The Dismal Science

by Peter Mountford

  “Like beautiful art students?” Probably unfair, but it needed to be said.

  “Make fun if you want, but if you’d like to see what I left behind, go visit Sandra someday. Go there for an hour—she’s still at our house. Have some tea with her and look around. Imagine that’s your life. It’ll make sense.”

  “It already makes sense.”

  The doors opened onto a serene little foyer, adorned with a preening team of outrageously ornate orchids; it was as lavish as the entrance of a five-star restaurant. Bold orange leather upholstery fronted the maître d’s console. The place sounded like handmade shoes brushing against handmade rugs. It was where, Vincenzo gathered, Lehman employees took people whom they wanted to impress into submission. The maître d’, a severe young woman with a flamboyant coppery nest of curls sprouting from her head, marched them through a hallway—past smaller and larger rooms within which an assortment of other people were being wooed—before she deposited them in a small room with a view toward Brooklyn. On a nearby table, a bowl of olives and some unidentifiable amuse-bouches were being kept company by a half bottle of Burgundy. The maître d’ opened the wine and filled a glass for each of them while Colin, not missing a beat, continued talking.

  Already, the hopeful cast of Vincenzo’s imagination had taken hold, offering visions of weekends with Leonora (Sam conveniently absent) and himself—he now dating a witty divorcée, perhaps, in her early forties—drinking wine just like that, but maybe in warmer environs. He and this divorcée would go to the opera and take very long vacations. On weekends, he and Leonora would go to the movies, to museums, they’d meet for coffee and—whatx? Life, maybe, but done satisfactorily, and all the time.

  Feeding a fresh morsel to Vincenzo’s fantasy, Colin presented what he did at Lehman in this way:

  “I get a request—something like, ‘What do you think about the sovereign debt situation in such-and-such country.’ I look at the numbers, write a couple pages and then someone, maybe wanting to seem smart, might ask some follow-up questions, so I’ll explain a little further. There’s also a team, which if you come on board, you’d be on. We’re dispatched, not unlike a Bank mission, to do a complete diagnostic on the quality of the sovereign debt, or do a sector analysis—so it’s very narrow in its focus. There are a handful of us and everyone’s incredibly smart. It’s fascinating work, bracingly clear, and there are absolutely no bureaucratic horrors, no incompetent governmental ministers to deal with. You can be completely candid. It’s exhilarating to be so unfettered, so unburdened by organizational boundaries.”

  Vincenzo glanced around the room. There was a stark postmodern vase on a stand in the corner with corkscrewing branches shooting out in organized, attractive chaos. Vincenzo thought of the young quants who’d been wooed in that room and wondered if they had rooms with different motifs. Would there be a hip room in which candidates received microbrewed beer and vegan canapés, where the art was less dour and contemplative and more splashy and exciting?

  “But you report to children,” Vincenzo reminded him. Ever since Colin had said that, Vincenzo had been thinking indirectly of Jonathan Paris, and what it’d be like to report to someone like him.

  “I complain, but he just wanted to clarify the source of my position. It’s due diligence—his ass is on the line, not mine. The bank is limber and there’s real honesty here, which you’ll find refreshing. If Egypt’s balance sheet is a wreck, you don’t have to write some fucking sixty-page report on the findings of your autopsy, you write an e-mail, ‘Be advised that Egypt’s balance sheet is fucked beyond all recognition.’ And, often, that’s the end of it.”

  This was, Colin knew well, a kind of pornography of efficiency for someone, like Vincenzo, who’d spent his adult life negotiating the internal politics and exasperating organizational minutiae of an institution like the World Bank. “It sounds exquisite,” he admitted. Looking at the miniature bottle of wine with its chaotic label, the timeworn nuances of its pedigree stamped, in code, cluttering it with the details of vintage, vintner, cru, appellation. That was how it worked: despite the allure of the new, eventually, if you stayed around long enough, you’d be so encrusted with the stamps of your stations, your positions, ranks, that the sum of those emblems would become the armor that defended you, defined you. That, he had to admit, was his own lot. “Everything about it sounds wonderful,” he said.

