A Marriage in Four Seasons

by Kathryn Abdul-baki

  “Me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Look who’s talking,” he said.

  “I wanted to have a pleasant evening, not be battered by vulgar, gratuitous bloodletting on the screen,” she said. “Why can’t you understand that? All you care about is what you want. You’ve become someone I barely recognize.”

  He was surprised by her anger. “You haven’t exactly been upbeat yourself, Joy. You’re pretty miserable most of the time.”

  “You’d be miserable, too, if you were me,” she snapped. “And if I’m so miserable, why don’t you do something to help?”

  “Come on. I haven’t tried to help you? I’ve tried to cheer you up, but I’ve come to the end of my rope, Joy. You won’t let anyone help you. You’re living alone inside your own head. You just want to be unhappy forever. Well, I can’t go on like this.”

  They continued to snipe at each other, falling almost unconsciously into one of the random arguments they’d been plunging into lately, barely remembering what it had been about in the morning, only that they were both still pissed off.

  She looked at him. “Then don’t. Go find someone else to make you happy!”

  He was silent.

  “Just go find someone else and leave me alone.”

  “I will,” he said flatly.

  “I mean it.”

  “Okay.” After a pause he added, “Maybe I have.”

  At first, she didn’t appear to realize what he had said, but then she turned to him. “What?”

  He stayed quiet.

  “What did you say?” she asked again.

  “Nothing.”

  “You did say something.”

  “I said maybe I will find somebody else.”

  “You said it funny. You said maybe you had. Isn’t that what you said?”

  His throat grew tight.

  “Do you have someone else?”

  He stared ahead.

  She paused, then said, “Wow, Rich. Is that what this is all about, this change in you?”

  He remained silent and focused on the road.

  “What’s going on?” Her voice came out cold but calm. “Do you have someone else?”

  Finally, he sighed. “I don’t have anyone else, Joy.”

  “You just said you did.”

  He knew he couldn’t take back what he’d uttered a moment ago. He was acutely aware of the possible outcome that his next words would bring, and so he had to navigate as best he could. On the one hand, as had been the case so many times before, he felt a sudden desire to come clean once and for all, but he also knew the costs of doing that.

  “I’m saying,” he said, his voice low, “that I did have someone else. A while ago. Not now.”

  She continued to stare at him, looking confused.

  “It’s over,” he said quietly.

  She seemed to have slumped in her seat, as though she was about to plummet to the floor.

  He turned into their neighborhood, his heart beating fast. “I’m sorry, Joy. It’s the last thing I thought would ever happen, but it did.”

  A deafening silence crashed around them. “When?” she asked, her voice thin as a needle.

  “A while ago.”

  “When a while ago?”

  He sighed. “Last year. It lasted a few months; then she left.”

  “She left? What does that mean?”

  “She left. Left me. Left the country.”

  She stared at the road in front of them.

  A light fog was touching the ground like wafts of cotton candy that parted for his headlights.

  Her voice drifted out into the dense white outside the window. “Who is she?”

  “You don’t know her,” he said gently.

  “Someone from your office?”

  “No.”

  “Who, then?”

  “Just someone I met. It was crazy, Joy, but it’s over.”

  She gave a little gasp as if struggling to breathe. They were already parked in front of their house. He reached over and carefully put his hand on hers. She jerked her hand away and hit his arm, hard.

  He flinched. “Joy, I’m sorry.”

  “You’re sorry?”

  “Joy—”

  “Just shut up. I don’t want to hear any more.”

  He was silent.

  “Bastard!” she shouted.

  He stared ahead at the garage door, which he hadn’t yet bothered to open.

  She stared up at the roof of the car. “I can’t believe this. All the healing we’d worked on after Stephen’s death, all the slow, painful reclaiming of my life.”

  “I’m—”

  “This can’t be true!” She started to cry, covering her mouth with her hands.

  He stared at her, helpless. A hollow fear ground into his stomach, bringing a sour taste to his mouth.

  “On vacation in Spain, you were so distant, so—so indifferent. I couldn’t understand why you weren’t enjoying anything.”

  “It was after Spain.”

  “You wanted to be anywhere else but with me.”

  “Joy—”

  “Please, just shut up!” she screamed through her tears.

  Somehow, they got into the house, both shell-shocked by the exchange. She didn’t speak another word to him, just grabbed her work papers and headed off to the study. He lay on the living room couch with the newspaper. Neither went near their bedroom.

  The next morning, having barely slept, Richard heard Joy leave the house early, drive out of the garage in the dark. He watched the sunrise from the living room couch where he’d slept, then headed off to the White Plains station to catch his train.

  She didn’t come home for dinner and got in after ten. Again, she slept in the recliner in the study, and the next morning they barely passed each other. She didn’t respond to his attempts at communication.

  They stayed like this a few more days, Richard trying to give Joy her space, but he knew that at this point she didn’t care about his thoughtfulness or his own remorse or pain. He could have dropped dead in front of her and she would have calmly kicked his corpse as she stepped over him.

  Finally, they did give each other basic information, a few words here and there about their respective daily schedules, neither broaching the topic of Richard’s confession. Fortunately, he had a business trip to Chicago scheduled the following week and would be gone a few days.

