The Dismal Science (19 page)

10

THE WORLD'S GREATEST FATHER

Vincenzo stayed in New York for another snowbound week, during which time he did not hear from Ben again, but did see his daughter on three occasions. Also, he went to the Guggenheim, MoMA, ate dinner at Daniel, and saw a movie, all alone. In e-mail and on the phone, he was cautious. Or, if not cautious, he was aware that he might be speaking to a wider audience. Otherwise, he believed he was approaching a kind of equilibrium. And he wasn't always alone: he ate at several great restaurants with people whom he'd known for ages but didn't quite count as friends.

Strangely enough, or to his own surprise, he ended up agreeing to see Jonathan Paris for lunch.

Maybe it was Jonathan's proximity to Vincenzo's undoing, maybe it was Vincenzo's brush with Ben, who seemed somehow tied to Jonathan in Vincenzo's mind, but over lunch Vincenzo found himself speaking in oddly personal terms with the young
man. After admitting that he was a widower—Jonathan had merely asked if Vincenzo was there with anyone—there was the usual lull. More mature people often tried to fill the space that followed the widower confession with something, anything, but Jonathan was so out of his depth that he remained mute, stunned by Vincenzo's humanity. That was when Vincenzo, veering off of the lines of their script, said, “I would like to meet women. The Internet, I understand, it has—”

“Sure, I guess there's, like,
Match.com
and whatever,” Jonathan said helpfully. He was still looking at the table. This table-gazing reflex had been going on for a while. “There'll be something for someone your age, too. I don't know what it's called.”

“How do you meet women? Is it on the Internet?” Vincenzo asked.

Jonathan laughed uncomfortably and shrugged and glanced up quickly, as if unsure what to do with Vincenzo's bluntness. He looked out the window at a wall. They were at a Thai place near Union Square.

“Or, do you like men? I'm sorry—I just—”

“No, no, I do
not
like men, I like women. But I don't know. How do I meet them? I guess I'm sort of shy—I don't ever go on dates.”

“Shy? You stormed the fucking headquarters of the World Bank.”

“Yes, I guess, but I don't know how I meet them. I know them already, usually—friends of friends, or something. It's not easy to meet girls.” He looked at Vincenzo and Vincenzo saw another little glimpse of that confidence from that day in his office.
“But I definitely don't go on dates with girls who I've never met. If it doesn't arise organically, I don't want to deal with it. It's just too difficult. What about you? You don't date at all?”

Vincenzo shook his head. “I plan to.”

“How are you going to meet them?”

“That was my question.”

Jonathan nodded resolutely. “I'm not going to go on dates with girls I don't know. Why make it more awkward than it has to be?”

“Why?” Vincenzo repeated. “Maybe
desperation?”
He smiled mischievously and Jonathan smiled too, but hollowly.

Later in that meal, in another somewhat memorable moment, Jonathan confided that he was terrified of failure, which was not surprising in itself, but it was comforting to hear him admit it. Evidently, he'd spent the previous day with a bullhorn, whipping an audience of hundreds into a fury in front of the United Nations, and yet he was afraid he wasn't doing enough with his life. What would Jonathan think of Leonora, whose current aspirations involved finding a better way to store the margarine at the diner where she worked?

When Vincenzo asked Jonathan to define failure, he embarked on a diatribe, cataloging an exotic collection of ways in which a person could experience failure before concluding, at last, after a momentous pause, “Insignificance—I think that's it. You want to leave your mark on the world. You want to be of value.”

“Maybe you should have children?” Vincenzo said. “I think that is the most simple way to take care of that feeling.”

“You have kids?”

“I have a daughter.”

“Oh yeah, I remember. Oberlin?”

“Yes.”

“What does she think about all this?”

“She's pleased, more or less.”

“She hated that you worked at the Bank?”

Vincenzo shook his head. “She didn't
hate
it. It became an inconvenient feature of her own biography.”

Jonathan tilted his head in a certain way, down to the left, which Vincenzo was starting to recognize as the gesture he made when he felt he had a good line of attack. “You didn't just do it to make her happy, did you?”

Vincenzo squinted. “The thing—my scandal?”

“Yeah, you weren't just trying to appease your kid, were you?”

“No,” he said, shaking his head slowly. “I hope not.”

“Jesus.”

“No, there were many reasons,” he said. It was striking: he didn't remember Leonora being part of the decision, but now it seemed clear that she was.

Jonathan's face remained frozen in astonishment, something like horror. Then, at last, the expression broke off and he smiled, laughed a little, shaking his head. “Yikes,” he said.

Then Jonathan said, “I guess that's the thing about having kids—they almost inevitably end up hating you. Seems miserable. Why do that to yourself?”

“You don't hate your parents, do you?”

“No, I guess I don't, but it's—you know—it's not easy.”

