Stories: All-New Tales

“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 g*y. 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 g*y 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.

“I was visiting a section called Sabunçu. My guide was Magsud, an Azeri fluent in English who we’d used before when I was there on assignment for the network. So I knew the guy pretty well. He knew the sort of things I liked and was interested in. This time, because I wasn’t working, I hired him just to show me around.

“When we got to Sabunçu, Magsud said one of the most famous djelloum in Russia lived in that part of the city. Would I be interested in visiting her? Things like palmists, astrology, and tarot card readings are like crack for chicks. Seers, shamans, psychics—lead us to ’em. So I said sure, I’d love to meet a Yit.

“Her name was Lamiya, which is Azeri for ‘educated.’ She lived in a small apartment in one of those soulless 1950s, gray-cement Communist public-housing projects where every building looks exactly the same and you can easily get lost. I think there were two rooms in the place but we only saw the living room, which was dark even in the middle of the day. Lamiya sat on a couch. Next to it was a baby bassinet. The whole time we were there she kept one hand inside the bassinet, as if she were touching the baby to keep it quiet.