Prague: a short story

I knew the poet before he was famous.

I knew the poet before he was famous. When he was Leo—not Leonard—Brenning, before he won all those bi- and tri-syllabic awards and fellowships. He was already a poet in college, which is important for me to say here. He didn’t “want to be” a poet, like I “wanted to be” a writer; he hadn’t come to college to “learn how,” like I had. He had come to practice. He was, by the time I made his acquaintance my junior year, already sending work out to publications—already published—already doing readings at the little coffee shops and bookstores a few blocks from campus. He was doing just this, a reading, the night our acquaintance began.

This was on a Tuesday in October at the university in Kansas we both attended: the football one, not basketball. It was perhaps half past eight, and I had walked down the hill from the university’s library to the student village in order to visit a popular used bookstore. I was planning to buy a collection of Henry James’s Shorter Masterpieces I had seen on sale a few days before, but when I walked into the store, the shelves I had hoped to visit were roped off, and the display tables that were usually stacked with books had been cleared. There were white cloths and wine glasses on them, instead, a mix of the town’s midwestern professorial and dreadlocked bohemian-types sitting in twos and threes around them facing a small, spotlit stage. A young man about my age and height—Leo Brenning—was standing in front of a microphone, reading.

I was a new English major at the time, having switched from pre-med only the winter before on the logic that people who secretly wanted to write books ought to, at some point, become less secretive about such desires, and so walking into a poetry reading seemed like a fortuitous accident. If I was disappointed about not being able to buy the book I had come for, the opportunity to lean against the shop’s back wall in the presence of so many of my new peers and instructors seemed like a genuine opportunity. Wasn’t this a large part of what being an English major was supposed to be about? Surveying my company, I only half-listened to the first two poems Leo shared, the first dealing with streetlights, the setting sun, and a locked gate at a zoo; the second about furrowed wheat fields, a cracked driveway, and a skateboard he never rode anymore. There was a drink cart off to the side, a man standing behind a dozen bottles, a liquor license in a silver frame propped up on the cart’s edge. I wondered if I ought to buy a drink, make myself more comfortable—but I had reading and writing plans for the night. I resolved to stay until the poet stepped off the stage, then leave. When he finished his poem about the skateboard, with its clear references to the falls of Lucifer and Icarus, clearly paralleled to one of his own ‘falls,’ everyone in the store gave him one of those ridiculous rounds of finger-snapping applause.

The next poem he read was titled “Love,” and because he said it was “capital-L” in one of the poem’s first lines, I knew the title, too, was capitalized. Here were stanzas about the poet’s mother, his sister, and a girl he had gone to Sunday School with, whom he’d later dated, who had become more beautiful and “holy” to him when she had renounced the church, whom he had slept with on the “altar” of her dorm room bed… All of which might, I’m afraid, suggest that my friend Leo’s early poetry was trite, or trifling, or hackneyed, but if it does, it’s only because I haven’t presented it adequately enough. In truth, the words Leo wove between the tropes in his poems were all well-chosen and often surprising. He delivered his best lines the way a good phlebotomist (the part-time job I had recently quit at Student Health) slipped a needle into a patient’s antecubital vein: without the recipient at first realizing they had been punctured. Perhaps most impressively, he never came across as false, affected, or pretending, but was instead relatable and authentic. When he held up his finger and said, “She stuck her finger into my asshole;/ Our love was interpenetration/ Porous and sharp/ Mixing, admixing, and interchanging;/ A thousand points of light could never have pointed me the way she did…/ She changed my life,” I alone in the room guffawed.

If you’re a student of Brenning’s work, or passingly familiar with him at all, then this reference to his rectum probably doesn’t surprise you, but it shocked me, and I was doubly shocked that no one else in the room seemed very surprised at all. We were standing in the student village in a state college in Kansas in 2003, after all. It was a credit to his delivery, I supposed, or maybe the rapport he’d built with his audience. Had he mentioned his asshole already, in a poem before I had walked in? When the poem ended, all of the onlookers, including the gray-haired men and women in their sports coats, wool skirts, and turtlenecks, again snapped their own fingers in appreciation.

