I’m a lawyer in St. Petersburg and this is my love story.
         Every day I eat lunch in the Sunken Cathedral restaurant. The Sunken Cathedral is on Nevsky Prospect and only a few dozen meters from my office.
         It’s a somewhat shabby place these days. The tablecloths are fraying at the edges and the stained-glass dome hasn’t been properly cleaned for years. The pianist is good but has been told to play nothing except songs by Elton John.
         The aquarium that separates the lower seating area from the upper seating area is filled with algae. A few large, sickly-looking goldfish float through the haze. They stare outward in mute reproach, unnerving the diners and upsetting small children.

I can afford to eat at better restaurants. My firm is reputable and my salary is more than ample.
         But the Sunken Cathedral comforts me. Like my own body, it has tried to keep up appearances while slipping slowly into decay. Besides, every tile, every door, every stained-glass shard in the ceiling holds this place to my past. The Sunken Cathedral used to be one of the most popular nightspots in St. Petersburg, and I used to come here regularly as a young man.

Forty years ago, when I was a law student, the Sunken Cathedral dazzled me.
         At night you had to enter through the back stairwell. During the day the restaurant was open to the public. But in the evening it often became, unofficially, a private club. You couldn’t join any of the social events there unless someone influential—some minor government official or local community figure—invited you.
         You would check your coat with Svetlana at the main door and marvel at the rich solid grain of the coat cabinets. Then you would pass through a short unlighted hall, with stone tiles that would click in step with your shoes.
         Gliding down the hall you would hear the piano. You would hear the singer crooning a romantic ballad in the style of Magomaev. You would hear the soft fall of the keys and the lilt of the ballad and the hint of scores of voices on the other side of the double doors ahead of you. And all the sounds would echo in the hallway, across the half-formed shapes of the shadowed walls.
         Smoothly the double doors would open for you. Then the hostess, sleek and modern in a daring one-piece dress, would greet you warmly and lead you to your table.
         You would drift through the dim, swimming light as if you were traveling under the ocean. Small flood-lamps surrounded the aquarium, which was filled with glowing tropical fish. The lamps would shine through the clear water and play their low marine tints across the silverware on the tables and the glass in the domed ceiling and the glossy black sheen of the piano.
         Farther away, in a deeper darkness than the rest of the room, the aquarium lights would ripple across dozens of dancing couples. They would dance slowly, clinging tightly to each other as they turned. And the singer, his hair as glossy as the piano, would urge them in his smooth voice to imagine the starlight, the tenderness of a first kiss under the Russian moon, the beauty of an embrace that would last forever.

Of course, even by the Soviet standards of the mid-Sixties, this was all kitsch. But it exactly fit the notions of glamour and romance that I’d developed as a very serious twenty-year-old. I had come to St. Petersburg—still called Leningrad at that time—from a small town just south of Murmansk. So I had no idea that people who were older or more successful or more sophisticated went to entirely different places than the Sunken Cathedral. Later I would learn that they preferred intimate gatherings in high penthouse apartments, or in countryside dachas, or in the spas where Party members met their colleagues and mistresses.
         For me, however, the Sunken Cathedral was my first great social experience. As a law student, I was a humorless ascetic. I had seen far too many movies where brooding heroes with high cheekbones and firm jaws sacrificed themselves to obsessive suffering in the name of duty. I cast myself in those films, melted my features into the features of the lead actors. Then I imagined the scenes playing on an endless loop in the mind of the unknown woman who would someday become my great love. I pictured her applauding my success in classroom debates, or trembling with desire as I presented a procedural argument to my professor.
         Fortunately I had a friend who helped save me from my self-absorption. At least once a month Nikolai brought me out of the trance of my studies, and into the very different trance of the Sunken Cathedral.

