At a cocktail party, a glamorous right-wing blonde interrogated a once-powerful senator, a man who still bore a sense of surprise at the swiftness with which he had been deposed. The woman pointed an accusing finger and let fly a sharp remark. The senator’s wife, ignored, sighed and shifted uncomfortably in the corner of a sofa where she’d been trapped by other people’s legs.
At a Christmas party, a left-wing congressional staffer sidled up to the wife of a famous neoconservative and began asking barbed questions about her husband’s past. Amid the cheer and gaiety, the woman’s face darkened in fury and she stormed away. The aide chuckled to himself.
At yet another gathering, this one a predominantly “progressive” in political tinge, the host introduced his friend, a well-known conservative journalist, to a group that included a famous Obama confidante. As the journalist extended his hand, the confidante executed a sudden pirouette and leapt gracefully away, like a fawn escaping a dog.
Oh, but parties in Washington can get complicated! If you are the host or hostess, the longer you live here the trickier it becomes to pull together a guest list that includes your favorite people but that avoids forcing antagonists to endure each other’s company.
If you are a guest, well, the longer you live here (and the better-known you become) the greater the chance there will be someone in the room whom you dislike intensely or hope to shun, or who in turn greatly desires to deliver some unpleasantness unto you.
I suppose the opposite is also true: The longer you’re here, the more people you love, and the more who love you back. Alas, heart-warming anecdotes don’t stick in the consciousness or apprehension of party-givers quite as much as the awful ones do.
When I first moved here, I had blithe and naive ideas about how easy it would to mix people of different political temperaments. Like most newcomers, I was also sufficiently ignorant of everyone’s histories with everyone else to think that it fine to bring together at dinner, say, two people who had served in a previous administration (little suspecting their mutual hatred, which dated back to the first campaign).
I thought: We’re all grown-ups here. Surely adversaries can be polite to one another in a social setting, can’t they?
Hah. So a friend of mine thought, too, until the night when two guests, one pro-Israel and the other militantly anti, came to fisticuffs in her beautiful dining room. So thought another when she seated a confirmed bachelor beside a woman who was so shocked by her dinner companion’s homosexuality that she asked mutual friends afterward whether the hostess had intended to insult her.
Apart from warning guests ahead of time or making painful cuts to her list of friends, what can a hostess do? Maybe borrow an idea from “The Great Gatsby” and make every party as big as you can. As Jordan Baker approvingly observed of Gatsby’s bashes: “I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.” She was right, you know.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
