Red Dress in Black and White

by Elliot Ackerman

  “The first and last reception you ever threw at the Çırağan Palace,” interrupts Deniz with a good-natured smile.

  Kristin gives him a look and he shrugs, settling back into his seat. Her gaze then turns to Peter and she speaks to him directly. “I want to congratulate you on this remarkable exhibit and say how proud the Cultural Affairs Section is to have helped, in our small way, to host tonight’s event.”

  Everyone toasts.

  “That’s very kind of you, Kristin,” says Peter, but his words stall in the forest of raised glasses, and before he can say anything more, Kristin continues her remarks, speaking over him, saying that she hopes Peter’s photos will bring awareness not only to the events in Gezi Park but also to “this community’s long struggle for equal rights and dignity.” The room listens, politely, but by the time she finishes most of the crowd, including William and his mother, has migrated into the gallery.

  Each person falls silent as they find their image on the blistering white walls. On one side are the portraits of the battered “men” of Gezi and on the other side are the women with their meticulously layered makeup and hair arranged as best as they can manage or covered with a wig for an evening out. Viewed from the doorway, a duplicate of Peter’s exhibit begins to form among the guests. Then the finished product appears: a set piece, the exhibit itself as subject, portraits in and out of the frame. William can’t put words to it, but he feels the effect Peter has created.

  “What did you help him with?” his mother asks.

  Of the twenty portraits, the only one that nobody stands in front of is the girl in the dress chosen by William. He points toward it and his mother says nothing but leaves him and wanders to its spot on the wall. Now every portrait is mirrored by its subject, or, in the case of his mother, a nearly identical subject. William turns back toward the door, where Peter leans with his camera hung around his neck. He snatches it up and takes a picture of his exhibit. Then he departs into the sitting room.

  Deniz and his guests circulate among the portraits, theorizing about themselves in Peter’s work, honing in on different details within the photos. William can hear them teasing one another, saying that they look like hell, or some variation on the same. The quiet that had descended so quickly lifts. The party that began in the sitting room and kitchen now resumes in the gallery. William’s mother has drifted away from the photograph of the girl in the dress, even avoiding it, instead finding protection with Deniz and the others, who keep her at the center of their conversation with their Cat that and Cat this. William has no one to stand beside, so he follows Peter.

  Kristin has forgone the gallery and stands by the window. With her thumbs she punches out a text message. Peter sidles over to her and she glances up from her phone. “I have to go,” she says.

  “You liked the exhibit that much?” Peter says self-deprecatingly. “What’s the matter? Problem at home?”

  “No, nothing like that. I’ve got to get back to work.”

  “It’s almost midnight.”

  “Not in Washington it isn’t, but the exhibit’s beautiful. Congratulations.” Kristin tucks her phone back into her overstuffed handbag, from which she removes a small bottle of Purell. She squeezes a dab into her palms, which she vigorously kneads together. Heading to the door, she nearly bumps into William, who is slowly angling across the room toward Peter. “It’s almost midnight,” Kristin says to the boy in a tender almost motherly tone, as if the fact that he is up at this hour is more remarkable than the fact that he is at Deniz’s apartment in the first place.

  “That’s Catherine’s boy,” says Peter.

  Kristin glances behind her, offering Peter a slight rebuke. Of course she knows that this is Catherine’s boy. “Don’t let your mother stay out too late,” she says to him, then touches his cheek.

  “He won’t,” says Peter, answering before William can. Kristin leaves and Peter and William install themselves at the window, staring toward the streetlamps with their halos.

  “Take a look here,” says Peter, lifting the camera from his chest.

  William tentatively leans closer.

  “The portrait you picked was perfect.” Peter guides the boy next to him by the shoulder. With his head angled toward Peter’s chest, William stares into the viewfinder. The picture Peter took inside of the gallery is a symmetrical panorama, five portraits hung on each of four separate walls, with every person a reflection of their own battered image.

  “Your mom filled the last spot.”

  William vacantly nods.

  “One of the first rules of being a photographer,” says Peter, “is that you have to take hundreds of bad photos to get a single good one.” He points back into the viewfinder. “This is the one shot that I wanted, understand?” He is inviting William to be in on something with him, even though William doesn’t completely understand what it is.

  The boy offers a timid smile.

  “Photography is about contrasts, black and white, light and dark, different colors. For instance, if you put blue next to black, the blue looks darker. If you put that same blue next to white, it looks lighter.” Peter flips through a few more images on the viewfinder, pointing out pictures that demonstrate this effect. Each time that William nods, it seems to please Peter, so William continues to nod. “But the blue never makes the white look lighter and it never makes the black look darker. Certain absolutes exist. They can’t be altered.”

  Catherine wanders over. She takes Peter’s hand in hers, quickly laces together their fingers, and then lets go. “The exhibit is fantastic,” she says.

  William reaches for his mother’s hand and grips it tightly.

  Peter shrugs.

  “You don’t think so?” she asks.

  He dips his gaze into the viewfinder, scrolling back through the images.

