Gunn's Golden Rules (14 page)

One time she bought me a shirt that came in a Lord & Taylor box. I went to the Men’s Department to exchange it for another size, and they said they didn’t carry the item at all. I called my mother to tell her, and she gasped. “I got it at an outlet,” she said, blushing through the phone. “I just used the Lord and Taylor box.”

When pressed on her dubiously successful gift giving, my mother just gets defensive. “You and your sister and your niece and nephew are so hard to buy for,” she told me recently, “because you have no interests.”

“What? No interests? Wait a minute!” I said. “Just to speak for myself, I am passionate about many, many things. I love fashion. I love design. I love books. I love architecture. I love movies. I could go on! You could get me any book. You could get me a DVD. An Amazon gift card.”

For me, gift cards are fantastic. Whenever I don’t have a perfect, one-of-a-kind gift in mind for someone, I love to give gift cards. Alas, my family says that’s too impersonal. They’re always complaining when I give these cards, saying I didn’t take the time to find the perfect gift for each person. I finally told my sister, “Apparently, my hinting has been too subtle. I get these for people because I’d like to
receive
them.”

And they’re way better than crazy objects that I then have to move around my house and hide in closets. Recently, I was given an objet d’art by some friends. They have never been in my apartment, and when I saw what they sent, quite frankly I was insulted. It’s grotesque, and 100 percent not me. I wish I could show it to you so you could see how there is no apartment on the planet, at least none I’d want to visit, where this could possibly look good. It’s ambitiously bad.

Why did these friends feel I needed that piece of bizarre sculpture in my life? I was honored that they wanted to give me something, but it’s very presumptuous to get people things that are going to take up a lot of space in their lives unless you know for a fact that they will really love it.

That’s why I find registries very handy. You can see what people need and want and what other people have already bought for them. It takes all the pressure off and makes you feel like you’re getting something that’s really going to be appreciated.

I’ve bought a lot of presents off gift registries, but truth be
told, I haven’t been to a wedding in fourteen years. I’m old enough that, by now, people in my peer group have either married or they haven’t. And if they’re doing it for a second time, it’s usually a small event with just a few family members, so I just send a small gift to acknowledge the event.

The last wedding I went to was at the couple’s house in Greenwich, Connecticut. They were fashion people. They had a big tent in the backyard and every possible bell and whistle. There were probably 350 or 400 guests. Even the Porta-Potties were fully equipped, luxurious trailers. I was sitting at the table of the grandmother of the bride, and I said to her, looking around in awe, “This is phenomenal!”

She looked at me with a trace of pity and said, “You must not get out much.”

This was the bride’s grandmother! Isn’t she supposed to rave about her family? Isn’t she supposed to be enthusiastic?

She’s right, I don’t get out much,
I thought.
But even so! This is an incredible wedding.

This couple really wanted a lavish party, but I pity brides today who feel that breaking the bank is an obligation. Weddings seem so stressful to me in general; it’s a wonder how anyone who’s throwing one feels like getting married at all by the end.

I know someone who rented the whole Yale Club and had a towering raw bar for the postceremony cocktail hour. This was before the multicourse sit-down dinner for more than two hundred people. They must have spent a quarter of a million dollars.

I always say in a case where you’re already breaking the bank (as on one of those ridiculously priced designer handbags), you should spend 10 percent less than you’ve budgeted
and give that extra money to charity. Your wedding guests won’t notice if there’s one less tier of oysters and lobster claws, but 10 percent of a fortune can make a real difference to people who truly need it.

Given how expensive weddings can be these days, I understand how eager the couple is to receive money as a gift, but if that’s the case, they should simply throw a cheaper party. I have thankfully never been to a wedding where the bride walks around with a money bag, though I have heard tell of them. Miss Manners calls this “simple social blackmail,” and she’s right.

