Eighteen
EIGHTEEN
THAT NIGHT, THE darkness seemed to come earlier, falling without any preamble. She dropped Zazi at the house, kept walking down the hill, and by the time she got to the bottom the sun had vanished behind a distant horizon.
The protesters were again milling about Rustaveli.
There was no march yet—they saved that for later, when the moon was higher overhead—but Amy could see them preparing signs, flags, boots, waterproof coats.
Whatever objectives they had screamed for yesterday were still unrealized.
They would, therefore, keep screaming, and scream again and scream again until someone of importance blinked.
Amy was tired, she was hungry, she knew this wasn’t her place.
She walked down Rustaveli, past Liberty Square, past Stalin’s seminary, down a few streets and then a few more until she came to a neighborhood she’d never seen before.
Streetlights glowed. The area felt welcoming, or at least less tense than the street in front of Parliament Square.
There was an almost Parisian feeling here, couples strolling hand in hand, that sort of thing.
Cobblestone sidewalks. A few restaurants beckoned, but when she peeked inside she saw clamorous groups feasting together and she couldn’t bear to be alone among them.
She kept walking.
It was the dogs of Tbilisi’s witching hour, as the dogs she had previously only seen sleeping were now up and wandering about, visiting the couples who were sitting outside under the heat lamps, begging them for food.
People seemed obliging, dropping bits of bread or meat to the waiting dogs, who knew to take it gently.
They had clearly reached an agreement with the people who visited the restaurants on these streets; you take care of us, we will be pleasing to you.
And the dogs did seem pleasing and easily pleased, sitting at attention, looking up at the diners with their large, liquid eyes.
She was disgusted with herself and her circumstances; still, she reached into her bag for a bully stick.
A dog came up to her, a smallish one, gray and spotted like an Australian shepherd, but small, with a flat face.
The dog sniffed at the stick once or twice, and Amy let him take it from her hands, and he lay down with the stick between his paws and nibbled it gently, looking up at Amy every so often with arched eyebrows, a canine expression of gratitude.
Amy crouched down with her elbows on her knees, knowing that this dog would not hurt her, that she could get close.
That the dog’s presence would be calming.
The dog chewed gently on the stick but kept it tight between its paws. She could not take it back. Nobody could.
Had she really come here to save Angel? Had she really thought herself capable of finding one dog among the thousands in this sprawling city?
Was it possible she was as na?ve as all that only a single week ago?
On the hilltop, mere hours ago: she had put her arms around Andrei, had felt him relax into her for a moment, for a heartbeat.
They were the same height and she put her forehead against his and felt the heat of his neck on her palms, and his arms were behind her back, and she knew what would happen here and she wanted it to happen, it was fine, she was betraying no one—in fact to not do this was to betray only herself.
They breathed like this, Zazi patient next to them, outside the church’s doors. She felt the wind blow against her legs. She waited for him to kiss her, she turned her head slightly. All he had to do was move his.
Together, they breathed for several seconds. Her whole body tingling. She could have moved her lips just a millimeter, but she wanted him to be the one to do it, to kiss her first. They would make it back to the house somehow. They would make it to her tiny bedroom, or to his.
She kept her eyes tightly closed. He still smelled like the incense of the church, and his brand of Russian cigarettes, and whatever soap he used, and the sweetness of the air outside.
She told herself to remember this moment. She felt that her life would change forever.
And then: he pulled away. In fact, he took several steps back. He said, “Thank you”—and what was he thanking her for, exactly?
“Thank you?”
He looked at the ground. She said nothing.
“You must understand,” he said. He was still several steps away. “I love my wife.”
She must have looked perplexed.
“I would not be here,” he said. “I would not do this if I did not love my wife.”
“I don’t—what wouldn’t you do?”
“And you love your husband too,” he said, and she wanted to know why he thought that, had she ever even mentioned Judd?
And she was so embarrassed that she thought she might keel over but she didn’t, she just picked up Zazi’s leash, and said that maybe it was time to take him home.
