The Lovers (2 page)

By the front door sat a wooden bin, like a small boat, containing an assortment of women’s shoes. She removed her own and tried on a pair of black sandals with short heels. Her size. They were more fashionable than the shoes she was accustomed to—Callie, her son’s fiancée, would have approved—and she placed her own practical shoes in the bin. She walked around, enjoying the sound the sandals made on the tile floor.
The sound of elegance
, she thought. The sound of a woman preparing for a party.

The kitchen was surgical in its sparseness, the counters bare but for an unlabeled bottle of red wine. A note was propped up against the bottle: “From my vineyard. Enjoy!” There were faces on the refrigerator door, photos of people on a yacht—all of them in their twenties and thirties, all with drinks. Which one was Mr. Ali Çelik? Which of the beautiful women was his wife? The magnets securing the photos in place read
CARPE DIEM
! and a
MAN’S WEALTH IS MEASURED BY THE AMOUNT OF FUN HE HAS
!

Yvonne opened the refrigerator. Cherries glistened inside a silver strainer. She tried one, and then another. She removed the strainer and carried it to the living room, along with a napkin and a small bowl for the pits. She had underestimated her hunger.

From the couch, she couldn’t see anything outside the window—only her own reflection. A brunette woman with pale skin and dark eyes removing pits from her mouth. At first glance, she looked younger than her fifty-three years. She tried not to be vain about this, but she was not un-proud. She had put on weight since Peter’s death, and the extra pounds had filled in her wrinkles, her breasts, her hips. She stood and walked closer to the window so she could see herself better, and then, wondering if the neighbors across the street could see her too, she took a quick step back and retreated to the kitchen.

It had been extravagant to rent such a large house, but it had been the only appealing one available when, two months before, she had decided to make the trip. Her son, Matthew, had invited her to join him and Callie and Callie’s family on the boat they were chartering from Greece to Turkey. “A pre-wedding cruise,” he called it in his initial e-mail to Yvonne. Yvonne had never heard of such a thing, but she had never heard of many things Callie’s family, the Campbells, were accustomed to. Having been overly impressed by wealth when she was young, Yvonne now tried to keep a safe distance from people with money.

“We’ll stop at EVERY archaeological site all the way
until we get to Troy. You’ll LOVE it, Mom,” Matthew wrote. Even his capital letters seemed pleading, anxious. It had taken Yvonne a moment to understand he was appealing to her presumed interest in history, the subject she had taught for thirty years. Matthew, though well-meaning, understood her on a superficial level.
Was that fair?
she wondered. Mother, teacher, historian, wife. Widow. He did not look beyond these terms, these roles. But Yvonne had not done so with her own mother either.

“I’ll think about it,” Yvonne wrote in response to Matthew’s invitation, though she had already made up her mind not to go. But then came April, when another empty and unremarkable summer stretched before her like an endless walkway. She had no plans when school ended, nothing to do for three months. She considered teaching summer school. It seemed a good match: her strength as a teacher had been with students who needed extra help, not with the ones who excelled. The honor students were Peter’s forte; if he had one flaw as a teacher, and as a parent, it was that he lacked patience with anything short of brilliance. Yvonne had discussed the possibility of summer school with George, the principal, who, during his first marriage, had dinner with Peter and Yvonne at least once a month. But George had suggested she take a break from teaching—“just for the summer,” he said, his hand on her shoulder—and she knew then that if he could, George would suggest she take a more permanent hiatus.

His lack of faith in her had to do with Oliver Cromwell.
On a Friday that past February, she delivered her standard lecture about Cromwell and the organization of the British Commonwealth. After the first few minutes, she’d noticed that everyone, even her least devoted student, was paying rapt attention. This was followed by snickers, and she knew something was wrong. Later in the day, an anonymous note appeared in her faculty mailbox: “You gave the exact same lecture WORD FOR WORD twice this week.” It was a student’s handwriting—she recognized his oblong
O
s. No doubt word of Yvonne’s forgetfulness had gotten around school and been brought to George’s attention as well. Summer school was no longer an option; she’d be lucky to have a job in the fall.

