There were two speakers at the club lecture night on Friday, both reporters. One was a retired foreign correspondent from National Public Radio, his voice bringing back memories of listening to the news in my bedroom on my old clock radio in the morning before school. The other was the chief foreign correspondent for Cuban national radio, a woman in her early thirties, which relieved me of the pressure of being the youngest person in the room. The crowd was typically Maine – that strange kind of liberal Republican that believes in small government and democracy and being left alone by the state, but also funds good roads and state parks and cringes at businesses which get too big or come from out of state. They’ll vote against the new casino for a variety of reasons, not the least of which the fact that the money for it comes from Maryland.
The last posting for the NPR guy was in Moscow, for the past four years, and he talked about the creeping authoritarianism of Putin. He talks with a kind of skepticism that comes from covering foreign politics and foreign countries for thirty plus years. It felt familiar; as a reluctant American who’s spent most of the last decade out of the country, it was easy to understand the perspective of someone who has seen that no country gets it right, and now that he’s back “home”, it doesn’t feel like we get it any more right than anyone else, we just get it slightly wrong differently. There are places which get it really wrong, sure, but we have no privileged perspective, just a different perspective.
The Cuban woman was far more strident. She was proud of Cuba, describing a kind of equalitarian, non-materialist paradise, and found much to criticize in the United States and the west. She didn’t lecture, really, but she came across much like the emerging standard of news talking head we now have here: certain of her correctness, certain in her views. The question and answer session was marked by a kind of skepticism – surely Cuba can’t be so wonderful, what about the suppression of alternative press, don’t people want a different kind of freedom? And the reaction from her was boringly predictable: the freedoms of Cuba are real freedoms, not the imaginary freedom to simply pursue more goods and the distractions of mass entertainment.
I had my question but the lecture time wrapped up too soon. We clapped appreciatively but quietly – this is Maine, after all, we’re not given to raucous displays of enthusiasm – and people migrated to the bar and to the buffet. The Cuban reporter ducked into a side room and buried her head in her iPhone, looking no different from any other mid-30s professional, while the NPR guy mingled with the crowd. I found him and thanked him for being a great reporter for so long, mentioned that I had spent some time in Russia as a banking expert, and we compared notes on food and people and the fact that vodka paired with savory canapes had been raised to a kind of perfect art form by Russian banquet halls. I wandered back to the side room and asked the Cuban reporter my question – “should I go to Cuba, or is yet another American tourist just part of the slow dissolution of what makes Cuba unique” – and she gave me a glowing yes, yes I should go, I’ll love the people, I’ll love the country.
I drove home.
It was a jarring evening, somehow, like a concert that paired Bach with house music. What struck me was this curious mix of the older reporter’s skepticism – which somehow I associate with journalism at its best – with the younger reporter’s certainty. I’m much more comfortable with skepticism, but I’m recognizing that that makes me an anachronism. We’re living in an age of certainty – or more precisely, an age of divergent certainties, and skeptics in such an age usually find themselves lost.
Back in London, I had gone to a club for dinner. Dinner clubs are strange things to me; in a world with restaurants of absurd quality which allow for exclusivity without strings attached, they seem superfluous. But I belong to one in Portland – admittedly, largely out of attachment to my father who was one of the first Catholic to belong to the oldest WASP club in town – and I’ve encountered them over and over again in my adult life. In London, I was the guest of a client – someone who was building a new financial company and needed help with her business model, and I got the consulting job. She took me there for dinner with her husband.
I got there a bit early, and headed to the bar – as one does, I suppose. Her husband met me there. I was in a suit with no tie, which seemed appropriate; he was in jeans and a suit jacket with no tie, which struck me after the fact as being more appropriate, but I was new to the London club scene and had to take instruction. He was vapid, but comfortable in the setting, which wasn’t surprising. He was also a trader, and having been a trader myself in various past lives, I found the requisite small talk – and he was also from New England, which made it easy to find small talk about the Red Sox and the Patriots and bad traffic around various intersections on Route 128 around Boston. I found myself looking for sharp paper to open veins.
Eventually his wife, my client, showed up, and we headed up to the casual restaurant level – some dinner clubs have formal and informal areas – and we had dinner. I had spent the better part of the past three days with her, and found her to be not just smart and clever, but also sort of insightful – she saw things about British society which hadn’t occurred to me in my nearly four years living there, and while I had a lot to offer regarding trivial regulatory issues, she had a kind of vision that I never could have. But at dinner, at this club in Mayfair, with her husband who seemed barely literate but who had gone to the right suburban private schools in Middlesex County and by dint of breeding gotten into the right university, she somehow faded into a grey and uninteresting background. I found myself wishing we were having dinner at a Wendy’s, or better yet, at a bad rest stop on the M2, the one where there was a particularly inefficient Burger King and a really bad picnic area.
I had tuna carpaccio and black cod in a maple glaze. Most clubs don’t list the prices, but this one did, which let me know how much my hostess was being overcharged. I had dessert, which I rarely do because I don’t like sweet things – this dessert had mostly bitter things despite the description. I left quickly, heading back to a lousy Airbnb that I’ve described previously.
