The Quiet Arrival

Almost everything that goes wrong with a private evening goes wrong at the beginning. Not during it — at the door.

A member arrives and is asked for a name at a desk. A companion waits in a lobby where she is looked at. Somebody takes a photograph of the room and does not think twice about it. None of these are disasters. They are small, and they accumulate, and by the time the two people involved are sitting down the evening has already been observed.

The alternative is not secrecy. It is simply arrangement. Someone knows what time the car arrives. Someone has already spoken to the restaurant. The table is where it should be rather than where it was free. Nobody is standing anywhere, waiting, being looked at.

We spend more time on arrivals than on any other part of an evening, and members almost never notice, which is the point. What they notice is that the evening seemed to begin without effort — that they walked in and were simply already there.

It is the least visible work we do and the part we would defend first.