Lucian Freud and Elisabeth Lloyd happen to arrive at our door almost simultaneously. Taking and hanging their coats, Barb says that tonight we’ve invited folk who deal differently and significantly with the general place of women in society. Lucian says he knows a couple hundred women, but isn’t sure he generally knows women’s place in society. To myself, I say that’d be like Joe DiMaggio having a 56-game hitting streak in 1941 and claiming he doesn’t know baseball.

Elisabeth says she’s delighted to meet the creator of Lucian’s vibrant and powerful paintings. The 85-year-old Lucian says he no longer 'does' many dinner parties, but nicely adds that he's glad to be here.

Elisabeth is curious too about the man from Beijing who affects half a billion women through his tightly managed state and its rule of only one child per urban family (farmers and minorities can have more). I say that when we invited him, we thought he'd be Time's "Man of the Year." It was too awkward and late to dis-invite him when he was dubbed only a Runner-Up (along with Al Gore, J.K. Rowling, and U.S. General Petraeus).

We chat briefly about the results of the Iowa caucuses last night, including the stirring cadences of "That Speech" by Obama. We disagree over whether it was too long or whether it was diminished by being telepromptered.

Because Hu Jintao advocates ‘mutually respectful talk,’ in advance of his arrival I’ve got a little list. First, I entreat Lucian and Elisabeth, “Please don’t talk with the President about Chinese dissidents.” Apparently, that’s a cold-war category, without full meaning now that some internal criticism is O.K.

Second, I plead with Elisabeth, Lucian, and Barb not to bring up the plights of those left behind in the economic transformation and hyper-consumerism of China’s past 20 years. I refer to the elders whose needs exceed the country’s resources, the youngsters from non-elite universities who can’t find relevant jobs, the cashless who often are refused treatment by Chinese hospitals, and the down-and-outs whose organs are harvested and sold. “Remember,” I entreat in my long-winded way, “China wants to project the best possible image to us and the world. We don’t have to be apologists for Hu, but the chap has taken steps to reduce rural poverty and promote social justice, eh?"

“Also,” the control freak in me hovers over Lucian and Elisabeth, “I know the scientific community says that time is running out, and global warming is worrisome, but kindly forbear in giving voice to that tired complaint of all Westerners, that 1) the air is filthy and soot-layered in China, and 2) the country’s pollution is epic, despoiling the whole world’s environment and health.” I point out that polls indicate that voters in the West lately rate the environmental issue at the bottom of issues they care about (after the economy, war, money, health, etc.) That's a lame rating.

Nonetheless I request forbearance because, well...because a couple weeks ago when I had phoned-in our invitation, one of President Hu’s aides had said his government had imposed a fuel tax, mandated a 20 percent improvement in energy productivity, and envisaged a 10 percent improvement in air quality by 2010. “It’s a start,” the aide had said, hoping we’d avoid hectoring along those lines.

“How can anything be discussed,” Elisabeth queries, “when we have so many things we’re not allowed to discuss? “

“What can we talk about?” Lucian demands with what I interpret as ruefulness.

“Everything else,” I say, my bum against the wall and fearful they’ll both say, “Bor-ing, Un-in-ter-est-ing.” Instead I hear, from my co-conspirator in tonight’s time: "Now that reminds me of something I heard or read somewhere -- 'There is no such thing as an uninteresting subject, only uninterested people.'" I'm not sure that's true; is oatmeal interesting? what if something can't teach you anything new or helpful?

I persist with my go-easy-on-Huisms, although probably I’m alienating Elisabeth and Lucian by requesting they provide openings for the President to shine, to show how far his country has come of late. For instance, I say, “Let’s give the chap the chance to boast about his moderately increasing spending to repair China’s shredded social net. Let him preen too about educational progress in remote areas. When our neighbor visited there 15 years ago, most English teachers couldn’t even speak English. Now, they can.”

My final argument, which may be either my weakest or strongest: since Chinese do not like being criticized by westerners, the more we complain to Hu about his authoritarianism, the more he may feel a need to rally his citizens against the ways of foreign devils.

Have we covered our bases? We'll see, we'll see.

--------------
UPDATE: Barb's quote from 'somewhere' about uninterestedness, which I just googled-up, is from G.K. Chesterton. Didn't know my wife was into Chesterton. The lady keeps surprising me.

Every year an estimated 400,000 Chinese die from air pollution, and I had wanted to button-hole President Hu Jintao about that. Hostesses are supposed to be polite, and so I agree to hold back. There will not be a peep out of me either about China’s sweatshop manufacturing or its slow reaction/cover-up for the SARS epidemic a couple years ago. As long as Hu does not pull geopolitical rank on me, I will offer unilaterally respectful talk.

Skeptically looking around our living room before he sits down in our grandest chair, Lucian Freud closely notices the looseness, tightnesses, angles, and changing directions of brush-strokes in our framed paintings.

We have a cockapoo named Presto, who sidles up to Lucian. Lucian remarks that dogs are one of his favorite subjects for close-up portraits.

I do not think he likes our landscapes, abstracts, and figures on canvasses far smaller than he now uses. It is fair to say they lack Lucian’s fabulous accuracy in anatomy, microscopic attentiveness to details, and original palette of color (earths, yellows, reds, and lead-whites). Worse, the people in our artworks’ group scenes all look alike, possibly resembling their self-regarding creators. (That, we learn, is one of Lucian’s perceptions about group portraits by other artists.)