Andrei said that he thought he’d stay on the hilltop awhile, that he hadn’t yet found whatever he had come up here for.
“We are both searching, Amy,” he said.
But what on earth was he searching for? Had he ever shown any indication of looking for anything?
And she thought about the tattoos and the beautiful eyes and the long freezing walks without a coat and how she’d thought he was one sort of person but actually he was just another husband , that’s all he was. Some lovesick husband. He belonged to someone else, and he came from a monstrous place.
She led Zazi away from the church, trying not to run; she couldn’t trip and further humiliate herself.
It turned out there was an easy-to-follow path down the hill, they hadn’t needed to bushwack their way up the side of the mountain.
The sky was a luminous, accusatory blue.
The same blue (of course) as Andrei’s eyes.
God. Humiliating.
She had never been rejected like that, certainly not by a man that she wanted, a man she’d embraced from the core of herself. Whom she’d felt so deeply connected to. Her cheeks burned from shame and from the wind slapping them as she hurried down the path.
And Judd, her husband, the father of her child, the man she was tethered to, a man who had betrayed her and was possibly betraying her at this very moment (evening here, almost dawn in New York—maybe that’s what those flowers were for?
Maybe just another piece of guilt-ridden performance art?): how insane that her husband could have whatever woman he wanted without breaking a sweat.
How was that? Why was that? A man in his early fifties, a good fifty pounds overweight, and sure he was a restaurateur, and sure there might be a certain glamour attached to him, but come on, Meret, you’re twenty-three.
You’re broiling hot. You’re really going to give it up to this fucking guy? This guy ?
She was so embarrassed she thought she might just die.
Now the shepherd was finishing up its bully stick, looking at her gratefully. Well. At least something appreciated her.
She looked up to where a man on the nearby sidewalk was holding a menu.
He waved at her, beckoned her in, and despite her rage and embarrassment she was also so incredibly hungry (she had actually eaten nothing yet today, was that possible?), and he said something to her in Georgian and she shook her head.
“Me ar vlap’arak’ob kartulad.”
At least after all this she could speak a little Georgian; she could say, “I do not speak Georgian.”
“Would you like to eat inside or outside?” he replied, smoothly. “I can turn on the heat lamp for you. It is very comfortable.”
She did not want the outside world to see that she was alone. “I’ll go inside, thanks.”
He set her up in a corner table with a gloriously misspelled English menu and a basket of bread.
She washed up in the small restroom, took a close look at her own face.
Her cheeks were wind-chapped. Her lips were dry.
The wrinkles around her lips were deepening, and the crease between her brows.
But she could look closely and still see what Scott had seen in the Limited dressing room decades ago.
The person she had been was still in there.
The woman she had become. She was still a person worth seeing. She knew she was. She had to be.
The restaurant was half full, and from where she sat she could watch the two waitresses march in and out of the kitchen with plates full of khachapuri, shishlik. She ordered the cheese khinkali and the red bean lobio and a glass of red wine that she knew might turn into a bottle.
It was the humiliation, yes, but it was also the sense that it should be otherwise.
That men who had been sent away by their wives should not remain faithful to their wives.
That she had been right there, connected to him, that they had connected, that she had seen him weep in the church and wanted to hold him in her arms. That he should have let her.
She wanted to love him. She wanted to change his life.
Or maybe she was ludicrous.
The khinkali came, fragrant with garlic and mushroom, six of them fat and pleated on a long white plate.
She remembered how the woman at the restaurant on her very first night had taught her to eat them—hold it by the topknot, take a nibble, be careful not to let the juice spurt all over you.
Amy took a nibble, and the juice dribbled down her chin.
It was okay, it would be okay. She’d leave here, go back to her real life, who cared anymore.
On the table, her phone started to buzz.
“Hey,” she said. “Good morning.”
“I was thinking of you,” Judd said. She heard the sleep still in his voice. She knew he was alone.
“What’s happening there? How’s the menagerie?”
“They’re fine,” Judd said. “They miss you. Want to say hi? Here, I’ll put you on speaker.”