The Sex Lives of Cannibals

Once we’d found an apartment, I made a foray to the supermarket around the corner for provisions. Two hours later, when I had failed to return, Sylvia went out to look for me. She found me staring blankly at a display of maple syrup. My shopping cart was still empty.

“Did you know that there are thirty-two different varieties of maple syrup?” I said.

“Well, just choose one,” Sylvia said.

“But which one?”

This stumped her, as it had stumped me. Confronted by so much, how does one choose? Regular or low-fat? The gourmet syrup from Vermont or regular old Aunt Jemima? Glass bottle or plastic? Fortunately for us, someone else eventually selected a bottle of syrup, and we decided that if it was good enough for her, an experienced American consumer, then it was good enough for us. Then we moved on to the butter section. Did you know that there are forty-three different kinds of butter and margarine? By the time we finished our shopping, winter had arrived.

Eventually, we had to go to the mall. We both needed new shoes and a new wardrobe. I was perfectly happy with my flipflops, but once we arrived in Washington, I noticed that people hurriedly crossed the street when they saw me approach. Even though the thermometer said it was 78 degrees, I found it excruciatingly cold, and so I walked around with several layers of tropical shirts and socks with ingeniously cut slits to accommodate my flipflops. So attired among the besuited Washington throngs, I discovered that I elicited the kind of reactions typically reserved for gun-toting crackheads.

Inside the mall we fell silent, our chins dangling below our knees. Before us were acres of climate-controlled, Muzak-enhanced retail space devoted to satisfying every consumer desire. It was breathtaking. We had become accustomed to no options whatsoever, and suddenly we were in a shopping mall, an American shopping mall. Bloomingdale’s or Hecht’s? Khaki or denim? Loafers or laces? All around us, people confidently walked into stores and made purchases. We moseyed around as one might do on the moon, feeling awed and bewildered. The dragon ladies at the makeup counter eyed us wearily. I was in tattered shorts and a flower print Bula shirt I had picked up in Fiji. Sylvia’s T-shirt promoted the nutritional value of bele, a weed that can survive on an atoll. Flip-flop, flip-flop, we wandered around the mall. And then we wandered right on out of the mall. It was too much. Taking pity, my mother solved our fashion problems by shopping for us. She has very strong opinions on how a man should dress and, having no other options, I obliged her. It was Sylvia who drew the line at the cravat.

Once I had shoes, I set about getting a job. I had hoped that after two years, the credit card people and the student loan people would just forget about the past and let things slide, but this turned out not to be the case. “Remember that nice meal we had in Annapolis three years ago?” I said to Sylvia. “Well, after three years of interest and late fees and finance charges, that meal is going to cost me $1,500.” This did not please Sylvia. On a piece of paper she added our rent, our monthly grocery bill, utility costs, and various miscellaneous expenses, and divided it in two. “This,” she said, circling the figure, “is what you need to earn each month. Not a penny less.”

Fortunately, due to a terrible misunderstanding, I soon found myself working as a consultant to the World Bank. I am not exactly sure what it was that led the World Bank to believe I had any expertise in infrastructure finance. I had never even balanced a checkbook. I hadn’t even tried. There is not much reason to balance a checkbook when your checking account rarely tops the three-figure mark. And so, to the Third World countries who had the misfortune of working with me on their infrastructure projects, I wish to apologize. I was just kind of making it up as I went along. I hope you understand. I needed the paycheck.

It was a large paycheck too. A large, tax-free paycheck. I was grateful to the World Bank. I understood what they were doing. They were alleviating poverty one consultant at a time. To earn this generosity, I played a game of pretend. I pretended to feel comfortable in a suit. I pretended to know what a derivative was. I pretended to be aware of the Asian financial crisis. What Asian financial crisis? I thought. The only financial crisis I was aware of was my own.

At a luncheon hosted by the chief economist of the World Bank, I was seated beside the Minister of Infrastructure from Haiti. He described how painful privatization would be for his country. Thousands of people would lose their jobs. Many more would find themselves destitute. I nodded sympathetically.

Yes,” I intoned. “It will be painful, but necessary.”

