The Dismal Science

by Peter Mountford

  “Cato hasn’t contacted me,” Vincenzo said although Walter had nicely pinpointed the issue: he might alienate someone who could otherwise offer him a bridge out of this void.

  “They haven’t contacted you yet! Avoid Bolivia and they’ll send you roses.” Walter gazed at Vincenzo, wide eyes expressing something between dismay and a sincere curiosity about whether Vincenzo might actually be interested in such an offer.

  When Vincenzo didn’t speak, Walter went on: “Look, eventually you’re going to have to decide who you want to be friends with and who you can live without.” Vincenzo had already gleaned as much and that was precisely why he wanted to proceed cautiously. “For better or worse, this world you’re entering isn’t as sweetly nondenominational as the one you’re leaving. Not that the Bank was exactly a pillar of independence, obviously, but at least there was a pretense. That pretense doesn’t count for much out here.”

  Vincenzo sighed and sat down. On the TV he saw footage of a snowstorm in the Midwest; it was advancing eastward, wreaking havoc on Christmas shoppers and commuters. He watched footage of cars parked on the side of the highway, their headlights shining in the direction of nowhere through the muffling torrent. They cut back to the studio briefly, then to President Bush on a military base somewhere shaking hands with a leathery general in dusty-hued camouflage. The president was pinkened with sunburn.

  Walter turned the volume up a couple of notches, but it still wasn’t audible. “Say hello to Leonora for me,” he said. “I must say, she really has turned out quite well balanced, all things considered. It’s a real testament to human resilience.”

  Vincenzo picked up a fork and eyed the pasta, hoping to restrain himself from overeating. “Testament to human resilience? Is that an insult?”

  “No, you seem like a fine dad, at least from the perspective of someone who hasn’t been a parent before, but for a while there I thought she was going to go over the deep end. The tattoos, the hair, that boyfriend.”

  “Yes, well, he’s still around. So are the tattoos.”

  “But she’s turned out to be pretty sensible, hasn’t she?” CNN moved to a sports update and Walter hit the mute button.

  Vincenzo gave in and skewered several tubes of rigatoni with his fork, pushed them into his mouth. “My food is better because I make it with care. That’s the only difference.”

  Walter scowled.

  Vincenzo smiled, got up, and went to the bookshelf to fetch the chessboard. Walter pushed his bowl aside to make room.

  7

  PENDULUM

  As the train pulled out of Union Station, Vincenzo read over the details of his pension agreement, which was complicated. He had to decide if he wanted euros or dollars, for one thing, and he was entitled to an array of payment plans, and there were various tax implications. Because the Bank was an international institution, he had never needed to have a green card to work there, and he hadn’t paid any income tax. In ninety days he would become, to the INS, an illegal alien. And, no matter where he lived, he would have to pay taxes on his pension.

  In Italian, the word pensione had two distinct meanings: “pension” and “boardinghouse.” The root pend signified “weight,” a retiree’s pension implied a weighing out hence, and was the etymological sibling of both “pendulum” and “pensive.” Such were Vincenzo’s thoughts as he gazed intermittently on the scrolling scenes of DC’s slums, which soon gave way to sparser and still poorer areas, and then, at last, to farmland. Rows of plowed mud, frozen stiff, zipped by, a pure blur in the foreground, making an orderly fan of lines farther back. White-barked birches rose on hedges near a stretch of forest, their naked branches like bones against the dark backdrop. The only birds left were a few blackbirds that gathered to peck their way through the crust of ice over puddles in the fields and drink the muddy water beneath.

  A nap.

  The train was pulling into a station somewhere in southern Jersey when he awoke again. Grudgingly, he took out the pension agreement and finished picking his way through the byzantine thicket of legalese, and finally, although it felt like gambling, made a couple of decisions. Then he opened the latest issue of the Economist, a magazine he had been receiving, if not quite reading, for twenty years. Before Cristina died, the magazine would be stacked neatly on the console by the door until, at the end of each year, she threw them all out, via wheelbarrow, and the process started again. In the last few years, however, he’d found he had more than enough time to read the magazines as they arrived, and the stack was now on her bedside table—all issues that he’d finished.

