Nino and Me

by Bryan A. Garner

  “They’re coming to pick up my suits for pressing.”

  “We can’t wait for your suits to be pressed, Nino.”

  “They’re just going to pick them up. They’ll be pressed by the time we get back.”

  “Who knows how long it’ll be before the guy gets there, Nino? The ambassador [I upgraded him] has been waiting for more than an hour and a half!”

  “I’m tired of having wrinkled suits. I’m not standing for it.”

  “Bring them down. I’ll leave them with the concierge.”

  “They’re coming, and I’m waiting.”

  I couldn’t get him to budge. Tom and Karolyne were concerned. Alissa was waiting with them, and I simply said there had been an unexpected delay. Finally, at 3:48, Justice Scalia emerged from an elevator wearing a blazer with a red tie. He was angry: “I look like a goddam yabber! [This, once again, was the Scalianism meaning “boor”—a major pejorative.] This is an insult to the ambassador for me to show up this way!”

  It was the lengthiest episode of extreme pique that I ever saw him in—lasting perhaps 15 minutes, until we (Alissa included) pulled up to the consulate. Karolyne, Tom, and I were all seriously worried about what might happen upon our arrival. We heard “goddam yabber” about ten times on the van ride to the consulate, and I couldn’t get the anger to subside. It only made him angrier when I told him he looked fine.

  “This was an unpredictable thing, Nino, having so many delays,” I said.

  “Justice Scalia,” Karolyne said, “I’m genuinely sorry. It’s my fault. I was sure I’d have time to steam your suits. I’m so sorry.”

  He said nothing for a minute or so, and then broke the silence: “I look like a goddam yabber. They expect a Supreme Court Justice, and they get a yabber.”

  His reddish, stern countenance concerned all of us. We stayed quiet until we approached the consul general’s imposing residence, a white-stoned colonial edifice on a hill in central Hong Kong. Alissa said, “That’s Consul General Hart waiting outside.”

  I jumped out immediately to greet him and to announce Justice Scalia, who was suddenly congenial and charming—as he remained throughout the rest of the afternoon. Among the guests were employees of the consulate and local lawyers. The event was beautifully catered, and both Clifford Hart and Justice Scalia eloquently addressed the assembly. Justice Scalia introduced me, Karolyne, and Tom, and he explained that he and I would be making three appearances in Hong Kong in relation to our coauthored books. To look at photos of the event, you’d swear that he was wearing a suit, the only giveaway being the gold buttons on his blazer. He looked perfectly dapper.

  One thing I learned from the experience is that Justice Scalia would never have been happy wearing a suit in the condition in which I habitually wore suits. I also learned that the one subject on which I couldn’t possibly placate him, under any circumstances, was wrinkles.

  First Visit to the Tailors

  Upon our leaving the consulate, Alissa accompanied us to the International Financial Center, where Yuen’s Tailors were located. Although they specialize (oddly enough) in Scottish kilts and other tartan apparel, they also make traditional suits, often for members of the bar. The owners, brothers Bonnie and Johnny, had done work for friends of Karolyne’s aunt Jenny, who lives in Hong Kong and is doubtless the most stylish member of Karolyne’s large family.

  Jenny and Sandra, Karolyne’s mother, met us at the Four Seasons Hotel and walked us briskly through the maze of shops to Yuen’s. Jenny walked beside Justice Scalia and chatted with him through the breezeways and corridors. They had met years before at the wedding. Karolyne walked with her mother, and I walked with Tom. I watched not only Justice Scalia but also the pedestrians all around. At one point, a friendly-looking man walked up to Justice Scalia and said, “Excuse me, are you Justice Scalia?”

  “I am indeed.”

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you. I’m a law professor visiting here this semester, and I thoroughly enjoy teaching your opinions.”

  “Good to meet you, Professor. We’re on a mission, so we must press on.”

  That was the first of several times that someone on the street recognized him. We arrived at Yuen’s in no time. Jenny made introductions and waited outside with Sandra.

  Following the normal practice with Hong Kong tailors, Bonnie took 24 measurements of Justice Scalia; he would call them out while Johnny wrote them down. Meanwhile, Johnny prepared an assortment of woolen fabrics to choose from.