It is an ancient conversation-starter, I realize, but on our coffee table we've placed a book featuring a lot of Lucian’s paintings as well as some of his extraordinary etchings from oversized copper plates. We are not compelled to like his work, but now as the four of us leaf through it, we do appreciate his cast of sometimes lumpy characters, mostly against the backdrops of his messy, paint-splattered studio. We note solo figures in and out of clothes. We also glimpse several of his rather honest self-portraits, including one that presents Lucian in the nude -- except for the old boots he wears so he will not spill pigment on his shoes.

Lucian chooses his subjects on impulse, he says. They are not professional models adept at holding poses, but friends -- or friends of friends, "people that interest me." Lucian says he demands of them congeniality, reliability, and punctuality. He requires that they pose in his studio even though he is painting a lamp or floorboard (he is very big on floorboards): the model’s presence, Lucian says, affects everything in his picture.

Over the course of as much as an astonishing 2,000 hours that each model spends in his company, an emotional connection evolves. Hmmm, that is more time that Rick and I spent courting a zillion years ago.

When Rick inquires, “When do you know when a painting is finished?” -- now that is a corny question -- Lucian says he gets preliminary inklings. Ultimately he finishes whenever he gets the impression that he is working on somebody else’s painting...

We hear how Lucian starts with his subjects’ eyes (sometimes teary or doe-eyed) and then appraises and reconsiders their intelligent faces. Next he paints and repaints their sagging lips, sweaty armpits, vivid paunches, pubic growths, stray wisps of facial hair, and weary (non-erotic) genitals.

His fluid depictions are not idealized. Lucian says, "I could never put anything in a picture that isn't exactly in front of me. That would be a pointless lie, a mere bit of artfulness." Not one for decorativeness or artistic flattery, Lucian recalls that when commissioned to paint Queen Elizabeth II, he famously showed her with a 5 o’clock shadow and a fright wig.

She was fully dressed, our Elisabeth (Lloyd) points out.

We don’t feel sorry for Her Highness, for it’s not as if the Queen is unpainted. We’re told she’s sat for 120 other portraits.

Just when Lucian was telling me that, yes, he does converse with his models (through tales, songs, poems, and anecdotes), President Hu arrives. So what if he's late -- at least he's here.

Looking out our door, I see his limousine is parked not in front of our place but in front of our neighbors, the Wellbornes. In response to Barb, Hu says that his staff members there will not need take-out from us –- they’ve brought their own food, drink, and self-improvement materials.

Tonight Hu has left his BlackBerry behind in the limo, which I interpret as a compliment to our company tonight.

Briefly putting my laptop aside, I participate in some idle cross-talk first with Lucian Freud, then with Elisabeth Lloyd.

He is a jovial, joking raconteur and mimic. It is easy to affiliate with such a charismatic charmer.

Early on, Elisabeth’s sunny earnestness and merry prudence also “clicks” positively with everyone.

The same with Hu Jintao, once he shakes hands firmly and apologizes for arriving late. “Traffic – it was maddening. Stop and go all the way.” he explains. We know that his aide had only “penciled” us in for tonight, and we’re grateful that Hu (and the others) showed.

Elisabeth, picking up the scent from our oven, says "Whatever it is, the food smells good."...

Following Lucian Freud and Hu Jintao into our dining space, I express a Folklorist’s interest in Elisabeth Lloyd’s research. Sitting down on my right, she affirms, “Yes, female orgasm is very mysterious. Nor has science thrown much light on it. In my book, I examine 20 explanations which turn out to be completely unsupported by the evidence. They were hopelessly bad science. I like good science.”

As Hu opens the bottle of water he has brought tonight, Elisabeth clarifies that most evolutionary biologists believe that every single body-part has a purpose. For instance, those academics argue that the purpose of the man’s orgasm is to inseminate women with child. With low standards of evidence, these scientists have been resolute in asserting that females respond to intercourse in the same way that males respond to intercourse -- with orgasm.

Not necessarily so, Elisabeth says. One point is that female orgasm during intercourse is altogether variable. Fact is, only a small fraction of women always respond to intercourse with orgasm. And for three out of four women, orgasm occurs by direct hand-stimulation of the clitoris.

The scholarly phrase, I learn, is ‘assisted intercourse.”

President Hu Jintao – also his nation’s Paramount leader, General Secretary of the Communist Party, and Chair of the Central Military Commission -- certainly is one of the world’s most important politicians, listened to and heeded wherever he goes. Hu, moreover, is a learned man, admired for promulgating a Confucian moral code about what self-controlled citizens in an “Harmonious Society” should regard as an honor and as a shame. Nonetheless, up to now he has not spoken, one way or another, in public at home or abroad, about (let’s be blunt about this) female orgasms (there! I wrote it -- and online at that.

Lucian Freud, Rick, and I turn to Hu as he coughs, leans forward, and puts this question to Elisabeth Lloyd: “How to say this delicately? The female orgasm -- whenever and however it occurs -- it is necessary for fertility? That’s its purpose, is that correct?”

Again, not necessarily. Elisabeth is careful to caution, “My view isn’t necessarily the right explanation. It’s just that at this time, it’s the best explanation that’s supported by evidence.”

What the evidence to date does suggest is that “female orgasm is NOT correlated with any aspect of fertility, pregnancy, or reproductive success, according to the evidence we have.” Contrary then to what purpose-seeking evolutionists have declaimed, the clitoris and female organism have not necessarily been “improved” or “adapted” by natural selection over time for better performance in fertilization.

