day while he prepared her plate. But before he could lift a finger, she had taken the knife and serving fork in hand. And as she began to relate the professional obligations that had commandeered her afternoon, she scored the fish’s spine with the tip of the knife and made diagonal cuts at its head and tail. Then slipping the serving fork between the fish’s spine and its flesh, she deftly liberated the filet. In a few succinct movements, she had served portions of the fennel and olives, and topped the filet with the charred lemon. Handing the Count this perfectly prepared plate, she plucked the spine from the fish and served herself the second filet with accompaniments—an operation that took no more than a minute. Then placing the serving utensils on the platter, she turned her attention to the wine.
Good God, thought the Count. So engrossed had he been in watching her technique, he had neglected his own responsibilities. Leaping from his chair, he took the bottle by the neck.
“May I?”
“Thank you.”
As the Count poured the wine, he noted it was a dry Montrachet, the perfect complement to Emile’s bass and clearly the handiwork of Andrey. The Count raised his glass to his hostess.
“I must say that you deboned that fish like an expert.”
She laughed.
“Is that a compliment?”
“Of course it’s a compliment! Well. At least, it was intended as one. . . .”
“In that case, thank you. But I wouldn’t make too much of it. I was raised in a fishing village on the Black Sea, so I’ve tied more than my share of knots and filleted more than my share of fish.”
“You could do worse than dining on fish every night.”
“That’s true. But when you live in a fisherman’s house, you tend to eat what can’t be sold. So more often than not, we dined on flatfish and bream.”
“The bounty of the sea . . .”
“The bottom of the sea.”
And with that disarming memory, Anna Urbanova was suddenly describing how as a girl she would steal away from her mother at dusk and wind her way down the sloping streets of her village so that she could meet her father on the beach and help him mend his nets. And as she talked, the Count had to acknowledge once again the virtues of withholding judgment.
After all, what can a first impression tell us about someone we’ve just met for a minute in the lobby of a hotel? For that matter, what can a first impression tell us about anyone? Why, no more than a chord can tell us about Beethoven, or a brushstroke about Botticelli. By their very nature, human beings are so capricious, so complex, so delightfully contradictory, that they deserve not only our consideration, but our reconsideration—and our unwavering determination to withhold our opinion until we have engaged with them in every possible setting at every possible hour.
Take the simple case of Anna Urbanova’s voice. In the context of the lobby, where the actress was struggling to rein in her hounds, the hoarseness of her voice had given the impression of an imperious young lady prone to shouting. Very well. But here in suite 208 in the company of charred lemons, French wine, and memories of the sea, her voice was revealed as that of a woman whose profession rarely allowed her the chance for repose, never mind the enjoyment of a decent meal.
As the Count refilled their glasses, he was struck by a memory of his own that seemed in keeping with the conversation.
“I spent a good part of my youth in the province of Nizhny Novgorod,” he said, “which happens to be the world capital of the apple. In Nizhny Novgorod, there are not simply apple trees scattered about the countryside; there are forests of apple trees—forests as wild and ancient as Russia itself—in which apples grow in every color of the rainbow and in sizes ranging from a walnut to a cannonball.”
“I take it you ate your fair share of apples.”
“Oh, we’d find them tucked in our omelets at breakfast, floating in our soups at lunch, and stuffed in our pheasants at dinner. Come Christmas, we had eaten every single variety the woods had to offer.”
The Count was about to lift his glass to toast the comprehensiveness of their apple eating, when he waved a self-correcting finger.
“Actually, there was one apple that we did not eat. . . .”
The actress raised one of her bedeviling eyebrows.