The Dismal Science (28 page)

As they wandered down the hill, he began to dread the walk back up. The farther they went, the more he wondered how he was supposed to do it. Going down was strenuous enough, and he had to slow down.

“I'm sorry, it's—” He shook his head and pointed at the sky.

“Yes, we live in a strange place. We are pressed against the atmosphere. I know foreigners who have been here five and six years and who never adjust to this. Every day they have headaches. It must be horrible. And it is too bad, I think, because it means that we will never have that much tourism.”

He looked around at the city, down at the park ahead. The city was not attractive, really, but this was a park that he could see himself walking in, if he moved to La Paz. He could see himself reading the newspaper there on a lazy afternoon. There was a way to like this life, even for an outsider. It just took a little work. They continued their descent.

At last, they arrived and sat on a concrete bench. She handed him a bottle of water and he had a long drink from it.

“You are ready for tomorrow?” she said. “You have your speech?”

“Yes, yes, I have ideas,” he said, which was not true. Insofar as he had thought about it, he had thought that it'd be best to say something simple and bland during the speech. He could talk about Bolivia's rich natural resources and the need for good governance and how much he appreciated the invitation—a recitation so sanitized it could be an operating table. “I like it here. I mean, I like being away from everything that has mattered to me for so long. I put so much time into these things. A family. A job. Putting together that life I had. Then it ended, and I—I don't know.” He shook his head. “I should shut up?”

“No. Tell me.” She had a sip of the water and handed the bottle back to him. He studied the inverse freckles on her chin, her bright eyes with those long eyelashes. He looked at the top of the bottle where her lips had been and he thought about her lips, what it would be like to kiss her, and he could barely contain the rush of desire that this brought up in him.

Taking a deep breath and trying to steady himself, he shook his head, still staring at the top of the water bottle, and said,
“I have nothing to do. I don't want to go back to DC, I am not welcome in New York, and I couldn't imagine going to my house in Italy. I would hate to be in Italy right now. So I think maybe I will stay here for a few months, you know? Why not?”

He looked at her and she smiled. She looked away. “You should stay. You would be a good addition to our city. A great economist. Famous economist! Who knows, maybe Evo will put you into his cabinet!”

Vincenzo laughed at this. “That would be strange, no?”

“He isn't afraid of being strange, you know. I think you are not afraid of this, either.”

Vincenzo chuckled, shrugged. “Have you—?” he began, but hesitated. “When was the last time that you restarted your entire life? Have you ever done that?”

She held up an index finger, said, “I have done it once.”

“Have you ever thought about doing it again? Just starting over?”

“I have, yes, but I don't want to. There are so many problems with my life, you can't imagine. But I don't want to do something else, or to live somewhere else. My ex-boyfriend is a foreigner, and I am not going to go with him to New York City, which I believe is a nice place to go on holiday, but I have no friends there, I have nothing there. So I will not go there just to be near him.”

“But what if you could live anywhere you wanted?” He was getting to a point now.

She looked at him and he knew she could see the point he was getting at, too. She shook her head. “I don't want to be anywhere else. I won't go anywhere else. Even if I could bring
my son, and go anywhere in the world, and live as comfortably as someone like you, I would not want to leave this place. I want to stay here and do this.”

He understood her point, and he was grateful that she had had the decency to see his point, too, and not to judge him for it. It was not going to be a lewd proposition, and she had probably known that. It would have been beneath her, of course, to go with him. And she was proud, in the straightforward sense of the word: she was proud of her country, and the life she had made for herself. No, she didn't long for an opportunity to settle, quietly, into a bucolic life with any man in the Italian countryside. Still, he held out hope; she had, after all, dated another foreigner, so she surely did not reject foreigners outright.

The sun was starting to set, so they headed back up the hill. They had barely made it out of the park when he became so winded that he had to pause and hold on to a nearby wall. They made it another half block before—feeling as if he would faint—he stopped again and shook his head. He could feel his heart convulsing jerkily in his chest, beating so hard that it was frightening—a muscle at the limit of its capacity. “Jesus. I can't do it,” he said, and looked up at her. “I'm sorry,” he managed to say. “It's not safe for me.” And, still afraid of fainting, he sat down there on the pavement.

“Let me go get my car,” she said. “You wait here.”

He nodded, the indignity of his situation complete.

She set off, and he leaned up against the concrete wall of someone's house and watched her jog up the hill. Before long, he regained his breath, and began to feel quite relaxed. Little beat-up cars zipped past once in a while. Two men in black
fatigues and combat boots, one of them wearing an Uzi, rode past on a dirt bike—the one in the back, the one with the Uzi, was holding on to the other for safety. A mangy yellow dog trotted past, panting.

Eventually, Lenka's car pulled around the corner and began putt-putting down the hill. Vincenzo stood up, and brushed the dust off the bum of his expensive corduroy trousers.

On the drive up the hill, he looked at her profile. She was more majestic when the sun was setting, because it allowed her skin to glow, as it should.

She pulled up under the awning of his hotel and yanked the parking break up.

