When A Billionaire Maligned My Wife And Me
This happened a decade ago.
The four of us were lounging on a porch overlooking the Atlantic, my wife and me and our two good friends who had invited us to stay the long weekend as their houseguests. I don’t recall the time of day or how brisk the ocean breeze was or the strength and slant of the sun. Or whether the four of us were reading or talking or just sitting with our own thoughts and listening to the gulls.
My best guess is sitting with our own thoughts, because we’re good enough friends to enjoy each other’s company without speaking.
Then the billionaire, who will remain unidentified, drove up to the house, called out the names of our friends, and followed their voices onto the porch.
He was a friend of our friends, who he considered his equals. But not us.
When he arrived, the billionaire was surprised to see my wife and me sitting there. He had a habit of thrusting his large head forward, the head of a bull. Now he thrust it toward my wife and me.
“Here they are,” he said, “the moochers.”
Astonishment. Silence. Silence of the creeping, crawling kind. “Moochers” is such an ugly word.
When someone delivers a sucker-punch insult aimed at you, it hurts. At the same time, when someone stumbles so badly in manners and decency, it’s hard not to feel embarrassed for them. I looked away from the billionaire. I think we all did.
The billionaire had aimed at us, but had fired off a double-barreled insult.
Of course my wife and I were hurt to be accused that we were taking advantage of our good-hearted and generous friends. And our friends, such wonderful hosts, so good at making us feel at ease in their home, were mortified at the attack on their guests.
As well, the billionaire had implied that our friends were oblivious to our “mooching,” that we were taking them for “suckers,” a word I suspect also featured prominently in the billionaire’s vocabulary and worldview.
Even the billionaire must have realized he had said something wrong. He left just as quickly as he came. Our friends apologized for his behavior. We laughed it off. He’d ruined the moment, but not the weekend, and certainly had done nothing to harm our friendship.
Brashness and a lack of a filter could be expected of this anonymous billionaire, an alpha male who moved with cocksure confidence through his world of fawners and flatterers. But this insult was an egregious lapse. Even for someone like him.
And the insult had a lasting sting, evidenced by my memory of it after all this time.
It wasn’t until later that I came to understand why he had lashed out at us and called us moochers.
One of Charles Dickens’ most clever creations is arguably the greatest moocher in literary history, a man named Harold Skimpole, one of the inhabitants of the novel Bleak House.
Skimpole is a middle-aged man who calls himself a “mere child” and warns that he is not to be trusted with any responsibility. His conversation is elegant and sophisticated, and entirely at the service of convincing us that he has no concept of either time or money or worldly affairs.
Skimpole expects everyone to be aware of his deficiencies. It then follows that anyone foolish enough to expect Skimpole to honor his obligations has only themselves to blame.
So the furniture dealer who rents chairs to Skimpole shouldn’t be surprised to be stiffed after the chairs are returned badly used. What else, Skimpole asks the dealer, did you expect us to do with the chairs except to sit in them?
When Skimpole is ill, a doctor comes to heal him. Skimpole tells the doctor he’s been well compensated by Skimpole’s “expansive intentions” to pay. These “intentions” are far more valuable currency than the ludicrous “bits of metal or thin paper,” that people capriciously call money.
The safety net beneath all these extravagant and irresponsible acts of childishness and ignorance is Skimpole’s benefactor, the generous John Jarndyce who always pays Skimpole’s debts.
Skimpole’s antics are a welcome change of pace for Jarndyce. Throughout the novel, the wealthy Jarndyce is assailed for funds by blustering and self-important shills for dubious charities.
So Jarndyce is amused and charmed by Skimpole’s candid claims of helplessness, so different in affect from the approaches of all the other leeches–– “vehement in profession, restless and vain in action, servile in the last degree of meanness to the great.”
But the result is the same. Skimpole and the others squeeze and plunder from the inexhaustible Jarndyce coffers.
And to put a final point of sophistry on it, Skimpole turns Jarndyce’s generosity on its head, asserting, “I [am] a benefactor to you by sometimes giving you an opportunity in assisting me in my little perplexities.”
If Skimpole is the artful moocher, my wife and I had no talent for moochery. We were merely two among many of that most ordinary species: weekend summer houseguests in the Hamptons.
