I am wary of writing this one, because there is no version of a man in my position discussing the difficulties of his position that does not read badly, and it should read badly.

So let me be precise rather than aggrieved. There is one narrow problem, it is real, and it is not a hardship.

A Dinner Where I Could Not Tell

Some years ago I had dinner with somebody I had known for about eighteen months and liked considerably. Good company, genuinely funny, interested in things.

Halfway through the evening he mentioned, lightly and in passing, a venture he was involved with. Nothing was asked of me. The subject moved on within a minute.

And I spent the rest of that dinner unable to determine whether the previous eighteen months had been leading to that minute.

I still do not know. That is the whole problem in one sentence. Not that he was working me — he may well not have been, and the odds are decent that he was simply a man mentioning his work at dinner, which is what people do. It is that the question is permanently open and there is no experiment I can run to close it.

Why There Is No Test

With most uncertainties I can gather more information. Watch longer, look at behaviour under pressure, see what somebody does when it costs them something.

This one is not like that, because every additional observation is also affected by the thing I am trying to measure. A man who is warm to me may be warm; a man who is warm to me may be warm because of what I am. Both produce identical warmth, indefinitely, and no amount of further observation separates them, because I cannot construct a version of the situation where the money is absent.

It is a genuinely unsolvable measurement problem rather than a difficult one. And it applies to nearly everybody I have met in the last twenty-five years.

The nearest thing to a test I have found is not a test of the other person at all. It is watching what I do with the uncertainty — whether I use it as a reason to be careful, which is prudent, or as a reason to withhold, which is just a comfortable way of never being disappointed. The first is a judgment about them. The second is a decision about me, dressed up as a judgment about them, and I have made the second one far more often than I would like to have on the record.

What This Has Made Me, Which I Do Not Entirely Like

It has made me slightly cold in a way I can observe in myself and have not been able to correct.

Not unfriendly. Reserved past the point that is useful — holding a small amount back from people who have done nothing to deserve it, as a hedge against a possibility I cannot rule out. That is unfair to a great many people, most of whom were simply being pleasant to a man at a dinner.

It has also made me overvalue accident. I place a weight on friendships that began before anybody knew, or by chance with somebody who had no idea, that is out of proportion to anything about those people specifically. They are not better company. They are simply the only ones about whom the question does not arise, and I have quietly organized a portion of my life around that.

Which means the man in the back of a car in Buckhead who told me a bad joke has an advantage in my regard that he did not earn and does not know about. That is not fair to him either, in a strange direction.

“You've got two settings with people,” a friend of thirty years told me, not unkindly. “Before you've decided about them, and after. Most of us only ever saw the second one.”

What I Have Settled For

I have stopped trying to solve it, which was the only real progress available. The question is unanswerable and treating it as a puzzle only turned every warm interaction into evidence-gathering.

What I do instead is act as though the answer were the generous one, and accept that I will occasionally be wrong and it will cost me something. That is cheaper than the alternative, which is being the kind of man who is never quite present with anybody. I arrived at that late and I am not consistent about it.

It's just money. Use it well. It does not follow that it costs nothing, and it does not follow that I am owed any sympathy about what it costs.

He and I are still in touch. I never found out about the venture. I have decided not to know, which is the closest thing to a resolution this particular problem allows.

Note: Victor Draemont is a character, and these notes are written in his voice. Nothing here is financial, investment, tax, or legal advice, and nothing here is a recommendation to buy, sell, or gamble on anything.