The Dismal Science (13 page)

“That's what they say,” Sam said, as if Vincenzo didn't know how these things worked. Like any good fundamentalist, his outrage was not dimmed in the least by his ignorance.

Vincenzo made himself cough; he sipped his wine, as if to clear his throat. “Do either of you have room for dessert?”

It was no good. They persisted.

Finally, when he could take no more, Vincenzo said, “You don't seem to grasp how, or to what end, the World Bank functions.”

“You've been brainwashed!” Leonora said, and the irony was so rich that Vincenzo was rendered mute with awe.

“I'm going for a cigarette,” Sam said and stood. Leonora followed him out.

Despite its steep prices, Tosca did not have the best Italian food in DC. Still, it was his favorite restaurant in the city. It was serene and elegant, the service far warmer than at other high-end restaurants in DC. He used to take Cristina there
every year on their anniversary, and continued to take Leonora there every time she returned home.

The maître d', a lanky Frenchman named Denis, came around and folded the napkins that had been tossed onto the chairs. He replaced them beside the bread plates. “How is your dinner?” he asked, in heavily accented Italian.

“Wonderful, thank you. My daughter, she has her mother's temper,” he said, in case Denis had overheard. But when he said this, it reminded him of the times when Cristina had hissed angrily at him in restaurants, including Tosca, and how he would try to get her to be quieter because her rage embarrassed him. And when he thought of that he felt a pinch of pain in his chest—that dull hollow ache that comes from wanting something impossible for too long. Sometimes, he was self-conscious about the feeling, and how quickly tears came to his eyes, and he wondered if people could see how heavily the dead were with him.

“I'm sorry for the disturbance,” he said to Denis.

Denis smiled warmly. “It's not a problem, Mr. D'Orsi.”

An inveterate dilettante, Leonora was very interested in art, literature, sustainable ecology, music, knitting, natural and locally sourced foods—all of which shared only one common denominator: they were pursuits that weren't likely to result in a gainful career. If she'd been casually interested in computer programming, he'd be less worried, but she did not seem especially interested in making a living. He blamed Cristina for this. Cristina
had nudged Leonora into summer classes, summer camps, a lot of enriching, but not especially difficult, summertime activities. Then again, he blamed himself for not pursuing the issue, for not demanding that Leonora get a job, for not choking off her cash supply. To her, money was boring. It came and it went and it didn't matter, really. What mattered were things like yoga and art. That she couldn't understand that yoga and art were also about money, that summer camp was about money, that every aspect of her life was about money—he blamed himself for that, and he blamed Cristina, too.

Having graduated from one of the most mind-bogglingly pricey colleges in the world, Leonora waited tables at an overpriced diner in Brooklyn, where she took the graveyard shift. She was vexed, above all else, by loiterers, inebriated batches of
hipsters
—as she called them—seeking a few hours of coffee and conversation late at night, maybe some fried eggs, before they wandered homeward. During their phone calls this was what she talked about: loiterers and their illegible tip tallies, their splashing vomit, and the time she watched a famous musician doze off and urinate in his jeans after a long tour and too much heroin.

Of course, everyone talks too much about their job, regardless of how uninteresting it is, and now Vincenzo, abruptly deprived of this cornerstone of conversation, found himself having to work harder at small talk in general. The thought of this void, the void he'd created, filled him with terror, something that he felt in his chest, a constriction.

While Leonora was just about to begin learning how much money would matter in her life, in his case, money wouldn't be a concern again. Per his agreement with the World Bank,
he'd be coasting indefinitely. Coasting, though—that word harried him, the lifelessness implied. Coasters were cork pads upon which people rested their moist drinks. To “coast” was to idle, which was one thing when you had a car full of brilliant people to keep you company, but quite another if you were alone.

By the time Walter finally returned from attacking the fence, Vincenzo had determined that he needed to start researching his options. The Tellus Institute's website had been unhelpful: a healthy and reassuringly sane blue predominated and the slogan “For a Great Transition” sounded either invitingly apropos, or menacing. So he surfed away, started reading more online articles about his case. The
Wall Street Journal
had something short. So did
Bloomberg
. Unfortunately, his life was forever abbreviated by the same dependant clause, “a vice president and twenty-four-year veteran of the Bank,” which was deployed, in one form or another, in almost all of them, as in:
Mr. D'Orsi, a vice president, and twenty-four-year veteran of the Bank, has no plans but looks forward to coasting in the approximate direction of oblivion
.

Walter proceeded directly through to the kitchen, saying, “You Italians, you really do a better job of even making pasta. How is that? I put pasta into boiling water, you put pasta into boiling water, but yours is better.”

“Will you check in on the house while I'm away?” Vincenzo said.

“I can invite women over and tell them that it's my house?”

Vincenzo nodded. “Wear my suits, too. Or, maybe I'll leave my passport and you can simply take over.”

Walter frowned sharply at the thought, and then slopped a herculean portion of pasta into what was meant to be a serving bowl. Walter had the metabolism of a hummingbird, and seemed immune to the deleterious effects of excess carbohydrates, lipids, salts. Energy crackled like an electric field around his body. He sat down at the kitchen table and began forking the rigatoni into his mouth and shaking his head in admiration.

“Are we really going to go to Bolivia?” Vincenzo said. The more he thought about it, the less he liked the idea.

“Don't wilt, Vincenzo—that woman's serious. For Christ's sake,
we
suggested it.” He laughed a little, eyes widening, as he did when excited about something he was going to say, some point he was making. “You can't decline an invitation to your own party!”

“I am not wilting, Walter. I'm wondering if it's a good idea.”

“Of course it's a good idea!” Walter turned the kitchen television on and started flipping channels, marching toward
CNN
. Whenever he was over, he relentlessly flipped between
CNN
and Fox News, a two-step channel dance he referred to as “taking the temperature.” So that, if they were watching a film and Vincenzo paused to open some wine, Walter would ask if he could quickly “take the temperature.” Once he settled on
CNN
, he glanced over at Vincenzo. “How would it be bad? Bad, like, it might annoy your new friends at the Cato Institute?”

“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.