  He tried to call her a few times from Chicago, but she didn’t answer. For the week after his return home, she seemed cordially indifferent to him.

  A few weeks later, she suggested they go out for dinner.

  “You bet,” he said, overcome by a surging relief that she was finally taking a stab at normalcy. They went to their favorite Mexican restaurant and ordered margaritas.

  She barely touched her tacos.

  “Is something wrong with your food?” he asked.

  She glanced up, her eyes looking ahead, past his face. “I’ve applied for a position in a private girls’ school in Virginia. Assistant principal.”

  “What?” he said.

  “They’ll let me know by the end of the month if I get it.”

  “Joy,” he said, dropping his fork. “No. Come on, sweetheart. Please don’t do this.”

  She went on quickly. “If they do offer it to me, I’ll take a leave of absence from Hunter.”

  He placed both of his hands on the table. He vigorously shook his head. “No. How can you just leave? And to teach at a high school? You’ve been teaching at the college level for years. And Virginia? The South? No way, Joy. We can work this out. I know we can.”

  She obviously sensed his confusion and hurt, and for a moment she looked as if she might even take back her words, but she went on. “Look. I need to get away for a bit. I need the change.”

  He blinked a few times. “I can’t believe you’re saying this. What about me? What about us? Our life here? I don’t want you to leave.”

  She sat back in her chair and calmly picked up h
er drink. He realized that she’d made up her mind.

  “It’s only a short distance away, and it’s only for a while,” she said as though to reassure him.

  “No, it’s not. You’re leaving me.”

  She exhaled. “Rich, don’t make this more difficult than it is. I need to be away to get back on my feet. You won’t begrudge me that, will you?”

  He stared at her. “How can I—Joy, please just reconsider. I’ll give you all the space you need here. Just please don’t go. Let’s work it out together. We’ll do therapy—anything. You haven’t thought this through.”

  She stared at the white froth in her drink, took a sip, picked up her fork, and ate a few more bites of her tacos.

  “Joy?”

  “Yes, I have,” she said quietly. “I have thought it through.”

  A sad, resigned smile hovered on her lips.

  Roxelana

  JOY

  16

  She’d always imagined Turkey as if she were experiencing it through shimmering silk. Even as Istanbul’s airport terminal greeted her with rank cigarette smoke and the disarray of flight information in Turkish, English, French, and German announced over the sputtering loudspeaker, it all seemed to filter through a diaphanous veil, an endless brocade of civilization. Despite the stench of disinfectant lacing the air, the squeals of children, the bark of baggage handlers, there was a timeless feel to the afternoon. She could have landed in the same spot a century ago and found the same bushy-mustached men alongside women in fluid robes. Even the reek of diesel fumes from the tarmac and passengers chatting on state-of-the art cell phones couldn’t mute the resonance of Turkey’s illustrious past.

  Since her divorce three years ago, Joy considered herself “back” whenever she traveled, returning to her real home whenever she touched down on foreign soil. She came alive, got a stronger foothold on life. Maybe experiencing life in two different areas throttled her mind into high alert and out of the self-pity she sank into more often than she liked to admit. Travel jarred her out of her rut, but it was also simply the fact that everywhere else seemed infinitely more real than her current life in suburban Virginia.

  She scanned the crowd in the “Arrivals” area as though someone were waiting for her, then walked on alone as she always did in new places.

  She had specifically asked Richard to meet her in Istanbul rather than fly over together so that she could spend this bit of cherished transition time in private. Despite their divorce, they were spending the next two weeks in Istanbul together, although Richard’s plane was not due to arrive for another two hours. He had telephoned yesterday from New York and told her not to wait at the airport for him, and so now, with her passport stamped and suitcase retrieved, she changed five hundred dollars into Turkish liras and headed for the exit.

  She’d dreamed of living like this her entire life—between different cultures, time zones, and realities, never bound to any particular spot. She’d loved this sensation of floating free, especially since her first trip to Spain. Even later, the troubles that had shredded her and Richard’s married life seemed to momentarily dissipate each time they were lifted out of familiar surroundings, the alien environment sharpening and stimulating her perceptions.

  She exhaled, shoving the memories of previous vacations with Richard into the hollow of her past, and walked out of the airport into the Istanbul sun.

  After they finalized their divorce, she and Richard had spent six months totally apart, not even a phone call between them. Her idea. She couldn’t stay in touch and disconnect at the same time, and she wanted to make a clean break. No reminders. No lingering fights. When they’d met in the attorney’s office to sign the papers, however, it was obvious from the look in his eyes that Richard was not past the pain of separation, perhaps hoping that she’d change her mind and call off the whole thing. Only after those initial six months did she feel sufficiently detached herself to finally call him late one night, and even then only after several glasses of wine. She’d been disappointed to find him out at that hour, but she left a message on his answering machine.

  He called her back the next day and told her he’d been at a ballgame with a friend, a male friend, and although she didn’t ask, he volunteered that he had no significant relationships. She didn’t either, although she didn’t divulge that. After that first phone call, he was the one to call her several more times. Once he even broached the subject of their reconciling.

