Red Dress in Black and White

by Elliot Ackerman

  Tonight she has taken their son, so he does consider phoning the police. Long ago he had the appropriate legal authorities explain to her that if she ever tried to remove the boy from the country, take him back to her home, the required papers had already been prepared so that divorce and custody would be settled in this, “their home,” as Murat instructed those same authorities to precisely inform her. Although Murat has faith in the legal precautions he has made, he does not rule out the police entirely. They would certainly send a car to return her, never mentioning a word of it, but in these days it is wise to be spare in the favors you ask. However, there is one other person he could contact, someone who assures discretion.

  Murat stubs out his last cigarette in the full ashtray. Peter’s book rests beneath it on the coffee table, surrounded by Catherine’s unread magazines. He checks the time. It is late. No matter. He punches out a text message. While Murat waits for a response, he again flips through the pages of Peter’s photographs.

  Tasteless, tasteless, tasteless, he thinks.

  How like him I once was.

  I am being beaten by myself.

  Twelve-thirty that morning

  Peter can’t believe that she brought her boy. You don’t see many second graders at house parties off the İstiklal on a school night, let alone one hosted by the luminaries of the police-brawling gay and gender-fluid community. Bringing him was yet another of Catherine’s little rebellions. When he saw William wandering around the wilted crudités, Peter felt protective of the boy. He also realized that Catherine’s rebellion wasn’t that she brought her son to this neighborhood to be with these people, but that she wanted Peter to meet him—something the two of them had not agreed upon.

  She had always said that she hoped Peter would get to know William. She had always picked her words carefully when speaking about him. “It is important for William to know men with a broad worldview,” she had told Peter. This was at the beginning, before they had spent entire afternoons sprawled naked across his bed in the sunlight, wordlessly communicating and validating small emotional contracts. This then evolved into “William needs a figure in his life with a worldview that isn’t as narrow as his father’s.” The journey between those two statements had taken nearly two years. Bringing William to the exhibit was her way of announcing to Peter that they had reached a destination.

  They stand by the door of Deniz’s apartment, where Peter has guided Catherine so that they might speak in private. He says softly, “I thought we’d both decide when I should meet him.” He can feel the boy staring at them.

  Catherine’s hair is the plainest sort of brown, but with a single blond streak, which she was born with and which will likely be the first to gray. It falls in front of her face. She nervously tucks the loose strand behind her ear. “I wanted him to see your work.”

  As he thinks of that work, Peter’s eyes traverse the apartment. On the other side of the door, his photos hang in the gallery. But it isn’t a gallery, just a bedroom he has painted white with Deniz’s permission. Nothing about this exhibit feels legitimate to him. Kristin has subsidized the entire event with consulate funds and for purposes Peter won’t question. He has chosen subjects who crave attention, which he can give. And he is there with a woman he can never possess.

  A pair of Deniz’s guests stumble drunkenly toward the apartment door, debating which bar along the İstiklal they should head to for after-party drinks. When they remove their coats from the rack, they are men’s coats—a heavy parka, a shapeless rain jacket. What has my exhibit revealed? Peter wonders. That these gay men and transgender women are forced to lead a double life? This is as obvious as their coats by the door. If he was trying to make some point about modes of coexistence, or double lives, he could have just photographed Deniz’s friends standing by the coatrack. Or photographed himself. Either would have spared everyone the trouble of an exhibit.

  He dips his eyes into the viewfinder around his neck. Peter had told William that a photographer has to take hundreds of bad photos to get a single good one. A thought comes to him very clearly: Some photographers just take hundreds of bad photos.

  He stares up at Catherine. “It isn’t fair for William to meet me.”

  “I wanted him to.” She gently rests her fingertips on his forearm.

  Two years before, he had been in a period of self-doubt. He had been grasping for reasons to stay in Istanbul. Meeting Catherine had given him a reason when otherwise he likely would have left. His work progressed, and although this exhibit wasn’t the show he’d long hoped for at the Istanbul Modern, it had nevertheless become another reason. Now that it is over, he’s left with only her. And he feels increasingly certain that she isn’t enough. But he doesn’t know how to tell her that he is leaving.

  Then he suspects she has anticipated this. Out of desperation she’s brought her son so Peter might pity her—or them both—and stay.

  “Will I see you tomorrow?” she asks, coaxing him.

  “What is tomorrow?”

  She hesitates, as though it is a trick question, one that can be interpreted and then answered with infinite variety. “Wednesday,” she says.

  The moment to tell her about his plans to leave has passed. It will return again and he will do better with his next chance. “Let’s talk in the morning,” he says.

  She has been gently holding his arm. With this answer, she releases him.

  The party has begun to empty. The young woman, Deniz’s date, disappears deeper into the apartment, luring one of the guests toward a bedroom where Deniz has already gone. William has wandered back over to the window. He sits looking down to where the other guests—the Hayals, Nurs and Öyküs—have gathered outside beneath the pale light of the streetlamps. They are on their way to the bars on the İstiklal. Their voices echo through the maze of alleys, whose narrow, ricocheting bends allow sound to travel further, and it seems as if they might wake the whole neighborhood with their deliberations as they struggle to decide in which direction they should go.