  “I’m sorry more people didn’t show up,” she continues. “I’d hoped a couple of critics might come to write reviews. I know Kristin tried to get the word out through the consulate, but you know most of the papers are afraid to print anything on this subject.”

  “Meaning photography?” says Peter.

  “Meaning them. Don’t be cute.”

  He tilts the viewfinder toward Catherine. She tugs the camera closer so that its strap cinches against his neck as she takes a deeper look. On reflex, her two fingers come to her mouth. “This whole thing was a setup for that photo?”

  He takes his camera back and nods.

  She glances into the exhibit, to where Deniz’s guests revel at being the center of attention, for once. “Don’t show them,” she says.

  “Catherine, I need to talk to you about something.” Peter rests a hand on William’s shoulder. “Give us a minute, buddy.”

  Catherine and Peter cross the room. They speak quietly by the front door while the party continues in the gallery. William reaches into his pocket and removes the Simon game. He plays for a few minutes, trying to match the elaborate patterns set before him, but he comes nowhere close to his father’s high score. While he presses at the flashing panels, he begins to think about what Peter had told him, about contrast, about how one color might change another. He glances up from his game. As he watches Peter standing next to his mother, the two of them speaking close together, she is like the blue. William can see the effect Peter has on her. While Peter looks the same, unchanged by her, like the black or the white.

  That night, two hours later

  Murat Yaşar usually doesn’t smoke in the house, but he is waiting. It is almost midnight. And he knows that she is out with him.

  He has seen Peter’s photographs and he finds them tasteless. Because he is an architect, Murat’s taste is a matter of business, for it has been proven in the marketplace. His family name, Yaşar, affixes itself to enough of Istanbul’s acreage that he hears it spoken as a destination more than he hears it spoken in reference to
his person. So he feels more than qualified to render judgment with regard to Peter’s taste. A book of his work—cheaply bound by a publisher Murat has never heard of—had been inscribed to her by Peter. When Murat read the slashing, unconstrained cursive on the inside page, he viewed it as Peter’s solicitation of his wife:

  For Catherine, I hope you find the same pleasure in these photographs as I found in our meeting. Yours, Peter

  Nearly two years before, on the night of that meeting, she had also stayed out past midnight. When she stepped through the front door and handed her husband the book, she offered it to him as if he were a child, as if by occupying his hands she might occupy his mind and keep him from probing about her evening. Thumbing through the pages, Murat asked if she’d had a nice time. He didn’t ask the obvious questions, the ones he suspected she possessed no answers for: why she had arrived four hours late, or why she smelled of cigarettes, or why she had insisted on taking a taxi when Murat had texted offering to send a car for her. Provoking her lies would only put her on guard. Murat merely shook his head, mumbling “Very interesting” as he leafed through Peter’s photographs. Unable to restrain herself, Catherine leaned over his shoulder and pointed to a few of the prints that she admired most.

  After Catherine came home with the book, Murat chose to say nothing of her other encounters with Peter, which he never learned of directly from her, but rather heard about in one instance from the maître d’ at one of his favorite restaurants, who casually mentioned that his wife had been there with “a young gentleman,” and in another instance when Murat happened upon his wife’s pocket calendar spread across the kitchen counter. In her rounded, girlish cursive, which had never matured into the handwriting of a grown woman, she had scribbled P, Kafe 6, Cihangir, with an hour blocked off in the afternoon beginning at four o’clock.

  In each instance, Murat decided that a confrontation would weaken his position. A shared antagonist would only drive her closer to Peter, and it was their closeness that had first alarmed him. She had taken lovers before—or so he assumed, given his limitations as a husband—but she had never spoken openly of another man in their home, gone to lunch with him in public, in short, shown such carelessness. The nearest Murat ever came to challenging Catherine about this affair was when he threatened to throw out Peter’s book after finding their son, William, sitting on the living room sofa with it spread across his lap. “He’s an impressionable boy,” Murat said, scolding his wife with the book flopped open in one hand as if he were delivering a sermon from its pages. Though there was nothing lewd in the images, Catherine certainly knew how she had overstepped by bringing something of Peter’s into their home. She also must have known how, slowly, she was provoking her husband. Whether she knew to what end this provocation might come, Murat couldn’t say, not even to himself. When she snatched the book from his outstretched palm and returned it to its place on the coffee table, among a growing collection of exclusively American magazines—Vogue, Vanity Fair, Architectural Digest—to which she subscribed but never read, Murat felt an inexcusable urge to hurt her. He then left the room.

  It hadn’t always been this way between them. When they were younger, things had been different. In the morning she used to make them breakfast while he made the bed. In the afternoon they would cross the city to meet on a bench and share from a single packed lunch. And at night—at night she would carefully wake him, her hands pleading for him, and his pleading equally for her. Murat doubts she would concede any of this to Peter. The portrait Catherine paints of their marriage must make him enough of a monster to justify her infidelity. But their past is as real as their present. Even if she says it wasn’t love, or claims it wasn’t happiness, Murat has proof that it existed: their son. Murat knows that each time she looks at William that past will assert itself. So always they will be married.

