A Block of Marble Awaits the Tastemaker’s Chisel

I couldn’t social-climb my way out of a paper bag. But now that I’m moving up in the world, I need a crash course in p’s and q’s. I need a subscription to AD (that’s Architectural Digest to you). I need a taste make over.

Before dinner parties I always worry: What if they serve soup with chopsticks? What do you do? Or, what if they decide to get interesting and make puree of brains with magnolia blossoms? Help, Ma!

So it was with the dinner party at Tara Tibbits’ house. Tara invited me because her friend the New York editor was coming to town. He wanted to meet me. This was very flattering but also, of course, terrifying.

I didn’t know Tara very well other than that she was some kind of professional tastemaker. When I arrived, I found that everything in her house was a work of art. If I were Tom Wolfe, I’d know all the names for these things.

I dared not sit down for fear of breaking the antique metal park bench that was covered with Christmas lights or the backless, couch-like thing or the 250-year-old chair. Not a Barcalounger in sight. So I just stood in the middle of the room--on the stage.

All I knew about the editor was that he was a terrific writer himself and that his wife was a curator at a famous museum in Manhattan. Five hundred unemployed Ph.D.s in art history spend their spare time daydreaming of murdering this woman.

For the first half of the party, I talked about art with a woman who was prettily dressed all in earth tones. When I asked how long she worked for the museum, the editor then explained that his wife couldn’t come and that the woman I assumed was his wife, talked to as if she were his wife, was actually a writer for the New York Times. But she lives in California.

I realized I didn’t know who was with whom. It was that kind of party.

To change the subject and draw attention away from the fact that I was incapable of socializing with grown-ups, I told the editor how much I enjoyed his writing on famous authors. “You’re a Roth scholar?” I said.

“Scholar?” he asked casually. “I know Phil.”

But as the evening progressed, I came to see that just because he was a smart New Yorker, that didn’t mean that somewhere in the distant past there wasn’t a link between our lives. Of course, he had gone to summer camp in the ‘50s with Bobby Binstock, son of the rabbi at Temple Sholom on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago. Why didn’t he just say so in the first place?

Just when I was starting to feel at ease playing Jewish Trivial Pursuit, the beer was served. Tara poured it into these enormous goblets, like wine glasses but scaled up to hold a whole bottle of beer. You had to wrap your two hands around the huge stem just to hold it. When I took a sip, I realized I was staring at the distinguished editor through the glass darkly while the beer foam went all over my face.

Another guest at the party was in the kitchen futzing with the duck. He is a Chinese chef revered by the foodoisie--the kind of guy whose name makes Wolfgang Puck and Jeremiah Tower foam at the mouth. Or cry in their beurre.

Oddly enough, he is an Anglo from New York who used to work for Xerox. He also has no restaurant, making him a chef without portfolio or a diplomat with a spatula.

He cooked up a duck that was something to quack about. It tasted like a Hershey bar melted on a barbecued rib. Even the side of chopped chrysanthemums was yummy. But then the moment I’d been dreading: How to eat the crab with chopsticks?

I watched as, one by one, the eminent editor, the remarkable chef, the pretty writer and Tara the tastemaker put down their chopsticks and ripped those saucy claws open with their bare hands.

Yeah! All right! Let’s get down, I thought. But I didn’t say it.

By the time the tea came in the little, round Bauhaus-kinda teacups with the handle that felt like you were holding Pinocchio’s nose, I started to relax. These were just plain folks. They eat. They sleep. They chomp on claws.