HOME / the breakfast table: An e-mail conversation about the news of the day.

Philip Weiss and Zo‰ Heller

the breakfast table:
entries

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Charmless Rich Slugs and Their Babes

By Zo‰ Heller
Posted Wednesday, June 9, 1999, at 10:25 AM ET

Dear Philip,

RSS

Thanks for the tips on American idiom. But I think you'll find that the more precise American translation for knickers is panties, not pants.

Your description of the Belmont race was very gripping, and the homily about competition--"great competitors are really competing with themselves"--is, strictly speaking, unassailable. Then again, most competitors aren't great. It seems entirely natural and, indeed, rational, that non-geniuses--writers, jockeys, police officers, whoever--should take notice of, and fret about, where they stand in their respective, professional pecking orders. Salieri would have been a fool if he hadn't noticed (and been somewhat downcast by the fact) that Mozart was better than he was at the composing thing.

Also, I can't help feeling that John le Carré protests too much on this matter. I once interviewed him and he went on and on and on about how deeply uninterested he was in the judgments of the literary world--how much more it meant to him to receive the praise of a taxi driver, or his gardener, than that of a critic. I thought the notion of prizing one's domestic help for their literary insights was pretty nauseating and fake. It also struck me that genuine detachment from the petty literary league tables would not have needed to announce itself so loudly and repeatedly.

May I change the subject a moment to vent some of my splenetic rage against that bouffant-haired wally, Donald Trump? The papers report today that Marla Maples has finally given up the ghost and agreed to accept the terms of her pre-nup with the Donald--a pre-nup, it should be noted, that was presented to her a couple of months after their daughter had been born and five days before their wedding. According to this agreement, Trump--who is worth, what? five billion?--gets away with a lump-sum alimony payment of $2 million. He has also agreed to pay for the child's school fees and health insurance. What a guy. I am quite reconciled to the beauty/money trade-off--the fact that charmless rich slugs get to marry babes--what kills me about Trump is that he doesn't even honor the bargain. He shtups beautiful young women and then is unwilling to cough up for the privilege. There's a photo of him in the New York Post today, clutching yet another willowy empty-head to his portly side. What is this lucky lady likely to receive in return for allowing him to jump her bones? A nice car? Some good jewels? More likely a couple of free meals and some signed copies of The Art of the Deal.

Love,
Zoë

P.S.: Do you remember the first time I met you in New York? It was about five or six years since I had met you in London. You told me, not very gallantly, that when last you'd seen me, I looked a lot "more dewy." I became very tight-lipped and snotty because I thought you'd said "more Jewy." "What do you mean by that?" I demanded. "Oh, you know," you said, all jolly and breezy, "younger, peachier, wider-eyed ..." "And that's how Jewish women look is it?" I said, really uptight now. It took us at least five minutes to sort out the misunderstanding and then, when we were clear, I got offended all over again at your implication that in five years, I had transformed from a sprightly chickadee into a craggy-faced gargoyle. Do you remember all that?

the breakfast table:
entries

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16