  Although it was definitely a bad idea, he wondered briefly what Cristina might think of this. She hadn’t ever warmed to New York, had found it too ossessivo—she’d spat the word out whenever New York came up. Now, sitting across from Colin, he tried to imagine her face, tried to imagine her talking to him about this—but his memory and his imagination were cutting crosscurrents and instead of the pricklier, more honest woman that she’d grown into, he envisioned the more pliant and encouraging woman of their first decade together. That Cristina would have endorsed it because he seemed to want it. It was the same Cristina who agreed to move to DC, maybe the most ruinous decision of her life. Later, when she became more blunt, she also became less predictable. So he really had no idea what she would have thought of this dream of a life in ossessivo New York, where he worked for an investment bank, slept with a younger woman. It would be easy to assume that she would object to a world in which the photos of her were all stripped from their frames and relegated to a box underneath the bed, but somehow, he thought she would endorse this life, and all the more for the fact that she would not have to be around while it occurred.

  The waiter, a pudgy and exhausted-looking Asian man in horn-rimmed glasses, entered and explained the menu, enunciating everything between long breaths, as if reluctantly. There was a choice, he said. Beef or halibut. He went on to describe another choice: Gorgonzola and potato croquettes or chanterelle and pea risotto. Sparking or still? Whole grain or sourdough?

  While they ordered, the waiter kept glancing up, out the window at the spectacular views.

  An hour later, when the meal was over, Colin said, “Let me know, and I’ll pass along your CV whenever. Frankly, it’d just be a formality, though. You’ll be on my team to start, and then, after a trial period, you’d have your own team. But we’d be working together.”

  Vincenzo looked back at the twisting black branches sprouting from the vase, back at the almost empty half bottle of wine, back at the window, so much like his last window, the same hissing vents, and said, “Why are you doing this?”

  Caught off guard, Colin replied, helplessly, “I want you here. I think you’d be a good addition to the team.” He reached out and divided the rest of the half bottle between their glasses. “And it’d be fun to work with you again.”

  Vincenzo saw a lot happening, so far, there, but he didn’t see much fun. The word caught his attention. “Your coworkers—they’re not so . . .” He shrugged.

  Colin bobbled his head, looking at nothing in particular in a way that revealed that though he wished it weren’t so, this was, in fact, the very point of this whole conversation: the banality of his coworkers bothered him enough to go headhunting on his own. “They’re not, uh—you know, by and large, as interesting as the kind of people you work with at the Bank. It’s a different culture, which has its benefits and its—um—” He tried to think of a non-pejorative word for this, and then gave up. Looking at Vincenzo again, he leaned in, almost whispering. “There’s a lack of nuance, I guess you could call it. That’s the only downside here.”

  Vincenzo attempted to imagine what it would be like to work with so many dullards, and if it would be so bad. It was very hard to imagine. Even now, having seen the place firsthand, he was at a loss. To test Colin’s enthusiasm, he said, “I’ve been approached by some other people. A think tank, and I’m probably going to be making a speech in Bolivia.”

  Colin winced, shook his head, much as Vincenzo had feared he would. “What kind of speech?” he asked.

  “It’d be a little event hosted by Evo Morales.”

  “Oh, don’t do
that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Your exit from the Bank looks, to the informed, like a momentary lapse of judgment. You were sick of the bureaucracy and the nonsense there and had an episode, but only because you’d been there too long. That was how I presented it to my colleagues and it made sense. If the very next thing you do is make some speech on behalf of Evo Morales in Bolivia it looks very much like you’re an antiglobalization zealot. A double-agent type. And no one likes that.”

  “Wouldn’t that impression depend on what I said during my speech?”

  Colin was not quite convinced. “I guess, and it’d depend on how much traction the story had. If it brings this story to life again, then you’d need to be out front with quotes about how you think democracy is great, but Evo Morales doesn’t understand economics, and so on.”

