clan around hotel bars. By now, everyone knew.

  He glanced over at her on the bed, arms crossed, ankles crossed, bulky hotel bathrobe constricted around her waist. Outside, downtown DC was barren at that hour, awash in the sickly orange light of thousands of old streetlights.

  It was his turn to talk. He drew a deep breath. “It was . . .” he said and halted there, searching for the next word and nodding slowly in silence until, eventually, he stopped nodding.

  The following morning, on CNN, there was too much to say, or maybe there was nothing to say. In any case, they did not seem equipped to explain what was happening in the world. Here, a dog appeared to be singing “Happy Birthday,” while over there someone predicted that the prices of homes in the United States would rise indefinitely and, somewhere else, someone said they’d fall soon. Everyone was afraid of rogue waves, flu pandemics, texting while driving. Everyone said what they thought and everyone was wrong. Even the people who said they didn’t know anything were wrong.

  Then yet another day began: more sun streaming through the window. Everyone got up and tried again. Wrong again. There was nothing left to say, no option left but to keep talking. And so they did.

  2

  COMMUTER

  The forecast spoke of a blizzard but only flurries decorated the air, so Vincenzo, Walter, and Leonora went for a walk after Thanksgiving dinner. They got all the way to the Brookville Market, where they hoped to buy ice cream to supplement the Safeway-brand pumpkin pie Walter had brought, but i
t was closed. Under the buzzing streetlight on that lonely, meager strip of retail, Walter looked pastier than normal, even sickly. A year or so ago a vein had risen under his left eye, and now it looked a little like a prison teardrop tattoo faded to an indigo blob.

  Walter and Vincenzo had both made it through their forties looking and feeling not unlike they had in their thirties, but middle age was in full swing now, extracting stark tolls. They’d met twenty years earlier when Walter, a lifelong columnist for the Washington Post, had interviewed Vincenzo about some World Bank project, neither could remember what it was now, and Walter—also an avid chess player—had noticed the chess books on Vincenzo’s bookshelf. Here, all these years later, Vincenzo was, needless to say, glad his old friend Walter had come over, especially considering the new awkwardness with Leonora. It was helpful to have a third. The awkwardness was such that she even went out to see her high school friends on Friday and Saturday, despite the fact that she couldn’t stand those people. While stranded at home during the days, she’d stare at her father slightly askance, as if she were waiting for something else from him, or just realizing the real scope of his frailties—the weakness, the vanity, the fearfulness, and that somewhere along the way he must have made some calamitous decision. How else, after all, could someone end up with a life like that?

  While they were walking back from the Brookville Market the snow started coming harder, spinning up miniature glittering cyclones in the air. At Connecticut Avenue, they stood and watched a herd of cars, yellow headlights igniting the blur of flakes. Everyone driving too fast. Leonora had a new prosthesis on and although she walked on it as if it were real, Vincenzo worried it might be loose and fall off if they ran. He grabbed her hand firmly and then, in a gap between barrages of traffic, they jogged across the slushy street.

  Between the black road and the peach sky and white snow and blond streetlights, the world had gone both vivid and dreamlike. Other than the crunching snow and their loud breathing, it was quiet out there in Bethesda, and in the silence Vincenzo reminded himself to be thankful for Leonora and for Walter and for his house, and the rest, too.

  A couple of blocks on, Vincenzo overheard Walter, beside Leonora a few paces ahead, say: “I’m impressed, Leonora, you’ve turned out to be quite a cool kid. I was a little worried there for a while!”

  Leonora patted him on the back, faux-condescending, and said, “You’ve turned out okay, too, Walter.” But then she squeezed his shoulder a little, like it wasn’t just sarcasm, like there was something true, and Vincenzo knew Walter would appreciate that.

  When you’re raising a child, you sometimes get to see them do something that you didn’t know they were capable of. It can be a stirring experience. This was one of those moments for Vincenzo. He stuffed his hands into his overpriced overcoat and knew, in a certain slanted way, that she was right about him: he’d made a bad, a ruinous, decision somewhere. Still, he’d scoured his life from the first half memory to this moment and found nothing to explain it, nothing but life itself, bathed, as it was, in muck and chaos, obese with very good luck and very bad luck, with household chores and uncontrollable laughter and breathtaking spells of disappointment and exhaustion and misery and unmitigated victory and bad traffic. That there had been any pivotal decisions at all within that twiggy, slushy morass seemed itself miraculous, and that there might have been one or two decisions that had mattered especially, well . . .

  In the summer of 1981, when Vincenzo and Cristina arrived in DC, they had never experienced such humidity, such thunderstorms. The weather was openly hostile to humanity. Cicadas droned all night and Leonora, then a newborn, squalled nasally in reply. Days were delirious, malarial. They sweated always. Rome had been hot, obviously, but Rome had also cooled at night. The heat in DC bore down relentlessly, keeping them awake when they should’ve been sleeping, putting them to sleep when they should’ve been awake.

  The World Bank was toward the end of a long expansion spearheaded by its then president Robert McNamara, and Vincenzo, hired as a junior economist, worked long hours in the pleasantly air-conditioned building.

