He didn’t look up. “What about the rock climber?”
She smiled, sure that he’d return to this sooner or later. She was tempted to hurl something at him about the guy being a fabulous lover. Or maybe she’d tell him she’d had several lovers, give him a taste of his own medicine; but to her surprise, she wasn’t inspired to concoct any lies, juicy or otherwise.
“He was handsome,” she said, still wanting him to suffer a little, but then she started to chuckle at the sad truth of it all, the part that still disappointed her. “And boring.”
Richard looked up, relief coating his brow.
“You?” she asked. “Anybody—”
“Nah,” he said, shaking his head, “not since us.”
She said nothing but was amazed by the weight in her own chest lifting at his response.
“But something was wrong,” she said, folding her napkin, unable to stop herself. “For us.”
He cleared his throat. “I was gone too much.”
“You were too rigid.”
He looked surprised. “I tried to be accommodating.”
“Not with me. Maybe you were with that—with whoever she was.”
He looked away. “That was a passing thing.”
“Passing thing? Is that how you still see it, Rich?” She ironed the crease of the folded napkin with her palm to control herself. She didn’t want to rehash any of this, but why not let him know how much he’d hurt her, hurt them both, by his twisted, narcissistic behavior?
“Maybe you’d like to reimburse me for my year-plus of therapy,” she said under her breath.
His brow furrowed. “I didn’t mean it that way.”
“How did you mean it? Did you think things could ever be the same between us?” Before he could answer, she put up her hands to stop him. She didn’t want his answer. At that point, anything could have ignited the tinderbox of their lives. They both knew his cheating was only the final blow.
“Look, I made a mistake,” Richard said, lowering his voice. “I feel terrible about it. You know that.”
“I don’t know it.”
“Joy—”
“You know how many times I tried to convince myself that you were just a nice guy who strayed? I know you were affected by Stephen’s death and how I shut you out, I admit that, but you were a snake, Richard. You just went your own way. I didn’t even know my own husband. How stupid could I have been?”
“Joy—”
She pushed her plate away and forced herself to smile. “Anyway, it’s done. We’re on vacation in Turkey, here to have fun.”
“Yes,” he said. “So, let’s drop it and try to enjoy this.”
She thought of how Roxelana would have handled a rival for her husband’s affection. The sultana would have had the woman summarily strangled by one of the palace’s notorious deaf-mute assassins. The corpse would have been flung into the river and nothing more would have been said about it.
“Indeed,” Joy said, relishing the vision of her rival having a silk cord snapped round her neck, her imagined gasps as she sucked on the last ounce of precious air, her skin turning ashen. For, oddly enough, she had remembered the woman after Richard confessed to the affair: striking black curls and eyebrows, pert nose and chin. They’d been at some function in the city, and the woman had come up to them—could Richard have invited her?—smiling and pretty, and quite young. Joy had soon forgotten about her and their friendly exchange that evening until after Richard brought her up again months later in that miserable confession. It had to have been her. Joy had sensed something about the woman at the time, maybe in her over-eager friendliness, but she couldn’t pinpoint what had bothered her and certainly hadn’t suspected she had any link to Richard. Sipping her beer, Joy forced the pleasurable image of the assassin’s cord around the woman’s throat to recede.
Apparently, he’d lost touch with her when she left the country with another man. Richard had insisted that the fling was over and that it would never happen again.
But if he’d forgotten the woman, it was only the beginning of the obsession for Joy. For months she’d fixated on her—or rather, on the woman and Richard together. She could barely look at Richard without the searing image of him making love to someone else blazing before her, someone else’s naked body in his arms.
As painful as it was, she couldn’t help replaying the imagined, lurid scenes in her head, simultaneously hooked and sickened, unable to turn them off and yet hating every second of the reel playing before her eyes. She didn’t want to know, and yet she tortured herself with questions. Why had he sought an affair to begin with? Was the woman, other than the fact that she was younger, that much prettier, smarter, better at sex? Had she been the one to tempt him or vice-versa? Once she even dared ask Richard what it felt like to make love to her, but he’d refused to talk about it.
