Turkey being a polite country, the American hadn’t expected to hear a lovers’ quarrel catch fire at a table not five yards away.
Yemek was a mirror-filled restaurant. Curiosity led the American’s eyes to a woman who drew back in her chair to touch shoulders with her own reflection. This curly-headed woman said “Pic! Pic! Pic!” in a strident and teary voice; her round cheeks blushed. Opposite her, a middle-aged man loomed over his moussaka, his face tilted in a little palsy of chagrin. “Yeter, yeter.” So said this sad-faced man, as if his throat had shut like a camera lens. He appeared to be eyeing himself in the mirror throughout the argument, which lasted another half hour.
“What are they saying?” the American whispered to his date. “Interpret it for me.”
Later that evening, he turned over the indiscreet couple’s argument a few times, to examine it from different angles.
“You’re making believe you don’t see it, but it’s obvious,” said Mack, the American. He sat cramped beside his date in a taxi that jolted along the skirts of old Istanbul. Here and there across the city, giant-pencil minarets stood prodding the low night sky.
Mack couldn’t help aggrandizing his diction a little — “It was the fault of the man,” he said — the vocal equivalent of sitting up straight. His usual way of speaking, snappish, all but bossy when he argued, often grew formal to match his Turkish date’s earnest, unleavened English. Mack was a good-looking thirty, an entrepreneur — or at least he portrayed himself as such.
They were driving now along the Irmak Road, which closely follows the turns of the Bosporus like a little sister. At the intersection of well-lighted Cami and Kale Streets, Mack watched vacationers in Red Sox caps hesitate to take photos of a mosque. And there, in every tourist’s face, he saw someone he missed, or thought he missed after ten months in Turkey. How had Mack ended up here, of all places?
“You are off. Off, off, off,” his date was saying. Deniz was an easy smiler, born in Istanbul. Her eyes were wide, almost black, and she seemed rarely to blink. “The woman doubtless just wanted a new coat or hat,” she said.
Her jeans had red, white and blue rhinestones along the legs; she’d sewn them there. “And how very nasty was that voice? ‘Senden nefret diyorum.’ How could one say that to her companion?”
“Are you positive she said that?”
Dust rose like smoke from the unpaved street as their cab shuddered to a stop. From behind Mack’s cement apartment house, the top of a whitish dome peeped out like the bald pate of a crouching monk.
Once inside his tentatively-decorated apartment of naked windows, Mack said for the third, maybe the fourth time: “Did you see the face she made when he said he loved her? She’s been bored for months — I’d put money on it.”
Mack was now walking overfull glasses of red wine toward the sofa that would open into a bed once this discussion ended.
“No,” Deniz said. She stroked her own cheek with the knuckle-side of her hand. “This woman was a calculator. Is that the way in which one says it? Calculating – this is what I meant to say. This woman understood the power of tears.”
“Nah, the guy was one of those. Old and gross. Never even been out of Istanbul a day in his life. He works for the — spice industry.” Mack spoke with the air of a wild guesser: squinting, finding taffy to stretch inside every few syllables. “Has no time for romance because he — takes pride in being a V.P of, of–” He trailed off.
He’d wanted his guesswork to be funny and to illuminate something; now he couldn’t find any words. Ideas had started to take shape in his mind — in the way that discrete images begin rising from pages of squiggles in books of ocular gimmicks — but then they died away. Mack was left feeling almost confused.
“Well,” Deniz said, “the man seemed an innocent person.”
Deniz was very feminine, lively, and — flashing the tip of her tongue as she reached for her wine — thin-mouthed, with chiseled dark eyebrows and wide dark nostrils. “Merely an unfortunate man in the grips of someone.” A table lamp lighted half of her big, handsome face.
Mack made a sound like “Hah!” with surprising pep.
At all hours, sea buses passed outside the peeling sill of Mack’s window. The small one, ferry Number 7, made its sharp turn across the straits now, sounding like a contented cat.
Deniz was raising her glass and she smiled to say, “Gatorade make men strong quick.” (That was the muddled English of a local radio ad, and now one of their personal jokes. Many things that tried to be Western here remained wrong in an unfocused way.)
“To Gatorade,” he grumbled. “Because there’s no Turkish wine worth drinking at all.” His moods surprised people, not least himself, but his sudden cat fits were redeemed by the attractive flush they brought to his cheeks.
Mack had always been of an irregular charm, handsome and bulky, a gruff joker when able to defeat his own natural inarticulacy, a depressive New Yorker whose red hair topped a face moved to similar colors by emotions he could rarely justify. He hadn’t meant to grumble at her.
