Three
THREE
TWO MORNINGS LATER, Judd made her a sandwich and she ate it in Ferry’s room.
She sat at his old desk, gazed out his window without seeing.
The sandwich was perfect: Roasted peppers and egg scrambled with Vermont cheddar on a toasted slice of baguette.
Well. Anyone could build a delicious sandwich out of ingredients like these, and she tried not to moan in delight in front of Judd when she took a bite.
He smiled anyway, knowing her too well. She wrapped a paper towel around the sandwich and while her back was to him he reached out and stroked her side the way he did when he wanted sex and she shrieked “ no ” and left the room and he said, “Okay, okay. Amy, I’m sorry. ”
They were living in a cautious détente, unsure—or at least Amy was unsure—what to do next or how to do it.
She had options: go to the restaurant, find Meret, demand what the fuck ; go to the restaurant, find Meret, slap her in the face; go to the restaurant, find Meret, ask her in the conspiratorial way of women to tell her the truth about what had happened between her and her husband.
Go to Meret and say: “Hahaha, you foolish girl, you know nothing. ” Which is what Jackie Kennedy evidently said to any number of her husband’s lovers, unsettling them with her smile.
The hostesses at the restaurant, Meret and the dozens before her, were always gorgeous and always cavalier in the way that gorgeous women were, the way Amy herself had once been once she realized that, no matter how she saw herself, other people responded to her presence in a very particular way.
Soon after arriving in New York, she began to stand tall, almost imperiously, and to move gracefully.
She could have slept—she often did sleep—with many of the straight men she’d encountered in her twenties, sometimes a bartender, sometimes a finance guy.
Not for the sex (she generally didn’t care much about sex one way or the other, and maybe that’s what Judd knew about her, what he was always looking for elsewhere?
But no , they’d worked that all out in therapy) but for the pleasure of the attention, and for the even more ecstatic pleasure of waking up in a beautiful apartment, floor-to-ceiling windows or a big marble bathroom, and she could just stay , sometimes for days, because these men loved having her around like a beautiful ornament and she loved the full refrigerators, the sushi, the fancy bedsheets.
She probably could have married one of them. Many of her acquaintances from that time did, and went on to have kids and live in Westchester and send her Christmas cards, and in those first years Amy felt nothing but good feelings toward them knowing that because she had married Judd, she had won.
Anyway, the hostesses were never as striking as she had once been, and she still knew how to hold her body imperiously, still knew how to make a shorter woman flinch, even if she rarely used those skills anymore.
But—but she still had them. They were somewhere.
She could put on some makeup and the black Yohji Yamamoto coat she’d been given twenty years ago and storm in there like a fucking stallion and demand Meret quit, leave town, kill herself.
Maybe she would do that later today.
Outside, pigeons cooing. Sir Licks jumped on Ferry’s desk to inspect her sandwich, because she had no boundaries; all the animals in the house felt entitled to her food.
She ripped off a tiny piece of egg for Licky and then another, slightly bigger, as she did not want to seem parsimonious.
The cat purred and pushed his wet nose on her arm, which was a certain kind of love.
Amy felt tears start to percolate again and refused to indulge herself.
She took her phone from the pocket of her hoodie and dialed Ferry.
It was nine a.m., which was probably too early, but on the other hand she and his father were picking up the whole of his $300,000 college tab so he knew enough to either pick up the phone or call her back.
“Ferris,” she said to his chirpy voicemail. “Nothing urgent.”
Thirty seconds later, her phone rang. Thank God. “Dos,” he said, which was what he often called her, a nickname stemming from the fact that his biological mother, Judd’s first wife, was also (hahaha life is funny) named Amy. Her nickname was Uno.
“Ferry,” she said. She could almost smell him through the phone, soap and musk-scented body spray.
It was a mystery how he was the way he was: his father was a cad and his biological mother a belligerent addict, yet somehow he had grown up to be six feet two inches of grace, possessed with a wisdom beyond his years and Confucian patience and American good sense.
Everybody loved Ferry but she loved him the most; it knifed her how much she missed him.
“You okay, Dos?”
“I woke you up,” she said.
“You didn’t,” he said. “I’m at the library, actually.”
“At nine a.m.?” she asked. “On a Thursday?”
“Along with half my chem class.”
Amy had gotten her BA four years ago from Baruch College, having finally completed her GED; what she knew of traditional undergrad life came from movies and her friends’ nostalgia.
