Men Remain Guests

“It is the personality of the mistress that the home expresses. Men are forever guests in our homes, no matter how much happiness they may find there.”

—Elsie de Wolfe

I read somewhere that starting off a piece of writing with a quote is considered a cheap trick—a weak-minded way to sidestep thinking up a proper lead all by yourself. It’s certainly tempting: If you can’t come up with anything intelligent to write on your own, go and find something intelligent written by someone else and trot it back out. The general effect will be to make you look, if not as clever as the original proclaimer, at least as if you’re the kind of deep thinking intellectual who goes around with pithy quotes richocheting about inside his head, ready for deployment when the situation demands them. At a dinner party, regurgitating a couple of well-placed witticisms by Winston Churchill or Groucho Marx or Ghandi can leave you looking positively dazzling—creating the impression that you’ve mastered half of Western literature, rather than just how to use Google. Who am I to turn my nose up at that?

In any case, the above quote by Elsie de Wolfe, the American actress and socialite remembered as the inventor of interior design as a profession (thank you, Google, again), neatly sums up the balance of power at our house after three months spent getting ready for a massive garden party due to take place there in a few days’ time. As an exotic species imported to this part of the world nearly twenty years ago, I have absolutely no blood claim (the only kind that counts) to the home I inhabit, which has been in my wife’s family for upwards of a hundred years. So I have long since accepted my supporting role there as Chief Mower of Grass, Fixer of Broken Stuff, Vanquisher of Large Hairy Bugs, Taker-Out of Garbage and Carrier of Heavy Things. I am appreciated for my facility at these things, unchallenged for ownership of them, and I try to tackle them with equanimity and good humor. Although sometimes I fail. The garden party in question is something committed to many months ago—possibly under the influence of alcohol—that seemed a flawless idea at the time, not least because my wife’s forebears were ambitious gardeners who left us much to work with. I’m not sure whether my wife is familiar with Elsie de Wolfe. But I believe she would recognize Elsie’s sentiment, since as the party date has approached the pressure to whip house and garden into a shape that suitably expresses its mistress’s personality has weighed heavily upon her. And, alas, on the Chief Carrier of Heavy Things. Indeed, Things have gotten so Heavy during the couple of weekends prior to the party that, in the interest of preserving domestic harmony, it seemed a good idea to start accepting any and all offers of help.

That is how, one recent Saturday, my friend Chip came to be sitting astride a large, fast, powerful lawn mower with which he had only moments before been made acquainted, staring in horror at the mangled remains of the prize azalea bush he had just reduced to pink and green potpourri. Those who read this column regularly will be familiar with my wife’s feelings on the subject of plants. That she loves them passionately and to distraction is an understatement, and no secret to her friends and family. So as Ashley returned home from some errands to discover Chip and me standing forlornly amid a blizzard of shredded azalea compost, I confess that there was a moment when I briefly considered turning and fleeing into the forest, leaving Chip to face the music alone. Of course my wife, with a composure that would have made her Great Aunt Edna proud, declared that she had never really liked the color of that azalea anyway, thanked Chip profusely for relieving her of it, and sent him home with a dozen eggs. For his part, I would say Chip seemed to grasp intuitively that the personality of the mistress expressed by freshly demolished accent shrubs was not the one he wished to be responsible for, and he turned up the following week with a beautiful white-blooming azalea to replace it with. So it would seem that Elsie de Wolfe remains as right today as she was in the nineteen-twenties. We men remain guests in our homes, no matter how much happiness we find there. And it’s just as well we do.