“Let us keep our toast to Gatorade, shall we?” Deniz now wore a tight smile. They’d been dating for five months.
Mack might’ve kept teasing her, but without his knowing why, his thoughts turned sharply back to the scene at the restaurant.
“Okay. That man, the guy from Yemek?”
“Yes?” she said. “Yes?”
Deniz’s dark eyes went big with what he mistook at first to be sarcastic exasperation. But, modern as she was, Deniz was the courteous daughter of a polite nation. It was her turn now to show real emotion. ‘It must mean something that you keep bringing up this other couple,’ she seemed to be saying. ‘You rarely let me talk about us — will discussing them be a way to get at problems in our own relationship?’ said her stare.
Mack was pleased to see Deniz this excited, and he half-joked: “Is that the kind of guy you go for?”
Meanwhile he was thinking: ‘Until now I didn’t understand why I focused on this, but maybe there is some kind of a chance here — for what, though? Isn’t it stupid? How could–’ Yet while Mack was figuring this out (the thought never hatched fully), another idea emerged to swallow the first one. He hoped to show her that serious relationships usually get really awful, hoped to prove how much better he was than that other guy, and so on. He found that he was smiling.
“He was a zonta, that guy.” Mack wormed his eyebrows as if he’d said something abstractly naughty.
“Ha! It takes one to know another one.” The neckline of Deniz’s black t-shirt gave a clear view of the notch in her collarbone. “You do not understand” — her eyes humid now and flashing — “how subtle their dealings were! The woman was a little horror, a brat. But she was desperate not to leave him.”
“Subtle? He was a middle-aged loser, and she was like twenty-five. Plus she had a really great body.” Mack had said this with enough oomph to be disrespectful. Now he made a point of glancing without haste over Deniz’s body, as if by complimenting the other woman, he had meant to flatter her, too.
Deniz raised her eyebrows, which may have been her way of telling him that he’d been a little obnoxious, but that he interpreted as: ‘Say whatever you want, a woman sees more clearly into these things.’ Her lips were red like the wine and she took her first sip from the glass.
Part Two
Before Mack had even met her, Deniz had had him by the ears.
It was in the middle 1990s that she’d traveled to New York, partly to study astronomy in the Museum of Natural History Cortazar Fellowship program, more to see if she had the pluck to leave Turkey for good (though she barely confessed this latter reason to herself). She’d come in May; by the Fourth of July she’d met and fallen in with some of Mack’s friends — or, not really his friends, more a long-standing clique about whom he’d huff every time it was made clear that latecomers weren’t allowed full rights of entry.
But if Mack’s demi-friends kept slipping Deniz’s name into conversation, at first he missed the jolt, the electric kiss in its z. Still, the sound lingered in his ear like a piece of music too fine to appreciate on first hearing. By August he feared he’d waited too long to express the proper interest such a woman. On their date, Donnie Brasco at the Ziegfeld followed by paella and a carafe of sangria, Deniz wore white sneakers and white socks. She avoided looking at him when he talked, a form of manners in the Islamic world. He misjudged this for excessive shyness. But something wily and almost mocking gave her demeanor a charge of life, too.
“You found that film pleasing?” she asked halfway through dinner. “In Turkey, a man like Johnny Depp is not taken for a mobster.” She meant to give her voice a wink and a nudge, but her measured delivery starched out any ironic inflection. “A man like that is taken for a woman.”
“Well, then,” said Mack, deadpan. “What would I be taken for in Turkey?”
She lowered her eyes, not really trying to hide her wry smile. “It is untimely for me to say.”
Mack, his big elbows on the table, tried to draw out this intriguing side of Deniz. He refilled her glass before his own, joked about the Muzak, ordered crème caramel and coffee. Bringing an appealing crease between his brows, he asked as gently as a librarian about her life. No, she’d never worn a headscarf, she answered, and in fact Turkey’s government made it illegal for women do so in public (Deniz didn’t mention that her sister, Afet, often wore one in private). Until she was six, her well-to-do, doctor’s family needed to boil all their water before drinking it. Deniz’s girlhood friend Hafo, a Kurd, had been sent away because of the theft of a classmate’s Members Only jacket — a crime this Hafo may not have committed. Deniz bowed her head when telling that story and, at first, Mack thought the sensitive gesture had been facetious.
As she rose from the meal, some inscrutable emotion sparked a very pretty glow to her cheeks. ‘Huh, she’s a blusher like me,’ Mack thought as she met his gaze with panicky eyes. ‘But what is she blushing for?’