  “I see,” Vincenzo said.

  The sky was clearing up and the views to lower Manhattan were majestic. Leonora would surely disapprove. But she was living quite squalidly now, coping with the harsher realities of a small paycheck, and maybe her once-swift dismissal of such a career, such a lifestyle, had been tempered. The same girl who had immediately refused a payout to attend an in-state university, had also—once she had arrived a few years deeper into adulthood—happily scampered into Saks Fifth Avenue in search of new clothes. She wasn’t a material girl, of course, but the matter of her father’s paychecks and the role of those paychecks in her life couldn’t possibly seem irrelevant. Back at his hotel room later that afternoon, he wrote an e-mail to Colin thanking him for inviting him to New York and saying that he was absolutely interested in working at Lehman, but he needed a little time to organize his affairs. He’d try to keep the press at bay while in Bolivia, he promised.

  Then he wrote an e-mail to Lenka Villarobles, and cc’d Walter:

  This sounds fantastic. I talked to Walter (cc’d) and we think this would be a great event. I’m looking forward to it. Let us know when you want us there and any other details.

  Afterward, he wrote a separate e-mail to Walter, saying:

  Talked to friend at Lehman and it sounds great. While we’re in Bolivia, I need to be on good behavior. No more wailing against the system in the press.

  And he wrote an e-mail to his daughter:

  I’m busy tonight. Can we meet tomorrow morning?

  Then he called down to in-room dining and ordered a glass of champagne.

  “Just one glass?” the operator said.

  “Just one,” he replied tersely. “Is that acceptable?”

  “Oh—I’m sorry,” the person stammered.

  “It’s fine.” He hung up.

  Screw them all! Yes! Goddamn it! He felt good—no, great! Fuck them all—he was having champagne in his heavenly hotel room that evening while the snow whirled again out his window under the swiftly darkening sky.

  9

  BEN

  Vincenzo awoke to a faint knocking at his door and was confused because he didn’t quite understand where he was at first—he’d just been lifting Cristina out of the icy shallows of a mossy and black sea cave. She was, incredibly, still alive—everyone else inside the cave where he lived had thought she was dead, but Vincenzo had known otherwise and had gone looking for her, and he had found her out in the sea somewhere, bobbing in the black waves, and then he had dragged her limp body back to the cave, and now here she was, standing, face of a corpse but evidently alive, gurgling nonsense as water dribbled from her mouth. Her lungs, he knew, were sodden as a sponge at the bottom of a lake, and she was dead but not dead, but he was just so relieved to have her back. Her eyes were pale, blind, and he thought he might be able—

  But then there was this knocking and what was happening broke away into that empty black limbo between dreaming and waking and then he was winded with the fresh notion, as devastating now as it was on the first collision, that he was, in fact, in a hotel and that she wasn’t there—he was in New York, and there had been no sea, no cave.

  But someone was, in fact, really knocking on his door, so he called out, “I’m in here!” It would have to be housekeeping or somebody from the hotel. But wasn’t it early for that? He thought of his wife’s mouth, the water dribbling out, the fact that it had just been a dream—“I’m sleeping!” he yelled, because they kept knocking. He sat up and reached for his glasses. “Jesus, I’m sleeping!” Was the hotel overly soundproofed? The clock informed him it was six fifteen, which was either bad or annoying, because urgent and unexpected news was never, or almost never, happy news. He went to the door and opened it slightly.

  “What can I do for you?” he said, squinting out at the person who had done this to his dream, but it didn’t look like a representative of the hotel; it was a handsome black man with a cleanly shaved head and a cleanly shaved face. A man in a perfect white shirt that was freshly pressed, open lavishly at the neck, a blazer, khakis—he was dressed for DC, and a different season. He was what Leonora called, with a degree of contempt that Vincenzo never quite understood, a “preppie.”

  “Sorry to wake you up,” he said and extended his hand. “I’m Ben.” The tone of voice was so precisely calibrated that it didn’t seem calibrated at all: it just landed nicely in the still-dream-addled consciousness of the listener, a voice confident that its offhand apology for waking the listener would suffice. It landed like drops of water on an already wet stone.