When they’d dropped Ferry off at Cornell, hundreds of acres in the middle of God’s own country, Amy felt something snap hard inside her, a surprising longing for everything she hadn’t done the right way.
Beautiful kids in sweatshirts, their businesslike parents spreading sheets and folding towels.
Amy stood among all the move-in chaos like she’d just landed on Mars.
Judd, who had a BA in film studies from Dartmouth, took charge of the sheets and towels.
“What’s it like there?” she asked. “The weather?”
“It’s been nice,” he said. “Not too cold yet. I’m still in shorts.”
“You’re always in shorts.”
“I guess that’s true.”
She was quiet for a minute. She wouldn’t rat out Judd. She wouldn’t —Ferry had also been through all this before, terrified she and his dad would get divorced, terrified that somehow this meant he’d end up living with his biological mother. She’d stayed with Judd the first time mostly for him.
“Everything okay, Dos?” She would not rat out Judd . She would not.
“There’s a dog,” she said, “in Georgia.” It was the first thing she thought of. “And she vanished.”
“Okay,” Ferry said. “Is this a story?”
“I guess it is.”
“Let me go out into the hallway,” he said. “I shouldn’t really talk in the reading room.”
She hadn’t told anyone about the dog in Georgia but if she were going to tell anyone it would be Ferry, and if there was a time to tell anyone it would be now, while she was not talking about Judd.
“Okay, I’m here,” he said. “Shoot.”
“There’s a dog in Georgia named Angel, which is Angelozi in Georgian.”
“What do you mean in Georgian?”
“In the language—I’m talking about Tbilisi, Georgia, in the Caucasus—I’m talking about the country.”
“Okay,” Ferry said. “I’m recalibrating. Continue.”
“Right, so this dog was famous for walking kids across the street to school. Angel would be there every morning and the parents would leave their kids with her, and she’d wait for traffic to stop and then cross with the kids.
All the cars would slow down. It was a thing.
People posted a lot of videos. I watched them all the time. ”
“She was a stray dog?”
“I guess so, yes. She lived on the corner. The grateful parents built her a dog house.”
“This is weird.”
“There are forty-six thousand stray dogs in Tbilisi,” Amy said.
“Okay,” Ferry said.
“So this has been going on for years, Angel walks the kids back and forth across the street, and then one day she’s not there, and nobody knows what happened to her, but there’s some blood on the inside of her dog house and people say they saw teenagers throwing rocks at her, but it might not have been teenagers, it might have been Russians. ”
“Russians?”
“There are a lot of Russians in Georgia right now, because of the war with Ukraine.”
Ferry let the line go quiet for a minute. “You sure everything’s okay, Dos? Is my dad okay?”
“He’s fine,” she said. “I’ve been watching Angel’s videos and I just—I am just so heartsick over this dog.
There are missions right now in Tbilisi, like search and rescue missions, all these parents and kids roaming all over the city looking for this one dog in forty-six thousand.
But who knows if they’re even searching the right way? Like if they even have drones?”
“Drones?”
“You need drones to cover wide open areas,” Amy said.
“I see.”
“And if the Russians did it, so help them—the Georgians hate the Russians already because they’ve been staging this low-key invasion since 2008, not like what they’re doing in Ukraine but still bad—”
“I know about the Russian invasion of Georgia,” Ferry said.
“Anyway,” Amy said, “I wanted to tell you about it.”
“Thanks?”
“It’s just been on my mind,” she said. “I guess I should find more to do.”
“You teaching?”
“Not this semester. I don’t even have to get dressed if I don’t want to.
” Every so often, Amy taught Food Writing at the Cooper Union Extension, her credentials being her years at Le Coin and the occasional food article she’d published in the local press.
But this year the enrollment hadn’t been there.
“But everything else is—”
“Everything is fine, sweetie. I shouldn’t have bothered you. I just keep thinking about—”
“Angel.”
“Angelozi,” she said, which was the way she’d heard it pronounced on YouTube.
“So then you should do something about it. Join one of the search and rescue missions.”
“Haha right.”
“No, really,” Ferry said. “It would be a good project.”
“What are you talking about? I’m not going to Tbilisi.”
“Why not?”
“I am not going to fly all the way to the Caucasus.”
“Well you’re certainly not walking.”
“Correct,” she said. “Anyway, I should let you get back to your—could you come with me? If I went?”
“I have midterms.”