bout de papier, Vol. 13, No. 2 (1996) — Summer 1996 // Été 1996, p. 38
“Where”, I asked, rummaging in my suitcase, “are the trousers for my dinner jacket?”
“When you called from Port of Spain you said ’pack my dinner jacket. I packed your jacket.”
An hour before we had arrived at the Hotel Torarica in Paramaribo. This was the small, very tropical, capital of Suriname, where I was accredited as non-resident Ambassador.
“You didn’t pack my trousers?” “You didn’t ask for trousers.”
“Dinner jacket means jacket and trousers. Do you expect me to present myself to the President in a tuxedo top and beige slacks?”
“Lower your voice. Perhaps you can rent or borrow them.”
“In downtown Paramaribo, with half an hour before this bloody fandango at the Palace begins? You must be joking.”
Without my wife’s practical guidance, my professional career as a diplomat would have been an unbroken chain of gatfes and disasters. This was an exception to the norm.
“Why don’t you try the maitre d’?”
A brilliant idea. Eric, the maitre d’, presided over the hotel dining room in a tuxedo and he was about my size. I called the dining room. Eric expressed sympathy, but said he was sorry. He had two sets of dress clothes. One was at the cleaners and he was wearing the other one on the job. I put down the phone and was glaring at my wife when the phone rang. It was Eric. He had decided that the President’s annual Independence Day reception took precedence over his dining room. The clothes would be sent up as soon as he could get away from the dining room and take them off. Ten minutes later a waiter appeared bearing Eric’s dress clothes.
Eric was my height, but he was younger and slimmer and wore his clothes in a formfitting crooner cut. The jacket was snug but wearable. The pants were amazing. It was like putting on a pair of gabardine tights. With a lot of careful tugging, I could get them on, but could not move the fly above half mast.
Judy agreed to go on ahead to the Palace. As she left I said “For God’s sake, don’t tell anyone what has happened.”
I lowered the cummerbund so that it would cover most of the exposed triangle of underwear and completed dressing. I stepped gingerly into the hall. It was clear that a difficult evening lay ahead. My mobility was restricted. To avoid bursting Eric’s seams, it was necessary to go down a small set of stairs slowly and sideways. God knows what I looked like. I reassured myself that by the time I arrived, the receiving line would be over and I could slink quietly out onto the badly-lit Palace balcony and pretend normality. The taxi was another ordeal. It was impossible to sit down comfortably. I wedged myself against the floor with my feet and against the back of the seat with my shoulders, using the forward edge of the seat as a fulcrum for my thighs.
At last, at the stately old wooden Palace, the former residence of the Dutch governors, I manoeuvred crabwise up the steps. Navigating cautiously into the ballroom, I was alarmed to see the President and Mrs. Ferrier still in position at the head of the receiving line. By the time I began my advance into the ballroom, there were no other guests sheltering me from the direct line of sight of the host and hostess. Pulling my trousers upward and pushing by cummerbund downward, I minced self-conciously across the ballroom floor. It may have been all the constriction below my waist that loosened my reasoning. Maybe, I wondered, as I drew painfully closer to my destination, they still think I’m the Soviet Ambassador. Ten months before, to the colossal irritation of the real thing, Surinamese Protocol gazetted me as the Soviet Ambassador and the Soviet, with the improbable name of Romanoff, as the Canadian. The Soviets had just invaded Afghanistan. Could I, with my Spandex tuxedo and a thick Russian accent, do terrible mischief to Soviet standing in this country? A marginally saner part of my mind prevailed. This train of thought, it said, is more likely to lead to unemployment.
The President smiled politely and took my hand. Mrs. Ferrier remarked that she had spoken to my wife. If they had noticed my distress, which was probable, they were magnanimous.
With as much haste as my trousers would permit, I fled to the shadows and the other guests on the balcony. Just beyond was a dark tangle of branches where the President’s howler monkeys practised acrobatics by day. My wife was talking to a group of friends. As I came up to them, instead of looking me in the eye, they were staring fixedly at my trousers and smiling.
“So much for state secrets,” I said.
“Hrr, hir, hrr.., “” giggled the entire group, including my wife.
Ulrich, a Belgian entomologist and longterm resident of Parimaribo, raised his head.
“Umm,” he said, and went on in his precise English, “I experienced a — uh — similar sartorial crisis. I had been living in Suriname for about six years when I received an invitation from the Dutch Ambassador to attend a black tie dinner. You know, Mad Max, he was Ambassador then?”
None of us did.
“Well, he was something of an amateur botanist, and he invited me to a formal dinner. When I removed my dress clothes from the cupboard, I found that they had been attacked by moths. Most of the holes were small, but there were three large ones in the trouser legs — one was the size of an English crown. As with you, this unfortunate discovery was made the night of the party. Patching was out of the question. What to do? Then it occurred to me. I applied black shoe polish to my legs. Umm…,” he went on, glancing at my unusual mid-section arrangements, “unlike your situation, no one noticed the subterfuge.”
Conversation drifted away from personal embarrassment. The sound of tree frogs and the faintly ripe fragrance of tropical compost rose from the marsh on the near bank of the Suriname river. The pinching around my loins was becoming anaesthetized by the champagne and, comforted by the dark, I began to relax. Judy and I were among the last to leave.
Back at the hotel, we stood talking to friends in the lobby when a waiter appeared. “Ambassador,” he said “the maitre d’ presents his compliments and asked me to ask you about his pants and jacket.”
“My God” I had forgotten about Eric. I had promised to come back quickly so that he could return in uniform to the dining room. Self-conscious again, I tugged down on my cummerbund and exited carefully to our room. A few minutes later I was in the kitchen. Eric was there wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and an expression that twitched between exasperation and professional aplomb. He was given his tuxedo, my thanks and apologies, and a large tip.
View the original scanned pages →
Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 13, No. 2 (1996) — Summer 1996 // Été 1996, p. 38. Read the rest of this issue →
