Eighteen #2
He did, and she said hello to the dog and the cats, closing her eyes and imagining Roxy on the bed, confused about why she could hear her voice but not smell her, and the cats were probably sprawled across the room, too, could hear her, too; cats supposedly had better hearing than dogs, and equally sharp senses of smell.
“Did they look at the phone?”
“They did,” he said. “They’re bereft.”
“Come on,” she said.
“Fine,” he said. “Maybe that’s just me.”
“Thank you for the flowers.”
“Hey,” he said. “I’m glad they got there.”
She sighed, looked around the restaurant to see if she was annoying anyone with her one-way phone call.
She and Judd both hated it when they’d see customers barking on their phones during the dinner hour, but nobody here seemed to care one way or the other what she was doing.
She popped the rest of the khinkali in her mouth and chewed in Judd’s ear.
“So yesterday afternoon my dad came in,” he said. “I decided to take him out for Georgian food, turns out there’s a new place on Fourteenth Street. I wanted to get a sense of what it was like where you are.”
“Ah,” she said. That was sweet. “And what did you think?”
“Totally authentic, as far as I could tell. Half the people there didn’t speak English. Arthur and I sit down and are like, what’s good? And they brought us some of everything, even more than we had ordered, salads, kebabs, that amazing bread filled with cheese.”
“Are you sure they were Georgian? Because all Georgians speak English.”
“They were Georgian! They were so friendly they made us nervous. Did you know they’re doing orange wine over there? It’s like them and California, that’s it. I had no idea.”
“I think they invented it here,” Amy said. “Orange wine.”
“That’s what they said! They’ve been making wine over there for six thousand years!” He sounded amazed.
“It’s a pretty old country.”
“And did you have the dumplings?”
“I’m eating them right now.”
“You are? You’re kidding,” he said. He got so animated about food, it was funny. “They make them vegetarian? You’re not eating meat, are you?” Hope in his voice, maybe she’d retreated.
“They do make them vegetarian,” she said. “These are mushroom.”
“And they’re good?”
“Yes,” she said. “They’re really good.”
The doctor had said, when she’d gotten him to go—god, what was that, six years ago now?
—he’d said Judd should really lose weight, his cholesterol was borderline, his blood pressure was not quite ideal, and now, six years later, he was certainly heavier, and had eaten six more years’ worth of heavy food, and had not seen a doctor since.
And Amy thought that she shouldn’t encourage him to eat like this, but on the other hand the joy he clearly got from food and from eating had to do him some equal and opposite good?
And for a moment she forgot about humiliation and about Andrei and did what she was supposed to do, cared for her husband.
“Did they have pickled walnuts?” she asked. “They do a lot of walnuts here.”
“Yes, yes, and all the bean dishes,” he said. “And the chicken with garlic. I don’t think there’s any way to really bring Georgian food into the restaurant, it would look like appropriation, but I’m wondering if there’s some kind of spice mixture or something, some way to capture—”
“You could do orange wine,” Amy said.
“We already do orange wine.”
“You could do Georgian orange wine.”
“I should talk to the guys,” he said.
“You should,” she said. She lofted and then nibbled another khinkali, quite a feat while she was on the phone. “I wish you were here,” she said, surprising herself.
“I do too,” he said.
Her mind flashed to the pressure of Andrei’s forehead against hers, where it had left an invisible, burning mark. She blinked to try to make the burning go away. It did not.
“I should probably go,” she said. “I’m being rude.” To whom? To whom was she being rude?
“Did you talk to Ferry?”
“I did,” she said. “He said that Uno’s writing him letters.”
“I read one,” he said. “She’s telling him all about her childhood, about what it was like when she was trying to get clean. I don’t know why she’s doing this to him. It’s making him upset.”
“She loves him,” Amy said. “She wants him to know the real her. And I don’t think she understands—”
“Maybe you could email her?” Judd said. “Explain it?”
“You want me to explain to Uno why she shouldn’t write her child letters?”
“No, no, you’re right, forget it. I think she’s just losing her mind in the hospital. But her boyfriend’s coming to visit from Singapore, so that’s good. It’ll give her something else to focus on.”
