Free Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin by Calvin Trillin Page B

being opened more than three or four inches.
    I let go of the drawer, and paused, still holding the pile of underwear teetering in one hand. “I really shouldn’t be doing this,” I said to my wife.
    “No, you shouldn’t,” my wife said. “If you threw out that junk you have in the lower drawer and put the underwear in there instead, you wouldn’t keep getting that drawer jammed.”
    “I mean I shouldn’t be spending my time unpacking clothes and trying to open drawers that are jammed by Stroud’s Fried Chicken T-shirts.”
    “Not if you’re going to get to the cleaners before they close,” she said. “I finally got the washing-machine repairman to answer the phone, but I have to leave for my meeting in five minutes if I’m going to stop at the post office. You should probably run over to the cleaners now and finish unpacking later, after you change that one light bulb in the hall.”
    “What I meant,” I said, “is that I really should have people dealing with these things for me. Didn’t you tell me that until he went to check the display of some CBS magazine Paley had never been in a supermarket?”
    “I don’t think you’d be happy having someone else go to the supermarket,” my wife said. “You couldn’t trust anyone else to come across those weird brands of diet root beer you like.”
    But it would give me a lot more time. Of course, when Paley had a lot more time, he used it to cheat on his wife and plot against the colleagues who trusted him. Maybe he would have been better off spending a little more time going to the supermarket and standing in Motor Vehicle Bureau lines. I thought about that for a while, and looked at the underwear in my hand. “Is it possible that organizing the underwear drawer is the path to virtue?” I asked my wife.
    “Maybe you’d better take a little break,” she said. “You’re beginning to talk funny. We can pick up the cleaning tomorrow.”
    1991
Thoughts on Power Neckwear
    I like to wear a power tie.
    I think it helps identify
    With colors that you can’t deny
    An A-list guy who sits on high
    In boxes when the footballs fly.
    It shows I’ve kissed coach seats goodbye.
    I’ve been to Delhi and Shanghai.
    I’ve met the Sultan of Brunei.
    My sight is where my problems lie:
    I’m color blind, so though I try
    To, through my neckties, signify
    That normal rules do not apply,
    I oftentimes in error buy
    A tie that says “This guy is shy
    Of influence—a small-fry guy.”
    The thought that I could mortify
    Myself like this just makes me sigh.
    Oh, woe is I. Oh, woe is I.
    1996
The Tweed Curve
    While controversy was raging over
The Bell Curve
, which contends that intelligence among blacks is immutably lower than among whites, there was some speculation that I planned to write a book demonstrating that rich people from Social Register backgrounds are, for the most part, dumb as dirt. I want to make it clear that I have no such plans.
    What caused the speculation in the first place? In
Remembering Denny
, a book that dealt partly with the fifties at Yale, I wrote the following about how a high school boy from Kansas City could be permanently affected by prolonged exposure to hordes of old-money boarding school graduates with names like Thatcher Baxter Hatcher: “If I meet someone who is easily identifiable as being from what wasonce called a St. Grottlesex background, my gut expectation—kicking in fast enough to override my beliefs about judging people as individuals, slipping in well below the level of rational thinking—is that he’s probably a bit slow.”
    Yes, I acknowledge that this is only my gut expectation. When rational thinking exerts itself, a moment later, I understand that intelligent thoughts can be expressed in the accent sometimes called Locust Valley Lockjaw, even if those thoughts are often about sailing or the stock market. Still, you might say that when it comes to being dismissive about the intelligence of an entire class of people,