Chapter Seven
I had by now come to dread every occasion when Manya’s work required me to appear at some function, a cocktail party or a dinner, as the trailing spouse. Dread, as in full-blown, dry mouth, gut-churning panic, like getting on an airplane, when flying is not your favorite thing, or like pushing long needles into your eyeballs. I always tried to be a good sport about attending Manya’s trade gatherings, especially since our new family’s financial well-being depended on it; so I went along. And, most often, I would deal with this condition with drugs, and always with drink.
There was a dinner party once given by an old line investment management firm, and hosted by one of its partners at his suburban house. This firm was very successful at gathering assets from pension funds and endowments and investing them in public stock and bond markets. Over time, and as with everything else in life, investment performance reverts toward the average; that is to say, all goes well for a while, at the asset gathering stage, but then inevitably things turn south. In the end, you end up with what you would have earned from index funds, if you’re lucky. Most likely, you would have earned a bit less. That little bit less (that little sliver of less) is what enriches the investment managers beyond your wildest dreams, or mine, and even theirs. This may help explain the bizarre self-indulgence that follows.
By mid-afternoon of the day of the dinner party, my left eyelid had started to twitch. It was ever so subtle at first, just a gentle tugging which by six o’clock had become like a run-away turn signal in a Mack truck: on-off, up-down, non-stop. I tore through Manya’s purse, a huge duffel bag actually (what do women put in these things?), looking for her sunglasses, the ones that make her look like a Martian. On me, they made me look like an overgrown, albino fly. I had to hide the twitch somehow, but not like this, looking like that skinny Jeff somebody or other in the movie THE FLY. Well, he’s not so skinny now.
Me: “Manya, who was the guy in THE FLY? Jeff what?”
Manya: “Help me with this zipper, will you?”
Me: “I can’t now; I’ve got to cover my face. My left eyelid is twitching like a teenager’s first orgasm.”
Manya: “Do you remember your first orgasm? Awww, that’s so sweet.”
Me: “Yes, I do. I still do. Do you want me to tell you about it?”
Manya: “Hell, no, just zipper me up! Jeff Chandler?”
Me: “It was auto-induced, if you must know.”
Manya: “I don’t want to know. The zipper, please. I know, Jeff Goldblum.
Me: “Who cares?”
The thought of orgasm by induction, like some sort of an argumentative technique, was too much for me. “Mommy and Daddy were just fighting,” I could hear them saying, “See, I told you so.” Q.E.D. What? It’s only my left eyelid twitching, that’s all. Reaching for Manya’s zipper, I could barely lift my hand, it felt so heavy. Then I couldn’t grasp the thing between my thumb and forefinger. I was short of breath; my mouth went dry. My right eye started in. This evening was going to be a disaster; I’m taking the sunglasses with me. I managed to zipper her into the lining of the dress where, naturally, it stuck.
On this particular evening, as we waited outside our hotel for the limousine that would take us to the dinner party, Alastair, the head of the investment firm came out of the offices next door, and walked toward us, also looking for a limo and a free ride, forever a value investor. We joined and Manya introduced us. Unfortunately, I missed his hand on the handshake, presenting him with one of those unintended limp fish. He looked at it like it was Jeff Goldblum’s right hand, the fly hand. Look, I know it’s a small thing, but that was a harbinger of the evening to come.
My physical condition was deteriorating rapidly, now I was shaking all over. The sunglasses wouldn’t cover this up. The driver approached, helpfully, and guided us inside. It was one of those big black urban Suburbans, bigger than a soccer mom’s minivan, but smaller than a Chinatown bus. I immediately sat in the way, way back, where I thought the engine was, like on a city bus. It’s always burning hot back there and I needed to induce a coma. But I was misinformed, again, there was no engine there, and it wasn’t hot. In fact, it was bittterly cold from the air conditioner, like it had a window unit blowing right in your face. Then I thought maybe I could induce some form of hypothermia. Why am I always hoping for natural disasters, any kind of disaster? “Christ, get a hold of yourself man,” I pleaded with myself outloud.
Me: “No, not you, Al. I was just thinking about how Roger must feel before a match.”
You see, I found out that he was a big tennis buff, and player, so I prepared a whole dialogue on the subject, and I was hoping to spring it on him to good effect. I’m going to do this thing right.
Me: “You know, Federer.”
He looked sideways toward the back, having forgotten already that I was there, and who I was. Alastair and Manya launched into complicated industry gossip, very grown-up stuff, about betas and reversion to the mean, investment performance, matrix inversion and who’s screwing whom. Meanwhile my ear lobes had also started twitching.
By the time we got to the dinner party I had calmed down, having done a thought experiment in which the place we were going to had been totally engulfed in flames, and dinner was burned beyond recognition, not to mention the dozens of innocent lives lost trying to save the raviolis. Well, that sense of well-being didn’t last as we were ushered into a most bizarre Gothic structure. Our host awaited us at the door, a heavy massive wood slab with that archy Gothic shape. I hadn’t seen anything like that since college.