  “I need something that’ll breathe,” Justice Scalia insisted. “I sweat a lot. If the fabric won’t breathe, I don’t want it.”

  I added, “We also want something that doesn’t wrinkle easily.” Justice Scalia and I traded smiles.

  He picked two fabrics, and then waited patiently with Karolyne while Tom and I went through the same process.

  While Bonnie was measuring me, a 30-something American man came in to get his tartan kilt for a costume party. I started chatting with him and found out that he’d been in Hong Kong for only six months as an investment banker.

  “Wait a second,” he said, looking at Justice Scalia. “Are you Judge Scalia?”

  “I am.”

  “Wow. What are you doing in Hong Kong?”

  “I’m giving a couple of speeches here with my coauthor—the man with whom you’ve just been conversing.”

  “I’ve heard a lot about you, sir. It’s an honor to meet you.” He paid and was soon gone.

  Bonnie and Johnny said we wouldn’t need to pay until our final fitting, which we scheduled for the night before we were to fly back to the United States.

  Jenny and Sandra took us to have dinner with Ivan, Jenny’s husband, a computer-science teacher at the University of Hong Kong; Jennifer, Jenny’s daughter; and Jennifer’s boyfriend, Will. It was an enjoyable dinner at a brand-new restaurant, the entrance to which was garlanded with dozens of flower arrangements given by friends and well-wishers.

  Among other courses, we had two orders of whole steamed fish. The waiter carefully prepared the fish for us, deboning the filets and apportioning them among us.

  “May I present the head of the fish as a centerpiece?” the waiter asked, looking toward Justice Scalia and me. Perhaps Sandra had told him that we had an honored guest. I nodded. He then prepared the head on one end and the tail on the other, with a small heap of bones and scraps in between, and said: “In Chinese tradition, we present not only the head but also the tail. We believe that what has a good beginning must also have a good end.” He then placed it in the middle of the table.

  Justice Scalia was sitting beside me on one side and Will, a young barrister, on the other. From Will he elicited a good deal of information about the nature of legal work in Hong Kong. But soon he was asking about Will’s relationship with Jennifer. How long had they been dating? About a year and a half. What did Jennifer do? She worked in procurement for Christian Dior. She was a lovely young woman, Justice Scalia said, and she had a charming smile and a demure but confident way of carrying herself. At the end of the dinner, Will was eager to pose for a photograph with Justice Scalia, saying that his colleagues in chambers simply wouldn’t otherwise believe that he’d had this experience.

  After dinner, Jenny surprised us with two bags, each containing ten shirts copied in China from those we’d had made by Mr. Kim in Washington. We both expressed profuse gratitude. Justice Scalia insisted on paying for his, but Jenny even more forcefully insisted that the shirts, both his and mine, were gifts from the family.

  As we walked through the mall back toward our hotel, Justice Scalia asked me why Will hadn’t proposed to Jennifer after 18 months. He was worried that he might be treating her unfairly—“wasting her time”—if he didn’t intend to propose. I said I didn’t know. It was my first time to meet him as well.

  When we got to Justice Scalia’s floor, we said goodnight and agreed to meet at the gym the next morning at 7:00. We’d have breakfast after our workout.

  Morning a
t the Gym

  Twice in Hong Kong we went to the workout facility before breakfast. (Tom, being a fitness fanatic, was there every day.) On the first of these two mornings, Karolyne and I walked into the gym to find Justice Scalia deep in conversation with an attendant. “They’re saying I have to change my shoes, but this is all I have!” He pointed at his brown dress shoes, exasperated.

  “We have other shoes,” the attendant said.

  Karolyne helped the attendant get the right size, and then Justice Scalia sat on a bench and changed into tennis shoes.

  “Now I’m ready!” he announced to me.

  “You want me as your trainer again?” I asked.

  “You’re my trainer. But first I want to get on this bicycle for a while.”

  “Ten minutes,” I said. “I’ll be on the elliptical machine just over there. Don’t overdo it, Nino.”

