A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism (31 page)

"You don't need to leave me alone," he said. "How are you feeling today?" He knew he sounded tetchy; he didn't want to, but he did.

"My headache persists. You?"

"Oh, I'm fine." He made it sound breezy, despite himself.

When he showed up at the Ritz later that morning, his mother was trying to recuperate from the altitude's assault.

She grimaced at his face when she opened the door. Then, despite her weakened state, she managed to cajole him into showing her his wounds.

He stepped in front of the mirror in the bathroom of her suite, peeled the bandages back from the top so that they hung off his face like flaps of skin that had been flayed incompletely. The scabs beneath were dark, nearly black, the surrounding skin inflamed and swollen and moist. His ear remained the most grisly. It had hardly changed. He came back out of the bathroom.

She nodded stoically, staring. She produced a grin—her lips pressed firmly together—that was meant to be reassuring, but he could see that tears were not far behind. Her whole face seemed to be flexing, straining for the expression. Mostly, though, her forehead gave it away. He knew he should be more sympathetic about the effect on her, but it was
his
face, and it was his life that had been upended. It was her decision to foist herself on him in this troubling situation, a decision made against his protestations. Despite himself, he felt like saying that he'd told her to stay away. He resisted, though. Still, he couldn't muster the kind of sympathy he knew he should have.

"It looks worse than it is," he said.

She nodded and then the tears started to well up.

"I'm sorry, Mom." He sighed and looked out the window, where the yellow light shone a little blurry in a lingering, thin, midmorning mist. He looked back at her. She pulled herself together, wiped away the tears with her fingers. He nodded. He went back into the bathroom to fix the bandages.

"What do you want to do today, Gabriel?" she called through.

He craned toward the mirror, pressing the adhesive strips back. They were never as effective on the second application. He'd probably have to change them by midday. "I was thinking we could go visit Lenka's mother. She said she wanted to meet you."

The two mothers squeezed each other's arms affectionately and pecked kisses and then Mirabel steered Gabriel's mother, him trailing behind, down the long hallway to the kitchen, in the belly of that huge blocky house. Water was boiled for tea while they stood around under fluorescent lights. Gabriel was acutely aware that he was supposed to be enjoying this more, that he was supposed to be attached to it more, but his mind was elsewhere.

Once the tea had been made, Gabriel ferried a tray of mugs and vanilla cookies to a front room. They sat around a bleak coffee table. It was one of the few rooms with a window that had a view. There were bars over the windows, but still...

The mothers chatted between themselves mainly, fortunately. They griped about how their children worked too hard (Mirabel initiated that idea) and were often absent (courtesy of Gabriel's mother).

"Mine is away now. She leaves her son with me!" said Mirabel.

"Gabriel didn't even tell me he was in Bolivia!"

"No!" Mirabel covered her mouth and stared at Gabriel. She smirked. "Is this true?"

He shook his head and rolled his eyes at the same time and managed to come off as both ashamed of his mother's griping and suspect.

Mirabel tsk-tsked and then returned her attention to her counterpart. Gabriel's mother segued into an extended summary of her complex life story, which was always a crowd pleaser: Chile and the tragedy there; her wild idealistic youth in Moscow; bearing a child as a single mother in California; raising that child alone while working as a professor. It was epic, but it had the elements of a good yarn: difficult beginnings lead to more difficult middle years, a willful woman fighting her way to happiness. The whole narrative felt laboriously manufactured to Gabriel by now. He'd too often seen his mother embellish the story one way or another for a given audience. Visions of herself in ghostlier incarnations, she was the artificer of her numerous worlds. That he did the same with his own life was, if not beside the point, certainly not the point itself—the point was that she proudly staked out territory above such manipulations.

Although she normally never talked about her romantic life in front of Gabriel—he vaguely knew that she'd been on dates here and there all his life, but nothing of substance ever developed—she spoke of it now. And it was startling to hear. The subject had been cordoned off in the way that many families deal with certain issues that are, for whatever reason, deemed out-of-bounds. Now, inexplicably, she was volunteering information about her romantic life to Mirabel. "There are men I meet," she said, "but none that I admire. Maybe now that my son is so absent from my life, I will need to go on more dates, though."