  One o’clock that morning

  She lingers at the party. While William waits for his mother to cycle through her many goodbyes, he wanders off and falls asleep on a bed littered with coats. Catherine heaves him off the bed and onto her shoulder as she climbs precariously down the many flights of stairs toward the street. In the backseat of the cab, William’s head is in her lap and they will soon be home. She gently nudges him awake. William jolts upright, causing the black silk blazer Catherine had draped across him as a blanket to fall to the taxi’s floor. She reaches between her legs, recovers her jacket and folds it into a pillow, which William rests his head against as he leans on her shoulder. She strokes his black hair.

  William fixes his attention outside his window. They have descended from the hills and now idle at an empty intersection. A single, stubborn traffic light holds them in place. When it turns, they take a left onto Cevdet Paşa Caddesi. On one side is the incomplete stadium for Beşiktaş football club, a construction site frozen by indefinite delay. Rust encroaches on the steel I beams, whose vertical spans rend a skyward grid into the partially laid foundation. A black-and-white pennant idles in a weak wind from a flagpole that marks the stadium’s entrance, but that also marks a congregation point for pallets of expired sod, stacked one upon another. The rotting sod can no longer cover a football pitch and instead it stains the freshly laid concrete. William has driven by this stadium many times with his father, who owns a majority share in its reconstruction and who usually grows silent and dismayed as they pass by.

  A similar silence fills the taxi as they come up on Dolmabahçe Palace, the former home of the sultans, which remains hidden behind its unscalable limestone walls. At its entrance a towering wrought-iron gate is hinged into a pair of hulking columns, each adorned with lashing Arabic script, the remnants of the country’s defunct Ottoman alphabet, which is now the unreadable lan
guage of a vanished empire. Long ranks of birch trees clutch at the star-riddled sky with their trunks white as bone and their branches obscuring a half-moon. Statues flank the wide avenue below. They stand, sentries hidden in ambush among the trees, their bronze-cast expressions frozen miserably into their vigil. Sleeping vagrants encircle the statues’ granite pedestals. They keep a separate vigil, obedient as dogs.

  * * *

  A week or so before, William and his father had passed such a vagrant on the street. It was a Monday, and Murat was stuck taking the metro. Usually, he was driven to work. The international school was on the way to Murat’s office so, on occasion, he would drop off his son. The two of them would sit in the backseat of the glistening black Mercedes. The driver would crank the wheel, wending through Pera, Cihangir, Taksim, those ancient neighborhoods built into the terraced hills, and Murat would play a guessing game with the boy. He would pick out a few buildings on their route and ask William to arrange their value from lowest to highest. He would then tell William that his job, as his son, was to become the best at this game. When William would ask why, Murat would explain that this was because his job, as his father, was to be the best at it now. And Murat believed that he was the best. He knew the names of every doorman, custodian and construction site foreman. He even knew their children’s names. He could look at the glittering tarnish of the horizon from İstinye on the European side to Kadıköy on the Asian side and rattle off the loan rate, scheduled completion date and likely completion date of any project. Across Istanbul’s two continents, he would read the skyline like a ticker of deals, those completed, those under way and his future. This was how Murat Yaşar saw the city.

  But that Monday morning his Mercedes remained parked in the driveway, and he stood underground at a metro station with his son. At a kiosk on the train platform he picked out a morning paper as he clutched William’s hand. They had been forced to take public transport as another round of demonstrations near Gezi Park had brought traffic to a standstill. Murat bought a copy of Radikal, one of the few papers the conservative government had yet to take a controlling share in. If a thought couldn’t be served up alongside poached salmon at a society dinner party in Beyoğlu, it couldn’t navigate its way through the elitist and leftist editorial team at Radikal. Murat had spent many evenings perched silently next to his wife at such tables. These were her people and he read their paper and went to their dinner parties because he thought it made good sense to keep tabs on those who might undermine both his business interests and, as he began to suspect, his personal interests.

  A train hurtled into the station, its brakes whining along the track. Murat handed his son a five-lira note. The boy placed it on the kiosk counter and was given two lira in return. He glanced back at his father, was rewarded with a nod and then pocketed the pair of coins. Murat thought it was important for the boy to get used to handling money. They rushed to the platform. William liked riding the trains and waited eagerly for the doors to open. His father hated the cramped cars and the indignity of standing shoulder to shoulder with strangers. He held his son close, pressing the boy to his legs.

  After the first stop, two seats opened up. Murat and William sat alongside one another. Murat handed his son the funny pages while he leafed open the business section. A column in the margin referenced his unfinished football stadium, specifically the latest delays in construction. Since the Gezi Park riots, Murat had been unable to place his other projects as collateral against the loan he needed to erect the superstructure, to say nothing of the interior—seating, concession stands, turnstiles, restrooms, electrical fittings—a crippling assortment of minutiae. The unfinished stadium sat along the main thoroughfare of Cevdet Paşa Caddesi like a ruin viewed in reverse, a monument to what had never existed.