Elisabeth has a caveat: “Of course sexual pleasure and stimulation is adaptive. The clitoris itself is adaptive in its promotion of intercourse and in its stimulating sexual excitement and lubrication and all of that. It’s clearly adaptive. But there is simply no evidence that the physical reflex of orgasm itself is adaptive. That’s a very important distinction. If that were the case, orgasm would correlate with an increase in the number of children. The women who are orgasmic would have had to have contributed more genes to the future.”

At present then, Elisabeth sees the sexual excitement of a female orgasm as just a happy accident.

Brightening, Hu says that if the male is sufficiently caring of his female partner, inciting her orgasm via her clitoris, assuredly he has proven himself worthy. In effect, Hu continues, that lover is the traditional Mr. Right: he has demonstrated that he will be caring and responsible, first as a mate and later as a father. “That inciting enables us to conclude that the orgasm, assisted or not, does serve a reasonable purpose, namely pair bonding. Elisabeth, that’s correct, isn’t it?”

Again, Elisabeth: “It seems intuitive that a female orgasm would motivate females to engage in intercourse which would naturally lead to more pregnancies or help with bonding or something like that, but the evidence simply doesn’t back that up.”...

Because cheese is traditionally absent from Chinese diets, we hosts are audacious enough to want to cosmopolitan-ize the President. Tonight, from an online recipe, I’ve prepared chicken and wild mushroom broth with cheddar cheese wontons. They go over fine.

When Barb speak of imported-from-China foods that she buys at our local market, Hu Jintao casually mentions that he’s cancelled his country’s agriculture tax. As I understand it, that step reduced the urban/rural economic divide and somewhat whittled away at China’s income disparities. Hu, who sure is comfortable with statistics, elaborates that just 1 percent of his population control 60 percent of the wealth. By contrast, in the U.S., 5 percent control 60 percent. Hu strikes me as one of those CEOs who believe it’s difficult to manage unless you measure.

Assuming ownership of a radish, Hu argues for recognition of his country’s progress. He assures us that China doesn’t just belch black smokestacks, the favored signs of progress of his predecessor (by 30 years) Mao Zedong. It’s propelling far into the Information Age. Relatively it’s becoming Innovation Country. “Relative to what?” Elisabeth probes -- but politely. She seems like a who-what-where kind of person.

Over quail, “the yield of the hunt” and Lucian Freud’s favorite Western food, Hu says that his young countrymen want to try out the thinking of Westerners like the economist Milton Friedman and the philosopher John Rawls. “Try out Rawls?” Elisabeth Lloyd fiddles with a fork and seems genuinely excited, “As in trying out a political order where liberty and equality are reconciled?” Hu replies with a statesman’s stiffness, “A qualified yes. Our Rawlsians are exploring a middle ground, without arguing for liberty against equality. Our interest is in moral duties and obligations that accord with people’s common idea of modern justice.”

Our company kicks that idea around for a while. Lucian, it evolves, wants "liberty first," prioritizing a society with as much individual opportunity as possible to exploit one's talents and endowments. As vigorously, Barb wants "equality first" in the "shared social space with fellow-citizens." Those differ, amicably enough, in their emphases and on the function of taxes. They do not 'triangulate' to a centrist position. That’s O.K. Somewhat opposing views have been heard and middle grounds not found. In this, I suspect we are unlike Hu's Middle Kingdom today, which after all is collapsing the boundaries between communism and capitalism.

Tonight I am boldly crossing my own cultural border, swooshing around in an embroidered Chinese gown. It is red silk. Hu Jintao, ever the diplomat, compliments me on it. I own up that I borrowed it from our next-door neighbor, Celia Wellborne. At a market in China, Celia had selected a material, taken it to the on-site tailor, picked through many style books for a pattern, been measured up, and returned a week later to a perfect fit.

At Rick’s bidding, Hu gives out with impressive numbers on improvements to the social net and about China’s progress in rural education. Rick whispers to me, “Things are going great.”

We Westerners roam beyond those topics that Rick had ‘planted’ for us, learning for instance about his wife and two children, his stint as a provincial governor, his having to compromise between competing personalities and factions within his Party. He does not mention restive minorities or his brutal suppression in 1987 of protests against China in Tibet.

With the pride of the hydraulic engineer that he was some 35 years ago, Hu does mention however the building along the Yangtze River of the mammoth 3 Gorges Dam, for flood control and hydroelectric power. Almost as one, we four Westerners come together as quizzical over that project’s wretched impact on the environment. Rick, who earlier tonight had asked us to steer clear of environmental topics, is the first to be caught up in the critical moment: I will have to ask him later what on earth got into him -- given his anxieties about being a good host, he is now a mystery, asking about valuable archaeological and folk-cultural sites that the Dam will submerge. For the rest of us too, it is as if a proverbial dam has burst open, as if Rick's 'ban' on environmental criticism is withdrawn. Elisabeth Lloyd follows through, noting how she has read that the mega-dam’s reduction of River silt will cause erosion and sinking of coastal areas. Lucian has heard of damage to biodiversity. I watch TV news and so I can wonder too about the dangerous landslides into the stinky Yangtze.

To which the President says, evenly, that authorities are working to minimize those costs and achieving cleaner technology. Only after a nation is well-off, however, can it afford to clean the environment. To his credit, Mr. Hu does not deny the Dam has forced the relocation of 1.3 million persons. Unfortunately, they are 3 Gorges’s short-term losers -- yet they have to be considered alongside the project’s many, many short- and long-term winners. (Hu is thought to be agile at table tennis, and he is up to returning the conversational ball too.)

