Our Mutual Friends

Our Mutual Friends, who are a homosexual couple, live, as the popular phrase has it, well over the top. They rent a huge traditional house in a gigantic garden, with all modicons, and pay well over the market price for it. They rent their car and their motorcycles. Since arriving a year ago, they have expanded their household staff from three to six and have tripled their salaries. They entertain lavishly, attend all the charity events, and hobnob with all the rich, famous, and glamorous. And they shop, shop, shop, always paying the top dollar (if not usually buying the top drawer).

They also say that they are at their rope's end.

And they say it frequently.

This has become a puzzle for most of us; and a worry for some who, Asian-like, wonder whether one day they'll have to step in and bail Our Mutual Friends one day.

Our Mutual Friends told me that -- that they do not make enough to afford their standard of living -- at our first meeting. They said "we still have to work". Mildly curious (there isn't any work one can do around here to support himself in such a style so anyone who works arouses curiosity) I asked what work; they said it was interior decoration for some clients back in the US, now mostly complete. Further inquiry revealed that there didn't seem to be any work going on. I decided the work was the usual fairy-tale of the habitually gainfully employed when they first find themselves in retirement -- purposeless and therefore, to their own eyes, mildly meaningless.

But it later emerged in discussions with other mutual friends that Our Mutual Friends were actually making efforts at raising funds. One proposed to sell his paintings (he paints abstract acrylics); the other suggested that they could have a garage sale to liquidate some fabrics and some minor collectibles. Neither was much of an effort, but it was an effort nevertheless; and all of it was attended by the unceasing complaints that there wasn't enough coming in.

In various discussions with other mutual friends I have always argued that Our Mutual Friends were putting on an act; that it was a pretense; a smoke-screen; a camouflage. The well off often resort to camouflage, I argued: it isn't only in order to keep a low profile against possible burglars or kidnappers, but also in order to protect themselves against ordinary envy, too.

Here I told an anecdote: while in college, I worked, among others, in a research lab with half-a-dozen other student-part-timers. Wages were poor and standard of living student-like. But one of us, Mary, turned out to be well off: she owned the house she lived in; it was bought, she told us, with her grandfather's legacy left to her. That and the sports car. And the tuition. And who knows what else. She worked in the lab, it turned out, for the experience; and perhaps for company, but not out of any kind of need.

The admission that she'd had it all from grandpa was to cost Mary dearly. Out of envy, she became everyone's favorite punching bag. I once witnessed someone at a party, drunk, telling her that she should be ashamed of herself that she had it so easy while we all barely managed to scratch our living. Mary once cried upon my shoulder about it; knight-like, I refused to take advantage of the situation, though Mary was not a bad looking girl; instead, I advised her in the future to hold her tongue. And I am sure she has.

I have therefore argued strenuously that Our Mutual Friends, unable to keep a low profile (and it is hard to keep a low profile when one loves living glamorously, which, for some reason, seems such a wonderfully gay crime) were engaging in a spot of deception about their true net worth; that, in other words, they were trying to have it both ways: to have the rich life but disclaim the resources necessary to have it. (Oh, pay no attention to this, it is all on credit you know, and about to be repossessed, too!)

Other mutual friends were not having any of this. Their conversation often turned here to other speculation: that perhaps Our Mutual Friends, being about sixty, were the first cohort of the modern American way of life, the cohort born in the prosperity which had followed World War Two; raised on the consume-til-you-drop ethos -- that special state of PR in which everyone tells you to spend and absolutely no one tells you to save; the cohort which arrives at the age of retirement having had a high current income all their lives, having spent all of it on a very high life-style, and having nothing other than the bare state pension to show for the lifetime of their labors.

I have known examples of this: over the last several years a fifty-one-year old lover confessed, with a note of panic in her voice, that she'd had to get serious about saving for her retirement and therefore could no longer afford to come and see me; a once-colleague from work, forty-nine, confided in me that though his annual income is in the top 1% bracket of the United States, he has nearly nothing in the bank (nine hundred dollars, to be exact) and a huge balance on his cards (thirty-thousand-plus) and that therefore a loss of his job would mean a financial Armageddon; and my aunt, sixty two, asked me how she could retire early on her lifetime savings of... twenty thousand bucks. (I could not see any way).

Marketing studies exist, executed for major investment banks, which show that these are not isolated cases but part of the general pattern: the high income-high consumption crowd, all those mid level managers on expense accounts and such, are in fact totally and utterly broke. Their salaries and bonuses go entirely into maintenance of their expensive life style.

Our Mutual Friends may be part of the same phenomenon. Now that they have retired, they do not know how to scale down the lifestyle, yet do not have enough to keep it up.

We all shook our heads over them: my elder West-European friends, who'd grown up with the shortages of the post-war years and have, through them, learned to save for the rainy day; my East-European friends, who'd grown up with the shortages of the communist era; and my South East Asian friends, who'd grown up with the shortages of -- well -- South East Asia. We all shook our heads at these Americans; and the American economic miracle which, it seemed to us, was now revealed to have been built on sand.

But then, our disputations about the financial position of Our Mutual Friends took a magically tragic turn when, in the car, standing at a traffic light, in the pouring rain, my friend Pong suddenly gasped: "I think they are going to commit suicide."

And then it all fell into place: yes, of course, that's what they will do: they will keep on spending at the current rate until there is nothing left and then they will pour themselves a sumptuous bath, open a bottle of Dom Perignon, and, with the tip of a fine silver blade, they will, like Petronius and Seneca before them, open their veins.

Perhaps it takes a great philosopher to conceive and execute such a plan. Spinoza was one to do so: though he'd not taken his life, he'd managed to die leaving behind him nothing but the 18 shillings it took to provide him with a decent burial. Childless, he had no one to leave his money to; and since in his life he had known no kindness from anyone, he'd seen no reason to leave his money to anyone. So he calculated his needs down the the last shilling, and when it was all gone, he died.