A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism (7 page)

Gabriel nodded. He did understand. He understood quite well.

Though far from the largest hedge fund, Calloway had a reputation for adamantine, Terminator-esque pursuit of gains that was legendary. It'd become a poster child for the perils, and potential profits, of unchecked avarice in the late nineties, when the dangers of highly leveraged, unregulated hedge-fund activity first became apparent. Entire nations could, it turned out, be brought to their knees by the collective whim of a few dozen math whizzes in monochromatic cubicles in lower Manhattan. The hedge funds themselves weren't impervious either, and many, including Calloway, had been run into near or total bankruptcy in 1998 when Russia suddenly defaulted on all its short-term debt.

A year later, Gabriel's mother published an op-ed in the
Los Angeles Times
that argued for more federal oversight of hedge funds. She mentioned Calloway in the piece, writing that "though small, [it] represents the worst kind of animal in this menagerie. In the ten years since it was founded it has served its tiny group of wealthy clients at the direct expense of stability in the developing world."

So when he took the job at Calloway, he wrote his mother an e-mail saying that he would be working for BellSouth. As lies went, BellSouth was pleasantly innocuous. Who, after all, could complain about telephones?

Her reply was just one word:
Congratulations!
She had learned to shun any discussion of work or politics with him. Although her position was understandable—political ideology was as personal to her as religion was to most of the rest of the world—Gabriel found her inflexibility, her sheer bullheadedness, maddening. Theirs was a tiny family, a family of two, and they could not afford to put a moratorium on discussions of such a large proportion of their common interests.

Intending to defuse the explosive device before she could use it against him, Gabriel opened their conversation that Monday by saying, "Mom, guess
what!
I forgot about Thanksgiving! I mean, I don't know how it happened, but it did! I'm sorry!" He laughed, because it was, he wanted her to see, just a funny blunder, like pouring coffee on your Cheerios.

"Where the hell are you?"

"Bolivia." He was sitting in his boxer shorts on his bed at Hotel Gloria.

"I thought you were dead, Gabo. I called a thousand times on Friday! Nothing! I waited. Saturday. Yesterday I called hospitals in New York."

"Oh Jesus," he said as the guilt latched on. "I'm so sorry. I have a different phone here."

"How long have you been there?"

"Not long. I'm so sorry, Mom," he said. "I forgot, and then I assumed—"

"It's fine, Gabriel," she said. "How are you doing otherwise?"

"I've been busy."

He said that he was "busy" as often as possible to her because she didn't respect him as much as he wanted. Not that her love for him was in doubt. Her love was, in fact, generally suffocating. Still, it was all swaddled in condescending innuendo. It was as though she saw right through the ruse and knew he was a hack, a third-rate reporter, just another shyster who'd conned a gullible editor into hiring him. Then, incapable of hanging in, he'd quit like a quitter and taken some snoozer of a job at the telephone company. This was the narrative he imagined she might construct to explain his professional life so far. Meanwhile, she was the genuine article. Brassy and brilliant, she was a lecturer who could hold forth on any subject for hours, and every sentence would be a mini-revelation; her oration would be grammatically spotless (though English was her second language), its syntax would be lively, and her word choice would be as apt as what Gabriel could produce only after exhaustive editing. His mother regularly gave papers at anthropological conferences. She had been the keynote speaker at a recent conference in Denver. Newspapers to which Gabriel had not been able to sell his freelance work quoted her regularly. So he told her he was busy. He said it all the time. He said it because it gave him a reason for being a deadbeat son who didn't even bother to call on Thanksgiving, and he said it because busyness was a noble state in his mother's universe. Or, more accurately, she believed that noble people were busy, and from this Gabriel settled on the logical fallacy that busy people were therefore honorable.

"BellSouth is in Bolivia?" she said.

It would have been better to know the answer to that question before he called. "Uh—we have some operations here, yes," he hedged. "I'm looking for ways to expand telephony further into rural areas. Farmers need telephones too."

"How else would they get in touch with their stockbrokers?"