My sense is that Hu understands his country's environmental mess. Still the bridge-builder, he does not dwell on pollution sources in our homeland -- vehicles, pulp mills, phosphorous as well as chlorine, and sewers that flush sewage, chemicals, and fertilizers into rivers during heavy rainstorms. Nor does he emphasize that China’s delivery of goods by transport is often cleaner than, say, North America’s. Also understated is that in effect North America, with its consumption of foreign goods, has outsourced much of its pollution to China. I suspect that Hu may be saving our face -- and his economy which needs the rest of the world as a market.

Rick deviates once more from his 'hands-off' approach to pollution. Now he has the chops to ask: "I hope I'm not overstepping, President Hu, but what if your government adheres to its present course? Within 25 years, China will emit twice the carbon dioxide of all the OECD countries, yes?" What could have triggered this from my mild-mannered husband?

Hu, the federal chieftan, deflects that question, characterizing the too-lax provincial governments as messing things up by poor implementation of his central government's environmental prescriptions. He's striving for better governance too.

I would say we’re pretty good foils for Hu to play off of.

Smoothly changing the subject, he refers approvingly to Newly Displaced Population, a 2004 canvas by the realist painter Liu Xiaodong. “Look,” he suggests, “Chinese authorities did not censor that critical painting. That openness is emblematic of China’s growing tolerance.” Pressed by Elisabeth Lloyd, however, Hu does admit that representations of the Tiananmen Square episode still are off-limits.

Flash forward to Lucian gamely asking about contemporary art in China. He does not bring up a topic he had remarked upon before Hu showed up, when we were talking art and anticipating Hu's arrival. Lucian complained then about those art factory villages where scores of Chinese artisans replicate original works from the West which they sell by the square meter. Rather than that concern, Lucian dwells now on the explosion of museums, galleries, and auction houses. That Shanghai and Beijing are very much “hot stops on the highly competitive international art circuit” comes as news to Barb and me, but not to the well-read Lucian.

He asks about the tension between younger Chinese artists who flaunt their personal styles in the face of their nation's official emphasis on the harmonious collective. Lucian wins no direct response from Hu to that, except I detect an eyebrow uptick, as if the President is reflecting that some Chinese these days go in different directions.

Lucian knows, moreover, about Beijing’s newish “798” district, a cultural quarter that clusters 300 artists’ studios, commercial galleries, bookshops, and restaurants. Lucian also is in the know about the top marks that Western critics and buyers give currently to important contemporary Chinese paintings, especially those not in the old social-realist mode. Happily, art professionals no longer have occasion to carp, “That’s pretty good for a Chinese painting.”

Few important Chinese paintings are purchased these days by mainland Chinese, the buyers principally being Europeans. According to Lucian, those buyers, and others, prop up the star system of international art. Hu asks, “But Lucian, is that a good thing?” That leads to our discussing whether that system is declining as the art market increasingly offers choice. I know middle-class people, for instance, who buy locally and thus value personal connectivity to artists whose work they hang in their homes. Lucian, though, tonight projects that the big-bucks crowd will continue buying globally…

A polite knock at the door. It’s Celia Wellborne, come to share the good news that her husband has found his heavy-duty crane, which had been stolen a week ago from a fenced construction site. The machine is not damaged, but the police haven’t yet nabbed the culprits.

Celia peers in at us in the living room, and waves at Hu, who waves back. Moments after she goes, Hu leads a discussion on the politics of construction, Beijing style. We're told that nowadays over half of the building cranes in the world are in China.

I pop open some of the champagne that Lucian Freud savors, and in response to my request, Elisabeth Lloyd gives the toast. We drink to "Reason.” God only knows why “Reason." Or was it "Good Reason" or "Good Reasoning"? Whatever. As a septuagenarian probably (as a healthy friend says of himself) "down to single digits," I prefer drinking to "Good Health." Elisabeth’s dedication, though, appears to please Hu. Lucian hoists his glass to Reason, but he doesn’t act like his heart is in it. He allows that once he was known around London as an utterly UNreasonable gambler.

We’ve haven’t had a second sip from our glasses before Lucian introduces, as counterpoint, a ray of Buddhist philosophy: people find enlightenment by getting their minds out of the way. That said, we all re-drink, with varying degrees of heartiness, to "Feeling, and To The Mind Not Getting In The Way.” Elisabeth is supportive, remarking that “intuitions are vitally important as fruitful guides [among other things] to Research.”

At times a quite private man about himself tonight, Lucian eventually orates (as artists can be so good at doing) about art and artistic behaviors. At one point, perhaps goaded by Elisabeth’s research, he quotes Pablo Picasso that sex and art are the same thing.

Hu Jintao, who certainly has done his background research for tonight, gets personal: he shares with us that the British typically constrain their jealousy when they see Lucian in the tabloid press hobnobbing with gorgeous female companions. The public accepts the series of beauties as Lucian’s due, as rewards for his high art. Lucian gives a bemused response to this aspect of his busy life being known outside London.

In China, Hu says, personal displays of artistic and intellectual genius or ability can be seen as a form of human plumage, designed to entice sexual partners. Fair enough. In the West too.

Think about it, though. Think how fashion is a kind of language, sending out messages. Yet the suit Hu’s wearing tonight is neither artistic nor intellectual-looking. Sort of churchy. I privately guess Hu is not much into enticing sexual partners.

(Evidently, he’s more into worrying -- as he had said earlier -- about reforming an exchange rate regime that’s been boosting inflation and creating an asset bubble at home. You know, I think he likes worrying about these things too.)

