A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism (35 page)

Looking at the manager now, Gabriel briefly considered going over to complain to her about Alejo. They might fire Alejo if they found out he'd been spreading rumors about a highflying customer to that customer's girlfriend. Even if they didn't fire him, it would certainly stir up a scandal among the staff, which couldn't possibly be good for young Alejo. But in the seconds that remained while he waited for the elevator, Gabriel decided against it.

In the end, Alejo couldn't be blamed for running that angle. It was the best angle available, so he did what he could with it. Presumably, he'd thought he might somehow curry favor with Lenka. It had looked like the play to make, so he'd made it. It was all very natural. Once upon a time, Gabriel might have done the same thing if he'd thought it would impress the right woman.

On his last errand of the day, Gabriel went up to the Lookout and told some of the journalists that he'd managed to confirm the rumor he'd circulated the day before, though a slightly different version of it. They were grateful for the addendum and, maybe sensing that he was a bit overwhelmed by something or other, tried to buy him some cocktails, but he refused. The sun was setting over the Andes by then, and he knew it was over.

The scheme had not played out as he'd hoped, but it had played out well enough. Despite his intentions, Gabriel hadn't broken the law. He'd set out to commit securities fraud and had failed, had accidentally behaved lawfully and told the truth. There would be no investigation. He'd emerged a hero in the eyes of the reporters he'd tipped, and he'd emerged a hero in the eyes of Priya. The only people who were hurt were those who'd held on to the stock—those whom he'd intended to spare.

He wondered what else he could expect from Lenka. Misleading him had been a subtle move; still, she could sabotage him in other clandestine ways: tell his mother, for example, or tell the press. But she wouldn't want to go too far. If she made too much of a show of his story, she'd implicate herself. And while Gabriel might survive the accompanying scandal, might even benefit from it, she'd be ruined. As he considered the issue, he felt a sting of sadness at the way things were shaking out. There was no anger on his side; he understood why she'd done what she'd done. It was, instead, a sorrowful stinging, the sick feeling of having lost a real shot at love. The sadness swirled in with his cyclone of schemes and calculations.

He headed downstairs, aiming to play blackjack for a few minutes before he went and picked his mother up for dinner, but as soon as he got there he realized he was famished. He hadn't eaten all day. He needed food, and he had earned a good meal, so he set off for his mother's hotel. He'd be a little early, but that was no problem. He planned to take her to La Comédie, a French restaurant in Sopocachi that was said to be one of the few excellent restaurants in town. He'd never been. Lenka had recommended it to him once and they had planned to go but had never gotten around to it.

In the taxi on the way to the Ritz, he thought about the situation. Lenka had definitely lied to him. It had been deliberate. It had been unforeseeable. The thought arrived horribly to him. Lenka had tried to scupper his plans. There was no other explanation. As the taxi wended its way through the choked city toward Plaza Isobel de la Catolica, he tried to think of another one, but nothing came to mind. Why would Evo say one thing to her and something else to Catacora? Catacora wouldn't lie—intentionally misleading a journalist or an investor would be a disastrous for a future finance minister.

In Lenka's eyes, by sleeping with Fiona, Gabriel had screwed Lenka in every way possible; he'd pretended to care about her while covertly arranging to enrich himself and his employers. To Lenka's mind, he'd just used her. It wasn't the fact that he'd slept with Fiona, really—Lenka might have recovered from straightforward infidelity, or at least not lashed out—but Fiona was also a source of information for Gabriel. So it must have seemed to Lenka, as it had to Fiona, that he'd been scheming when he went to bed with each of them. To Lenka, he'd turned out to be nothing more than a cold-hearted villain.

The irony was that the reason he'd survived was that he'd tried to lie. The two lies—his and hers—had canceled each other out, and Gabriel had inadvertently told the truth. If he had told Lenka's "truth," as she had doubtlessly expected, he'd have committed securities fraud and wrecked his personal portfolio. He'd have lost his job at Calloway. Lenka had lunged and she'd missed, because he was lunging in another direction. The lesson was fantastically cruel to everyone involved. He'd arrogated to himself a victory, but that victory had (fatally) been built on the assumption of her fidelity.