“Mom, please come,” Matthew begged during a phone conversation in mid-April when they had little else to discuss. Yvonne had been standing in rain boots on her porch. She would have been flattered by Matthew’s invitation if he actually seemed to want her presence, but she knew he was including her for the sake of appearances. If Callie’s parents were joining them, how could he explain his mother’s absence?

“It looks like Aurelia and Henry are coming now too,” he added.

The prospect of Aurelia’s presence—and especially Henry’s—made the trip more alluring. Yvonne had worried for so long that Aurelia would reject any romantic attention, just as she had shielded herself from her parents’ affection. Now Yvonne was quietly thrilled whenever Henry put his arm around Aurelia and Aurelia allowed it to remain.

“Could I come for part of it?” Yvonne asked Matthew.

It had all been settled during that one long phone call. Once they decided Yvonne would meet Matthew, the Campbells, Aurelia, and Henry halfway through their cruise, in Turkey, she knew she would spend the preceding week and two days in Datça. As soon as she made the decision, her mood improved and the light drizzle ceased. She removed the take-out menus rubber-banded to her doorknob and threw them in the trash.

That evening Yvonne had gone online and found this house. A “gracious house,” a “meer walk” from the beach, the website said. She would spend nine days here and then the boat would pick her up in the Datça harbor.

In Ali Çelik’s kitchen, she continued eating cherries until her stomach was full and her fingers were purple. She cleaned up and washed her hands, made sure the door and windows were locked, and with heavy legs walked up to the master bedroom.

She changed into her pajamas, brushed her teeth, rinsed her swollen feet in the shower, and collapsed onto the bed. The headboard suggested it was king-sized, but as she moved under the covers toward the center, Yvonne discovered two mattresses had been pushed together, bound by a single sheet. At home, she had started sleeping in the middle of her queen mattress—it made her feel less small, less irrelevant than staying on her side, or his—but here that would not be possible. Each night she would have to choose.

She lay on the bed with the light on, staring at a hook in the ceiling, directly above the bed. It was an eyehook, the
kind used to hang a plant. Who would want to hang a plant from there?

She couldn’t sleep. She stood and scanned the bookshelf. The majority of the books were in Turkish—even
The Da Vinci Code
, whose ubiquitous cover design Yvonne recognized. A few books were in German, and one in English:
The Woman’s Guide to Anal Sex
. She read the spine again to make sure she wasn’t mistaken. She opened the front cover and an order slip from Amazon.com slipped out. It had been sent to “Manon.” Yvonne flipped through the book, pausing at the diagrams, and replaced the slip and the book on the shelf. Çelik apparently hadn’t gotten around to putting everything away in time for his renter.

She returned to bed, trying to get comfortable. Various images flew, unbeckoned, to her mind: the note she had found beneath the windshield wiper of her car after Peter’s memorial service, which read, “Can’t you see what you did? If you had parked your car one foot back someone else could have parked in front of you. But you didn’t. Next time, try not to be so selfish. Try to think of other people in this world.” The fact that she focused on this note, that week and for the following months—and still, now—was maddening, baffling. A note about her parked car! But it seemed to contain all that she hated about that time, those days of obligation and defeat.

And then there was the image of the woman in the gray winter coat who had appeared at her doorstep all those Decembers ago. Yvonne had been pouring water into the
red bowl at the base of the Christmas tree when she saw a woman she didn’t recognize walking up their front steps. Even the woman’s gait was angry. A loud, determined knock. Yvonne opened the door.

“Are you Aurelia’s mother?” the woman said. Her face was ravaged, her eyes wild.

“Yes,” Yvonne said.

“Well,” the woman said, “I want you to know that your daughter just landed my daughter in intensive care.”

How deceived Yvonne had been to believe Aurelia was sober then, that it was so easy to return from a rehab center in Arizona to Burlington High School. How deluded she had been to think that Aurelia wasn’t dealing. It was what they had told Yvonne and Peter in the family counseling sessions they’d gone to: “All kids who do drugs, deal drugs.” “Not our Aurelia,” she said to Peter, who was reluctant to welcome their daughter back home. “Not our Aurelia,” he had repeated, but coming out of his mouth, the words meant something very different.