He stepped off the stage, then, and I shouldered my bag and slipped out the door. One of my goals, at the time, was to read a short story every evening at a coffee shop, Grand Empire, and Empire was getting ready to close in about an hour. The stories were usually by Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Cather, or Baldwin, but lately, after reading him for a class, I had fallen into a Henry James groove, and James’s stories were longer. My “process” required that I read a story, record my thoughts about it in a marble-covered notebook I had purchased for the purpose of doing so, then write a list of three similar story premises I thought I could write on—because this was how I thought fiction writing happened. Sometimes I even went so far as to write a first line or even paragraph for one of these ideas. I had yet to make it farther. Running late tonight, there was no chance I would be able to finish reading one of James’s stories, much less write about it. I would have to settle for getting halfway through one, then finishing it the next night. Accordingly, I began “Brooksmith,” and was perhaps a third of the way finished when the poet burst in five minutes before the shop closed. The staff was already Windexing the pastry case and polishing the La Marzocco so it would shine for the morning visitors. They had already put up a number of the chairs around me, filled the mop bucket, and rolled it to its place beside the front door. Leo leaned over the counter to ask for a double shot. “Put it in paper if you need to. I have to write something, like, right now,” he said, and the barista pulled the shots and pushed a demitasse across to him. No money changed hands.  

Our eyes met for a second as he lifted the demitasse—did he recognize me from the reading?—and he raised the little porcelain cup to me in salute before tipping it back. Then he returned it to the counter and fell to one of the nearby tables to press a pen to a notepad he had removed from his breast pocket. I left as they turned out the lights, but Leo stayed. He was, as I learned in the months to follow, more of a regular there than I.

---

I began seeing Leo everywhere after that, and I realized that I had been seeing him everywhere for a long time. Since I had arrived at the school, really. This latter point became clear to me when I saw him at the library the next week. Not him in the flesh, but his picture, a photograph, tacked up on the wall in a display case near the library’s front entrance: all of the school’s National Merit finalists. Then I saw another photo—a different one—in a case in the student union reserved for the school’s Fulbright winners. Leo, according to the tag beneath this latter picture—would soon attend Charles University, in Prague, to study poetry, drama, and fiction.

In the first of these pictures Leo was young, a freshman, clean shaven or incapable of growing a beard. In it I recognized him from my summer enrollment tour, and from the 7:30am “University Experience” class we had both been enrolled in during our first year. Then, while I was looking more closely at the second photo, the bearded one, I began to realize I had seen him often eating lunch at a table at the student union, that he had been a member of another class I had taken—a survey of American Literature—and that we’d crossed paths on the college’s concrete sidewalks dozens, if not hundreds of times. I also knew exactly where he sat at the library when he studied. I had seen him at the same table against the back wall of the library’s third floor almost every time I had visited that level. I had just never registered him before.          

If the poet had been invisible to me, or at least had presented himself in a way I hadn’t registered, for three entire years, and had now become suddenly, incandescently visible, I decided that it must have something to do with my finally acclimating to my new field of study. Having begun my study of English Literature in earnest, veils I hadn’t known existed had been rent from my eyes, and I was now—only now—seeing the world as it truly was, in earnest.

And it seemed that I was suddenly visible to Leo, too. “How’s the James?” he asked me the first time we spoke, in that same coffee shop a few afternoons later. I was reading The Jolly Corner from the collection of Shorter Masterpieces I had finally purchased, and he stood above me. At the library, he was always blinkered, focused, looking down when I saw him, buried in a book or leaning over so far he risked falling into the poems I now understood him to be writing. But at Grand Empire Leo held court, discussing music with the baristas, food allergies with the vegans, and books with anyone—but especially the young women—he saw reading there.

“It’s okay,” I said cautiously. By this time, we had made eye contact and nodded our acknowledgment of one another several times—here, outside the library, inside the student union, on the steps outside of Eisenhower Hall on campus. “I thought Aspern Papers was better.”