That was my mantra at the World Bank—painful, but necessary. Privatization will lead to greater efficiency, which will lead to greater productivity, which will lead to an increase in capital, which will lead to more investment, which will lead to wealth and prosperity for all. I absorbed this like an infant absorbing the strange new world he finds himself in. I sat at my desk like a sponge soaking up the conversations in the corridor, internalizing the e-mail traffic, trying to decipher what my boss was talking about. Painful, but necessary.

It took many months, but eventually drinking water straight from the tap no longer seemed like a provocatively dangerous thing to do. Wearing shoes began to feel natural again. Restaurants ceased to be intimidating. After we got married, Sylvia and I honeymooned in Brittany. When a business trip took her to Brussels, I joined her for a long weekend in Amsterdam. We vacationed in the wine country of Sonoma. Somehow, inexplicably, by small increments, we became part of the cosmopolitan class. We lived well. We traveled comfortably. We read the right newspapers. We subscribed to the right magazines. Conversations alighted upon the IMF’s role in Turkey, the cuisine of Andalusia, market reform in China, the animal life of Zambia, and where to find white asparagus. We were adapting to millennial America.

At the World Bank, my coworkers and I discussed the pressing issues of the day. Which airline has the best business class, Singapore Airlines or British Airways? Which stock should I buy, Nokia or Qualcomm? Where should I buy a suit? Burberry’s or Brooks Brothers?

On a trip to the Middle East—business class, via a rest stop at the Park Lane Sheraton in London, with an automatic upgrade to suite—I spent two weeks at the InterContinental Hotel in Amman, Jordan, ostensibly to help organize a conference on infrastructure finance. I had little to do beyond ensuring that the PowerPoint projector worked correctly. The most pressing task was composing a birthday greeting to King Abdullah on behalf of the World Bank and the senior government officials attending the conference. It took the better part of a day before the French-speaking Moroccan, the robed Saudi clutching his prayer beads, and the jittery Syrian agreed that the felicitation was sufficiently flowery for the occasion.

When the conference ended I traveled to the south of the country to visit Petra, the golden city in the canyon. I had long fantasized about going to Petra. I had always envisioned approaching it after a hard journey across the desert, guided by Bedouin tribesmen, pressing on in the blazing sun, resting at the occasional oasis, where we would water the camels and pass the time discussing The Thousand and One Nights. Instead, I barreled through the desert in a chauffer-driven black Mercedes. I was with my boss, a Persian who often reminisced about the caviar served in the first-class section on Iranian Airlines before the revolution, and a professor from the Harvard Business School. They were engaged in an animated discussion about the deal Goldman Sachs had made to finance a new power plant in Qatar. We passed through Palestinian refugee camps. In the desert, young boys herded their goats. We were overtaken by an enormous white Cadillac with Saudi plates. Above, a squadron of military helicopters hovered near the Israeli border. It felt so odd passing all this life in a chauffer- driven Mercedes, and suddenly it occurred to me that I had become what I once loathed—a grossly overpaid consultant dithering in the sun. I was wasting my time. As you may have gathered, I am generally amenable to wasting time, but not like this. I felt like I was perpetuating a fraud, and while I can’t say that I felt any particular moral outrage, I did appreciate the ridiculousness of my situation, and if I was going to live a ridiculous life, I could do better.

Sylvia too had since become dispirited with life in Washington. For a long while, she had simply absorbed the sights, sounds, and realities of life in the most important city in the world. She was like an automaton. She had some distant memory of this world, but it felt like a long-forgotten dream. Confident now that she understood life in Washington, she began to form opinions. “This sucks,” she would declare after another day of forging partnerships, promoting synergy, attending conferences, disseminating knowledge on the Internet, producing vapor. In Kiribati, she had worked with the tangible. In Washington, she worked with the gaseous. How exactly will a link on a corporation’s website improve the lot of the two billion people living on less than a dollar a day? Presumably, they don’t have broadband access. Quite likely, they don’t even have electricity.

One evening, returning home after an excruciatingly long day, which was devoted solely to massaging the prose written by a nonnative English-speaking economist into something approaching coherence, I was pleasantly