What does it say about a country that schedules its imperial housekeeping for the long weekend, and tells itself the timing is a coincidence?
I spent Monday at Eliza’s, where the brisket had been on since six and the flag on the porch was the small kind, the kind you put up in May and forget about. There were eleven of us. There was a bourbon flight nobody had asked for. There was, as there always is at Eliza’s, a lobbyist I will only describe as bipartisan, who turned up in linen and turned his phone face-down on the side table within the first ten minutes, which is the tell.
He mentioned, between the corn and the second bourbon, that there had been “some movement in the Southern Caribbean over the weekend.” He said it the way you would say the dishwasher had finished its cycle. Nobody asked what kind of movement. Eliza refilled his glass. My sister-in-law Judy, who has worked at the National Archives long enough to recognize a sentence that will be classified later, raised one eyebrow at me across the deck and then asked our host where she got the rub.
We talked about the rub for a long time. We talked about the rub the way previous generations of Americans had talked about the weather during difficult news cycles, which is to say at length and with feeling.
The lobbyist’s phone buzzed twice on the side table. He apologized to the table without picking it up, which is a thing I have only ever seen done by men who already know what the message says. He used the word “interdiction” once, and then a second time, slightly softer, the way you correct yourself in church. Both times we let it pass. The neighbor’s dog wandered through. Somebody asked about the gas situation at Costco.
I want to be careful here, because I am a columnist and not a Pentagon stenographer, and because the official posture by Tuesday morning was that nothing had occurred that required posture. There was a vessel, and then there was footage of a vessel, and then there was a sentence from a podium about narcotics and threats and the safety of the homeland, delivered at the cadence of a man reading the back of a cereal box. There was no one to ask whose boat. There was no one in the room whose job it was to ask whose boat. Asking whose boat was, on Monday at Eliza’s, considered slightly rude, like asking how much the deck cost.
I keep thinking about the moment the lobbyist turned the phone over. Not the buzzing. The turning. The small physical decision that the news on the screen was not for the brisket course. He is a man who has worked for four administrations and survived all of them by knowing exactly which sentences belong to which rooms, and on Monday afternoon he had decided that the Southern Caribbean belonged to a different room than the one we were eating in. We respected the decision. We refilled his bourbon. Eliza brought out a peach thing.
Judy walked me to my car at the end of the night and said only, “Margaret, please,” which is what Judy says when she has things she is not going to say. We stood under Eliza’s porch light a moment longer than we needed to. Somewhere in a briefing folder that will reach the public around Thanksgiving, someone is right now choosing which verbs to use. Somewhere a boat that existed on Sunday does not exist on Tuesday. Somewhere a sentence is being written about how this is what we wanted.
I drove home past three other cookouts on my street. Every one of them had the small flag. Every one of them had the brisket smell. Every one of them, I am sure, had a guest who turned a phone face-down on a side table and used a word twice, slightly softer the second time.
We praised the rub. We asked for the recipe. We did not ask whose boat.