  I wasn’t really worried about him. But I did want to be sure he didn’t overexert himself. After about eight minutes on the recumbent bicycle, as he was watching a tennis match, he was huffing and puffing a little while eagerly following Serena Williams and others in the Australian Open. I went over to him.

  “You okay?”

  “I’m fine,” he said, breathing heavily. “Two more minutes. I want to see the end of this match.”

  I went back to the elliptical, watching him pretty closely. He seemed fine. Soon he got up, sweating a little, and said, “Okay, what’s next?”

  “Let’s take a drink of water,” I said.

  “Boy, look at Karolyne running on the treadmill,” he said. “She’s quite fit.”

  “Yes. Why don’t we try your frozen-shoulder exercise?”

  “All right. Let’s do it.”

  Once again, the gentle lean against the wall, with the palm of the right hand going progressively as high as he could reach, proved painful for him. We worked on the left shoulder instead, but soon he lost patience: “My left shoulder isn’t the problem!”

  “Nino, you need to work on that one as well—for preventive reasons. If you don’t, you’ll wind up with two bad shoulders.”

  I noticed that within two minutes after getting off the bicycle, his breathing was back to the normal resting rate.

  “Let’s do something else. How about these machines?”

  The exercise machines were a little different from the machines in Singapore, and there were fewer to choose from. We tried the leg curl, the medicine ball, the lat machine (a bit), the shoulder press (a tiny bit), and the chest press—all at low weights. I tried to talk him out of the lat machine, saying he might hurt his shoulder even worse. He insisted on two reps, though, at ten pounds. Pulling down wasn’t painful—just going up.

  “This is what I need, you know. I need to do this regularly,” he said.

  “So do I. Do you have any good equipment at home?”

  “Nothing I like.”

  “Remember, a few years ago I was going to buy you an elliptical machine?”

  “Boy, the press would have fun with that.”

  “We need to find some cardio equipment that you’ll use.”

  “I’ll do better. I’ll use what I have. When I get back, I’m going to exercise more!”

  The Ritz Lounge and Bar

  We soon established a routine of meeting in the lobby on 103 and taking an escalator down to 102 for breakfast (or late-night drinks) at the Lounge and Bar. The lounge provides a panoramic view of commercial Hong Kong, with its two dozen or so dazzlingly lit-up buildings giving off Chinese New Year messages. You could also see hundreds of apartment buildings teeming on the hillsides of Hong Kong Island. We estimated that 200 vessels could be seen in the harbor at any given time. When we’d see an interesting ship, cruise liner, barge, or tugboat going in or out of the harbor, we’d comment on it and check on its progress from time to time.

  Meanwhile, the Lounge and Bar had its own charming feel inside, with two enormous 25-foot catenoidally shaped glass chandeliers descending from the 30-foot ceiling. We habitually sat at either of two corner tables where we could best take in the scenery, both interior and exterior.

  We marveled not only at the view each morning at breakfast but also at the culinary offerings. In the 7,500-square-foot restaurant were seven sumptuously outfitted stations: a noodle bar, a dim-sum bar, a pastry station, a congee (rice-porridge) station, a fruit-and-salad station, an omelet station, and a hot-food station. This was a breakfast like no other. Because breakfast was included in our room charges, and because Justice Scalia, of course, insisted that breakfast was his favorite and the most important meal of the day, we dutifully met there every morning.

  Despite his adventurousness with Singaporean breakfasts, the first day in Hong Kong Justice Scalia reverted to a conventional American breakfast of ham and eggs. Tom ate fruit. Justice Scalia kidded me about my selections: “Noodles for breakfast, Bryan? You’re having noodles?! And what are those lumps on your plate?”

  “They’re dumplings, Nino,” I said, smiling. “These things are collectively called dim sum, and they’re the greatest breakfast foods ever devised by any culture. I can’t believe you’re having an American breakfast despite all these splendiferous choices.”

  “There he goes,” he said to Tom and Karolyne. “Splendiferous!”

  Using some serving chopsticks, I put some noodles on his plate. “Okay,” he said, “let me try those!”

  Karolyne showed him how to use the chopsticks with pan-fried angel-hair noodles, which present a different challenge from sushi. Despite the thickness of his hands and fingers, Justice Scalia was dexterous and coordinated. He got the hang of it pretty quickly.

