The Dismal Science

by Peter Mountford

  “Well. I’m just trying to—”

  “No need to explain. I might be going to Bolivia, actually.”

  She appeared puzzled. “What’s in Bolivia?”

  Was she feigning obliviousness? He said nothing, and she didn’t either. “Do you want to call Sam?” he said. “I’ve made reservations for three, but they can be changed if he’s busy.”

  “He’ll be there, Dad. Are you okay? You seem weird.”

  “I am weird! You should know that about me!” He chuckled, with some difficulty. Then he looked away, shook his head.

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  “Then say what you mean.”

  “You seem, I don’t know, you seem cold.”

  “Oh.” He nodded. He understood, and it made sense—after all, there was something like an icicle driven through his torso. “I’ll recover,” he said and smiled. “So, I’d like to swing by the Met, if possible. I gather they rehanged the nineteenth century, and I want to see it. We have time, right? Two hours is plenty.”

  She put her eyebrows into an emotive arch, something her mother would do. It was condescending and infuriating. “Are you okay?”

  He paused, shrugged. “I haven’t felt this good in years.” He had never deliberately hurt her before in that way and it felt awful.

  Leonora’s pain was clear in her face. It was as if she could tell he had never felt so little love for her. From that theory of the stages of mourning he had harvested one idea that, he thought, stood up to scrutiny: some emotions must occur, almost by definition, separately. So, although he loved Leonora—loved her far more than any other living being—he could still hate her at times, too; and when he hated her, he just hated her.

  She wanted to stay and say more, this much was clear. She wanted to talk it out and dispel the horrible feeling right away, but he was already standing up, already going for his coat, saying, “You ready?” and, “Don’t forget the bag.”

  8

  FINALE

  Vincenzo had been the middle of seven children whose father had lapsed, decisively, from the Catholic Church. Despite being docile in so many regards, his father, Geomar, had refused to attend any of his children’s baptisms or confirmations. This wasn’t something that they talked about in the house.

  Occasionally, when drunk enough, his father ranted against the Church and the absurdity of the notion of God, but these soliloquies were rarely intelligible and, anyway, he said a lot of things when he was drunk. His father had held great promise once—he was an assistant manager of a leather factory at age nineteen, and everyone supposedly believed he would end up a tycoon—but his mind was addled by his time as an infantryman during the war. A shell had burst against the hull of a nearby tank during the Allied invasion of Sicily and his face was scarred from the shrapnel.

  After the war, he couldn’t return to the leather factory, found the work too grisly, and took a job instead working for the city as a gardener. Some years later, he was moved to sanitation, and helped keep the streets clean. He drank a liter of homemade grappa daily, but was never violent or angry—was simply gone, muttering to himself and making facial expressions as if carrying on a conversation. His mind and his liver deteriorated in tandem, withering soggily, together, until they brought down the rest of him. Death came precipitously, as it often does even in the supposedly slow cases. It was the sixties and Vincenzo was in his first year of university. He was back in Milan after spending a riotous year in Denver—aswim in blond girls—as an exchange student. Now he was starting to wonder if he’d made a mistake choosing to turn himself over to the frustratingly pious and otherworldly study of the classical Italian literature. Admiring, in his roundabout way, his father’s dedication to the soil and the earth of the present, Vincenzo had started pining after something more terrestrial and something as far from Milan’s working-class doldrums as Denver had been.

  Vincenzo, who adored his father perhaps more than did any of his siblings, had lapsed early, too, shortly after his confirmation. But, when his father was on his deathbed, his mother summoned a priest, insisting that his father had implied, somehow, with his hands, rising in a circular motion, like smoke from incense, perhaps (by this point he could no longer speak) that he was looking for absolution. And though his father was mute, the priest claimed to somehow take his confession. The priest administered his last rites. If his father had been cognizant enough to know what was happening—that, after he’d spent decades rejecting the Church, his wife was shoving him back into the fold in his final hours—he would have been, Vincenzo knew, sickened. At the time, it seemed an incomprehensibly brutal form of betrayal.

