She continued to the bathroom, still smelling his tangy cologne on her skin. She briefly wondered what would have happened had she played along with him just then. She felt her stomach tingle. Would she have been aroused, as she’d clearly been last night? What had last night been about, anyway? Why hadn’t she held on to that moment longer?
“Shit!” she muttered, no longer in the mood for sightseeing. Maybe they should have just hopped into bed and found out what this was all about, followed that spark to see where it led.
She slipped off her nightgown and gazed at herself in the full-length bathroom mirror. The overhead light sliced sharply into her right thigh and shoulder, changing her into a distorted Picasso nude. She stared at her breasts, still nicely rounded; and turning, she took in her buttocks and small waist. She’d gained a few pounds, but she didn’t mind. She turned back full circle and glanced at the small, still-visible C-section scar above her pubic hairline. She’d always treasured it. It was all she had left of Stephan and her one pregnancy. She stepped into the tub and under the hot shower to wash away the sudden onset of trenchant sadness.
One of the last residences of the Ottoman sultans, the nineteenth-century Dolmabahce glittered along the Bosphorus like an immense alabaster wedding cake. It was all that the Topkapi was not, lavishly maintained with expansive, vibrant carpets and furniture. It looked every inch like a baroque French palace.
“Those must be the largest stalactites ever commissioned,” Richard said, pointing to the Baccarat chandeliers stretching across the ceiling of the vast throne room. “The crystal factories of Europe must have all but gone to war over the opportunity to illuminate this place.”
“Pretty amazing,” she agreed, although she found herself floating back to his arms cuddling her in the room earlier. Richard seemed absorbed by the brilliant crystal before them now, rather than the nearly romantic moment they’d had.
When she did turn her attention to the setting, she couldn’t help feeling somewhat dismayed by all the fine Italian and Russian paintings and Rococo furniture before them. Despite the palace’s gorgeously preserved opulence, or perhaps because of it, she found it blatantly devoid of the magic of the desolate, haunting, older palace.
“It doesn’t seem very Turkish,” she said as they descended the outside steps facing the river. “I prefer the Topkapi.”
“That’s because you like old things,” he said with a smile. “This was only built in the 1800s.”
Clearly, Richard related better to this newer, more European-style palace, elaborately restored to its former glory, than he had to the starker, more Eastern Topkapi. He was fascinated by this carefully furnished harem, the eight-foot long bed of the towering Sultan Abdul-Aziz, the special room for the sultanas in labor, the separate one for them to give birth, and a particularly well-appointed bedroom with a silken blue bedspread and canopy, where each newly circumcised prince slept. Yet, to her, these rooms were not half as evocative as the empty and eloquent chambers of the Topkapi.
Richard’s mind always shot for the practical, she reminded herself. It was what he’d been trained to do and why he was successful in the world of finance. To Joy, the older palace’s unfurnished rooms were far more evocative, freeing her mind to fill in the phantom spaces.
Emptied, the chambers had easily conjured up the secluded women and their eunuch guardians, the “cage” where the sultan’s young brothers were sequestered away from the rest of the palace lest they try to overthrow their older brother, the grounds where the Christian slave boys trained to become future Janissary cavalrymen. Even the bejeweled Roxelana had seemed to glide alongside them down the Topkapi’s corridors, resplendent in her power despite her former slave status.
It had been precisely the absence of concrete evidence in the Topkapi that Joy had found so inspiring, like a blank page on which to write history, or even the future. Her own future.
As they watched the river slosh against the Dolmabahce’s garden walls, enjoying the sunshine and fresh breeze, she said, “This entire empire was ruled by slaves. Palace women and Janissaries.”
“Our own government’s ruled by slaves posing as bureaucrats. Only they aren’t strangled when they make mistakes, like the Turks were. We taxpayers are.”
She shook her head, smiling. “Nothing’s ever the same once you’ve regurgitated it, Rich.”
He looked pleased to have amused her. “It’s simple. This was a court run on rigid codes. When the codes were discarded by so-called reformers, the entire structure collapsed.”