  In this latest issue, there was a brief mention up front about the fiasco at the World Bank involving the Italian ex-vice president in charge of Latin America, who had quit his job over a scuffle regarding Bolivia. “The other party involved, William Hamilton, the U.S. executive director, has not yet tendered his resignation,” the unnamed author wrote, cheekily, as if it were just a matter of course that his resignation was due.

  Vincenzo arrived at Penn Station in the late afternoon and ate dinner alone in the hotel’s restaurant. He noticed that there were an unusual number of other graying gentlemen in shirtsleeves eating alone. They all had reading material. They all drank wine, mostly red. They all passed on dessert.

  According to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s infamous stage system for bereavement, the “phases” to mourning were: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and—finally—acceptance, the littlest of consolations. The system did at least offer an attractive order, a reassuringly straightforward shape to the disordered experience, so it was hard not to think about it once in a while. Still, he wondered why there was no space for bafflement. Maybe it fell under the rubric of “denial.” But, if so, why did it persist through subsequent phases? And anger, smuggled in the middle, didn’t it burn its way through other emotions? Couldn’t even lofty acceptance, couldn’t it be embraced balefully? Maybe his was just an unusual case. In thinking about Cristina’s death Vincenzo had noticed that there were actually an array of discrete losses. Maybe it was only because the loss was so sudden. Because a bomb lands on a village and yes, the blast itself is tragic, the people it kills, but the subordinate tragedies also ricochet away from the initial blast: a brilliant child goes deaf and loses his way in life, resulting in a troubling burden for his sister; or the wife of a man rendered chronically impotent by his injury enters into an affair, which results in a daughter, whom the impotent husband rears with as much love as he can muster, but it’s always a qualified . . . et cetera, et cetera. And in this way the aftershocks ripple through history itself.

  In the case of Cristina’s death, there were at least a dozen serious subsidiary losses for Vincenzo. Enormous plans that needed to be unwound, countless relationships that unraveled. The worst of all had to be the damage to his relationship with Leonora, who had been closer to her mother to begin with. Still, the family had been triangular, the sturdiest shape known, and when one of the points was wiped out, the remaining two formed a line, which stretched in search of some new formal identity.

  So, because there were actually many different waves of mourning, the stages might be muddled. If so, might they achieve synchronicity at some point? And, if not, would he always be at the mercy of those separate waves raking across his soul, each tide perpetually chasing the last?

  He had quit his job in the midst of what, from a clinical angle, must have been some grand wash of resignation. But it was much too late in the process for resignation. Years had passed. Surely he had to have arrived at acceptance by now. Up close, he might have looked to be tinged with a bit of lingering guilt, but he saw it all as a yellowy bath of acceptance. Because this was the end of the line. It just had to be.

  At dawn, Vincenzo put on running clothes and went down to the hotel gym, which was almost completely empty. He lifted some weights, spent some time on the stationary bicycle, reading subtitles on CNN and glancing often at the young bodies dancing two screens over on MTV. Vincenzo had been captain of the
World Bank’s soccer team for a few years about a decade ago, but had given up for no worthwhile reason, and was pretty badly out of shape now. The fifteen pounds he’d put on felt normal. Every year his physician said, “You should lose about ten pounds, but otherwise you’re still surprisingly well preserved.” The joke that never got old.

  Now that he was a retiree, Vincenzo decided he’d lose that weight—why not? He had the time. In fact, he’d do better, he’d lose twenty pounds. By the time the cherry blossoms were out, he’d be back to 165. The gym was fun. It felt good to get the blood pumping again, it felt good to sweat and push his body until his mind was finally forced to shut the hell up. Afterward, he showered and ate a healthy breakfast (black coffee, fruit, muesli), and went for a little walk around Midtown. He felt euphoric, giddy, and overly energetic when he returned, as if he could feel the stretching out of unidentified possibilities. While walking, he’d put his mind to his professional options. The following morning he was meeting Colin at Lehman Brothers’ Midtown office. There must have been something appealing about that world other than the money, because he knew at least a dozen brilliant economists who’d left top jobs at the Bank and Fund for permanent careers at investment banks. Then again, if he worked at a think tank, he could focus on ideas and policies, and he could speak to an audience, could shape the discussion in his own way for the first time in his life.