“Aspern Papers is excellent,” he said, and then he introduced himself and pulled out the chair across the way from me. We spoke about the 1^st-person narration of James’s Venetian story and the many levels of irony it conveyed. Then, when the conversation flagged, he pulled out the same notepad and pen I had seen him pull out before and he fell to writing. I thought he might just be jotting down a thought, or a reminder of something he might want to follow up on later, but he wrote and wrote—scratched some things out and then continued to write—and after ten minutes had passed I decided to open the cover of my own notebook and do some writing of my own. This was no easy task, I found, in such close proximity to his prolific, unceasing pen. Perhaps forty or forty-five minutes went by in this way—I wrote a paragraph while he flipped six or seven pages over the backs of one another—and then one of the young lady graduate students I had seen him speaking with before said his name—said it twice—and he sat up, startled, flipped his notepad closed, and told me he would catch me later. “You’ll have to tell me what you’re working on,” he said, pointing to the anemic paragraph in my still unbent, unworn marble-covered notebook. I told him I would.

---

One morning the next week in my British Romantics course, my professor, lecturing on Coleridge, drew a comparison between one of Coleridge’s poems and one of Keats’s, then put a recent Brenning from the Missouri Review on the board, demonstrating how these poets (and, implicitly, his instruction; he had taught Leo the year before) still influenced contemporary literature. Two hours later I sat with the poet himself. “Is that Kenzenak?” he asked, naming the prof. “He would call me derivative. As if I’m some kind of, what, ersatz Coleridge? I wrote those when I was a freshman. They were in the mail before I took his class. Let me guess, he was talking about Lime-tree Bower? I hadn’t even seen Lime-tree...”

 Derivative, he said. Ersatz. From our conversations that same day: “rancor,” “unpropitious,” and “rhapsodic.” I know, because I began jotting these words down in the margins of my notebook during the times he invariably pulled out his own little pad and began scrawling the early drafts of his someday-to-be acclaimed pieces. I can still hear the words as if from his lips: he was incapable of speaking quietly. Sometimes during our conversations I was embarrassed by Leo’s volume and his ambitious and unlikely phrasings. More than once, I looked around Empire hoping no one else had heard what he’d said. Who talked like this? But if Leo came across as occasionally—often—pretentious, he was also playful and courageous with his locutions. And who can become great in any field without experimenting and risking failure? Many of his words, like “surreptitious,” “irascible,” and “supercilious,” were words that I had in my vocabulary, too, but I wasn’t comfortable saying any of them out loud until I heard Leo say them first. Leo gave me permission.  

In those months—October, November, and December, the meaty heart of the school year—I became a better writer, too. I worked harder and more often. I started more stories, pursued their writing further, and even came close to finishing a few.

Leo and I both stayed in town over the winter break—he, because he didn’t want to upset his ‘creative routine,’ and I because of a winter session course I was taking to catch up on my credits. Then, at the beginning of January he boarded a plane in Kansas City bound for the Czech Republic: the long-awaited Fulbright trip. He was going to study Franz Kafka, Karel Capek, Milan Kundera, and Vaclav Havel. I was going to keep plugging away at my short story project.

“I think I can write one,” I said the night before he left. One short story was my goal. I had come to believe that one short story, complete, gleaming, and immaculate, would ordain me as a writer. That if I could just complete the first one, the rest of my destined work would be unblocked and begin to spill out of me.

“One?” Leo chastised. He was going to be gone for an entire year—he expected me to finish a collection of stories.

“Three,” I said to him, laughing. I would write three short stories, maybe four. For his part, I suggested he write a chapbook of poems.

A chapbook? Leo leaned forward and spit some of his tea back into his cup. He would write a volume, he said. A volume and a play. Two plays, he boasted. Drama, he was starting to think, might be the medium his talents were most amenable to.