He'd always known that this was why game theory didn't survive studies of real people. Real people's motivations were too complex and flawed to be fathomed by any mathematics.

When Gabriel arrived at his mother's hotel room, her neatly packed bags were lined up at the foot of her bed ominously, like a pair of paunchy forest green tombstones. She'd packed early and then put her bags there, a visual reproach to Gabriel for his having ditched her earlier, whether she'd done this intentionally or not, the effect was the same. She kissed him on both cheeks. She seemed subdued in a way that he understood was supposed to induce guilt, as if she were too sad to be animated. She wore a flowing brown dress and shawl, and he saw that she was wearing the turquoise earrings he had sent to her for her most recent birthday.

"I'm sorry I fled." It was better to just have it out. He could repeat the lines about how busy he was, but she'd known he was busy. She'd flown down anyway. She'd done what a good mother should do, and now her bags teetered next to the bed.

"It's fine."

He nodded. Maybe it was this way for all grown children and their parents, but he found that whenever he saw her, the whole interaction was shot through with ruefulness. Or at least, the start and end of each visit were heartbreaking. They hadn't done enough, once again, hadn't said the things that they should have said. His gratitude had not yet found voice, and her kinder feelings about him hadn't managed to find voice either. Instead, they had disappointing fragments. "Well, I should have made more time for you," he said. "I'm really sorry about that."

"It's a question of priorities," she said.

He couldn't have said it better. It
was
a question of priorities. Lenka and he could very well have loved each other and might have lived a wonderful life together. But if empirical economists had learned anything in the past hundred years, it was that people were deeply irrational. An irrational fear of loss drove them to make seemingly ludicrous decisions.

If Lenka and the Calloway Group were mutually exclusive, then Gabriel, who had spent so much time in recent years pining after the kind of life Calloway offered, had simply chosen the option that would be hardest to replicate in the future. He could find another woman he'd love, he assumed. He could not find another job like the one he'd been hired to do. And though it might seem awfully cold when it was rendered so bluntly, he felt certain that most people—good people, great people—made decisions that were equally cold on an almost daily basis. It was simply how people viewed life: there were thousands of decisions to be made, and every one of them involved weighing the likely outcomes against each other.

For example: A young couple is thinking about buying a house in a neighborhood they like. The house is small, but they are not expecting to have many children. It's close to friends and family, and they believe the house will appreciate in value. They could wait, but mortgage rates may rise, in which case they wouldn't be able to afford this house anymore. A more pleasant calculus than Gabriel's, but no less methodically calculated.

What about the young couple's marriage? Was it altruism that brought them together, or did each one look at the other and decide that this person would likely bring more happiness than anyone else currently available? Emotion might have swept them away in the moment, but behind that emotion lay a methodical weighing of pros and cons. To an economist, it would make sense: Every decision someone makes is aimed at maximizing his utility. Utility can come from strange places, even from giving anonymously to a charity.

To Gabriel's mother, this was all heresy. To her, there were different classes of desire.

At the restaurant, Gabriel asked for a table in the corner. The restaurant was small, candlelit, and almost empty. It looked authentic, an actual extravagant restaurant, with pressed white linens, dark wood, leather, scowling staff. A smoldering stack of wood in a nearby fireplace exhaled a shrill whine. Gabriel opened his menu. Although nothing cost more than five dollars, it was the most expensive restaurant he'd seen in Bolivia.

He had no idea how far Lenka would go. And did she fear that he would try to get back at her? He could only guess at the extent of her anger. It was a horrible situation. The nightmares competed for his attention. On one hand, he had the acid terror of the professional horrors that she might wreak on him. On the other, he had the heartbreaking knowledge that she despised him. The temptation was to run to her house and pound on the door so he could explain it all—or try to explain it all. She might understand ... she was ambitious too. But there was no point. Anything he did would look like an attempt at damage control.

