Several thousand miles away, at the elegant Chanterelle restaurant in Manhattan, Danielle R., a corporate executive, is celebrating her anniversary. Her husband, Howard, who still looks as radiant as when he carried towels for the lacrosse team, leans close and begins to speak. Then he leans closer and tries again. But she still can’t hear him above the four people at the next table dialing and yakking their way through their $65-per-person dinner. When Danielle complains, the headwaiter shrugs meekly. He seems to regard those telephone antennas, wheeling and dipping and glinting in the chandelier light, as the swords of an unstoppable army.
Which they may be. It’s certainly too late to shout, “Here come the cellular phones.” There are about 6 million in service, up from some 4 1/2 million a year ago. And while the war against this intrusive technology may not be quite over, life’s borders have already been redrawn. You, Lech Walesa, the McGuire Sisters and every insurance salesman in Delaware are now living in the global phone booth.
Phones have gone off recently in concert halls in Houston (pianist David Korevaar played on) and on golf courses in Chicago. (“This guy was getting ready to tee off, and he kept talking,” says theater manager David Randolph.) Etiquette expert Charlotte Ford had her spa vacation disturbed by a man who made business calls from the dining room. (“I was appalled,” she says.) Entertainment executive David Geffen reportedly has two phones in his car-and not just because, as he said in a recent Vanity Fair article, “I date men and I date women.” After all, to have only one cellular phone in L.A. is to be no better than the kids you see on skateboards, talking to their friends at the beach.
The resistance movement seems sporadic at best. New York’s Le Cirque restaurant employs a “phone-check person”; ushers at the Alley Theater in Houston make phone sweeps, asking patrons to leave equipment in the lobby, and judges at the Dallas County Courthouse have banned lawyers from using cellulars during proceedings. But the nation’s maitre d’s are turning out to harbor permissive thoughts beneath their pomaded hair. Places like the Edwardian Room of The Plaza hotel will provide patrons with a cellular phone if they need one. (“This,” says the headwaiter, “is a power-breakfast place.”) Miss Manners herself does not take a firm anti-phone stance. “You don’t talk in the movies,” says Judith Martin, “but why are those busybodies peeking in other cars to see what people are doing.?”
Perhaps the most phone-haters can hope for is an admission that this is not just about reaching out and touching someone. It is also about a nervous desire not to live in the moment: the very un-Zen-like notion of having the body in one place and the mind in another. In the case of the phone talk that goes on during Swedish film festivals, that is understandable. But Hans Mair, the general manager of Vargo’s restaurant in suburban Houston, says, “We do a lot of prom business and even the prom kids come in with them.” This is the first generation that can be out on the town and waiting for the phone to ring at the same time. How sad. These kids need help. All they get, though, is directory assistance.