“You’ve read up a lot on Ottoman history,” she said.
“I’ve always liked military history. The Ottomans were military geniuses.”
Joy realized that there was still much about Richard she didn’t know. For an instant, this thought reminded her of his betrayal and how he had so thoroughly hidden his affair from her. But it also reminded her of good things. Richard’s knowledge of the tangible world had always fascinated her. It had made her feel safe at the beginning of their relationship when much of life was still in flux for her. She was surprised to feel a giddy wave of desire surge through her again, as she had earlier in the hotel room.
“Rich?” She was about to suggest they go find a quiet place to just sit and talk and get to know each other all over again.
“Yes?”
She was suddenly self-conscious. He had suggested being a couple again and she had rejected it, and he had suggested sex and she had rejected that. She couldn’t help worrying where this was going, where she was being swept, who might get hurt and how much. Yet it had been a long time since she’d felt this overwhelmingly drawn to Richard, and she wanted to find out how he really felt about her, why he kept hinting that he was still in love with her, and whether he truly believed they could start over.
“Are you tired?” she asked, surprised that all these thoughts came out as this clumsy question.
He looked at her. “Are you?”
“I think I’d like to go back . . .” she started, then stopped. “This morning, in my bedroom, I felt you wanted to say something, like you had something specific on your mind.”
He seemed about to say something when a bellowing horn blasted. They turned toward the sound. A fearsome-looking contingent of soldiers dressed in ceremonial medieval Ottoman uniforms with glinting sabers, pantaloons, and tasseled helmets was marching down the walkway toward them. Their menacing stance, framed by the effeminate Beaux Arts pink gates of the palace, was almost comical. She moved back toward the gardens for a better view, hoisting her camera to take pictures of the flamboyant headdresses and swords as other onlookers gathered to watch the spectacle. The performance lasted a good five minutes.
When it was over, she looked around for Richard and found him off to the side, talking with two men dressed in jeans and black T-shirts. One of them, his head somewhat too big for his neck and shoulders, was handing Richard a card.
“Very beautiful, and an excellent price,” she overheard the large-headed man say as she came up to them. The other man, bald and older, was nodding.
Richard looked intrigued. “We hadn’t planned—”
“Best prices in Istanbul,” the large-headed man was saying. “Shipped straight to America.”
Richard turned to her. “Want to look at carpets?”
“Now?”
“He says they have a warehouse.”
“Straight from factory,” the older bald man said, glancing at Joy, his eyes lingering on her hair. His gaze seemed overly penetrating, almost insolent.
Richard turned back to them. “Better prices than in the bazaar?”
“Bazaar?” The younger, large-headed man’s face contorted at the idea of buying a rug in the famed market. He dragged his finger across his throat and the older man smiled ruefully. “Bazaar,” the younger man repeated and redrew his finger against his throat with emphasis.
“That bad?” Richard said, looking amused.
“They cheat you in bazaar,” the younger m
an said solemnly. “Not good quality also.”
Richard led Joy a few steps away from them. “Do you want to go to their warehouse?”
“But we were going shopping in the bazaar together,” she reminded him.
“It might be good to check out their prices first. Then we can go to the bazaar and compare.”
She stared at him. “I don’t want to spend my afternoon with strangers,” she whispered, “or be pressured to buy anything.”
He glanced at the men, then back at her. “These guys sell wholesale. Here’s their card.”
She reluctantly looked at the business card encrusted with gold letters, trying not to show her disappointment at Richard’s willingness to forego exploring the exotic bazaar with her in favor of a trip to a warehouse in the company of some hard-selling carpet dealers. The card didn’t prove they were reputable vendors. Her thoughts flew back to Spain, to Richard’s nervousness whenever he spotted a gypsy, his suspicion that there was a con artist on every corner. She remembered the mysterious young man in Granada and her missing bracelet.
“I’m not going anywhere with them,” she said. “We’d planned to shop alone.”
