Lunch With Bores - The High Price Of Community

The Potter family was not a bad sort, well-meaning, good neighbors - a sunken cost as Fielding Harper viewed it, hard to ignore and some interest to be drawn.  Why his wife insisted on lunch with the Potters was beyond him.  Their scraping the their leftover salads into foldable cardboard boxes- not separately but both his and her plates scraped into one sodden mess - should have been the final withdrawal from the account. 

Leave it at 'I'm there if you need me' and no presumption of interest should have been enough, but it wasn't, and off they went on the second Tuesday of every month to a neighborhood restaurant which had weekly specials on that day. 

 

It was the price to pay for living in a neighborhood - there is something expected from proximity, a bow to good will perhaps, a social bonding expected but one which Fielding was quite happy to do without.  He looked at these monthly lunches with the Potters as an investment - cynical as that was, it was the reality of longevity, pushing the envelope past one's time. You never knew when it would be time to ring the bell for the servant.  

It was one of those 'Love her, loathe him' friendships, but what do you do when couples are joined together at the hip? Fielding, brought up with good manners and courtesy couldn't bring himself to rudeness which would have put the last nail in the coffin lid, so he suffered through, kept his counsel, and deferred to Bob Potter's stories about static heads, flow rates, and overflow valves - redoing the bathroom.  

 

It wasn't just a quick on-and-off reference to necessary homeowning investment, but a saga of trips to Home Depot and tales of comparative pricing, the durability ratios of plastics and porcelain, fittings, work windows, and auxiliary fixtures. 

Marfa Potter was more doable - she at least fit the Harpers within an accommodating frame of reference, but she still banged on about her wayward son, the desultory job of her daughter, and the absent family in Chillicothe until the restaurant had emptied. 

The American Park neighborhood was typical of an upper middle class, professional enclave of Washington.  It was cohesive via political allegiance rather than midwestern neighborliness, chatting across the picket fence or hanging the wash.  Neighbors' bonding was borne of commiseration - that fool in the White House - and hours were spent in driveways spieling about the retrograde, morally destitute, impossibly arrogant man in the Oval Office. 

Fielding enjoyed listening, and always stopped when hailed.  There was something vaudevillian about the miserable pain and suffering of his neighbors. Every pitch and roll, every toss and turn of hatred was part of a circus act in which he was to play the appreciative audience.  He went up Byfield Street and stopped at the Barkers, the Wrights, the Villas, and the Schwartzbaums like down a shopping aisle. 

But all the Punch and Judy, Grand Guignol, the hysteria and the nonsense was far more entertaining than a penitential lunch with the Potters.  Fielding, a natural born conservative who had never even as an adolescent veered off the straight and narrow, had at first found it hard to keep his own counsel and his mouth shut when one neighbor or another lit into Donald Trump; but when he began to see it as a side show - a stop at the bearded lady, one at the midgets, another at the baby with two heads - did he look forward to his walks up and down Byfield Street. 

Now, one word about Clausewitz, Darwin's territorial imperative applied to geopolitics, America's joining The Machiavellian Club of Three - the new international triumvirate of Putin, Xi, and Trump - would have gotten Bob Potter off socket wrenches and given Marfa Potter fits, but was it worth it? Indigestion comes with stirring the soup.  

 

On the other hand Fielding's apostasy would have assured cloture.  That would be the last Caesar salad and chicken tenders they would ever have to eat together. 

Fielding's wife had invited another couple to lunch a few months back.  She was a classmate of his wife, and he was a retired administrator of one of Bill Clinton's social welfare agencies.  The woman had banged on over the oeufs en gelee, the pasta dish, and halfway into the meat course about the political deity of Kamala Harris and how she was about to head off to South Philly to get out the vote for her; and Fielding had had enough.  Not only were his remarks poorly received, but he was cancelled, told in no uncertain terms that he and his wife would not be welcome at any reciprocal meal. 

Breeding and some residual sense of propriety helped him keep his tongue with the Potters.  It was a contribution to neighborliness and a deposit in the marital account.  Having lunch with the Potters was dues paid to his wife, all of which would be returned in kind at a later date.  Marriage is, after all, a contractual affair. 

Glenn Gould, the Canadian pianist considered the master of Bach's Goldberg Variations abruptly gave up concert performance and began recording in his own studio.  There he could perfect his interpretation, editing, re-recording, editing again until he was satisfied that he had produced the perfect work.  Audiences were just intrusions, annoyances, trifling irritants, so better to leave them aside and do the work for which he was suited if not destined. 

Faulkner’s genius was solitary.  His characters may have been  figures borne out of the South, Mississippi, slavery and Jim Crow, the mulatto and octoroon culture of New Orleans, the Delta, and American idealism but were nevertheless his own.   The opening long paragraph of Absalom is Faulkner’s confection of all the above.  Atmosphere, drama, suspense, resentment, fear – all put together in one solitary work of  insight.  The voice of Rosa Coldfield is Faulkner’s and Faulkner’s alone

Most genius is solitary. Faulkner worked alone.  Absalom, Absalom perhaps the greatest A emerican work of fiction ever, resulted from his sensitive and personal perceptions of the South as a place, race as a signifier, and family as the crucible of maturity. 

This is not to say that Fielding Harper was a genius - he was not - but that he had the instincts of genius, that unique appreciation of solitariness - the only environment where creativity can gestate.  'My parts do not make a whole', the Phillip Seymour Hoffman character says in the Sidney Lumet film, Before The Devil Knows You're Dead. This assembly can only be accomplished alone. 

'We all die alone' was Tolstoy's message in his novella, The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Ivan, who has carefully constructed his life to leave him alone realizes that ironically in his moment of death, he is facing it entirely, absolutely alone.  No family, no friends, no colleagues, no community makes any difference when one is facing eternity.  There is no more personal moment, no moment which states the obvious - we live and die alone.   Ivan should have been preparing for this moment, not whiling away his time in fabrication. 

The world of perfunctory, obligatory social engagements is maya, illusion - distracting from the essential, only reason for being - spiritual evolution. 

Nietzsche had the same idea but expressed it differently - the expression of pure, individual will is the only validation of human life. 

So, Fielding Harper soldiered through another Tuesday lunch with the Potters, held his tongue, finished his fettuccini alfredo, thanked everyone, and walked home alone.