Over-Indulgence

The gluttony of travel writing and the need to be loved

Last weekend, I met someone who didn’t like me. Worse, he liked me and then changed his mind.

You’ll never hear me say, Not everyone’s going to like you. At least, you won’t hear me say it to myself. Why wouldn’t everyone like me? Fuck.

When I do meet people who don’t like me, I tell myself that I disliked them first. The types who eat chips and salsa slowly, forgetting the basket between bites—I assume they don’t like me. Sometimes I meet people and sense that if they found out I was Jewish, they wouldn’t like me; evolution has selected for this instinct in Jews. You know those men who cultivate arrogance by “working on” themselves until they can project onto others the disdain they once turned inward? Those men never like me. Women with perfect makeup couldn’t possibly like me. I wish I knew how to do my makeup. I apply makeup and look worse.

So this guy who liked me and then didn’t was a manager of a hotel I was writing about. This hotel, which bills itself as a “wine hotel,” is very new. I won’t name the hotel, but I’ll give it this: When a hotel opens, things don’t run smoothly. When writing about new hotels, I account for the kinks. I get it. Hotels have many moving parts and coordination takes practice.

There’s the caveat.

Here’s the story:

My boyfriend and I were sitting in the lounge adjacent to the hotel’s Italian restaurant. We were scheduled to do a 6:00 wine tasting, but by 6:15, no one had approached us. When most people in the lounge filed outside for a “Tree-Lighting Ceremony,” we followed and watched a Christmas tree transform from dark to twinkly with the flick of a switch. (I’m not sure what qualified this as ceremonial, but again, I’m Jewish.) Back inside at 6:30, I saw the manager who would soon dislike me, but so far liked me fine. Let’s call him Oliver. His name wasn’t Oliver, but it had the same vibe as “Oliver”—an old-fashioned name repurposed, very Gen Z. Upon check-in, he had given me the hotel tour. Now he seemed glad to see me, the way hotel managers are trained to seem. I asked him if maybe the 6:00 wine tasting hadn’t happened because we were in the wrong place.

“You’re not in the wrong place,” he said without elaborating.

Oliver made me feel old. He was offensively young. He wore a tie and a white shirt with a collar. He had straight posture and baby skin. He looked so confident, the way you must be if you’re 25 and “managing” something. As the three of us chatted, he told us about the last hotel that had employed him, where one holiday-season amenity was a Christmas train ride that included a singalong and chocolate milk in a souvenir mug. He was feverishly enthusiastic about that train ride; I could see how he’d ascended through the hospitality ranks. Eventually, when I brought up the wine tasting again, he said, “Let me go find the Beverage Director.”

A few minutes later, he returned to report that the Beverage Director was in the cellar, selecting the perfect bottles for our tasting. I didn’t really believe that some vague “Beverage Director” was agonizing in a cellar, but I pretended to believe. We wouldn’t see Oliver again that night, but I swear: At 6:30 p.m. on Friday, he liked me. Or if he didn’t like me, he was committed to faking it.

No “Beverage Director” ever materialized, so at 7:00, we approached the hostess stand at the Italian restaurant. “Hi,” I said. “We were supposed to have a wine tasting at six and I’m wondering if there’s anyone here who might…know about it?” The hostess looked at us blankly and then summoned a man in a suit, ostensibly the restaurant manager, a dead ringer for Christopher from The Sopranos. “They want to try wines or something,” she told him.

As Christopher led us to a table, I asked him about the wine tasting. He made it clear that he a) had no idea what I was talking about and b) would not be investigating.

Ten minutes later, a server appeared. It was time for dinner with wine pairings, he said. I explained that we weren’t looking to eat a multi-course dinner, that just a quick wine tasting would be fine. He held up a finger, hurried off, and then for no clear reason returned with two full glasses of rosé. A tasting generally comprises four to six wines, a few sips of each; giant glasses of rosé never enter the picture. “Thank you,” I said. “Um. We’re supposed to do a wine tasting?” The words had begun to lose meaning. What was a wine tasting? In the Tower of Babel, which I had once believed to be a “wine hotel,” a wine tasting was just a funny-sounding piece of a foreign lexicon. The server said that he was a Level 1 sommelier. He reiterated that we would now experience a dinner with pairings. I was starting to feel like an asshole. I imagined my 10-years-ago self, who wasn’t yet writing about luxury hotels, peering into a crystal ball, watching Present-Day Me demand a “wine tasting.”

The sommelier returned with two bottles of white and four glasses, and poured us full servings from each bottle. My boyfriend and I glanced at each other. For a second, absurdly, I thought I might cry. If this even counted as a problem, it was a First-World problem, but the more I talked, the less my words meant. I was the bug in The Metamorphosis: “I cannot make anyone understand.”

What ensued was sheer chaos.

