The Dismal Science (5 page)

Strolling through the mall afterward, he decided to stop in at Williams-Sonoma, where he browsed for a while and three women, all of them attractive and in their thirties or forties, approached him separately to ask if he wanted anything. He felt like telling them that he did want something, he definitely did—but he just shook his head. They had spotted his Neiman Marcus bag, of course, and thought he was in a buying mood, which he was.

Everything in the store was pristine, just so—exactly like the catalog. He liked that about it. He liked it all a lot. He went back to one of the women, a voluptuous one with the wary expression of someone acquainted with the kind of loss that can disfigure a person.

She asked if he had changed his mind, and he told her that he had.

“Let me help you then,” she said and he was struck by the urge to kiss her, right there and then, but he resisted. She was just doing her job, after all.

It took half an hour to decide that he would like a set of Belgian copper cookware; two Le Creuset cast-iron pots; an array of stoneware serving dishes and mixing bowls; a hand-carved olive-wood salad bowl; a full set of bubbly lime-green Biot glassware; eight full settings of dinnerware; designer pot holders; an unremarkable coffeemaker and an attractive toaster; a mighty roasting pan; an industrial-strength blender; a full set of Wüsthof knives; and a diamond-dusted sharpener. Taken together, the items presented a fearsome, if improbable, arsenal of blades and blunt instruments. The other saleswomen watched on, wide-eyed, as he kept going, kept picking up more and more things and the boxes started to pile up in the space beside the checkout counter. Eventually, it stopped. The grimacing woman spent a long time tallying it all and once she finally finished she seemed apologetic and flustered when she said that the total was $6,107.21. She worked on commission, no doubt, and he had just made her month, so he stared at her for too long, wanting to find some lightning bolt of connection, some paroxysm of uninhibited humanity to slap them both awake. But it was not forthcoming and—though she was clearly being as polite as she was able—he eventually looked away.

With the help of a second saleswoman, she and Vincenzo hauled everything down to his car in two trips.

Back at the house he spent hours replacing the old with the new. He unloaded the new supplies onto the counters and floors, took all of the old supplies and loaded them into the Williams-Sonoma bags, and carried them out to the car. Then he started unpacking the new things and putting them in their places. It was hard work, hauling it all to and fro, and by the time he was done it was three in the afternoon and he was exhausted. It was the most manual labor he'd done in years.

Styrofoam peanuts and pills had escaped and touched down on the floor gingerly and now dashed away from him when he hurried past to fill one of his new glasses with water. He called Walter, his closest, if not to say only, friend. They met occasionally for lunch and lightning rounds of chess in the pocket park beside the World Bank, the café on the Bank's mezzanine when the weather was hostile to chess. Walter had never stocked up the kitchen of his post-divorce apartment; he ate cereal out of his disintegrating Teflon sauté pan in the morning, drank everything out of the three mugs he'd picked up at recent conferences. The open maw of the baking soda container at the back of Walter's refrigerator appeared, to Vincenzo, to be cackling at the overlit emptiness.

“Walter,” Vincenzo said, “I have something in my car that I think you will want. Will you be there in half an hour?”

“Half an hour?” Walter said and moaned slightly under his breath. “I'm trawling chess chat rooms for single women. It's safe to say I'll be here for the rest of my life.”

The city's Metro system was built by forward-thinking people and had barely changed since the 1970s. Nor had many of its passengers, apparently. When Vincenzo and Leonora boarded the southbound red line at Bethesda that morning, he saw a number of familiar faces. Some glanced at him and smiled weakly before averting their eyes. He and Leonora stood in silence until Dupont Circle, where Cristina would have debarked. The doors opened and some people got off, a few others boarded. The doors chimed twice and slid shut. Vincenzo watched this intently. He was wondering if he'd ever see it again when Leonora leaned over and whispered, “Hey Dad?”

“Yes.” He swallowed the lump in his throat, looked at their feet.

“Will you do me a favor?”

“Of course.”

“Will you tell Paul Wolfowitz to go fuck himself?” she said, and laughed exactly like her mother, slightly too loud for the setting, which shattered something else he'd been guarding.

“I don't think Paul would like that,” he whispered, and made himself chuckle. He looked up at her. No one spoke on the train except for them, and it was crowded enough that, whispering or not, people could overhear. He wondered if any of them were Bank employees.

“Do you think he cares?” she said.

“Oh,” Vincenzo said. He shrugged. “Yes, definitely. He's not
inhuman
.”

A woman he did not recognize looked up, stared blankly at him, as if he weren't even there, and then looked down again.

They said nothing else until the train pulled into Farragut North. Metro Center was next and if she got off there, she could walk to the protest and he'd never know.

He leaned in, kissed her on both cheeks. “
Stammi bene cara. Mi chiamerai presto
?”

“Sì Papi. Ciao.”
She squeezed his arm and he felt the lump return to his throat.

The doors parted and he was swept up in the current rushing toward the escalators.

Once on the escalator, the pace slowed and he rose steadily toward the day, listening to the baritone sax. The musician had been there for fifteen years and his dreadlocks were like long tubes of cigar ash—Vincenzo's hair, what was left of it, had also gone gray. The nakedness of the musician's emotion as he played there every morning provided an amazing contrast to the waves of commuters who rushed past him. Most people who emerged from the K Street exit at Farragut North were in the thrall of their professional mission, whatever that might be.