Soon the two episodes joined together, and it was the enraged mother leaving a note on Yvonne’s car. Yvonne shook her head, as though she could detach the image from her mind. Her skin was moist, covered with salt. She got up and swung open the window. The wind promptly swept it shut. She looked at the clock. Three. She’d been trying to sleep for two hours. She tried sleeping on her side, with a pillow between her legs, the way she had when she was pregnant. She tried to sleep on her stomach. The pillowcase was rough on
her face. She removed a well-worn T-shirt from her suitcase and wrapped it around the pillow.

At dawn she realized the crocheted curtains offered no solace from the light. She rose to examine her other options for sleep. As she stood on the threshold of each of the other bedrooms, she was reminded of her younger self. Every night, after brushing her teeth, she would check on the twins. Matthew’s room smelled of buttermilk, that heavy scent of boy. But from the start Aurelia had been a restless sleeper, given to bizarre positionings. One night her legs would be crawling the wall by her bed, her mouth open in amazement. The next she would be facedown, limbs spread like a skydiver.

At six in the morning, wandering the Datça house like a phantom, Yvonne settled on the room with the twin beds and heavy curtains, and crawled into the bed closer to the door. She needed to sleep; she wanted to be strong the next day. It had been twenty-eight years since she and Peter had honeymooned in Datça. She wanted to wake up ready.

A piercing sound was slicing through the house. A siren? An air raid? She rolled out of bed, taking the covers with her at first, then disentangled herself. She ran into the hallway and tried to determine the source. It seemed to be coming from everywhere around her—above, below, the walls themselves. She was surrounded. She ran down the stairs and it shrieked louder. In the living room, she lunged toward something black, plastic, near the TV. A telephone. She listened to it
wail again, and heard similar cries coming from above, from what she now realized were the other phones.

She picked up the phone nearest her. How did one say hello in Turkish? She settled on “Allo.”

“Good morning. Did I wake you? It’s Ali Çelik!”

“I was resting…”

“You can’t sleep the day away!”

What time was it?

“I was calling to check on you, to make sure everything is okay.”

“The house is great,” she said, looking around the living room. In the morning, it looked less romantic, more sterile. But still, it was clearly a well-kept, clean house.

“Good. I’d like to come by and say hello.”

“Yes,” Yvonne said. “And I owe you the remainder of the deposit.”

“Oh, yes, that too,” Mr. Çelik said, as though it was an afterthought. “Maybe I’ll stop by in two hours?”

“Sure,” said Yvonne. “What time is it now?”

“Eight o’clock. Time to get up!”

Upstairs, she changed out of her pajamas, which she noticed were threadbare at the thighs and faded everywhere. Peter would have bought her a new set by now. He was the one who pointed out when the heels of her boots were wearing down, he was the one who suggested it was time to trade in her old Toyota. Yvonne, the youngest of three daughters, was not accustomed to shopping for something new when the old, or handed-down, could suffice.

She dressed in a crisp skirt and a bright plum top, and ran a comb through her hair. A week before the trip, she had been to a hairdresser who, after an hour of snipping and brushing and blow-drying, pronounced Yvonne’s cut “youthful.” For an hour after leaving the salon, she felt lighter, walking on the balls of her feet until she noticed the heads of every other fifty-something-year-old in Burlington, and even some sixty-year-olds, were similarly coiffed. Now she pulled her hair up behind her head, securing as much of it as would stay into a short ponytail.

She carried her purse with her downstairs to the living room and lay on her back on the blue couch, her hands joined over her chest, her ankles crossed on the armrest. She looked, she thought, like a parody of someone in a psychiatrist’s office. But here she could fall asleep and still be able to hear the doorbell when Mr. Çelik arrived.

A thump. Yvonne awoke and leaped up, but no one was at the door. She returned to the couch and saw her unzipped purse had fallen to the floor and some of the contents had spilled. She knelt down on the zebra-skin rug, the coarse hair scratching her shins. Beneath the couch, she saw her tin of lip balm, the squashed orange earplugs she had used on the flight, and the small bottle of evening primrose oil she kept with her when she traveled. The capsules had helped her through menopause, and now she was afraid to be without them.