UZBEKISTAN OR BUST
“Edie! You’ll never guess—the Times is sending me to Tash-
kent!”
Edie Amos stared at her boyfriend, Douglas, as he quivered
with excitement in the doorway of their apartment. It was
eleven o’clock on a Friday morning. Douglas never came
home this early.
“Sending you where?” She worked late nights slinging
fettuccine Alfredo at tourists in the theater district, so
she suspected she was still partially asleep and hadn’t
heard him correctly.
“Tashkent, Tashkent,” he said, bobbing on his heels like a
little kid about to pee his pants.
“Tashkent...” Geography was one of those holes in her
education. She had gone through school at the tag end of
that blissful window when educators didn’t want to stuff
too many facts into kids’ heads. Part of that generation
of Americans condemned to blunder around Trivial Pursuit
boards in vain pursuit of the blue pie wedges. “That’s
in...?”
“In Uzbekistan. Isn’t that fantastic? It’s like my life’s
big dream has finally, finally come true!”
Give the guy another moment, and he would break into
highlights from Man of La Mancha.
From the rapturous glint in his green eyes, Edie was
certain Douglas expected her to receive his incredible
news with grace and selflessness. With shared joy, even.
And Edie did make a valiant attempt to curve her lips into
some semblance of a smile. But she couldn’t. She just
couldn’t. Her lips had gone as numb as the rest of her.
Uzbekistan? Uzbekistan was Douglas’s big dream?
Apparently she had missed, or maybe just forgotten, a
conversation somewhere along the way... the one in which
her boyfriend confided that his life’s big dream was to
travel to remote former Soviet bloc countries. She
couldn’t remember Douglas ever mentioning big dreams,
period. Or even middling ones. She’d assumed that living
here in New York in this apartment with her was his dream.
“Can you believe it?” Douglas, flushed with happiness and
so animated that he was practically tap-dancing in front
of her, was completely oblivious to her lack of
enthusiasm. “I get to leave on Sunday!”
He might as well have doused Edie with ice cold water,
which wouldn’t have been a bad idea in any case. She was
floored. She felt like all those cartoons featuring a guy
walking down the street who has a piano drop on him.
Emotionally she was just two legs sticking out from under
a Steinway.
“This Sunday?”
“Of course!”
Of course. In his eyes she could see him mentally ticking
off the list of things he had to attend to in two short
days. Laundry. Phone calls. Packing.
Girlfriend dumping.
He ruffled her hair as he skipped past her on the way to
their bedroom. Her heart sank. Their bedroom. This was the
first bedroom, the first apartment, Edie had ever
permanently shared with a guy.
Well. She’d thought it was permanent.
“I bought my e-ticket before I left the office,” Douglas
chattered as he scanned the closet for his bags. “Dontcha
love the Internet?”
She stumbled after him, trying to process it all. Don’t
panic, she told herself. Don’t jump to conclusions. He
hadn’t said anything about breaking up. Going to
Uzbekistan wouldn’t necessarily be fatal to their
relationship.
“When are you coming back?”
He twisted around with a look of astonishment. “Edie,
don’t you get it? I’m being transferred.”
“Transferred?” That sounded fatal. Her voice rose. “Why
didn’t you tell me?”
His eyes dilated in surprise at her reaction. Apparently,
the fact that she wasn’t sharing his Uzbek bliss was
finally beginning to penetrate his cranial
matter. “Because I didn’t know. How could I? This is all a
big surprise to me. The guy who was there had a heart
attack, and he’s flying home for a triple bypass.”
“So this is just temporary.”
“They’re not sure. It’s sort of up in the air.”
Up in the air? That made it sound as if he could be gone
forever. “Uzbekistan...it’s so far....” She would have to
rustle up an atlas. And what she didn’t know about the
political situation there could fill an encyclopedia. It
sounded uncertain....
She would also have to start skipping “The E! True
Hollywood Story” and flip over to the news a little more
often.
“Why are they sending you there?”