Swallowing as if surprised by her own actions, Deniz took Mack’s jaw between her dry calloused fingers. She raised her parted lips voluptuously. Over her shoulder, their abandoned table looked a mess: a linen napkin standing like a teepee, another slumped and gory with ketchup wounds; a coffee mug kissed red on its lip. All the while Deniz’s warm, not-so-supple mouth carried the delicate, acid sweetness of tomato and sangria. Soft mittens of Muzak pawed at Mack’s ears. The snips of Deniz’s teeth hinted against his mouth. Deniz kept her eyes open the whole time.
“How do you like them apples?” she said.
With her grin, her eyebrows raised, and that hip-slung posture, she looked to be imitating some movie character with all her might.
Mack felt childlike and his mood soured. “Let’s take off,” he said, almost under his breath.
“Oh, now?” Deniz said. “Yes?” Unhappiness seeped into her disposition, the way a chill seeps into a house not well insulated against it. “Do you mean to — end the night?”
Did she merely like the idea of being out with an American? Mack wondered. He stood looking at her for a moment, at her quick nods and her thin, dismayed, devious, sweet smile. He didn’t know what he felt; he decided he was moved by her. This raised his spirits a little, which allowed his better impulses to emerge.
“Let’s just take off, okay, Deniz?” Mack said, more kindly. “I’m sorta tired, is all.”
As they walked to the subway Deniz asked if they might stroll beside the median of sleeping Park Avenue. They followed the narrow path of topsoil that lay like a brown sheet all the way to that giant headboard, the MetLife building. Deniz leaned on him. He absentmindedly identified the streets they passed; she repeated the numbers. Her neck was thin and the soft babyish hair at the nape was very subtle and warm as he put his hand to it. She geisha-stepped down the stairs of Grand Central like an escaping thief. A week later she returned to Istanbul without having let him know she was leaving.
It would be an exaggeration to say that she lingered in his memory after that. Still, every once in a while — and no less often as time passed — he’d recall their date and smile. It wasn’t so much that he’d think of her. Rather he’d wonder that he’d been out with a friendly-faced Muslim in white sneakers and white socks who’d avoided his eyes when he talked, a riddle leading with a surprise awkward kiss.
By and large, though, Mack kept his head buried in his own life.
Near the end of his twenties, near to quitting his fact-checking job, feeling lonesome nearly half the time, he began an indolent transition into adulthood. He still treated commitments as if they were mosquitoes, but he’d moved from feeling bored by the world to being a little intimidated by it. He imagined this to be one of the first blushes of maturity.
In 1999, when his ex-roommate Jeff told him of a prospect in the virginal backwoods that was Turkey’s online industry — “They have no Internet Yellow Pages there,” Jeff said — Mack agreed to step away from his life. Considering his date with Deniz, the choice of Turkey struck him as perfectly comical. Maybe it was a sign. ‘Why not take five years abroad to get rich?’ he thought. There was some daring in his choice to abandon everything, though not as much as he believed. He’d been treading water so long, any new tide would have carried him.
What had he done since college? He hadn’t planned on becoming a fact-checker for CondeNast Traveler. He did other things, of course. By the time he turned twenty-nine, the worst of the free downtown newspapers printed his two-column parodies of Hollywood, once a year and with slipshod artwork. That was it. He found himself growing grim about the mouth, etc.
For these reasons in September 2000, he carried his borrowed suitcase across Istanbul’s gray, bustling, kebob-smelling Bagdat Street. This was the “ex-pat section.” Mack rented a room en suite with Jeff’s, overlooking the lifeless fecal green velvet waters of the Bosporus.
Nothing in Turkey happened according to plan. Mack may have called himself an entrepreneur, but that was self-generosity. There already was an online Istanbul Yellow Pages. Mack and Jeff were lucky when the extant Yellow Page company offered them badly-paying jobs as assistant vice presidents. Jeff flew home in defeat after the third week, but Mack took to the role of the grumpy ex-patriot. He decorated his apartment sparsely with the castoffs of acquaintances who’d outgrown futons and CD towers, and next to these he placed the art-deco lamp, hand-carved bookends, and the silver ashtray that he’d bought in the vain hope of developing a signature style. He luxuriated in that satisfied melancholy shared by most émigrés. He wanted to write a book. News from home reached him as a muted, dreary echo. He made a few American acquaintances and knew no Turks. Every night a white smear of moon on the dark Bosporus. End of chapter one.
