Seven Lies

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A woman threw her glass of wine at me. It happened at Gloria Danilov’s party at the Temple of Dendur. I didn’t know the woman – hadn’t spoken to her or even noticed her. Gloria had just introduced me to Harold Gedney, who detached himself from me almost as soon as Gloria left us. A moment later this woman steps up: ‘Excuse me, are you Stefan Vogel?’ ‘Yes,’ I say, and without hesitation she flings her wine in my face. Red wine: a great spatter of it all over my chin and neck and white shirt. She walks away swiftly but calmly, no one stopping her, and from the stunned way people look at me I can tell the assumption is that I must have said or done something disgraceful.

I got out of the place as quickly as I could, not looking for my attacker, just wanting to remove myself from the situation, and walked all the way to the Port Authority.

‘Excuse me, are you Stefan Vogel?’ ‘Yes.’ Splash!

The sheer reflexive speed of it. The strange naturalness this gave the gesture, as if it were simply an inevitability, a law of physics, that the acknowledging of my name should trigger a little violent deluge of red wine.

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