When they moved to the United States, Cristina didn't have any trouble learning the word “commuter,” which she employed often, teasingly, to describe her husband. The word was only a few letters away from the Italian
commutatore
(commutator), but bore no resemblance to their word for someone who traveled a great distance to and from work:
pendolare
, from their word for pendulum. Still, “commuter” seemed amusingly inapt to them. It turned out that the usage emerged in the 1800s. Before that, to “commute” simply meant to change or substitute one thing for another; often
it implied substituting a penalty for one less onerous. In the nineteenth century, people used “commutation tickets,” good for multiple rides on the railway. And, for a brief time, the people themselves were called “commuted,” as in: “I'm commuted; my ticket is worth ten rides.” Maybe it was the passivity of that construction, or its criminal hues, but by the early 1860s the word was “commuter.”

As he walked down K Street amid the swarm, he thought about an article he had seen in the
Wall Street Journal
that morning. According to a new poll, Evo Morales was all but certain to win the Bolivian presidential election. Evo was the antithesis of these people crowding downtown DC, and the opposite of most politicians. Although Vincenzo had been an economist at the World Bank for most of his adult life, he considered himself an outsider, too, and empathized with Evo. The election was still weeks away, but, according to the
Journal
, Evo had a double-digit lead. A former coca farmer, he was a charming and handsome bachelor who never wore suits or ties, seemed gleefully oblivious to such things. His complexion was like desert clay after a rain, his hair full and ebony. He was, it seemed, never photographed without a guileless grin on his upturned face.

Once elected, the article said, Evo would be a hero of the new populists—a saner Hugo Chavez, a younger Fidel Castro. Pundits were surely already talking, Vincenzo guessed, about a new kind of domino effect whereby formerly friendly Third World states followed Bolivia's example and elected leaders who were openly hostile to the interests of the United States. Brazil was already halfway there with Lula. They were right to be afraid, Vincenzo thought, and he was also sure this movement
was, all in all, a good thing for the world. The stonier think tanks would say that George W. Bush had been too quick to embrace democracy as the cornerstone of his version of post–Cold War policy. The Chinese had the right idea, they would say: capitalism needed to precede democracy.

Vincenzo knew he would hear about the results of the poll at work. The American executive director, William Hamilton, would want to know if Vincenzo intended to cut Bolivian aid in response to Morales's policies.

The protestors from the Rainforest Coalition were gathering on Nineteenth Street, between the
IMF
and the Bank. The Bank had installed a temporary security kiosk by the service entrance for the cafeteria in the back on Seventeenth, so Vincenzo entered that way. He could smell bacon and chlorine coming from the kitchen as he rushed down the hall toward the elevators.

In his office, he removed his Armani overcoat and put it on the hanger behind the door, was about to settle in at his desk when he noticed the pink Post-it on his new flat-screen monitor. With dread, he leaned in to look at it:

           
Can you meet me at the IMF's cafeteria for breakfast?

           
—W. Hamilton

           
8:27 AM

Less than ten minutes ago. That time stamp indicated that he, Hamilton, was at work already and Vincenzo was not. Not that they were competing for any professional territory, but the number implied something about their differing degrees of enthusiasm.

Hamilton had already spoken to his bosses at the State Department, no doubt. The board's annual review of Bolivia had come and gone without incident recently—Hamilton had not said a single word during the entire meeting—and the Bank's policy in Bolivia wouldn't be up for review by the executive board for another ten months. In the meantime, Vincenzo was the only person who could change Bank policy toward Bolivia.

The best thing to do would be to pretend he hadn't gotten the note in time. But he wasn't going to hide today or be subtextually prodded about his work ethic. He pictured Leonora striding across the platform at Metro Center, dragging her wheeled pink-and-black checkered carry-on bag, one of her boots touching the ground a little unnaturally, as she debarked the southbound train and boarded the northbound; he could see her dragging the bag down K Street from Farragut North toward the warm mob outside his office. He saw her wearing her headphones, stomping along in her crazy green boots, off to battle, clutching a cup of coffee in a fingerless-gloved hand.

Setting his briefcase down on his desk, he opened his closet and checked himself in the long mirror on the inner door. Gravity was having its way with his face now, dragging sacks down beneath his eyes, tugging jowls out of his cheeks. He looked like an Italian politician—some ghostly cousin of Berlusconi. Finding nothing improvable in the mirror, he shut the door and marched off, back in the direction of the elevators.

3

OFF TO BATTLE

Rumor had it that breakfast at the World Bank's cafeteria wasn't as good as breakfast at the International Monetary Fund's cafeteria, even though both were made by Marriot from identical recipes and identical ingredients. The debate was, of course, not about breakfast at all; it was about the participants in the debate, a select group in the twin organizations, where breakfast wasn't a popular meal to begin with, since most people took it at home
before
they came to work. By joining the debate, a person could indicate that he was prepared to take at least two of his three daily meals at the office, which implied ambition. Too, he was signaling his eagerness for a special kind of staid jocularity that was de rigueur among the number-crunching economists who filled the two buildings. William Hamilton, the United States' executive director at the World Bank, had pioneered the breakfast argument. Hamilton claimed, in a memo circulated among the executive directors and senior management of both
organizations, that he had conducted a blind taste test of both cafeterias' biscuits 'n' gravy, a dish he chose because “it requires the most skill to pull off well.” He concluded, “Unfortunately, the Fund's cafeteria kicked our behinds!”