The Lovers (10 page)

“And you never told him you know it was him.”

“No. I knew it would humiliate him somehow, that I knew he had been jealous enough to do such a thing.”

“Had you ever been unfaithful to him? Why was he suspectful?”

“No, never,” Yvonne said. She considered telling Özlem that, because of the way they had met, through the
poste restante
, Peter was occasionally concerned she would fall sneakily, whimsically in love with someone else.

She opted for a more basic explanation. “Our daughter was going through a difficult period, and she was lying to us a lot, and Peter started feeling that anyone could lie to him. I know it doesn’t make sense, but distrust…it’s a viral thing.”

“It makes sense,” Özlem said. “It does.”

Yvonne shrugged, as though to say,
All that can be said has been said
. “What are you going to do?” she asked, determined to return the conversation to Özlem.

“I don’t know yet,” Özlem said.

Yvonne nodded, and then finished her glass of wine. “I’ll stop by tomorrow,” Özlem promised, and left.

They had exchanged confidences—Özlem’s large, Yvonne’s small—within the course of a short time, and now they both seemed ready to escape the room in which the inequality of these confessions had been voiced.

Yvonne heated a frozen pizza for dinner. While she was waiting for the pizza’s crust to brown, she drank Özlem’s glass of wine. It was not good, but she enjoyed it immensely.
What a silly, insignificant story she had shared. She was free to tell whatever story she wanted to a new and impartial listener, and this is what she had chosen?

She moved outside to the patio to eat and began to read the first page of her novel. It was a thin book she had read many years before, about a woman’s love affair with an older man when she was a teenager.

One day, I was already old…

Yvonne read the line three times. She felt far beyond her own years. Age had not crept up on her gradually, but rather had dropped down on her like a net. Not immediately after Peter’s death, as she might have expected. No, in the weeks afterward she had purpose. There was the service, the lawyers, the insurance people offering her pointless advice: “I know it’s too late now, but next time you get car insurance, don’t skimp on uninsured motorist coverage.”

The idea of opening mail was hard enough. The condolence cards with their sad flowers and gray clouds suggesting—what? Heaven? A rainstorm? And banal words. “Thinking of you at this time.” “With sympathy.” With sympathy! They should have said, “With fear.” Or, “With relief.” Yvonne knew that everyone who wrote to her was thankful that a member of their own families, their spouses, had not been killed. Wasn’t everyone a gambler, a statistician? The fact that Peter had been killed decreased the chances that they would lose their husbands, their wives, their children.

Yvonne had made a point of not crying during the service. She had cried all morning before it began and cried when ev
eryone had gone home, but she would not cry while reading the Auden poem Peter had loved and that now seemed too appropriate; she would not cry when others teared up upon seeing her. Her tears were private—for him alone, not for show.

Adjectives abounded the day of the service, adjectives about Peter’s life: wonderful father, loving husband, devoted teacher. And later about Yvonne. How brave! they said. How strong! So amazing! What a fun-loving but devoted couple they had been, how many students they had helped educate and nurture. The students at the funeral looked down at their own palms whenever they were mentioned, as though trying to weigh the import of their teacher’s death on their own lives.

Yvonne detested the vapidity of adjectives, their prevalence, their interchangeability. How wonderful and strong their love had been! How fun and amazing their marriage had been. What a devoted father, loving teacher, wonderful husband he had been. What a devoted husband, loving father, wonderful teacher. It meant less every time someone pressed their hands into hers and looked at her meaningfully.
Please stop
, she had wanted to say to them all.
Please stop talking. None of this is working.

After the service, after everyone had left, she caught her reflection in a bathroom mirror, and was astounded at how young she looked. She looked eighteen. Her face was flush and tight, her eyes shone without filter. Three months later, after she had dealt with the lawyers and written thank-you
notes for the flowers, it was as though she was walking into the water and suddenly the ocean floor fell from her feet: she looked in the mirror and she was old, old, old.

Yvonne made her way up the red-railed spiral staircase. The air, usually cool by evening, was still hot. She opened the window in the bedroom and it promptly shut itself again.

