Nine #2
“I’m only famous in this house.”
He nodded, returned to whatever he was doing on his laptop.
She wasn’t sure if she was dismissed or not, or if she wanted to be.
He was wearing a white undershirt, the sleeveless kind, that showed off his strong biceps and his stick-and-poke tattoos.
He seemed to be concentrating deeply. A single lightbulb from a ghostly pendant lamp swung gently above the table where he sat.
She had felt almost normal today, taking a cab, walking Zazi and Phil around a lake.
But now back in this strange house she felt, again, like she was an extra in an art film.
“What are you working on?” He turned to her: those eyes. “I’m sorry, if it’s private—”
“I am writing a letter to my daughter.”
“Oh,” she said. “Where’s your daughter?”
“In Moscow,” he said. “With her mother.”
“Ah,” she said. With her mother, she noted. Not his wife. (Why would she think that? Why would that matter?)
While his eyes were still on the screen he said, “I am going to take a break now from writing. Would you like a beer?”
She wouldn’t, she had no interest in ever drinking alcohol again. “Sure.”
“I’ll get you one,” he said. “Have a seat.”
Although his voice said boxer and his tattoos said inmate , Andrei moved with the easy grace of someone who’d been trained to use his body professionally—an athlete or a dancer. “Did you dance?” she said.
“My mother was a dancer. She taught me a bit when I was younger.” He sat down across from her, slid a beer across the table. “You?”
Under the pendant light, his hair showed streaks of silver. He had a glamorously beaten-up face, like that of a movie star who played action roles or the villain in period dramas. Busted nose, full lips.
“I didn’t dance, but I always wanted to.”
“You’re tall,” he said. “It would have been hard for you to find a partner.”
“I know.” She’d had dreams, as a small child, of wearing a tutu and joining the lineup of sparkly pink girls at the Christmas recital, but even then she’d been much too tall. Which was what her mother said. (Which was a nice way—well, a way—of saying they couldn’t afford it.)
“Irine said that you were a model.”
“God, I wish she’d stop saying that,” she said. “I was a model for about thirty seconds. And it was a very long time ago.”
“You still could do it if you wanted.” He said it in such a serious, matter-of-fact way that she did not think he was flirting.
Still, a butterfly in her stomach.
“I’m out of the game,” she said. “Anyway, I teach now. Food writing at a local college.”
He scratched at the back of his neck, languidly. “I don’t know what that is, food writing.”
“It’s writing about restaurants, different recipes, that sort of thing. Where food comes from.”
“Where food comes from?” Then he smiled, a real one, revealing chipped teeth. “Americans do not know this?”
“Not, like, the food system. Not farming,” Amy said.
“My students write about restaurants or about different kinds of cuisine. We’ll take tours of, say, Chinatown, and research the different ways that these neighborhoods were built, what the restaurant industry means to different parts of New York City.
It’s an important part of New York’s economy. ”
“So your students write about the economy.”
“Yes,” Amy said. She took a sip of watery beer.
“Do you ever make your own food?”
“Sure,” she said. “I mean, not as much as I used to, but for many years I cooked in a restaurant.” For some reason she did not mention it was her husband’s restaurant.
“Did you enjoy that?”
“Oh sure,” Amy said.
“But you don’t do it anymore.”
“My life got busy.”
“Too busy to have a job?” he asked.
“Raising my son has been a job,” she said. “Rescuing animals is a job.”
“Ah,” he said.
This was a conversation—she was surely having some sort of conversation—but she had no idea what she was supposed to say next.
This used to happen to her all the time when she was younger, but she thought she’d grown out of it.
Or, now that she was forty-six, she only spent time with people to whom she had things to say.
She should have gotten up and gone back to her room.
She didn’t have to sit here and wonder whether or not he was teasing her.
If he didn’t have those impossible eyes!
And also the fine, stubbly jaw, the full mouth.
She stole a glance up at him and then quickly back to the table.
“Do you miss home?”
“No,” she said. “Do you?”
“Of course,” he said. “Everyone I love is there.” He paused. “You have a husband?”
“I do.”
“And he doesn’t mind that you are here by yourself?”
“It doesn’t matter whether he minds,” she said, then looked up at him; he was looking straight at her. “And no, he doesn’t.”
He smiled, casually, and she felt her heart pulse. How long had it been since she had felt this kind of pull toward a man who wasn’t Judd? Alongside this kind of intimidation?
Years. Years. And even though Judd was still beautiful to her, still broad and familiar and safe—how long had it been since she’d wanted to tear his clothes off?