"Precisely! Anyway," he said, moving right along, "I've got a date today, with a woman named Lenka, who works for Evo." He needed to score a point and subtlety be damned.

"Oh?" He had successfully piqued her interest. "What does she do for Evo?" she said in Spanish; she always switched to Spanish when the conversation went personal.

"She's his press agent," he said, following her into Spanish. "I'm hoping she'll introduce me to Evo."

"I'm going to write a long essay about him for the
Nation,
" she said.

There was a pause while each waited for the other to ask a follow-up. Then, when Gabriel realized that his mother was going to steer the conversation to herself and her piece in the
Nation,
he ran interference. "I met Lenka through a journalist I know who works for the
Wall Street Journal.
" There was some truth in all this. He was, in fact, meeting Lenka later, but it wasn't quite a date. It was supposedly an interview. "She's a single mother," he said.

"Oh, my love, don't take advantage of her!" A single mother herself, his mother had an unending reserve of sympathy for women in her position.

"I'm not going to take advantage of her, Mom," he said.

"Well, of
course
not," she replied, and he could hear a hint of pity, a sentiment born of her cloying, overly maternal side. What made it worse was that her implication in saying "of
course
not" in that way was that he
couldn't
take advantage of Lenka, regardless of his intentions.

Despite his winsome ways and boyish good looks, Gabriel was no Casanova, not by a long stretch. He had dated sporadically in college, and while women were often initially drawn to him, he had a confounding knack for fumbling at the crucial moment. Sometimes, from the back of his mind, he watched himself going astray but was unable to right his course. His timing, for one thing, was atrocious: tepid one minute, overeager the next. He invariably put forward precisely the wrong kind of sweetness (fraternal, adorable), and then cut it with a dissonant brashness (cruel, pouty), so that the whole package seemed both contrived and careless, and he managed to come off as simultaneously overeager, lecherous, and creepily insecure. Maybe if he could relax a little, he would be more successful with women, but as it happened, he'd only been with nine, all of whom came to know him in nonromantic circumstances. They had, in short, been seduced by accident. With Fiona he'd assumed she was out of his league and had viewed her simply as a valuable contact. Only once she was suddenly naked, in the middle of her hotel room, stubbing out a cigarette with one hand and letting her hair down with the other, did it occur to him that maybe her interest wasn't strictly professional.

Gabriel, phone cradled at his ear, said, "Mom, it's just a date. I'm going to be here for a while, and I thought it'd be nice to make a friend. That's all." Sometimes, he liked to ambush her with some shocking burst of candor—she was so excitable!—and he did so now. "But if we end up screwing tonight, all the better!"

"
¡Hijo malcreado!
" she screeched, as if horrified. "I have
not
raised a womanizer!"

"A capitalist and a womanizer!" he said and listened to her holler with laughter on the other end. He stood up and straightened his back. She was relaxing, so he moved to deliver the bad news, "But, Mom, I wanted to tell you that it looks like I'll be here through the New Year."

"
No.
Gabriel!"

"Believe me, it's not what I want."

She groaned. "Gabriel, don't.
Please.
"

"I have no choice.
Really.
It's this new job. Is there any chance you'll come down for your piece on Evo?" He'd said this last bit to ameliorate the situation, but as soon as the idea was aired, he realized that it'd be wonderful. Problematic, too—the lies would have to become more elaborate, unfortunately—but he missed his mother badly and would love to see her.

"You're staying there for Christmas?"

"That's what I'm saying." He said it as flatly as possible, like he was selecting dressing for his salad. If he gave her any room with this, she'd pin him to the wall with it.

"Will I ever see you again?"

"
Drama,
Mom," he said, reverting to a shorthand he'd adopted in high school. It was always a question of tone with her. Although she was someone whose life was steeped in the intricacies of language, so much of their communication was between the lines. She lilted soothingly in Spanish, whereas his experience speaking English with her suggested that the language was most useful for perfunctory mother-son business, or lecturing. "Look," he said, holding firm, "you'll see me when you come down to interview Evo."