  “You’re holding them too close to the tips,” said Karolyne gently. “Refined Chinese hold the chopsticks toward the far end, away from the food.”

  “Oh.” Justice Scalia laughed, adjusting his grip. “I want to be refined!”

  With shu-mai pork dumplings, he adopted a different strategy altogether: after splattering one of his shirts when a dumpling fell into soy sauce, he resorted to impaling the dumpling with a single chopstick and lifting it into his mouth. “Say,” he joked, “these are awfully good!”

  As I was leaving the table to get a bowl of congee, I said, “I’ll bring you a small plate of those noodles.”

  “Please do!”

  Just as in Singapore, Justice Scalia switched to local fare after the first breakfast and never looked back. The second day, he tried dim sum, and the third day congee with pickled vegetables. Finally, on the fourth day he sampled the soupy noodles: “Who would think of soupy noodles for breakfast?” he said. “But these are really good! Can’t believe I skipped these the first three days.”

  After the first day, he sampled all the fare except the American items. Even so, he and Karolyne would split a few pastries at the end of each breakfast.

  One of the appealing points at the Ritz Lounge and Bar was that the chef alternated many of his dishes day by day—angel-hair fried egg noodles one day, spaghetti-sized fried egg noodles the next, and thick udon noodles the next; or Japanese fried rice one day, Korean-style kimchee fried rice the next, and Chinese pork-fried rice the next. This kept our foursome on a daily breakfast adventure as we discovered differences. It was Justice Scalia who first noticed the shifting fare.

  “Hey,” he said to me one morning, “where’s my angel-hair? I loved that yesterday. I want my angel-hair.”

  “Well,” I said, “today they have only spaghetti-sized noodles.”

  “I guess I’ll try these,” he said with resignation. But soon he decided he liked them even better.

  “It all started here, you know,” I remarked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Italian pasta—your favorite food from the time you left the cradle.”

  “You mean Marco Polo? Yeah, he brought noodles back from the Orient.”

  “Isn’t that an urban legend?” Karolyne asked.

  “I think it’s true,” I said. Justice Scalia nodded that he did,
too.

  “Let’s find out,” said Tom, taking out his iPhone. Within seconds, he’d found a reliable-looking website confirming Karolyne’s doubts. Italian pasta occurred in total isolation from China centuries before Marco Polo had sailed home to Venice in 1292.

  “Well, what do you know?” said Justice Scalia. “I’m glad my forebears invented it on their own.”

  “But China was in fact earlier,” said Tom, still swiping screens on his iPhone.

  “Even so,” said Justice Scalia, “Italians came up with it independently. You can’t keep a good idea down.”

  A Full Day in Hong Kong

  On our first full day in Hong Kong, a Saturday, we had breakfast and then met our guide, Polly Lin, a diminutive, bright woman with a ready smile and the metabolism of a hummingbird. She took us to the Hong Kong History Museum on the Kowloon Peninsula. Then we took a 15-minute helicopter tour of Hong Kong starting and ending at the Peninsula Hotel. The helicopter ride was fascinating. We wore headphones, and the pilots pointed out major landmarks as we went. Justice Scalia was jovial and playful. As I snapped a few photos of him strapping himself into the seat, he looked across at me and stuck his tongue out for the camera.

  We flew all around Hong Kong Island, and we had a superb view of the tallest building, the ICC, where our hotel was located. From the air we could see the building’s overlapping windows, designed to mimic the scales of a dragon. In fact, the enormous skyscraper was meant to suggest a dragon heading toward heaven. The views were breathtaking.

  During lunch at Spring Moon, the Michelin-starred restaurant at the Peninsula, the waiter brought to our table some glistening, gelatinous-looking strands.

  “What’s this?” Justice Scalia asked Karolyne.

  “Can you guess?” she said.

  “No idea.”

  “It’s jellyfish.”

  “Jellyfish! Well, let me try that.”

  “Nino,” I said, “that may be a bit adventurous for you. I don’t eat jellyfish. You know, it might sting your tongue.”