As I leave the apartment, telling Q that I am off to meet a friend, I can’t help but wonder how much dinner is going to run.
I have a thing about being late so I get to the restaurant a few minutes before six o’clock. I am not surprised to find that I have already arrived. I am seated on a sofa in the vestibule reading a Philip Roth novel that I immediately recognize has not yet been written. I say hello softly and my future self rises to meet me.
I am disappointed by how I—the older I, that is—look. I do not look terrible, but I do not look spectacular either. I am particularly dismayed that my body proves susceptible to some ravages of age from which I thought I would be immune. I understand that I will grow old, of course, but I exercise quite regularly and eat right, and like to believe that I will be able to keep my weight down until my knees give out and maybe even for some time after that. But here I am, not much more than sixty, I think, and already I have something of a paunch. I am also a bit jowly. This is alarming.
I am, furthermore, not as well groomed as I am now. We are each dressed in a blue oxford and khaki pants, but the older me’s collar is worn past a point that I would now allow. I note that collars have grown wider again, presuming of course that I am continuing to keep up with fashion trends. This strikes me as a change for the worse, but of course styles will come and go.
In other subtle ways, I have allowed myself to deteriorate further. I have a few coarse ear hairs that require frequent attention; these have been allowed to have their way. My nails could use a clipping. I have psoriasis in some spots. It is manageable, but I note that this is not being tended to either: my hands are dry and flaky.
It is me and not me.
I do not consider myself extraordinarily vain. I look at myself in the mirror when I shave or after I get back from the gym, but I do not spend all that much time examining the vessel in which I reside. Still, I know myself well enough. What is most disturbing about this future version of me is that it is obvious, at least to me, that I am deeply and profoundly sad.
“Shall we go to our table?” I ask.
“That sounds fine,” says older me, and we present ourselves to the maitre d’, who finds our name in the reservation book.
“I’ll be happy to take your coats,” he says.
I see a disgruntled look on my older face as he hands the coat over to the captain. I am peeved myself and reluctantly relinquish my own. Mine is a thin, cotton autumn jacket—the weather has not turned too cool yet. The jacket could easily rest on the back of my chair. Nor is it an expensive coat. I purchased it for forty dollars or so, on sale at Filene’s Basement. If it were to get stained, life would not end. And it most decidedly will not get in anyone’s way. Still, they require that the coat be checked.
This service is putatively free, and if it really were, I might not mind so much. But at the end of the meal, when the coat is delivered, there is the obligation of tipping the coat check person. I never know how much to give. On the one hand, I generally feel bad for coat check people. They have to stand for hours in a dreary closet, which in nightclubs is always in the basement and too close to the bathroom. The patrons are often drunk, and they always have just one more thing, a hat or gloves that can just go in the sleeves but are inevitably mislaid, or a bulky handbag, or, too often, something unreasonable, like a humidifier, which I once saw someone check on a Saturday night. All this to collect a tin of dollar bills. The job seems like a raw deal and the attendants have my empathy. On the other hand, it is a service that I neither need nor want and to which I therefore, as a matter of principle, demur.
I feel this way about many services. I do not mind paying a blacksmith or a gastroenterologist because I cannot make horseshoes or perform colonoscopies myself. I am, however, perfectly capable of draping my jacket over the back of a chair. I am highly capable, too, of parking my car in a lot. I do not need someone to drive it from the front door to a spot fifty feet away, at a cost of two or three dollars. Nor do I need someone to wash my clubs with a towel after a round of golf—setting me back five dollars for two minutes work on his part.
I am particularly uncomfortable with the concept of the bathroom attendant. This person provides no direct assistance, of course, and it makes me uncomfortable to have someone squirt soap in my hands and offer me a towel. I do not use any of the sundries spread across the counters of upscale bathrooms. I do not use cologne, I do not groom myself in public bathrooms and thus do not require aftershave lotion or styling gel, and I would never consider, not even for a second, taking a sucking candy or a stick of gum from a tray near a row of urinals.
The cost can mount up. It gets particularly expensive when one does not have small bills and thus faces the Hobson’s choice of either leaving an absurdly big tip or rummaging through the collection plate for change. In this situation I will usually just hold it in, although on more than one occasion, I have paid five bucks for a pee. Inevitably, this is later a source of regret.
I see that the older version of myself feels precisely as I do about the coat, and a bond is forged between us.
“What do you tip for a coat?” asks older me.
“Two dollars?” I say. “You?”
“Ten dollars.”
“Jesus.”
“Inflation is a bitch.”
I nod.
All of this is depressing, but it seems silly to allow it to spoil the meal, and I resolve to enjoy myself. It is a nice table, much nicer than the one that I had with my mother years before, and far away from the men’s room. I try to recall whether the restaurant maintains a bathroom attendant on duty. I think that it does and resolve, therefore, to limit myself to one Diet Coke.
After we sit down, I ask about the Roth novel.
“It is a Zuckerman story, set late in his life, in a hospice in fact.”
“I thought he was done with Zuckerman, after Exit Ghost.”
“He cannot resist Zuckerman. He came back to him one more time.”
“Is the book good?”
“Brilliant,” says older me. “It is about the loneliness of death and, ultimately, the impossibility of making peace with one’s life. It is, I think, the defining book of our generation.”
I nod.
I say, “One writer to another, it is funny how writers keep coming back to the same themes.”
Older me says, “One writer to another, you don’t know the half of it.”
He asks, “How is Q?” She is obviously on his mind.
“She is magnificent,” I say. The older me nods.
“The garden is having some problems. There is a developer who wants to build on the land. He has money and political support. Q and her colleagues are worried. But other than this, she is as wonderful as ever—beautiful, brilliant, principled.”
The older me nods again. I have the sense he doesn’t say very much.
“I have been wearing flat-front pants, at her suggestion. I am wearing a pair she bought me right now. I don’t know how I feel about them. They are unquestionably stylish and thinning, but I feel uncomfortable without the pleats. Sometimes I almost feel as if I’m naked. Q says no one needs all that material hanging around. She’s undoubtedly right, but I have been doing things the same way for a very long time, and it’s hard to change. You know what I mean?”
Older me nods once more. He says, “If I have my dates straight, you and Q moved in together not long ago.”
“Yes,