Elisabeth Lloyd has heard of a study in The Proceedings of The Royal Society demonstrating that the greater the artistic endeavor, the larger the sexual appetites. She’s uncertain about those researchers’ proposed link between artistic sexuality and schizophrenia. Indeed, an inborn chemical may contribute to artists’ individualities and their uniquely imagined views of the world. Before Elisabeth will go along with that conclusion, however, she says she will need more data. Data do win, apparently with her, the prudent scholar.

Rick brings in some background data, which I suspect the well-briefed Hu Jinao already knows. (For the dinner tonight, we had told our guests who else was invited.) Much as Lucian Freud typically paints people “how they happen to be,” Elisabeth studies how women happen to have orgasms. Today, with her “unorthodox and admirable” claim, Elisabeth is likely one of the most frank scholars on that intimate action that directly involves the whole human race.

That said about her reputation, Rick returns to her evidence. In turn, that ultimately becomes prologue for his attempt to pry out from Elisabeth the inside story on the life history of Elisabeth’s predecessor (by 50 years) at Indiana University: the famous and terribly important sex scholar Alfred Kinsey.

Frankly, I am relieved that Rick, Lucian, and Hu fail, completely fail, to motivate Elisabeth into passing on anything spicy about Mr. & Mrs. Kinsey and their randy colleagues in the ‘50s. It is really none of our business. Others’ private sex is not a public matter. And that kind of talk is a silly and dangerous distraction from important crises in our world...

As we adjourn to the living room, I maintain that folk behavior is interesting and horizon-broadening to know about. I refer to specific sexual adventures of the Kinsey Gang. My sources are the not always reliable books, movies, and biographies on that Gang, together with their pioneering research. Everyone, I figure, at the table is curious about what went on back in Bloomington but we’re circumspect. We present ourselves as un-shocked, we wear our most disinterested expressions.

That is, everyone except Lucian Freud. He still appears bemused.

Summarizing, Lucian eventually declares that “everything is autobiographical.” Elisabeth, shaking her long brown hair, again is not so sure. The most she’ll say now is that good science does arise out of personal drives of researchers.

Slightly off-topic, eventually Hu Jintao only offers that old feminist cry from the ‘60s and ‘70s that ‘the personal is also political.’ He doesn’t elaborate on that, in or out of his nation’s context. Perhaps at variance to the child-like obedience demanded by the murderous and absolutist Mao, Hu’s politics enable his countrymen and women to have -- if not liberty -- more personal space?

I assume, all very respectfully of course, that Hu is a devotee of the school of ‘Capitalism now, Democracy later... Maybe.” So when a chance arises, as tactfully as possible, I inquire if he has any idea how much ‘later’ may be. I figure he’ll say something about his path of gradualism and incrementalism. I expect that observation especially since five or ten minutes ago, he was telling us that he governs by consensus among rival leaders, and thus he’s certainly not in a position to solve speedily all governmental problems by himself. Other leaders have to come round.

Elisabeth is more direct: “President Hu, what are the chances that social democracy will be established within 10 years? And with a farmer's vote equal to a city-dweller's vote?” I'm confused by Elisabeth's question as I had thought citizens didn't ballot on state or local officials. What I hear from her is that now the rural voter registers as just one-quarter of the urban voter. I want clarification.

Hu doesn’t go there. What he repeats is that political reform will have to be cautious and studied. Hu says China is "pursuing a scientific outlook in development" through solutions that integrate not only economic concerns but environmental and social ones.

Hu's scientific quest to tie things together strikes Barb as akin to Lucian's artistic need to have models pose throughout an entire picture's creation. Eyes turn to her as she recalls what Lucian had said earlier about the model's presence affecting his painting of everything, e.g., the floorboard in the background, the lamp at the side, the sheet on the couch.

Eyes turn back to Hu with his point that China should “cherish socialism”which is hostile to great inequities and supportive of millions continuing to rise out of poverty annually. "Workers," Hu accentuates with what could be interpreted as either a smirk or a hope (sorry, I am not good at reading Chinese faces), "workers have recently gained job rights including the development of skills and talent via on-the-job training. Also lawyers now are taking on cases for workers' rights." And Hu has initiated programs and centers to make officials more accountable and government more open about meetings and functions.

“How’s it working out?” Elisabeth asks pleasantly, grateful (I think) to be talking about something other than her sex research. And as she ever-so-discretely pours Earl Gray Tea, Barb asks too: “Are there also provisions for elected works councils, collective bargaining, trade unions, and direct profit-sharing?”

For half a moment, Hu visibly blanches, cautiously and studiedly.

Suddenly, a pang of guilt hits me about my earlier pushiness tonight over energy, carbon credits, global warming. Maybe I shouldn’t be deferential to foreign authority, but after all this cordial man is our guest in our house. Methinks we should tread more lightly challenging him and his Party’s hierarchy. Our Chinese teapot and our questioning of his regime may ignite in Hu’s mind, even sparking him to reflect that his most brutal predecessor may have had the right idea after all, i.e., during the Cultural Revolution, Mao the Uber Authoritarian attempted to closed-down all his country's teahouses, the better to squelch dissidents.

Not to worry. No scowl emanates from our Presidential guest. Ah, relief. Tea-time with us, here in our often-democratic and very often-comfortable West, may veer toward the argumentative, but it hardly threatens his state, which now permits teahouses anyhow.

And…who would have thought? With marked chagrin in his voice, Hu says his father -- who had a small tea-trading business -- was denounced during the Cultural Revolution.