"I think that's a great idea," Gabriel said.

"Your mother loves you," Mirabel said, maybe having interpreted his mother's lack of interest in men as an indication of her fidelity to Gabriel. A pretty thought.

Throughout, Gabriel—shunting off his fears about his scheme, which was unfolding all the while—did his best to play the part of the aw-shucks son, feigning exaggerated protestations against the essentially harmless criticism from his adoring mother. "Not true!" he'd yelp, grinning as if in spite of himself.

His mother eventually maneuvered the conversation to politics and there she hunkered down. It was here that the two women found their true point of connection. In South America people demurred when it came to politics, but only until they opened up, and then there was nothing else in the world they wanted to talk about. The matriarchs shared their disgust for the notable Bolivian political catastrophes, and their admiration for Evo; they expounded on their hopes for the future.

Two hours passed in this way, bouncing around between politics and anecdote, the women commiserating in turns and then moving their focus to Gabriel. By the end, they had established a kind of maternal buttress. They ganged up on Gabriel in alternately cooing and scolding tones. He did his part, but it was painful. He needed a cigarette. He needed to get back to work. He wished at least that Lenka were there to buffer the awkward environment.

At noon, Mirabel offered them lunch and Gabriel's mother looked at him searchingly.

He grimaced and shrugged, explained that there was work to do. He suggested his mother remain behind, but she wasn't having it.

***

He directed his mother to an Internet café three blocks from Lenka's house. She bought a bottle of water and took another aspirin. She'd been gobbling aspirin all day to fight off her headaches. She sat down at the computer beside him. He could feel her eyes sweep across his screen. He turned to her and said, "I think I might—" He gestured at the screen.

"What?"

"This is personal."

She gazed at him blankly.

"It's private," he said.

"Right," she said. The absence of affect was palpable. Then she looked away, back at her own screen. She was blushing, shaking her head. "Of course." Had she thought he was talking about sex? That he was going to read a pornographic e-mail? He chose not to clarify. He moved two computers away, opened the browser, and checked his e-mail. In a second tab he opened
finance.yahoo.com
and checked on the ticker SCZG, and in a third tab he launched a Google News search, narrowed to "Previous 24 Hours," for "Santa Cruz Gas."

He waited while the three screens assembled themselves.

The e-mail landed first. One from Priya:
News?
As subject lines went, it didn't bode well, but it was better than, say,
Fired.
He opened the next browser. The ticker showed that the price had risen five cents. The story had probably not made it out. If it had made it out and there was no change, he was completely screwed. He opened the browser for Google News. Nothing, as expected. Back to the e-mail tab. He opened the mail, but there was no message. The message was the subject line itself:
News?

He wrote back:

TO
:
[email protected]
FROM
:
[email protected]
SUBJECT
: RE: News?

Tomorrow. Talked to journalists and I believe they're verifying today.

—G

There were other e-mails too—an announcement that Harlan's band was playing at the Living Room in SoHo, two trade confirmations from E-Trade ... He read none of this. He just logged out. Then he checked CNN, a reflex, but there was nothing happening in the world.

He checked his E-Trade account. A few percentage points down: unimportant.

He glanced over at his mother. She was typing away brusquely, smiling to herself as she did sometimes when writing. Her fingers swept into a line of thought aggressively and then her right pinkie stabbed the backspace, as if transmitting a message in Morse code. There was a short pause. Then her fingers rattled off another burst, some recalibrated declaration. There was no particular musicality to it, but there was muscularity, some assertiveness in her handling of the keys that indicated a maestro was at work.

