The Dismal Science (16 page)

He needed new fire, a fresh purpose to his days. Instead, he had a hissing heater by the window of his well-appointed hotel room. And he had those massive snowflakes, too, a hundred million delicate and crystalline lattices suspended peacefully between gusts, like a sea of glowing spirits floating aimlessly
between waves—but then they'd all spin wildly away from the window as if gathering for a tsunami.

Vincenzo had been to investment banks before, but they'd all been ensconced in steely towers planted firmly into lower Manhattan. Only Lehman lived in Midtown, in the decidedly un-suave and un-somber Times Square. The building wore a belt of
LED
screens around its lower floors, in keeping with the flashiness of Times Square, as if it were just another wacky tourist attraction. The snowstorm had slowed, for the time being, and when he got out of the taxi and looked up, he found the building cut an impressive figure, glassy and glinting—tickers spinning maniacally around it. Wall Street was having a bad day, as it happened, so all of the tickers were running red.

In the queerly long and narrow lobby, he found a few guards clustered together behind an absurdly long table, maybe fifty meters, against the wall. He approached them and said he was there to see Colin Donnell. A portly black man put together a show of diligence and told him what he already knew, that Colin was on the twenty-sixth floor, office B-2664.

Vincenzo had assumed there would have been some security. Apparently not.

At the twenty-sixth floor, he entered a space that looked like any office building anywhere in America, the elevator banks opening out onto a row of cubicles. Quants and assistants and other younger people, mostly men, sat in shirtsleeves within
their taupe cubbies. It was, somewhat surprisingly, rather less charming than the World Bank offices.

He walked around the cubicles, over to the window on one side, near a hallway going to the staircase, and saw the crowd seething on the street below, yellow cabs shoving their way through—there was little sign of the snow from up there. No sound came through the thick windows. All he heard was the quietly hissing heating vents and a faint whirring from the state-of-the-art elevators. Looking for his own visage in the glass, he caught his shimmering outline and checked that his tie was right, his collar. He tugged his jacket taut at his sides. He hadn't been nervous to talk to anyone in ages, at least since he talked to Wolfowitz about the possibility of a promotion. He checked his watch and saw he was three minutes late, just right.

He looked at the numbers on the offices ringing the periphery and saw they were ascending, so he started walking.

When he came to Colin's office, he found the door was open. He knocked anyway.

Colin, on the phone, waved Vincenzo in. The office was a shoe box, with a view to the Hudson and the hazy and snowy shores of New Jersey.

Colin hunched forward, visibly strained by whatever he was dealing with, and spoke into the phone: “—which is why we're monitoring them.” Vincenzo sat in the chair and looked at the desk. It was quite neat. There were only a few bookshelves: no room, really, for many books. There were two armchairs and a table, too, but it was so cramped he couldn't imagine anyone wanting to sit there. “My belief, to reiterate,”
Colin went on, “is that the spreads will be widening as the Street mulls the figures. The balance sheets are just not as favorable as Mikhail suggested—and the near-term debt, in particular, is poorly priced.” He paused, listening. “Fine. That's okay. I'll do that. But I don't want to have to walk you through this again and again. We've been through it already and you're still asking for more, but it takes me time to put it together and we're—”

He leaned even farther over his desk, so his face was poised over the phone's receiver. “Exactly. Look. I've got to go, so why don't we just meet at two and we'll go through it then—are you free at two?”

A brief pause.

“Two thirty?”

Another. His eyes wide with exasperation.

“Three it is.” He hung up, rolled his eyes, said, “I report to children.” Standing, he extended his hand to Vincenzo.

“Sounds like fun,” Vincenzo said flatly and shook the hand.

Colin chuckled, flopped back down in his chair. “Would you believe me if I told you that it actually is tremendously fun?”

Vincenzo shrugged. “I believe anything these days.”

“Come with me.” Colin stood and led the way out. On the way to the elevators, Colin hashed out the basic biographical updates: a kid at Penn State, another doing a medical residency, neither married. He, meanwhile, was living with a woman named Gillian, who recently finished her
MFA
in video art at the New School. She made hilarious and absurd self-portrait films nightly, in which she rattled off improvised monologues. Afterward, she did extensive editing on each fragment, he explained, and it was
clear he admired her art, in a way, but was mostly baffled. Some of these, he said, showed at a tiny gallery in Chinatown.

Colin's former wife had been a ghoulish fixture of the city's society magazines, a boozy heiress whose droopy face was forever slathered in makeup. The new girlfriend, bubbly and mercurial and—although Colin didn't say so, Vincenzo deduced it from what wasn't said—not terribly smart, was, not surprisingly, the opposite of his ex-wife in every way. His children, meanwhile, found his reincarnation repulsive in the most predictable ways, but they were grown, so they weren't—to be perfectly blunt about it—his top priority anymore. “They wish I'd stayed with Sandra in Cleveland Park so that they could cart their screaming toddlers over at Thanksgiving and everyone could rest assured that everything had worked out according to plan. But whose plan was that?”

“Your plan, I suppose,” Vincenzo said, although he sympathized completely with Colin.

“So, I should've just stayed the course? Forced a smile and pressed on?”

“No, no, I didn't mean that.” They stopped at the elevators and Colin pressed the
up
button. “Was it hard to leave?” Vincenzo asked.