"I'm not going to go there, Gabriel. I have classes."

"They're scheduling classes on Christmas Day? That's not right."

"You're hopeless, child. Now, go be nice to that woman." This was in her closing-time voice, and it was too bad. He did miss her. This was, in part, he knew, the sadness of being abroad too long. Even if he spoke the language like a native, the isolation was inescapable. He was simply too gringo-ized to fit in.

About his father, the man who'd provided the whitening influence in his DNA, Gabriel knew virtually nothing, not even the man's name. His mother refused to tell him. The whole subject was something she assiduously avoided. A lifetime of habit had made Gabriel disinclined to discuss him too.

When he did occasionally ask her about him, she replied in a blizzard of ardent and vacuous declarations. "It doesn't matter who he was! We were students! He was a foolish child and so was I and there is nothing else to say about it!" It was a narrative she steered principally by bellowing every single line shrilly, in Spanish. But her resolute imprecision, her insistence on obfuscating every engagement with the subject, conveyed that whatever she might have to say, she wasn't going to say it to Gabriel. For some reason—whether the man had been an abject shithead or something else—she needed him to remain an enigma to Gabriel.

She wanted, ultimately, to be viewed as an idealist. A Chilean exile who'd defected to Moscow, and then defected, once again, to the United States. Her biography wasn't a story of a woman driven to extremes by crude human concerns—in this story, her personal decisions were a series of philosophical gestures. In the United States, she'd finished her doctorate at UCLA and had her child, himself a complex product of the Cold War, born in the United States of Soviet and Chilean stock. She'd propped this wailing infant on her hip when delivering papers at conferences. Her wild and murky backstory made her a favorite at those dreary events.

She published widely: regular op-eds in the
Los Angeles Times
and the
Washington Post,
longer essays in
Boston Review, Mother Jones,
and the
Nation.
Few of her publications were in
Anthropology Today,
or
Current Anthropology,
or the other academic journals of her field, but no one in the department seemed especially bothered by that. By the time she was thirty-six, she had tenure at Pomona College and was leading rallies to boycott South African diamonds outside jewelers in Claremont. Her son, meanwhile, was then in the third grade at the largely white Franklin D. Roosevelt Lower School, where he had the language and a name reminiscent of the Mexican immigrants of Claremont's poorer surrounding areas. But he spoke with the precocious eloquence of a professor's child and wore a pigmentation that was, ultimately, neither here nor there.

Growing up, he never considered the possibility that his identity might be a fixed thing, that it might not be something that could or should be adjusted for each situation. He had been born with multiple identities, after all: Californian, Chilean, Soviet, bourgeois, only child of a single mother, Latino, Caucasian. In these, he saw options. He was partially pasty Russian and partially
café-con-crema
Chilean. Despite what his mother seemed to believe, it wasn't as if one race had swallowed the other. He may have ticked the box for
Latino/Hispanic
on all of his college applications, but it wasn't that simple. He ticked
Latino/Hispanic
on most job applications too, except for that one summer-job form in high school when he chose
Caucasian
and was quite sure that was what won him a position as a waiter in a snooty French bistro in Claremont.

If his racial and ethnic complexity had been mostly a burden when he was growing up in Southern California, where he was saddled with the perennial curse of creoles across the world (that is, instead of being a member of multiple groups, he wasn't a member of any), it meant something very different once he got to college. At Brown, he found himself gifted with the versatility he'd always wanted. He was not one person bisected or composed of fractions of other people-he was a person amplified, a many-voiced man.

His mother, sensing this emergent tendency to view his identity as multifarious—a convenient array of masks that he could don as he pleased—chided him on the phone about this once when he was a freshman, saying, "You want to pass for white sometimes, but, Gabo, this is not attractive. Not at all. You should be aware that it says nothing appealing about you, trying to play up one race over another."

"What do you
mean?
" he replied severely. He didn't use that tone with her ever. He could be stern, but he'd never been so harsh. She was understandably stunned. He continued, "Are you saying that I need to pick a side?"