Sixteen
SIXTEEN
IN THE MORNING, a brisk knock on the door. Maybe that’s what had woken her up. A brisk knock, then another. Irine?
“Come in?” She was sitting in bed, still wearing the sweatpants she’d worn the day before. She could only guess what her hair looked like. The knocker knocked again.
“Jesus.” She ran her hands through her hair, then cupped them around her mouth to test how bad her breath smelled (bad!).
But she opened the door anyway. It was a granny, beckoning.
Amy held up a finger, the universal sign for one minute, pulled her hair into something like a bun and followed her downstairs.
Could she stop to brush her teeth? The granny looked at her expectantly, so Amy followed her down to the kitchen, where, on the kitchen table, sat a giant, an absolutely gargantuan, globe-shaped vase of flowers.
“What on earth?” Marmar? No—Bachana! It was Bachana.
“Your name,” Bachana said and pointed to a card on the table.
Roses, hydrangeas, daises, tulips, so much greenery she could feed a cow breakfast. Bachana handed her the card.
Just thinking of you. J.
God. She never called him J.
“They’re from my husband,” Amy said. “In New York.”
“He misses you?”
“I suppose,” Amy said, although the flowers didn’t feel like a missing-you kind of gesture as much as they felt like a demand.
“What you do with them?”
A fair question—they took up half the table.
“Do you want them?”
“Me?”
“Like, do you want to put them in your room? I don’t think I have room in mine for all these flowers.”
“I don’t have room,” Bachana said. “Who has room?”
And Amy felt herself flood with embarrassment.
How had Judd found out how to send her a bouquet in Tbilisi?
Was he trying to show off their American extravagance?
Did he have any idea what things looked like on the ground over here?
And with Maia gone, and who knew what Irine was doing, and this insane display of disposable wealth, it was so tone deaf.
She caught herself. No, of course he could not know what things looked like on the ground over here. She had never told him; he had never asked.
“They are very beautiful,” Bachana said. “So many roses. I never see so many.”
“Yes,” Amy said, looking again at the card. Just thinking of you. All these flowers and this was the best he could think to say.
He’d been with Meret while she was here.
He had to have been. Why on earth would he have sent these flowers otherwise?
Amy waited for her gut to roil in jealousy or disgust, felt faint surprise when it didn’t.
In fact, all she felt was a cementing of the distance between whatever New York could offer her and whatever she could do here in Georgia.
“We will fix it,” Bachana said. She turned, pulled some wine bottles out of the garbage bin in the corner of the room.
“What will we fix?”
“The big size.” Bachana rinsed out two bottles and filled each with tap water. She then brought the bottles to the kitchen table and expertly pulled a few roses from the bouquet, a bit of greenery, some dahlias. Artfully, she arranged two small bouquets in each wine bottle.
“You like?” Bachana asked.
“Beautiful.”
Soon she and Bachana were rinsing and filling bottles—they spread eight out on the table and yanked enough flowers for all of them.
Outside the window, she heard barking and yipping; one of the other grannies had let the dogs outside for their afternoon fresh air.
Amy thought she should probably walk some of them.
As much fun as they had humping each other outside, it wasn’t really exercise.
“What do you think?” she asked Bachana, showing off one of her vases, this one filled with hydrangeas.
“Yes, good,” Bachana said. She finished planting a few sprigs of delphinium among the roses in her bottle. “This is nice, yes?”
“Lovely,” Amy said. “You should keep that one.”
Fifteen years ago, Amy and Judd had walked from the East Village to their courthouse wedding.
Somewhere on the Bowery they came across a bodega with a half dozen buckets of flowers by its side door: roses and tulips, of course, but also dahlias and peonies, anemones, orchids, and callas.
Judd stopped her. “You need flowers,” he said.
“Oh, come on,” Amy said. She had promised herself she would be businesslike throughout this; she would be controlled. She would not let this new thing she was getting, this new family, this new life, make her collapse with emotion. She was holding tight to Ferry’s stroller.
“‘Come on’ what?” Judd said. He was wearing a suit, he looked so handsome. She was wearing a white silk blouse and white jeans.
Out of the bucket: fragrant lilacs, white daisies, a lily of the valley. There was a sleeve of butcher paper; Judd wrapped them. “For you,” he said. In return, she plucked an orchid for his buttonhole and another one for Ferry to hold.
“Now we’re a proper wedding party,” Judd said.
She kissed him, still holding tight to Ferry’s stroller. As safe as she had ever been in the world.