Nikolai came from Krasnojarsk, in Siberia, but you would never know it. He had developed a casual Leningrad accent that blended perfectly with his long stylish overcoat and the laughing ease with which he threw his scarf around his neck.
         The school had made us roommates. He was always breezing in and out of our apartment, always rushing off to some secret jazz club meeting or a date with a figure skater.
         “You should study more,” I said, annoyed that he kept interrupting my homework.
         “I’ll be fine.” He tossed me a tape for one of the cumbersome reel-to-reel units that we had to use in those days.
         “What’s this?” I asked, catching the tape in my ink-stained hand.
         “Connie Francis.”
         I pretended to be unimpressed. “Why are you giving me a Connie Francis tape?”
         Nikolai straightened the cuffs of his shirtsleeves. As usual he was getting ready to go somewhere. “You’re coming to a party with me tomorrow.”
         “Tomorrow,” I said, “I’m busy. And even if I weren’t, why would I need a Connie Francis tape?”
         Nikolai grinned, swept his coat from the closet. “There’ll be women at this party. Don’t you want to have something to talk about?”
         “The kind of woman who interests me,” I said priggishly, “would never listen to Connie Francis.”
         But Nikolai didn’t seem to hear. In a single smooth pivot, a turn that was as graceful as a dance step, he slipped into his coat and darted out the door.
         Once Nikolai was gone I listened to the tape. I played it softly, so the neighbors wouldn’t hear.
         The first song was “Kiss ‘n’ Twist.” It had been chain-copied all over Russia, passed from person to person in secret.
         Like many Russians, I’d first listened to “Kiss ‘n’ Twist” in a Soviet film where it could be heard playing from the window of a dacha. In the movie the music had represented the anti-socialist tendencies of the dacha owners. But the song was so compelling that some people went back to see the film over and over just so they could experience that sexy, exhilarating Connie Francis voice.
         Along with most of my friends, I never understood how enjoying western pop music could be said to undermine our faith in the Party. Indeed, I’ve sometimes been amused by Americans who, in recent years, assume that we must have greatly admired U.S. culture and values because we secretly collected Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. All I can say is that our attitudes were complicated. Moreover, those attitudes differed so much from individual to individual—indeed, differed so much within each individual in various settings and circumstances—that it’s impossible to generalize about our tastes.
         Anyway, I disapproved of Connie Francis, but not for political reasons. Shostakovich was my idol and classical music my passion. I’d played the violin as a boy and both my parents were professional musicians. So Connie Francis struck me as being less subversive than frivolous.
         Yet as I listened to “Kiss ‘n’ Twist” my thumb began to tap on the table. During “Dat’s Love” I found myself walking restlessly around the room, my feet moving to the music. And by the time “Stupid Cupid” was playing, I was doing the Twist, swiveling my hips and mouthing the words while I gyrated back and forth in the center of the carpet.

So it was no great surprise that Nikolai convinced me to start going to the Sunken Cathedral with him. I was lucky to meet someone who immediately saw how desperately I wanted to have fun, to enjoy all the things I was predisposed to condemn.
         Nikolai was able to get us into the Sunken Cathedral parties because his older brother was already an established lawyer. Between our monthly visits we tried to save up as much money as possible, so we could buy dinner or drinks for the women there.
         At every party, during every round I made through the stir of guests, I was looking for someone to fall in love with. Eventually I found her.