  Outraged by his mother’s actions that day, young Vincenzo got drunk by himself during the funeral and showed up at the post-funeral wake intending to set his mother straight in front of everyone. During the ensuing fiasco, of which he would, mercifully, remember very little, he reportedly yelled at his mother and the priest, claiming they were in some obscene and diabolical union, stealing helpless souls. His brothers intervened, pulling him out to the garden, but not before he destroyed at least one vase of flowers. Once outside, he managed to punch his eldest brother out before he was expelled from the grounds and left to stumble through the streets alone.

  Two days later, Vincenzo apologized to his mother, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to retract it all, because much of it had been true. She assured him that she forgave him, as did some of his siblings, but subsequent history would reveal that it had been one of those moments for a family—one of those breaks that wouldn’t ever be fully mended.

  Before long, he was in Massachusetts for university, and then Rome for work, then to Washington with the World Bank. Along the way, he missed all but two of his siblings’ weddings. He stopped keeping track of their avalanche of children while he was still in Rome.

  As a junior economist at the Italian central bank in the seventies, he met and fell in love with Cristina, who was then a student at Sapienza, and was as Catholic as anyone else in Rome. By then, he was not only atheist, but had a kind of worldly American air about him, too, in a way that Italian women found intensely sexy.

  Early on, he told her that he would never attend church with her, and if she was going to make an issue of it, they couldn’t see each other. Within two months, she had stopped attending church altogether. That had seemed like it was the end of the subject, but, of course, nothing is so simple.

  For some years, he and Cristina sent each of his siblings and his mother a Christmas card. Then even that became difficult to sustain.

  The one time he saw the whole family after moving to DC, during a business trip to Milan in the early nineties, everyone was cordial. Everyone seemed happy to see him. He took them all to a good restaurant. They were impressed by how far he’d come—he was the most accomplished person in the family, already, although he still hadn’t even really bloomed at the Bank. Woozy with the wine he’d bought them, his siblings and mother hugged him firmly at the end of the night, told him that they should do a better job of keeping in touch. No one mentioned his father. No one mentioned the funeral. No one called or sent any cards for a year.

  When his mother finally died, in 1998, he sent flowers, but was unable to find time to make it over for the funeral.

  And when Cristina died, he received cards from only two of his siblings. He hadn’t called any of them and had no idea how they’d found out.

  A blizzard crept in overnight and when Vincenzo opened his hotel room blinds in the morning he peered at the dim but nonetheless blinding glare of a hundred million snowflakes, each glowing with just enough of the hidden sun to reflect its own little light, so that the air itself was a swirling frenzy of radiance. His muscles ached from his workout the day before—already, his enthusiasm for the new lifestyle was under threat.

  Then he turned on the news and went to brush his teeth.

  Sitting at the efficient little desk, he ate in-room-dining breakfast and sorted through his now ebbing
flow of e-mail. There was another message from Jonathan Paris, which struck a casual tone. As with the first e-mail, he said he was excited about the news, and was wondering how Vincenzo was doing; he suggested they meet up next time Vincenzo was in New York. Once again, Vincenzo didn’t answer.

  He returned to the message from Lenka Villarobles in which she’d suggested a date for the party in Bolivia. After his horrible day with Leonora, he couldn’t manage to think about Lenka’s proposal.

  He called Walter. “Did you get the message I forwarded from that woman in Bolivia?”

  “I did, in fact. We should book flights soon, I think—there are not a lot of itineraries available. You can go through Miami or Houston and I—I think that’s it. Not a very popular tourist destination!”

  “So you think we should do it?”

  “Oh God, are you still worried about alienating people? Jesus, Vincenzo—”

  “I’ve got a meeting this morning with someone from Lehman Brothers, so I don’t want to be rash.”

  “They probably wouldn’t even notice.”

  “They will notice.”

  “Well, maybe, but it’s hardly a reason to not go.”

  “Don’t oversell, Walter. Please.”