Upstairs, she recalled, was a sliding door to the balcony. She could open that window without it slamming shut. She climbed the stairs to the top floor and saw the contraption was still there, laid out on the bed. But the maid seemed to have adjusted it; now it looked like the figure at the end of a game of hangman. Yvonne picked it up—it was heavier than she expected—and folded it into an unwieldy shape, placing it under the bed. It was still conspicuous. A colorfully painted trunk, depicting what looked like a fox hunt, sat at the foot of the bed. Yvonne opened it tentatively, and was relieved to see only blankets and sheets. She placed the contraption inside and closed the lid.

She slid open the door to the balcony. The night air was warm. Yvonne paused as she looked out on the red rooftops below, pink in the moonlight. Datça was prettier now, all its blemishes hidden in the blue night.

Downstairs, she washed her face, and while standing at the sink, the wine hit her all at once. She used the walls for balance as she made her way to the twin bed. When she
landed on the mattress, she sighed, very happy to be free of the obligations of standing.

Her eyes were closed and her mind was unstable. She gripped the side of the mattress to keep herself steady.
I should drink water,
she told herself, but she knew if she got up she might fall. So she held onto the bed and her thoughts spun.

Aurelia had been ten or eleven when one night, at a neighbor’s wedding, she consumed two pieces of cake and, high on sugar, wanted to dance. Yvonne had taken her out to the makeshift dance floor, and they held hands. Without speaking, Aurelia initiated their movements. They each lifted one arm overhead until they were facing away from each other, their fingers straining to keep hold of the other’s hand, before turning toward each other again. Right arm up, left arm up. Around and around the two of them spun, and each time their eyes met Yvonne saw that what everyone said was true: Aurelia’s eyes did indeed resemble her own—they were cloudy and dense, the color of a substance that, heavier than everything else, had settled to the bottom of a glass. Right arm, left arm. Yvonne had felt light from the spinning, from the wonder of genetics—of birth!—and yet, at the same time, she experienced a sinking responsibility for having brought this girl into the world. In the course of one dance, she had witnessed all Aurelia’s vulnerability and kindness, and the enormity of her daughter’s emotions—the fragility of her joy and the intensity of her pain—had
hit Yvonne with such force that finally she had to stop the twirling and say, as cheerfully as she could, “Okay. That’s enough.”

In the morning Yvonne awoke with her face tucked into her elbow. The heavy wine had now coursed through her blood and soured. Her skin smelled like old armor.

She walked downstairs, gripping the railing tightly. Her balance was uneven, her hands clammy. The marble was cool to her feet. As she approached the first floor, the strength of the sun was frightening. On the dining room table lay the Dove book Özlem had brought her. The mirror on its cover was meant to announce the beauty of anyone who looked into it. Yvonne caught her reflection and winced.

She made her way into the kitchen, where she scooped grounds into the cone filter of the coffeemaker, added water, and stood watching as it made its waking noises. The machine was in the corner of the kitchen, near the sink, and Yvonne could smell a strong odor. Garbage? She looked—almost nothing in the trash can. She checked the sink itself. A piece of sausage that had come off her pizza when she’d rinsed her plate, but that was all.

She removed a coffee mug from the cabinet, saw that it said
TURKEY IS FOR LOVERS
, put it back, and took out a smaller mug that was bare save for a turquoise rim. She walked to the dining room table, all the while feeling as if someone was watching her. She turned and something caught her eye. In
the top corner of the kitchen, above the coffeemaker, there was something brown, feathered, oval. An owl.

Yvonne almost gagged. The smell—that meaty, musty odor—must have come from the bird. Was it dead? No, it was asleep. A brown owl, its feathers pulled around its torso like a cloak. She could call Mr. Çelik but she felt funny about him now, knowing what she knew. If she opened the window would the owl leave? Should she chase him out with a broom? How did it get in? She recalled opening the sliding door of the room on the top floor the night before.