The way I recall it—inevitably heightened by my memory—she stepped out of the darkness and slowly took shape in the floating, liquid light.
         “Your friend,” she said, “tells me you like Connie Francis.”
         “Doesn’t everyone?” I said.
         She crooked her slender elbow against the bar, where I was trying to look grim and confident as I sipped my vodka. I had decided, rather simplistically, that if Nikolai was the high-spirited one who never left the dance floor, I should be the moody one who never left the bar. The usual result of this strategy was that Nikolai would dance with every attractive woman available. Meanwhile I would have, at best, a few brief, awkward conversations with women who could never quite penetrate my off-putting barrier of arrogance and shyness.
         I ordered this new woman—Tanya—a drink. She eyed me humorously, her head tilted back, one eyebrow cocked in ironic curiosity.
         “Your friend also tells me you’ve got a full tape of Connie Francis songs,” she said.
         “That’s true,” I said.
         “Obviously you and your friend have an act.”
         “Do we?”
         “Of course. It’s a classic set-up, isn’t it? First he says you’ve got a Connie Francis tape. Then he tells me you’re shy and sends me over here. Then you invite me to come to your place so we can listen to Connie Francis together.”
         This indeed sounded like something Nikolai would plan, but he hadn’t said anything to me about it and I was unprepared for the serene directness of Tanya’s remarks. The dim aquatic light wavered over her neat cat-like face, flickered across her mocking eyes.
         “You didn’t honestly think I’d come to your place to listen to Connie Francis, did you?” she asked.
         “I thought nothing about anything,” I said, chastened. “I don’t know you.”
         “No, I suppose you don’t. You just assumed. Very presumptuous. Very unbecoming.” She looked over at the dance floor as if there were nothing in my face worth holding her attention. “After all, I don’t even like Connie Francis.”
         “Who do you like then?” I asked.
         “Shostakovich,” she said.
         “So do I.”
         “Why am I not surprised?” With an ostentatious stage-yawn she slid up on one of the barstools and smoothed her skirt down as she crossed her legs. “And I suppose you have a tremendous selection of Shostakovich records at home, don’t you?”
         “As a matter of fact,” I said, “I do.”
         “And you’d love to have me come listen to them, wouldn’t you?”
         “There’s no need to make fun of me,” I said.
         “I think I’m a much better judge of that than you are. Are you saying you don’t want to play your Shostakovich records for me?”
         “I’m not sure.”
         She turned slightly on the stool, swung her legs away from me and toward the pianist. “Why don’t you ask me?” she said.
         “Ask you what?”
         “To come listen to your Shostakovich records.”
         “Is that what you want?”
         “You’ll have to ask and see,” she said.
         I hesitated. “Would you like to come listen to my Shostakovich records?”
         “When?” she asked.
         “Tonight,” I said.
         “Not tonight.”
         “Tomorrow?” I suggested.
         “Next week,” she said decisively. “Wednesday. At seven. Give me your address.”
         I wrote the address on a strip of paper. She read it skeptically.
         “This is a student place, isn’t it?” she said.
         “Yes.”
         “I hate student places. I might not come.” She handed me her drink. “You can finish this if you want. Or maybe you can give it to your next Connie Francis fan.”
         Then she slipped off the barstool and headed for the hall. She left my address on the bar.

She didn’t come on Wednesday at seven. She came on Thursday at six. Immediately she took out all my Shostakovich records and cross-examined me about them. My answers seemed to satisfy her, though her knowledge of Shostakovich was quite a bit deeper than my own.
         “Are you a musicologist?” I asked.
         “I’m a violinist,” she said. “I’ve been second chair with the Leningrad Symphony for the past year now.”
         “I used to play the violin,” I said.
         “Prove it. Play something for me.”
         Humiliated in advance, I took out my violin and performed a Bartok exercise, displaying my normal bowing difficulties and primitive vibrato.
         “You’re not very good,” Tanya said simply. “Let’s listen to a record.”
         I put on Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony. Tanya and I sat next to each other on the couch and listened. Halfway into the third movement—the long, sumptuous Largo—we kissed.
         “By the way,” Tanya said later, turning the record over, “I lied to you last week. I love Connie Francis.”

Tanya wasn’t my first girlfriend, but she was the first one who mattered more to me than my studies and my dreams.
         She was two years older than I was and quite a bit more experienced in almost every way. When we met she was the mistress of a married cellist, a man in his early forties who had been promising for months to leave his family. She gave him up within a week of starting to date me. After that we both took great pleasure in snubbing him whenever I would pick her up at orchestra rehearsals or accompany her to concerts.
         We thought of the Sunken Cathedral as our special place. Tanya seemed to enjoy my enthusiasm, the pleasure I took in entering the restaurant with her or putting my hand on her back as I led her to a table. Then after dinner I would escort her away from the table and out onto the dance floor.
         With the cellist, she said, she had become tremendously cynical about romance.
         “That’s why it’s so wonderful I found you,” she told me once, curling up against me in my bed. “With you it all feels so fresh.” She ran her finger along the back of my ear. “It all feels so new.”
         Then she kissed me and asked me to close the door. She didn’t want us to be disturbed by Nikolai and the rest of our friends, drinking and singing in the other room.