But the would-be anecdotist failed really to know Istanbul, because he saw such little of it in those first weeks: The crowd at Patty McGill’s Dublin Inn that aspired toward “Western chic,” everyone decked out in pleated jeans or tennis visors and tight denim jackets; the touristy Spice Market, crammed with sacks of cumin, $150 turbo nosehair groomers, wooden barrels of nuts, fruits and royal jelly scraped from the honeycombs of the Aegean. Nothing in Turkey had anything to do with him.
After three months, Mack wrote to his father that “Americans on the whole are better-looking than the average Turk, but there are more superbly beautiful women here.” The next day he dialed the operator and found Deniz. She was a graduate researcher at the Istanbul University Science, Faculty, Astronomy & Space Science Department.
Part Three
When Mack pressed her buzzer late that cold Friday afternoon, she emerged to stand five steps above him on her front porch, her head cocked, her eyes narrowed against the blare of an angry Turkish sunset. She wore her hair down, 1960s style, with a precise flip and a mesh of baby’s breath pinned over her left ear.
The sight of Deniz squinting Magoo-like and wearing her famous white sneakers and socks actually brought a lump to his throat. He’d spent that entire morning reminding himself of her features, her long thin mouth and wide dark nostrils, but as she tiptoed down the stairs to him, she was so much more actual than his imaginings.
“We are on my home ground here, Mack.” She visored her eyes with a hand; her face relaxed into a grin. And she gave a modest shrug, underscoring some self-deprecating remark she hadn’t made.
“Hi, Deniz.”
He was taken aback by the wattage of his feelings. The last thing he’d expected was to be moved by her, to feel overcome. Was it just some odd turn of nostalgia? His face tightened.
“It is wonderful to see you, Mack.” In her soft voice, there was the bait and the hook of real kindness.
“Your English is still really, really good,” he said. Working a sudden crick in his neck, he weathervaned his head left and right, like an owl.
It seemed as if she hadn’t blinked once. And there was Vaseline on the ends of her eyelashes; he stared, trying to figure out what substance it was.
Abruptly, she was standing in front of him. ‘Tell her she’s beautiful,’ he thought. He hesitated, unsure whether to shake her hand or to kiss her, and this led to a certain amount of his leaning and retreating. To ease the awkwardness she touched his chin with her pointer finger. He laughed a quick, surprised laugh. And her finger arched up, yielding flaccid at his chin like a lobster’s feeler bent against the glass wall of an aquarium. “Hello,” Deniz said. It seemed a fraught little word the way she used it.
Later, waiting in line at the movie theater, they didn’t talk much. He liked the bumpy outline of her bra in her black sweater. He liked her odd dignity and her scrubbed cheeks. During the Turkish-language previews, she leaned to him and whispered — her breath warm on his ear — “Mack, you do not appear smart as I had recollected.” Then she stared into his eyes to show that she was only joking.
He realized he’d been lonelier than he’d thought and they started to have Wednesday nights, Saturdays, and Sunday mornings together. He asked why she’d rushed to kiss him that first evening back in New York. “To ascertain if I could force myself,” she admitted, pulling her hair over her mouth bashfully. And why had she left? She shrugged and wore a look of defeated confusion. “Too much for me, after all.”
In or out of her sneakers, Deniz had a mild taste in clothes, a guardedly Western style that ran toward tailored pants and dresses that never managed higher than her knee. An affable target of jokes, often bouncing with anxiety, she’d work to better Mack’s spirits by forever livening her own, little by little — though some private caution always seemed to keep her from real joy. Her smile would contract, and her face might take on a fuddled look.
“Do you love the stars as much as I do?” she said in bed one night, dreamily, her eyebrows and her loose hair very dark and sleek. “‘This most excellent canopy, this brave overhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire.’ That is Shakespeare, Mucky.” (Deniz’s sometimes nickname for him was “Muck,” which had just changed into “Mucky.”) “I have pinned that quote over my desk at the University, in English. Did I ever tell you that?”
“I like the stars, yeah — of course,” Mack said, feeling pleased next to her, even though this kind of wistful “pillow talk” wasn’t his forte. “Who doesn’t like the stars?” he said, and wanted to add something dreamy, but what did he know about constellations, outer space, what good was he at the deliberate cheesiness of courtship?
Deniz’s apartment had steam heating, and her pipes sounded in quick Lamaze-type breaths, like an old person easing into cold bathwater.
“I know it’s obvious, but” — with hushed and sluggish speech, Mack meant to convey that he was just thinking aloud here — “I’m always struck that they look exactly the same, in Turkey and at home, the stars.”