Besides, there’s no shame in marrying simply. In Washington when I was growing up, weddings were typically a ceremony followed by a champagne reception. There was never a meal associated with a wedding. If you felt you had to feed the out-of-town people, you did it the night before at the rehearsal dinner. Ultimately, whenever you’re entertaining, it’s good to work within the budget you have, and if that means you just do a cocktail hour, that’s totally fine. Just make sure it’s a fun and gracious cocktail hour.

Generally speaking, I am all for doing things cheaply whenever possible. For example, I prefer not to take taxis or limos. For some reason, people don’t believe that I take public transportation. They assume that I have a car service, or maybe even a sedan chair carried by nubile models. In fact, I take the subway twice a day on average, and I salute its relative speed and convenience.

The subway is, however, a petri dish of bad manners. I’m not talking about mild nuances of behavior or even some of the craziness that takes place within the train’s cars or on the more oppressive platforms where riders sweat or freeze and hold their
nose or ears. That’s just the sound and smell of New York.

I’m talking about the way people push and shove and act as if they are in the Thunderdome. Why do people ascending the stairs behave as though it’s perfectly acceptable to leave no room for people who are descending and vice versa? There is adequate room for one aisle to go up and one to go down.

What happened to using words instead of actions as the means of moving past people who are obstacles in your path? I find that merely saying, “Excuse me, please …” is a successful method. I have never needed to push, shove, or body block my way through a crowd, so you needn’t, either. And remember that backpacks, wheeled luggage, and baby strollers were not invented to be used as battering rams. I like getting around the city fast, but I often feel kind of beaten up by the time I reach my destination.

Another place where it seems like niceties have been completely abandoned is on airplanes. I have to fly all the time for work. As we know, flying used to be a very glamorous thing and is now only a hair less miserable than a cross-country trip on an un-air-conditioned bus in August.

Still, quite frankly, I look forward to that airline door closing. There is no phone. There is no Internet (although airborne Internet access is surely in our future). I am insulated. I can actually just focus and write on my computer or read a book. It’s heaven. But I can’t sleep on planes, which is why taking overnight flights makes me crazy. I am always wide awake. I am the perfect person for the exit row. If the pilot ever needs me, I am right there, ready to go.

Maybe that’s why strange things are always happening to me on planes. One time, I had my seat in coach and was just
about to start reading when a woman came down the aisle with an eight- or nine-year-old child and sat next to me in the middle seat, with this large child on her lap. She thought children could travel for free, and no one had stopped her.

Seats today are close quarters to begin with, but this was ridiculous. No one in the aisle could move. Eventually, the flight attendant came and sorted things out and explained that children over two need their own seats, but until then I thought I was going to be pinned down by a large preteen for the whole flight.

Once when I flew from Paris to New York, we made an emergency landing in Boston because a famous nightclub owner and her teenage son refused to stop smoking. Something similar happened once when I was flying from New York to Detroit early on a Sunday morning. There was a bad-tuxedo group—the men wearing these hideous purple and pale blue tuxedos and the women clad in acetate gowns—throwing lit cigarettes at one another. The pilot ended up leaving the cockpit to come yell at them. When we landed, the sheriff got on board and took them away.

Another time when I boarded, an older man was sitting in my seat. I asked him about his seat, and he didn’t seem to understand me. I said, “If you’re in my seat, where’s your seat? Because I’ll sit in it.”

When that failed, I approached the flight attendant and explained the situation. She said, “Well, just take a seat.”

“Aren’t these seats assigned?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, “but if someone comes and you’re in his seat, you can just move.”

“But this man in my seat must have an assignment of his
own.” I said again. “Can’t you just help me figure out what it is, and then I’ll sit there? It will make it so much easier for everyone.”

She was completely and totally uninterested in helping facilitate. I realized I was being really annoying, but I stood in the vestibule by the entrance to the plane until there was only one seat left, and then I sat there.

So it’s not just the fellow passengers who can make a flight difficult, sometimes it’s the flight attendants. They say they’re there for your safety and to do anything they can to make you more comfortable, but sometimes their stress levels get the better of them and they become more like jail wardens than attendants.