Medium, he said. Amenable. We left the coffee shop and went to our bar, The Underground, an old, basement-level, prohibition-era place catering mostly to graduate students, to meet some of the other humanities-types who had stayed in town over the break. Leo was dating one of the counter girls from the coffee shop, a grad student from Colorado who had come east to Kansas in pursuit of an English masters, but she was out of town, back in Boulder. I wasn’t the only person who raised an eyebrow when he left that night with the waitress who had served us, a tattooed anthropology major from Nebraska.

---

I spent the first month of my friend’s absence being unusually productive. Talking to him at Grand Empire, then heading to The Underground when the coffee shop closed, had begun to take up two or three—sometimes four or five—hours of my afternoons and evenings. I could never get much done when his inspiration struck and Leo wrote for half an hour or forty-five minutes at a stretch midafternoon, and since he had done the bulk of his ‘real’ work in the mornings (he got up at five-thirty, and was most prolific between six and nine, he’d told me), the time he passed with me in the evenings wasn’t time he regretted. The evenings were when I had formerly done most of my work, though, so after he left the country I suddenly found myself drafting four or five, sometimes even six or seven pages a night.

The new semester started at the end of January, and my finances obliged me to pick up a job in February—at The Underground, as it happened. And then I started seeing someone, Melissa, an English major on a pre-law track. We had had a couple classes together—had taken to sitting next to one another in the classes we shared—and the second time she came down the stairs without her friends and sat down the end of the bar nearest the cash register, I picked up her number. In some ways, Melissa reminded me of Leo. She, too, was deeply intelligent, and she, too, had a way with words. She was slyly funny and wrote poetry and essays of her own. I wasn’t sure that, had I not switched my major to English, I would have ever noticed her, or her me, but by the time we reached the end of Spring Break, we had become an item. We began spending more than half of our afternoons and evenings together, and then started sharing our nights. Time I had previously devoted to Leo became time I devoted to her.

Did the poet wonder if he had any innate talent, or did he just write? Did his being a morning person have something to do with his success, or was that particular circumstance coincidental? Working nights at the bar paid my rent, and bought dinner on those nights when Melissa and I chose to go out, but the hours between eight and midnight, when, if I hadn’t been prolific, I had at least been productive, were no longer hours I made use of.

Those who want to write make the time to write, I know now—they will themselves to write—and in the mornings, when I might have written, I was too tired from my work the nights before, or Melissa had stayed over and was still in my bed, or my morning classes were scheduled to begin too soon, or—but that was just it, wasn’t it? If I had wanted to write, I would have.

In his emails, often four and five pages long, full of words like “trenchant,” “sublime,” “ribald,” and “caesura,” replete with details about his explorations and adventures, Leo told me he was writing. He had had some trouble with the time change at first, he said, but by the third morning he was waking at five-thirty, local, to put a pot of water on the hot plate in his Soviet-era dorm room and press his pen to paper. He had also started to smoke pot with some of the other expats, he said, a new habit he was experimenting with for the way it “both focused and unfocused” his mind, and he’d found a good place for caffeine, too: the Bohemian Bagel, a place where the coffee refills were free. “Everything is going well,” he concluded. “Hope you’ve finished two or three of those stories—I’ll want to read them when I get back!”

---

Our love was interpenetration/ Porous and sharp/ Mixing, admixing, and interchanging…

I thought of my friend’s lines often in this period, but not because I was thinking of him. Rather, the lines encapsulated my relationship with Melissa. I was, in no small way, in awe of her. She wasn’t a National Merit finalist or Fulbright scholar like Leo, but she had been valedictorian of her senior class in high school and received one of the university’s prestigious, named scholarships. She was involved in student government, held a handful of important leadership positions on campus, and had been listed as a research assistant on two of her professors’ papers. Sitting across from her at Grand Empire was, indeed, reminiscent of sitting across from Leo. But while Leo’s verbal gifts presented themselves immediately and forcefully, as in a poem (to sit across from Leo was to witness a small, brilliant pyrotechnic display two feet in front of your face and thirty-six inches above the table), Melissa’s gifts were more subtle, coming to light over time, as in a novel. To speak with Melissa wasn’t to be a sounding board for work in its experimental phase that was later to appear in print (as I have now recognized many of my exchanges with Leo to have been, having seen so many of the words and phrases from our conversations appear in print), but to participate in something perhaps more rare and valuable: a conversation with someone who wanted to know the other as much as she wanted to be known.