Hu Jintao pours cream into his tea, stirs it, and says that yes, things are working out. ”On the whole, the opportunities outweigh the challenges.” Greater democracy is on the horizon inside the Party, with more candidates than there are Politburo positions. But at present social democracy can not usher in the gross domestic product that China needs for its hikes in people-oriented welfare. Accordingly, considerable faith is placed on revving-up in the country’s dynamic private sector: its entrepreneurs are demonstrating how newly efficient and profitable products or processes can elevate the entire economy. The state sector is certainly no slouch either, for it has produced Fortune 500 companies that list their shares abroad, thereby giving the Party a voice in global capital markets. State-owned enterprises now have stakes in global stability: they have been acquiring foreign companies for commercial purposes. Hu also cites technology -- and he explicitly values the world-wide-web invention of our last-month guest Tim Berners-Lee -- as a force for economic, social, and political change in China.

Silently I wonder if Hu regards that electronic force as a socio-political boon or bane.

Lu Freud, still on an economic theme, subsequently asks how the savings of Chinese play out in the country's evolution. Hu agrees his countrymen are prodigious savers. It is a point of pride for many Chinese to cheap out (my term, not Hu's). They track down the good deal and thus economize.

The country’s banks are awash with household accounts (some $2.25 trillion, Hu remarks). Happily too, citizens now have access to overseas markets where their investments can help cool China’s over-heated, export-addicted economy with its double-digit annual growth.

Silently I wonder if that remarkable economy, and the U.S. teetering economy, will go bust this new year.

State-owned enterprises also have stakes in global stability, Hu is saying now. They have been acquiring companies in other countries for commercial purposes. Avoiding extremes, Hu uses the neutral word ‘acquire’ rather than the provocative verb ‘take-over.’

I am not sure that Elisabeth Lloyd is satisfied that Hu has answered her timetable question about democracy, but she does give him some slack. I do too, even though a small paranoid voice in me wonders about overseas acquisitions by foreign countries’ state-owned enterprises. Will those takeovers geopolitically affect the security of nations whose business are taken-over?

And what about China's modernizing military and its foreign assertiveness, plus its efforts to buy up much of the world's oil and gas? How about that, Mr. Prez?

Right now, however, none of us want to spend time and energy arguing with the Paramount Leader.

I am interested to see that Hu does not talk, like his more flamboyant predecessors, about Marxism and anti-imperialist struggles. Rather, he speaks of China's peaceful rise and of overcoming the scarcities that evolve as cities, farms, industries, and state businesses compete for ground water. That shortage, he reminds us, is part of the complex larger picture where state-owned companies and provincial and city governments all compete against one another.

What is more -- and here we get a troubled tone from Hu -- 70 percent of the publicly traded companies are worthless. The banking systems have up to 1 trillion dollars in bad loans. The President quotes his Premier, Wen Jiabao: “The growth in the economy is unstable, unbalanced, uncoordinated, and unsustainable."

Freud and Lloyd, whose last names could be the last words of a rhyming couplet, admire the Chinese leaders’ honesty. They strike me as truth-tellers themselves.

I could be misreading Elisabeth, but I also detect a wariness about all politicians’ claims of what happening or not happening.

Now Elisabeth is pondering aloud about the stability of families in the country’s rush to materialism and commercialism. Because parents work so hard to get ahead and make money, do they have much time and energy to nurture their only child? Hu replies that these families do have problems and that a growth industry in the service sector is psychological counseling for families.

Hearing that, Lu lets out a roar and a toss of his head. Although not directly deprecating his paternal grandfather Sigmund’s transformative analyses, Lu indicates that psychological counseling and hand-holding nurturing are definitely not his (Lu’s) style.

Oh my. Lu does not formally recognize his offspring until they are adult…

Like countless women before, Elisabeth Lloyd and Barb appear to find this Lucian Freud bloke fascinating. Damn, they hang on his words. Hu Jintao notices too. Why is it that chaps in the arts fascinate women? Is it the excitement and challenge of their roguish, unpredictable personalities? Do wild chaps bring out the rebels lurking in women?

Thirty or more years ago, I remember Barb wearing a certain smile when she once observed from a distance (in a second balcony) that Zubin Metha, the conductor, was ‘Sexy.’ I think she’s smiling like that at Lucian now, from up-close.

Lucian picks up on sensory data fast, and if at this instant he were to ‘do’ his host, he’d paint me a jealous green.

Most likely in Lucian’s case, the attraction is his glorious output. Yes, that must be it.

Definitely the allure is not his input, all those supremely long stretches introspecting his subjects, standing at his easel day after day, with his models laying on a couch, perhaps even his Grandfather’s couch. Lucian takes time out for the artist & model meals that he cooks. With drive and focus like that, who could hang out in cafes with family or friends (isn’t that what visual artists do?)

We learn, however, that one way that Lucian does connect with his daughters is to paint them many times, perhaps in bathrobes. The pictures are benign and paternal, and in his clinical and visceral style.

At one point tonight, Hu Jintao finds himself comparing Elisabeth Lloyd’s and Lu Freud’s intensity and honesty. Of all things! What is Hu thinking? What a risky, gutsy, off-putting thing to do when you’ve just met the people.

All that I can surmise that Hu is roughly accustomed to quickly, very quickly, judging colleagues from assorted cadres.

In Hu’s reckoning, the intensity and honesty of Lu Freud’s hogshair-brushed canvases have helped set his work apart from the restrained, more thinly applied paint favored by other British figurative artists. If money is too crass a topic for a dinner conversation, the Communist leader doesn't much care: Hu notes approvingly that a while ago, one of Lu's works brought the highest price ever paid to a living European artist.

