He ordered for the whole table without the slightest trace of performance. That was the first thing I noticed. Not that he chose so well—though he got everything right, including the dish I had wanted and then talked myself out of—it was that there was no display in the way he did it. No glance at me for confirmation, no gesture announcing “I’m in charge here.” He simply told the waiter what we wanted in the tone one uses to discuss the weather, and handed the menu back. For the rest of that meal I kept thinking about what that gesture meant, and whether the fact that I kept thinking about it said something about me too.
Wealthy men will sometimes give you a kind of attention I long ago learned to read correctly. It is flattery served as performance—praise spoken for effect, curiosity that is really possession, making you feel special because they want you to feel that way, not because they are actually tracking who you are. I have received too much of that; I know its texture. This one was different.
He asked about my work—not the surface way, but the way that only comes from someone who actually listened to the first answer. He asked me what the hardest part was. I said something vague, that I found the work meaningful, yet sometimes it felt as though it did not add up to enough. He did not console me. He said, “So what would ‘enough’ look like?” I did not know how to answer. I am still thinking about it.
He has a large-scale life I cannot reach. All evening I was aware of it, the way you are aware of the height of the room you are standing in. But what I was not prepared for was that all of it did not seem to be a subject for him at all. He did not mention his success, did not establish his position in any way. The whole meal was—I will use the word deliberately—quiet. Quiet in this sense: nothing was being proven.