  The idea of consulting at one of the aid institutions—the Caribbean Development Bank, or the Inter-American Development Bank, or the UNDP—came and went while he waited for a light to change. Nothing about returning to that community appealed to him.

  Back at the hotel, he winked thanks at the cute female concierge when she told him the names of some good restaurants, and she—to his surprise—smiled bashfully, as if flattered.

  Upstairs, he checked his e-mail and saw a message from Lenka. He opened it with a little dread: he didn’t really want to go there, after all, he thought. It was too much.

  If he was available, she wrote, Evo’s political party would host a party on December 30 at the National Museum. That would put it less than two weeks before Evo’s inauguration. It was the very end of Vincenzo’s grace period. If he aspired to be anything more than furniture, he would, by then, have had to declare allegiance to someone or other.

  Leonora arrived at noon and they walked to Central Park. There was a cold front bearing down and the air was so icy the bones in his hands hurt, so he kept them in his pockets. Already the city was festooned with Christmas regalia: crimson bows on lampposts, vast plastic wreaths in windows, strings of impatient lights flickering in apartment windows, each casting its own golden-spoke halo. Salvation Army bells tinkled faintly, and the odor of roasting chestnuts snaked through the windswept streets. Holidays were awful, post-Cristina, some grim interminable party he’d agreed to attend before realizing he’d rather do anything else. Leonora treated the season similarly, with dutiful resolve.

  She asked what he planned to do next.

  He might, he said, get a consulting job at a financial institution in New York.

  “Really?” She winced.

  He resisted the urge to ask if she was more displeased about the prospect of him working for an investment bank or of him living in New York.

  For lunch, they went to the eighth-floor café at Saks Fifth Avenue and ate at the counter. Both had fourteen-dollar Caesar salads. They shared a half bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé and an appetizer of taramosalata. Then he bought himself an absurdly long, many-hued Paul Smith scarf and, for his daughter, a snowy hand-crocheted angora sweater. While the items were being gift wrapped, he told Leonora that he’d put them under a little plastic tree in his hotel room and they could open them on Christmas Day.

  Her face registered stifled shock. “You’re not going to stay until Christmas, are you?”

  “Of course.” He laughed. “I’m not sure that I ever want to go back to DC.”

  “But I—I don’t know if I’m going to be here.” She looked at the ground, her face going red. Then she dropped her voice and said, “Can we go back to the café and talk?”

  He leaned down and signed the receipt, picked up the bag, and followed her back to the café. They sat, once again, at the bar. He was aware of a dread in his stomach when she reached out and gripped his hand, earnestly, looked him in the eye, and told him that she was going to spend Christmas with Sam’s family. She said that they would spend the next Christmas with him in DC. “We want to trade off. One year with them, one year with you. You know? It’s only fair. I did Thanksgiving with you this year. So we’ll do it with them next year. It’s like—doesn’t that make sense?”

  Vincenzo blinked. The news was so unexpected that he had no idea how to respond. They’d never been apart for Christmas. He struggled to think about something else, anything at all, anything neutral, he thought about salt and pepper (what’s the profit margin on those?), then laminate, paper, and angora, the concept of fashion itself, but none of it was any good, he was nodding at her, chewing on his lower lip, and warm tears were already falling out of his eyes.

  “I’m sorry, Dad,” she was saying. “I didn’t realize you were going to quit your job.” She was saying things like that.

  The bartender approached but then stopped, no doubt seeing Vincenzo’s face, and turned away.

