I said yes.
To one more story, this masterpiece that I could see burning in his eyes. But I had a condition.
Anything, he said. Whatever I needed.
I wanted him to leave me in the story when he was finished.
He told me he had wondered if I might ask for that. I was surprised he hadn’t known. He nodded agreement, and that was settled.
We talked idly through dinner. Occasionally his eyes would unfocus, and I could see the lines of plot being woven together behind them.
I wondered what he would name me this time, almost asked, then realized it didn’t matter. Then realized I wasn’t even sure what my own name was anymore. Grace, maybe? I thought that sounded right. Grace.
He started scribbling on the cover of the folder while we were waiting for the check. I watched him write.
“Rafe fell in love with her voice first, tumbled into it when she introduced herself as…”
Jonathan Carroll. LET THE PAST BEGIN
EAMON REILLY WAS HANDSOME AND SLOPPY. He seemed to know everyone, even waitresses in restaurants. When he walked in the door, they beamed and began seriously flirting the minute he sat down at their table. I saw this happen several times at different places, places none of us had ever been to before. I asked if he knew these women but he always said no.
Eamon wore his heart on his sleeve and it worked. People cared about him even when he was being impossible, which was pretty often. He drove an old, badly neglected Mercedes that was filthy inside and out. Whenever you rode in it, he had to move stuff off the passenger’s seat and throw it in the back. Sometimes you couldn’t believe what was there-a metal dowsing rod; a box of diapers (he was single); a jai alai xistela; or once a very intimately autographed, badly wrinkled photo of a famous movie actress. He wrote everything in block letters so precise that you might have guessed it came from a typewriter. He kept a detailed daily diary but no one ever saw what was in it, although he carried the book around with him everywhere. His love life was a constant disaster and we wondered why no woman ever stayed with him for very long.
He had once been together with my girlfriend Ava for a couple of weeks. But she was no help when I finally got up the nerve to ask why she broke up with him. “We didn’t fit.”
“And?”
“And nothing. Some people just don’t fit together in certain configurations. There are people you can be good friends with, but if you turn it into lovers, the mix is wrong or toxic or…something. For me, Eamon is a good guy to hang around with but he wasn’t a good boyfriend.”
“Why?”
She narrowed her eyes, which is usually the sign a topic is closed and Ava doesn’t want to talk about it anymore. But this time was different. “Sit down.”
“What?”
“Sit down. I’m going to tell you a story. It’s kind of long.”
I did as I was told. When Ava tells you to do something, you do it because, well, because she’s Ava. The woman likes dessert, foreign politics, the truth, working in perilous situations, and wonder, not necessarily in that order. She’s a journalist who goes on assignment to extremely dangerous places around the world like Spinkai Raghzai, Pakistan, or Sierra Leone. You see her on the TV news holding down her hair or helmet as a military helicopter takes off nearby, leaving her and a small camera crew in some forward armed outpost or barren village that was attacked by rebels the night before. She is fearless, self-confident, and impatient. She is also pregnant, which is why she’s home these days. We’re pretty sure the child is mine but there is a chance that it might be Eamon’s.
I’ve known Ava Malcolm twelve years and loved her for about eleven of them. During those eleven years, she expressed virtually no interest in me save for an occasional late-night telephone call from unimaginable places like Ouagadougou or Aleppo. The reception on these calls was invariably bad and scratchy. More often than not until the birth of satellite telephones, somewhere in the middle of these chats the line would suddenly go dead, as if it had grown tired of our gabbing and wanted to go to sleep.
Later she admitted that for a while she thought I was gay. But when she came back from some assignment at the end of the world and saw I was living with Jan Schick, it put an end to my gay days in Ava Malcolm’s mind.
But poor Jan didn’t stand a chance. I always assumed I would only get to love Ava from a distance, be grateful for any time she gave me, and go on admiring this brave talented woman as she went about living her larger-than-life life.
Then she got shot. The bitter irony is that it did not happen in some far-flung flyblown, 130-degree-in-the-shade hellhole where the bad guys rode in on animals instead of tanks. It happened at a convenience store four blocks from her New York apartment. A quick trip to the market for a bottle of red wine and a bag of Cheez Doodles coincided with a dunce named Leaky trying to rob his first store with a gun he later said went off accidentally, twice. One of those bullets nicked Ava’s shoulder. But since it came from a Glock G36 subcompact pistol, being “nicked” was an understatement. It probably would not have happened if she’d dropped to the floor like the rest of the people in the store as soon as Leaky started screaming. But Ava being Ava, she wanted to see what was going on, so she just stood there until the gun went off while pointed roughly in her direction.
Ava saw many terrible things in her years as a reporter but had always escaped being hurt. However, as is often the case with people who have been seriously injured, it traumatized her. When she got out of the hospital, she “traveled, screwed men, and hid for a year.” Her words.
“I came out of the hospital with my arm in a sling and my ass on fire. I was about 142 percent crazy, I’ll say that. I wanted to live life twice as hard afterward-see twice as many things, and have as many men as I could. I’d come this close to dying and the only sure thing I learned from the experience was I wanted more: more life, more sex, more new places…
“So I used up all the frequent-flyer miles I’d accrued over the years in my job. When they were gone, I called in every favor I had due from people who could get me where I wanted to go. I spent a lot of time in southwestern Russia because that area was like the new Wild West, what with all the oil money and exploration going on down there.
“It was in Baku that I met the Yit.”
This was typical Ava storytelling. On her TV reports she gave you relevant information in perfect sound bites and was crystal clear about it. Yet in person she often got so carried away telling you a story or personal anecdote that she overlooked the fact you might not know Baku or, like most people on planet earth, what a “Yit” was.
“Please explain the last two terms.”
“Azerbaijan,” she said impatiently. “Baku is the capital of Azerbaijan.”
“Okay, that’s Baku. What’s a Yit?”
“A djelloum.”
“What’s a jell-loom?”
“A Yit is another word for a djelloum-kind of like a fortune-teller but more shamany. It’s a sort of combo fortune-teller and sage. But in Azerbaijan, women are djelloum, not men. Which is interesting because it’s a very macho, male-oriented society otherwise.”
“Okay-Baku, and a Yit.”
She leaned over and kissed me on one side of my mouth. “I like how you stop me and ask for clarification. Most people just let me rattle on.”
“Proceed.”
“Okay. So at the end of the trip I wanted to spend some time in Baku because one of my favorite novels, Ali and Nino, takes place there. The book makes the city sound like one of the most romantic places on earth. It isn’t, but that’s beside the point.