The Dismal Science (32 page)

Up close, the doppelgänger looked less like Cristina than she did even from a slight distance. When she stared at him there, beside the horrible bar at that horrible hotel, saying nothing, he knew he was looking at someone else altogether.

“You look a lot like someone—my wife,” he said, in English.

She smiled, surprised. “I do?” She looked relieved, in the way of a woman who, after being leered at, discovers that the source of her discomfort is happy to speak of his wife.

“Yes,” he said. “Very similar—it's very, very, very similar.”

“How long have you been married to her?” she said.

The question boomeranged through him, and he let it do that, he let it move. Then he did the math. “Twenty-five years.”

“That is incredible,” she said. Her voice was nothing like Cristina's. It was higher, ditzy. It was no good.

“Yes.”

Now was when he would have kissed her, now was when he almost needed to kiss her, but it wasn't fair, not to him, not to her, not to Cristina, not to—who else? He knew that there were others, too, who would be understandably offended. So he just reached out and took both of her hands in his hands. She looked perplexed, even worried, but he squeezed and released her hands quickly and she smiled at him, confused, sort of, and maybe very sympathetic, too.

“See you around,” he said, and turned and walked to the elevators.

The question that always seemed most vivid was: How much can you remember of anything? And then the harder question always snuck in, too: Of that which you do remember, how much of it is
true?
These memories, nicely edited and cropped to form by time and our wily minds, do come to look
so tidy. Now that the image has been neatly assembled and the lighting adjusted, how are we supposed to embrace this Photo-shopped ghost? Eventually, even the most enthusiastic owner has to be suspicious of its provenance.

Cristina's emergent jowls had transfixed him for months, but now he found them scrubbed from his image of her face. Or worse—at other times—they were all he could see. She was vanishing, supplanted by an assembly of gauzy ideas of Cristina. Eventually, you can't even live in the past anymore, because there's nothing left.

After Leonora lost her leg, she wouldn't let them fit her for a prosthesis. For almost two years, she insisted on using crutches, not because she loved being teased or having limited mobility or drawing attention to her loss, but—Vincenzo and Cristina came to believe—because the idea of her functioning well was such an affront to her new understanding of her life. During that first year, she was so terrified of becoming whole again, or being mistaken for whole, that she'd have nightmares about feeling the toes on her right foot again, about her leg returning. Eventually, the dreams went away, and she put her artificial leg on. In a few years, she was even talking about it with people, making jokes about it. The gap became part of her.

And what about that, as a deeper compartment in the slowing, draining bank of a person's being: the attrition of memory. Cristina's smell, once so distinctive, was the concept of a smell. The memory of a memory. Here he found gleaming rafts of nostalgia, wishful thinking bobbing, commingling with tattered slabs of honest memory. Here were abstractions
whittled into “facts” by the currents. Like, for example, Cristina's much-ballyhooed intelligence, which he and Leonora had begun to celebrate as if ambitious scholarly sojourns were Cristina's raison d'être. But she wasn't a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, she was a marketing manager, she was in charge of event planning. Still, every church needs its myths, its miracles, and what else is there to do with such a colossal vacuum, but set about beatifying the spirit? What else is there, but to map her way up the hill to heaven?

Later that night, Vincenzo sat on his bed and waited, expecting something. A visit from the doppelgänger, or Ben, or Walter, or Lenka—a phone call from someone, a moment of clarity, a vision, a cathartic jag, but nothing happened. The air teemed with potential violence and yet calm ruled. The hotel room was still. The television dark. Below, he could hear cars honking and people talking in the street, the barely muted roar of the masses, but that didn't concern him. In the closet, his shirts hung on their hangers, neatly pressed. Beside his bed, the shoes, in their shoetrees, awaited his feet. The two books on his bedside table awaited his reading. The suitcase lay on the ground, gaping at the ceiling, awaiting his need to go somewhere. Nothing moved.

16

FINAL DISPATCHES FROM THE OUTER EDGE OF LIMBO

A month passed.

There had, not surprisingly, been no word from Colin and nothing from Tellus. Ben had not contacted him either. Whomever Ben had represented, they weren't interested anymore. No one was interested. There'd been no word from Lenka. Nothing from Walter except one short e-mail, a week later:
Sorry about the argument. But, just so we're clear, it was your fault
.