She rose slowly, all the while keeping her eye on the owl, which appeared to be sleeping. She walked backward to the staircase and then quickly went upstairs, where she changed into her yellow swimsuit, pulled a sundress over her head, and gathered what she would need for the day. She would leave the house to the owl and hope it would depart on its own. When she returned cautiously downstairs, the owl was still small, sleeping. She left the front door propped open, enough so the owl could see the sky and find its way out, and locked the gate at the base of the stairs.

She had almost forgotten about the car, about the tar and the Power Creme. From the gate the car looked good, back to normal. But as she approached the Renault, she saw that in patches, the paint had been ruined. Here and there, the car now had the pale yellow and thin texture of a daisy petal held up to the light.

She thought of the cost. She didn’t have the vaguest idea of how much it would be to repair the damage. Maybe, she
decided, she could return the car in the evening, when its flaws were less likely to show.

She carefully draped the beach towel over the hot driver’s seat and drove into town. She parked near a small corner store, where she bought two large wreaths of bread from behind an outdoor display counter, a carton of orange juice, and the largest bottle of water she could find.

She drove with the bottle of water sweating between her thighs and with both hands on the wheel as she navigated the road to Knidos, which seemed both longer and curvier today. She noticed every bump beneath her. The hills looked as though they had been scorched since the day before.

When she came to Yakaköy she spotted a hotel on her right, a colorful chateau on a hill, with sun umbrellas that promised a pool. She was tempted to check in there for the rest of the week. She could leave behind the owl and the sex swing, the book about anal sex, the twin bed. But then there was Özlem. And the deposit. She couldn’t abandon it. It was unlike her to entertain such a frivolous thought.

As she passed through the town she watched the old women sitting along the road, in front of their small wooden tables, hammering and pounding the nuts. Yvonne recalled her promise to buy something from a different vendor each day, but she had already forgotten what yesterday’s woman looked like.

She slowed the car and bought a bag of almonds from a woman she couldn’t be sure wasn’t the same one she had bought from before, and, as though to compensate for her
own confusion, for the possibility of breaking her own oath to herself, she stopped the car a few hundred feet down the road and bought a jar of honey from another woman. Each transaction took place over the transom of the driver’s door window. The women seemed grateful, but she felt silly. What was she going to do at the beach with a jar of honey?

There was no shade in the Knidos parking lot, and the heat enveloped her like a flannel coat. She passed the restaurant, and with small footsteps—even walking was exhausting—made her way to the beach. She sat on the sand with her water and bread and looked for the boy, for his shells. He was nowhere in sight, and Yvonne was surprised by her own disappointment.

She broke off small pieces of bread and ate them slowly. As the day accosted her, she could smell stale wine leaving her body. Yvonne sipped from her water bottle until it was empty and grunted as she lifted herself to her feet and walked toward the sea. She dipped her toes in the small wave that fizzled on the shore. The chill, the warmth. She waded in.

When the water was waist-high, she dove in and swam every stroke she knew. She kicked out, out, out with no destination in mind. Ahead and to her left, she saw something white. She turned. A kickboard floating, with no one in sight. It rose and fell with the water, and she began to swim toward it. The next time she looked up she saw a boy hoisting himself onto the kickboard. It was her boy. She waved her arms as though signaling to an airplane above.

The boy looked in her direction, lifted a hand, and
pointed to the shore. Yvonne made it back there first, and stood on the beach, waiting for him. She could see he was balancing the shells he had found on the front of the kickboard. He kicked from behind, keeping the board steady. The shells rattled but none fell. When the water became shallow, he slid off the board carefully and carried it like a tray. All of it—the kicking, the way he made his way out of the water—was so effortless and assured. He walked toward Yvonne, smiling his big white smile, his eyes bright. They had no method of greeting but this—wide smiles, nods. He began to lay the shells out before her, in neat rows.

“Lovely,” she said, examining the shiniest one. “Nice to see you,” she added, unable to contain herself. She was so happy to be with him.

“Nice to see you,” he said, imitating her.

They were both silent for a moment, looking at the shells between them.