Twelve #2
The plaza was emptying out, and the stray dogs of Tbilisi were returning to their positions on the stairs of the plaza, looking as placid and eternal as the hills of Rome.
Amy wondered if the people in the crowd had accomplished anything, sent any kind of message.
Their bodies, pressed together, moving toward the police, toward the cross, toward—well, she wondered if they knew what they were moving toward.
Or if the point was simply the crowd and the roar and the forward motion.
“We’ll be back here tonight,” Maia said. “Are you going to come with us?”
“I don’t—is it safe?”
Maia gave her such a withering look that Amy felt her insides curdle. “I have no idea,” she said.
Amy nodded. And together they watched the remaining protesters of Tbilisi disperse, daarbiet , until there was nothing left but the trash-strewn plaza and the sleepy dogs and the snarling cops and, overlooking it all, the tired-looking droopy-armed cross.
She wondered why her first response had been to panic, and her second response had been to scream that she was a tourist. Nobody else had seemed to panic.
Nobody else seemed to care who she was or whether she belonged.
She could be part of the fight or she could remove herself.
She had chosen, that afternoon, to remove herself.
It had never occurred to her to do otherwise.
AFTER MAIA LEFT—“ I better get back to chemistry class”—Amy headed in a new direction, west on Rustaveli as opposed to east. Maybe there was something to be found there?
She passed a cinema, a coffeeshop, a store with ugly shoes in the window, and then the broad glass frontage of an extraordinarily chic-looking hotel.
She looked up: the Stamba. Very Tribeca-looking, but more spacious than a Tribeca hotel would be, taking up the entire block.
Through the window, she could see a dimly lit bar, and a doorman was helping people in with their oversized luggage, and a Tesla was parked out front, the kind with the doors that opened like wings.
She looked down at her dirt-splattered jeans. Well, the worst thing they could do was kick her out.
But the doorman smiled widely. “Checking in?”
“Just here for a drink,” Amy said. After this morning, she thought, she really did deserve a drink.
“Right this way.”
The lobby was enormous, had clearly been part of some sort of industrial building, and now was filled from floor to triple-height ceiling with books.
She had never seen so many books in her life—there were probably ten thousand of them, hardcovers and paperbacks, shelved to the heavens, ignored by the bustling crowd.
How on earth had anyone found that many books?
“It’s just decoration,” the doorman said as she eyed the massive shelves. “Bar is to your left.”
Amy shook out her hair, hoped she looked half human. The bar was all perfect lighting, leather stools, art deco fixtures—like a million bars around the world, but how strange it felt to be in such a place after having just participated in a semi-riot.
“Martini, madame?” asked the bartender.
She looked at her phone; it was only half past noon. “Just a glass of white.”
She wondered if she was allowed to borrow one of those books to keep her company at the bar—were any of them in English?—when her phone flashed with news that Lynne was calling. She picked up and then realized she didn’t want to pick up. Oh well, too late.
“Jesus, I shouldn’t have called, I probably woke you.” Well, at least the possibility had occurred to her.
“You didn’t,” said Amy.
“How is it there? Is it crazy?”
“I’m sitting at a very glam bar drinking a glass of wine,” she said. There was no point in trying to explain the rest of it.
“Oh! Well that sounds all right then,” Lynne said.
“Everything okay in New York?”
She heard Lynne take a deep breath on the other side of the world. “I just wanted to let you know—well, I didn’t know if I should tell you, but then I thought about what I would want to know if I were you, ten thousand miles away from home—”
“Six thousand.”
“Six thousand, ten thousand, I tried to think about what I would want, and then I decided—”
The bartender slid the wine in front of her, along with a small dish of spiced walnuts. “ Madloba,” she whispered.
“I decided, yes, I would want to know—”
“Lynne, what is it?”
The white was absolutely perfect, crisp, dry, cold.
