chews the last bit of duck and lays down his knife and fork. “The balcony?”
“Of course.”
They excuse themselves and wind their way between tables. The other diners are all well dressed—a couple of women glitteringly so—and Richard hears a smattering of German, a phrase or two that he thinks might be Croatian, a fair amount of English. There’s jazz on the sound system, “Someday My Prince Will Come.” That’s the only kind of music they seem to play here, and it’s a big reason he loves this restaurant. His father ran a seedy jazz club in one of Boston’s northern suburbs, and though it went out of business nearly thirty years ago, Richard thinks about it often, easily summoning the sight and smell of nineteen overflowing ashtrays, one on each table and three on the mahogany bar.
They step outside and light their cigars. The snow has slackened. Down below, they can see the lights of a few villas and farmhouses and, to the southwest, the airport’s runway lights. It’s cold but not that cold, especially because they’re full of food and wine.
“Is it my imagination,” he asks, “or is Monika on edge?”
“Rysiu, I’ve always felt you were wasted on journalism. With your sense of seismography, you ought to be a novelist.” He looses a puff of loamy smoke. “I had this little thing going on locally. And Monika’s not used to that.”
The protagonist in his novels, a middle-aged detective in the Krakow police department, repeatedly cheats on his wife, often with three or four different women over the course of a three-hundred-page book. The twist is that he never pursues younger lovers. They’re always at least his age and sometimes even older. His forte is highly atmospheric mature sex. He calls on them with weary eyelids, a bottle of Egri Bikaver, a tin of pasteurized roe, a chunk of smoked sheep cheese, cranberry relish. The world may be changing, but his actions affirm that in matters of the heart he adheres to the old ways: he kisses their hands coming and going.
“What kind of little thing?” Richard asks.
“She’s twenty-two, works at that record store on Florianska.”
He wouldn’t be able to conceal his dismay if he tried. “Jesus. The blonde with that milky-white complexion?” The girl looks about as old as Anna.
“If you think what you’ve seen of her is milky white,” Stefan says, “you ought to . . . Well, you don’t like hearing this. Do you?”
“Not especially.”
Stefan laughs and pats his shoulder. “I felt sure you wouldn’t. But the setup’s perfect, and I couldn’t help but want to watch your reaction.” He sucks hard on the cigar, the tip of it glowing bright orange. “Two brothers-in-law alone outdoors on a snowy night. One of them utterly, blindly infatuated with his wife. The other a hedonistic rake. Don’t be surprised if this appears in a novel.”
Richard won’t be. “What surprises me is her age.”
“Several of her predecessors were a year or two younger. Rysiu, our good detective’s consorts are camouflage. They serve their purpose, though you should see some of the women who hit on me at book signings. The problem with this latest one’s not her age. It’s the fact that she lives in Krakow. I broke it off last week, but just yesterday I glanced out the window and saw her standing on the sidewalk watching our building. I suspect I may have fucked up.”
“And Monika knows?”
“She does and she doesn’t. In other words, she hasn’t been told. I’m sure she has no idea who it is, at least not yet.”
“Are you going to tell her?”
“Is that what you’d do if you were in my shoes?”
He’s not about to say that he’d never be in Stefan’s shoes. The only people who can truthfully say how they’d behave in any given situation are, by and large, people Richard Brennan does not want to know. “I think I probably would,” he says.
“I think you probably would too. Of course, you’d never put yourself in this position to begin with.” He gestures toward the dining room. “In there at that table, you’ve got everything you need. You’ve even got everything you want.”
Why argue with the truth? In Richard’s profession, you travel a good bit and see a lot of different people, a fair number of whom are women. He spends the occasional night in L.A., where he sometimes has dinner with a film producer in her early thirties, whose love life, he knows, is a disaster. The melting nature of her good-night hugs has led to the suspicion that if he wanted to, he could get himself invited back to her place or entice her to his room. It’s not that he finds her unattractive or that her relative youth summons scruples an available woman closer to his own age might breach. It’s just that he’s already found what he spent his twenties looking for. How this came to be seems every bit as mysterious now as it did seventeen years ago. A geopolitical event got him sent halfway around the world, and he stumbled across the right person. That his domestic happiness is firmly grounded in happenstance sometimes unsettles him, but when he looks around at other contented couples, their stories are often similar. You can’t say why fate smiles at some and sneers at others.
In a moment he and his brother-in-law, who writes fiction and lives it too, will go back inside and join their families for dessert. Mustafa will send over some cognac on the house, and Stefan will pronounce it the best he’s ever tasted. Christmas plans made, they’ll say their good-nights, and when Richard bends to hug his sister-in-law, she’ll balance on her toes and whisper, “I’m sorry I snapped at you. Don’t be angry.” She will kiss him on the mouth, something she’s never done before. It will surprise him, but he’s going to forget it within the hour and will not think of it again for a long time.
Before any of that can occur, though, while they’re still out there on the balcony, he asks Stefan the obligatory question: “What is it you want but haven’t got?”
“I don’t know. I have some of it—I just don’t have all of it. And truthfully, Rysiu, if I were to find the missing element, you know what I suspect would happen?”
Richard takes a deep draft from his cigar, then blows out a cloud of smoke. He watches it disperse, the tiny particles spreading over the hillside, beyond the treetops, growing farther away from each other as they disappear into the night. “What?”
Stefan brushes a few snowflakes from his hair. “I feel all but certain that it would spell the end of me. With no need to hunt, I’d be a dead duck. One day I might show up on your plate.”
He's had a good bit to drink, and his bladder’s sending distress signals. So he asks Julia and Anna to wait in the foyer while he pays a visit to the bathroom.
To write news the way he does, you need to notice plenty of seemingly random details because life isn’t just the big things, it’s all the little ones too. For instance: a makeshift clock mounted on the wall in the bedroom of a boy killed by a stray bullet in Delano, California, in May of ’93. The clock’s hands were wooden skewers, one longer than the other, both of them glued to the hub of an electric motor that jutted through the spindle hole of a 33-rpm record which served as the clock face. The title of the record: Internal Exile. By the Chicano rock band Los Illegals. Where the boy came across the recording, which by then was more than ten years old, or what it might have meant to him, his grandmother who had raised him couldn’t say, but she knew he’d built the clock for his seventh grade science project. Any good reporter notices a few things like that, but Richard likes to think he notices more than most.
Retained from his visit to the bathroom tonight: in the urinal there’s a cherry deodorant cake.
The correct term for these items is “urinal deodorant block.” They’re also known as “piss pucks.” If you look into the question more deeply, you’ll find that in cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland, with their large concentrations of Polish immigrants, Polonophobes used to dub them “Polish mints.” The thing is, you seldom see urinal deodorant cakes in Poland. Why this particular receptacle contains one is puzzling,