Gunn's Golden Rules (19 page)

I still believe that to be true, even if people like those terrible White House party crashers are constantly providing a counterexample in which trashy behavior is rewarded. To cheer myself up, I try to remember the difference between short-term and long-term success. Living a really good life and making a real mark on society is a marathon, not a sprint.

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OW, BACK TO REGULAR
old parties. I confess to you, and I’m somewhat ashamed of this: I don’t particularly like entertaining. I know I should, but I just don’t.

I love cooking. I cook for myself every day. I like the ceremony of it. It takes me into a different zone. I make a lot of pasta and meat loaf (ground chicken or turkey and only occasionally ground beef). Rather than buying in bulk, I just grocery shop every day. I know my rate of consumption, and that way I can just pick up some produce and whip something up. I haven’t bought red meat in a long time. I’d like to say it’s because I’m so ecologically conscious, but the truth is, I can’t make a good steak.

But cooking for a crowd of five or ten or, heaven forbid, twenty?

No, thank you. I don’t like feeling like a slave to the care and feeding of my guests. Whenever I’ve had parties, I’m in
the kitchen mixing drinks for the entire evening, and I never actually get to enjoy and converse with anyone. Maybe that’s why the only people I see with any regularity are my friends the Banus, who drink only champagne. It makes hosting so easy. All I have to do is say, “Want some more?” and pour away.

Honestly—and maybe some of you can relate to this—I just can’t stand the pressure of being responsible for hosting a memorable (and not in a bad way) evening. Martha Stewart, bless her heart, intimidates me. That level of entertaining is so over my head:
What do you mean, you didn’t dig up your own potatoes for this dish? You didn’t make the doilies? The plates didn’t just come out of a kiln?

I love Martha, but it gets ridiculous.

And yet, I have learned a few things in my many years of party attendance.

Bad weather is good for parties. You get only those people who really want to be there.

Entertaining shouldn’t be about showing off. It’s all about making people feel comfortable and setting a stage for everyone to have a good time, make new friends, and have stimulating conversations. You want to leave a party thinking:
If I hadn’t gone to that, I never would have met this wonderful person, or had that delicious meal, or felt that sense of camaraderie with the people I met at the dessert table.
You don’t want anyone looking at the clock, thinking,
When can I leave?

N
OW, WHERE ARE MY
single ladies and men? It’s hard, isn’t it, when you don’t have someone to take to a party full of couples? At office parties and certain events, there is pressure to bring
someone. People are constantly trying to hook me up with dates, but I’d just as soon go alone.

Even my own mother (to whom I’ve never officially come out) says, “What about your old age? Don’t you want to be with someone?”

Lately, I’ve started to say, sincerely, “Maybe not.”

The truth is, I don’t have time to be a good partner. Relationships take commitment, and all my energy goes into my work. I wouldn’t want to let someone I cared about into my life and then never be home, or always be distracted. To be a good partner, I would have to give something up. What would it be?

There are a lot of perfectly happy single people in this city. It just matters who you are and what you want. And I would never want to be one of those serial monogamists who have a different partner every year and are always wondering why it never works out. Generally speaking, there’s a reason why people can’t sustain a long-term relationship. They think,
It can’t be my fault,
when the odds are pretty good that they’re doing something at least subconsciously that tells the world they’re not ready to settle down. At least I
know
I don’t want to settle down!

That’s why parties where people are expected to bring a date even if they are single can be so stressful.

It’s not quite as bad, though, as parties where people bring dates who
aren’t
expected. That’s one of the most egregious social sins anyone can commit. It’s hugely presumptuous.

I’ve been at fairly small dinner parties to which someone’s unexpectedly brought someone with an excuse like, “My sister was in town.”

The host is typically accommodating but secretly seething.

Someone I know had people who showed up to her wedding who had not RSVP’d. She didn’t have food for them or a place for them to sit, so she said, simply, “You should have told us you were coming,” and sent them away. Good for her!

Fortunately, bad behavior by others can sometimes work to your advantage. At events with tables for ten someone sometimes shows up with an unexpected guest, and suddenly there are too few place settings. Usually, this is about the time I’m dreaming of being back home in front of the TV, so I will graciously say, “Please, take my seat! I will just disappear.”

“No, please don’t!” my tablemates will insist. “Stay!”

“No,” I say gallantly, “things happen for a reason. I am happy to sacrifice for the good of the table.” Meanwhile, I’m thinking,
I wonder if I can get home before
House Hunters International
starts
? (I watch a lot of HGTV.)

The only trick is: Don’t look back. Keep going. Pray there’s no coat check. Don’t stop for a taxi. Get around the corner and then hail one.

Honestly, it’s fun to get dressed up, but I prefer simpler affairs. I like it when I go to parties and there’s a pitcher of something sitting out for people who don’t know exactly what they want right away. And I like when you can just go get your second drink yourself. It frees up the host and lends an air of informality to things. Similarly, it’s good to make dishes in advance so you can just heat them up.

I also like having at least one person around who is widely disliked among your crowd of lovely people. You never know who’s going to get along with whom, but you do know people need
someone
to gossip about later, and you don’t want it to be you.

My niece and I were just talking about Thanksgiving, and
she was saying there was someone she wasn’t particularly looking forward to seeing.

“But if she weren’t coming,” I told my niece, “maybe you’d be picking on me!” It’s always good to have someone in that pariah category, because they let the rest of us off the hook.

