And Yet... (26 page)

So I am grateful to my colleagues at
Vanity Fair
for the witty “tough love” initiative that began this process. I quite understand that their main motive was not to have to go on looking at me the way I was, but the application of cosmetic and camouflage also had some unintended consequences. For instance, having acquired a new set of gleaming white gnashers from Dr. Gregg Lituchy, I had an incentive not to turn them as yellow and brown as their predecessors had been. I signed up for a couple of antismoking procedures, at the magazine's expense, in the vague hope of kicking my worst habit, and felt the usual self-hatred and irritation when I was back to smoking within a few days, if not hours, of having quit.

However, I think that the Allen Carr antismoking course must have “worked” subliminally, because a few weeks after resuming smoking (and thus having a grinning death's-head as my hourly companion) I woke up one October morning in Madison, Wisconsin, where I'd gone to do a book signing, and knew that I was going to throw my smokes into the loo and my lighter and matches out of the window.
Which I thereupon did. The following day, I was back in Washington and being interviewed for the “Lunch with the FT” feature that the fine
Financial Times
runs every weekend. All the conditions for a relapse were perfect: my interviewer was a smoker, the day was lovely enough to permit us to sit outside with ashtrays on the table, the food was the rich and spicy and perfect cuisine of the Bombay Club, off Lafayette Square. And I didn't even ask for a puff. I was so proud of having this fact reported in the
FT
that I left the paper lying around where my antismoking daughter—whose complaints had also tipped the scale—might see it.

But now welcome to the world of the unintended or unforeseen consequence. I have or had another bad habit—that of biting my fingernails—that is even older and more deep-rooted than my nicotine dependency. I've been chewing away since I was eight, in other words. But once Dr. Lituchy had whitened and straightened and bonded my teeth, I no longer had the crooked and jagged snaggle-fangs that enabled me to get a purchase on my fingertips and to work the jaws in that nice crisp and crunchy action that makes all the difference. All of a sudden I was buying nail files at the pharmacy and buffing away at oval extremities that for the first time in half a century looked as if they belonged to a human. (Tiring of this rather feminine activity, I now go to a gay Vietnamese manicurist in my hood and fight to keep the expression “hand job” out of my mind as he fusses away over my paw-like mitts.)

Anyway, just as there are uncovenanted side benefits to major dental work, so there are things about quitting the smoking habit for which nobody prepares you. Did I have any idea that I would indulge in long, drooling—nay, dribbling—lascivious dreams in which I was still wreathed in fragrant blue fumes? I'm embarrassed to say that almost no nocturnal reverie has ever been so vivid or so actual: had the damn ciggies come to mean that much to me? I would wake with the complete and guilty conviction that I had sinned in word and deed while I was asleep. (In bold contrast, the morning mouth felt much better.)

Then there's the short-term memory loss. I might have been due
for this anyway at my age, but my recall for names and faces and facts, and for things from early education such as historical dates and verses of poetry, had been holding up pretty well. Abruptly I was suffering intermittently from what a friend once called “CRAFT syndrome.” (The acronym represents the words “Can't Remember a Fucking Thing.”) A visage would loom up at a party, or a literary reference would be on the tip of my tongue, and my recognition of the first or recollection of the second would dissolve like a ghost at cockcrow. This was bad enough in itself, but I also began to realize that I
cared
less. What the hell will it matter in a few decades whether I can put a name to this face, or an author to this snatch of verse? Along with the mild loss of function, in other words, came an access of the blues. My friend Darryl Pinckney put it very well and very bleakly when I told him that I was being visited as never before by low-level depression and mild but persistent anxiety. “That's to be expected,” he said. “You are in mourning. Maybe even grief.”

The Allen Carr seminar had taught me to tell myself that quitting the habit was not losing a friend but rather slaying an enemy, and I had tried hard to remember this mantra. But one doesn't get over a love-hate relationship with mere platitudes. All I can say for sure is that—while my terrors now are minor when compared with the miseries of a year ago—the old terrors were then, whereas the current angst is now.

From the heavy to the light: my colleagues in the looks department at
VF
decided that my hair could use some work, too. The problem here is that of a tobacco-colored top, more or less doing the job of covering the domed scalp while suffering lately from some forehead encroachment. And very fine: unmanageably so, in fact, with a double crown that makes it near impossible to style. Wash it, run a brush and hand through it, and the day can begin. Two efforts have been made to improve on this. My wife's hairdresser, Dennis Roche, who cuts and blow-dries Georgetown, recommended a “Brazilian keratin treatment.” (I had an immediate flashback to the ladies from Brazil as they waxed and ripped my groin.) And it was decided that I should
have my locks sculpted by none other than the great Frédéric Fekkai.

The keratin hair-repair treatment, originating in Brazil like so many things in the world of body fur, is now being popularized by rug stars like Roche and Peter Coppola. It essentially shrink-wraps your hair and leaves it both thicker and (if your problem is unruly curliness) straighter, which is odd since the principal ingredient is derived from sheep's wool. There's no big deal; it's sort of painted on and then left to dry for about twenty minutes, with the result that my hair doesn't frizz out when the weather turns humid, can be combed or brushed in such a way as to lie flat and in general stay put, and doesn't look as if I've been trying anything fancy. So, two thumbs up to that.