“But life is difficult,” Vincenzo ventured. “The best things are
very
difficult.” He knew that idea wouldn't quite resonate
with Jonathan, who had that Ivy League attitude that assumed further waves of greatness were blossoming out on the watery horizon, then approaching hard and fast. He was the kind of person who, in his midtwenties, bullied his way into the office of one of the World Bank's vice presidents, and then presumed to give that vice president a lecture. The kind of person who had been informed, from the moment that he first spoke, that he was “incredible” and “gifted”—even if he was just drawing a circle a bit prematurely. When he was young and impressionable, many people had, no doubt, assured him that he could achieve
anything
he set his mind to, and then, as he breached adulthood, this myth still rang true for him; it rang loudly, deafeningly, this extraordinary notion that he could achieve anything he set his mind to.

“Parenthood is difficult, but it's kind of fun, sometimes, and you do it because it's important,” Vincenzo explained. “Don't you like doing things that are important?”

Jonathan nodded, his mouth bunched up contemplatively, and said that this sort of made sense to him. It wasn't enough to make him run out and impregnate someone, but he seemed to accept that there was something there. “You know, parenthood does sort of appeal,” he said. “It's not where I am right now though, it's a different kind of project.”

Vincenzo snorted. “Yes, it's a different kind of project.” Now, he was starting to regret agreeing to this lunch. Somehow, he had hoped to see some new information here, some flash of insight into his own decision that day, but this wasn't helping.

After lunch, Vincenzo ambled into the Barnes & Noble on Union Square and found a copy of W. S. Merwin's translation of
Purgatorio
. He'd read a glowing review in the
Financial Times
. Among English-speaking Dante aficionados, it was the first meaningful advance in decades, maybe more.

When he originally matriculated at the University of Milan, at eighteen, Vincenzo slogged—with increasing discomfort—through Petrarch, Cecco Angiolieri, Dante, Boccaccio, and Machiavelli. In the early winter, when he was starting to be sure that he'd made a serious mistake, he met the legendary and legendarily tetchy economist Federico Caffè at a bookstore where Vincenzo worked nights. Caffè was in Milan giving a series of lectures at Bocconi and Vincenzo, immediately taken with him, went to several of these lectures. Soon, Vincenzo was submitting his application to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which Caffè had recommended to him, brusquely telling him that there was nowhere else to study economics, not even Roma Tre, where he taught.

He thought about it for a month but, despite thorough contemplation, found himself still facing a choice between two absolute unknowns. Still, he applied to
MIT
, as if to test the hypothesis, and when they accepted him he viewed it as a sign. By the time the first flowers were budding on the azaleas, Vincenzo had dropped out of Milan, forfeiting all of his exams, and accepted their invitation to study in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Dante and Machiavelli were each concerned principally with the political machinations of their times. The Italian Renaissance was bookended by the two—a poet at the start, a philosopher at the end, both Florentines, both men whose minds were not lost in any abstract clouds, but were stuck intractably in the thick mud of politics. Dante spent much of the
Commedia
flaying and trumpeting the villains and heroes of his political era, while Machiavelli did much the same in his plays; even his philosophical works were designed to appease the ascendant regimes (as those powers changed, so—subtly—did his philosophies). Both men chased the favor of the leaders in Florence and both missed the mark completely, with ruinous results for their lives.

But Vincenzo had trouble sustaining even the slightest interest in Dante. The decision to allow his lack of interest in Dante and Dante's peers to rearrange his plan was, in a way, the first truly pivotal decision of his life. It was made blindly, madly, with no sense of what it might mean for him.

Of the
Commedia
's three sections, only
Purgatorio
was, for young Vincenzo, of anything resembling an abiding interest.
Paradiso
and
Inferno
were unreadable—so morally neat, so didactic and certain: the horrendous being treated horrendously and the righteous being rewarded. Vincenzo, already an eager atheist by the time he encountered the
Commedia
at seventeen, was especially off-put by the savage medieval logic and the gleeful sadism.

At least, on the mountain of Purgatory, souls were in a more complicated position. These venial sinners suffered only a partial loss of grace. The only of the three books set on earth proper, it offered a glimpse of people as flawed as the reader and, for that matter, the writer.

All of those undergoing their purgation had to overcome an absurd and arbitrary punishment to locate the solution to the problem of their sin. The sin would be abstract, indelible, and unmoving, but the punishment clear, finite. In the end, the victims would find salvation in escape from their present circumstances, from literally climbing the mountain toward heaven.

The lesson, weighed out properly, was nothing more than a florid insanity, chaotic as the coastline. Saints were tossed into heaven on a series of misplaced whims. Paradise was geography. To hear the heavenly trumpets sounding, you should arrange your body skyward and commence marching. The lesson was that God was capricious and unthinking and that salvation could be located only by force, by unthinking exertion, by way of celestial topography, by walking uphill.

And, yes, Vincenzo thought, maybe that was it, after all. At a loss for other explanations: why not.