Bowing slightly, Hu then moves on to congratulate Elisabeth for her integrity and for academically concentrating on…on what?...I am dumbstruck that he re-introduces this topic… on muscle-tightenings around genital areas experienced as pleasurable waves of tingling sensations throughout parts of women’s bodies. Long live intensity, Hu proposes, and sits back down with a tight brave smile.

From the two other men in the galleries, “Here! Here!”

From the responses of Hu's toastees, I infer artists and academics like to be toasted.

From me, there is curiosity about Hu’s entourage, back in that limo of his. What would his staff make of their Man’s table topics tonight? I doubt if he is always like this.

Taking the cue, Lu warns Elisabeth that he was fond of his paternal grandfather Sigmund and warmly remembers his high spirit. Then in his very own high and amicable spirits, Lu Freud asks Elisabeth whether she rejects the psychiatric theory of vaginal orgasm articulated originally by his ancestor: “I feel very guarded about it [psychoanalysis], but I’m fairly ignorant about it.”

Oh my, we are back to that again. I had hoped that we had moved on…

Elisabeth Lloyd is forthright in replying to Lucian Freud about Sigmund (and in speaking to Hu Jintao and me): “Because of his conviction that female orgasm must be an evolutionary adaptation to promote reproduction, Freud insisted that women ought to have orgasms through vaginal intercourse, and labeled women who required clitoral stimulation for organism ‘frigid,’ ‘neurotic,’ and ‘dysfunctional.’ These sorts of labels have made millions of women miserable for decades, yet there is no evidence to support these theories. In the 1960s and ‘70s, (sex researchers) Masters and Johnson challenged Freud’s ideas, marshaling biological evidence indicating the women have only one type of orgasm -- clitoral -- and that [your grandfather] Freud’s oppressive standard of vaginal orgasm was a myth.”

I lose my train of thought for a while.

Oh my, how far have I come, from a fairly straight-laced, small-town, un-bohemian upbringing. Now I am conversing politely with near-strangers about female and male pathways, and about uterine upsucks of sperm through which female orgasms contract to aid conception.

And oh yes. Elisabeth Lloyd reminds Hu Jintao that the evolutionists’ upsuck theory is not substantiated.

What next?

Many of Lu Freud's very human models, pictured intimately on sofas or sprawled across a floor or couch, are beautiful women. Some of them have become lovers and mothers of his children, said to number between 14 and 40. (He is, as he acknowledges, a great absentee father of the age.)

(Unlike Larry Rivers, the avant-garde painter of New York’s ‘50s and ‘60s, Lu however has not painted a nude of his mother-in-law or his mistresses’ mothers…I’ll tell you one thing: my superlative son-in-law, Phil, is no painter. Even if he were and even if he were as as Byronic as Lu Freud is, I can tell you I would not pose naked for him…)

Barb and Lucian Freud exchange a glance. They don't seem at odds with each other.

(What flashes thru my mind right now is this. As a seventh grader on the wild side, before I knew much about life -- remember, that was way back in the tame, antediluvian '40s -- I submitted to our school newspaper a smart-alecky article about our music teacher. She played organ at her church and at Wednesday Night Sing-Alongs in the local movie theater. My text referred to that teacher as an ‘orgasm.’ That was a word I’d vaguely heard bruited-about, which I must have thought had edge (although that connotation of 'edge' was then unknown to me). Maybe too, I was envious of whatever majesty that word conveyed. A friend of mine was horrified, and more knowing: she persuaded me to tone down my language and call the teacher an ‘organism’ instead. I did. To myself now, I also recall another teacher, the faculty censor. He rejected my whole article and afterwards spoke rudely to my parents.)

Back at tonight's party, I continue tuning-out something Hu Jintao is telling me about externalities and consequences. And how activities that address problems in one sector create interlocking problems in other sectors. I cock my ears, but not my eyes, across the room. There Elisabeth Lloyd, responding to Lucian Freud’s specific inquiry, is repeating that the orgasm itself appears to be strictly for fun. This time, she adds that a woman’s climax can presently be seen as “useless” for biological purposes as a pair of male nipples.

------------
UPDATE: After our guests left, Barb asked me about the girl, the "knowing friend" who'd suggested the word change in my article about the organist. Last I'd heard, Emma was a beautiful grandmother somewhere.

Lu Freud is not surprised at the inutility of male nipples, although he does acknowledge that he impulsively painted -- for shock affect (I suspect) in his depiction of “Large Interior, Notting Hill” -- a baby suckling on a naked man’s breasts. This subject, he explains with a tug at his knotted scarf, was a fairly recent inspiration.

Did Elisabeth Lloyd know of that painting when she made her point about nipple uselessness?

I venture out on a limb and suggest that male nipples can indeed both be sensually stimulated and stimulating. Firm. Whereupon Elisabeth and Hu Jintao look away from me over to Rick. They seem to almost imagine that vulpine, brooding, fit look of his -- from 4 decades ago...

Lucian Freud, perhaps intrigued by my sly demeanor, will want to do a sketch tonight of me, hanging flesh, potbelly, and all? Please, a quick, very quick sketch? It could be arranged.

Head tilted now, Hu Jintao is sitting in a wooden chair with his feet tucked under his legs. He sort of resembles the chap we saw earlier tonight in our coffee-table artbook, Lucian’s “Red Haired Man in a Chair.” Fortunately for us all, Hu is neither red-hair or long-nosed, since red-haired men with long noses in China commonly are thought to be The Devil. (That’s my Folklore vocation coming out.)

