The Dismal Science (4 page)

Six stops in from Bethesda they'd arrive at Woodley Park-Zoo/Adams Morgan, nearest Leonora's school. Initially, Cristina would walk her to school, but after five years Leonora walked herself and Cristina stayed on the train for one more stop, alone with Vincenzo, before she got off at Dupont Circle, nearest the Brookings Institute, where she worked as an event planner and marketing coordinator. That trip from
Woodley to Dupont, all 120 seconds of it, was spent either in silence or talking about some business of the house, generally to do with Leonora. After Cristina got off, Vincenzo rode one more stop, to Farragut North, alone.

As soon as Leonora arrived at puberty, she began shutting out her parents, with the help of a bright-yellow Walkman.

Within a month, Cristina—probably panicked by the prospect of so much conversational time with her tense and unfamiliar husband—bought her own Walkman. Vincenzo, in a mild show of defiance to their headphones, started bringing the newspaper.

Then the summer before she started high school, Leonora's life was brutally upended. First, in June, her best friend jumped to her death off the Adams Morgan bridge. A month later, on Lake Garda, Leonora was floating in an inner tube when a speedboat piloted by a wealthy teenage boy drove over her legs. Vincenzo was at the market at the time, and her mother, on shore, carried Leonora—her legs hacked up by the blades, gushing blood onto the grass at the water's edge—up to a police car. They were able to spare her right leg, but her left leg had to be amputated below the knee. A decade later, thanks to the War on Terror, advances in prosthesis technology would make it possible for her to walk almost normally without a cane—you had to look for the limp to see it. Still, her days of wearing miniskirts were over before they started. For several years, the mention of sports was enough to make her cross her arms and blush. Whereas Leonora had been invisible, at worst, in middle school, she entered high school the object of the most vicious kind of fascination. Somehow she was simultaneously invisible and relentlessly noticeable.

Before long, she was wearing blackberry lipstick and dark eyeliner, making dozens of mixtapes, and smoking Marlboro reds. A psychologist Vincenzo and Cristina surreptitiously queried explained that she sounded no angrier than any teenager would be in her situation, but they should look for evidence of drug use and self-mutilation. She pierced her nose and her lip at the beginning of her senior year, but according to the psychologist, that didn't count. That year, the bathroom sink upstairs was stained a dimmer shade of whatever hue she had most recently applied to her hair. It went from mute pink to watery indigo to a sickly vermillion.

When Leonora went to Oberlin, Vincenzo and Cristina continued riding the Metro together. After several months, she put away her music. He put away his newspaper. Tentatively, they began talking again, but not in the same way. They started talking about Leonora as if she were not in their house, because she wasn't, and they talked about what they might do with the rest of their lives. They held hands once. A week later, they held hands again. She began kissing him on the forehead before she got out at Dupont.

Leonora was in her junior year at Oberlin when her mother, wearing noise-cancelling earphones with a new no-skip CD player, stepped out into Massachusetts Avenue during her lunch break and was struck down by a truck full of shovels.

The trauma team at George Washington did its best, but by the time Leonora's flight landed at National, her mother's body had been moved to the morgue. Vincenzo picked Leonora up from the airport and they stopped in a turnout on the GW Parkway to sob and hug across the bulky center console. They
almost made it to the hospital, but stopped short, went instead to the Uno in Georgetown and ate bad pizza, weeping while they chewed. He didn't want to see the body, he said, but if she did—and she just shook her head. They were exhausted already, and there was a long way to go.

Vincenzo had seen Cristina in the emergency room shortly after her heart stopped. Her blood was warm still and she almost looked alive, except that her mouth was open in a dreadful way, lip curled in an expression she'd never made alive. He opted for a closed casket, thinking he was sparing himself some agony. Only later did he realize that it was quite the reverse—that he'd be glimpsing her out of the corner of his eye for years to come; a quick double take and he'd see that it was just another woman of about the same height, with similar hair and posture.

He accepted the two weeks off, but once Leonora had returned to Oberlin he found he couldn't stand being alone at the house, so he went back to work early. He ended up working longer hours, up to twelve or fourteen a day, six or seven days a week. At night, he saw Walter often for chess and dinner. He played chess with strangers online, too.

All of the work paid off. In less than a year, he was promoted to vice president of Latin America and the Caribbean.

That was when he began driving to the office. His new position came with a parking spot on the red level, reserved for the most senior staff, and though Vincenzo wasn't overly interested in the status boost that came with being the one in the elevator who said, “Could you please press the button for the red level?” he did find that continuing to ride the Metro twice daily alone was more than he could bear.

This Monday would, in fact, be the first day since the promotion that he took the Metro to work. The previous night, over Korean takeout, Leonora—living in New York since she'd graduated from college last year, and visiting for Thanksgiving—had insisted on taking public transportation, because Vincenzo's Mercedes had eight cylinders and was not, strictly speaking, eco-friendly. Maybe it was the cumulative effect of her repeated and early exposure to the unequivocal brutality and fragility of mortal existence, but she had mellowed prematurely, had become quietly persuasive, rather than brash. Whereas similarly aged children of Vincenzo's colleagues were often petulant, Leonora expressed her displeasure subtly, calmly.