The waiter returned, and Gabriel realized he hadn't been reading the menu at all. Quickly, he glanced at the wine list and asked for a bottle of the same Bolivian white wine he had been drinking in his hotel room since he arrived—the cheapest wine on the menu, by a long shot. His mother ordered lake trout, and he asked for grilled llama tenderloin, medium rare, with blackberry demi-glace.

Dinner was fine. The conversation remained stilted.

They passed on dessert but ordered coffee. He wanted a cigarette. She read his mind and said, "You can smoke if you want to."

"I don't smoke!" he said and chortled.

Her expression didn't change. "If you get cancer, I'll cut your lungs out myself."

He pulled his pack out of his pocket and lit one. He soldiered through the awkwardness of it. She was fixated on the cigarette, purely contemptuous, as if she'd anthropomorphized it into a herpes-ridden Ukrainian harlot who was trying to finagle a green card out of her son. Time was running out and she couldn't really lay into him about it. She and the cigarette grudgingly agreed to be civil during the rest of the visit. She didn't ask how long he'd been smoking. Maybe she didn't have to; maybe she could read him that well.

They finished their coffees and he stubbed his cigarette out. He moved the ashtray to an empty table nearby. She was talking again about the article she was going to write on Evo. She thought Evo was marvelous, of course.

"History doesn't bode well for him" was all that Gabriel said.

She just looked away, her lips pressed together. "Well, we'll see." That was the end of that. Then she said, "So, when will you be back in California?"

"California?" He realized that she was likely wondering when he would next be at Big Thunder's headquarters. So he added, "I don't know."

"You're still renting the same apartment in New York?"

"I am. My plants are probably dead by now," he said, to get off the subject of California.

"Have you had anyone in?"

"I asked Harlan."

"That one with the beard?"

He nodded.

"Then they're dead," she said and grinned.

There were other things they were supposed to be saying to each other. Kind things. But they had old habits to contend with—old inertias. The acting out of stale, well-rehearsed arguments, like opposing generals in dueling late—Cold War drills intended to affirm the effectiveness of their warheads. The machinery for devouring each other was intact, even if the reason for it had disintegrated.

Back in her room later, conspicuous luggage still aslant at the foot of the bed, they worked their way through a preliminary goodbye. He'd be around in the morning to see her again for half an hour before she left for the airport. Still, he felt like he needed to get started now, so he thanked her, in Spanish, for coming down.

"Thanks for letting me come," she replied. "I'm not going to worry about you."

"You shouldn't," he said abruptly, already crouched, fists up. It was inescapable. Backpedaling, he sought a way toward something sincere and kind. "It was great to see you," he said. "I mean—even if it seemed like I was dodging you, it meant a lot to me that you came."

"That's sweet." She grinned, guileless, as if that were all that it took to soothe her. As if she were that kind of mother.

AFTER BREAKFASTING in Gloria's revolting cafeteria, he headed to the Ritz, where he rode the elevator up to the fourth floor. The hotel's logo, emblazoned everywhere, was a three-spiked crown, like the top of a chess queen. Cousin, in motif at least, to the emblem from real Ritz-Carltons: the head of a lion, in profile, atop a crown. Royal-themed insignias aside, this Ritz was, he now saw, a total pretender. At his mother's door, he collected himself, remembered that his duty was to keep it sweet and simple, before he knocked. The last few days had been so stressful, but now it was over and he would be able, in theory, to actually connect with her.

After a minute, he knocked again. "
¿Madre mía?
" he said. No answer. He glanced at his cell phone and saw that he was five minutes early. So he went back downstairs.

At the front desk, he said, "Do you know where my mother went? She's in four-oh-seven."

The man behind the counter shook his head. "She checked out."

"Really?" It sort of made sense, since she was leaving for her flight in half an hour. "We agreed to meet here this morning. Did she leave a note for me?"

The concierge glanced at the counter. "I don't think so."

"Well, she must have left her bags—"

"Let me see."

The man went to a back room and returned with another man, this one in a spiffier jacket and tie—probably the manager. The manager looked not unlike Catacora, though a little duck-faced. Gabriel, beginning to feel exasperated, blinked at the man and said he was looking for his mother. The manager opened a drawer and pulled out a receipt, looked it over.