Loose Living (10 page)

However, misordering can be a mirror of the self, a manifestation of a wider derangement of self from which we all, from time to time, I suspect, suffer.

When we misorder it could be that we are ordering dishes for
another
self who happens not to be present at the table.

This un-present self may be in hiding or may be in fear of its life. It could be that we are scared of or disgusted by the company we are keeping. Or, on the other hand, this un-present self may well be ‘trying to get out'.

Worse, the present self may not be the real you, or may not be the you you wish to have eating for you. Or, for that matter, living for you.

If this condition recurs we urge you to seek attention from the Montaigne Clinic without delay.

I Could Have Done As Well Myself At Home. If you are beset by this feeling it means that you are a homebody and not a social butterfly and should stay at home.

The I Think They Want Us to Leave anxiety is plainly a feeling of being unwanted in life. You may very well be unwanted in life. Examine your conduct.
However, there are worse things than being unwanted in life.

I Won't Order That Because it Requires Too Much Work (lobsters, crabs and so on). This is an anxiety about making a mess of it. Of not being able to cope and being revealed as unsophisticated. Of going beyond your known skills of control.

We urge that you practise going beyond your known skills of social control on all occasions in life.

That Table Over There is Having Something That Wasn't on the Menu. This anxiety is common in restaurants serving food other than that of your own culture.

They Get the Best Food Because They are Chinese, Chechens, etc. It could well be that they own the restaurant. You will never know.

The Fear that Life is a Cheat. This shows up as a feeling that the food is overpriced, or that the serve is too small, or that the fish is shark, or that the chicken is cat, or that the wine is inferior wine placed in quality-labelled bottles.

This is not so easily cured but can be, over time, with practice and the expenditure of large sums of money. Life is Sometimes a Cheat, but Life is Not Always a Cheat. To know when it is or is not a cheat is the art of life.

It requires much practice and takes a lifetime.

I
T HAS
to be said that I do not warm to Dr Bricolage, although he was my sponsor here at the Montaigne Clinic.

He appears to have good table style and can certainly carve well. Montaigne, by the way, was a notoriously poor carver, something about which many scholarly jests are made.

Dr Bricolage is a powerful figure but there is a sternness in him towards human frailty which I do not share or like.

Having previously become accustomed to the life of the
château
and the Duc's bountiful, if eccentric, care,
with those endless days of meandering talk and intricate renaissance games on the lawn, it is strange now to have to attend what are known as ‘staff meetings'.

Staff meetings here do resemble life at the
château
in that they take the form of seven-hour banquets where people quote Montaigne or that wretchedly silly Jean-Anthelme Brilliat-Savarin.

I suppose these occasions are very little different from those mysterious ‘staff meetings' we hear rumours about in departments at Australian universities.

On our staff at the Clinic we have a Dr Avion, a scholar in Airline Travelling Disorders. One of his hypotheses is that airline travel has taught millions of people how to remain civilised in cramped conditions with hundreds of strangers undertaking the perilous enterprise of a long voyage which causes considerable disorientation, in a narrow steel capsule.

Airlines have taught people how to eat and sleep side by side with strangers in a civilised way, how to share a toilet with hundreds and keep it clean.

Dr Avion argues that air travel is training for the urban living barracks of the future in what he sees as a grossly overpopulated global village.

He believes that one day most of us will eat, sleep and live in aircraft-type structures—similar to the communal life of the long houses found in some cultures in Borneo and the South Pacific.

Airlines have taught many people about the entrée, the appetiser, the cheese, the dessert. Admittedly, it is a western pattern of meal.

I was once seated beside an Indian student who had never been on an airline before or in the west. We had sat for a time in silence when I felt a tug at my elbow and heard him say, ‘Sir, would you mind, could you explain kindly, what are these?'

He held up the knife, fork and spoon in their sealed plastic wrapping. I said that in most families the knife, fork and spoon would not come in sealed plastic wrapping.

I then tried to explain how to use each of these utensils, although I could not explain why food is carried to the mouth on the back of the fork and not by the concave side, which would be easier.

The Indian asked me to explain how he should eat in Australia.

I took to the task with enthusiasm. But my enthusiasm soon died when I realised how much there is to teach about how we eat if we start from a zero knowledge situation.

