Après-ski Intrigue

To celebrate our first day of our annual ski trip, my buddies and I decided to treat ourselves to dinner at an upscale restaurant in part of the resort’s lodge complex. It felt like a great way to cap off a spectacular day on the slopes with a group that included a couple of my best friends: a tall, swarthy intellectual, and a less-tall (yet more-tall than me) and less-swarthy short-haired Doctor of Philosophy.

As we toasted to our inaugural evening, we noticed that at an adjacent table, the casino mogul Steve Wynn was celebrating his birthday with friends. It looked like most of them were old friends, since, other than Steve, most of them had white hair. He gave a brief speech about how important friendship was, and in particular the compassion and kindness that comes with deep personal connections, and we were taken with the apparent genuineness in his words.

After a few rounds of drinks at altitude, we were getting a little more light-headed than normal, and the next time the waitress came by to ask us if we wanted anything, my intellectual friend said to her with gusto “We’d like another round of stiff drinks,” and then added, “on me!” to our group, and a few of Steve’s friends stared at us quizzically, perhaps puzzled that things needed to be paid for.

At the conclusion of our dinner with Steve, we walked over to the main lodge to decide what to do. The foyer featured an ample seating area with couches; to the right was a restaurant, and to the left was a bar with mood lighting. From our vantage point, we could see that the bar was full of what looked like boisterous people in their 30s and 40s, but once a few of them came out into the foyer, we realized that the lighting was impeccably done since despite the heavy plastic surgery, these people that had left were inarguably a couple of decades older. This made our next move clear: We needed to determine the ages of the rest of the patrons.

After ordering some drinks and moseying up to a few of the customers, we had largely confirmed our suspicions. And I noticed that while it was fun to mingle with these older people, I felt out of my element. But I realized that this didn’t seem to be the case for the Doctor: He’d begun speaking to one of the women at the bar, listening intently, and nodding and laughing at the appropriate times. And he did a lot of that, as she seemed to speak without pause, gesticulating with eyes wide, giving him little opportunity to say anything. Since we were nearby and she was interested in pulling more people into her orbit, the rest of us were introduced.

Of medium height, she was extremely fit and wore a tight black long-sleeve shirt with rhinestone patterns on it, and she smelled strongly of sandalwood. Upon introduction, my intellectual friend smiled at her with a skill that he’d honed over years of selling snake oil, and then looked at me, opened his eyes wide, and then rolled them, and I smothered a laugh and faked a cough. My intellectual friend had already judged her unworthy of our Doctor friend.

Sometimes when someone talks, they fill your consciousness as you’re pulled in by their charisma, or that they’ve got something you really want to hear about – like that they’ve got the secret to getting rich, or a deep insight into human nature, or whatever it is they have to say because you find them attractive enough – and while she had our Doctor’s attention, this woman didn’t have this effect on the rest of our contingent. However, she made up for it in spades in sheer volume, expressing her opinion on all things at length and in detail. There was something about the jazz musicians on stage that went on for 10 minutes and 25 seconds, ending only when she felt compelled to go and speak to them and ask if they remembered her from last night, and then upon her prompt return there was an extended treatise on the value of the environment that lasted for 17 minutes and 21 seconds, and I thought about how, in my youth, one of my friends had asked me if there was anything worse than having a testicle slowly crushed in a vice.

And then, out of nowhere, she said, “And then, last night, two of these old guys got into a fight over a woman! You see that guy over there?”, and she nodded in the direction of a booth across the bar, and then said “That’s one of them. When it was happening, I thought that guy was having a heart attack, and then you could see that they both were rolling around on the ground with beet-red faces and veins bulging out of their necks and foreheads!”

She had stunned us with this revelation: something that was interesting, and stood on it’s own merits. She continued: “At their age it seems incredibly dangerous! One of them could have had an aneurysm,” and as I nodded along, I stole a glance at the booth. Accompanied by two similar-vintage women, the man was reminiscent of a pinkish Rush Limbaugh. I could see white hair sprouting from the back of his collar, and I wondered if Rush was also a silverback.

As we considered this information, a lull had settled over the conversation, and I felt compelled to interject, “It’s great that they were able to revive both of them!”, but my companions weren’t listening to me. The Doctor remained polite in his attention to her, but my intellectual friend, resisting her pull on our Doctor, had seen an opening and took it. “So…”,  he began, and I listened intently. I’d heard this tone before and I knew there was something interesting coming. And because he’s a very moral and philosophical person, I was almost certain that it would be in the one-on-one Lincoln-Douglas debate format.

With feigned casual indifference, he asked, “How old is that?”, and she said, “Oh, I imagine around sixty,” and my friend, ever so deliberately and with just the right tone thrust the spear, tipped with the poisonous question that was on all of our minds: “So how old are you?”

She evaded the question, but he was relentless: “It’s not like were not all going to die eventually!” To her credit, she was slippery and left him unsatisfied with something about “our age”. And while they were engaged in this intellectual thrust-and-parry, I looked in my Doctor friend’s direction and imagined the romantic feelings towards her that he might be experiencing, and, unlike my intellectual friend, felt compelled to bring these to a crescendo; making sure I had the Doctor’s attention, I looked at him and then at her and then back to him, and as covertly as possible formed a tube with the fingers and thumb of my left hand and with my right index finger executed a less intellectual/more physical thrust-and-parry. For his part, the Doctor gave no acknowledgement of my demonstration and continued to nod and raise his eyebrows when she spoke.

The balance of power in the conversation had shifted and my intellectual friend had taken control. “What films have you seen recently?”, he asked her, and in the shortest response she’d given to this point, she mentioned that she’d seen “Saving Mr. Banks”, a film about Mary Poppins and Walt Disney,  and that it was a moving experience.

She couldn’t have known it at the time, but this hit a nerve with my intellectual friend, whose wife had converted to Judaism a few times. “Of course, you know that by paying money to see a film about Walt Disney that paints him in positive light, you might as well be endorsing Kristallnacht and Hitler – Disney’s anti-Semitism is well documented. The way that guy rolled out the red carpet for Leni Riefenstalhl is outrageous!”

When drinking, my intellectual friend frequently employed these debate skills when protecting his friends, and when people ran into this buzz-saw of moral rectitude, other members of the conversation sometimes suffered benign neglect, and I often felt obliged to ensure that they were not left behind. The Doctor’s expression remained inscrutable but I believed that he was still taken with the woman, so as the one-sided debate raged, I, looking in his direction and nodding towards her, formed a circle with my right hand fingers and thumb and brought them to my mouth and, pressing out my left cheek with my tongue, mimed fellatio.

Because of his impeccable bedside manner, the Doctor has an incredible discipline of not betraying his thoughts when he so chooses, and this was no exception: No amount of generous altruism on my part could alter his enigmatic expression.

All the while, my intellectual friend continued to score uncontested debate points: “Hell, maybe we should just unfreeze Walt’s head and ask the old son of a bitch to deny it!”, and, in a selfless gesture of compassion, I made a giant arc over my head with both of my hands and again mimed some finger-lovemaking, but alas, I’d been too obvious and the woman had seen it, and she gave me a look that could be described as either puzzlement or horror.

Either way, the look was the signal to move along: From our contradictory positions and in separate ways, my intellectual friend and I had done all we could to help our dear Doctor, but there was no more to give as she had caught me out. I tapped my intellectual friend on the shoulder and said “We really should be going,” and to her, “It was great to meet you!” and I whisked him away to the other end of the bar.