  Years ago, when they met, Murat was living in her country, attending university, a choice his father did not support. Not because his father objected to an American education, but because Murat pursued a degree in architecture. Construction was the family business, and business was what Murat’s father wished him to study. Murat believed that spreadsheets, leasing forms, labor contracts—the bureaucracy of putting up a building—could be apprenticed in any office. To make a beautiful building, or to use the words that had won over his father, “a superior product,” took devout study. It was often said of the elder Yaşar that he would take the dimes off a dead man’s eyes and return nickels, so it surprised everyone, and Murat most of all, when he convinced his father that a slightly frivolous degree in architecture would be more advantageous to the family’s business interests. Though he had presented a convincing argument, Murat hadn’t been entirely forthcoming with his father about his ambitions, which transcended the family business and its financials. He wanted to have enough skill so that the buildings he would design in his life might reflect something of it. Soon after meeting Catherine, he confided this to her. Soon after that, she stopped referring to his floor plans, technical drawings and schematics as his work. She began referring to them as his art.

  Although Catherine saw Murat as he wished to see himself, not even she could provide him an escape from his family. Like his father, Catherine’s father presided over a dwindling business empire, though his business wasn’t construction but rather construction materials export. When the two patriarchs and occasional associates realized their children lived within an hour’s train ride of New York, it was they who had brokered the introduction. Like Murat, Catherine wanted to reinvent herself outside the confines of her wealthy family. She had danced as a girl and this was where her ambitions had always dwelled. After high school, Catherine’s father had given her a year’s allowance to make something of her dream. When she met Murat, that fruitless year was dwindling to its end. Without her having found her way into a dance company or any steady work, the expectation was that she would attend university.

  It was Catherine’s body—her height (slightly too tall), her frame (slightly too shapely)—which betrayed the promise she’d shown for dance as a girl. The same limitations nature had placed on her ambitions caused Murat to feel a corporeal draw to her, at least at first, in the freedom of his university days. Catherine’s father had hoped that Murat’s influence might help her to resume her studies, to relinquish one dream for another. To the contrary, she soon moved in with Murat and he supported her, which liberated Catherine from her father’s expectations. So she continued to dance, even though her efforts amounted to little. With Murat she too felt free, as if glancing at a menu she could choose her life. After yet another year, when it came time for Murat to return home, she agreed to join him. “What do you think your father will say?” Murat had asked. “I’ll be his finest export,” Catherine had responded, but malice lingered behind her words, and had Murat been a more mature person, a less trusting person, in short, the person he was now, that malice would have cautioned him. Catherine had no ambition beyond escape. And once she made that escape, it terrified Murat when he slowly realized that her ambition to escape endured, captive as her life had become to his.

  When Murat returned from university and took over the family company, immersing himself in what he had once considered the apprentice work of business, he learned of the burden his father had carried all of his life: the uncertainty of labor schedules, the corruption of contracting agents and the tyranny of balance sheets. And this is when his anxiety began, a tension that despite her efforts not even Catherine could calm. Murat also learned that he had never convinced his father of the importance of his study, or his art. His father had humored him, a few last years of self-expression, the gift of a doting parent on a frivolous child.

  Murat had come to understand that the architect with his pencil and paper was not the creator. The creator was the foreman, the contract negotiator, those whose hands touched brick and mortar. “A real job means you shower at the end of the day, not at the
beginning,” his father had been fond of saying. Life was not reflected in buildings, as Murat had once thought. Life was earning enough to live. He learned this before his father died, and when he assumed his father’s burden, he came to regret those wasted years of study, and Catherine.

  * * *

  Pacing his living room Murat can’t help but find something amusing or, perhaps, ironic about his situation, in which Catherine is the expatriate in his country. It has been almost ten years and she has never accepted Murat as her guide, even though he had once accepted her as his. When Murat’s cousins used to invite her to lunch, Catherine always had an excuse, until those invitations vanished. When he and Catherine decided on William’s education, Catherine insisted on an international lycée instead of the strictly Turkish one Murat had attended. And Catherine quit her language lessons years ago, often phoning Murat in the middle of the day, interrupting his business meetings, just for him to translate directions from her to a cabdriver. Murat has long wondered if the draw to Peter is that he knows less of this place than she does.

  He must seem more like me then than I am now, thinks Murat. Except in one important way, one she doesn’t yet know, or even suspect. Peter is a man of limited means, but I am far worse off than he is. I am deeply in debt.

  A gust of wind enters through an open window.

  If Murat were not waiting for Catherine, he would still be awake, pacing their house with a head full of troubles. Before the protests at Gezi Park, his unfaithful wife had been the largest of his problems. He longs for such simple concerns. But the riots, the politics, they have corrupted a system that was once reliably corrupt. A construction license can no longer be bought. He has a half dozen stalled projects—a glass tower in Zeytinburnu, acreage of underground parking lots, a controlling share in a new stadium for Beşiktaş football club—all of them, at this moment, little more than holes in the ground. When each project finances the other, and when none of them progress, this is a far greater problem.