A Marriage in Four Seasons

by Kathryn Abdul-baki

  At the last minute, she had packed the half-full container of anxiety pills she hadn’t needed in a year. Just in case.

  She lifted her duffel bag onto the bed and took out two books, a friend’s dog-eared guidebook and Roxelana, a biography of the beautiful Russian slave girl who had become the consort of the renowned sixteenth-century Turkish sultan, Suleyman the Magnificent.

  She read a few pages of the biography, to the part where the scheming Roxelana conspired to kill her husband’s beloved grand vizier; then, losing track of the same paragraph for the third time, she rested the book on her chest, closed her eyes, and surrendered to the pull of the soft pillow. She had hardly slept on the nine-hour flight over, and the last thing she wanted was to start off the trip jet-lagged and irritable.

  17

  “Madam!” A man’s voice pierced her dream.

  Startled awake, she leaped off the bed and opened the door. It was the hotel porter. Behind him stood a tall figure.

  “Hey,” Richard said, grinning above the porter’s head.

  “Hey,” she answered, still half asleep.

  “Can we come in?” Richard asked, as if this were the most natural thing in the world.

  She moved aside, and Richard stepped around the porter and into her room. Despite having just awakened from a troubling dream—of Richard, no less—she was almost glad to see him and gave him an affectionate hug.

  “You’re looking good,” he said jovially once the porter had left.

  She smoothed her hair. “I fell asleep. What time is it?”

  “Almost six. We got in early.”

  “Good flight?”

  “I slept,” he said. Then he added, “They gave me a room on the floor below, but they’re fixing the shower, so they wanted me to wait downstairs. I told them I could come up and see you, but they insisted on sending someone along to make sure you knew me. I thought you might have told them that—you know, you know me.” Despite his smile, she sensed his disappointment that she hadn’t informed the concierge of their relationship beforehand.

  Richard looked surprisingly youthful and invigorated, his hair neatly trimmed and the lines around his eyes crinkling with enthusiasm. He’d also obviously lost weight since she’d last seen him, his face and chest leaner. Although he’d always claimed not to relish traveling, whenever he’d gone on overseas business trips, he returned looking energized. She used to joke that only he and James Bond could get off a ten-hour flight looking so unruffled.

  He walked over to the window where the Hagia Sofia gleamed sienna in the late afternoon light. He gave a slight whistle. “What’s that?”

  She smiled. “The Hagia Sofia.” It was now her turn to say this.

  He stared at it, nodding, then turned to her. “So,” he said, “how does it feel to finally be here?”

  “It feels great,” she lied. Although she had perked up from her earlier low mood, grains of unease still churned in her stomach.

  “This city’s huge,” Richard said.

  “And this location is good. You chose well, Rich.”

  “I hope so,” he said, looking up at the ceiling fan. “They don’t have air-conditioning.”

  She glanced at the fan. She hadn’t noticed the lack of air conditioning. “It’s May. It shouldn’t get too hot.”

  Richard slid off his jacket. “I should have asked. We can change hotels if it gets too bad.”

  She chuckled. “Let’s not start that.”

  He looked skeptical as he unbuttoned the top of his shirt. “The things you take for granted.”

  “Here,” she said, twisting the antique iron handle on the window and pushing open the glass panes. It was warmer than she’d expected in spring, but there was a breeze. “The night will be cooler, and these are big windows,” she said cheerfully, although she was already disheartened by his misgivings. In the past, accommodations hadn’t bothered him as much as they did her. She used to be the finicky one.

  “It’ll be okay,” he said, glancing back out the window and then returning his gaze to her. “It’s great to see you, Joy.”

  “Same here,” she said, trying to convince herself that, indeed, she was still happy to see him. “You must be tired. Do you need to rest?”

  “Hell, no,” he said. “I’ve been sitting all day. Let’s go out and investigate.”

  Surprised by this atypical show of sightseeing bravado, she smiled, pulling her sneakers out of the suitcase.

  He stood and waited while she put them on, seeming at a loss as to whether to sit on the chair or the bed or to be more deferential and stand. He hadn’t yet remarked about the lack of a television in the room.

  He picked up the book she was reading. She expected him to ask why she still carted books across the ocean in her suitcase when it was just as easy to look things up on her phone or iPad. Ever the pragmatist, always moving on to the newest gadget to simplify his life, he never understood her tactile and visual preference for old-fashioned paper.

  “Roxelana?” he asked.

  She tied her laces. “Suleyman the Magnificent’s wife.”

  “Sounds familiar,” he said.

  “She was a Russian slave girl who married the sultan.”

  “It’s a porno movie,” he said, as though he hadn’t heard her.

  “What?”

  “I pass the billboard on my way to work: Roxelana XXX.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Well, she was pretty enterprising. Ottoman sultans never had just one wife before Suleyman.”

  “Oh?”

  “They just took harem girls who bore them sons. But Roxelana wasn’t satisfied with being a mere concubine and insisted on becoming the official wife and mother of the heir.”

  Richard leafed through the book.

