the LAST SUPPER

Around the time of my first kitchen fire that day--7:30 in the morning, a flaming Trader Joe’s kitchen rag disintegrating atop the au jus pot--it hit me that there are two incompatible ways we experience dinner parties.

First, the picture of that night’s dinner as I had imagined it for weeks: hundreds of votive candles surrounding the house, open windows revealing a fire on the hearth--a floating dusk mirage to greet arriving guests. Ice-cold champagne poured on the veranda; algebraically arranged crudites on Italian pottery that glowed as if invested with its own inner life; myself in crisp white cotton, chatty, secure in the evening’s preparations, a calmness about me suggesting culinary authority, or at least massive insurance coverage.

OK--there are two ways we experience dinner parties. There is, on the one hand, a cosmopolitan event of social exchange and architectural food presentation found inside glossy magazines, a phenomenon so integral to the second half of the American century that it would be hard to imagine (or explain) the lives of a certain class of people without considering the dinner gathering. So much collides there--the attempt to build community out of the anonymous drift of cityscapes; the desire to show off a kind of wealth in an evening’s preparation and execution; the wish to enter, through conversation with table mates, those bright warrens of modern experience our cities seem to offer up so readily, yet whose entrances almost always prove hard to find.

This picture is, of course, what a guest might imagine. A host’s experience--especially if he is cooking for 39 people, as I was that day--is altogether something else. This is the deranged “I-feel-I’m-combing-my-hair-with-firecrackers” experience that Martin Scorsese captured so well in the “GoodFellas” climax, with Ray Liotta balancing police helicopters, his quadriplegic brother’s needs, the cocaine sweats, a coke mule missing her hat and a ziti with meat gravy recipe all at once. Yet those of us who are serial hosts (say, 12 dinners a year or more) still find ourselves easily seduced by the glossy magazines and their dinner-party-theme articles. The counterfeit details alone should tip us off--why, for instance, do the guests in these layouts, like converts awaiting the mother ship’s arrival, always button their loose-fit shirts to the throat?

Still, we slip into foggy denial before each dinner party, imagining a perfect evening pulled off with the crisp maneuverings of a panzer attack, forgetting that the police helicopters and demanding coke mules are inevitable. So with half a charred towel wrapped around my blackening hand (the other half on the cat’s tail as he caromed out the kitchen door like a NASA experiment), I couldn’t help wondering why we serial hosts remain so hellbent on chasing our grail--the perfect dinner party.

The first course, a shellfish soup of shrimp and scallops and floating leeks, would be poured and served by me as I made observations on my home’s history, Martha Stewart’s IPO, Indonesia’s bioengineered-food debate, the possibilities of agriculture harvest on Mars. Three people who had met before would happily rediscover their acquaintance; guests would slide effortlessly from the Champagne to a Riesling; with bossa nova murmuring on the hi-fi, I would find time--after checking on the main course for 39 people--to refuel the fireplace with Sonoma oak before sitting down to a lively but agreeable debate with a Nike-clad advocate for the homeless.

Now, the background on why my cat smoldered in the garden while the arrival of more than three dozen guests was imminent that day: Five years earlier, I had moved into a small two-story cabin that sits on a secluded and wooded hilltop just north of downtown L.A. Built in 1904, the slanting structure was heated by a mail-catalog J.C. Penney wood stove, haunted by deer and coyote, an annual skunk litter and a massive spider infestation. Here was a sepia-toned space that cried out for furniture to be rough-hewn on the spot, which I did, building a pine table for the “dining room” (really, the kitchen’s hip). In the half-decade that followed, I slowly filled in the silhouette of dinner party host and cook, graduating from roasted chicken and potatoes to cumin-crusted turbot on yucca puree with wild watercress and a red wine vinaigrette. This year, suddenly, I found myself forced to move out of the cabin and, as a parting measure, decided to invite every guest who had sat at the pine table back for a Last Supper.