Immediately he felt dull — this was trite, even for pillow talk. To break off his mild exasperation Mack turned his eyes to the blue glass beads that hung from her door frame to ward off “the evil eye” — many Turkishs home had them.
At the edge of his view, three gnatlike flies went zigzagging, hopping on air toward the window, drawn to the succulent roasted lamb of the street carts that served night-worshippers at nearby Sultan Selim Mosque. The foreignness of it all, he thought (disregarding her TV, her DVD player and microwave oven, the poster of Woody Allen’s Manhattan that she’d hung in her bathroom), the foreignness! He thought of the theology school across from his office, where the muzzein prayer rose like a phoenix from fires of hatred of the West; he thought of the row after multicolored row of genuflectors’ backs that together remade the floor of Sultan Selim into a vivid, breathing patchwork quilt. No, nothing in Turkey had anything to do with him.
One evening after they had been dating for almost five months, Deniz closed a phone call by saying, hurriedly, for the first time, “I love you. I love you.”
The words reached Mack with a stupefying force. He pressed the droning receiver to his forehead for three full minutes after she’d hung up, while he tried to look into himself: Did he feel deeply for her? How could he have missed the seriousness of her feelings? He’d turned a deaf ear so often that he ought to have a neck cramp. He fell into a profound gloom thinking about it.
Istanbul did not feel like his home and it never would.
“….you know such little about women,” Deniz was saying. “This is the reason you can’t see why that woman argued with her poor man in such a crowded eating place like Yemek.” She and Mack had been talking for forty minutes and as often happens, their conversation slid from the subject at hand to a contest of pet generalizations.
“The truth of it is, women know how to be difficult.” Deniz stood pouring water from the clanking, rattling sink that one day would explode to flood up Mack’s apartment. “Can you blame us? It is the only power left us.”
“I can’t believe my ears,” Mack said. “I never thought I’d say this to a woman, but you’re being sexist against women–”
“Trust me,” she interrupted. “Turkish women know about subtle powers better than an American man. It is work for women not to be difficult. This is an issue you fall short of understanding. Many women think that they may get away with anything — even Turkish women. And they are right.”
“You really think men are fooled that easy? Please.” He was trying to find the right word. “Whatever games, or stratagems you try, do you really think–”
“People are correct, then, when they say that Americans know so close to nothing of politics? Because this is in essence what we are discussing. A form of politics.” Being contrary wasn’t in Deniz’s nature, and maybe for that reason she appeared eager to be contrary now. “You are lucky, in that I do not engage in politics with you.”
‘Politics?’ he thought. ‘Politics?’
She was getting to something. The warmups had been over for a while; the match had started. “I am that sort who gets taken for granted, Mack. Do not deny it,” she said with a snorty laugh. “This woman had another lover, I am sure of this, but it is almost not the point here. My point is about the way people who are so-called ‘in love’ treat one another today, because….” She trailed off with a sigh. “If men could better see all the bad, perhaps they’d–”
“What? They’d what?”
The force with which he’d spoken evidently surprised her. She pulled her hair over her mouth.
Mack was breathing angrily now. He had porcupined up like a cactus plant. “Were you saying that — what? — that you would’ve known how to trick something out of a man without having to embarrass him? Embarrassing a man, is that like the big guns or something?”
“No,” she said. “No.”
“Then, what?”
She wasn’t frowning, but she seemed to be frowning, even though her face barely moved. Her sour expression was all in her eyes.
He swiveled around, giving his back to her. And in his way of killing the already slain, he said: “You know I’d never take any ‘politics’ from you, or whatever you call it.” He felt that he would end up feeling guilty for what he was about to say — that she would gain some advantage in being the one who was treated badly — but he kept on talking. “I’d be out the door, and you’d keep calling me up, ‘Oh, come back! Come back, please, Mack.’ And I wouldn’t. I really wouldn’t; no fucking way. I’d just keep going.”
He ran his hand through his hair and closed his eyes. “Who says that about Americans, anyway?” He sighed. “What the hell am I doing in this country?” Meanwhile he had an epiphany: ‘She left New York because of her date with me. She was afraid of me.’ He’d never thought this before, but with a proud, self-aware disregard for nuance he was sure that it was true.
When he looked again, Deniz was standing by the side of the couch. The storm winds had died down, and he thought her very attractive at the moment. It wasn’t just that her lips seemed fuller — maybe they were swollen from her having chewed on them — or that her hair was beautiful, with the two longish curls that dangled across her forehead, but because her unblinking eyes now seemed particularly caring and gentle. Her Vaselined lashes trapped sparks at their tips.