Once she was done, they walked down Prado. They ate ice cream cones in the gloaming afternoon. Gabriel looked around at the throngs, and at the whitewashed façades of the old buildings, at the black wrought-iron balconies, and he felt in love with the place for the first time. He'd never quite managed to love Bolivia, but he did now. Maybe it wasn't pretty, but it was
his,
and he felt pride of ownership. Here, not two blocks from where he'd been blown up, eating chocolate ice cream in the afternoon with his mother, he knew that he'd fallen in love with La Paz. He hadn't quite gone native, but there were stages to these things.

That night he and his mother ate at a fancy restaurant at the top of another hotel. The food was mediocre and the views astonishing. The city glittered on three sides through giant, tinted floor-to-ceiling windows. The restaurant was as hushed as a church, and the city lights around them flickered like votive candles at the perimeter of that church. They talked about Evo Morales, and Bolivia, because there was so little else they could talk about. They talked about Gabriel's injury. About the terror of it.

Then, to comfort him, she said that she would be there for him, no matter what.

He smiled at her. But until she'd said it, he hadn't quite realized—not consciously, anyway—that he didn't believe that she would be there for him no matter what. She was not like other mothers. Just because she loved him more than anyone else on earth did not mean she would be his steadfast supporter. He didn't speak any of this, were he to approach it even obliquely, she'd be hurt and defensive, and she was dangerous when she was hurt. He sipped his white wine. She was drinking tea still, trying to rehydrate enough to wash away her headache.

Afterward, he walked her to the Ritz. It hadn't been very difficult to keep her away from Hotel Gloria and the Presidente after all. Tomorrow, though, she had her interview with Evo, and the tidiness of her separation from him would begin to crumble. At least she was leaving before Evo's party—unless she managed to change her mind about that. He could see that happening. If Evo invited her, she'd probably stick around.

As they walked down Arce toward her hotel, Gabriel kept an eye out for muggers. He'd been robbed many times in Latin America. There were, by all accounts, very few thieves in Bolivia, despite the poverty. It wasn't surprising actually, what with its genteel, proud people. If they'd kept their navy intact despite having lost their coastline, they'd manage to maintain nineteenth-century propriety in the face of crippling twenty-first-century poverty.

"Why don't you tell me more about Lenka?" his mother said in Spanish. The sidewalk was wide and empty there on Arce, and he was grateful that they were walking side by side and not facing each other across a table anymore.

"Sure. What do you want to know?" he replied, also in Spanish. "Should I tell you about our sex life?"

She rolled her eyes and clucked her tongue, then shook her head.

"She likes to bite—"

"Oh my God, Gabo—
please,
no more!"

He laughed.

"Do you love her?" Her voice tilted up at the end, as if to make it sound like a perfectly normal or perfectly straightforward question.

"Yes." He didn't even think. It was true. He wished it weren't, but it was. Even her family, whom he had found too alien at first, too bleak—now he wanted them to adore him as much as he adored them. He wanted them to like not just him, but also his mother. When he thought about going back to New York, he was distraught about leaving Lenka behind. When he thought about the fact that he'd almost certainly be fired within twenty-four hours, he felt relieved. Would he stay in Bolivia? It didn't even need to be asked. Of course he would. For how long? Until the relationship broke one way or another. With the money he'd earned in the last couple months at Calloway, he could coast in Bolivia for years.

His mother was grinning, he could feel it. She was amused.

"Why are you so happy?" he said.

"I don't know." Maybe it was what it was: maternal glee at her son falling for someone who was not unlike herself. Or maybe she was seeing the death of his career at Big Thunder in this development—maybe she was seeing his staying in Bolivia as a freelancer, or possibly even on staff for Evo. Wouldn't Evo appreciate a young bilingual man with an Ivy League education who wrote about finance? If daydreams were really just the mind's mechanism for giving space to a miniaturized version of life where things were the way they
should be,
then, in his mother's glee, Gabriel recognized the extent of her discontent with his life as it was.

"Is this job competing with her?" his mother asked. Despite a tendency toward conversational subterfuge, when she wanted to be perfectly blunt, she could be perfectly blunt.