It became the kind of scene that makes you want to be a writer so you can capture a transient unique form of social agony being undergone by people who have it made in every way, the observer excepted. The bouts of wind continued. Z turned out to be right about the saté, but it appeared during the appetizer phase. Emissaries came out with salvers of skewers of it but never made it to our neck of the woods. Where are these treats? a Motswana said plaintively. Overhead there were strings of paper lanterns with real candles in them, a poor idea because the lanterns were jerking around and spilling hot wax on selected prominent people. We joined a move to get into a pergola that had been erected on a platform over a drained swimming pool. AID directors are forbidden to live in houses with functioning swimming pools. Had this thing been constructed for this number of people? I wondered, thinking I could feel the floorboards yielding. I got out. I pulled Z back out into the teeth of the gale with me.
Everything was adding to the mad hatter tenor of events. In every collation of at least two hundred Brits there will be several people with hysterical surnames. I think this is the result of coming from a culture which has yet to wake up to the fact that it’s a thinkable thing to do to go down to the name-changing bureau and rid you and your offspring of these embarrassments. Or possibly they don’t do it just because Americans do, when they notice that people start falling about laughing when they introduce themselves. Anyway, they were all there: Mr. Hailstones, Mr. Swinerod, I. Denzil Quorme, Mr. Leatherhead, and a plump couple, the Tittings. Anyway, there we were with all the Brits with ludic names all in one enclosure. The feeling of being under guard was enhanced by the presence of lots of actual guards, Waygards in specially cleaned maroon uniforms, spaced like caryatids around the edges of the incipient riot we were becoming. I had to get myself under control. I kept thinking This is the world created for us by grown men, n’est-ce pas? This was the human comedy. I warned myself that a perfect way to go wrong in the real world is to assume that because someone looks like a fool he or she is unintelligent. Someone at this point turned up the PA so that the authenticity of the thing we were hearing would be more unmistakable. Expectations were raised when Ariel seemed to be running for the house. The receiving line had dissolved. But then she was among us frantically on another matter, finding her pet, her dog.
Why would Denoon attend a carnival like this, with not an underdog in sight?
Finally somebody relented and opened the house up. It was all true about the splendor within. Welcome to Macao, somebody to my right murmured. I was staggered by the furnishings and what it must be costing the government to ship them from one end of the earth to the other, because these were massive articles like teak chests, lacquer screens, bronzes, a vast gong, celadon vases. The food was along the lines Z had posited. I ate as I scanned every room in the place, trying to look desultory. Ariel was ubiquitous, cringing on behalf of her possessions when anyone got too close to one of them. I utilized Z to monitor the late arrivals outside, which he was sweet about despite the wind comedy problem. I said to him Explain something to me: this is the second most important representative of the United States in this country, after the ambassador. What does this place say? Suppose you went to the Chinese embassy and it turned out to be a replica of an American log cabin circa 1830? You’d be flummoxed. Is everything ultimately a camp experience, is that the message? I asked him. There was no sign of Denoon.
I pretended a fixation on seeing every piece of chinoiserie there was, which naturally took me off the beaten track and into the private rooms at the back of the house. Obviously I was drivenly trying to satisfy myself that Denoon wasn’t secreted somewhere. This came to an end when I opened the door to a tiny room and was met with a blast of freezing air-conditioning and the sight of an aged chow on a quilt, an animal never intended for life in Africa. When it barked it was more like a cough than a bark, but it still attracted the attention of a maid who got stern with me and said Mma, it can die. This by the way was the only airconditioning in use anywhere. Everywhere else, massive floor fans swept the different scenes, continuing the meteorological theme of ceaseless wind underway outdoors. All the rippling and undulating produced made for an undersea feeling. It was time for me to circulate normally.
It was also obvious that my usual associates came from a lesser stratum than was being represented that night. I didn’t know many of the attendees, except for a handful, and those glancingly — like the brother-sister act from Montreal who had been brought to my attention a few days previous by the screams of a tot pursuing them through the mall. He wanted his pushtoy back, which his older brother had sold to the Canadians without his permission. They ran a gallery devoted to naive art and were on a buying trip, focusing on the scrapwire toys the children in the squatter sections and the periurban villages make. The one the tot wanted back was a beautiful specimen, complex, a bicycle with wheels that revolved and pedals that rose and fell and a rider devised from a stuffed and twisted yellow hypermarket sakkie with blue text where the eyes should be, saying that refunds were impossible. The legs pumped when the thing was rolled along. The toy was a masterpiece. They were holding it up like a chalice while the tot leapt at them. I meandered after the brother and sister into their bolt-hole, the British Council reading room, and watched while they tried the toy out and exclaimed about it until some Batswana began politely hissing. We chatted at the fête. They were in Botswana on a mission. They had reason to believe that somewhere among the squatters in the Old Naledi section was a blind child who was an artistic genius who made things out of scrapwire not to be believed, such as radios, locomotives, dirigibles, large scale things. Had I heard of him? So far they hadn’t found him, but they were certain he was there. I left open that I might be able to help them: they were an example of the clientele I was reposing on in those times.
It was not a comfortable scene and I was saying the wrong things, out of distraction. Things were going on that I felt I had to understand, like the maid who was darting around and doing something to each lamp. It was nothing, but it was odd — and I was in discomfort until I knew what it was. She was drizzling liquid incense onto lightbulbs with an eyedropper. I edged my way into a group of women talking about their recent vacations. One woman was just back from Greece and was mildly wondering why every Greek woman over forty seemed to be dressed in black. Someone told them it was slimming, it came to me to say. They had no idea I was being amusing.
At about this time I observed that a particular woman seemed to be shadowing me from group to group. She was a wreck.
I let her catch up with me at the shrimp tree.
Do you know me? I asked her. Because you seem to be following me. It wasn’t hostile. She admitted immediately she was following me.
She was following me because I was American and seemed so at home and she was looking for someone she could impose on for something. Underneath the extremis she was in she was the way you would die to look at forty, forty-two. Sorority person, I said to myself. She was in a couture version of safari attire, which she had to know was a mistake. The invitations had specified formal and she was barely touching smart casual. She definitely looked rich, which made me not sisterly toward her. I have a vulgar marxist reaction to the rich, which is part of me. Not that I’m a marxist of any kind. I would have made a wonderful marxist if I’d been born into it, probably, which is the only way it could have stuck. Too bad for marxism. I feel toward marxists the way you feel toward Greek Orthodox people when New Year’s Eve comes and they get to go to this fantasy mass with basso priests droning, candles flaring, gold leaf all over. If only you could believe it. Also my temperament is marxist in that analytically looking for the cui bono or materialist explanation is nearly always correct in retrospect. Also I love marxist academics because it turns them into such absolute bloodhounds when it comes to critiquing actually existing capitalism. But as for the dungheap states these bouquets of humane thought have turned into as they decomposed, no thank you and again no thank you. Denoon knew everything about marxism and loved to talk about it. It was Marx and Engels’s fault that when Lenin took power he had no idea what a socialist state should be like, because they had never bothered to describe it. Engels supposedly thought full communism was going to be like the Shakers, without the celibacy. Denoon told me the name of the actual person who thought up the Russian state socialist system. He is now totally forgotten. It may be Pashukanis. It was definitely not Lenin. I have the name written down somewhere. But to this day I resent it that Denoon never credited me with having had my own view of marxism. I maintain that my attitude had always been pretty nuanced. He also knew by heart some letter of Marx’s where he bewails that it is too late for him to open a small business. The skin of the rich is different and the woman before me had it. She was also ash blond.