The other brother wrote that it was too expensive, and asked, in what I imagine he thought was a joke, whether they couldn’t just do Chipotle instead.

And that was the end of the seafood dinner, and very nearly the end, it turned out, of the extravagant family gatherings altogether, because it emerged, the moment the cost landed on the people incurring it, that no one in that family had ever actually wanted lobster towers and fifty-year port.

They had wanted lobster towers and fifty-year port that someone else was buying, which is an entirely different appetite, and it did not survive its first contact with a bill of its own.

An appetite that evaporates the instant it is asked to pay for itself was never really an appetite; it was a performance, and I had been the audience and the box office both, for longer than I liked to count.