From that perch, Hu remarks that Elisabeth Lloyd and Barb are refreshingly free-talking, at least as compared to the Communist women he comes into contact with, in Beijing and around his country on many tours. He remembers Hillary at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, saying that it no longer is acceptable to discuss women’s rights as separate from human rights.

Women number less than 25 percent of his current parliament, he says, and that’s about the same proportion as in the U.S. and Canada. The downside is that it’s far from fulfilling Mao’s old espoused goal of “women holding up half the sky.”

Men, he adds about the overall population, so far outnumber women in his country that his government is going out of its way to promote bright and emancipated women as role models.

When Hu does speak with Chinese women, he says they sometimes preface their remarks by noting (as Mao used to do) that women are a strong economic force. Then the women rail against bureaucratic corruption and cronyism, against the government’s slow (but Hu says “deliberate”) decision-making and its over-emphasis on memorization in schools, against lowbrow content on TV and Communist Party extravagances, and so forth. According to Hu, Hu rails about those concerns too.

Barb has another smile during Hu’s brave litany of Chinese women’s grievances. Who knows, perhaps she’s freshly glad that she didn’t hook up with that Chinese suitor from years ago, now a bureaucrat back in Beijing's Foreign Ministry?

Hu lauds to us women’s contributions to China’s present work and knowledge force. And are you ready for this? (Lucian and I are ready, but I don’t think Barb is.) Refusing to let go of our wicked and preposterous leitmotif of the night, Hu volunteers that women parliamentarians have yet to speak to him of the big O, an Ultimate Human Right (UHR). (You had to be here to believe he said that.) Perhaps, Hu muses with a smile –- O.K., he’s outright laughing –- women parliamentarians should rail for that UHR too.

Lucian agrees that 1) it probably wouldn’t upset the stability of the Chinese state if women’s UHRs included their Orgiastic selves and 2) a proclamation along those lines could help lure those many young Chinese men away from the online games that Hu had said they're addicted to.

Naturally, I have to mount my hobbyhorse spurred on by Lu Freud and Elisabeth Lloyd. We question the role that China has played in diplomatically shielding Sudan's leaders at the UN Security Council and arming factions in Darfur -- this in return for oil leases there needed to fuel Hu Jintao’s economy. I say that the UN's new peace-keeping force of 9,000, which was deployed earlier this week, probably is not numerically or logistically strong enough to make a difference, is it? That 'is it?' is my little inducement for Hu to begin making much more of a difference, maybe by providing helicopters and providing Chinese peace-keepers there. (We use whatever weapons we have to animate others to change, yes?)

('Weapons' is not the right word here.)

Hu assures me that his nation's influence on Sudan is limited and that the government in Khartoum is backed by other nations. China is trying, however, to be a responsible stakeholder in Darfuri affairs by backing UN and African Union forces to finally, finally end the dreadful fighting there. I want to ask about this week's tribal fighting in Kenya, but frankly I do not know if China has a presence there, as elsewhere in Africa where it has been cutting investment deals in the energy and finance sectors.

As graciously as possible and apropos of nothing in particular that I recall, Hu later says that China is reclaiming its past as the dominant power in Asia -- for instance, it is aligning itself with its neighbors through loans and slashed tariffs. China, in quest of security in its region, also is cooperating with the West to woo North Korea away from its high militarism.

Hu further asserts that his countrymen will transcend limits of their pasts. Curious. No one had said tonight that today's Chinese were copiers, but Hu still feels obliged to say that increasingly the Chinese are original in their intellects, technologies, and standards. “You’ll see," he moves closer to Rick to predict what he claims is part of the "New Confucian" outlook, "Much as China should accommodate modern science, Confucianism has a distinct lesson for Europe and America. The West will learn from us.”

Somehow the example of learning that I remember the most, involves fish. Before being served for dinner, China's fish increasingly are being raised in irrigated rice fields. Fish droppings then are recycled as natural fertilizers, a step which in turn boosts rice production and lowers usage of synthetic fertilizers. Meantime, as fish eat weeds and insects, the demand is cut for pesticides.

Hu's example sweetly plays to my green prejudices...

Members of Hu Jintao’s team await outside, each with a BlackBerry. In her rental car, Elisabeth Lloyd has a hotel to return to, having a busy day tomorrow downtown with luminaries. Lucian Freud is catching a red-eye flight back to his show at the MoMA in New York. Hu will drop him off at the terminal.

As Hu shakes our hands and climbs into his stretch limo, he says that sometime we all should visit the new Beijing. For one thing, its 3 million car drivers generally are much more patient than the lane-changing Western drivers he keeps seeing on our roads (and whose incautious behaviors made him late tonight). Chinese may well toot their Audis’ horns, he says, but theirs is a toot to inform, and certainly not to vent the sort of road rage he’s seen in the West.

“You behave yourself now,” I advise Lucian. He shrugs and murmurs a sub-linguistic sound, which I interpret as meaning that he will, his way.

Lucian kisses the hostess goodnight. A wisp of Barb's hair falls out of place.

Our visitors dart off. Rick and I return to clean up our dining/kitchen area. After we pick up the plate that Hu Jintao pretended to spin (an ancient Chinese art) and after we scrape away the crumbs on Elisabeth Lloyd's dessert plate, after that, we notice something sad: Lu Freud had eaten off a dish that is chipped. It's actually a plate with a dragon on it. Imported from China. What isn't these days?

Anyway, we goofed. Yep, we will do better next time.

All the same, I can not help having serious regrets: I was supposed to get that plate. Not a guest. Certainly not Lu...