A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism (11 page)

"This is not my area."

"I just want to know whom to talk to."

All around them cars honked and pedestrians hurried along, their shoes clip-clopping on the asphalt. She took her sunglasses off and squinted up at him. Shielding her eyes with her hand, she considered him. "I know that it's your job. And I think it's okay. I'm sorry if I seem—"

"It's okay."

"Can we just not talk about it?"

"Absolutely. Honestly, I like you and if we don't talk about this stuff—that's fine."

She continued to shield her eyes and look at him. She seemed relieved to have dispensed with that issue. She said, "We should eat some lunch though."

"Of course! You lead the way—I'm up for anything."

"You mentioned room service?"

"Room service?" he repeated, nodding, not sure that he'd heard her right. He looked at her dark eyes, the overlong lashes curling up toward him, the sad and forgiving look of someone wiser and more sensible than her circumstances required she be. He saw some tiny muscle behind her eyes relax.

"Yes," she said and her eyes narrowed. "Room service."

He nodded at her, biting back his delight. "Billed to the hedge fund, in fact."

She rolled her eyes, as if amused with him and herself equally. She sighed, then turned and started in the direction of his hotel. He followed.

At the next corner, they had to stop because the traffic was moving.

"When do you have to be back?" he said.

She shook her head. She put her sunglasses back on. "Tomorrow morning, at the latest."

She led the way through the traffic. A smile spread until she was on the verge of laughing, and he knew she wasn't joking.

And it was not this realization itself but the look on her face that ruined him. His guilt settled in right then. Giant raptors glided overhead, their shadows sweeping fast across the brightly lit pavement, sweeping past preteen beggars, colossally bored, their outstretched hands cupping nothing.

He followed her through the revolving doors, across Gloria's lobby, her hips popping more assertively at the outer edges of their swing—she was aware that he was staring, he knew—and her shoes clacking on the tile floor harder than they had earlier. He had his room key in his pocket, his index finger tracing the teeth.

In the elevator, he leaned in and kissed her. They paused when the elevator stopped at the second floor, stepped away from each other as a maid entered and pressed the tenth-floor button. The three of them ascended in silence, all watching the numbers above: 3 ... 4 ... 5 ... 6 ... 7, and at 8, the elevator squeaked to a stop. Its doors blundered apart, and the maid stood aside.

Lenka led the way and Gabriel pulled the key from his pocket.

An hour later, they lay side by side on their backs while he caught his breath, which still took a lot longer than it would have in New York City. Lenka pulled down the sheets to get some air on her skin. He sneaked a peek at her cesarean scar again. It had transfixed him while he was on top of her. The scar was crude and jagged and puffy. He rolled onto his side and traced its length with his index finger. She looked at him, shifted her weight, and explained that the anesthesiologist had had trouble administering her epidural. He'd somehow been unable to puncture the ligaments of her spine and offer relief. He had given up in a huff, as if it were her fault. By the time they cut her open, she had been in labor for ten hours and had taken not so much as an aspirin for the pain.

"I screamed for a while and then I passed out. When I came to, I felt supernaturally calm—there was no pain at all. They had opened me up completely and were pulling this purple thing out of me. It only sort of looked like a baby. It looked like they were hauling out my intestines. The next thing I remember I was holding a clammy baby. He looked ugly then, nothing like he does now. He had a face like an angry old man. They had put morphine into my IV by then, and I felt much better. I remember it looked like a bomb had exploded in me. High on those drugs, I watched while they sewed it back up. I had the baby with me. He was asleep, bored by the world already."

"What did your husband do?" asked Gabriel. His arm was asleep, pinned beneath his own torso, so he rolled onto his back and looked at the ceiling.

"My husband stood back. He looked like he was going to faint."

Gabriel thought about it for a minute. "And what happened afterward?"

"Nothing. Six months later we were divorced."

"Isn't that something that you're not—" He held it there.

"Because I am Catholic?"

He nodded.

