The Dismal Science (21 page)

They started taking holidays in deliberately arbitrary places, places they had never been to before—Scotland, Thailand, Russia. When they disagreed, now, they seemed more able to laugh and argue at the same time. They bought the house in Italy with the thought that its restoration would be a project that they'd work on for a few weeks a year, at least, maybe more, into their dotage.

This was all taking shape when, one day in the late winter, when it was horribly cold and overcast, he returned to his office after an exhausting meeting with a boorish delegate from Germany and found a message from a police officer on his voice mail. The officer said that he had something important to talk about and asked Vincenzo to call him back immediately. It was clear from the man's tone that he had awful news to impart. It was going to be something unimaginably awful.

“This is Palmer,” the voice said. It was a hoarse voice, a shambling voice, laden with a DC drawl.

“Officer Palmer?” Vincenzo said, not wanting his dread to come through.

“Yes. Is this Vin—” The officer halted, evidently trying to remember his name.

“Vincenzo D'Orsi.”

“Right,” he said. “Um . . . I'm—”

“I wanted—” Vincenzo blurted, and then paused because the sentence had nowhere to go; he'd just wanted to shove a wedge into that space. And there, in the moment he'd opened, Vincenzo knew acutely, if obliquely, that this would mark the end of a generous run of good fortune, one that he should have done more to appreciate, even though people never appreciate such things. It
had
been long. Still, in that way, Vincenzo burrowed into the moment he'd bought, but then he found it didn't contain him and time was already up and Officer Palmer was speaking, and so Vincenzo reluctantly surrendered his consciousness to the information at hand.

After New York, Vincenzo spent a week at home in Bethesda. By then, the limelight had moved along, more or less. There'd been no word from Ben, either. Walter had relaxed about that question, too, and hadn't mentioned their awkward conversation the day of Ben's visit.

On Christmas Eve, he and Walter roasted a chicken and ate it with a loaf of good bread, sitting in his basement and watching
The Sopranos
, a TV show that Walter rhapsodized about as if it were
Hamlet
, but about which Vincenzo couldn't muster much enthusiasm. At one point, when the lead character, a bloated ogre in a bathrobe, confided to his psychiatrist about his difficult daughter, Walter chirped, “Look, it's you!”

Vincenzo obliged with a smile. The frequency of these digs from Walter seemed to come and go like the tides, a
byproduct of the gravitational pull of Walter's waxing and waning sense of self-worth.

Later, they played two florid games of chess, and Walter, too addled to go home afterward, decided to sleep on the sofa in the basement and watch more television.

The next morning, Christmas morning, they ate bowls of cereal and drank espresso.

“You okay?” Walter said, and it was clear he was serious.

Vincenzo nodded. “Did you sleep okay last night?”

“Fine, thank you.” In spite of the vein on his face, a murmur of lightning in a distant cloud, Walter was not someone who ever seemed lonely. Even though he almost never dated, he didn't appear troubled by his solitude. It was a charade, Vincenzo knew. After the dishes were washed, Vincenzo handed Walter the keys to the house and got in a cab bound for National Airport. Walter would spend the day with his brother's family in Baltimore before catching up with him in La Paz a couple of days later.

The word “insignificance” had been lodged in his skin like a splinter since Jonathan had spoken of it in New York. It repeated several times a day, the pain of a minor wound that demanded to be recognized. And what a word it was! An oxymoron, or at least a snake eating its tail: a signifier for a thing without significance. And even if that was too literal a reading, significance would have to be a substitute for other more viscerally potent notions, like power, that failed to entice once you understood them. But, still, the splinter stayed.

Were he to take measure of such things, Vincenzo might notice that he had managed the largest aid organization's policies in a very needy continent, which surely indicated a kind of significance. And by that measure he'd annihilated his own significance, but fortunately life wasn't really about such things.

Machiavelli, in his wisdom, was not a fame seeker at all, and had been perfectly content to remain in the shadows. Zeroing in on the functional value of a thing, he would have seen no value in “significance,” per se. The question of influence was more timeless, it seemed to Vincenzo. The question being: Who pulls the strings and why? By that measure, the idea of them going to Bolivia was really about forwarding Walter's career, maybe, giving legs to his already leggy story about Vincenzo's scandal. And Colin's recommendation that Vincenzo join him at Lehman was just about advancing Colin's position: calling in reinforcements. Leonora wanted him to renovate the house in Italy, so that, he supposed, he would be far away, and occupied, and maybe even, though it was an uncharitable thought, setting up a wonderful vacation home. She wanted him to like Sam so that this aspect of her life would be easy, too. And what about Vincenzo himself? What was he gaming for? To fill the void he'd helped create in his life. Find some new significance. But he considered his own moves so far: the rash adoption of mutually assured destruction tactics with Hamilton, his pulling the trigger on that situation, the way he courted totally incompatible professional suitors afterward. What kind of ploy was this? He was playing on instinct, and though it seemed a ludicrous series of moves, he knew it was sound.