“Well, I don’t want to alarm you, but I was walking by the restaurant yesterday and I saw Meret sitting there on that bench in the front of the restaurant. You know that new bench? And then—”
“Actually, I don’t want to know.”
“No, no, it’s not what you think. Or maybe it is? Anyway, she was crying. Like, hysterical. I asked her what was wrong, I couldn’t help it. And she just brushed me off.”
Amy did an internal check to see how she felt.
She felt nothing.
“I thought maybe someone had died? Or maybe she’d been fired? But I asked her again and she just said men and I said, you got your heart broken, huh? And then she didn’t say anything else. But, you know, it seems pretty clear she got dumped—”
“Did you ask Judd?”
“Me? Why would I—I mean, I didn’t—”
“If you see him you should ask him.”
“That’s it? You’re not worried?”
“I’m ten thousand miles away,” she said.
“Six thousand,” Lynne said. “But yes, you’re right, of course, you don’t need to be bothered with this. What’s it like there, anyway? How are the men?”
“I have no idea,” Amy said. “I’m staying in a house with five other women and eleven dogs.”
“Oh Amy, you’re mad.”
“Listen, thanks for telling me about Meret. I’ll speak to Judd.”
“I just thought you’d want to know.”
“I’m not sure I did,” Amy said. “But now that I know, I’ll follow up.”
“Did I upset you?”
“No, no,” Amy said. “It’s really fine. It just feels—honestly it just feels really far away.”
“It is,” Lynne said. “Thousands of miles.”
They said good-bye and then Amy clicked her phone’s off button.
She almost certainly wasn’t going to follow up.
She took another sip of wine, a bigger one.
Under the bar, her knees creaked. Even if she did not feel like feeling anything, her body never stopped wanting, needing to feel.
Like that was all it was there to do. She had once said to Judd, half seriously, that she would have been perfectly happy to exist as a head in a jar, rolling around on wheels; he’d laughed and said “ridiculous” and hadn’t asked her to explain.
But what she would have told him, had he wanted to know, was that she didn’t understand what all the scaffolding and the wiring, the veins and bones and muck—what all of it was really for.
It was all going to fall apart eventually anyway.
Here it was, the proof! Aching knees and a dull ache behind her shoulder blades that never faded.
Gray hair at her temples, gray hair at her part.
The deepening well between her eyes. All this while her mind, her spirit, felt as young as ever—as new and inexperienced and demanding as ever.
She had only been alive for forty-six years! With all the experience the world contained, how on earth was forty-six years enough time to really know anything ?
Her mother had died relatively young, at seventy-six; she hadn’t been ill, or if she had been ill had never mentioned the illness to anyone.
In fact, in their last correspondences—they emailed sometimes, or sometimes still wrote letters—her mother had sounded newly hopeful about life, even optimistic.
She was going to take a class on home repair at MCTC.
She was thinking about joining a walking club that took strolls around the lake.
Forty-six years wasn’t enough; seventy-six years wasn’t enough, none of it was enough to learn how to fully live. Her life in human years was probably more than halfway over but she knew that she had yet to really get started. It was galling, the parsimony of the human lifespan.
She wondered if her mother had felt like this. She wished that her mother had been the kind of person she could have asked. But her advice had almost always been so glum. “Enjoy it while you’re young,” she used to tell miserable twelve-year-old Amy. “It’s not going to get any better.”
Was she supposed to feel sorry for Meret?
Or to feel glad that she was in pain? Was she obliged to feel anything at all?
She had spent her entire life taking care of people, feeling their feelings for them, trying to assuage or even heal them: her mother’s anger and her husband’s ambition and Uno’s addictions.
But she didn’t feel like feeling right now.
She had traveled so far, it had been such a day; at least she could have that.
She watched the people outside the window for a while as they went about their lunch breaks, manhandling bags of groceries, dogs, children.
What was the word again? The freedom to rule oneself?
She chewed mindlessly on some walnuts.