Leo sent me an email the week after Spring Break detailing his trip to Venice, where James’s Aspern Papers was set, outlining his adventures during Carnivale, and then his messages tapered off. I heard from him once in April and once again in May. By the middle of June I hadn’t heard from him in almost six weeks—perhaps because he was too busy traveling, or because my own emails in response to his were so spare. Whatever the reason, I didn’t hold it against him. I had made more money than I needed by putting in five nights a week at the bar, and Melissa and I planned a two-week trip to visit Yellowstone in Wyoming. When Leo crossed my mind while we were traveling, it was only to wonder what he might have written when a view from a summit or of a lake was particularly striking. Would he have had the language to describe these vistas? How would he have transcribed those sunsets, geysers, or our encounter with a moose to the page? Would he have used simple language, or tried for allusions, or a figurative angle? With his specific genius, he’d likely have had better luck describing the images of Melissa and I wrapped together in our cabin sheets or sleeping bags, images I wouldn’t have wanted translated into the written word, least of all by Leo Brenning. This was poetry I preferred to keep sacred in the privacy of my own mind.

We came back from the trip tan and healthy, our legs taut from hiking, and spent the first week of July moving Melissa’s things into my apartment before our summer classes started: The Modern Novel for me and a required lab credit for her. I had missed two emails from Leo while we were gone, the first running to eight pages, the second only a paragraph, expressing some concern at the first having not yet received a response. He had met someone, he said. A girl named Isla, from Chicago. She was in Prague studying fiction. She was “the kind of girl Emily Dickinson might have been if she had gotten out more.” He had first encountered her sitting in front of a cafe one morning rolling a joint on the cover of a collection of Stuart Dybek stories while her coffee cooled, and the two had begun traveling together on the weekends, to Vienna and Krakow, already, and they had plans to visit Budapest. They were probably there at the time of my reading. She reminded him of me, he said, in her fanship of the American short story and her naked, though unarticulated, desire to become a novelist. I wrote back to apologize for missing his email. I told him it was nice to be thought of.

---

Then it was fall. Changing my major midway through my third year had put me behind, and Melissa was set to graduate in December. My plan before we had met had been to graduate the next winter—a five-and-a-half-years career—but we had begun to talk about the possibility of an “us” together after undergrad—her in law school, me getting my masters, the two of us living together somewhere closer to water that would accommodate us both. My subscribing to a heavier course load—six extra hours each semester—could make this happen.

So I cut my nights behind the bar down to four a week in September, then three in October, and took two extra upper-level classes, a schedule that meant reading more and writing more than I had ever done before. I created a division of labor, reading in the evenings, writing my papers after I had my coffee when I woke up. In October I found a sort of rhythm, or I hit a kind of stride, and realized that I had postured as a student during my college career, and acted like a student in my classes, but had never really been a student—had never truly devoted myself to my studies. Now I knew what it was like to get up at five-thirty in the morning and be fully immersed in my task by six—knew what it was like to work through the morning, break for a twenty-minute lunch, and fall back to my work as automatically as the minute-hand rounded the clock. I wondered, once or twice, what I might be able to accomplish if I turned my newfound capacity for concentration onto my efforts to write fiction, but I didn’t have time to try. This, I concluded, must be what had given me the strength for my remarkable new ability to study: the fact that there simply wasn’t time for second-guessing or working on anything else. Was this what made Leo a poet? Did he have the sense there wasn’t time for anything else?