We would slow-dance under the stained-glass dome. Around us the other couples would turn in their slightly different revolutions, at their slightly different paces, while all of us would drift on the same general current that seemed to carry us along the dance floor.
         Tanya would press close to me and settle her cheek on my shoulder. Sometimes, gently, almost sleepily, her head would rise and she would look at me and lift her warm mouth to mine. It always seemed miraculous to me that this woman, so brisk and ironic, would give herself to me with such tenderness. Then her head would droop to my shoulder and I would hold her tighter and feel the smallest movements of her back against my arms, the softest rhythms of her breathing against my chest.

We were together for nearly a year. Then she was transferred to an orchestra in Moscow. There was some obscure political maneuvering behind the transfer, some odd bureaucratic nonsense that ensnared her along with several other musicians.
         I tried to see her as often as possible, but after she moved things were different. Her letters, originally filled with references to our future, became steadily cooler in tone. During my final few visits she seemed distracted and distant. Then one night after a concert she told me she was in love with someone else. She was seeing a journalist and she planned to marry him. I asked her to marry me instead, but she refused. Our relationship was over.

Apparently she was transferred back to the Leningrad Symphony several years later, but by then I was already working abroad.
         I represented various Soviet interests internationally, first in Finland, later in Belgium, later still in Boston and San Francisco. These were prestigious positions for a Russian lawyer and I was proud to attain them.
         I married my first wife less than a year after Tanya broke things off with me. The marriage fell apart almost immediately. Poor Marina kept telling me that I was still devastated from losing Tanya and I kept telling her this was absurd. But eventually Marina found my enormous pile of unsent letters. The letters were all addressed to Tanya and careened back and forth between hatred and adoration, childish fury and grotesque self-abasement. Marina moved out of our home the next day.

Eight years ago, when I decided to quit traveling and settle in St. Petersburg for good, a number of firms expressed interest in my services. I chose the firm that Nikolai founded, and I’ve been content with the choice ever since. Nikolai runs the firm with the same carefree energy that he applied to our days as law students, and with the same buoyant results.
         I’m also content with my second marriage. Neither Anna nor I would claim it’s a marriage based on great passion. It’s a friendly marriage, a decent marriage, and our three children act as stabilizers, constant reminders to both of us why it’s so important that we treat each other with courtesy and respect.
         A writer and translator, Anna has an extraordinary collection of eyeglasses and contact lenses. At night, before I go to sleep, I occasionally open the drawer where she keeps all her eyewear. I like to see how large her collection has grown since we first met, and to wonder how much more it will grow in the future, in the years ahead that I could never imagine spending with anyone else.

Tanya didn’t marry the journalist. According to my friends, she left him when I was working in Finland. The Sunken Cathedral had already ceased to be fashionable by then, but Tanya visited it constantly. She would sit at the bar and cry, and would sometimes go home with men she didn’t know.
         Nikolai ran into her at a music festival and asked her how the Sunken Cathedral could still have any appeal for her. She said she went there because it was the only thing left of the one relationship that had ever mattered to her.
         “I can’t believe I gave him up,” she said. “I’ve never stopped loving him.”
         Then she started crying and told Nikolai she needed to go. Soon afterwards she lost her position in the orchestra because she had quit coming to rehearsals and had been late to several concerts. Then she was sent to an orchestra in Arkhangelsk, where she eventually married the curator of an art museum.