  “What can I do for you?” Vincenzo shook his hand, allowing the door to open more because he wanted to be sure to imply to this black man that he wasn’t afraid of him, because what kind of person was afraid of—

  “Can I come in?” this man who was named Ben said, but the question was nullified or belated because he was already entering and Vincenzo, who had intentionally blocked the door with his body, was now giving way to this man who had somehow insinuated himself, physically, into the inch between Vincenzo’s shoulder and the door, prying at that space with so disarmingly casual a feat of body language, fast and slow at once, that the breach was complete before Vincenzo had time to gather that there had been a breach at all. That Vincenzo was wearing his pajamas and barely awake and that he didn’t know Ben was, to judge from the body language, not the kind of thing people should get uptight about.

  Which was how Vincenzo found himself standing there in his hotel room, the door closed, with a man named Ben offering him a seat on the very bed in which he’d just awoken, as if they were in Ben’s office; and Vincenzo, still trying to catch up with the tumbling shape of the interaction, the social jujitsu underway, was now mainly aware that, without question, he was in the presence of someone who did this kind of thing often. Ben sat down and said, with all the nonchalance of an old pal encountered, by chance, at a bar, “How’s the city treating you?”

  Why did Ben not have a coat? This was what Vincenzo wondered. There was a snowstorm outside, after all. He had never met a black man named Ben, for that matter—there was something especially askew here.

  “You don’t have a coat,” Vincenzo said aloud.

  Ben looked puzzled, which was strange since he was the one who was responsible for the puzzling aspect of this interaction.

  “Who sent you here?” Vincenzo said, and as soon as he sent this forth he found the statement itself, the drama of it, called to mind some dexterously executed scenario from a spy novel in which the bookish bureaucrat ends up hanged to death by his own socks in the closet of his hotel room in what would be described—in the deliberately ambiguous lingo used in movies, if rarely in life—as an “apparent suicide.” And so was this the disarming face of a CIA assassin? He looked somewhat like the black valedictorian of Leonora’s graduating class at Oberlin, but that guy had been gay and an aspiring urban planner. Still, this guy was, Vincenzo gathered, someone who could charm his way through a room—any room. He’d cut through a party like an ocean liner. He could work a crowd of people—any people—and that was a special skill. Everything was balanced perfectly. The only hint of fury could be felt in the over-en
ergetic handshake. Vincenzo had met the valedictorian at his daughter’s graduation; that man’s accomplishments were maybe just slightly too vigorously achieved. He had risen above his classmates so unequivocally that there needed to be a kind of furious accelerant there, some—

  “Why are you in my room?” Vincenzo said.

  “I’m here to talk about your plans.”

  “I have a phone.” Vincenzo looked at the phone and Ben looked at it, too. Vincenzo felt that he shared the swelling anger in his own way. Now, he wanted to punch Ben in the face, but he also didn’t want to die there.

  “I wanted to talk to you in private,” Ben said.

  “The phone is private.”

  Ben smiled.

  “What do you want with me?” Vincenzo pressed.

  “You’re in a peculiar place—you’ve got to make some decisions, and I wanted to discuss your options.”

  This man was like Jonathan Paris’s more dangerous double, his dapper doppelgänger. Vincenzo stood, feeling the need to urinate immediately—he gestured toward the bathroom. Ben waved him along and leaned back, glanced around the room. Peeing with the door open, Vincenzo tried to think of what he should say next, tried to think about the moves available, the strategy. If it were chess, he’d want to control the center of the board, but there was no center on this board. There was no objective, except autonomy, survival. He flushed, washed his hands, considered himself in the mirror: the expensive pajamas hanging loose on his wilted torso; he considered his sagging face, hooked nose, intense dark eyebrows flecked with white, the mottled dome. It was extraordinary to think that now that he was an unemployed widower in late middle age he was finally worthy of a talking to by the CIA.