I suppose it was the time I beaned the historian Wilfred McClay with a wine cork — blat! right between the eyes — that I knew I’d never be one of Washington’s great formal-dinner hosts. It’s true he’d just claimed that if St. Ignatius Loyola were alive today, he would make a first-class director of development for some lucky university. But as my wife Lorena pointed out at some length the next day, we had given the dinner in celebration of Wilfred’s new appointment to a chair in history at a college in Tennessee, and being a host carries with it certain responsibilities — one of which is to refrain from heaving things six feet down the dining-room table at your guests, even if they seem to be insulting your favorite sixteenth-century saint. She was quite certain about this as a rule of etiquette.
Then again, it may have been the time we squeezed together fourteen of Washington’s evangelical writers in honor of a visit by the editor of a midwestern Christian journal. That was the night I thought I’d get conversation flowing by asking what differentiated those evangelicals who drink alcohol from those who don’t. Our guests didn’t actually come to blows, but there was, as I recall, some discussion of whether Love thy neighbor was a hard-and-fast law or merely a guideline. Lorena plumped for guideline and kicked me under the table, smiling brightly as she asked our shouting guests whether anyone would like a little more gazpacho.
But bad host or not, I keep talking my wife into cooking up her dinners — we’ve thrown perhaps thirty in the year and a half we’ve been in Washington — because, well, because it’s so much fun to get eight or ten people around a table, ply them with wine and lots of food, and turn them loose to talk, and talk and talk and talk.
We’ve invited a Washington socialite or two (whom we bored to tears, I’m afraid), a couple of politicians (who bored us to tears), some junior members of the diplomatic corps (who knew enough to smile and not throw things, no matter how bored or boring), and an unsurprisingly large number of magazine writers and editors.
But mostly we’ve had intellectuals, because intellectuals, strange as it is to say, make the best dinner guests, and Washington, even stranger to say, is a great town for intellectuals. They’re always passing through, with nothing to do except see their editors or testify before Congress or lecture at a think tank, and the one thing they all know how to do is talk.
Not exactly card-carrying intellectuals ourselves, my wife and I are nonetheless intellectual fellow travelers, and if you teach almost anywhere or have written a book about almost anything, you can hardly pass through D.C. without receiving a pressing invitation to dine with us.
Of course, things don’t always turn out as we plan. There was the professor from Boston, famed for the relentless moral seriousness of his thought, who spent the evening happily talking gibberish with our 18-month-old daughter.
And then there was the Englishman who used an entire dinner to tell us about each of the books he’d written. About each chapter in each of the books he’d written. About why each reviewer of each of the books he’d written had misunderstood each chapter in each of the books he’d written. Lorena insists that the meal can’t really have dragged on much more than 22 or 23 hours.
One summer barbecue, planned for ten couples, began falling apart when the first cancellation came late on the afternoon of the day before. By the time the charcoal was lit, we were down to three guests, staring forlornly at one another over the mounds of potato salad. (Something the socialites, politicians, and diplomats are better at than the intellectuals is reading their calendars.)
But the absences were made up for at a fancier dinner the following week. One guest decided to bring along a friend; a footloose professor from California dropped by to see if we were doing anything that evening; and a poet and his wife, getting the date wrong by just seven days, showed up in shorts and sandals for the barbecue. Lorena sent me running down the block to the convenience store (I don’t really mind paying $ 5.75 for a pint of cream in an emergency) and thinned the vichyssoise until it tasted like little more than cold milk with chives sprinkled on top.
But the wine was good, and the rest of the food kept coming and coming, and the talk rolled on, louder and louder. And then, about eleven o’clock — in the middle, as I remember, of an argument about who should have gone to jail in the Teapot Dome scandal of the 1920s — one guest lobbed a roll at another, just to get his attention. That’s when I knew at least one Washington dinner had gone down well.
J. BOTTUM