He hesitated a moment, then said, “Okay. I’ll see you back at the hotel.”
She looked at him. “I didn’t mean you should go with them. We have no idea who these men are.”
He smiled. “Relax, Joy. This isn’t New York. They’re only businessmen.”
“Or crooks,” she whispered. “You can’t go. It’s the stupidest thing I ever heard.”
Richard looked puzzled. “What are you afraid of, Joy? You used to like adventures, remember? Just wait for me at the hotel. I’ll take a quick look and then we can go to the bazaar.”
She stared at him, genuinely nervous. He hadn’t always been so trusting. “What if something happens to you?”
“Nothing’s going to happen, Joy. Take a taxi back to the hotel and I’ll see you later.”
“Rich,” she said, her voice catching, “what on earth are you trying to prove?”
He gazed at her a moment. “Maybe that I can enjoy life?”
He turned away before she could answer. They weren’t married now, so apparently her objections were no longer relevant.
He flagged her a taxi. As he shut the door after her, she detected a spark of exhilaration in his eyes, as if he were embarking on some male-only expedition that women couldn’t fathom. It was so utterly foolhardy she could hardly believe it.
He patted her hand, cheerfully. “I won’t be long. I’ll call you.”
20
She returned to the hotel, barely able to contain her irritation. She almost wanted to high-tail it to the bazaar by herself, shop at her leisure, and get whatever she liked; but the idea of being inside an enclosed market in the midday heat after having just been in the cool riverside gardens of the Dolmabahce palace wasn’t appealing. A swim in the hotel’s picturesque swimming pool was what she felt like. She hunted through her suitcase for her swimsuit. She’d swim and read in the charming garden.
She had a better idea. A hammam! Why not treat herself to one of those invigorating Turkish steam baths? She’d wanted to try one since they got here, but due to Richard’s lack of interest in exploring public baths, she’d put it aside. Now would be the perfect time to go.
Ingres’s famous paintings of Turkish bathing women flashed before her, the pink flesh and hedonistic glances of the reclining nude odalisques of the imagined women’s bath that had for centuries fired up the imaginations of Western painters. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, wife of the eighteenth-century British ambassador to the sultan’s court, wrote of her own visits to a hammam in Istanbul, vividly describing the Turkish women lounging naked in the steam as they experienced the ultimate in pampering and relaxation. There was one around the corner from the hotel. An exotic, indulgent Turkish hammam. Now, they’d see who was being adventurous.
The young blonde woman at reception assured her that the nearby hammam was indeed a clean and modern public bath, and said that, today, the hours women could go were, conveniently, in the afternoon. Ignoring the receptionist’s hints that she’d be better off going to a hotel spa, she set out, the euphoria of adventure trampling any tentativeness. She walked to the corner, turned, and came to the elegant doorway she’d noted this morning on their way to the Dolmabahce.
Inside the ornate, green-tiled hammam entrance, however, she was surprised to find only an unimpressive little vestibule with a few wooden stools. There was a crude sign with a female silhouette. She followed the direction of the arrow.
A woman splashing water on the floor of a hallway came over and raised two fingers to indicate the two-lira fee. Joy handed her the money, and the woman gave her several green-and-white striped towels and pointed her down the hall.
There were small cubicles along the hallway. Joy went into one and wondered what hammam etiquette was. Did one bathe naked or wear some sort of underwear? She changed into her two-piece black swimsuit for now and placed her folded clothes on a shelf. Wrapped in a towel, she slipped her feet into one of several pairs of wooden clogs in the cubicle, picked up her purse, and clip-clopped down the hallway.
The vast bathing chamber of gleaming, white marble walls and columns was misty with steam. Deep cracks in the marble columns and floor made it look as if it had been in use for centuries, but it was clean and smelled of herbs and soap.
Beams of afternoon sunlight filtered down through perforations in the high-domed ceiling, illuminating the women already sitting or lying on a raised platform in the center of the room. Most of the women seemed to be wearing some form of undergarment as they were being scrubbed by female attendants wrapped from the waist down in green and white towels like the ones Joy had on.