"It was difficult. I had—"

They were interrupted by a knock at the door. They had ordered a bottle of cheap Bolivian chardonnay and two slices of vanilla cake for lunch. Gabriel went to the door, and Lenka sat up and clapped approvingly when Gabriel returned and handed her her cake. Then she set it down carefully on the mattress, staring at it lustfully. She pulled off the cellophane wrap, and stabbed her fork in. She lay back and chewed, while he poured the wine.

"You were telling me about the divorce from Luis," he said.

She nodded and proceeded to tell him about the last day of her marriage to Luis, about how he slashed the tires of her car in an attempt to keep her from leaving.

"Understandable. I'd cut your tires too," Gabriel said. He sat next to her with his cake and took a sip of the wine, which was awful. He could feel the furnace heat emanating from her body.

"The cut tires didn't stop me." Instead, she said, she got into the car with infant Ernesto on her lap and, clutching her rosary in one hand, shifting with the other, and steering with her knees, drove away as fast as possible, murmuring her Hail Marys as they wobbled noisily at twenty-five miles an hour all the way down from El Alto to the city, a nine-mile trip.

Gabriel had another sip of the awful wine, which somehow deteriorated with further drinking. He gave up on his cake and handed her the rest. Sitting there beside her, he was aware that he had not felt so fully at ease in the presence of a naked woman in years.

By the time she'd arrived at a service station near the market, she continued, all that was left on the wheels were the most meager scraps of rubber. "I could've recited the entire rosary, it took so long," she said, "and Ernesto was screaming the whole way, shrieking like he knew what was happening. He made the sound I wanted to make."

Once she was done with her story, Gabriel pondered his next question. Should he ask? It seemed so. "Was your husband abusive?"

She didn't answer at first. Gabriel turned to face her again. Up close he could see the splattered area of pale, reverse freckles on her chin. He remembered the lines he'd seen on her forehead earlier, lines formed by years of making expressions like the one she was making then.

Eventually, she said, "People often abuse each other when they are married. It happens. There are degrees, I guess. Regret is important to growth, and growth is very important in a marriage. You should learn from mistakes. He did not seem to learn from his mistakes. Or, he did eventually, but it was too late. I know that he is very kind to his new wife. With her he is a saint. And I like to think that maybe it was me, that maybe I taught him how to be that way."

Listening to this, he understood that, unlike Fiona's sadness, which had molted many times and calcified like a spiny shell, Lenka's was simpler, lighter: it was an aura, a weary air. It radiated like her warmth, and maybe that was why Lenka's was, in the end, a softer pain.

When Gabriel's mother brought him to Chile in 2001 for his grandfather's funeral, she made a point of stopping in Bolivia, she said, because she wanted him to see the
real
South America. Her homeland was too Europeanized for her taste. The trip would be his rite of passage. Other children had bar mitzvahs or first communions, he needed to see "the real South America." She took him on a tour of the shantytowns of El Alto, which were as squalid as promised, but he was not affected in the way she'd hoped. He noticed, yes, that people lived in conditions that hadn't been seen in North America in a century. He saw that they inhabited hovels with no electricity or running water. Families had simply commandeered a small section of land, hastily erected a home, and dug two holes: one for drinking water and one for an outhouse. Unfortunately, both holes plumbed the same water table, which had long been contaminated by a dangerous cocktail of fecal-borne parasites and bacteria. Still, what struck Gabriel most was the place's wildness—its anarchic quality. Chaos indicated a lack of structure, which itself implied freedom. Apart from certain mandatory field trips into the lowest rungs of squalor, he avoided his mother's company in La Paz and traipsed around the city alone. He chatted to locals in Spanish, to foreigners in English.

Growing up in Claremont, that little white dot amid the broad, poor, and largely Chicano Inland Empire, Gabriel rarely spoke Spanish outside of his house. Socially, he was in a complicated position: he looked mostly white but had a Mexican-sounding name. If any of his white classmates or teachers implied that he was Chicano, he was always quick to correct them. Yet among his friends and classmates who knew him reasonably well—these were generally white, lower-middle-class kids—he was the comparatively rich child of one of the more prominent faculty members in their small college town. His house was nicer. His friends' parents watched a lot of television, while his non-TV-watching mother was erudite; the walls of their house were insulated by bookshelves jammed with volumes in various languages.