“Did you ever consider leaving me for her, Rich?” she asked.
He sighed as though he’d been preparing himself for this. “No, I didn’t.” His shifting eyes told her he was either lying or else trying to spare her feelings. She wondered, a little meanly, whether he was contemplating heading for the airport.
“You could have started something new. Maybe she was more fertile—”
“No,” he said flatly.
“I found a postcard from her before our divorce. I was sure you’d follow her.”
The postcard had been stashed in his desk. There had been no return address, and it had said that she was staying in Africa. The card had rattled Joy, thinking of the woman marooned far away and daring to contact Richard so openly. She wondered at the time whether Richard would mention the card, but he never had and neither had she.
“No, I wouldn’t have left, Joy. And I didn’t.”
“Why not?”
He sighed again. “I didn’t want to leave you, honey. I loved you.”
Honey? Did he intentionally say it, or was it out of some old habit? She was not sure how she felt about being referred to as “honey.”
“Well, you were obviously ready to risk losing me when you got into it.”
“I never imagined losing you. I wasn’t going to go that far.”
“How thoughtful,” she almost sneered.
His face looked drained. He reached out and gently placed his hand on hers. “It was a mistake, Joy. I can’t change what I did, much as I’d like to. Can we try to put this behind us? At least for now? Please?”
She took a deep breath. “You’re right,” she said, sliding her hand out from under his.
With the time that had passed and the fact that she’d agreed to travel with him, she knew she shouldn’t be kicking his butt so hard. She’d promised herself that she wouldn’t bring up the past, but she obviously hadn’t been thinking realistically. Although at this point she had no idea how to channel her feelings into a more constructive conversation, she reminded herself again that it hadn’t only been the other woman. It was also her and Richard’s inability to match up their ragged edges and sew up the rent in their life together.
They finished their meal talking about where they’d go the following day, whether to start out with the Hagia Sofia and the mosques or explore the bazaar. She couldn’t wait to shop in the exotic, renowned market, but they decided on the sanctuaries for their first day.
As they walked the few blocks back to their hotel, the street humming with bustling shoppers and people strolling, she began to feel more upbeat. When he walked her to her room, she touched his arm. “Sorry about dinner, Rich. Old wounds. Jetlag. But I’m glad you’re here.”
She waited for him to suggest that he come inside for a few minutes or that she go down to his room, maybe order drinks in the hotel’s bar downstairs—some sign that he wanted to be with her for a while longer. She needed some sort of reassurance that they could make it through the next two weeks without driving each other insane by unwittingly drawing each other back to the past, but he only said, “Meet you at nine for breakfast?”
Must
ering a smile, she watched him walk away down the hall.
She sat on the crisp bed sheet that had been turned down by housekeeping, the two pillows fluffed invitingly, a small chocolate placed on each; but she suddenly felt less like sleeping than like having a glass of wine. Only there was no mini-bar in the room and no room service. A big disadvantage, she had to admit, of boutique hotels that didn’t cater to travelers who expected amenities.
She opened the window and peeked down into the alley. Except for the noise from a few stray cats, it was quiet, and it was still warm out. She wondered whether Richard had gone to sleep or whether he was fretting about the lack of air conditioning and TV. Since it wasn’t yet ten o’clock, she considered going down to his room to see if he felt like a nightcap. He didn’t used to have qualms about getting dressed and fetching snacks from the hotel bar if there wasn’t one in the room, one of the perks of traveling with him.
She decided against it. It was safer to end the night on the neutral tone they’d just parted on than to risk reopening their history. She would have ventured to the hotel bar herself, as she often did when traveling alone, but in glancing through the hotel directory she saw there was no bar, and the restaurant served only breakfast. So much for a nightcap.