A robust bath attendant with heavy, bare breasts took her handbag, then grunted and gestured for her to lie down on a mat spread on the marble central platform. Joy quickly complied, removing her towel and stretching out on her belly. Warm water immediately spilled over her head, shoulders, and back, drenching her. She drew back in surprise, but the attendant murmured encouraging coos in Turkish and doused her again.
The attendant rubbed a loosely woven coarse loofah with a thick, square bar of soap and began to scrub Joy’s back in strong circular sweeps as if her skin were a hardy wooden washboard. At first, Joy recoiled from the harsh pressure, but after urging her muscles to relax, she started to get used to the relentless, steady strokes. The attendant re-lathered the loofah and commenced again, round and round like a spinning top, diligently scouring Joy’s shoulders, back, and legs.
There was none of the decadent finery shown in the erotic Ingres paintings in this functional bathhouse, and no signs of the insouciant women of Lady Montagu’s letters. Joy certainly couldn’t imagine anyone being comfortable enough to smile under the pitiless loofah, but once this cleansing part was over and the attendant began to knead her back and shoulders with lavender-scented oil, she felt her face and body go slack and imagined her own expression turning as indolent and wanton as the faces of those women in the paintings.
As the attendant massaged her fingers, pulling the joints of each, Joy pictured Roxelana, a foreigner like herself, bathing like this for the first time, a frightened captured “heathen” girl from Russia submitting to the rigors of a thorough Oriental washing before being presented to Sultan Suleyman. The young slave could not have foreseen her glorious future then or known that she would one day elevate herself to sultana and have her very own spectacular hammam built near the Hagia Sofia, the one still called “Roxelana’s Hammam.” Joy and Richard had passed the aged structure several times, now a hall for selling carpets.
Carpets. Again came the jab in her gut at Richard’s having gone off with those men, but she forced herself to shut out this worry and luxuriate in the delicate perfume of rosewater the attendant was now sprinkling on her.
She jerked back, ticklish, when the woman started to rub the soles of her feet, but the sensitivity s
ubsided with the expert pulling of her toes and the strong knuckles pressing the crevices of flesh she’d forgotten she even had. She started to feel light, as if the very matter of her body were evaporating. Even her breaths grew slower, her eyes gradually closing as if being pulled deeper into her skull. She was so drowsy she could barely respond when she was finally nudged to turn over.
In the vaporous heat, she grew anxious again. She had no idea what had gotten into Richard to go off like that, and with no apparent regard for how she felt about it. She obviously couldn’t influence what he did anymore. Had he not been with her, had she been traveling with twenty strangers as she’d originally planned, she wouldn’t have had to deal with this preoccupation.
Soon, however, even this wrinkle of unease was smoothed away by the confident fists, pummeling and pulling, working her body as if it were pliant, willing clay. For a moment, she imagined Richard stroking her.
She thought of how he’d expressed a desire to romance her this morning and how she’d rebuffed his advances without even asking herself whether or not she wanted them. Seduce her? Was he serious? And was it true, as he intimated before going off with those men, that she’d forgotten how to enjoy life? Was she now the one who was a drag?
He’d obviously been aroused this morning. Would she have been swept along? Could they go back to intimacy? Despite her muddled questions and emotions, she was surprised to find that she was now yearning for him in the impersonal, yet pleasurable, handling of her body by this total stranger in this unfamiliar bathhouse.
All at once she felt a familiar current make its way up her body, starting at her knees and climbing up her thighs, then higher where it resonated, taking her breath away. She gasped, embarrassed, trying to quiet the trembling in her hips, hoping the attendant hadn’t noticed the involuntary shudder of pleasure gripping her.
She came to, shielding her eyes from the sunlight shooting down from the ceiling.
The attendant was gone, and there seemed to be fewer bathers around. Her swimsuit top lay limply on the marble beside her, and she remembered the attendant undoing it to scrub her ribs and breasts.
A Marriage in Four Seasons Page 16