Vincenzo's itinerary had him at a Marriott by the airport in Miami on Christmas night. After settling into his room, he returned Leonora's phone call. A dog barked in the background, but she sounded pleased, altogether. Of course, he had no idea whether she was having fun or not or whether she actually liked those people or not—it appeared that she'd never confide in him that way, or not anymore, if she ever did. It was all niceties, now. He might as well be talking to one of his siblings in Milan.

Later, he took his copy of
Purgatorio
and went to the hotel bar, hopeful that there'd be a group of stranded travelers making a party out of thin air, but he saw that there was only one other man there, another middle-aged guy with not much hair, so he took a stool far away from him and ordered a hamburger from the bartender.

The only of the three books set on terra firma,
Purgatorio
was also the only space that inhabitants were passing through. They were, as in life, just visiting, free from the confines of infinity, blissful or otherwise.

The following morning, he showed up at Miami International Airport three hours early and made it to the gate for his flight to Bolivia with plenty of time to spare.

He sat down and checked his e-mail. The avalanche of correspondence that had followed his scandal was over. After erasing the junk, he closed his computer.

A family: two parents with their newborn in the bank of seats directly opposite him. The derelict father tapped away
on his laptop while his wife fed the son, who fussed and cried constantly. The feeding was interminable—it lasted an hour, at least. The baby cried through much of it, but the mother kept pushing her breast on him and eventually he'd give in.

Vincenzo took a brief nap and when he awoke the infant was shrieking and spitting up copiously all over himself while the novice mother tried, in vain, to soothe him, and the father (now wearing headphones) continued with his computer.

Not able to watch any more, Vincenzo got up and went to a different seat.

Some hours later, after the plane had taken off, Vincenzo, up in business class, and trying to get to sleep, heard the baby crying again, loudly—they must have been just on the other side of the curtain from him. After ten minutes, unable to stop himself, Vincenzo got up from his seat and, parting the curtain, discovered the mother right there, in the same awkward position she'd been holding in the airport, hunched over the baby, pressing her breast into his face underneath her floral drape. Nearby passengers did their best to hide their distress.

Vincenzo kneeled beside the woman and, speaking Spanish as well as he could, said, “Can I hold the baby?” This was all he could think of—that maybe somehow the baby would calm down if someone else took over. Then maybe he'd fall asleep. This had sometimes happened with Leonora when she was an infant, she would calm down only for him; other times it didn't work that way, but one never knew.

The woman—too frazzled to be off-put by this breach of in-flight protocol, to say nothing of handling-a-stranger's-baby
protocol—pulled the baby out from under the drape and he shrieked, crimson-faced, into the cabin.

Vincenzo took him from her gingerly and stood up. He hadn't held a baby in years, couldn't remember the last time. To the mother, he said, “Maybe it wants to suck on something, and if you keep offering your—” he wasn't sure what the word for breast was in Spanish, so he said it in Italian—“
seno
, but it's not hungry?” He shook his head. “I don't know.” Bouncing him in his arms, he blew on the baby's face, because his face was so flushed, and then the baby fell silent, blinking at the breeze. Seeing his little face so pinched with distress, Vincenzo thought of—he couldn't help himself—Dante's treatment of the gluttonous in
Purgatorio:
how Dante denied them food but made them smell it. If overfed infants died early in their cots, before they could speak, let alone confess their sins or take communion, would they be heaped up in a corner of that terrace on the mountain in purgatory, while the metallic odor of breast milk floated across their nostrils and they howled, writhing among each other, in an obscene pile? Was that how God, in his wisdom, organized the afterlife?

The woman had tears in her eyes now, her chin was crinkled as she watched her silent baby blinking calmly at Vincenzo.

Vincenzo shook his head; he had not really expected it to work. The baby kept calm as he blew onto his face and then, abruptly, he burped once, loudly, spat up a fountain of undigested breast milk down the front of Vincenzo's sweater. Vincenzo quickly smiled at the mother to assure her that it was okay, and continued rocking the baby, singing
Fate la Nanna, Coscine di Pollo
softly as the baby fell asleep.

Nearby passengers watched as discreetly as possible. It's not every day that a dapper aging gentleman from first class comes back to coach to console a crying baby.