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?”