“That car—I know you love it—but it's kind of crass, Dad.” That was how she phrased it, but she grinned warmly at him when she said it.

“It's just comfortable.”

“I know, but let's take the Metro. For old time's sake.”

He nodded.

The following morning, Vincenzo awoke an hour earlier than normal, took a shower, and knocked on Leonora's door. Downstairs, he fetched the newspapers from the stoop, put coffee on, and opened the refrigerator. Yesterday, they had abandoned their three-day campaign to consume the Thanksgiving leftovers and had ordered the takeout; the aluminum trays were stacked up in the refrigerator beside the bowls of vegan stuffing, vegan cranberry sauce, and (not so vegan) whipped potatoes—Leonora, newly dairy-free, had managed to convince
herself that what tasted like butter and cream in the potatoes was actually just olive oil.

Vincenzo cracked only two eggs into the new skillet, because apparently vegans didn't eat eggs either. When Leonora finally showed up, he had already finished his breakfast and was reading about the Bolivian election in the
Journal
. She poured herself a mug of coffee from the new coffeemaker.

She opened the refrigerator, pulled out a box of rice milk, and said, “Did I mention that the Rainforest Coalition is going to be at the Bank today?”

“You did, yes—thank you. They do incredible protests.”

“You know them?”

“Of course—the last time they came, I had to park in Georgetown and walk. I wore blue jeans and a T-shirt so that I could get through, but they had heard that we do that, so they all wore suits. You couldn't believe it! Thousands of hippies in suits—it was
amazing
. That afternoon I went to their website and donated one hundred dollars out of respect for their techniques. The message, I'm afraid, is a little tiresome.”

She rolled her eyes, put some granola into a bowl, and filled it with rice milk. She sat at the kitchen table, looking at him earnestly. “The thing is, Dad, I was thinking of stopping by before I catch the train.”

“Oh?” Vincenzo shrugged. He'd suspected that that was what she was thinking about, but still it stung. Hoping to put the issue down lightly, he said, “I don't know if I like that, but I suppose I could just tell the police to aim their fire hoses at the girl with the lip ring.”

She mustered a dutiful smile, then said, “You wouldn't really mind, would you?”

He shrugged, looked out the window at the collapsing fence in the backyard. “Maybe, I—I don't know.” It seemed remarkable that she didn't know that he'd really mind. And it seemed remarkable that she could take his breath away like that. He put two slices of bread into the new electric toaster, pressed the button, and watched the slices slowly descend.

“It's nothing personal,” she said.

“Oh?” Wishing he could resist, but finding himself unable, he said, “Well, yes, it is something personal.” He shrugged again. It had become a favorite gesture for him, the shrug. It was versatile, the implication open to interpretation. “My work means a lot to me.” He stared at the glowing wires inside the toaster.

“You really don't want me to be there.”

As if thinking about this, he squinted and looked out the back window again, then said, “Could you come in for lunch?”

“That would sort of defeat the purpose. You know, if halfway through the day, I put down my sign and went inside for a veggie burger with Dad.”

“I see.”

“Do you? I think you're taking it personally. This isn't about you.”

“You think?”

“Yes.” She stared at him, unblinking. After a moment, she pressed her lips into the tense smile that she used to indicate that she was ready to drop the subject, but was nonetheless sure that she was right, anyway. Then, seeing that his certitude
matched hers, she said, “You know, there will be no other children of Bank employees out there today.”

This seemed to support his argument. “Because they know better,” he said.

“No—my point is that this isn't something children do to get even with their parents. If it was, there'd be dozens of us. This
really
isn't about you.”

He just nodded slowly, and continued looking at her intently.

At last, she said, “I'll just go back to New York.”

This was when he was supposed to assure her that it was fine for her to attend the protest, but he couldn't bring himself to do that. So he said nothing. She sighed. He looked at the toaster.

“I like the new kitchen supplies,” she eventually said in order to squash the blooming awkwardness.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Why did you buy it all?”

He shrugged. “It was just a shopping spree,” he said.

She nodded. Did she really believe him? Did she not know him any better than that? No, probably not. How would she? He turned back to the toaster. He could hear the wires buzzing inside.

The shopping spree had taken place on a Sunday, a day that had begun innocuously enough: over a slow brunch at the Four Seasons in Georgetown, he read an inch or so of the Sunday
Times
. Then he drove home the long way, along the canal, his window open, cold air numbing his ears. It was a bracing morning, autumn at its dazzling zenith, the oaks
a nearly industrial yellow, while the maples ran fuchsia and the poplars deepened to dirty umber. Down in the woods by the canal he caught the faintest traces of smoke from the fireplaces burning the season's first fires. He cruised up Nebraska and crossed over to Western, and saw the great white facades of Mazza Gallerie. Soon, he was corkscrewing too fast through the concrete tunnel and screeching onto the lowest level of the parking garage where he parked near the elevators, the only car that had ventured so low. Up at Neiman Marcus, he spent $461.08 on a pair of burgundy pajamas and calfskin house slippers. It was an odd whim for a man who, in spite of his vanity, had always been as frugal as any economist. But this was fun in a surprising, almost explosive, way—in a way that he hadn't felt in a long time. Like being drunk and careless when everyone else was still sipping their way carefully through the cocktail party.