Are You A Good Host?

When asked to peel shrimp, shuck oysters, or slice salmon for a party, do you find an inordinate percentage of chore time is spent gobbling these delicacies while your wife is out of the kitchen? Having been caught with your mouth full and relieved of seafood duty with a curt "Thanks anyway," and given the task of washing and drying endive, do you then tear off a few exterior leaves and determine that those beneath are "plenty white enough" and place them directly on the serving platter?

While, parked in your place of exile (the living room sofa furthest from the Camembert), you hear an unusually frenetic slamming of pots and pans, culminating in the sound of a collander hurled against the wall and the words "Jesus Christ," do you rush to the kitchen and offer to help? Or do you draw a link between your unwillingness to buy a costly non-stick pan the previous day and a mass of troublesome rice glued to the bottom of the lesser model you did purchase? Confronted with a batch of burned paella, do you find the soothing words, "Don't worry, babe, you can't wreck Spanish food," are met with "I just did" and an overly theatrical dumping of paella into the trash?

Asked to "see to the bar," do you briefly note that everything appears to be in order before pouring yourself a drink and settling down with a back issue of "Harper's" featuring an article by William Gass on the unknown Kafka? Do you find your reading almost immediately interrupted by the intrusive query, "What about lemons and limes?" and, as you carry a lemon and lime to the bar, followed by the equally terse "sliced"?

Do you find learning about Kafka makes you unusually ravenous, that the raw bar across the room looks particularly inviting, and that your wife's plucking shrimp from burned paella provides ample opportunity for your own shrimp-plucking until you tiptoe toward the breakfront and hear the following word hissed: "Don't"?

When peremptorily summoned, do you cast aside your magazine with great bravado and resolutely enter the kitchen with the air of a martyr willing to sacrifice his very essence for the commonweal? Do you heed brusque instructions to "make yourself useful" and begin beating egg whites with tremendous solemnity as if performing cosmetic surgery on a major Hollywood talent? Are you distracted from this labor by the sight of an enormous shrimp perched atop the refuse in the trash bin and do you further note that said refuse is actually a bed of perfectly pristine rice, seemingly arranged by an elf or other helpful creature to make the plump shrimp comfortable?

Are you cognizant that you are staring at a centerfold from "Gourmet" and that the shrimp is practically begging to be eaten? Do you thereby reason that if you slide your mixing bowl across the counter in the direction of the trash bin and lower the speed on the mixer that you can safely procure the shrimp while simultaneously doing your wife's bidding? In your eagerness to grasp the shrimp do you inadvertently press the button which ejects the beaters and sprays your egg whites into an alarming aerial display which descends like snowfall to the floor?

Do you then hear the patter of Marc Jacobs-clad feet approaching the kitchen with an urgency you realize is rapidly escalating in volume and intensity as though the tiny feet themselves wanted to do you harm? As you begin to gather your indignation into what you hope will be a convincing tirade on the building's fickle electrical system, do you feel a blast of pain to your midsection so acute that you find yourself writhing in agony and egg whites on the kitchen floor?

As nausea reduces you to the fetal position and you recall a day on a soccer field early in the courtship of your then girlfriend/now wife when you specifically told her that there was one type of male pain nearly unendurable, do you see her peering over you with what is clearly concern? Are you then aware that her attention is focused not on you but on the shrimp clutched in your fist and that she has raised her foot to stomp on your hand and snap your wrist when you are saved by the least welcome sound on earth: the doorbell?