“I suppose I was being silly, Muck.” She put her glass of water on his peeling windowsill.
“Forget it, Deniz,” he said. “Come here and sit” — and she did. He thought: ‘Was I too harsh?’ Well, even if he had been. She was a woman who would excuse and excuse and excuse.
They sat close, facing each other. ‘What the hell is wrong with me?’ he thought. He gave her a hug, and, surprised by this sudden and atypical gesture, Deniz was slow to submit to it. But after three seconds she laughed and let herself be squeezed against the seductive corner of his couch.
She took his hands, brought them to her throat, and mimed being choked, sticking her tongue out.
“Don’t do that,” he said. The tendons and subtle bones around her windpipe had given a little under his thumbs. This chilled him; more than that, the gesture, and the argument itself, made him feel depressed.
“All right,” she said, smiling. “All right, Mack.” Her smile contracted, a suggestion of grief passed over her face, and then it was gone. Rising, she said: “I’m going to take a shower, and then we are to forget it” — but that wasn’t the end of it.
Part Four
Three months later, Mack taxicabbed his way over one of the few, small bridges that connect Asia unconvincingly to Europe like threads of interrupted sewing.
A dustcloud followed his taxi, nudging it through the narrows of “the Golden Horn,” where the streets curved dreamily around old wooden townhouses and dark cyprus trees; and it was here, at a Christmas party, that Mack would be reminded of the argument he’d witnessed in Yemek.
Armed with a cigarette, he arrived at the party alone, brooding. He was a snob about parties, and at office parties in particular he felt sullen, weighed down, unlikable. The host, his cap-toothed American boss David Cassill, opened the door with, “Come in, Mack, come in already.” Cassill laughed a smug boss laugh at being able to look brazenly over Mack’s shoulder for more important guests; he showed a Cheshire smile of bellyskin where his Harvard sweatshirt couldn’t quite reach to his waistband.
“Thanks,” Mack said. “Thanks.”
Two-thirds of the party-goers seemed to be pasty Europeans or ruddy Americans and Australians; the rest were striving Turks who, like Deniz, were certain that the pull of tradition could be offset by gestures, by poses that had only to be maintained. (Zontas suffered jealousies as did fundamentalists; the difference was in their angle of approach.)
Near the window, next to the boom box that played Jamiroquai, three older American men turned expectantly toward the door whenever it opened, hoping to see the chesty young beauty whom they’d all imagined when they’d agreed to come here. These men looked away from Mack now and returned to their conversation.
As he grabbed a beer from a table by the window, he saw — across that murmuring, congested living room — the same curly-haired young woman whose public lovers’ quarrel he and Deniz had held up to such scrutiny. The woman from Yemek. His heart seized. Here she was, standing in Cassill’s linoleum-floored kitchen, talking to a man at the refrigerator. She looked introspective, dark skinned, and she gazed about the party absent-mindedly, seeing Mack but not really seeing him. Mack turned away in a hurry, and felt the need to race off somewhere. But after the moment of shock had passed, his thoughts came as slow and deliberate as they had been hasty and nervous. He inched his way across the room, and — as soon he saw that she was alone — he charged over. Of course, he accidentally crashed into her at the threshold of the kitchen. He spilled his beer everywhere.
“Ananin ami!” The woman yelled. With her bass voice she sounded middle-aged, but she was twenty-five, at most. Beer had darkened her night-blue dress, a Rorschach splotch from her breastline to her waist.
“Sorry.” It was her, for sure. The round cheeks, the curly hair.
With unmistakable effort, this young woman calmed herself before saying: “You have really spilled on me, man.”
She wasn’t smiling but neither was she frowning. His mood had improved.
“I’m very sorry.” Mack reached to wipe the yellow dew off her forearm, but then he checked himself. Touching her would be an invasion. “Excuse me, bayan, but did I” — he almost lost his nerve here; some zonta slid past him into the kitchen. Mack flattened his big body against the doorframe and craned his neck to see past the zonta, who was devil-goateed like Snoop-Dogg.
“Did I — meet you somewhere once, bayan?” Mack said.
“I don’t think so really.” The young woman’s accent made her voice sound as if it came from deep in her throat.
“Yeah, okay,” he said. “I mean, I know we didn’t meet.” He gave an awful, staccato chuckle and threw his cigarette into his now empty cup. “I hope I’m not being too forward. You were at a restaurant in the Asian side a few months ago, in Beykoz? Having a fight with your boyfriend. I hope I’m not being too forward.”