As a social circle, 39 guests is not a title contender. But it was as diverse a list as any, in part because diversity in acquaintances seems to be an ingrained reflex in Los Angeles. We are eager to reflect the city’s balkanized landscape on our own friendship rosters--MP3 technicians and celebrity tree trimmers, Heal the Bay scientists and magazine film critics. When an entire guest list originates from the same office dead pool, it suggests failure on a soul level in millennium Los Angeles. And the dinner party can be the purest expression of success here: “Wow, you sure know a lot of interesting people!” equates friendship with capital, the guest list with the ATM statement.

The main course, a seared ahi steak julienned over braised red cabbage, encircled by a puree of garlicky mashed potatoes and drizzled in a homemade au jus, would soon follow. Somewhere, bottles of Australian Penfolds Grange would be breathing while I effortlessly quick-seared plank after plank of ruby fish, all the time shifting through snatches of conversation with smiling guests who floated through the kitchen. Not a drop of splashed grape-seed oil on me.

Most of us have, at one time or another, attended an ideal dinner party. These unplanned events, often happy accidents during stopovers in cities such as Austin or Seattle, are typically lorded over by single, pale women in blond page-boy cuts who sport faint accents, the origins of which are impossible to pin down. My own experience was a last-minute chance invitation to a Manhattan party of 14 guests and nine courses. There was something about the unnaturally calm presence of my hostess as she moved attentively from guest to guest, from giant prawns blanketed in scrambled quail egg to individual hamachi baskets, that seemed to suggest intense breath-work regimes, a low-salt diet, the absence of sweat glands and distant star clusters. I couldn’t help admiring her pluck and lack of adrenaline; I had myself attempted similar evenings dozens of times, and each night was a trip to life inside a Tex Avery cartoon.

That’s not entirely true. There is always a hovering pause that I’ve watched open near the evening’s end, when the glasses are half filled with wine, the food fully parsed, the French doors open and the conversation as bright as the candlelight is dim, when the perfect moment--a moment that Spaulding Gray might take a year and a book contract and a round-the-world ticket to find--does come. And if that pause--a fantasy of social equilibrium and democratic gratification conjured out of an afternoon’s brimming chaos--is a metaphor for the ideal dinner party, then the Angeleno dinner party is a metaphor for life as we attempt to shape it in Los Angeles. Then you schlep off to find dessert.

Dessert--individual, luminescent berry galettes tipping small hats of home-cranked ginger ice cream--would follow. A glass of single malt in one hand, plates of pastry in the other as I dispersed the evening’s last course through the house, I would find time to gently break up a heated political debate with a wry witticism, act as docent in an info-packed moonlight tour of my drought-resistant garden, remove a wine stain from a guest’s blouse using my grandmother’s gypsy recipe and explain Jacques Derrida’s theory of difference in language to a beaming 7-year-old.

So, how did the evening actually go? There was a second kitchen fire, though not nearly as disastrous as far as the cat was concerned. Twenty-seven people showed up instead of 39, and while I didn’t find time to debate a homeless advocate, a local philanthropic executive did pour Champagne on the veranda, the bottles of which stayed ice-cold. The soup went over fine, the fireplace tended itself, and for the largest part of the evening, I remained in a semi-coherent state, manufacturing 27 plates of architecturally stacked ahi tuna.

And the perfect moment did come, about 11:30, while I sat at the pine table. (For the record, guests ate wherever they could at the Last Supper.) I had put on innumerable evenings like this around the table, though not nearly as super-sized as this one. Now, however, I realized why I, at least, had become a serial host: In the dinner party, without knowing it, I had found a tool to bring order into and make sense out of my life in Los Angeles.

Social equilibrium and democratic gratification out of chaos.

The parties at the pine table were all chapters in a story I told about myself while living in the cabin; the Last Supper was a way to end that story, close that book.

Someone else put together dessert that night--factory-cranked ice cream, no galette--and two days later I moved out of the cabin for good.

I took the table.