  “Fair enough, but I do think it’d be fun. For what it’s worth. I’ve been often, and I always like it.”

  After they’d hung up, Vincenzo read the rest of his messages. He closed the browser once the e-mail was read.

  He leaned back and had another sip of the already tepid coffee. He looked around. What now? In that visit with the HR woman, when she’d asked for his badge, he’d puffed his chest and forged ahead, but looking back, he saw how deeply frightening that moment should have been—he was forfeiting his means of entrance into the building he’d been visiting daily for most of his adult life. Of course, he was ready to move on, or that had been the idea—but everything about it seemed less easy when he was sitting in his cramped hotel room staring at the dancing snowflakes outside, with no unread messages in his inbox.

  To begin with, he was not accustomed to being unproductive.

  But that wasn’t even it. He’d been unproductive before. What he’d never done was stop advancing himself, steadily, gradually, upward within the architecture of the Bank. Now he was supposed to put that energy toward some other thing. The great second act. Or was he onto his third act, now? Alas, it was probably the third act. The finale.

  He needed new fire, a fresh purpose to his days. Instead, he had a hissing heater by the window of his well-appointed hotel room. And he had those massive snowflakes, too, a hundred million delicate and crystalline lattices suspended peacefully between gusts, like a sea of glowing spirits floating aimlessly between waves—but then they’d all spin wildly away from the window as if gathering for a tsunami.

  Vincenzo had been to investment banks before, but they’d all been ensconced in steely towers planted firmly into lower Manhattan. Only Lehman lived in Midtown, in the decidedly un-suave and un-somber Times Square. The building wore a belt of LED screens around its lower floors, in keeping with the flashiness of Times Square, as if it were just another wacky tourist attraction. The snowstorm had slowed, for the time being, and when he got out of the taxi and looked up, he found the building cut an impressive figure, glassy and glinting—tickers spinning maniacally around it. Wall Street was having a bad day, as it happened, so all of the tickers were running red.

  In the queerly long and narrow lobby, he found a few guards clustered together behind an absurdly long table, maybe fifty meters, against the wall. He approached them and said he was there to see Colin Donnell. A portly black man put together a show of diligence and told him what he already knew, that Colin was on the twenty-sixth floor, office B-2664.

  Vincenzo had assumed there would have been some security. Apparently not.

  At the twenty-sixth floor, he entered a space that looked like any office building anywhere in America, the elevator banks opening out onto a row of cubicles. Quants and assistants and other younger people, mostly men, sat in shirtsleeves within their taupe cubbies. It was, somewhat surprisingly, rather less charming than the World Bank offices.

  He walked around the cubicles, over to the window on one side, near a hallway going to the staircase, and saw the crowd seething on the street below, yellow cabs shoving their way through—there was little sign of the snow from up there. No sound came through the thick windows. All he heard was the quietly hissing heating vents and a faint whirring from the state-of-the-art elevators. Looking for his own visage in the glass, he caught his shimmering outline and checked that his tie was right, his collar. He tugged his jacket taut at his sides. He hadn’t been nervous to talk to anyone in ages, at least since he talked to Wolfowitz about the possibility of a promotion. He checked his watch and saw he was three minutes late, just right.

  He looked at the numbers on the offices ringing the periphery and saw they were ascending, so he started walking.

  When he came to Colin’s office, he found the door was open. He knocked anyway.

  Colin, on the phone, waved Vincenzo in. The office was a shoe box, with a view to the Hudson and the hazy and snowy shores of New Jersey.

  Colin hunched forward, visibly strained by whatever he was dealing with, and spoke into the phone: “—which is why we’re monitoring them.” Vincenzo sat in the chair and looked at the desk. It was quite neat. There were only a few bookshelves: no room, really, for many books. There were two armchairs and a table, too, but it was so cramped he couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to sit there. “My belief, to reiterate,” Colin went on, “is that the spreads will be widening as the Street mulls the figures. The balance sheets are just not as favorable as Mikhail suggested—and the near-term debt, in particular, is poorly priced.” He paused, listening. “Fine. That’s okay. I’ll do that. But I don’t want to have to walk you through this again and again. We’ve been through it already and you’re still asking for more, but it takes me time to put it together and we’re—”

  He leaned even farther over his desk, so his face was poised over the phone’s receiver. “Exactly. Look. I’ve got to go, so why don’t we just meet at two and we’ll go through it then—are you free at two?”

