Dinner in the Free World

Just one minute more—I’m nearly through this thought—and there. Now it’s out. I can get back to my duty.

Funny, really, how this entire party was your idea and now I’m the one in a state. Not a proper tizzy, mind you. Just surprised by the anticipation. I’m happy to do it. I think it could be a good mix. I’m sure Groz and Felix will get on well enough.

It’s really a question of tabling—who goes on your side and my side. Your friend, the new missus and—God help me—the missur. What? No, I’m not trying to sling a slur. It’s a difficult position they’re in; I’ll give them that. I wouldn’t enjoy venturing into this hetero-minefield after sending salvos of “you really must come down” via SMS—no small feat.

But if conversation with the women doesn’t suit, should I invite them to knock back snifters and talk covered calls with the lads? People now, whatever their pronouns or politics, need a decent pour of comfort before they’ll say anything real. Only with that fertilizer does anything worth keeping actually blossom.

I suspect this party, like most situations they’re invited into, will feel like a dry clay pot pressed against a concrete wall. Sun or shade, it hardly matters. The heat leaches either way. Eventually, death covers all.

Yes—grim. I know.

Well then—hand me those dishes, wife, and I’ll do the rest. No, the yardwork’s done; I was only typing something fickle. A little fragment, really—though kind of you to ask—about this exact sort of feigned curiosity you’re showing now, which, if history holds, will arrive in droves later when it’s safely past being useful.

Groz will be the first to bring it up, the tempestuous rogue. He means well. Always urging me to “put myself out there.”

He’ll try something like, “So—have the monkeys typed the novel yet?”

No, not that. Too clever for him. Half the table wouldn’t catch the reference, anyway. His version will be warmer, a soft jab wrapped in goodwill. That doesn’t bother me.

Your reactions do.

You’re consistent, I’ll give you that. Your warmth rarely peaks, and your winters blow in hard, but only in response to movement. Yours is a private currency. You portion it out to yourself and to the few who’ve earned your careful denomination of “love.” I understand that. Accepting that premise—your premise—feels, perversely, like taking measure of a man. Or at least the one measure that matters in marriage.

Marriage. I do hope it comes up at dinner. It’ll be good to test old Felix, standing on the brink of the anniversary of his acclaimed post-subjugation. Rumor has it, he and the new beau have made something of a joint-venture erotica empire. I’m told there’s a full-length mirror on their bedroom ceiling, and they hold passports with suspiciously dense Thai ink. I don’t judge. Not for that.

It’s just: sex is treacherous conversational ground for us. Among women, judgment can masquerade as curiosity; it alchemizes confession into community. Among men, you must halt most anecdotes before revealing a fetish or risk tumbling into a deposition. Fetish is both power and liability; I’d rather not open my books. I’ll take mezcal instead. Yes—the good bottle. I picked it up this morning.

But it’s not sex I’m circling. It’s submission. Feminism, anti-feminism, the whole studied theater of who kneels to what. Every modern conviction seems to route back to the same exhausted crossroads: who submits, who refuses, who pretends not to be submitting while signing off on the debits.

Take Mexico.

I was twenty-five before I learned it’s technically the United Mexican States. A federation like ours. How official. How irrelevant. Eighty-odd years after nationalizing oil, they perfected the art of a soft dictatorship that markets itself as vacationland. No local infrastructure, but excellent resorts. I’ve driven past tenements tucked into dead valleys—their satellite dishes aimed at the same sky as the infinity pools down the road.

We wring our hands about others’ theocracies and strongmen, but somehow the cartel-state gets filed under “vibes.” We condemn jihad, meme ISIS, and then do lines off the patio table with frightening moral clarity. We won’t say terror with the tacos. That would be gauche.

The business of vice is the last honest growth sector. We outsource our conscience to headlines, and our complicity to long weekends. Smart, decent, liberal people fly down, step over the labor, bless the ceviche, and tell themselves it’s culture. They return to their giant employers with sun on their shoulders and a private sense that, for a fleeting moment, they were close to godliness. They were not. God, if anywhere, was in the nature that had to be killed to stage that feeling.

I don’t actually believe in interventions. In the grand scheme, there are no clean actions to take. We need the labor. We want the drugs. We like our imported fruit. We like our cheap flights and our moral stories. This isn’t a manifesto. It’s just a notation in the margin: look at what we are prepared to normalize so long as the narration flatters us.

Anyway.

If you’ll excuse me, I should take the trash out before the guests arrive.