She turned on the ceiling fan and closed the window to shut out the sounds of the cats, which started to remind her of her own Ophelia, now dead. She’d lasted ten months after the divorce. Joy had grieved her death as if she’d lost another child, those old memories rising again like demons. She’d wondered whether the cat had really died of grief, never having adjusted to the move to Virginia, or maybe from missing Richard, although he’d never interacted with her much.
Changing her mind, Joy reopened the window. She needed to stay connected to the tangible activity outside to avoid being pulled into some miserable dream like the one this afternoon, being wheeled around by Richard and feeling out of control.
When she first moved to Virginia, she’d found the colonial brick homes and open spaces of her new countryside surroundings endearing. There was a freshness to the rolling terrain that was vastly different from the older, lived-in look of the New York boroughs and suburbs. Although she missed New York, she’d found enough to do in the Washington area to distract her from both Manhattan and Richard.
Her first Virginia winter was so mild that she barely wore her coat, and that in itself seemed to signal a new beginning. She was renting a small townhouse not far from the school where she taught and didn’t even have to shovel the short driveway the one time it snowed. The snow seemed to melt within hours in Virginia, not pile up into the glacial, soiled peaks it did in New York where it stayed until March. The southern warmth brought an early spring, with dogwood and cherry blossoms busting out of pale-green branches like pink-and-white popcorn. The long freezing winters of New York were almost a forgotten part of someone else’s life.
She had a short drive to work rather than a train commute each morning, and even when she drove into Washington, she hugged her purse less and walked less quickly than she ever had in Manhattan. The absence of frantic, rushing crowds eased her nerves and enabled her to pause and enjoy the open skyline of the city with its sparkly turquoise skies.
The second year was different, however. Virginians seemed ruder, the winter colder. She began to feel nostalgic for the crisp Park Avenue buildings, the Madison Avenue galleries, and the eateries on every corner, especially her favorite deli on 47th Street. The Washington streets were as devoid of food as if there were a famine. This third year, oddly enough, she’d even begun to miss her marriage.
She felt adrift, not uncomfortable alone, but not entirely at home with only her work. She enjoyed her freedom and yet longed to feel settled. She seemed to be at a crossroads. Perhaps this was what had drawn her to Turkey, this historic intersection crisscrossed through millennia by Greeks, Byzantines, Central Asians; this place that awkwardly bridged both Europe and Asia and wanted to be both. A place conflicted, like her.
Staring out at the glittering lights of Hagia Sofia, she finally drifted off.
18
Joy leaned against the outer stone wall of the Topkapi Palace gardens overlooking the Bosphorus Strait. The aqua water lapped thirstily against the marble, exhaling its heady sea scent.
It was their second full day in Istanbul, and everything absorbed the azure of the sky: the stone ramparts along the river, the shimmering water. She imagined those hapless harem women of the past who, if suspected of deceiving the sultan, were said to have been sewn into sacks and hurled into this same beautiful waterway in the middle of the night.
They’d just finished the first half of their palace tour, viewing the emerald and ruby-encrusted scabbards of the sultans’ swords and the royal jewels that dazzled like lasers. Joy was equally impressed by the massive cauldrons of the kitchens, huge tubs that could have cooked a dozen sheep at once, along with the blue-and-white Ming china collection that shone as if it had just been washed and tucked back into the cabinets. Five hundred years ago, these kitchens had purportedly fed ten thousand people at the festival of the circumcision of Suleyman the Magnificent’s two sons, the banquet menu apparently so tantalizing that the exact recipes used were still preserved in the museum.
After lunch they were due to view the harem, those legendary living quarters of the sultans, their families, and legions of female slaves.
She and Richard crossed the courtyard to the palace riverside cafe, where they ordered the signature Imam Bayildi, eggplant simmered in tomatoes and onions, and two glasses of icy raki, the Turkish anisette liqueur.
“It was Roxelana who convinced Suleyman to move the harem from the separate women’s building into this Topkapi complex,” Joy said. “Before her, all women and children lived apart from the sultan in the Old Palace. When Roxelana had Suleyman change this tradition, his subjects accused her of bewitching him.”