  A brief pause.

  “Two thirty?”

  Another. His eyes wide with exasperation.

  “Three it is.” He hung up, rolled his eyes, said, “I report to children.” Standing, he extended his hand to Vincenzo.

  “Sounds like fun,” Vincenzo said flatly and shook the hand.

  Colin chuckled, flopped back down in his chair. “Would you believe me if I told you that it actually is tremendously fun?”

  Vincenzo shrugged. “I believe anything these days.”

  “Come with me.” Colin stood and led the way out. On the way to the elevators, Colin hashed out the basic biographical updates: a kid at Penn State, another doing a medical residency, neither married. He, meanwhile, was living with a woman named Gillian, who recently finished her MFA in video art at the New School. She made hilarious and absurd self-portrait films nightly, in which she rattled off improvised monologues. Afterward, she did extensive editing on each fragment, he explained, and it was clear he admired her art, in a way, but was mostly baffled. Some of these, he said, showed at a tiny gallery in Chinatown.

  Colin’s former wife had been a ghoulish fixture of the city’s society magazines, a boozy heiress whose droopy face was forever slathered in makeup. The new girlfriend, bubbly and mercurial and—although Colin didn’t say so, Vincenzo deduced it from what wasn’t said—not terribly smart, was, not surprisingly, the opposite of his ex-wife in every way. His children, meanwhile, found his reincarnation repulsive in the most predictable ways, but they were grown, so they weren’t—to be perfectly blunt about it—his top priority anymore. “They wish I’d stayed with Sandra in Cleveland Park so that they could cart their screaming toddlers over at Thanksgiving and everyone could rest assured that everything had worked out according
to plan. But whose plan was that?”

  “Your plan, I suppose,” Vincenzo said, although he sympathized completely with Colin.

  “So, I should’ve just stayed the course? Forced a smile and pressed on?”

  “No, no, I didn’t mean that.” They stopped at the elevators and Colin pressed the up button. “Was it hard to leave?” Vincenzo asked.

  Colin turned and looked at him knowingly, as if Vincenzo had intended for there to be extra subtext in the question. “It was the single hardest thing I’ve ever done,” he replied, still staring at Vincenzo in that knowing way. “And I was afraid I’d made a mistake—it’s not easy to dismantle such a complex and fully constructed identity: the house, the wife, the job—to leave all of that.” He turned away at last and pressed the button again. Standing there, Vincenzo could hear the elevators whirring inside their tubes, thrusting air out of vents. “I guess you would know, too, in a different way.”

  Vincenzo shrugged, unhappy with where that fragment of conversation had gone, and said, “No, I don’t know.”

  Misinterpreting his reticence, Colin said, “People scoff at the midlife crisis, as if it’s just this trite masturbatory phase dumb men go through, just more poor male impulse control.”

  “But we know better,” Vincenzo said, and they both laughed.

  They entered an elevator and Colin jammed his thumb against the button for the thirty-second floor, the top floor, labeled Club Floor. “No, really, it was the most difficult and honest move I’ve ever made.” Vincenzo thought about his own great move, tried to assess the difficulty and honesty of it, but found himself unable to measure it on such terms. As far as that tautology of an “honest move,” Vincenzo had nothing to say—honesty was as extraneous here as it always had been. Hindsight would validate or repudiate the decision, but finally, the logic of these momentous decisions was no more certain than a pair of tumbling dice.

  In the elevator, Colin continued, “I looked at my life and I could see it clearly, could see where it was going, and I said, ‘I don’t like this. I don’t want this to be the rest of my years.’ And it was scary to give up everything I’d spent the last three decades building, but it got better. Other things come along.”