She cocked her head and breathed through her nose, like someone receiving a bothersome message through one earphone. “Now, who you are?”
“Well, I was there. No one. No one. I was just — we couldn’t help hearing. The woman I was with, we saw your argument and talked about it all night.” Only now did he take a breath. He regretted having said “all night.”
Pinching her dress between her thumb and pointer finger to keep the dampness from her stomach, the woman asked:
“Is this considered not really rude in America, to spy about someone?” she said, but almost at once her annoyance drifted off. She arched her right eyebrow, and it looked like a worm touching its toes. “What were you talking about it, man?”
Mack swallowed. “If it’s not presumptuous, may I tell you?”
He knew some of his own failings, and one of them was that people took his kindnesses for their opposite, his attempts at sincerity for an acerbic mocking cynicism; he didn’t dare wait for her to answer.
“Okay, well,” he said and mercifully, after he licked his lips, the words came. He told her that, at the time of the argument, she had been seeing her boyfriend for, say, a year. No, less than that. When she’d first met him, she had been intrigued by the guy, because he was older, on the ball, a little well-to-do. He probably had a car, some European or American buddies, and a recipe for gravlax or another dish that none of her old boyfriends knew. “But then, a few months in, he’s just — older. Doesn’t like to go out much, snores, acts rude to waiters, he even smells old sometimes.” Mack felt on a roll. “The George Lucas wattle under the chin; the biggish belly when he’s undressed. So, you wanted to break up with him that night at Yemek, but weren’t able to do it yet. He bored you. He–”
Mack had to stop; the woman seemed dumbstruck. And the noise of the party had swelled like an energetic toad.
She gave up picking at the wet spot on her dress, though she kept her thumb and index finger positioned in an upside-down okay sign; the fluorescent glow of the kitchen joined with the light from the living room candles to underline her eyes harshly, to curl shadows at the bridge of her nose, and to accentuate a hairline crack that branched up the doorframe just above her head — tendrils raked out from its sides — and all this gave the impression that she had little antlers and chiaroscuro hair. She was raising her face sadly, and he examined her soft features, the round cheeks, cleftless chin, the mouth whose thick lower lip obtruded like a bottom drawer left partway open. Her hair had been combed with obvious effort — a failed attempt to level out all her mermaid curls. The eyes themselves shone black and glassy, like the skin of a seal. She had a long, flattish nose.
Mack figured that she must still be dating the guy, and as soon as he decided that, he realized it might be nice to help her admit the truth to herself. He felt an unspecific pang of obligation. He could do some good here.
“I realize how weird it must be–” He cut himself off. The music seemed quieter now.
“What’s your name?” he said.
But at that moment the goateed zonta in the kitchen returned to squeeze out between them again, edging his way back toward the party. Mack lowered his head and let the zonta pass. Off in the living room someone was yelling “Makam, makam!” and the music got louder, but not as loud as before. As Mack looked up again his eye caught the kitchen window, which gave onto a nearby apartment’s terrace, flowers propped on a balustrade, an empty lawn chair.
“Azime. My name is Azime.”
Mack turned to her. Through her parted lips she showed little teeth that leaned into one another and jostled for a view of the world outside.
Mack said, “You’re still with the guy, huh?” He realized to his surprise that he wasn’t hitting on her, not in the least. There was nothing sexual in this for him. All he wanted was to feel the pang of obligation more acutely. “I’m Mack, by the way,” he said, trying for high camaraderie. “Are you a friend of Cassill’s?”
She motioned with her thumb like a hitchhiker. “Sener — my boyfriend his name is Sener.” Her voice trembled like a woman’s headscarf. “He is just in the room nearby. I should say to you really, I do not think what you say is true. I should walk off from you now. Sener is not like what you say, man.”
That she might leave and return to her boyfriend distressed him more than he’d expected. “Wait, wait,” he said, crossly, much too crossly.
‘She’s a complete stranger,’ he thought. ‘Why do I care so much?’
“Azime, don’t go just yet. Does this make sense to you, what I’m saying? What happened in the restaurant to make you so upset? Did he do something wrong, Sener? Did you do something wrong?”
Her color had come up, and she shook her head. “Your name it was Mack, yes? This whole thing comes very very odd. I do not think you are really polite, Mack.” She leaned back like a water skier, touching shoulders with the doorframe. The earlier defiance of her eyes had given way to a new light of curiosity.
“I don’t think that you understand what you said just now, which is really false about my boyfriend.” Azime shook her head. “Maybe one time he is mean, but Sener does not ‘bore’ me. He does not.” And she said it again, in a sharper key. “He does not.”