  A midlevel functionary from the Ministry of Interior had given a quote to the newspaper: “Yaşar Enterprises’s share will be bought out at a fair price if funds cannot be secured to continue this project.” The loans Murat needed would have to come from a government bank, yet the column made no mention of this fact and its bearing on fairness. A couple of years before, the government had petitioned Murat to partner with them on the project during a citywide revitalization initiative, yet the column also made no mention of this fact and its bearing on fairness. The phrase “loss of confidence” appeared in print several times with Murat’s name appended to the allegation. Then the piece ended with a final quote from the football club’s general manager. “Murat Yaşar sold us a shell, not a home.”

  Murat folded his paper in half and tossed it under his seat.

  Look at us all, he thought, crammed onto trains, unable to drive because of the gridlock created by our own childish dysfunction. If it weren’t for last spring's protests, my stadium would have been built. The government has overreached. The protesters have overreached. They are all equally guilty.

  A woman searching for a seat stepped on his foot. She apologized halfheartedly to Murat and then hoisted up the toddler perched on her hip. The train carriage rocked. Murat thought to offer her his seat, but, irritated as he was, he didn’t and instead watched as the woman stumbled along, burdened by the weight of her child.

  You have little in common with these people, he assured himself.

  They had one more stop before Şişhane.

  Murat put his arm around William, and then glanced down. The light from the fixtures above them was shabby. It fell bitterly over the compartment and it shorted off and on, flickering as the darkness outside in the tunnel contested with it. Father and son fixed their shared concentration on the dimly lit funny pages. They began to laugh and the sound of their laughter rose above the unrelenting noise of the train.

  * * *

  A pair of boys, Arabs or gypsies, played a game at the station’s exit. They raced up the down escalator, pulling after one another’s shirttails, nearly tumbling on the treacherous steps. Murat and William rode up the escalator the correct way, silently passing the playful boys, who examined them with desperate eyes. As they came out of the station and into the combination of fresh air, low morning sun and blue sky, Murat’s gaze shifted to a vagrant lying on the sidewalk. The man held a cardboard slat with a message penned in black marker, soliciting money for food. Next to him was a collection of empty lager cans, some tipped over, some still upright. The vagrant’s rheumy, glacial eyes stared toward the tall buildings whose dead windows shone high above, and in the way he searched vacantly upward he appeared like a defeated mountaineer stranded at an inescapable base camp, his lager cans like so many depleted cylinders of oxygen, the evidence of his many failed attempts at the summit. His gray beard hung to his chest. His saliva-tipped mustache curled into his mouth. And the small bloodshot pustules of alcoholism congregated on his cheeks like freckles on a fair-skinned child.

  Murat stopped and glancing down he took William by the shoulders and pressed him to his legs as he had done on the train. He held him in front of the vagrant. “Do you see this man?” Murat asked his son.

  William nodded.

  “This man has nothing. Now look at me.”

  William turned over his shoulder and stared up at his father.

  Murat wore a tailored suit, as he always did, today it was a conservative charcoal gray, a white handkerchief meticulously folded in the pocket, a creaseless full-Windsor knot cinched at his neck; he had shaven at six a.m., his hair was cut the first Tuesday of each month. That morning he looked the same as he did any of the other mornings that his son had known him.

  “That man is half a billion lira richer than I am.”

  William looked again at the vagrant.

  “Do you understand?” Murat asked.

  William nodded, as if trying to comprehend his father’s debts. Murat crouched next to him on the sidewalk, stooping to eye level with his son. He had confused William and he regretted it. The boy couldn’t appreciate such debts, and shouldn’t have to
, at least not yet. The silk hem of Murat’s suit jacket brushed against the street. He and the vagrant were close, their bodies almost touching.

  Murat dragged William away by the hand. They wandered onto İstiklal Caddesi and Murat pointed out certain buildings, quizzing William about their value relative to one another and sharing insider details of many—the confidential plans for a new shopping center here, a landlord who bribed building inspectors there. They then passed Galatasaray Lisesi, the oldest school in the city. Engraved on the iron gate was the year of its founding: 1481. Murat explained to William that this was not even thirty years after Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror seized Constantinople from the defending Christians.

  “Did he build the school?”

  “No,” said Murat. “His son Bayezid did.”

  “Bayezid,” repeated William, slightly mispronouncing the name, the influence of his mother’s American accent showing.

  “Bayezid the Peaceful,” added Murat, and his clear pronunciation served as a subtle rebuke to his son.

  The story, or at least the version recounted by Murat, was that when Bayezid inherited his empire he took it upon himself to revitalize the city after his father’s bloody conquest nearly destroyed it. To understand his new capital Bayezid would roam the streets disguised as an ordinary citizen. On one of these secret walks he found himself in a garden filled with red and yellow roses. A young man in simple dress who had a reputation for great wisdom tended the garden. After Bayezid revealed his identity, he asked how to improve his empire and its capital. The gardener advised the sultan to educate his people and explained that his own wisdom had come through quiet contemplation among his roses. He then suggested that Bayezid build a school there, which the sultan did. The gardener became the first headmaster and administered Galatasaray Lisesi until his death.