“That’s good,” she said.
“Come home soon,” he said.
“I will,” she said. She hung up before he could ask her what soon meant.
She wiped her hands on her napkin and turned her attention back to her remaining dumplings, knowing, if she’d had her way, she wouldn’t be eating anything at all right now, that she would be somewhere with Andrei, in his bedroom, her bedroom.
That she never would have picked up the phone.
Her forehead still burned where he had pressed against her.
SHE’D SAT AT the table far longer than she’d planned on, buoyed by the excellent food and the wine and the waiting for a check that never materialized.
Finally, as her knees started to grow stiff from sitting, she threw too many lari on the table and headed out the door, waving at the staff who waved back, cheerfully.
On the street outside the restaurant, exactly where she’d left him, was the Aussie she’d met before.
“Were you waiting for me?” she asked, bending down to rub the bony spot on the dog’s delicate dark gray head.
She wished she’d thought to bring out her leftovers for him to eat.
The dog looked up at her lovingly, but without expectation.
His fur was soft and slightly springy, like someone had brushed it.
The wine and food had warmed her, or perhaps it was just the distance from this afternoon’s humiliation.
She headed back in the direction she thought she’d find home—she could have taken out her phone, but she wanted to test her own sense of direction.
It had been almost a week in Tbilisi, after all.
Shouldn’t she have some idea where she was? The Aussie followed at her heels.
“Hey, dog, do you know Angel?” she asked. “Have you heard of her? She’s famous.”
The dog looked up at Amy, pleased to be acknowledged.
“Do you have an interesting backstory, dog? Do you need to be rescued?”
The dog trotted along next to her, reserved, pleasant.
He stayed by her feet as she walked down one cobblestoned block into the next, turning around once to find herself back on the block she had just left, when she heard, in the distance, a sort of rumbling noise.
She knew what the noise was, and she knew it pointed the way home.
“Do you want to come with me?”
But the noise was too much. The dog disappeared into the darkness of an alleyway as soon as Liberty Square came into view.
The square was flooded with people; a gateway had opened and there were even more people than had been there last night, and even more police, and even more tanks.
There was no way around them, or through them, and she was certain the mass of people backed all the way up to Rustaveli.
The thudding, thumping noise matched her suddenly pulsing heart.
How would she get home? She stood one hundred meters away, down a sidestreet where the crowd would probably not bother to go, but if they did, she would be washed away by the tide of them.
Perhaps the best way to go home was to simply go through?
The square—the oval—was surrounded by roadways filled with marchers moving at a slow clip, somewhere between a slog and a trudge. Many of them were holding posters and flags, and a group ten people across held up a banner that said, in English, WE WILL NOT GO BACK .
On either side of the roadway were police (or were they soldiers?) lined up like stanchions, faceless behind their visors, dressed entirely in black, holding shields emblazoned with the world POLICE , in English.
They hemmed the protesters in, and Amy wondered if their hearts were hammering behind their uniforms, too.
They had clubs in their belts, and Tasers.
How old could they be? Why were they here supporting the government? Why weren’t they on the side of the young?
Amy looked at the map on her phone to see if there was a way around the protest—there was, maybe, but it took her up into the hills, and she wasn’t sure if she’d be able to follow the unlit path. She took a few steps back and was instantly unsure of herself. The night had gotten so dark.
She could, perhaps, go back to the restaurant—they were nice there, she could sit—but would they let her stay all night? The thought of ordering more food made her ill.
She wondered if it was time, after all, to return to New York.
She had been in Tbilisi for a week, managed to make a fool of herself, somehow alienated her host, and hadn’t solved any mystery whatsoever.
Angel was lost to the mists. Ferry was going through something painful, and Uno might need her help again.
Nobody would have to know she’d come home early. She could play it off like it had all been some wonderful adventure, and not a strange, lunatic foray into a world dealing with infinitely more complicated problems than her own.
There was a narrow space behind the cops on the sidewalk that she thought she could make it through if she squeezed. She wouldn’t draw attention to herself.
All the dogs that were usually on this path—where were they?