Me: “Wow, I haven’t seen anything like this since college,” lying, my lips quivering.
It turns out he had gone to Yale, as a student, I mean***(footnote below), where they have many such Gothic structures. This inspired him to build his own version of a Gothic home in a prosaic suburb of raised ranches, looking overgrown for the size of lot it was in. Still, the house was amazing, a Gothic nightmare of minuscule proportions, with room after room hung with, get this, tapestries. Yes, like the Unicorn. We were given an extensive tour of the suburban chateau, minus the bedrooms, and shown the workrooms
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***Footnote: “Going to Yale” is an expression meaning something akin to losing one’s mind, as in “going crazy” or “going walkabout” and even “going AWOL.” While we’re at it, “going” is itself a rather funny word.
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of the queen, the mistress of the house. And, after cocktails outside around the moat, where I was introduced to a very jolly Dutchman (he was flying), we were ushered into a large room with a huge rectangular refectory table. That would be the refectory, where we were going to be fed.
The effect was entirely medieval, thinking as I was of “Le droit du seigneur” (no footnote) and the tantalizing “jus primae noctis” (look it up yourself) and what that would do to relieve my anxiety. “Where are your daughters?” I blurted out, the insanity of which I didn’t realize until weeks later, after I had finally calmed down.
Our host: “They’re in the kitchen preparing our supper.”
Me: “Oh, super.”
Manya had abandoned me at the moat, and was only just now catching up to me. I think she enjoys watching me squirm in the agony of sociability.
Me: “How long is the party supposed to last?”
Manya: “Until about nine, according to the limousine schedule.”
That was a relief. At least, there was an end in sight. As I approached the table, I saw that, of course, we were assigned our seats. I promptly started to panic again. I was given a seat in the middle of one of the long sides of the rectangle, where you have to crane your neck back and forth, like a ventriloquist’s dummy, keeping two conversations going at once. And, of course, Manya was not sitting next to me; I knew it, those bastards. To my left was Grimhild, the boss’s wife, and to my right, Josefina, the wife of the chairman of the board. This is unbelievable; this can’t be happening. My entire life flashed by, looking like aerial images of Berlin in 1945. The people across the table from me were too far away to be of any use, they too were probably spouses suffering the same form of purgatory. Manya was down at the end, on one of the corners where she could at least look normally at one person. It was simply unfair, both groups at the ends of the tables were having a great time, joking and babbling away contentedly, since they all knew each other already and were laughing at us. I looked at them wistfully, I was trapped, and I couldn’t run away. I looked for the exits, but they were covered by large brawny caterers, all women. I imagined the poorhouse where my family was going.
Grimhild now sat to my left and Josefina moved to my right. When did they switch places? I launched into a frenetic babble of my own, startling both of my interlocutoresses. One of them made a reference to my adrelanine pump. She must have had some training in medicine; I told her that what I needed was an anesthetic. Whereupon she giggled and offered me the breadbasket. Grimhild then asked the inevitable American question, “What do you do?”, meaning how do you make a living and how much money do you have. I said I was a writer, using one of my many false personas, while neatly implying my relative poverty.
G: “Oh really, what have you written?”
Me: “I write under a pseudonym.”
G: “What’s that?”
Me: “A made-up name.”
G: “No, what’s the pseudonym?”
Me: “Oh, King of Jesters.”
I could see that she didn’t want to admit that she had never heard of me/him, El Rey.
And so it went, just louder and louder. Nine o’clock came and went and we still hadn’t gotten past the second appetizer course. I had run out of material long ago. Grimhild had mentioned that she was a child during the war in Germany, so I thought I would connect by telling her about my Hungarian parents who fled to Brazil after the war. Naturally, she asked me if they were Nazis. I quickly swiveled to my right, and told Josefina the same story. She was from Argentina, so she was more sympathetic. I knew by this time that I shouldn’t have had those eggplant canapés back at the moat, for the pressure in my intestines was becoming unbearable, looking for a way out. But I didn’t dare get up to go to the bathroom, since I was sitting in a pool of my own sweat. Now I understood why every single person at the table had left at some point with horrible, frightened looks on their faces. It wasn’t just the conversation.
The main course finally arrived around ten with some sorry looking overdone raviolis embedded in it, looking like hard, angry little pellets. Maybe I could crawl out the bathroom window and sneak away, I thought. Every now and then, Manya and I noticed one another and waved. The evening had by now acquired an elegiac quality, a soft surrender to impending disaster. I can’t go on, it’s too painful. Suffice to say that it was after eleven when we finally got outside. The limos were gone, having left at nine as per the schedule, but the flying Dutchman graciously offered us a ride back to the hotel in his Volkswagen.