The bellhop opened the car door, but Vincenzo didn't get out. Instead, he turned to her and said, “If I stay in La Paz afterward, can I take you out to dinner sometime?”

Smiling gently, she shook her head. “Thank you, but no. I don't want to.”

“Is it your boyfriend?”

She shook her head again. “No, it's you.”

“Fine, that makes sense.” He made himself smile at her. Then he got out of the car.

The bellhop had opened the hotel door for him and was standing aside, waiting. Moving slowly, Vincenzo approached the open door, and returned to the crisp lobby. There, he sat in one of the leather armchairs. Ten minutes later, someone approached and asked if he needed anything. He shook his head.

Back in his bathrobe, with the
BBC World News
on the television, he sat in the armchair by the coffee table. After several thwarted drafts, he had abandoned any hope of responding via e-mail to his daughter's missive, and had decided to call her instead. The phone rang four times before she answered.

“Hello?”

“Hello. It's me—Papi.”

“Oh! Hi! I didn't recognize the number, sorry. How's Bolivia? What's going on?”

“The altitude is destroying me, but I like it here. I have the party tomorrow.” The line was fuzzy, and there was a slight echo, so he could hear himself whispering the words again half a second after he said them, and he could hear that his voice was quite effete after all, and his daughter's imitation was accurate. “How is New York? Are you back in the city, or are you still with Sam's family?”

“We've been back for over a week. The party is tomorrow? A big party in your honor? Wow, I kind of wish I were there. I'd love to see that. The president of Bolivia is throwing a party in your honor. That's crazy, isn't it?”

“Yes. I'm sorry about the letter.”

“What?”

“I'm sorry about being so—what was the word you used in that e-mail?”

She sighed, frustrated, maybe. It was hard to read her sighs. “So what happened with that woman who invited you there? Did you guys go on a date?”

“No, no. She is not interested in me, not at all.”

“That's too bad.”

“No it's not too bad. It's fine.”

“Okay,” she said.

An intercontinental hiss filled the silence.

“Aren't there dating services,” she mused as if they were brainstorming now on how to solve his problem. “I'm sure there's something online. I can look into it if you want.”

“Don't do that,” he muttered.

“It doesn't have to be cheesy,” she said.

He didn't answer. And, after a long enough pause, they both started talking simultaneously. Then they both shut up and waited for the other to continue. It was then that he decided that he would wait indefinitely—he would wait silently for the rest of the day, if he had to. Either way, he would see this through. He got up, pulled a half bottle of white wine from the minibar, grabbed one of the tumblers, and sat back down.

“When do you come back?” she said.

“Come back?” He twisted the cap off and filled the glass. “I don't think I'm coming back. I'm going to sell the house in Italy. I'm going to sell the house in Bethesda.”

“Jesus
. Where are you going to go?”

“I don't know.”

“Are you sure you want to sell the house in Italy, Dad? You bought that with Mom. You guys worked on it for two years.”

“I am aware. You think I don't know? I will sell it.” He had a sip of the wine, which tasted metallic, overly bright. “How's Sam?”

She didn't answer.

“Hello?” he demanded.

“He's fine.” There was a long pause. He said nothing, ready to wait out anything she had to offer.

“Why do you hate him?” she eventually asked.

“I don't hate him! I've told you that before, and it's true. Now you have to accept it! I don't hate him! I don't hate him! I don't hate him! What I hate, and I do hate this, is that you are giving yourself to him. He is a fool and it is obvious. But I don't
hate
him. In fact, I like him, maybe. In New York I liked him—but I hate that my daughter, the person I love most in this world, is copulating with this fucking fool and she tells me that she is in love with him!” He stood up and, pacing, relinquished what was left of his control. “And I hate the idea that you would allow someone as boring as that—this idealistic child, who protests against things he doesn't understand, things he cannot understand!—I hate that you give yourself to him! I hate that you want to be with him more than you want to be with me! I am your father! I am your blood! Your
only
family! But you
throw
me aside!
That
is what I fucking hate!”

He drew a deep breath and grasped his forehead, aware that he had gone too far—he paused and waited, resisting the urge to throw the phone into the window.

There was no answer. He could hear himself breathing into the hissing static.

He sat down again. He drained the rest of his glass of wine and refilled it. The inferno inside him started to dim as quickly as it had ignited. “Look I . . .” But he decided against apologizing preemptively, and let the silence stand for a moment. She, too, had good reason to apologize, after all.

At last, he heard a sound—a swiftly inhaled breath, a long shuddered exhale. She inhaled again, more slowly. “Is that all?” she whispered. That voice—that phrase—it cracked straight
through a plane of glass that had somehow remained intact inside him. It was the most painful sound he'd heard in years.

“I'm sorry,” he said, although it was too late.

There was a fuzzy click on the line when she hung up.

14

SPEECH

While not religious, Vincenzo believed in a kind of cosmic balance. Leonora, for example, had been savaged with loss, and so when, in college, she was in a terrible car accident, she emerged unscathed. The paramedics were astonished. But it made sense.