It reminded me of a club experience I had about ten years ago. I was working for the now-failed savings and loan, and an investment banker was trying to impress me as I had some marginal ability to influence the allocation of underwriting expenses on our bond issuance. He took me to his house on the north shore of Long Island – this was Gatsby territory – his house was one of three townhouses in a subdivided mansion of a 1920s Wall Street baron. When I say this was Gatsby territory, I’m not being facetious: the mansion was almost certainly in the mind of F. Scott when he thought about the Gatsby pile, a mile from the Long Island Railroad stop and with a grand lawn rolling down towards an inlet of Long Island Sound. The mansion had been a ruin until some 1980s magnate bought it and carved it up to make even more money for himself. My investment banker had bought one of the “units”, an umpteen thousand square foot townhouse.
He met me at the train station, and we went to his country club and played golf, golf being well known amongst the banking community as one of my vices, along with booze. After nine holes, we went to his house. He fired up his grill and made steaks while I talked with his wife, who hated him and hated me for knowing him, and after extricating myself from that conversation, I spent a good half hour with his son and his Hispanic nanny, both of whom seemed pretty nice. Eventually the banker found me, plied me with steak, and said we should really go to his yacht club, but noted that I didn’t have a blazer. He and I went to his wardrobe, a room larger than the main floor of my house in Seattle, and he changed into pink trousers with little whales embroidered on them, and he found a blazer for me. It had a fresh packet of chewing tobacco in the vest pocket, which I pointed out to him and he said “oh, good, I was looking for something like that” and took a chaw.
We got into his Range Rover and drove to the club. It was spectacular, the clubhouse on the shore but with a long, wide pier leading out into the Sound, on which a large crowd was gathered for a Friday evening fete. He guided me out and introduced me to the great and the good, or rather the rich and the rich. I’m not at my best in such society, but I did the best I could, and found a few people who didn’t mind talking to a savings and loan guy from Seattle with roots in rural Maine. I didn’t have whales on my trousers, but at least I was a Harvard graduate. I had three martinis, which as someone once said, is both too much and not enough.
We headed back to his house. We ate steak. The kid and the nanny disappeared somehow. The banker’s wife made a scene. I ducked out into a black car which drove me back to Manhattan, somehow avoiding any ominous roadside billboards which F. Scott had warned me about.
As a kid, just about to leave Portland, my parents took my sister and I to the club for my last dinner in Maine before I moved west. They had bought bottles of wine when we were born – a bottle of proper red burgundy for each of us, vintage of the year we were born, premier cru, all the best – and they wanted to open the bottles for us as we had both graduated from university in the same year. Inevitably, my sister’s bottle had gone off, which precipitated one of the most spectacular explosive arguments between my father and my sister that I had ever seen. The wine didn’t really precipitate it – I have no memory of what did – but within a half hour of sitting down, my sister and father started yelling at the top of their lungs at one another. That didn’t last long – we really aren’t that dramatic a family – but my sister stormed out and drove home, and surprisingly, my father did the same a few minutes later.
My mother and I looked at one another, sort of dazed, and I asked her if she wanted to have a nice dinner with me. She said yes. Despite being underage, I asked for the wine list, my bottle of wine having already been poured and mostly consumed. I like whites; I liked whites even back then. I ordered the best, most expensive white Burgundy on the list, and my mom had lobster and I had – I think – lobster bisque and then the veal chop. The club staff was entertained by the whole thing, and didn’t ask for me to sign the bill at the end. My mom and I had a wonderful time; I remember it as one of those moments when my mom let me know who I was, and if I’m honest, I didn’t let her do that for twenty years after that moment. That was my mistake, but that dinner was just about perfect. Although my sister and my father both hate it when my mom or I bring up the memory of it.
Today my father, mother, sister and I went to lunch at the club in town. It was just a regular lunch, albeit in a place of upper middle class privilege that really has no place in any rationally constructed world. But my parents were happy, my sister was as happy as she could be, and despite feeling a pervasive sense of dread and impending crisis, I became happy too – assisted by a couple of perfectly mixed martinis and a platonically ideal cruet of French onion soup. Two tables away, a woman I had met at the lecture last Friday was being pressured to contribute a meaningful sum of money to a local Democratic party worthy by an attractive woman and a florid politico who fit the role to a tee.
I found myself flirting with my eyes with the woman; I can’t flirt worth a damn generally, but I find that across a room, I can do so quite well. I look piercingly at the woman I’m trying to flirt with as if to ask “why in hell are you doing whatever you’re doing”, and either that is ignored, in which case the game is off, or it’s met with a return look of “wait, no one else in this room gets the fact that I’m being a complete sell out – why are you looking at me?” At that point, I adjust my gaze to say “well, I’m looking at you because you know you’re selling out, and since you know that, you know it’s a choice, so why not choose something different?”. And again, the eyes either say “screw you”, or say “you’re right, let me detach from this trivial game and let’s have a conversation.” There’s a probability funnel associated with this, of course: of the women I look at initially, maybe 20% actually return the gaze. Of the 20% who return the first gaze, maybe 10% detach. So I have about a 2% hit rate. And of those 2%, effectively all find me tiresome and wish they had just focused on whatever they had been doing prior to looking at me.
Today, the woman returned my gaze, but it ended there. I was with my parents, at their club – I’m a member but let’s face it, it’s their club – and she was trying to snare a political contribution or whatever.
But it was yet another club moment. After they left I described it to my family. They all thought it funny. I guess it was.
I drove home.