Table for Two

by Amor Towles

No one is born pompous. To attain that state requires a certain amount of planning and effort.

Certainly, we are all shaped by that first decade of our youth, but the first decade of our youth is shaped by the decade that preceded our arrival.

Sitting on their porch, she had been breathless with talk of travel and music and books and all manner of open-endedness.

The burying of one’s spouse, the retirement from the job, the moving from one’s home where one has lived for twenty-two years—this is the undoing, the unmaking. It is through this process that time and intent reclaim the solitary soul for its grander purpose. A humbling reminder, outside the window a telegraph wire supported by lean gray poles ran through the desert bearing news of weddings and wars.

Alas, there is no fixing of man’s position in the system of the heavens, anymore than one can fix the position of a skiff at sea. Alas, yes, alas; but also, avanti!

—You are a woman of great courtesy, Prentice said with a bow. —Hardly, she replied. But I’ve got a soft spot for oncewases.

There was nothing jaded or ugly about her laughter. On the contrary, it was the laugh of one who knows well the foibles of others without begrudging them. It was a tribute to the human comedy—the sort of laugh he had not heard in years, or maybe eons. The sort of laugh that should not be interrupted! (A waiter approaching with a plate of tea sandwiches is discreetly waved off.)

Not because of crocodiles and sabers, you understand, but because the edge of the stage is a precipice! For there are no takes in the theater, Evelyn; no second chances. One false move, and the actor plummets through the pitch toward the craggy bottom of his own self-indictments.

the minutes dismantled the hours.

When she had finished, he roused himself from the couch and thanked her as one who thanks a chance apostle for the telling of a timely parable.

Silence fell around them. A silence as limitless as time. The silence from which all things spring, all things good and evil. With a great effort, Prentice raised his gaze and looked her in the eyes. —The shadow of my former self. It was a pitiful admission. A comic one. It had been written in the pages of Prentice’s personal history to elicit guffaws. But young Evelyn, so prone to beautiful laughter, remained sober. Sympathetic. Unflinching.

—My mother told me it was more important to be interested than interesting. —Have you heeded her advice? —Only as a last resort. Olivia and the blonde were both silent—reflecting for the moment on motherly advice and other monoliths.

Variety may be the spice of life, but no one ever told the band at El Rey’s.

Litsky rang off. Because here’s the thing: Ma and Pa loved to see the girl next door, all right, sitting on top of the silver screen. But the only thing they loved more was seeing her tumble back to earth. That didn’t mean Ma and Pa were bad people. There wasn’t a mean-spirited bone in their bodies. They just couldn’t help themselves. The Krauts call it schadenfreude. Litsky called it human nature—which is just a fancy term for the God-given flaws we have no intention of giving back.

—You want to know what this town is like? he said. I’ll tell you what it’s like. It’s like a waiting room. It’s the largest waiting room in the world. We’re all sitting on wooden benches reading yesterday’s papers, eating yesterday’s lunch. But every now and then, the door to the platform opens and the conductor lets one of us through for a ride on the Payday Express.

door closed, an orchestra abandoned its search for the twentieth measure, and a string of gently swinging Christmas lights went out one by one, leaving Litsky in the ebon embrace of the eternities.

Marcus had learned this in his early days as a litigator in Arkansas. In the jury box of the Pulaski County Courthouse (in any jury box in the country, for that matter), one could expect to find a sample of the human condition: a patchwork of intellects and experiences, personalities and prejudices.

On top of the stack that Miss Ross was now straightening was a motion to dismiss—which had presumably begun its journey as a tree. Solitary and majestic, that tree had provided shade to some little patch of America.

A ray of sunlight graced the paper-laden desk. Marcus followed its diagonal trajectory back through the louvered shades into the open air above the farthest reaches of the lot, back over Death Valley and the Grand Canyon, back to the idylls of eastern Arkansas, where the tributaries of the Mississippi River flowed on without effort or interruption. Miss Ross politely cleared her throat.

Yep. In Indiana, a young girl had good reason to suspect that lists were the foot soldiers of tyranny—crafted for the sole purpose of bridling the unbridled. A quashing, squashing, squelching of the human spirit by means of itemization.

Armed with the gentleman’s pencil, Eve flipped to the blank page that’s always hiding at the back of a book like the unprepared kid at the back of the class. Across the top of it in large capital letters she wrote PLACES TO GO, then commenced to itemize:

Lists aren’t so bad, Eve realized. They didn’t have to be a catalogue of ladylike constraints. They could just as easily testify to plans and aspirations. A celebration of the not yet done. Of what Thou shalt! It really just depended on which side of the pencil you were on.