Six notebooks. This was his current tally, according to his email in early November. He had filled six notebooks with poetry in the ten months he had been gone, and he hoped to fill another before he returned. It wasn’t all golden—“It doesn’t all shine,” he admitted—a lot of it would probably turn out to be shit when he looked back at it again—but there was much that he was proud of. Poems that could be culled and polished. Enough for at least one good, moderately-lengthed volume, he thought. (There was, of course. Praha Ramblings became the foundation upon which he built the rest of his career.) Romantically, he and Isla had fizzled almost immediately—they “were a complete misfire”—but they remained travel companions and collaborators. They were leaving Prague at the end of the semester and would visit Barcelona, Madrid, and Bilbao together. He would be back in Kansas before Christmas, he said. He’d love to meet up at Empire or Underground to catch up.

Leo didn’t return before Christmas, though. Isla invited him to stay with her family in Chicago over the holiday, and he sent me an email updating his projected date of arrival to “in time for the turn of the year.” I finished the semester with a 4.0, and two of my professors told me they would be willing to write me letters of recommendation. With the break stretching before me, Melissa out of town at her parents’, and Leo having told me he had finished not only a seventh, but also an eighth notebook of poetry in his last month of travels, I woke up at five-thirty on the first Monday morning of my break and decided to work on my fiction. As if the nine months I had spent away from my writing had been not a hiatus but a gestational period, I found when I opened my old, marble-covered notebook that characters I had loosely conceived of had developed, and that ideas I’d had for potential plotlines had matured. With the new diligence and ability to focus I had earned in my previous semester of study, I finished drafts of three short stories and got midway through a fourth in the ten days that passed before Christmas Eve. Then I got into my car and drove across the state to visit my family in Western Kansas for two days before driving back on the twenty-seventh in anticipation of a pair of important reunions.

---

Leo texted on the morning of the 28^th. “Tete-a-tete?” he asked, but I put off responding to him. Melissa had come back the night before, and we were making a day of having brunch, going hiking, and picking up take-out to stay in with for the night. When I got back to Leo on the morning of the 29^th, he urged me to meet him at The Underground at noon.

What had I expected? That I would have him to myself? That we would sit together at our usual table and he would show me the poems he was most proud of? That I would hear more explicit details about his nights with the masked Italian woman he had met in Venice during Carnivale (the subject, later, of his slim novel in verse San Marco Square)? Certainly, that stack of eight notebooks—and my own, comparatively diminutive stack of finished short stories—featured prominently in my imagined version of our reunion. Perhaps we would set up an old-fashioned slide projector, too, and shine pictures on the subterranean bar’s wall!

The reality was that I was far from being the only person present to welcome Leo home. There were almost three dozen people at Underground when I arrived: graduate students, mostly, but also some of our undergraduate peers, and even a few of the English department’s associate professors. A knot of them were gathered around Leo: it was all I could do to fight through and tell him I would talk to him when he wasn’t quite so busy. I ordered a burger and fries, chatted with a couple of my former coworkers (overwhelmed by my schedule, I had put in my notice and quit the bar six weeks before), and then fell into a conversation with one of my classmates about the Modern Novel course we had both taken in July.

We stayed at The Underground until after two o’clock, the crowd around Leo becoming more, not less, thick, and then someone called out an address a few blocks away from the student village and said that the party was moving there. The graduate students had organized a whole thing, it seemed, at a house four of them shared.

“You’re having a party for Leo?” I asked one of them after I’d been made to understand that everyone was leaving.

“No—it’s an annual thing. Our winter celebration,” he said, a thin gauze of beer foam coating his thin, graduate student mustache. “We do it about this time every year. David—” he pointed—“has been in touch with Leo since he left, so he thought we should schedule it to coincide.”

At the graduate students’ house there was a keg in the living room and hard liquor in the kitchen. Leo told the group of us gathered that he’d had beer with lunch and dinner every day while he’d been abroad—that his tolerance had become tremendous. When I asked if he thought it’d helped his writing he squinted and said he wasn’t sure it had mattered. Then he took my shoulder. “I want to talk to you when we can talk. You want to get out of here in a while and grab dinner?”

