“It won’t matter,” Donna said. “The church will have lots of flowers. We’re going to have banks of them going down the stairs straight to the sidewalk. We’ve got to work on your entrance, though. Usually there are limousines, and that does for ceremony, but with both of you coming from the same street, we’ll have to think of something else. Maybe we can work up one of those processions with children, you know, that they have in the villages. I always think those look beautiful.”
“That is because you have never had to live in a village,” Father Tibor said.
“Here’s more coffee,” Linda Melajian said, putting the pot down in the middle of the table. “Bennis called to say she’s going to be held up at the lawyers this morning, and you’re supposed to stop complaining.”
Linda Melajian stomped off, and Gregor watched her go. It was nearly noon now, and outside the big plate glass windows of the Ararat Restaurant, Cavanaugh Street looked clean and cold and mostly empty. Donna had finished her measure-ments and wrapped the tape measure around her hand, and she pushed against him a little to give her room to sit down. The remains of the lunches Gregor and Father Tibor had tried to eat were still sitting on the table. Father Tibor never ate much, but Gregor used to, until all this thing with the wedding. Now he’d left a great big stack of grape leaves stuffed with lamb sitting on the plate, and Donna Moradan-yan started picking at them.
Sometimes—and, for some reason, much oftener now—Gregor Demarkian thought that Cavanaugh Street was someplace he had imagined for himself on the worst and darkest days of his life. It wasn’t someplace real. He would wake up in an hour or two and find himself still in that awful apartment near the Beltway, the place he had gone to wait for Elizabeth to die. Then he would turn over in bed and look at the numbers on the clock he had always set for five, so that he could be at the hospital before she woke up, if she woke up. Day after day, week after week, for almost a year, with nothing else to think about, and nothing else in his life. It was when he had first realized that he was not good at making friends or keeping them. He was too closed in on himself, and for all the time between the day he had married Elizabeth and the day she had died, he had lived as if they were the only two people in the world. Work didn’t count. Work was something he was good at, but when he walked away from it, it was as if it had never been.
Now he was here in the Ararat, and all the people around him were his friends. They worried about what he did and didn’t eat, how his relationship with Bennis was going and why it was going that way, what his work was doing to him, whether he was doing too much of it, whether he was doing too little of it. It would have shocked the hell out of most of them to be told that he was a “closed-off ” kind of person, but he thought he was. He was just better at hiding it, or better at hiding the defense mechanisms that could signal its existence.
He felt a tug on his sleeve and looked around. Father Ti-bor was looking worried, which might or might not have meant anything in particular. Father Tibor was five years younger than Gregor and looked at least a decade older. He’d spent most of his youth and middle age in Soviet prisons of one kind or another.
“Krekor?”
“I’m okay. Kind of tired, that’s all.”
“Are you upset about the ceremony?” Tibor asked. “I’m not sure what to do about it. On the one hand, you and Ben-nis are my closest friends, and I am certified by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to perform marriages. On the other hand—” He threw his hands in the air. “I am not an unsophisticated man, Krekor. I know that not everyone who comes to the altar truly believes, and the world is full of hypocrites. But.”
“Yes,” Gregor said. “But.”
“She is not the sort of woman who thrives on compromise, is she, Krekor? It’s really all we need here, a little compromise. A little pro forma. I do not pretend that the questions involved are not serious. They’re very serious. But in this case, for the purposes of a wedding, maybe not so much. I don’t understand why I can’t make her see that.”
“Don’t look at me,” Gregor said. “I can’t make her see anything. I’ve been trying for years.”
“It is just a matter of pro forma,” Tibor said again. “It is a matter of satisfying the forms when you cannot satisfy the substance. If we don’t do that, I will have a problem with the archdiocese. I might be able to get away with it if the whole thing could be done in privacy, but you know there will be no privacy. You are not a private person. She is not a private person.”