So why were we so unjustly accused?
Earlier that weekend, our friends had thrown a party. One of their guests was a well-known actor who I had gotten to know a bit at other events. This actor loved to read, and when he and I discovered that we shared a love of Proust, we immediately became engrossed in a discussion of our favorite characters and favorite scenes.
The more the world of Proust expanded for us, the more the world of the party contracted.
In the midst of our discussion, the billionaire arrived at the party and made a beeline to the actor.
I believe the billionaire felt a kinship of fame with the actor and thought the two of them should bond, because they were the two best known people at the party. He greeted the actor heartily and ignored me. Everything about the billionaire’s body language indicated that he expected to displace me as the actor’s conversational partner.
Instead, the actor gave the billionaire a perfunctory “hello,” and he and I went right back to discussing Charles Swann, Odette, the Vedurins or whichever Proustian characters we were having fun gossiping about.
The billionaire stayed in place for a few seconds, perhaps seeing if he could jump into our conversation. He couldn’t, so he moved on. Years later, at another event, the billionaire told me that he didn’t read books, because doing so was a waste of his time.
It was then that I understood why the billionaire had called us moochers. It was his way of lashing out at me, because at the party the actor and I, ensconced in our world of Proust, had ignored him. He had been unable to add anything to our literary discussion, so he found himself lost at that moment, irrelevant and ignored, a state of being that must have been as abhorrent to him as it was rare. He must have been furious.
Harold Skimpole, that arch-moocher of Bleak House, was right in one crucial respect: just as being a good host requires guests, to be a benefactor requires someone who needs your help and is willing to take it.
When the giver and the recipient behave graciously, it becomes a lovely thing for both sides.
Gratitude grows and the better possibilities of life and humanity are affirmed.
Thus, the imprecation of moocher should be rare, as should the gloomy shadow it casts.
I wish it would disappear completely, and let be what is best and brightest in our world.
I enjoyed this, David. Nicely structured! Vividly rendered. Good reminder of how difficult it can be to resist others' distorted representations of us, even if we know, intellectually, that the exchange is more about the other person's baggage than about us.
I'm dodging your mooching question with a craft one: why not give us the time of day and the ocean breeze and the particular slant of sun? Why not just paint the scene without calling attention to what you don't remember? My own feeling is that a little invention in scenes like this is not only permissible, but actually essential to drawing a reader into the emotional truth of a memory. I've never been to the Hamptons. Why not take me there?
Interesting piece, David. It seems to me your story isn't really about mooching, however, but about how the rich feel about people who benefit from their wealth. In this sense, "moochers" are both the "untouchables" of your world and, at the same time, the people who provide many rich people with a twisted sense of self-worth. (Your story is also about jealousy btw, which is a whole other topic!)
As an outside observer of this phenomena who has sometimes been caught in the crossfire, allow me to offer a story and a question. I'll start with the question. What is the line between being a "moocher" and the natural give and take of family and community? And - now I'm going to twist the question - how does the fear of being seen as a "moocher" impact family and friends' ability to be in community with wealthy people, and vice versa?
And here is my somewhat similar / somewhat different story. Sixteen years ago, a probable-billionaire offered my husband and me a great and unexpected gift - to host our wedding at his estate. My husband's father, a master craftsman who had recently died, had spent many years helping build the estate, so my husband accepted the offer with great joy.
And here is where the chalice became poisoned. We met before the wedding to discuss logistics and dates. At the end of the meeting, the probable-billionaire cautioned us, almost off-hand "Now, don't expect us to pay for the rest of your wedding." Of course, just as we never would have asked to have the wedding at his estate, such a thing would never have occurred to us.
From that time on, this great gift became a weight around our necks. In one casual sentence, we had moved from a young couple receiving a mitzvah on behalf of a beloved and recently departed friend, to moochers with our hats out begging for more.
In another ironic twist, we wound up supporting my husband's father's business for many years at great financial cost to ourselves. We did it because my husband couldn't bear to let this man who had been his father's close friend down by closing it. The day this business relationship ended was one of the best days of our life.
And the funny thing is, I'd bet you anything all that time this man thought we were the ones mooching off of him!