I shrugged, said Sure, and he went back to the conversation about The Penal Colony he was having with one of the Associate Professors. It wasn’t yet four in the afternoon, but my ability to appreciate things going on around me was devolving rapidly. I filled a glass with tap water in the kitchen and wondered if this annual winter celebration was supposed to last into the night. If so, I didn’t think many of the graduate students were going to see much of it.

I stepped outside into the cold, then, where the afternoon brightness was shocking and there was a smell of wood fire in the air. I called Melissa to cancel our dinner plans. “That good of a time?” she asked, and I told her No, truthfully. But the prospect of dinner with Leo—the possibility of sitting with him at Grand Empire, as I imagined we might, would make the whole wasted afternoon with these wasted graduate students worth it. “You’re making me nervous with your man-crush,” she kidded me. “Keep me in the loop. I’ll wait up.”

Back inside, I was approached by one of the newer graduate students—I hadn’t seen her before, so she might have been starting at the semester break—who touched my arm to get my attention and asked if I was the fiction writer. I had never told anyone besides Leo and Melissa about my fiction, so I said, “I’m sorry?” and my eyes must have gone more or less automatically to my friend returned from abroad.

She turned to look at him with me, curiosity knit between her brows. “Leo said you were studying Henry James and Willa Cather. You guys had a standing afternoon talking hour?” She looked past me as if afraid she might have been misdirected.

“Oh no—that’s me,” I said, but the look she gave me now was skeptical.

“And you’re an undergrad?”

I told her that I was—that for five more months I was.

She smiled with some relief, then, whether at my being the right person or at my not being a graduate student, I couldn’t tell, and said, “I fucking love James. He puts so many words on every page, and somehow there’s still so much going on that isn’t written.”

I asked her if Henry James was going to be her focus—was she planning to write her thesis on him?—and she knitted her brow again, the skeptical look returning.

“No. I’m an undergrad, like you.”

So she must have been one of the graduate students’ girlfriends, I thought, or someone Leo knew who I somehow didn’t, which wouldn’t have been that surprising. We passed the next half-hour or so talking about Henry James and short fiction, and when Leo came over to the kitchen table where we had settled, he was smiling.

“Good, you’re together.” He wavered a little where he stood, an aboard-ship kind of back-and-forth, but his eyes were clear, and his words were precise. He wasn’t slurring. “Let’s go have dinner.”

That there was a yellow taxi out front of the house seemed almost surreal—I had never taken a taxi in our midwestern college town; wasn’t sure I had ever even seen one—but I got into the its back with the two of them and we drove to a candles-and-tablecloths restaurant across town where I knew some students worked but doubted any had ever eaten.

I waved away the drink menu in favor of another glass of water, and my tablemates, sitting together across from me, both laughed when I asked my fellow James enthusiast why I hadn’t seen her on campus before.

“This is Isla,” Leo said, and when she said “I’m from Chicago” at the same time, everything fell into place. This slim, thick-browed girl with her manner of pressing her whole face forward into others’ space during conversation was the one who, in Leo’s last several months’ emails, had embodied everything expatriate and American about expatriate American life. “Isla!” I said. I told her that I should have known—that I should have asked—that I was so sorry.

“I should hope so,” she said, and we were all still laughing when our drinks and the antipasto began to arrive.

I don’t remember what the two of them ordered—I was famished and coming down off a pretty good afternoon drunk—but I had the chicken parmesan and half our basket of bread. Across the table, above their steaming plates, Leo and Isla recounted their adventures and told tales about the recent months they had passed traveling together.

Prague! The Paris of our generation! A medieval castle balanced on the skyline. Cobblestone streets with violinists playing on every second corner. Puppet shows, grog stands. A history of protest by self-immolation and political action by defenestration. In Prague you could have a five-course meal for what amounted to about six dollars, US. In Prague you could buy your beer and cigarettes from vending machines anywhere you went. At a cafe near the university, Leo regularly spent a handful of crowns on a bottle of wine and wrote all afternoon. The two of them had attended evening poetry readings at an English-language bookstore staffed by a rotating group of expatriate American university professors on sabbatical. They spoke of going to discotheques at eleven-thirty at night and dancing until the sun rose the next morning. They had visited train stations on a whim, shown their passports, and found themselves hours later in Warsaw, Paris, and Berlin.