How does one fend off the influence of a summer day? You start by serving tea at three in the afternoon. Then, having thanked the Lord for His bounty and passed the biscuits, you talk about relatives long since dead. You dredge up some story you’ve dredged up before. And when the conversation flags, rather than adjourn into the waning wonder of the vernal afternoon, you pick up a magazine. For Aunt Polly, this was preferably a Saturday Evening Post she had already read before. Turning through the pages, she would occasionally stop at a photograph—say, of a short-haired Amelia Earhart preparing to fly across the Atlantic alone—in order to remark with a mix of indignation, wisdom, and finality: —Now I’ve seen everything.

could feel her own face beginning to grow flush, her own hand beginning to tremble. But she wasn’t about to break into tears. She felt like every tear in her body had dried up. They had dried up from an old and relentless anger. An anger stoked by that long parade of preachers and teachers and Prince Charmings, wannabe puppeteers all. At every stage of her life, Eve had met them. But nowhere had she encountered as many puppeteers as in Hollywood. Every agent and manager, every director, producer, and studio chief had his arms out and his fingers extended, looking to grab a woman by the strings.

It was the indignation that provided you with focus and moral urgency, which in turn helped you to be dogged and relentless in pursuit of your quarry.

Maybe in the years of retirement he had grown less used to villainy. Maybe when one shifted from the life of doing to the life of remembering, one became more sentimental, more susceptible to the influence of one’s emotions.

The personality of a man always poses the biggest obstacle to his own education, thought Charlie. He’s either too proud, too stubborn, or too timid to submit to the process of discovery.

When Charlie had finished the winnowing, the house suited him better. An old friend who stopped by said it looked less like a house that Charlie had lived in for over twenty years than a way station. That was the word for it, all right. A place where someone paused while on his way to somewhere else. One could enter one’s final days laden down or light-footed, and Charlie was committed to choosing the latter.

It is a funny aspect of life, thought Charlie, how a group of grown people can convince themselves to do something that none of them really want to do. They start by talking an idea into existence. Once the idea begins to take shape and dimension, they’ll talk away their hesitations, replacing them with all the supposed benefits, one by one. They’ll talk away their instincts and their second thoughts and their common sense too, until they are moving in lockstep together toward some shared intention that doesn’t appeal to any one of them.

For a moment he had considered donning a Panama hat, but resisted the impulse, having long believed in the maxim that what is best stated is understated.

would reenter this house of villainy and wend his way once again through the glamorous assemblage. Only this time, he would do so in the manner of an apparition. —You are a man of no consequence, he said

The name they gave it shows you how little they understand. Because a good still is anything but. It has to have motion. It has to give a sense of the action that’s simmering under the surface.

How does one go from being at the top of one’s game to being a man who’s unemployable? Wendell knew the answer to that question. Everyone in Hollywood knew the answer: quickly. In this town that was rule number one.

When you’re down and out in Hollywood, everyone’s a comedian. That was rule number two.

the engine, overcoming the temptation to take another swig. At least, until the temptation overcame him.

Fuller’s casino was an elaborate, intricate, and well-oiled machine of human failings. Everyone there understood that. They all had come to either indulge in or profit from a sin. And they all had some semblance of a smile on their face, even the losers.

The second moral Finnegan gleaned that night was that money was like the wind.

vast collection of a thousand objects representing memories and aspirations that were equally out of date. Most houses, Finnegan had come to believe, were an attempt at suicide in slow motion. When you finished the search, you wanted to take a shower. Not just to wash off the dust, but the greasy residue of human desperation.

—I understand what you’re trying to do, she continued. Keeping me in the dark for my own good. But sometimes I feel like my whole life has been a journey from one well-intentioned silence to the next.

history suggested that the monuments of the overreaching could last a very long time. True, the men who had built these monuments (or rather, caused them to be built) were gone. But one generation after the next, new versions of the moguls had appeared, ready to assume the thrones and pursue their whims with the same presumption of preordainment. No, thought Eve, one can’t count on the sands of the desert or the winds of the Santa Ana to undo the works of the single-minded. For the world to have any sense of justice, a team of artisans had to come forward with their hammers and paintbrushes and pumice stones in order to patiently unmake the palaces of the proud.