But nothing in life goes smoothly or consistently. Not long after the first hair enhancement, and on the morning of my appointment with Fekkai, I woke up to discover that my face had swollen to approximately twice its normal size. It wasn't even a regular and consistent swelling, either: one side had ballooned out as if I'd been kicked by a mule, while below my chin was dangling a sort of goiter or wattle or dewlap. Thanks a
lot
! Nothing makes one look more immediately aged than an extra swag of flesh over the Adam's apple, let alone a bloat around the cheek, and in an hour I was due at a salon which was positively rife with youth and beauty.

Everyone was very nice about it, pretending not to notice that the frog prince was getting his turn in the Fekkai chair. My trusty photographer even murmured something consoling about “photoshopping.” I was given, with an absolute minimum of fuss, a very close and skillful shave of the rudely expanded facial area, and then the most deft and swift shaping and trimming of the hair that I've ever had. A pity that everything in my self-improvement program was visibly pulling in two directions at once, and that my next appointment would be with an ENT specialist, who, oddly enough, would make me pay through the proboscis. (The pills he gave me made the swellings go away, but a month or so later a good bit of the heaviness under the chin reappeared, and seems now as if it has decided to take up permanent residence. I'm glad it likes the look of things.)

Finally to the most vexed question of all. Exercise. When you are still smoking, this doesn't really come up. A nice long walk? I'd rather have a cigarette. A visit to the gym? Some other time. What about a nice game of tennis? Are you by any chance
joking
? I have half a pack to get through. The only thing that could conceivably interest me would be a late-night snack, perhaps
avec
cocktails and wine, so as to give me a reason to open a fresh carton. And then, let conversation begin! Now that this is all in my past, what about something to fill the void?

I have often thought that when I do die it will be of sheer boredom, and the awful thing about growing older is that you begin to notice how every day consists of more and more subtracted from less and less. All right then, that rules out joining an exercise club. The sheer time spent getting there and back is bad enough, without the warm-ups and other horrors, and the encouraging chats with trainers and fellow members and all the rest of it. (I used to try to deduct the cost of a Washington, DC, club membership from my taxes, on the journalistic basis that so many of the other members were faced with indictment, but even so the zest for regular attendance soon left me.)

Then I started to hear about the ROM. This device—the initials stand for “Range of Motion”—was the perfect “no excuses” invention for slothful mammals. It promised to give you a workout in just four minutes. No: it was better than that. It insisted that you never give it
more
than four minutes. The catch was that it cost well over $14,000, but, hey, remember that great slogan for Stella Artois beer—“Reassuringly expensive”—and think of all the club subscriptions and travel time you will save over a lifetime (if you can pardon that expression). In return for the outlay, you receive a silver-and-black Harley-Davidson of a machine that acts as a standing reproach to your sloth and flab. I got one and put it in my office, so that I can't get from the door to my desk, or from my desk to the drinks cabinet, or from either to the bathroom and shower, without having to pass the glinting ROM. Lazy as I am, I am simply unable to persuade myself that I can't part with four minutes every day. Also, I need to make that money back.

The thing is constructed and balanced around a heavy steel wheel that is moved by a series of chains. The hardest way to move the wheel is with your feet, on the rear pedals. The second hardest way is with your arms, using the metal oars at the front. At first I thought that there must be some snake oil involved, but I have since met several good trainers who use the machine mainly or exclusively at their gyms. At the worst, you get your heart rate right up and break a decent sweat. At the best, you lose weight in the bargain. As a compromise, you can look thinner without getting any lighter. This is because—wouldn't you know it?—muscle weighs more than fat. In fact, the ROM people warn you that you may gain a few pounds in the first few months of use. The best I can say is that, even though I had just given up smoking, I didn't add any poundage to my 190 starting weight. And, which is the second best to shedding for real, I did start to receive a few kind remarks on how I looked thinner. I'll take what I can get. (And I wish I knew, and maybe someone can tell me, why my scales almost always show me about a fifth of a pound heavier
after
my shower than before.)

So this is the scorecard after almost a year of effort. Weight: the same, only slightly better distributed. Life expectancy: presumably somewhat increased, but who's to say? Smile: no longer frightening to children. Hair and skin: looking less as if harvested from a battlefield cadaver. Nails: a credit to the male sex. Ennui, weltschmerz, general bourgeois blues: more palpable and resulting from virtue rather than vice (which somehow makes them worse and harder to bear) but arguably less severe. Overall verdict: some of this you can try at home and some of it you certainly should.

(
Vanity Fair
, September 2008)

I
F ANY COUNTRY
has enjoyed a long reputation for peaceful and democratic consensus combined with civic fortitude, that country is the Netherlands. It was one of the special countries of the Enlightenment, providing refuge for the family of Baruch Spinoza and for the heterodox Pierre Bayle and René Descartes. It overcame Catholic-Protestant fratricide with a unique form of coexistence, put up a spirited resistance to Nazi occupation, evolved a constitutional form of monarchy, and managed to make a fairly generous settlement with its former colonies and their inhabitants.

In the last few years, two episodes have hideously sullied this image. The first smirching was the conduct of the Dutch contingent in Bosnia, who in July 1995 abandoned the population of the UN-protected “safe haven” at Srebrenica and enabled the worst massacre of civilians on European soil since World War II. Dutch officers were photographed hoisting champagne glasses with the sadistic goons of Ratko Mladic's militia before leaving the helpless Muslim population to a fate that anyone could have predicted.

Those of us who protested at this slaughter of Europe's Muslims are also obliged to register outrage, I think, at the Dutch state's latest
betrayal. On October 1, having leaked its intention in advance to the press, the Christian-Democrat administration of Jan Peter Balkenende announced that it would no longer guarantee the protection of Ayaan Hirsi Ali.