A New Year’s Eve party in Luxembourg City was thrown off-balance and never recovered after the inclusion of a partnerless friend.
Ian Fink and Pauline Morier invited Ali Zorba, 29, more than a month ago, giving only passing thought to the implications of his singleness.
The damning asymmetry revealed itself the moment Zorba arrived and found that Fink, Morier, and the other guests – four couples in total – had already formed two even lines on either side of a coffee table, with each person speaking to the one sitting directly across.
Zorba observed no natural place for himself, so he sat awkwardly on the floor on one side of the table until Fink insisted he squeeze in on the sofa, which he did, taking precious butt space from the four people already there.
After pretending to be very interested in his own fingernails for several minutes, he muscled his way into one of the four conversations already underway, but that left another person without a conversation partner. This dynamic would haunt the group for the rest of the night.
The imbalance only became more glaring when it was time to eat at the rectangular table where Morier had placed settings for four guests on either side, the two hosts at the ends, and Zorba at a corner, which everyone agreed was physically infeasible.
The hosts tried to move Zorba’s spot to one side, but that left it too cramped. They rushed to a stack of books in their home office to review geometry, topology, and advanced number theory – anything to be able to solve the seating problem.
When they came back, they discovered that Zorba had simply taken a chair at the end, meaning that one of the hosts was now seatless. Fink placed himself at a tall accent table in the adjacent kitchen, saying that it would be fine. However, he was now alone, and it wasn’t fine.
Later, he and Morier would take turns sitting alone in the kitchen, creating an overall ambiance of instability. Each time one of them needed a refill, salt, or bread, they had to visit the main table.
By midnight, with most of the people inebriated, standing, and swaying to music, the numerical discord seemed to have been forgotten, but it came roaring back following the obligatory countdown when each couple ceremoniously kissed.
Zorba found himself with nothing to do and nowhere to look. If he watched the others locked in their lip unions, he would appear pitiful or creepy, but if he turned away and faced the wall, for example, he would also appear pitiful or creepy.
In the end, he pretended to get a phone call. Unfortunately for him, what he assumed was his phone in his pocket was a deck of cards he had brought as part of a half-baked plan to show a new magic trick.
It was too late. He continued talking into the deck of cards as if it were normal, hoping that the others might believe he was making a joke. No one did, however, and no one had the heart to even comment on his unusual behavior.
The final show of the fundamental unevenness came around 1:30 a.m. when the invited couples, each with their own designated driver, announced they were leaving.
Zorba had no designated driver. Turning down a hollow offer to crash on Fink and Morier’s sofa, he called a taxi and spent his entire Christmas bonus being transported a mere six kilometers.
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Originally published by RTL Today