Vincenzo replied:
:-)

Hamilton had not reached out, not since their e-mail exchange. Even Leonora hadn't written. The deluge of e-mails from reporters had stopped altogether. Instead, he woke to messages about elongating his penis and unbelievable deals on airfare to Iceland.

Only Jonathan Paris, of all people, contacted him to ask how it went in Bolivia. Had Jonathan really not read about it? Had he not seen the footage on the Internet? It had been
reposted on the
Huffington Post
and, if it had not gone viral, it had certainly torpedoed whatever claim to sanity Vincenzo had before. Yes, perhaps Jonathan, who was not like other people his age, had not seen it.

Vincenzo wrote:
It went as planned. Hope to see you again when I'm next in NY
.

But, in fact, he was already in New York. He'd been in New York for three weeks.

He ate dinner at the far end of the bar in the top-floor restaurant at the W Hotel. There were two bartenders who worked the night shift: Trent, an aspiring graphic designer who was chillingly—exhaustingly—ambitious, and Rachel, who “made paintings,” as she put it, in a linguistic contrivance that he hadn't encountered before. Rachel reminded him of Leonora minus the politics, and maybe minus the problem of real and unrecoverable loss, minus that fury. But maybe Rachel was just sanitizing herself for her customers' benefit—maybe the paintings she made were Marxist drivel? He'd asked about her father once, a few days prior, and the question had compelled her to say that her father was dead. With this, unfortunately, he saw that this was probably why she reminded him of Leonora—she
wasn't
missing the loss at all.

“I'm sorry,” he'd said.

She shrugged and shook her head, because what else was there to say?

Then, as usual, he drove right past his misgivings, he couldn't help himself, there'd be no scab left unpicked—one way or another, he'd worry the wound until it bled freely again. “How did he die?”

She drew a sharp breath and he could see how much she wished he hadn't asked that. Then, after exhaling, she said, “He killed himself,” and presented a tight-lipped smile, bug-eyed—as if shocked by the news herself. As if she wanted to put together a joke to help Vincenzo through the information, but no joke would help. It was a familiar expression—it was the face of maturing but fixed, intractable sorrow.

He knew some things he could say, but those things would just mend the awkwardness on top, so he didn't speak.

Another night, he met a talkative drunk man who was a screenwriter and had been flown to New York to meet with some producers who were hiring him to adapt a novel. He talked, tediously, about the details of his work, and then, maybe sensing that the conversation had been lopsided, the man—porcine, with a rake of bushy black hair across his head, Vincenzo had already forgotten his name—asked about him. Specifically, he said, “What about you?”

Vincenzo shrugged and gestured at the space around them vaguely.

“What are you doing here?” the man pressed.

“I like this hotel.”

“That's it? You're staying here because you like the hotel?”

Vincenzo nodded, then said, “I don't know.”

“What, do you have amnesia?”

Vincenzo laughed a bit too loud and shook his head. “I wish.”

“You
wish
?” the screenwriter said, clearly pleased by the unexpectedness of the phrase.

“I used to be an economist,” Vincenzo said.

“When?”

“Recently. Now, I'm between things.”

“My brother is an accountant, and he insists that . . .” And he went on like that for another ten minutes, just talking about his brother, who was an inept tax accountant. What he said was amusing, but beside the point. Then he asked, “Where do you live?”

Vincenzo had already put his house in Bethesda up for sale. He had put his house in Italy up for sale, too. He'd sold his car back to the dealer. Movers were shuttling his things into a storage unit in Gaithersburg, where they would likely remain, he sensed, for the rest of his life. “It's hard to answer that question,” he said. “I'm between places.”

The man laughed loudly, and then started talking again.

Looking around, Vincenzo saw the same people—mostly middle-aged men—were there, mostly eating alone. Some were in pairs, coupled with a woman or a man, but not many. Many wore suits, but had removed their ties. Vincenzo was in his mustard corduroys and a burgundy sweater, a white T-shirt underneath. He had the beginnings of a beard. He hadn't had a haircut in a while and didn't anticipate getting one for another month, or two, or more.