  Vincenzo spoke English fluently already. He’d spent a year in Denver on a high school exchange program, had forever since been fascinated by the Latinate versus Germanic roots of English words. After six years studying economics at MIT, he returned to Italy in his midtwenties now able to pass for American. But Cristina—who spent that first Bethesda summer sweating in the garden of their overlarge house, her newborn on a blanket nearby—struggled with the language’s wooden Germanic notes. She joined a group of non-English-speaking wives of Bank-Fund staff who met weekly for tea, cookies, and English conversation in a small conference room on the International Monetary Fund’s mezzanine level. A real sense of fluency came to Cristina only once Leonora started at the Woodley Academy, and Cristina could enunciate (if barely) the über-Germanic, “What kind of kindergarten gives its children homework?”

  Over the next thirteen years, the three commuted together in the mornings. In the early years, Leonora would often be the only child on the train—most public-school children traveled by bus, most private-school children by car—and strangers would stare at her in a nakedly enchanted way. She had an intriguing kind of beauty: grimly dark hair and pale skin that contrasted with her wide, euphoric grins; she used her eyebrows to great effect, generating flirtatious and precocious facial expressions (she became accustomed, early, to being cooed at by strangers, and learned to transfix the attentions of potential admirers by making direct eye contact). The wiles of an only child. Her mother dressed her adorably, too, in trendy little outfits—a pastel polka-dot pattern in the lining of a jacket might be repeated in her headband. She even wore little sunglasses on bright days. Vanity was a hobby for everyone in the family. Arriving a shade or two too dapper for a party was, for Cristina and Vincenzo—and later Leonora—always the preference.

  Vincenzo felt a bit monstrous next to his women—he’d gone bald in his thirties, had too-large eyes and had always thought his face avian, if not downright villainous: he was dagger-nosed and hollow-cheeked, with a wide thin mouth. So he gleaned a palpable spike of pleasure when he sat there on the train with his gorgeous wife and daughter in front of an admiring, if drowsy, audience of commuters.

  Six stops in from Bethesda they’d arrive at Woodley Park-Zoo/Adams Morgan, nearest Leonora’s school. Initially, Cristina would walk her to school, but after five years Leonora walked herself and Cristina stayed on the train for one more stop, alone with Vincenzo, before she got off at Dupont Circle, nearest the Brookings Institute, where she worked as an event planner and marketing coordinator. That trip from Woodley to Dupont, all 120 seconds of it, was spent either in silence or talking about some business of the house, generally to do with Leonora. After Cristina got off, Vincenzo rode one more stop, to Farragut North, alone.

  As soon as Leonora arrived at puberty, she began shutting out her parents, with the help of a bright-yellow Walkman.

  Within a month, Cristina—probably panicked by the prospect of so much conversational time with her tense and unfamiliar husband—bought her own Walkman. Vincenzo, in a mild show of defiance to their headphones, started bringing the newspaper.

  Then the summer before she started high school, Leonora’s life was brutally upended. First, in June, her best friend jumped to her death off the Adams Morgan bridge. A month later, on Lake Garda, Leonora was floating in an inner tube when a speedboat piloted by a wealthy teenage boy drove over her legs. Vincenzo was at the market at the time, and her mother, on shore, carried Leonora—her legs hacked up by the blades, gushing blood onto the grass at the water’s edge—up to a police car. They were able to spare her right leg, but her left leg had to be amputated below the knee. A decade later, thanks to the War on Terror, advances in prosthesis technology would make it possible for her to walk almost normally without a cane—you had to look for the limp to see it. Still, her days of wearing miniskirts were over before they started. For se
veral years, the mention of sports was enough to make her cross her arms and blush. Whereas Leonora had been invisible, at worst, in middle school, she entered high school the object of the most vicious kind of fascination. Somehow she was simultaneously invisible and relentlessly noticeable.

  Before long, she was wearing blackberry lipstick and dark eyeliner, making dozens of mixtapes, and smoking Marlboro reds. A psychologist Vincenzo and Cristina surreptitiously queried explained that she sounded no angrier than any teenager would be in her situation, but they should look for evidence of drug use and self-mutilation. She pierced her nose and her lip at the beginning of her senior year, but according to the psychologist, that didn’t count. That year, the bathroom sink upstairs was stained a dimmer shade of whatever hue she had most recently applied to her hair. It went from mute pink to watery indigo to a sickly vermillion.

  When Leonora went to Oberlin, Vincenzo and Cristina continued riding the Metro together. After several months, she put away her music. He put away his newspaper. Tentatively, they began talking again, but not in the same way. They started talking about Leonora as if she were not in their house, because she wasn’t, and they talked about what they might do with the rest of their lives. They held hands once. A week later, they held hands again. She began kissing him on the forehead before she got out at Dupont.

  Leonora was in her junior year at Oberlin when her mother, wearing noise-cancelling earphones with a new no-skip CD player, stepped out into Massachusetts Avenue during her lunch break and was struck down by a truck full of shovels.

  The trauma team at George Washington did its best, but by the time Leonora’s flight landed at National, her mother’s body had been moved to the morgue. Vincenzo picked Leonora up from the airport and they stopped in a turnout on the GW Parkway to sob and hug across the bulky center console. They almost made it to the hospital, but stopped short, went instead to the Uno in Georgetown and ate bad pizza, weeping while they chewed. He didn’t want to see the body, he said, but if she did—and she just shook her head. They were exhausted already, and there was a long way to go.