Table for Two

by Amor Towles

Though Pushkin and his wife, Irina, had not been blessed with children, they had been blessed with a cozy two-room cottage and a few square acres that they farmed with the patience and persistence appropriate to their lot. Row by row they would till their soil, sow their seeds, and harvest their crops—moving back and forth across the land like a shuttle through a loom. And when their workday was done, they would journey home to dine on cabbage soup at their little wooden table, then succumb to the holy sleep of the countryside.

But the visitor spoke with such enthusiasm and made use of so many colorful expressions that Pushkin took pleasure in watching the young man’s words float past as one would the banners of an Easter Day procession.

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

fact, so tight was her grip on the young man’s arguments, should he ever want them back, he would have to gnaw through his own phrases the way a wolf in a trap gnaws through its ankle.

The wisdom of the peasant is founded on one essential axiom: While wars may come and go, statesmen rise and fall, and popular attitudes wax and wane, when all is said and done a furrow remains a furrow.

“No one pushes a monarch over a cliff to celebrate the way things were,” proclaimed Irina.

“The time has come to sow,” it would say in spring, as it raised the blinds to let in the light. “The time has come to reap,” it would say in fall, as it lit the fire in the stove.

“Dismissed!” shouted Irina that night in their little apartment. “How does one get fired from Communism!”

And Pushkin? He rolled about the city like a marble on a chessboard.

Sometimes, one plus one does not so easily sum to two.

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

Just as the poet in Pushkin’s soul had once written odes to sprouting shoots and summer rain, he now turned his verses to pigeons that perched on pediments, and trolleys that rattled in the lane. Which is to say, once again Pushkin’s life with Irina was so satisfactory, he wouldn’t know what to wish for. That is, until the second of May 1929.

Now, of all the lines in Moscow, the line that was the most elusive, the most daunting, the most insurmountable was the one that led to the Agency of Expatriate Affairs—that department in which one applied for an exit visa from Russia. Just finding the line was a significant challenge.

director, who was raised among the wheat fields of Ukraine, wiped a tear from his eye with as unsentimental a knuckle as had ever been fashioned by God.

From the beginning, the Bolsheviks’ intention had been to establish a foothold in Russia and then expand the movement across the globe. And as to New York City, when a blacksmith hopes to shape a piece of iron, where better to thrust it than the center of the furnace?

Gripping the leaflet in both hands, Irina watched the two women follow their fellows into the heart of the city. Then she looked up again at the giant sun of a biscuit that towered over the building, and suddenly, even though she was an unflinching atheist, she knew exactly why God had brought her here.

Many young authors finding themselves so satisfactorily situated would have waded into the choppy seas of their ambitions without a moment’s delay, using their free hours to spin sentences into paragraphs and paragraphs into pages, melding memories and fancies with immediate impressions until their first novel was ready for its miraculous debut.

He ordered steak frites and a glass of Côte du Rhône. And before he broke bread, in lieu of grace, he raised his glass to John Dos Passos and to socially conscious fiction from the thirties and beyond.

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. But of all the forces that are likely to influence him as he proceeds from one fork to the next, there are few more powerful than the moderate increase in income.

Long gone are the days when the world was divided into manors and huts. In their place, we have an era in which the necessities of food, clothing, and shelter are experienced in a thousand gradations. Thus,

Like parents, authors have no business attempting to relive their glories or redeem their sins through the lives of their creations. Authors must learn to stuff these burdens in their kit bags and lug them up the trail themselves. So, in all likelihood, Timothy deserves a more measured assessment.

For signatures do not span a simple spectrum like the hues of a rainbow. Rather, each signature is a color unto itself. So fundamentally idiosyncratic is a man’s signature that it is as binding in the eyes of the law as his fingerprints or a trace of his DNA.

But as two bottles of wine harvested from the same vineyard in different years are at once similar and distinct, just so two signatures by the same person scrawled at different times are both recognizable as coming from the same hand and yet expressive of the different circumstances under which they were penned.

he bent over ten issues of Forbes magazine, which were literally (well, not literally literally, but figuratively literally) brimming with exciting new words and concepts.

It did not escape Timothy that this was the second time in a day that he had entered a familiar place of business and been asked to wait, only to have a middle-aged man in a suit—whom he had never seen before—suddenly appear at his side. It dawned on Timothy there must be men just like Mr. Robertson and Mr. Metier in places of business all across Manhattan.

By that point, Tolstoy had fully embraced those tenets of mystical Christianity that led him to an ascetic mania entailing vegetarianism, sexual abstinence, and an opposition to private property. The penmanship of the inscription would have to suggest all of this. What’s more, it would have to be executed with a fountain pen—and in nineteenth-century Cyrillic, no less.