For instance, he did not know what a bread roll was. He didn't know what butter was. He wanted to butter the roll on the outside. I said that it was not customary. He then began to cut the roll with his knife and I had to say that the convention was to ‘break' a roll with the fingers, not to cut it.

No, I said, I could not explain why this was so.

I had to explain that the little rectangular packets contained butter and that butter was made from milk, etc. I had to tell him where to put the butter wrappers (he wanted to put them on the floor or in his pocket).
In fact, I don't know where to put those wrappers. I work by the rule that nothing should be on the dining table other than those things relating to the meal and enhancing the meal (table decoration, for instance). Garbage has no place on a dining table.

In German hotels they have garbage pails on the table for the wrappers from the tiny packets of food (butter, jam, mustard and so on). An abomination worse than the wrappers themselves.

I had to tell my fellow Indian traveller that in an Australian home all the courses would not come on a tray at the same time, as they do on an airline. To make the point I took away his tray and his main course and his dessert and cheese and biscuits, leaving him only the entrée (which, I commented, was not always found in the Australian home).

He remonstrated with me about this action. But I told him that it was part of the lesson. He continued to look at me suspiciously. I told him to imagine himself seated at a table. What is a table? He said that in his part of India they sat on the floor. My food was now getting cold and I had lost interest in the exercise. I dumped all his courses back on his airline ‘table' and made that little half turn which indicates that the conversation between two airline travellers is over.

I then began to drink the fifty tiny bottles of wine and spirits which I had ordered as part of a lesson for him in alcohol and its variations and customs. I recall nothing more of this flight or the Indian's struggle with airline dining.

The Clinic is in somewhat acrimonious debate over whether good service in restaurants and other places is ‘stylised affection' or ‘commercialised affection'.

The performance of good service does include some of the features of fondness—the warm smile, the conventional greetings such as ‘good to see you again', and may even at times resemble flirtation. If you ‘act' friendly you are inclined to
become friendly.

I have been a customer in a bar in Washington where the female table attendants touch customers on the leg or genital area when serving drinks. Frankly, I find this confusing. Perhaps I was in a special sort of bar and didn't know it. As to what followed, I can only suggest that someone Slipped Something Into My Drink and that this does not concern us here.

Some restaurant staff both in Australia and the US have begun the practice of resting a hand on the customer's shoulder while discussing the order. I find that when this happens I think that the waiter must know me from somewhere or that he may be trying to Slip Something Into My Drink or whatever.

Or that I met him after he had Slipped Something Into My Drink the last time I was there.

I remember being embarrassingly confused on my first visit to the US when, in a restaurant in the deep south, a woman staff member said, ‘Now, honey, you come back and see me soon.' I took it as a personal invitation and returned that day after she had finished work to discover she did not recognise me. I came to learn that it is a simple Southern courtesy.

Which is not to say that bona fide affection cannot be found in commercial relationships.

However, Dr Bricolage argues that, leaving aside serendipitous exceptions, good service is not, and should never be, seen as an order of affection and nor should it be treated as such.

He maintains a strict formality in all his commercial dealings.

I share his objections to the advertisements which use the language and promises of love, sex or friendship.

For example, American Express, which promises us that we will never be a stranger in a foreign land if we carry an American Express card. This is not my experience.

A credit union advertises that ‘to us you're family'. That could not be true. They would not want me as ‘family', I'm sure. And I do not wish to ever be ‘family'.

The advertising for Clive James' last visit was ‘A One Night Stand with Clive James'. I found this misleading, although, I suppose, very few other people went to Clive James' performance expecting what I would understand to be ‘a one night stand'.

I object to merchandising which offers you membership of a ‘club'. As if one could be truly a member of something as subtle and as occult as a club by buying the advertised product.

I argue to the contrary of Dr Bricolage about the possibilities of affection between service people and their customers. There are people who unceasingly fall
in love with table attendants, flight attendants, bank clerks, bar staff and nurses—with people met in the daily round of business.

I argue that there is a delightful grey area in the service industries and there is much trespassing and wonderful excursions over the boundaries—without, that is, committing a criminal offence.