In Bolivia, he found something else. Bilingual and of indeterminate ethnicity, he darted in and out of clubs, cafés, and hostels on Illampu and Sagárnaga, switching between foreign backpackers and the locals. He was amphibious. He danced salsa and talked trash about gringos one minute, helped cute Australian girls explain themselves to a waiter the next. In the course of three days he fell into bed with three women: a pretty local with a lazy eye, an Italian backpacker six years his senior who didn't shave her armpits, and a frighteningly beautiful Israeli, the daughter of an El Al pilot. It was an unprecedented run for him.

While on the flight back to Miami with his mother, it dawned on him that part of what he'd loved about Bolivia was that he was finally completely outside of the range of the pressures of his murky class position—the compulsion to "succeed." More to the point, everyone seemed outside of its range.

Gabriel's mother didn't know what to make of it all. What a treat that he was smitten by Bolivia, on one hand, and that he was as ardent as she had hoped he would be. But he seemed to love it for all the wrong reasons. "This is not a holiday from reality," she said.

He enthusiastically agreed. (They might as well have been speaking two different languages.) He insisted that what he loved was the feeling of being outside the pressure-inducing illusion that he took for granted in the United States.

She tried to steer the conversation back to the miserable living conditions in Bolivia, but it was no use. He said, "In Providence, I'm surrounded by these overachievers who, for all their politically correct talk, are still just as white and privileged as the assholes who run Bolivia or the U.S. Just as privileged as you and I. You know, we're all living with this preposterous falseness..." and so on. His mother stared at him, alternately hopeful and frustrated by his line.

Bolivia did not have a study-abroad program that Brown would endorse, but Ecuador did. He had filled out his application for the program within a week of returning.

Though he didn't have the words for it yet, he would later realize that what had struck him was not Bolivia itself but what it implied about the United States. That despite being one of the safest and most prosperous countries in human history, the United States was actually a very bizarre place. Elsewhere in the world, the unattainability of great fame and fortune was more readily accepted, and so life was less driven by grandiose fantasies. Elsewhere, people wouldn't tell their children that they could achieve anything, because, of course, they couldn't.

When he returned to Providence from the trip with his mother, Gabriel found his peers' obsession with making it finally
felt
as trite as he had always believed it was.

A semester in Ecuador did nothing to dampen the force of his revelation. He returned, if anything, more bombastic than ever. To his college friend Harlan, he'd said, "It's like Morpheus came along and took me out of the Matrix. Now I'm back inside, but I know it's fake. We're all doing laps in the cooling waters of a giant mirage..." Harlan bristled at the suggestion that he was a drone in the illusion, insisting that he knew it was a mirage as well. In fact, to Harlan, it may have seemed Gabriel was finally figuring out what he, Harlan, had known all along. Gabriel, undaunted, tried to tell him that knowing it and feeling it were different, but that was when Harlan checked out, on the grounds that Gabriel was acting like a patronizing fuckface.

In time, he refined his understanding of the issue. The mechanism for capitalism's perpetual rejuvenation was, he came to believe, built into human nature. Economists called it
utility. Utility
had a floating definition, which was approximated by something like "satisfaction," or "joy." At the root of all economic theory stood the assumption that human beings' primary motivation in life was to maximize their
utility.
A simple and apparently irrefutable concept: people want to be pleased, and they do not want to be displeased.

But economists also believed that there was a direct relationship between wealth and utility: the more money a person had, the more utility he had access to. The ratio wasn't one to one. A hundred dollars meant a lot more to a poor Bolivian farmer than to, say, Oprah Winfrey. Still, every single dollar a person had would, in theory, increase his utility. To Gabriel, the correlation was somewhat less straightforward. People like him, for example, might be instilled with an initial desire for money, which, in turn, spawned a secondary desire to be finished with that first desire. People might desire to be done with the desire.