“Sounds like she did,” Richard said, pouring the customary vial of water into their glasses of raki to make the liquor cloudy and milder than if simply sipped over ice.
Although Roxelana had been an extraordinarily strong-willed temptress, Joy couldn’t help feeling pity for her, along with the other beautiful women chosen from across the empire as gifts for the sultan, for having to waste their lives in this “gilded cage,” as it was known, with no other ambition than to gain and retain their master’s affection. The faded beauty of the Topkapi gardens further amplified the sense of the stifled lives led here by the pampered, conniving slave women and their royal children. Would Roxelana, she wondered, have attained such prominence had she, like Joy, been unable to bear children?
“You had to be a slave woman’s son to become sultan,” she said. “Ironically, most of the slaves were Christians from Eastern Europe and Russia, which seems to have made the royal family mostly non-Turkish after a few generations.”
“It makes sense,” Richard said. “Slaves were cut off from their origins. Without competing local noble families, the Ottomans totally centralized their power.”
She stared at the river. Richard had always understood the rules of power. It reminded her of how he often had to have the last word in an argument, as if to maintain his position in their relationship.
“Concubines fought to propel their own sons, at the expense of all their half-brothers, to accede their father’s throne,” she said.
He nodded. “It brought the dynasty down in the end. Isolation in the harem eventually drove all the offspring nuts. Down the line, the poor bastards got weaker and less exposed to the outside realities and more vulnerable to being controlled by savvier political forces.”
Joy imagined a mob of crazy little princes stampeding down the elegant corridors.
“Whenever the palace women used to come out to the gardens, any man found on the premises was instantly killed by the royal gardeners,” she said.
Richard whistled. “Did they use hoes or scimitars?”
She rolled her eyes, a smile escaping. “
Silk cords around the neck.” Although in the past she would have found his glibness annoying, now it somewhat lightened the horror of this detail.
Lunch arrived, and the sweetness of the eggplant drizzled with olive oil, raisins, and pine nuts perked up her taste buds. Imam Bayildi. “The cleric swooned.” She closed her eyes, empathizing with that long-ago cleric said to have fainted over this dish, giving it the well-deserved name.
The sun in the breezy cafe felt good. Yesterday had been over-cast and drizzly, and they’d escaped the moody skies by touring Istanbul’s three main mosques: the Hagia Sofia, the Sultanahmet, and the Suleymaniya.
The Suleymaniya, considered Istanbul’s greatest mosque, had been designed for Suleyman by the famed architect, Sinan. With its gray marble and granite colonnades, it was the most forbidding of the three from the outside, but Joy had found a tender poignancy to the placement of the domed mausoleums of Suleyman and Roxelana side by side in the garden, Suleyman’s larger one and Roxelana’s smaller one. Even in death, the lovers seemed to be straining toward each other.
“You weren’t exactly bowled over by the Hagia Sofia,” Richard said now.
“It’s a little schizophrenic,” she said, not adding that this aspect of the sanctuary reminded her of their current relationship.
Though clearly a masterpiece, the Hagia Sofia seemed to her to have lost its essence in its transformation from cathedral to mosque, as though trying too hard to announce its conversion. Although the name of Allah was prominently displayed in all corners in large gold letters, the naves and Byzantine mosaics were stark reminders of the building’s Christian past.
By contrast, the Sultanahmet, the Blue Mosque, had a deeply Eastern feel to it, the ethereal stained-glass windows organically blending into the tranquil blue mosaics of the walls. Even its chandeliers, suspended like strands of pearls above the kneeling worshipers, seemed to effortlessly lift the murmured prayers into the sky.
“Kemal Ataturk had the right idea by westernizing this place,” Richard said. “It would have taken centuries to push Turkey forward if he hadn’t dragged it out of the Middle Ages after the First World War.”
A Marriage in Four Seasons Page 14