A Comeback with the Ring of Truth
Confronted by a party guest with an axe to grind, I must flap my gums faster than they’ve flapped in my whole flippin’ life.
I performed an earlier version of this essay—which appears in somewhat different form again in The Accidental Terrorist—as part of the Essay Fiesta reading series at The Book Cellar in Chicago, December 21, 2009. Certain names, as they say, have been changed.
One of the common occurrences in my life (and maybe yours) is to walk away from a difficult confrontation, stew for a while, then smack my forehead when, far too late, the perfect rejoinder pops into my mind.1
There may have been other occasions, but off the top of my head I can recall only one exception to this frustrating pattern. It was 2003, at a Christmas party I hosted at the house I was renting in Queens. I was married then, and the parties we threw were legendary affairs, packed with interesting people and replete with flowing booze.
On this particular occasion, in addition to the usual suspects, we’ve invited my old friend Katrina and her new husband Bernard. Katrina and I went to high school together in Utah as young Mormons, dated for a time afterward, and stayed in sporadic touch over the years after we both abandoned the faith. Bernard is a Nordic immigrant nine years younger than Katrina. The two of them met in graduate school, where Katrina earned a master’s degree in microbiology. They’ve both recently been hired by a pharmaceutical company in Connecticut, which places them within a not unreasonable driving distance of Queens.
It’s my first time meeting Bernard. He strikes me as a nice enough fellow when I take his coat at the door. I chalk his reticence and his inability to look me in the eye up to the nerves you get at a party where you don’t know anyone.
I spend some time catching up with Katrina while Bernard stalks the fringes of the party, sampling our beverage offerings. Did I say sampling? A better word might be plundering.
About an hour in, I’m talking with a small group of friends in a corner of the kitchen when young Bernard—a newly minted doctor of chemical engineering, mind you—saunters over and edges his way into our conversation. Did I say edges? A better word might be bulls.
In a slurred North Sea accent, he says, apropos of nothing, “You know what I just found out that I did not know before?” Our liquor cabinet seems to have loosened—and thickened—his tongue considerably. “I found out in the car on the way down here. This guy here”—he indicates me with the wineglass in his hand—“he used to be engaged to my wife.”
I glance around the circle of half a dozen people. It includes my longtime friend Bob, and also my friend Elizabeth, who is mostly blind.
“Well, this is awkward,” I say.
“Yeah,” Bernard goes on, “he, like, got engaged to her at some airport.”
This is true. It was the Salt Lake International Airport, seventeen years past. I was about to board a plane and begin my two-year tour of duty as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—the Mormons. Katrina and I had only been dating a few weeks at the time, but we had fallen desperately in love, as people often do when attraction manifests and the time to act on it is short. I wanted her to wait for me while I was off saving souls in the wilds of, er, Canada, and she had dropped some big hints that a certain little question might seal that deal.
I do not like the intent look on Bernard’s face, nor his belligerent tone. I haven’t been in a fight since junior high, but I can still sense the inexplicable threat of violence in the air. I don’t want Elizabeth caught in the middle if things turn ugly. I try to play it casual.
“That was a really long time ago,” I say. “We were kids. I was nineteen.”
“Yeah,” says Bernard. “And my wife was twenty.”
“Bill, time to change the subject,” says Bob quietly. He’s a former merchant seaman and Coast Guard engineer. “You’re only digging a hole.”
“Can you believe this?” Bernard says to the group at large, spreading his arms and sloshing wine on the floor. “I only just found out. That’s a pretty big thing.”
I suffer from the delusion that calm, reasonable words can make a difference in the world. “Not really, it’s not,” I say, trying to make it sound offhand. “It didn’t mean anything. To Mormons, getting engaged is a pastime. It’s a sport. It’s just a thing you do.”
This, also, is more or less true. Mormons stress marriage so early and so fiercely that single women can be made to feel like old maids at twenty-one. But by the same token, engagements made under that kind of pressure tend toward fragility. I myself was engaged no less than five times more after Katrina, and my father claimed to have notched seven rings on the old engagement belt.
Unsteady on his feet and unfazed by my footnotes, Bernard plops the steaming carcass of his beef down in front of us. “You know what else I found out? There was something about a ring, this ring—made out of wrapping paper?”
I look around the group again. “Foil,” I say. “It was the foil wrapper from a stick of chewing gum.”
I was nineteen, had never lived away from home, and was about to embark on a two-year experiment in poverty. No way I could afford a real ring. So when I got down on one knee in front of Katrina in that airport departure lounge, I pulled out a Wrigley’s wrapper folded twice lengthwise, sized it around her finger, tore off the excess length, and fastened the ends with a scrap of Scotch tape. Voilà! Instant engagement ring.
(Of course, the ring turned out to be worth less than what I paid for it, given the trajectory the romance followed, but that’s a story for another day.)
Bernard wags a finger at me. “Yeah, yeah, that was it. A gum wrapper. And you know what else?” He leans in close enough for me to gag on his breath, but doesn’t lower his voice a bit. “She still has it. She still has that ring.”
I don’t know why this hits me as such a shock. I never stopped to consider how that time in our lives might have been as important to Katrina as it was to me. I do my best to keep a neutral expression. The tension is unbearable.
“That’s nothing, Bernard,” I say, patting his shoulder. “I still have the gum.”
His eyes widen. For a moment he looks like he believes me.
Then everyone laughs in a good-natured way, and so does he, and the tension ebbs away. Bernard wags his finger another time or two, and, with a dip of his head, wanders away in search of other entertainment.
“You dodged a bullet there, pal,” Bob says.
I watch as poor Bernard shows one of my guests his stomach tattoo.
“I guess that’s what I do,” I say, and I go looking for a drink. ∅
My memoir, The Accidental Terrorist: Confessions of a Reluctant Missionary, is available from all the usual sources online, though I would encourage you to order it either from your local independent bookstore or from Bookshop.org.
My friend Geoff Landis reminds me that the French have a term for this experience: l’esprit de l’escalier. Translated loosely, this “staircase wit” is the bon mot that occurs to you on the bottom step as you’re leaving the party.
Great anecdote, Bill.
Since "Bernard"--a Nordic guy--didn't look you in the eye, I suspect he might be Finnish. My corporate overlords are from Finland, and Finns in general don't look strangers in the eye. As the anecdote goes: "Finns don't look you in the eye, instead they look at the tips of their shoes. Once they know you for ten years, they might look at the tips of your shoes."
I think that the reason we walk away from a difficult confrontation often is because we think what happened wasn't so important, while the offended party does, or that--probably in your anecdote--while it was important then, you have gotten over it, left it behind (water under the bridge and all that), and are lost for words when confronted with it.
Yes, we've all done stupid and silly things in the past. Then we learned from them and grew, changed for the better. Then, to be held accountable again is like punishing a criminal twice for the same crime. Anyway, fantastic comeback. I laughed, too.
Weirdly wonderful