 “Do you remember,” Leo asked, and “Do you remember,” Isla responded.

I looked down at my plate—and then across to theirs—and with some embarrassment realized I had eaten my entire meal before either of them had finished a quarter of their own. “We’re on a European schedule,” Leo said, shrugging off my apology, and Isla said she couldn’t possibly imagine finishing a meal in less than two hours anymore. “Everybody takes everything so much slower in Europe,” she said. “It’s ruined me. Everyone enjoys everything so much more over there.”

Leo encouraged me to order another entrée—or at least coffee and dessert—and told me to relax and save my strength: the night was still young.

Did we have poetry readings ahead of us? Discotheques? Falling into our familiar old pattern, Leo did most of the talking for the rest of the meal, describing he and Isla’s travels through Spain at the end of their trip—sangria and paella on the beach; the Cathedral de la Sagrada Familia in Barcelona; the Prado in Madrid—and when he stood up to go to the bathroom, I asked Isla what she thought about his poetry. “Oh, it’s phenomenal,” she enthused. “Everyone over there loved it.”

“He said he got a lot of new work done,” I observed.

“Stacks,” she said, twirling her fork above her dish. “So much work.”

“And it was good?”

“The best he’s ever written, he says.”

I expressed my surprise at this. “You two make it sound like you were always so busy. Traveling, eating for two or three hours at a time, drinking and dancing—”

She touched her napkin to her lips, dropped it to her lap. “That’s the thing. When you’re over there, there’s just so much more time. You don’t waste it watching TV or commuting or doing any of the quotidian, asinine things we all do over here. It’s like you have twenty-eight hours a day instead of twenty-four. I read so many more books over there than I would have if I’d been here. I did so much more writing.”

Quotidian, she said. Asinine. Reading. Writing.

She held up her hand to get our waiter’s attention, asked him for three glasses of port. “If you really want to write,” she said as he departed; “if you want to be a modern-day James—or even Fitzgerald or Hemingway—then you have to go. They all went. It’s like Leo said: Prague is the Paris of our generation.”

Prague. The thought had crossed my mind, of course, purely as a hypothetical after reading the first few of Leo’s emails in January and February. But it began to take hold and firm up as a real possibility now as Isla, Leo and I raised our little glasses of ruby port to tip against one another’s. We lingered for another half hour, enjoying our coffee and tiramisu, then called back our taxi, directing the driver to return us to The Underground. There, while Leo stood at the bar holding forth, Isla and I remained in the shared light of our booth, discussing Henry Miller and Anais Nin. Speaking about the stories Isla was writing; speaking about mine.

There was the possibility things might have worked out differently. My phone buzzed in my pocket, but it must have been while I was standing to visit the head, or while we were ascending to leave the speakeasy. And I might, of course, have simply turned and walked home. Somehow, this had been rendered impossible. It would be a couple of weeks before the campus opened back up and I pushed open the heavy door to enter the Study Abroad office; eight months before I walked across the cobblestones of Old Town Square and up the hill to visit Prague Castle. Six more weeks before I began to understand that my homesickness wasn’t homesickness, but an internal ripping and tearing; an inexorable, unmendable widening of my comprehension of what I had done: what I had sacrificed and what I had lost. But then, Leo standing on the curb waving, Isla reaching back and beckoning from within the recesses of that yellow cab—then I was already gone.

Peter Shull is a Midwestern novelist and educator. His novel Why Teach? is now available in paperback and e-reader editions from Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Kindle Store, and Kobo! His short stories Cheaters and Ornamental Pond Fish of Southwest Kansas are available on this site!

Cover Design, Nathaniel Roy

Cover art credit: Maurice Olin