Maybe I’ll start entertaining more since I just moved into a more party-friendly apartment. For the first time in my adulthood, I have a dining room table. It’s beautiful, and I love having it. But no one’s ever sat at it. Maybe this will be the year I actually start enjoying party giving … Or maybe I’ll continue to put my gorgeous dining room table to a slightly less social use: doing crossword puzzles in my pajamas.

A
LAS, UNLESS YOU ARE
made of stronger stuff than I am, there is no avoiding the holiday-party circuit. From what I can tell, the holiday season is just an excuse for bad behavior. Party season is like a military gauntlet, with cocktails being flung at you instead of clubs.

I knew I had entered into a real state of Grinchdom when I was chatting with the maintenance man who was putting up a tree in the lobby of a company I was doing some work for and heard myself say: “This tree looks like a metaphor for this company: anemic, ratty, and artificial.”

Well, we bonded over our ambivalence about both our employer and the sorry state of the old plastic tree, and that was a nice moment of holiday cheer—our laughter around the tree. But, in general, I have trouble getting into the spirit.

I travel by train on the holidays. Leaving New York for Delaware one year, there was a power outage on the tracks. It was like the evacuation of postrevolutionary Russia. When power
was finally restored and the first train left the station, there was a cheer at Penn Station. Then they put four Acela trains together, and everyone was sitting on suitcases. We were just lucky to get out of there. My niece and I had been talking about how we were going to have a Merry Skype-mas, whereby we would all sit around our computers and talk with one another over the Internet rather than gathering under the same roof.

Well, once we arrived at our destination, it was one thing right after the other. My mother had a high blood pressure attack. She had to go to the emergency room and stay in the hospital for three days. That night, my nephew, Mac, took his parents’ car to a party. At four a.m., the police were pounding on the door. The car was found in a ditch. Mac was in his room, covered with blood and mud.

My sister called me at a quarter to six in the morning from the emergency room to report on Mac’s condition. I drove to the ER in Mother’s car and picked them up. They didn’t volunteer details, and I didn’t ask, because I didn’t want to have to tell my mother. I could honestly say that I knew nothing. Better that she should hear all about it from my sister.

Unfortunately, at a quarter to ten, my drama-queen niece called and told me the whole story before I could tell her I didn’t want to know. So then when my mother asked what had happened, I had to fill her in. I could have faked ignorance, but as you know, I am pretty much incapable of telling a lie. Alas!

Wallace told me on the way back that she’d started out feeling sorry for Mac, then she felt sad for the family, and then she just felt mad. I said, “You should feel mad. Anger is good.”

At the same time, it wasn’t such a bad holiday season over all. Nobody died!

E
VEN BEFORE THE HOSPITAL
visits and car crashes, family get-togethers have been fraught. One year, my sister-in-law (she’s my sister’s husband’s sister, if you like the details of convoluted relationships) used Thanksgiving dinner as an opportunity to fight with her brother about who would host their mother for Christmas.

“You led me to believe that she spent three days with you, but I happen to know she was only with you for a few hours,” my sister-in-law said accusatorily.

“What?” my brother-in-law said. “We had her for three days.”

“That’s not the information I have,” his sister said.

It’s not as if this can’t be verified one way or the other, and is Thanksgiving dinner really the time to do it?

When she behaves that way, she acts like she and the person she’s speaking to are the only people in the room. I hate it when couples do that.

Quite a few years ago, when my niece and nephew were very young, old family friends joined us for our family Thanksgiving dinner. Owing to Wallace and Mac’s young age, there were knock-knock jokes and probably some references to farting and other bodily noises.

One of the invited guests turned to her husband and stage-whispered, “Bob, would you please do something to ratchet up this conversation! I’m about to fall asleep from boredom.”

I started to stew.

My sister was talking to my niece and nephew about whatever preteens are interested in, and meanwhile this lady is huffing and puffing dramatically.

Well, someone asked my sister something, and I said, “Wait! Before you answer, make sure you properly
ratchet up
the quality of your answer, because heaven forbid that our guest should be bored to such a degree that she falls into her plate of food!” With that, I threw down my napkin and stormed away from the table and upstairs to Mother’s guest room.

The stage whisper is highly problematic. It’s trying to do what you want to do without taking accountability. My grandmother was a master of it, and now my mother has taken up the torch. You criticize someone in the room without saying something to their face. It’s rude. Think they can’t hear you? They can. They’re being polite enough to
pretend
that they can’t.

There are four topics that should be completely avoided at all social events, and they are: religion, politics, finances, and sex. These things are, quite frankly, nobody’s business. There is, however, an exception in New York: money is totally fair game.

I think that’s because it’s a very expensive city, and unless you find some luck, it’s very hard to get by. On my teacher’s salary, I did get a little panicky at times. Thank goodness that for the sixteen years I spent in the West Village, my landlords never once raised my rent. I paid $1,200 a month for that entire time. (Trust me: That was an absurd bargain for what I got, especially considering my neighbor was Sarah Jessica Parker, whom I adore.) I loved that apartment for the first thirteen of the sixteen years, until the disrepair spread to the point where it seemed dangerous. I thought the windows were going to fall out.

Anyway, before I even dreamed I would ever have the means to buy an apartment, Nina Garcia was complaining about the renovation of her new place. She was talking about how much it cost to redo the bathroom. I thought she said $17,000 and was aghast.

“No,” she said,
“Seventy thousand dollars.”

I nearly fainted.

When I first moved to the city, I spent the first five years dumbstruck by questions about how much I’d paid for things. It’s something you would never ask in Washington. You’d be considered a heathen, raised by wolves in a trailer park. And now I ask it!
How much is this apartment?