  She knew he was lonely. He’d never cultivated strong male friendships, relying mostly on her for their social life, but she told him she was happy. They could still see each other, but as friends.

  Although he agreed, she sensed that keeping their relationship to mere friendship would be hard for him, sensed that to him the marriage wasn’t over. In a way she was relieved because part of her was still attached to him, but she was also sad that he seemed unable to move on. Since then they’d resumed friendly, albeit infrequent, contact. On a few occasions she’d met him in New York for the day, even visited his small East Side apartment. Twice he’d driven to Virginia to see her and sightsee in Washington. Platonic visits, all. Separation was a process, she was finding out, and the road to complete uncoupling would not be as automatic as she’d hoped. Their years of companionship seemed to cling to her like weights she wasn’t able, or perhaps didn’t want to let go of.

  With a stack of mid-term papers to grade, she’d turned over the task of hotel bookings in Turkey to Richard. His choice of the Pensione in Istanbul, described as a row of renovated seventeenth-century attached houses converted into a “boutique hotel,” located around the corner from the major sights, sounded perfect. He’d remembered her preference for hotels with local ambiance. Next week they would head for the ruins of Ephesus and the seaside resort of Antalya where the sprawling Marriott and its beautiful beach awaited them. Until then, she was looking forward to a simpler, more authentic experience of Constantinople.

  The taxi driver veered off the main street and drew up to a row of quaint, blue-painted houses. Pensione was painted in yellow on a plaque next to the glass front doors.

  The driver pointed out the window and declared with a flourish, “Aya Sofia.”

  Joy looked to where he was gesturing and caught her breath. Through a line of gracefully pruned trees stood the unmistakable reddish colossus of domes and minarets, the Byzantine Hagia Sofia, once the largest Christian basilica in the world.

  In the hotel’s lobby, she was offered a glass of hot tea and some pistachio sweets while the reception clerk did her paperwork. Paintings of medieval Istanbul hung on the walls, images of languid women in silken gowns lounging under fruit trees; men in intricate robes carrying curved swords and strolling through gardens; a portly, turbaned sultan offering a doe-eyed maiden a rose.

  A young porter picked up her suitcase, escorted her to the elevator, and up to a third-floor, Victorian-looking room. He threw open the maroon curtains.

  “Aya Sofia,” he announced, echoing the taxi driver earlier, as he pointed out the window to the imposing sliver of red wall and minarets visible through the trees.

  She smiled and tipped him. His pride in the historic building—the one-time church that the Ottomans had converted to a mosque in the fifteenth century and that had become a museum with secularization in the 1930s—was as evident as the driver’s had been. Perhaps they assumed a Westerner would be most interested in a once-Christian landmark.

  The porter left, and Joy stared a moment longer at the domes and minarets before kicking off her shoes and dropping onto the wide bed, where afternoon sunlight splattered the velvet coverlet. The mahogany dresser and satin-upholstered chairs ironically conjured up a cozy English cottage, although she was in a Turkish hotel, smack dab in the midst of some of the greatest Byzantine and Islamic monuments ever built.

  Waiting for Richard. What on earth had she been thinking?

  She’d been surprised when he’d called, out of the blue, to tell her that he’d learned from a mu
tual friend that she was planning this trip.

  “Want company?” he had asked.

  “Company?” She’d assumed he was joking.

  “I thought we could travel together, like we used to.”

  She paused, wondering what had brought this on. “I’m going with a group. It’s a cultural tour. I’ll have plenty of company.”

  “A group?” He’d sounded skeptical, and she pictured his eyes twinkling in that way they did whenever he was amused. “Why not ditch the group and go with me?”

  She had laughed.

  He persisted. “It’ll be fun to discover it ourselves, and we can see the things we feel like.”

  She’d prepared herself to travel alone, but the enthusiasm in his voice was infectious, and he knew how she hated group tours. Although the sadness of their lost marriage had remained submerged in her belly, she’d never seriously contemplated going back to him; but since he seemed to finally want to be friends, there was no reason not to try for that.

  “I’ll get back to you,” she had said, imagining herself exploring the ancient alleys of Istanbul under his watchful gaze, and then pictured being cooped up with a bus full of strangers for ten days. Could being with Richard be worse than that? Despite being well aware of their past conflicting travel interests, she’d also enjoyed their camaraderie and shared curiosity in new foods and historic details of the places they’d visited. She considered his proposal for a few days, then called him back and invited him to join her.

  Now it seemed like the wackiest idea she’d ever agreed to. In place of the usual euphoria of freedom that travel brought her, there seemed to be this void sucking her into the bed, as if she could curl up and disappear into the mattress and never have to get up.

  Although part of her wished she hadn’t let him talk her into his joining her, another part needed to come to terms with their divorce, to prove to herself that their now-separate lives needn’t mean a total end to their past, parts of which were good. She assumed he still wasn’t dating anybody, since nothing was impeding his coming with her. When he asked whether to book two separate rooms at the hotels, she’d been shocked at his suggestion that they might share one. She calmly declined and left it at that, although she couldn’t help wondering what exactly each of them was expecting from this reunion.