When Nikolai wrote and told me what Tanya had said, I was thrilled.
         I was still too proud and too angry to contact her, but I had endless visions of meeting up with her again. She would steal into Finland and beg me to come back to her. Or on one of my trips to Russia I would pass her along Nevsky Prospect and pretend not to recognize her. Or we would fall into each other’s arms and begin kissing wildly there on the street. My imagination went through every possible combination of reuniting with her—even as I moved farther and farther away, across Europe, across the Atlantic, and finally across the whole of the United States.
         Over the years these visions of her, and of the encounters still ahead of us, dimmed but never died. In the end they were a permanent part of me.

Last September I was introduced to Tanya’s son.
         Anatole was a handsome soft-spoken man in his late-twenties who looked nothing like his mother. He worked in London as an art dealer and specialized in promoting Russian painters. He was thinking of opening a gallery in St. Petersburg and wanted our firm to consult him on the legal issues.
         I took him to lunch at the Sunken Cathedral.
         “This isn’t where I normally bring our clients,” I said, “but I thought it might interest you. Your mother used to come here.”
         Anatole looked at a fleck of dried food that was stuck to the brim of his empty wine glass. “Did you know Mother?” he asked.
         “For a time,” I said.
         “Makes sense, I suppose. She was the one who recommended I try your firm. She’s having a holiday with Father in Karelia this week.”
         He gazed around the room with a polite show of interest. Then he noticed the domed ceiling, where one of the grimy stained-glass shards was starting to come loose.
         “Actually,” he said, “I’ve heard about this place.” He gestured toward the algae-filled aquarium. “Mother mentions it sometimes when she’s had a drink or two after dinner. Always a very annoying topic, Father says. Then again, he’s not so terribly tactful himself.”
         “So she still talks about coming here?” I asked.
         Anatole cocked an eyebrow ironically, his mother’s son after all. “Only when she’s tipsy. She claims this is where she met the great love of her youth, whatever that means. He sounds pretty appalling, to be honest. He was some cellist, much older than she was. He was married, and that’s why they couldn’t be together. But she still cries when she brings him up, and still insists she’ll never get over him. Father, of course, finds the whole subject infuriating.”
         “Yes,” I said, “I can see how it might upset him.”
         The night I met Tanya, after I watched her leave the restaurant, I finished the rest of my drink and wandered away from the bar.
         Walking along the edge of the dance floor, I could still recall her mocking eyes, still smell her perfume, still hear the mischievous murmur of her voice. I didn’t know if I would ever see her again. Yet as the dancers swayed slowly beside me, my anticipation seemed to grow. It rose with every step I took through the dark, through the dim waver of the aquarium light. The light rolled and flickered, bringing out a trace of a woman’s shoulder, a slice of a man’s face, the stippled surface of a wall.
         I crossed the restaurant and headed through the double doors. Then I was in the deeply shadowed entry hall, with its haunting echoes of hushed voices and muffled piano music.
         I lingered in the hall for a moment so I could be alone with my image of Tanya. The singer’s ghostly, disembodied bass filled the dark stone arches overhead, surrounded me with words that were too faint to hear.
         Then I turned the corner and went to the coat-check counter.
         Behind the counter, Svetlana sauntered playfully along the rows of coats and hats hanging in the heavy wood cabinets. She ran her smooth young fingers across a fur muff, a wool collar, the soft fabric of a woman’s jacket.
         When she saw me she laughed and said:
         “Sorry, I can’t resist. They feel so wonderful I can’t keep my hands off them.”
         I offered her my coat-check number.
         “I don’t need it,” she said cheerfully, waving the number aside.
         She went straight to one of the cabinets and whisked my coat from its hanger. Her long false eyelashes were, I thought, both fetching and absurd, and it flattered me that she remembered which coat was mine.
         “How was your evening?” she asked.
         “It was perfect,” I said.

KEVIN FRAZIER works for a TV production company in Finland that makes international documentaries. His short stories are forthcoming in Fiction, South Carolina Review, Event, Island, and The Dalhousie Review, among other places. He has lectured at the Russian State Institute of Cinematography in Moscow and has published studies of the Russian poet Khodasevich.