Steve Braunias
Steve Braunias is informed he’s hideous
It’d been a while since I’d gone out for a drink and everything was going swimmingly in the sense that I was all at sea, in over my head, drowning. There was a bunch of us. A mild bunch, nice people, old friends, complete strangers, in a pub on a Friday night. Wine, beer, cheerful spirits. All good. Except there was a tension in the air and I developed a very fine, beautifully attuned instinct for it, based on talking to someone who thought I was the worst human being to have ever slithered across the surface of the earth.
I missed my fireplace. The winter evenings of 2019 have been a long and reasonably content shut-in. I work from home and, at about 4 or 5, I slip into something more comfortable, close the curtains, pick up my book — I’m slowly relishing Paul Theroux’s epic travel book about a year in China, Riding The Iron Rooster — and draw up an armchair by the fire. I’m quite parsimonious about the firewood. I ordered only a square metre back in summer and figured I could eke it out with sacks of coal and foraging for pine cones in the nearby woods. It’s worked out okay so far and there should be enough wood for another month.
Yes, party all the time. And so it was that one of the great bores of my generation put down his book, slipped into a smart pair of chinos and a winter coat and headed for town. Friday afternoons have a special kind of excitement in all cities and there are traces of it, too, in one-horse towns. The horse walks into a bar. Everyone and their dog and/or horse were already in the bars when I got downtown at about 4. The light was falling, laughter burst out of doors, drunkenness had not yet taken hold and the city belonged to the office workers set free. I felt quite nervous.
She said over and over, like a chant, “Stop being so disingenuous.” I kept replying over and over, “But I’m not.” It was catch-22: each denial sounded more disingenuous than the last. Things had started well. I was a bit startled to be out in company and to have a drink in my hand instead of Theroux’s vivid comedy but I soon found my tongue and the conversation was pleasant, lively, normal. Now and then when I went to the bar I ran into other people who I knew and stopped to chat with them. One guy muttered that
he had to talk to someone else before they left and I thought he stalked off a little bit abruptly.
This hurt my feelings and I brooded that it was significant of some deeper antipathy or downright loathing but I put it out of my mind and gamely rejoined the conversation at my table.
The best, most adept conversationalists are people who feel comfortable in large groups — five, six people, maybe more. You see it in Four Weddings and a Funeral, where Hugh Grant is charming and being charmed in the company of his closest friends. I lack charm — and conversation — in these kinds of situations. I’m most comfortable one-to-one. Except the one I got to talking with on Friday night after a couple of hours of chatting to other people was intent on informing me that I was awful and furthermore that everyone was of the same opinion. I said I didn’t know that. She said, “Stop being so disingenuous.”
She set down a list of character failings. Some were true, some were sort of true, all were really hurtful. Neither of us had drank very much. I said, “I don’t get it. You really seem to hate me.”
“No, you know I like you,” she said. “I really
She set down a list of character failings. Some were true, some were sort of true, all were really hurtful.
value our friendship.”
“Jesus Christ,” I said.
And then there was something or other like the big reveal. I asked why she was telling me all these terrible things about myself and she said I needed to hear them because she was sick of people apparently regarding me with awe — “You have this myth about you” — and enough was enough. “They’re always blowing smoke up your arse,” she said. I’ve always hated that phrase. It’s so uncouth, and impractical. Anyway, she reasoned that her insights were a kind of corrective. Well, good job; I had to concede that any compliments I’ve received for my writing were now entirely submerged by the knowledge or confirmation that I’m hideous.
She texted an apology the next day. No harm done. Friday nights are made for bad scenes. Not long after she left the bar, I left too, taking my many and various character failings back home with me on the bus. It was about 10. I lit the fire. “The train reached Shenyang,” Theroux wrote.
NEXT WEEK: Ashleigh Young