The sommelier delivered unto us a “tasting” of every single white wine the hotel must have had in its cellar. He would pour us full glasses of two whites at a time, saying something like, “I’ll step away so you can enjoy,” often leaving not just the glasses but the bottles, and then returning three minutes later with two more bottles and four more glasses to add to the clutter.

Have you ever seen someone make music by amassing wine glasses and running a wet finger around the rims? That’s what our table must have conveyed to outsiders—that we were about to give a wine-glass concert.

“This is a wonderful, um, wine tasting,” I told the sommelier 7,803,026,536,409 bottles in, “but it’s a lot! It’s really ok to just give us a splash of each.”

There would be no splashes. There would be no mercy. Sure, no one was physically forcing wine down our throats, but the frenetic pace and excessive serving sizes left us little time to think and little will to resist. This “wine tasting” was the aggressor. This wine tasting said, You want a wine tasting? I’ll give you a goddamn wine tasting. I kept telling the sommelier that we’d had enough, but what did that even mean? In this hotel, no meant yes and stop meant harder. He was smiling so fiercely, he was sweating. He told us multiple times that he was “taking care of” us. Food began to appear. Burrata. Some fish thing. A meat stew. Calamari. Two salads. Cake after cake. An army of cakes. A cake onslaught. Someone pushed the neighboring table against ours to accommodate the surplus.

We were drunk beyond all reason by the time the sommelier started what he called our “tour of reds.” He poured us a Borello and a Sangiovese and at that point started drinking with us. The wheels came off. “Oh my god,” I slurred. “I can’t.”

What, though? What couldn’t I do? I was doing it!

My boyfriend went to the bathroom and returned with the news that I was going to feel much drunker when I stood up.

From there, the evening transpired in flash-bulb images: In one memory, the sommelier tells us, “It might feel like a lot, but in total, you’ve probably only had five to six glasses each.” (First of all, is that not a lot? Second, in total, we’d had five to six troughs.) In another memory, my boyfriend stands, holds a hand out like a crossing guard, and shouts, “STOP!” I know this memory is fabricated because my boyfriend’s communication style is very cards-close-to-vest, but what’s certain is that it was he, not I, who was able to fend off the sommelier. In this hotel, women were to be seen, not heard. Only a man had the power to end the Bacchanalia. In another memory, as we stumble to our feet to leave, the sommelier says, “I believe that everyone we meet, we meet for a reason.” And then a group hug? Perhaps! In another memory, I’m trying to press the elevator button, but actually I’m jamming a thumb into those fire-emergency keys that only firefighters can operate. In yet another memory, my boyfriend is in the bathtub in our hotel room, fully clothed.

For some reason, this is the one picture I took that night. My boyfriend’s camera roll includes a picture of me mooning him.

On Saturday, we woke with approximately 12 brain cells apiece. My boyfriend had somewhere to be, so he left me in the hotel room, where I kept forgetting what was happening; what time it was; what I was doing with my day, my life.

When I got myself down to the front desk to check out, I saw Oliver.

“Hey, Oliver!”

He nodded.

“They served us a lot of wine last night!”

“Well. I told them to take care of you.”

“Thank you! I think we might have drunk every wine in the restaurant.”

In return, I was gifted a tight-lipped smile.

I hadn’t been hung-over in a very long time, but here it was: the old Everyone hates me feeling. I remember reading once that anxiety is a symptom of hangover. That’s a theory. Or maybe we do dumb things when we binge-drink that later cause us anxiety.

Later, my boyfriend told me that Oliver hadn’t been particularly warm to him, either.

“What did we do?” I asked, horrified.

“We didn’t do anything.”

“We must have!”

“Come on. What could we possibly have done?”

“So many things!”

“He was probably just having a bad day.”

I told my boyfriend that I had watched Oliver approach a father who was photographing his young son and offer to photograph them together. That’s not the behavior of someone who’s having a bad day.

I have since come up with a number of theories, all of which my boyfriend shoots down: Maybe we were loud? (“They over-served us against our will! If we were loud, that’s on them.”) Maybe we were demanding? (“When? No! That didn’t happen.”) Whether or not Oliver likes us is of zero interest to him. But how I wish I could rewind the night, watch the tipped bottles suck the wine back in, right themselves, re-admit their corks. Why had I been so obsessed with our “schedule”? Why hadn’t I just accepted that the wine tasting wasn’t happening? I could have imagined the wine tasting and written about it in approximation. Instead, I had tampered with fate.

I want to send Oliver a bouquet of sunflowers, or give him a surprise car, like Oprah. I want to thank him more effusively for his hospitality, or pay him the exact compliment he’s always craved, or offer him the generic advice of a stranger: Everyone you meet, you meet for a reason. Everyone on Earth just wants to be loved. Throw your love around like confetti, Oliver. You’re young and you don’t know it, but you’ll blink and all this will be gone.

Love,

Diana

P.S. What kinds of people don’t like you? Let me know in the comments.

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