Dear Kurl,
Saturday night, schnitzel night! You arrived at our house tonight laden with shopping bags, embarrassed, apologizing for not asking ahead of time, saying you’d planned to cook at home but your uncle Viktor wasn’t feeling well, and your mom had decided to go visit your aunt Agata at the nursing home. I asked you whether it’d be okay if there were extra people for dinner. Bron, you probably expected—she is a fairly good bet for dinner on weekends—but Rich, the Decent Fellows’ guitarist, and his wife, Trudie, were over tonight, too.
Bron and I helped you unload the groceries and find the right skillet. Rich, Trudie, and Lyle sat in the living room, chanting, “Wienerschnitzel, Wienerschnitzel, Wienerschnitzel,” which I can only assume was some jingle from the 1980s. They’d all hit the green pretty hard by that point.
You’d brought some tools from home, including a knife sharpener. You took our biggest knife from the drawer and dragged it through the metal discs. I had just read your letter about how you learned to cook from your brother Mark, so I watched you with new fascination and respect for your skills.
“Technically,” you told Bron and me, “it’s not called Wiener schnitzel unless it’s made with veal and comes from this officially designated area of Germany.”
“You mean Austria,” Bron said. “Wien is Vienna.”
“Nope, I mean Germany,” you said. You unwrapped a stack of pork chops and peeled the top one off, slapped it onto the cutting board, sliced it horizontally in half, and opened it like a greeting card. “It’s a tourist thing in Vienna now, but the dish didn’t come from there. They think it was imported from Italy, originally.”
“Wait. Did you research this meal?” Bron asked.
“He researches everything,” I said. “Ask him about salamanders.”
Bron loved this. She latched right on to it: “Tell me about salamanders, Kurl. I’m dying to hear about salamanders!”
You’d produced a small, spiked metal hammer from your grocery bag and started pounding the pork chop to make it even thinner. The noise brought Shayna into the kitchen. “It’s dead, man, it’s already dead,” she shouted, and grabbed your forearm and pretended she was trying to wrestle a weapon from your hand. You relinquished the hammer, and she took a turn with it. “Look, I’m beating your meat,” she joked.
I was worried I’d embarrassed you with that comment about the salamanders. I hadn’t meant to bring up a subject from your letters like that. It completely violates the principle of freely writing about whatever topic you’re thinking about, doesn’t it, if the recipient of the letter is going to turn around and hold up the topic for social mockery? The whole time the meal was cooking, I was racking my brain for a way to apologize.
And then during dinner, Bron had to go and bring up the subject again. “Kurl, I’m begging you,” she said. “Please tell us one fun fact about amphibians.”
You didn’t seem particularly offended by it, though. You simply grinned, chewed your mouthful of schnitzel, swallowed, and said, “The word amphibian comes from Greek. What it means, or used to mean, is living a double life.”
Bron put down her fork and stared at you. “Adam Kurlansky, that is the most profound thing I’ve heard all day.”
You shrugged. “It’s just facts.”
I know you dislike it when I scrutinize you too much, Kurl. But at the risk of being called a nosy little bugger again, can I simply state that you’re a good deal more handsome than I suspect you quite realize? You have a broad, Slavic face and a wide, smooth brow. Deep-set eyes. Small ears lying flat to your head. All of these in themselves could be considered neutral-to-positive attributes. There’s a pleasing angularity to your cheekbone and jaw that contrasts with the softness of your mouth.
“A generous mouth,” they say in novels. However, at school very few people would describe your mouth as “generous,” because you keep it in a straight line. Similarly, your brow is locked into a slight crease. Eyelids slightly lowered. Jaw slightly clenched. I’ve observed these tiny efforts on your part to hold your face still because I’ve been laboring for months now to decode your expressionless expression, Kurl. It falls midway between I-don’t-care and don’t-mess-with-me. The moment you become distracted, it all changes, though. When you were cooking your schnitzel, for example—your face was completely different than I’ve ever seen it at school. And I saw the change again when we sat down to eat and everyone was exclaiming over the food.
“This is incredible, Adam,” Trudie said. She held up a forkful of schnitzel to show the layers between the breading. “What all’s in it?”
You said lemon peel, sardines, capers, and dill. Half the secret, you told us, was keeping the other dishes (in this case, the salad with sweet vinaigrette, the noodles in cream sauce) gentle in flavor so they don’t distract from the schnitzel. We all spent a minute or so quietly savoring the food, which really was amazing.
And your face, Kurl, as we discussed the food! You can’t possibly be unaware of how hard we were all working, the whole evening, to see this change come over your face. Not just Shayna and Bron and me—even Lyle makes more jokes when you’re around, trots out all his most reliably crowd-pleasing stories for you. We’re all bending over backward to get you to crack a smile, because when you smile it feels like the sun coming out.
You will point out, of course, that everyone does this. Everyone wears a different face at school. And you’ll point out that the extent to which I have trouble switching faces explains much about how I get treated at school. You’ll be right on both counts. But somehow with you the change is more extreme, like two different people. I wonder, Kurl, when you look in the mirror, do you ever get to see the unguarded face? Because I wish you could. It’s a wonder to behold.
“Will you come with us to Paisley Park? Please?” Bron asked you at the table. Paisley Park After Dark—the thrice-yearly dance party advertised only twenty-four hours before the doors open and only to Prince’s most devout acolytes, a.k.a. his Facebook followers.
“Don’t come if you have to work early tomorrow,” Lyle warned. “It’ll be a late night.”
“We’re taking the day off, sort of,” you said. You told us that your uncle had been paid today for a couple of roofs, so he wouldn’t be in any shape to work tomorrow.
“It’s a done deal, then,” Trudie said. “You’re coming with us tonight.”
I’ve got to stop writing and get dressed for Paisley Park now. You’re downstairs watching TV with Rich, Trudie, and Lyle while Shayna and Bron are choosing what to wear.
I just realized something. When you first arrived at our house and said you weren’t cooking at home because your uncle wasn’t feeling well, I guess what you must have meant was he wasn’t feeling sober. Have I got that right? If so, I’m really glad that tonight you had us to cook for, instead.
Yours truly,
Jo