Table for Two

by Amor Towles

But if Irina was quiet, she was quiet the way a heated skillet is quiet—in the moments before you drop in the fat.

The human race is famously adaptive, but there is nothing that a human will adapt to more quickly than an improved standard of living.

The road along which a young man discovers what he is capable of is no midwestern interstate. It has no uninterrupted views to the horizon, no painted white lines, no brightly lit signs indicating the distance to one’s destination. Rather, it is a narrow and winding byway crowded with undergrowth and overhung with branches. Along his journey, the young man is presented with sudden intersections, divergent footpaths, and fateful detours, each of which, if taken, will lead him to other byways with their own intersections, footpaths, and detours.

At each crossing, faced with the decision of whether to go left, right, or straight ahead, the young man may rely upon the advice he has been given as a child, or the sum of his experiences, or the flip of a coin.

The airing of well-seasoned complaints, unspoken animosities, suspicions and recriminations; feelings of shame and indignation; the retaining of attorneys and the dividing of spoils; the endless explaining of developments to family and friends; to which might be added all the grim and unanticipated practicalities like disposing of one’s wedding album and waiting in line to get one’s maiden name restored to one’s driver’s license: There are so many painful facets to divorce, too many to enumerate here. Most of them are probably familiar to you anyway, whether through first- or secondhand experience. So, there may be some virtue in trying to distill the entire emotional outcome into a phrase. If one were to

Sometimes, that’s what we need—a little smooch on the noggin that assures us, however improbably, that everything is going to be all right.

There is some measure of anxiety to be expected when one is on the verge of attaining a long-held dream. One cannot help but worry that the physical reality will fail to live up to the splendors of the imagination.

I want to hear what’s happened no matter how ugly, or uncomfortable, or unnerving it might be. Because if we don’t stare down the things that make us want to look away, then the world is just a mirage.