SWAGLAND

We didn’t know. It seems incredible, but we didn’t.

We had no idea.

My daughter was in a movie that was having its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. I was her date, for one reason. When you’re in an indie movie that gets into Sundance, this is how much the producers pay for you and a loved one to fly to Utah and stay in a hotel in Park City: zero. So if your mother offers to buy you a plane ticket and pay for a hotel, you accept the offer, even if it means taking her with you.

Before we went, my daughter had gotten an e-mail invitation, through her agent, to a party: come for lunch cooked by a chef, and an afternoon of skiing. She RSVP’d yes, saying she would be bringing a guest. A message came back saying that our arrival time was to be 12:30 p.m., as if it were an appointment. This should have been a tip-off, but what did we know?

Another missed red flag: The party was being held at something the invitation called ____ House, only it was the name of a ski jacket company. Maybe it was … a store? A house owned by the ski jacket company as a perk for its executives? Like Andy Warhol, we didn’t care—we were happy to go, having nothing to do until my daughter’s movie that night. And we like lunch; we like skiing.

It pains me to share this, but we dressed warmly, in clothes suitable for winter sport. We wore layers. We brought gloves and hats. We wore thick, sensible socks.

A cab drove us to a mountain. At the bottom of the mountain was a big silly wrought-iron gate and a security guard, who checked us off a list and waved us on. We wended our way up the mountain, high, high up; eventually, our cab pierced through the cloud level to the clear air above, air so thin that breathing it felt like you had just chain-smoked a pack of Marlboros. The landscape belonged to a Dr. Seuss book—from up here, the houses far below looked like tiny Whoville.

Here above the clouds were giant, hulking houses, more conference-center-sized than house-sized. Though built yesterday, in a trice, they were meant to summon the idea of “lodge,” of “rusticity,” all rough-hewn timber and rock-of-ages stone. The taxi delivered us to one of the houses, where a large man who looked like a bouncer let us in. At the door, a smiling young woman greeted us, checking my daughter’s name off a list on the clipboard she carried. Was my daughter still up for skiing? she asked. Great, she would just get her outfitted. She whisked her into a bedroom to try on ski boots. “But my mother—” said my daughter loyally. “We’ll do her later,” said the young woman. I didn’t know why, but I understood that later seemed unlikely. Never mind; I would just wander around.

This was such a strange party. First of all, it lacked guests. Aside from us, there were no guests. Instead of guests, the living room was filled with racks of parkas and puffy ski pants, like a clothes store. Many young women milled around, women who seemed to be here in a working capacity, all of them in very tight jeans, and long blond hair ironed flat as a sheet of glass. The dining room table was covered not with a cloth or buffet plates and forks and knives wrapped in napkins but with clunky cameras and photo equipment. Two photographers sat at the table, quietly eating sandwiches out of paper wrappings.

Clearly, they were not being offered the same food we party guests had been promised in our invitation. So far, our party seemed to be hostless as well as guestless. I worried that it was going to be chefless and lunchless as well.

I found the gleaming state-of-the-art kitchen. Here, sitting at a round table, were four more young women—more ironed hair, more fleeting smiles in my direction, the kind of smile people give when you sit down in an airplane seat next to them: I acknowledge you are sitting down next to me, but this is the end of our relationship; we are not going to make friends. They sat with their laptops in front of them, having a meeting of some kind. Not very partyish of them, I thought.

Here, standing at attention by the stove, were not one but two chefs, a young man and a young woman. They would be delighted to make my lunch, they said, and showed me an elegant sample lunch on a plate—pistachio-crusted sea bass, slivers of vegetables inside a little shredded-potato basket. Yes, please, I told them, but first I’ll see how my daughter is doing.

Here she was in the living room, cocooned inside a stylish chocolate-brown down parka and black ski pants, new knit ski cap on her head, new ski gloves in her hand. “So I’ll return these when I’m done skiing?” she was saying to the young woman with the clipboard.

“No, no,” said the young woman. “Keep them.”

Keep them? Really? We looked at each other. What kind of party was this? At that moment and not before—amazing, I know, but it’s true—we realized it: This wasn’t a party at all.

“Mom,” my daughter said under her breath, “This is all swag.”

We weren’t total naïfs. We knew what swag was: free stuff that companies give you to promote their products. We’d even seen what Sundance swag looked like. Our family had been to the film festival a year earlier, when my daughter had a part in another movie shown there. At the Salt Lake City airport on our way home, we ran into a longtime movie star we knew a little. Usually withdrawn to the point of sullenness, he was beaming. “Check these out!” he said, lifting a jeans leg to show off his swag Frye boots. “And this!” he said, waving a brand-new cell phone in the air. “I had to buy suitcases at Target to get everything home!” And all he’d had to do, he said, was have his picture taken with his new purchases.

Later, I had given my daughter an earful on the subject of wretched excess and the way Some People sell their souls cheap.

She listened. She knows that growing up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan means always having to feel you’re guilty. That’s a joke, but not really. Your parents may send you to private school, but they send you to public school first, so you’ll always know how lucky you are. They don’t send you to summer camp without reminding you of all the poor children who can’t go. They spend half the holiday season shipping off presents to needy children they never met and who aren’t you.