  “You have nothing to be sorry about,” Vincenzo said. “It just caught me off guard.” He said that he needed to find a bathroom. He stood up. He said that he’d be back in a second, and could she guard the bags?

  She just stared at him, tears in her eyes now, too. He turned and walked toward the restrooms.

  The summer Leonora lost her leg on Lake Garda, before they left for Italy, her friend Greta jumped off the Adams Morgan bridge. She left a note addressed to Leonora: Tell my parents that I get it that they meant well, and I hope this doesn’t hurt them too badly.

  Her parents shared the note with Vincenzo and Cristina, who decided to let Leonora read it, too. After she’d read the note, Vincenzo grabbed Leonora, who was already weeping, by the shoulders and fixed her with his gaze, told her that if she killed herself, she would also be murdering him. “I will die. Do you understand?”

  She’d stared at him in mute horror, her lip trembling, and he wanted to slap her in the face, make her understand him, but Cristina had grabbed him by the shoulder.

  “What do you think you are doing?” Cristina hissed, in Italian.

  He shook his head, looked back at his daughter, who was too freshly traumatized even to speak. He looked back at Cristina. “I know you don’t agree, but I happen to know that there is no God, no heaven. She must know this.”

  With that, Leonora ran out of the room.

  Then, a month later, an Italian doctor drove a mechanical saw through Leonora’s leg.

  Life was so geometrical at times, the pieces fit so neatly that it was hard not to imagine that there were gods orchestrating the show. That is what Vincenzo thought when he sat in a marbled stall in the bathroom at Saks Fifth Avenue and wept as quietly as possible, biting the heel of his thumb. Eventually, the torrent loosened. He blew his nose twice. Flushed. He washed his face with cold water. He dried off and, looking at himself in the mirror, his giant eyes and his long narrow nose both reddened, was amazed by the intensity of his reaction. It wasn’t like him to emote so nakedly: that had always been Cristina’s turf. He was the stoic one, the one who tried to dampen arguments and apply cold reason to her outbursts. Maybe he’d acquired some of her heat when she left. Maybe that was how it worked.

  In any event, this Christmas issue would be fine. He could do any number of things. He could, for example, spend the holiday in Piedmont working on the house. The space would do him good. Jesus, he could even stay in New York alone. Maybe Colin would have a little project for him to do for Lehman—if not, he could just stay at a hotel and start exercising and catching up on his reading. Or, of course, he could consent to his own Bolivia proposal and head off there with Walter. Yes,
maybe it would do him good to get some space to think about things.

  That—the simple act of considering his options—was how he realized that Leonora’s rejection was not as straightforward as it had seemed at first. There were options, now. He’d been on a few dates, hoping to see in Cristina’s absence that kind of array of possibilities—oh, the women he could have! —but it hadn’t worked out like that. The whole thing had been soaked in awkwardness, as if the women knew he was a new widower without him needing to say so. Now, though, he felt truly free of that. Not in a metaphysical sense, but in a simple and concrete way; logistically, he was free. He had no responsibilities.

  When he sat down in the café again, Leonora, who had seen him break down often enough since her mother died, looked like she had recovered from her own minor sadness and was now mainly concerned about him.

  “Maybe I can change my plans,” she said weakly.

  “No. You go see Sam’s family. That will be nice for you. I apologize for my reaction. I have been emotional ever since I quit the job, you know? It is a very difficult thing, the transition”—he said this, but it meant nothing, he was doing a press conference—“because my professional life is more or less finished, and even though it’s my own doing, it’s a surprise to me. Still, I know this is a chance for me to get away and do something else.”

  “You going to go to Piedmont?” she said.

  “No, no, no, no, that place would kill me. I might even sell that house. It’s too much! Reminds me of your mother. I might sell the house in Bethesda. I don’t know. I’ll stay here for a few days, I think. Then, I’ll go”—he shrugged, pushed out his lower lip—“I’ll go somewhere.”

  “I’ve heard Australia is nice this time of year,” she said.

  “That doesn’t interest me at all.” He found her suggestion inane and he did nothing to hide that impression.