“So then,” the man said. He didn’t finish.
Amy’s husband was turned on by other, younger women (look, even if he didn’t sleep with them, he flirted, patted knees, rubbed shoulders, hugged, she’d seen him, he did this in front of her), while she just marched forward with her middle-aged libido and her own understanding of herself as a not very sexual person.
The flurry of passion that ignited in her when she first met Judd had lasted a year or maybe more before the genial routines of cohabitation replaced fucking against the bedroom wall—which was how she liked it, coffee in the mornings, clean underwear all day.
But if she wasn’t a very sexual person, why did she suddenly feel this way?
“How long are you going to stay in Tbilisi?” he asked, after a few minutes of her being acutely aware of both their breathing.
“I’m supposed to go home at the end of next week,” she said.
“And what if you don’t find the dog?”
“Oh, I’ll find her.”
“How do you know?”
“I have a feeling,” she said.
“What kind of feeling?”
“Or a connection…” she said, “with certain dogs,” and she thought of the woman in the park: I have a psychic connection with animals. I know what’s inside them, what they’re thinking.
“I understand,” he said, and she was almost certain he wasn’t teasing her. “Some people are like that. My grandmother was like that.”
An opening to ask questions, but Amy didn’t ask.
“There are a lot of dogs in Tbilisi,” Andrei said.
“Yes,” she said. She slid her beer bottle back and forth across the table. “What’s your daughter’s name?”
“Faina.”
“That’s pretty,” Amy said. “What does it mean?”
“What does it mean?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Sometimes names in foreign languages mean different things.”
“It’s a Russian name,” he said. “It’s not a foreign language to her.”
“Your daughter’s Russian?”
“Yes, of course,” he said. “As am I.”
“Oh,” Amy said—when he’d said they were in Moscow, she’d just thought—“What are you doing here?”
“I live here.”
“I know,” Amy said, “but if you’re Russian, what are you—”
He let the question dangle for a minute. “I came here in September, so that I would not have to go fight in Ukraine.”
“Oh. Right.”
He shrugged, went to the humming refrigerator, came back with two more beers. “Georgia is one of the only countries you can enter without a visa,” he said. “There are a few others, the UAE, Argentina. But it is more expensive to go to those places.”
“Of course.”
“It is expensive here too,” he said. “But not quite as bad.”
“How did you find Irine?”
“The same way you did,” he said. “The internet.”
“She was advertising a room?”
“Help around the house, mostly,” he said. “Fixing things that couldn’t be put off any longer. I showed up and saw how many rooms there were here and proposed that I rent one. It took some convincing—”
“Why?”
“Not everyone here wants a Russian man in their home.”
Amy popped the cap off her beer. The label was red and gold with a block-print design, and under the Georgian writing was the English word BEER . It wasn’t very good, but if Judd sold this at the restaurant he could charge ten dollars a bottle for the glamorous label alone.
“I am lucky,” Andrei said. “By the time I got here, there was almost nothing left for under a thousand lari a month.”
Amy did the math in her head. Four hundred dollars, give or take. “It’s kind of an odd house, isn’t it?”
He smiled again. What a relief his smiles were. “Eleven dogs,” he said.
“How does anyone take care of so many dogs? How do you walk them? How do you feed them? And the noise!”
“She gets donations here and there, I believe,” he said. “You paid the food bill for several weeks, in fact. Both the humans and the dogs.”
“I figured,” Amy said, although actually she hadn’t really considered how exactly her money had been spent.
“Has she asked you for more money?”
“She doesn’t have to,” Amy said. “I’m happy to help if she wants me to. Do you think she’s in need?”
He shrugged. “Three old ladies, a house that’s falling apart, a daughter she is desperate to send to university abroad, and all these dogs,” he said. “On one school administrator’s salary.”
“I should give her some money,” Amy said.
“She will be offended if you try,” he said.
“I should probably do it anyway.”
“As you like,” Andrei said.
The faucet dripped.
“How long are you going to stay here?”
“In this house?” he asked. “As long as I can.” Beneath them, a dog barked once, sharply. “In Tbilisi? I have no idea. Maybe forever.”
She looked at him.
“I can’t go home,” he said. “I am a deserter. And my wife won’t have me back.”
“She won’t?” Amy said. “Why?”
“Because, as I said, I am a deserter.”
“But surely—surely she doesn’t see it that way. She didn’t want you to, what, go to the front? Wouldn’t that be extraordinarily dangerous?”
He laughed, echoing the dog’s sharp bark. “My wife is a very strong defender of Russia. She sees the soldiers as heroes.”