Colin turned and looked at him knowingly, as if Vincenzo had intended for there to be extra subtext in the question. “It was the single hardest thing I've ever done,” he replied, still staring at Vincenzo in that knowing way. “And I was afraid I'd made a mistake—it's not easy to dismantle such a complex and fully constructed identity: the house, the wife, the job—to leave all of that.” He turned away at last and pressed the button
again. Standing there, Vincenzo could hear the elevators whirring inside their tubes, thrusting air out of vents. “I guess you would know, too, in a different way.”

Vincenzo shrugged, unhappy with where that fragment of conversation had gone, and said, “No, I don't know.”

Misinterpreting his reticence, Colin said, “People scoff at the midlife crisis, as if it's just this trite masturbatory phase dumb men go through, just more poor male impulse control.”

“But we know better,” Vincenzo said, and they both laughed.

They entered an elevator and Colin jammed his thumb against the button for the thirty-second floor, the top floor, labeled
Club Floor
. “No, really, it was the most difficult and honest move I've ever made.” Vincenzo thought about his own great move, tried to assess the difficulty and honesty of it, but found himself unable to measure it on such terms. As far as that tautology of an “honest move,” Vincenzo had nothing to say—honesty was as extraneous here as it always had been. Hindsight would validate or repudiate the decision, but finally, the logic of these momentous decisions was no more certain than a pair of tumbling dice.

In the elevator, Colin continued, “I looked at my life and I could see it clearly, could see where it was going, and I said, ‘I don't like this. I don't want this to be the rest of my years.' And it was scary to give up everything I'd spent the last three decades building, but it got better. Other things come along.”

“Like beautiful art students?” Probably unfair, but it needed to be said.

“Make fun if you want, but if you'd like to see what I left behind, go visit Sandra someday. Go there for an hour—she's
still at our house. Have some tea with her and look around. Imagine that's your life. It'll make sense.”

“It already makes sense.”

The doors opened onto a serene little foyer, adorned with a preening team of outrageously ornate orchids; it was as lavish as the entrance of a five-star restaurant. Bold orange leather upholstery fronted the maître d's console. The place sounded like handmade shoes brushing against handmade rugs. It was where, Vincenzo gathered, Lehman employees took people whom they wanted to impress into submission. The maître d', a severe young woman with a flamboyant coppery nest of curls sprouting from her head, marched them through a hallway—past smaller and larger rooms within which an assortment of other people were being wooed—before she deposited them in a small room with a view toward Brooklyn. On a nearby table, a bowl of olives and some unidentifiable amuse-bouches were being kept company by a half bottle of Burgundy. The maître d' opened the wine and filled a glass for each of them while Colin, not missing a beat, continued talking.

Already, the hopeful cast of Vincenzo's imagination had taken hold, offering visions of weekends with Leonora (Sam conveniently absent) and himself—he now dating a witty divorcée, perhaps, in her early forties—drinking wine just like that, but maybe in warmer environs. He and this divorcée would go to the opera and take very long vacations. On weekends, he and Leonora would go to the movies, to museums, they'd meet for coffee and—
whatx
? Life, maybe, but done satisfactorily, and all the time.

Feeding a fresh morsel to Vincenzo's fantasy, Colin presented what he did at Lehman in this way:

“I get a request—something like, ‘What do you think about the sovereign debt situation in such-and-such country.' I look at the numbers, write a couple pages and then someone, maybe wanting to seem smart, might ask some follow-up questions, so I'll explain a little further. There's also a team, which if you come on board, you'd be on. We're dispatched, not unlike a Bank mission, to do a complete diagnostic on the quality of the sovereign debt, or do a sector analysis—so it's very narrow in its focus. There are a handful of us and everyone's incredibly smart. It's fascinating work, bracingly clear, and there are absolutely no bureaucratic horrors, no incompetent governmental ministers to deal with. You can be completely candid. It's exhilarating to be so unfettered, so unburdened by organizational boundaries.”

Vincenzo glanced around the room. There was a stark postmodern vase on a stand in the corner with corkscrewing branches shooting out in organized, attractive chaos. Vincenzo thought of the young quants who'd been wooed in that room and wondered if they had rooms with different motifs. Would there be a hip room in which candidates received microbrewed beer and vegan canapés, where the art was less dour and contemplative and more splashy and exciting?

“But you report to children,” Vincenzo reminded him. Ever since Colin had said that, Vincenzo had been thinking indirectly of Jonathan Paris, and what it'd be like to report to someone like him.

“I complain, but he just wanted to clarify the source of my position. It's due diligence—his ass is on the line, not mine.
The bank is limber and there's real honesty here, which you'll find refreshing. If Egypt's balance sheet is a wreck, you don't have to write some fucking sixty-page report on the findings of your autopsy, you write an e-mail, ‘Be advised that Egypt's balance sheet is fucked beyond all recognition.' And, often, that's the end of it.”

This was, Colin knew well, a kind of pornography of efficiency for someone, like Vincenzo, who'd spent his adult life negotiating the internal politics and exasperating organizational minutiae of an institution like the World Bank. “It sounds exquisite,” he admitted. Looking at the miniature bottle of wine with its chaotic label, the timeworn nuances of its pedigree stamped, in code, cluttering it with the details of vintage, vintner, cru, appellation. That was how it worked: despite the allure of the new, eventually, if you stayed around long enough, you'd be so encrusted with the stamps of your stations, your positions, ranks, that the sum of those emblems would become the armor that defended you, defined you. That, he had to admit, was his own lot. “Everything about it sounds wonderful,” he said.