Feeling the lingering pleasures of a job well done and a meal well eaten, he listened with satisfaction to the sounds rising from the street eight stories below: the honking of horns, the shouting of drunkards, the barking of dogs, even the siren of a police car. Together, they all combined to form the symphony that is the city of Manhattan on a warm summer night.

Like the cursive L that looped so completely it seemed to be a figure eight leaning into the wind. And the top of the capital T, which extended with such authority, it was sure to shelter the lowercase o in the event of rain.

In fact, the only thing Smitty seemed to love more than tequila was strangers. And he loved them young or old, spicy or unspicy, salted or unsalted too.

“Happy Holidays?” I asked, when I was stepping off the elevator. She responded by pushing the button that promises to close the doors more quickly.

Peggy couldn’t have been more pleased by the gesture. It appealed to her sense of romance, her sense of ritual, and her sense of décor.

She felt cheated by the implicit promises of her youth. Cheated by institutions like Smith College, the Episcopal Church, and Jane Austen, each of which openly celebrated the sacrament of marriage.

That’s why Nell had given her little laugh. Because it tickled the feet of reason to imagine that John was meeting the chairwoman of the garden committee in some local hotel room for an hour or two on the occasional Saturday afternoon.

Then she walked out the door with what, I think, objectively speaking, you would have to describe as a slam.

In the aftermath of a heated conversation, bad ideas travel at the speed of light.

No marriage benefits from an aura of doubt. It’s almost always better to clear the air than let a suspicion linger. And that’s especially so when the suspicion is unwarranted.”

What can one ever do when two adults are working through a private crisis? “Cross our fingers.”

Because when she looked down into the little screen of Nell’s camera at the figure of her husband on his secret outing, what she saw was an image of unadulterated joy. A joy that not only existed in her absence, but seemed to require it.

Between you, me, and the fencepost, a night at Carnegie Hall was never my idea of a good time. It was Tommy who had floated the notion, as part of our 1996 Evenings Out campaign.

But nothing is ever quite as simple as it seems. At least not if you’re overeducated, overpaid, and living in New York.

Imagine that, I thought with a smile, classifying the moment as one of those colorful little instances of eccentric behavior the city occasionally provides as consolation for all the noise and traffic. Like when you’re on the Upper East Side and you happen upon a woman in furs walking a cat on a leash. Or when in the middle of the day in the middle of the week in the middle of your very own block, you almost stumble over a cabbie who’s kneeling on a piece of cardboard, in order to pray in the direction of Mecca. How can you not respect a faith that requires you to carry a compass?

philosophy major at Yale, one of the youngest managing directors in Goldman Sachs history, Tommy rarely stumbles upon his point of view, and he never blurts it out. Having grabbed hold of some thorny issue, Tommy mulls it over for days in silence, considering it from every possible angle in every possible light. By the time he shares his opinion, not only has he carefully chosen his vocabulary, he has crafted complex sentences and persuasive analogies. He has even considered likely rebuttals and fashioned counterarguments. So detailed and well articulated is his position once he decides to air it that you feel a little helpless to argue against it—even when it never made any sense in the first place.

After spending twenty years tugging themselves to some imagined middle ground, the divorce sent them shooting off in the opposing directions they had wanted to travel all along.

Once he was back with his head on his pillow, I leaned over and kissed him on the brow. 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.

But once Isserlis was playing, within a matter of seconds, you could tell you were in the presence of some form of perfection.

The very cello Isserlis was playing had survived two and a half centuries despite the fact that its entire essence seemed to depend upon the fragility of its construction. But the greatest improbability, the near impossibility, was

Yes, the music was ascending and we were ascending with it. First slowly, almost patiently, but then with greater speed and urgency, imagining now for one instant, and now for another, that we have reached the plateau, only for the music to take us higher still, beyond the realm in which climbing can occur, beyond the realm in which one looks down at the ground, beyond hope and aspiration into the realm of joy where all that is possible lies open before us.

The only advantage to growing old is that one loses one’s appetites. After the age of sixty-five one wishes to travel less, eat less, own less. At that point, there is no better way to end one’s day than with a few sips of an old Scotch, a few pages of an old novel, and a king-size bed without distractions.

Family traits are passed down from generation to generation out of the impenetrable past with no discernible point of origin, but family wealth must begin somewhere.

Within this vast almost fetishistic catalogue of holy subject matter, one popular subset was the Seven Joys of the Virgin—that is, the seven most exultant moments in the life of Mary. Generally speaking, these referred to the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Adoration of the Magi, the Resurrection, the Ascension, the Pentecost, and the Assumption. You