I parked in front of something designed to look like a former stable and wandered around the main residence, casing it for an entrance.Īs I passed a long window, I saw the profile of a woman staring fixedly into the distance, moving her lips in spirited chatter. The architecture ahead was nouveau hunting lodge, polished wood in the kind of low, modernist arrangements I’d encountered at expensive hotels in underdeveloped countries with my parents. With the address Julia had given me, I followed my glitchy, ancient GPS to the mechanized gate marking the entrance to Anna’s family compound. My goals at these things usually extended no further than making at least one moderately clever comment and trying not to spill anything on my shirt. Of course, the “people we would like” often turned out to be amateur poets and holistic healers, but to her eternal credit, this didn’t stop Julia from holding out for social transcendence, the nature of which I didn’t fully understand. She believed this dinner held the potential for a better-than-usual time, since it brought together a number of people we didn’t know very well but had been told we would like. Julia would be arriving late from a shift in the ICU and wanted me to be the advance guard. This may be why, when my girlfriend, Julia, asked me to meet her at the house of a recent acquaintance of ours, a New Age–leaning woman named Anna whose family, through what specific brand of plunder I don’t know, owned a gigantic house out in horse country, I agreed. It’s a natural response, I guess, to being raised by relatively kind parents who taught me to be polite and decent and to rely on the company and help of others, but to also consider myself smarter and, on some fundamental level, more deserving of complete fulfillment than anyone in the world besides maybe my sisters. And the fact is, I do tend to like people in practice, even though I’ve built an airtight case against them in principle. Like most people trying to get by in something like the regular current of American life, I don’t act like a total asshole to most people I meet, and am generally regarded as pretty nice, mainly because I leave myself vulnerable to hearing out other people’s crises and complaints for longer, on average, than would be merely polite.
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December 2022
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