To take the most obvious case, in houses of ill fame, the confusions between ‘good service' and genuine affection and passion are of course intentionally confused by the nature—by the theatre, as it were—of that service.

Clients and, indeed, those in this profession can be forgiven if occasionally things become ambiguous. And professional sex workers do sometimes marry clients.

Speaking of confusion, I told Dr Bricolage and the others that the restaurant as a place of therapy has been important to me.

Although, in the interests of intellectual generosity, I did recall to Dr Bricolage an embarrassment from my own restaurant life.

I had been dining regularly at a restaurant with pretty much the same people for a couple of years, a lunch club. We had always enjoyed the witticisms and the quiet wisdom of our Greek waiter. All great waiters are professors. He taught us our Greek food and our Greek culture. He made pertinent but wise remarks and, because of his trade, which by its nature required him to come and go, his interventions were always ‘pithy', his witticisms ‘throwaway'.

One Christmas Eve, after the restaurant quietened down, we asked Con to join us at the table for a drink. He at once became a ‘real' person. He was garrulous. He was opinionated. He drank lavishly. He revealed a very narrow and prejudiced mind. He was arrogant. He was full of spite for the rest of the staff and for many of the customers. It was most unpleasant.

The reason that conversations with bar staff and waiters and so on can be on a slightly higher level of amusement and more considered than other conversations is that the two participants in the conversation have time to think and polish what they wish to say in between the comings and goings. Waiters and bar staff have to go away from the conversation to wait on others (and I suppose carry on conversations with those other customers, although it dismays me to think that they have good chat with others as well as with me) and it is in this time of separation that both can ponder what it is they wish next to say. Waiters and their customers are playing something which resembles simultaneous chess. The staff are the chess masters and we, the customers, are the challenging amateurs.

I privately noted, there at the meeting, that most of us are preferable and perhaps most desirable when in our social and professional roles (psychiatrist, priest or, in my case, Bon Vivant). I do not have time to discuss the wearing of uniforms and the impact of this on the human sensibility.

In these roles we display control, confidence, and we ‘present' ourselves. We have on our well-cut
and well-designed uniform of personality. As ‘real people' we lack something. We lose style, we lose our ‘art'. We become ragged, grubby, low-powered, un-neat.

There is another disorder abounding in our western societies which is related to all this.

It is that there is something reprehensible about being sexually or otherwise engaged by ‘part' of the person. There seems to be some kind of emotional policing of this area. The rule seems to be that you should ‘love' a person in their entirety and that every encounter with another human being should be deep, committed and ‘whole'. At the Clinic we consider this a grim derangement.

There are times when we play-act and when we enjoy the part divorced from the whole personality. We enjoy stars and celebrities this way.

We can, in our own way, for a short time, ourselves offer a dream, a fantasy, a symbol.

Sometimes we enjoy others because they remain in a role, remain a brilliantly facetted spectacle.

We enjoy celebrities, great beauties, Femmes Fatale, and Regency Rakes, Father Figures, Mother Figures, in this way.

Some years ago (or was it months?), when people were forever Slipping Something Into My Drink, I sometimes became a vamp, or worse, and did not conform to the Californian model of a mature person.

I am left with many ‘happy' memories. I do not think that it did me that much harm. It is, though, for others to say. We are not required by the Rules to
always present all our defects and to ‘slip out of role'. Sometimes we enjoy others because they remain in role.

We fear that there are Emotional Auditors who are out to discover if our particular affair, engagement, involvement, is deep, whole and committed. Those who are incapable of this are to be disqualified from having any part of sexuality or any emotional life.

These Auditors are themselves, of course, fully wholesome, correct and perfectly loving people.

We at the Clinic support those who love imperfectly; those who are sexually errant.

We fear that the standards set by the Emotional Auditors are too high for many of us.

But it is for these reasons that intimacy and domesticity can be rather unadorned, artless and unrefined in our contemporary world.

In a word, in domestic intimacy we become slouchers. We let slip the standards of self.

I, shamefacedly, admitted to the staff meeting that I am forever falling into the confusion between considerate service, kindness and love.

It may be a sad commentary on my personality, but it has been my secret conviction that one should take and give fondness, or anything resembling fondness, wherever you find it in life.