*   *   *

We should have guessed that we were in a swag den, but we didn’t. We didn’t know how swag was delivered. In real life, this house was owned by some nameless rich people; during the festival, when the ski jacket company rented it, it became a swag house. Swagililand. Swagadoon.

One of the photographers was taking my daughter’s picture in her new clothes: click, click, click, click, click. The young woman with the clipboard led her downstairs, where the family room had been turned into another clothes store, only this one sponsored by a famous blue jeans company. And now she was outfitted in a jean jacket and form-fitting jeans. Three young women hovered around her like handmaidens, fetching different cuts and styles of jeans, complimenting her contours, pressing her to take one of every kind. Or like Cinderella’s fairy godmother, magically dressing her in her beautiful ball attire, only at this ball everyone would be attired in blue jeans.

*   *   *

I could see the confusion in my daughter’s eyes. She’d been raised to feel guilty, but she was also a twenty-one-year-old with free clothes literally being thrown at her. It was time, if for perhaps the first moment in my life, to keep my mouth shut.

“I know it’s terrible to say,” she said, “but I love it.”

A cheerful young woman, a professional skier, arrived to take her skiing. The skier had been hired to ski with her and give her a free lesson in her new outfit. I was going to be beyond a third wheel; I was going to ruin the photo op. That was fine: I was hungry, and it had started to snow outside. Off they went, a cameraman and a photographer in tow.

Two or three young actors appeared over the next hour or so. I recognized one of them, an actor I’d seen in small roles in films, but I couldn’t remember which films. The actors and their retinues left minutes after they came; like trick-or-treaters, they arrived in the foyer looking both anticipatory and dying to go, staying only long enough to collect their gifts and have their pictures taken before fleeing, off to stalk more swag.

The chefs cooked me lunch. I was the only one for whom they cooked lunch, all the other visitors having declined the offer. I ate it while chatting with the chefs, standing at the kitchen counter, the kitchen and dining room tables being unavailable and the living room being a store. The young women at the kitchen table, all from the marketing department of the ski jacket company, typed into their laptops. Other young women—some from the ski jacket company, some from the blue jeans company, one from a sneaker company whose sneakers were on display in yet another room—sat around in various rooms, bored, or watched the snow fall outside the enormous picture windows, or talked on their cell phones.

I picked up a nylon sports wallet from a display arranged on the living room hearth. I thought, I wouldn’t feel greedy if someone offered me this little wallet. I think I could accept it. A girl on duty in the living room smiled at me. Clearly, she was not going to offer me the wallet. The swag was for the Talent. It occurred to me that I could be a terminally ill child, my little head bald from chemotherapy, and she would smile at me in just this way, this you’re-not-getting-any-swag way. The photographers, I sensed, felt sorry for me, stuck here as I was, and spoke to me with kind condescension. “Hi, Mom, how’s it goin’? You doin’ all right?”

Time passed. I talked to the bouncer about his recent foot operation. I declined a martini offered by the bartender, who was promoting a new brand of vodka. I looked out the window at the other jumbo houses and noted how much they looked like the photographs on the covers of Architectural Digest, which used to occasionally assign me to write about the homes of the rich and famous. I wondered what I would say about one of these houses if I had to write about it, and I scared myself by pretending that I had to write about this house and all the lies I would have to tell. I would have to say the word grand, and I would also have to say the word cozy. I would have to say the house was both grand and yet, at one and the same time, cozy. I imagined that there was a penal colony for lying writers, and that I would have to go there, perhaps living in the cell next to James Frey, perhaps sharing a bunk with Lillian Hellman.

Because the house was not grand—or only in the sense that a Disney World hotel is grand—nor was it homey, its interiors absent of any personal effects: no family photographs, no books, no magazines, nothing on any surface. The porcelain vase collection behind glass in the dining room cupboard had clearly been bought by a decorator with a wave of a checkbook; every piece of furniture was spanking new, like a furniture-showroom display. “I just wish we could have gotten the fireplace to work,” said the young woman in charge of the blue jeans room, looking genuinely disappointed. One glance at the antiseptically clean fireplace told you it had never been used. Something about all this cleanness and newness felt sinister, as if the owners had been murdered here and a real estate agent had covered up the bloody mess with fresh wall-to-wall carpeting and these stagey trappings.

My daughter returned, her cheeks flushed. She had loved her ski lesson, and she had met Stewart Copeland, the former drummer for the Police, in a gondola! One of the blond young women offered her a cup of coffee. Yes, thank you, she would love a cup of coffee.

The young woman pushed a button on an elaborate, shiny machine on the kitchen counter; steaming coffee poured forth into a mug.

“That’s a beautiful coffeemaker,” said my daughter.

“We’ll send you one,” said the young woman.

“Thank you, that’s great,” said my daughter, polite but calm, now wise to the ways of swag. “I’ll give you my shipping address.” I eyed the enormous, brand-new eight-burner stove and wondered how to get her to admire it out loud.