Mack imagined himself a robot programmed to rescue others by telling the truth, only the truth.
“I saw what I saw, Azime. You’ve wanted to end it with him for a while, you just haven’t known it yourself, not, you know, consciously. But you’re not happy.” It felt necessary for him to shore up this truth with a squint. “That’s why you’re not walking away from me now,” he said.
With her mouth drawn awry she looked around, saying nothing. He didn’t know what to add, and the music played, the party murmured on.
She said, “I do not remember what we fight about that evening.” She ruminated a second. “A person maybe think one idea in a fight, but they decide they are not right afterwards. They are wrong afterwards.”
“Maybe I’m wrong,” he said, moving his brows and his mouth. “Am I wrong?”
“I have to go to the other room now, Mack,” said Azime. She laughed stupidly. She began to turn away, and in a moment of hesitation, she said in a scornful voice, “I do not know what other to say.”
He was right, he knew it. He felt his robot circuits shorting out from an exorbitance of truth and philanthropy. He tried to catch her eye one last time. But she wasn’t looking at him anymore.
He had a powerful urge to phone up Deniz right away, to tell her what had just happened. But he’d promised he wouldn’t call her anymore. He’d left her in November, left her for good, ending it over the phone at midnight, and he knew it would be heartless to get in touch with her now and send her reeling again.
Part Five
At the end of the night, as Mack was getting his jacket, Azime and her boyfriend shouldered by him on their way out the door. Sener’s hair was gray and quite thick. He stood taller than Mack, and his chin looked stronger than Mack had remembered. It struck him that, though he hadn’t in the least forgotten what Azime looked like, he never would have noticed Sener.
Azime was holding Sener’s hand. Mack almost said good-bye to her, but he kept quiet.
And yet, she looked at him briefly, guiltily, like a child who’d be sent to bed if she were caught looking. When her eyes did meet his, however quickly, it was with a gaze not unlike a cheerless shrug.
Turkey is a country in which a lot of citizens feel in disarray; Sener, for example, must have been a zonta; though he was Turkish, he spoke in English. “Who is that?” he asked Azime, just before the door closed behind them.
“Sıradan kimse,” Azime said. “No one. Just an ahmak.”
And the door closed.
Through it Mack could hear Azime saying to Sener that she loved him: “Seni seviyorum.” This phrase he knew, and even coming through the door, it wounded him a little. He’d been working from home these last two months, and he’d had days recently when he skipped the ATM for the teller — not for any extra service, just to have a conversation with someone in broken English. Just to have human contact. But this was different. This was a feeling beyond normal loneliness.
What had made wiseass tongue-tied unsympathetic friendless Mack believe that he could help her, anyway? What did Mack, five thousand miles from home, know about how people related to one another in Turkey, or anywhere?
Once he reached the sidewalk, Mack leaned against the rail of Cassill’s front porch, getting his bearings, swallowing his old acute bitterness. The nearly empty street before him — cobble-stoned Duman St. — was lit and narrow. Harsh wind was shouting between ancient houses. Above the imbricated roofs Mack could make out a gang of hills wearing snowy Kufi caps; the sky stood fixed over the hills, a majestical something fretted with golden something or other. A wrinkled, drunken beggar wearing what looked like a Santa’s hat now walked past–carrying a baguette, a jug of red wine, and a poodle. After four or five steps this beggar, shuffling his bundles through a jolt of wind, lost the ground under his feet and dropped the bread, the wine, and finally the little barking dog. “Kahretsin!” the beggar cried. “Kahretsin!” Further along the street a couple strolled arm in arm on their way downhill toward where Mack needed to go — the cabstand on Sair Ziya Pasa Street. Mack recognized this couple.
He waited; he stared. Azime was wearing a long tan coat — about thirty yards down the street. It revolted him that he’d thought this stranger would’ve seen him as some angelic helper. ‘I don’t give a damn if she wants to lie to herself,’ he thought. He understood that he really wanted something, and he could almost figure what it was, could almost express it to himself, but it was forever just out of reach and needling him.
Against his better judgment he decided to call out to Azime now. He hoped to make his voice sound nonchalant.
“Deniz!” he yelled by mistake. Wind flattened out the sound anyway. The feeling of confusion and bitterness didn’t ease after this silly slip of the tongue but got worse. He felt it in his cheeks, in the heavy pulse at his temples, and it choked him.
Once Azime and Sener were pretty much around the corner, Mack began to follow them.