Bachana held up her vase to the light streaming through the kitchen window. The light beamed through the silky petals of a pale pink rose. “Your husband often sends you flowers?”
She thought of the orchid in Judd’s buttonhole. “He used to.”
“But no more?”
The ceremony had been brief. Ferry had fallen asleep in his stroller. Jorge, the dishwasher, had popped some nonalcoholic bubbly in the courthouse lobby (“I wasn’t sure we could bring booze in here.”). They went out for lunch, went home for a nap, were back at the restaurant for dinner service.
“We’ve been married for a long time,” Amy said.
“Ah,” said Bachana. “And you are not happy anymore?”
“Happy?” Amy considered it. “I guess sometimes. But I just couldn’t go on the way we were going, you know?
I felt like I couldn’t stand one more day with him.
So I guess that’s not very happy.” She slid a rose into the vase she was working on; the stem jammed.
“I was always just—I was the support beam of our marriage. I wanted to see what would happen if I went away.” Amy picked up another bouquet, turned it this way and that. Some baby’s breath here? Or here?
“There was another woman?”
“Another woman?” God, she was so obvious. “Probably. Maybe. I’m not sure.”
“There are always other women,” Bachana said.
What kind of marriage had she had? “I guess that’s true.”
They were quiet for several minutes, completing their vases, taking tulips out of one, moving hydrangeas into another.
“Men all over the world are the same,” Bachana said. “They always chase after other women. They cannot help it. They have a drive to—how do you say this? To populate the world.”
Amy laughed. Men were the same. No, she did not miss him.
“New York, Tiflis, no matter,” Bachana said, shaking her head. “My husband, when he was alive, he had so many women!”
“But you stayed together?”
“Yes, of course,” Bachana said. “I just tell him, you can do what you want but if you bring me another woman’s baby I’m throwing it in the river.”
Amy laughed again; Bachana wasn’t smiling but she had a mischievous look in her eyes. “And if you bring me disease I throw you in the river.”
Amy nodded. “Fair enough.”
“So we agreed,” Bachana said. “No baby, no disease. Flirt, do what you do, I don’t ask. You come home at night, you earn your wages. I don’t ask!”
“And it didn’t bother you?”
“Not so much—sometimes I flirt too! There used to be more men in my life, too. Aren’t there men for you? You are so pretty!”
“No,” Amy said. “I’ve been faithful to my husband.”
“Ah,” Bachana said. “For us,” she continued, “we were not as faithful, but we come home to each other every night. It was okay. We were married for twenty-eight years. I think it was a good marriage for most of those years, you know? We understood one another.”
“What happened?”
“He died. Almost seven years ago, cancer of the stomach.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Well, everyone dies,” she said. “At his funeral, I look at the women there, I think—was it you? Or you? But I was curious, not angry. I felt so sad for him, at the end. There was so much pain. Stomach cancer is very terrible.”
“I’m sorry,” Amy said again. “I really am.”
Bachana fidgeted with one of the vases. “We had known each other since we were children. At the end I held his hand. I said to him, thank you for this life that you have given me. I am not angry about anything at all. I don’t know if he heard me at that point.”
Bachana was smiling now, at the memory or at Amy.
“Did you two have children?”
“One, a son. He lives in Kazakhstan, works on oil pipeline. I visit him two years ago, but I did not like it,” she said. “Very hot and dry. And the food!” She wrinkled her nose. “But he makes a living and sends money sometimes.”
“You must miss him.”
“Of course,” Bachana said. “And I miss my husband too. It surprises you what can happen.”
“Everything surprises me,” Amy said. “All the time.”
“Come, we deliver flowers. You can carry?”
“I can carry.”
They gathered up the wine bottles in their arms, and Amy followed Bachana down a different passageway out of the kitchen, this one wallpapered in a maroon paisley pattern, the strips of paper peeling haphazardly.
A short staircase up and then Bachana pushed open a narrow wooden door.
“Marmar,” she said. The room was small and spare, with a twin-sized bed and a small chest of drawers.
A wooden cross with drooping arms dangled from a chain in the window.
“Huh,” Amy said.
They placed a vase of flowers on the chest and went to the next room, Natela’s, which looked much the same as Marmar’s, same cross and everything, and then they placed a vase in a tiny spare room where Zazi lay sleeping on a rug.
“Bad dog!” Bachana said. “You should be downstairs!”
Zazi looked up with a guilty dog expression and fell back asleep.
“We give Irine next.”
“Is she home?”