  “She was ruthless,” she went on. “Anyone who opposed her was eliminated. Even her own son, the one who should have inherited the throne, was removed. She had her favorite alcoholic son, ‘Selim the Sot,’ succeed his father instead.”

  “All that in here?” he said, looking impressed as he closed the slim volume.

  She nodded and stood.

  “Let’s go.”

  “Let’s check on my room first,” he said.

  They walked down one flight to his room. The door had been left ajar, his suitcase placed on the bench at the foot of the bed. His room was decorated differently from hers. In one corner stood a chair and a lamp with yellow crystal beads dangling from the shade. There was only a single bed, however. A bachelor pad.

  “It’ll do,” Richard said, looking less than content as he glanced up at the ceiling fan. “No TV?” he added.

  “No TV,” she repeated, overcoming an urge to smile. And no remote, she thought.

  Walking beside Richard down the tree-lined street beyond the hotel felt natural. She hated to admit that she was comfortable in his presence, able to talk and joke as if they’d just picked up where they left off three years ago. Minus the misery of those final few months.

  Although the years apart had been peaceful for her—no pent-up fuming—she had often missed the familiarity of being married, the Sunday omelets, his making her coffee in the mornings, his reading up on politics and then recounting it back to her like a bedtime story. She missed the feeling that there was someone there for her no matter what. But then the reality of his affair would come crashing around her and flood out all the positive memories.

  “Oh, gosh, look!” she said suddenly, interrupting her own thoughts.

  The Hagia Sofia was looming above them, immense lead-colored domes and red walls surrounded by four needle-like minarets poking at the evening sky. Despite its Christian origins, the minarets had converted the mammoth structure into a thoroughly Islamic sanctuary.

  “The world’s largest church for a thousand years. It was turned into a mosque in the fifteenth century,” she said.

  Richard stared up, looking impressed. “Are we on the European side or the Asian side?” he asked, scrutinizing his map.

 
; “European.”

  He looked surprised. “The most famous Islamic landmarks are in Europe?”

  “Ottoman rule extended to both continents. It’s the Sultanahmet District, but it’s Europe.” She pointed toward the six minarets of another large mosque farther away and highlighted against the rosy sky. “That must be the Blue Mosque.”

  “You’ve really studied up on this,” he said.

  “I’ve been planning this trip for a while.”

  Before he could say anything, a delectable whiff of smoke permeated the air.

  Richard inhaled, an eager grin spreading across his face. “Shish kebab?”

  She breathed it in, too, amazed by how quickly history and sublime architecture had been eclipsed by the intoxicating lure of food assailing them from an outdoor restaurant.

  “Two doner kebabs and two Turkish beers,” Richard told the waiter once they’d been seated in the restaurant’s garden and had perused the menu. They had a view of the Hagia Sofia on one side, the reddish walls now deepening to russet in the sunset. Strings of white lights, like a regiment of fireflies, meandered through the branches of the small trees neatly planted around them.

  “Nice flowers,” Richard said of the white roses placed on their table. His recent interest in gardening had been apparent from the blooming pots on his Manhattan balcony during her last visit to his New York apartment.

  She sniffed the fragrant blooms. “Turks love flowers. They call roses the ‘sweat of the Prophet.’ Even tulips were developed here.”

  “Not in Holland?”

  “They were introduced to Holland years later. They were brought here first as wildflowers from Central Asia by the Ottomans. They’re painted on all the tiles.”

  Richard listened intently, still looking relaxed despite the long trip. Bachelorhood seemed to agree with him, and, although he’d never mentioned it, she couldn’t help wondering again whether he was dating anyone regularly. She’d be surprised if he didn’t occasionally go out with women.

  Forcing herself back to the present, she said, “There was a Sultan Ahmet who loved flowers so much that his reign was known as the ‘tulip era.’”

  He smiled. “Yeah?” Then, he cleared his throat. “As a matter of fact,” he said, his tone shifting, “I’m grateful you agreed to my coming with you, Joy.”

  She shrugged. “We once talked about coming here.”

  “But you had your mind set on coming alone.”

  “I’ll be going other places alone.”

  He nodded, looking as though this realization saddened him.

  The tables around them were filling with customers and their children. Although the sun had already set, people seemed to be ordering tea and ice cream rather than dinner.

  Her stomach rumbled. “I didn’t eat much on the plane, so I could enjoy my first Turkish meal here. Remember my attempts at rolled grape leaves?”

  “They were good.”

  She made a face. “They were horrid. You just forgot.”

  “I didn’t forget. You’re a wonderful cook.”

  “You didn’t used to think so.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Yes, I did.”

  She chuckled at what had once been vexing spats. “I used to get so angry whenever you’d say, ‘That isn’t the way my mother did it.’”

  “Well, that was back in the beginning,” he said. “One of our first fights.”

  “We had so many first fights—and seconds and thirds.”

  “We don’t fight now,” he said, looking hopeful.

  She couldn’t help laughing. “There are two hundred miles between us.”

  Before he could answer, their waiter appeared with the smoking skewers of lamb on frothy white rice.

  She inhaled, then picked up her fork and sampled the meat. A delectable jumble of garlic and allspice melded in her mouth.

  After a few bites she said, “I dreamt about you this afternoon.”