On a flight to Tampa for a speaking assignment, I sensed there was going to be trouble when I saw a very young flight attendant who seemed furious. Can’t you just tell when someone has an aura of hostility? The second you see them you know they’re going to be troublesome. Sure enough, a woman came on the plane with a huge, unwieldy roller bag, and she told this angry flight attendant, “Excuse me, but I’m going to need help putting this in the overhead.”

The response: “Then you had no business bringing it on board.”

Debatable.

“But I do have it on board,” the woman said, “and I do need help.”

And the flight attendant said, “Well, you’re not getting any help from me. That’s not what we’re here for. When you get to your seat, you’ll have to ask someone.”

“And if they won’t help me?”

“We’ll have to check it.”

She had a curtness and a dismissiveness that I found very unpleasant.

And she later did something even worse. During the safety demonstration, she was pantomiming along to the safety instructional. I was reading a book. Others were engaged in their own work. Suddenly, she stopped what she was doing, paused the recording, and, with her two-inch-heeled foot, kicked the newspaper of the person in the first row! She shouted, “I’m not doing this demonstration to entertain myself!”

Frankly, I worried about her blood pressure.

Carrying around anger like that is really dangerous, but I think it’s up to each of us to deal with it on our own time. I hate confrontation and am so turned off by people who insist on starting fights all the time. Some people are so insecure that they will push a confrontation at every opportunity. There are even people who at a party (often after a few glasses of something) will blurt out things to others like, “I feel like you don’t like me.”

It’s so childish, and it never ends well. Either they say that, actually, they don’t like you, and then there’s awkwardness. Or they say they do like you, but you’ve just put them in an uncomfortable position, so you’ll never know if you just coerced that answer—or if at that moment, because of the question, they actually stopped liking you.

Remember at the playground when kids would ask each other a million times, “Are you my best friend?”

After the tenth time you want to say, “Well, not anymore!”

I still remember the grade-school drama involving my oldest friend, Doug Harbison, and my new friend, Craig Smith. I felt confident enough about Doug’s friendship that I could assure Craig that he was my best friend because I thought nothing
would alienate Doug. I was wrong. It really hurt Doug’s feelings, and I felt terrible.

Bad manners often come from a place of deep unhappiness. It’s almost a declaration of bad citizenship, a way of challenging the world: “Why should I be a good citizen? You haven’t been good to me!”

Frankly, in my experience, people who try to put you on the spot about your feelings are just angry with you, and they’re projecting negative feelings onto you. They want to start a fight so they have an excuse to be so upset. Often the anger is based on your aloofness. They’re thinking,
Where does he get off not liking me? I’m very likable!

You know, this book started out as an etiquette book, but at times I’ve thought,
Maybe it’s too tough to behave well under all the crazy circumstances modern life throws at you.

Do you know how Amy Vanderbilt, the etiquette maven, died? In 1974, she fell or jumped out of the second-story window of her East Eighty-seventh Street town house. It was mysterious. I wonder sometimes if the number of things that could go wrong between people just overwhelmed her and she lost all interest in avoiding pitfalls like open windows.

In fact, when you start thinking about how cruel people can be to one another, you wonder whether you should become an advocate not for manners but for living in a cave with a boulder rolled in front of it. Life is full of many shocking surprises and upsetting interactions. Maybe we should all opt out.

Especially because becoming a hermit brings up some great design opportunities. We can bring back the fifties bomb shelter.

My mother was very into that idea back in the day. She was looking at plans right and left and stocking up for it. I think I
was in my twenties when she finally got rid of all the boxes with the gallon plastic containers of distilled water and the by-then-exploded canned food.

I didn’t care about preparing for the apocalypse, but I did love the architecture. The shelter was basically a submarine with a big periscope. The thought of a nuclear war terrified me, and I didn’t enjoy the nuclear drills we had to do at my school. I used to think,
I don’t think hiding under our desks is a useful exercise. Will it really protect us if bombs fall and the whole building caves in?
I was a critic even then.