His jaw dropped. “It’s just one of the hottest places in
the world at the moment, that’s all.”
“Dangerous, you mean,” she said, hysteria rising in her
throat.
“Not really. Not yet. What with the rebel groups gathering
on the border with Turkey...”
Her breath caught.
“There’s political instability, but no real violence,”
Douglas said with a shrug, already sounding like a
seasoned pro. If it were possible for a voice to swagger,
his did. “A good journalist knows when the danger’s
serious enough to require him to pull out.”
The key word in that sentence being good. It wasn’t that
Edie doubted his prowess. Douglas just didn’t have that
much experience... didn’t speak the language . . . hadn’t
even been out of the country as far as she knew, except to
go spend a week in the Caribbean each February. Why were
they sending him?
Why my boyfriend? she thought selfishly. For the past few
months, whenever Edie had thought of her future, Douglas
had been in it. Now he was just blithely leaving New York.
Leaving her.
They hadn’t been dating long, but their relationship had
seemed so solid. A month ago she had agreed—at his
invitation—to move into his apartment, which she’d had the
sneaking suspicion he’d rented with an eye to having her
share with him. It was preposterously big for a bachelor,
an argument he had used to wheedle her out of her matchbox-
sized Brooklyn efficiency. It hadn’t taken much arm-
twisting, of course. She had thought it was so romantic
that he wanted to share his life with her.
“I never knew you wanted to go to Uzbekistan.”
“It’s not Uzbekistan particularly,” he said, shifting his
feet. “It’s the opportunity to be a foreign correspondent.
It’s what I’ve always wanted.”
“Since when?” The question exploded out of her. “When did
you decide this was what you wanted? Last month you were
talking about trying to find a job on local TV news.”
He clucked. “That was just a whim.”
He always had whims. “And this isn’t?”
He turned impatiently and put his hands on her shoulders,
almost as if to give her a firm shake. “Edie, this
assignment is a plum—and it just dropped in my lap! I hate
the idea of us being separated, too—I’ll miss you like all
heck—but this is too good an opportunity to turn down.”
Like all heck. Edie wanted to cry. Half the time she found
his leftover Iowa farmboy phrases irritating, but now they
seemed so cute. Now he would be off saying “like all heck”
and “dollars to donuts” in a country where no one could
appreciate how sweet they were.
“I hate the idea of your leaving.”
He leveled a disappointed gaze on her. “I can’t believe
you’re being like this. Do you think that if you got a big
acting opportunity to make a movie somewhere far away that
I would try to discourage you? I wouldn’t dream of it!”
“You wouldn’t?” she asked. “Not even for a second?”
“Of course not. I’d encourage you.”
His eagerness to send her packing on this nonexistent
movie shoot didn’t strike her as flattering. And the
difference was, a movie wrapped in a few months, tops.
Whereas this new assignment of his sounded completely open-
ended.
But deep down she knew he was right. She was being
ungenerous. She just felt so resentful—of his job ...of
Uzbeks...of the way he was so happy about something that
made her feel as if she were about to go into cardiac
arrest.
His hands dropped from her shoulders. “Anyway, it’s not
like we’re married.”
“No.” They hadn’t even gotten around to buying a couch
yet. Now the odds of them ever being joined in wedded
bliss were probably even significantly lower than the odds
of them ever getting a Jennifer convertible sofa for the
living room.
It was almost too much for her to take in. They had met at
a bar in the East Village four months ago. From the first
night, Douglas had pursued her with an intensity that had
overwhelmed her. It was the first time she’d actually felt
courted. The guys she had known before Douglas were more
interested in hooking up and then moving on than settling
down. But they had mostly been actors. Douglas, with his
stable career, his farmboy background, Jiminy Cricket en
thusiasms, and general togetherness had bowled her over.
She’d thought she was so lucky. She’d finally thought she
was getting it all together.
Now it was all falling apart again.
“Hasn’t our relationship meant anything to you?”
He stared at her with unveiled impatience. “How can you
even ask that?”