  Richard looked up from his food. “Something sexy?”

  She glanced at him, impatient. “Not every dream involves sex. You were pushing me down a bumpy road in a wheelbarrow. Puerto Vallarta, I think.”

  “A wheelbarrow?” He glanced upward as if trying to recall. “Didn’t we rent a moped there?”

  “It was scary. I felt like we were out of control, going to be lost.”

  He stopped eating. “But I wasn’t lost, honey. I didn’t want us to separate. I wanted us to stay together. Your dream proves that.”

  She stared at him. He didn’t seem to get it, to comprehend the kind of pain he’d inflicted on her.

  “I know,” he mumbled sheepishly. “I screwed up.”

  There was an awkward silence, and she felt her neck grow hot. They resumed eating.

  “God, this is delicious, isn’t it?” he blurted out, as if desperately looking for common ground.

  Yes, it was she who had pushed for the divorce. He had screwed up. Big time.

  Those years hadn’t been easy. Her heart caught: Stephen. A dream come true, then obliterated. She still felt that gut-numbing blow whenever she thought of losing the baby. Nothing seemed to make sense in those moments. How could a rational person ever accept the ruthless taking of such a joyously anticipated child? There had been no way to reasonably explain any of it.

  They’d tried for another baby, their anticipations dashed monthly and turned to disappointments until she was finally convinced it was useless.

  “Good, huh?” Richard said now, seeming to sense her sinking mood, his face pleading with her to get back on track.

  “Yes,” she agreed, somewhat soothed by the soft texture of the lamb and its delicate, unusual spicing. “Really good.”

  She couldn’t help drifting back to that rocky year, her uterus still swollen and both of them mourning their lost child.

  Then she’d learned of Richard’s infidelity. Infidelity. The word rolled in her mouth like a marble she wanted to spit out. How obscene to describe plain old cheating in such elegant terms.

  She pushed around the rice on her plate as she pushed around the shards of anger in her mind. She saw Richard take a bite, but he was staring into his plate as he chewed, perhaps as lost in the past as she was.

  Even before Richard’s cheating, however, she’d found it difficult to reorient her relationship to him once the prospect of motherhood was gone. She’d hoped, naively, that a child would fix things for them. A family had been such a cornerstone of her initial attraction to Richard that facing life without a child to bind them to each other had changed the premise of their marriage. It had seemed almost crucial that they reinvent their relationship to move into this new, childless blueprint, and they might have eventually succeeded had it not been for . . .

  Bastard! How could he have—and after the death of the baby?

  She tried to keep her mind on the fluffiness of the rice and the rich seasoning of the lamb, then on the melting pinks and purples of the sunset behind the Hagia Sofia, but the hostility kept creeping in.

  Without that other woman, there might have been something of their life together to salvage. She had defined the end.

  Once they were divorced, Joy could hardly believe it. She and Richard—their marriage—over. She had swung between outrage and grief, one moment feeling she’d been flung into a scorching flame and the next like she was clawing herself out of some frozen underground cave.

  She lied to friends, telling them the separation was amicable. Those who stayed in touch after she moved away were solicitous and caring, the same friends who rallied to support her in the wake of the lost baby and—those few who knew of it—of Richard’s straying. Joy was clearly the wronged one, in their view, and they were quick to stand by her while duly expressing hopes for a reconciliation. She was touched by their loyalty but couldn’t console herself with it. There wasn’t an easy verdict in her and Richard’s case. Both had come up short. Padlocked into her sorrow after the baby, she’d pushed him away, left no room for him, and he had retaliated with fru
stration and, finally . . . Bastard!

  She had been distant, yes, but they had each catapulted the other over the brink.

  The stars were now filling the cobalt sky, and the rest of the restaurant’s outdoor tables were taken. A young man at the table next to theirs was bouncing a toddler on his knee, popping bits of spongy Turkish bread into the child’s mouth. Across from the man, his young wife nursed an infant beneath a large floral head scarf. The couple took turns cooing to the giggling toddler.

  “Been going out any?” Richard asked. “Dating?”

  “Some,” she replied, trying to sound offhand. She had suspected this would eventually come up, but she was surprised that it had so soon. They’d never openly asked each other about other relationships.

  “Anyone in particular?” He looked down at his food as though to dodge her response.

  She paused. “Last summer I spent time in California with a guy I met rock climbing.”

  He looked up. “Rock climbing?”

  “Yep.” She wasn’t sure whether he was more surprised by the news of her rock climbing or by the mention of a man in her life.

  He looked intrigued. “I didn’t know you were into that.”

  She wondered if he even heard the part about her companion. “I was working on my vertigo. It killed my arms and legs the first few times, but I got the hang of it. It’s never too late to start over.” She hoped he would get her drift. It was never too late to start over with another man.

  “Sounds challenging.”

  “It was.”

  “Did it work? For the vertigo?”

  “It helped. And the guy,” she added, “helped even more.”

  He went back to his food, again avoiding her eyes.

  She was surprised, herself, by the vindictiveness of her response.

  “I joined a gym and do some horseback riding,” she continued. “I have my work and new friends.”