The Great Mistake by Jonathan Lee

Author:Jonathan Lee [Jonathan Lee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

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Four women are singing in Mr. Burnley’s garden. Three dancers are behind them, flourishing calabashes. The white expressionless supervisors sit and blink.

Fine wooden furniture out here shows signs of permanent exposure. Thin muslin, the general dress of the performers, is perfectly creaseless and clean, and trimmed with colored satin, with ribands and sashes of the same. Some of the musicians sport silk stockings. Some of them sport colored kid shoes. Gilt buckles gleam as they tap their feet, expected to entertain.

Andrew stands to the side and watches, a glass of water in his hand. He feels pity and shame and relief. He feels he has fully succumbed to a system. He feels an awful secret relief at not being the very lowest. At the end of the performance everyone claps and nods. Only the vigor varies.

Mr. Burnley’s wife is standing at the door after the music stops, inviting everyone—she means the white people—to come inside the house for dinner.

That blindingly bland smile of hers. Its beauty lights up Andrew’s inner world for half a second. Then her eyes go dead as they train themselves on the next person, the guest over his shoulder, and light up again, and go dim, a routine of rehearsed charisma. What would it be like to have that kind of power, to be the central point upon which a world turns, to be able to animate people with only a look, and yet to have to listen, at other times, to your husband pretending that you are nothing more than his ornament? Is Mr. Burnley ever intimate with her? And does she ever enjoy it? And what of Mr. Carlson’s wife? These are questions Andrew will never get an answer to, just as he will never quite come to a theory as to why Mr. Burnley himself is barely ever seen.

The dinner unfolds according to a logic of decadence, the principle of excess. So many candlesticks, so many handsome shades, so many serving plates and bottles of wine that it quickly becomes impossible to fix your attention on any single thing, and this starts to seem like the point. The whole room is brilliant, therefore nothing is, and between courses bodies swim in and out of Andrew’s field of vision, lost and found, and his panic, his sense of disorientation, sets in. The younger wives are always swapping seats, the impossibility of remembering all the names and faces becomes more impossible still, the difficulty of keeping others engaged with an idea stirs in his bones, the need to let the conversation fall into a smooth groove, his unease in this area, and it does not help that he has lost his copy of Charles Day’s Hints on Etiquette, its advice on how to think ahead to the next linked comment or inquiry, shaping out a suitable topic with a stranger, because he loaned it to the latest arrival from America, the new-new boy, and people never do take care of other people’s books, not unless they have had to fight for them.

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