Red Dress in Black and White

by Elliot Ackerman

  The flash goes off, surprising them like an accidental gunshot.

  “I’m sorry,” says William. He is sitting up, his bare feet hanging off the side of the sofa, the elastic from his pajamas cuffing his ankles.

  “With a little practice, you’ll get very quick with it.” Peter steps to the living room window. He draws open the shade and motions for William to follow. The two of them gaze out across the cityscape. The sun has risen and its glare has subsided and no longer sweeps the rooftops. The light is clear and the birds Peter had noticed before are perched in long single rows on the windowsills and gutters of the adjacent apartment buildings. Peter points them out to William. “See whether you’re quick enough to catch a photo of a bird as it either takes off or lands.”

  William stands at the window, the camera strap looped around his neck, his grip stretched across the Nikon so that only the very tips of his fingers brush against the edges of the power button and the shutter release. When a garbage truck passes beneath them, its heavy engine spooks a half dozen birds, which take flight and swoop in parabolas above the street. William snatches up the camera, but doesn’t manage to push the two buttons in sync with one another. Nothing happens and the boy misses the shot.

  “That’s okay,” says Peter. “Just wait and try again.”

  William glances up at him, and then registers a determined nod.

  “Stay there,” says Peter. “I’ll be right back.”

  He leaves William by the window and walks deeper into his apartment. He knocks on the shut bathroom door. No answer. Peter can hear the static hiss of the running shower. He lets himself in and takes two steps before he can see Catherine through the steam. She is faced away from the water that jets against her back. She has leaned her arm on the tiles, resting her forehead in the crook of her elbow. Her expression is clamped, the eyes sealed, the mouth shut and the jaw clenched against the shock of the water, whose rivulets trace the contours of her toned shoulders, her full hips, her strong thighs. Watching the water course over the athletic body she crafted years ago, which ultimately failed her artistic ambitions, Peter notices a slight tremor run through her, the only indication that she is crying.

  “Peter, please!” She doesn’t turn toward him. Her forehead still leans against her arm. Her eyes remain shut. The mascara she’d worn the night before streaks in jagged lines from her cheeks to where Peter can see it on the edge of her chin.

  “William’s awake,” he says, glancing down.

  “Okay.”

  He stands motionless, his feet fixed to the tiled floor.

  “Peter—” she snaps.

  He lets himself out of the bathroom and stands in the hallway, still holding the shut doorknob as if trying to hold on to her nakedness, something she has never denied him until this moment. How useless his hands seem. He hides them in his pockets. The shower turns off.

  Peter returns down the hall. Light fills the living room. William stands at the windowsill in his pajamas as he fumbles with the camera, straining his fingers around the grip to reach the pair of buttons. Peter leans against the arm of the sofa. The birds from before remain on their nearby perches. William has the camera angled toward them. He watches their jerky movements—the occasional flap of their wings, the spastic craning of their necks—and he waits for them to take flight.

  The bathroom door slams shut.

  A pair of the birds bounds off the ledge. Like a miracle, one of the birds is completely black and the other is flawlessly white. William snatches the Nikon. His synchronized fingers find the shutter release and power button. He snaps a photo. The two birds extend their wings, catch a gust of wind, and glide out over the gray street, rising in an orbit above the stuttering traffic. “Look,” William says, showing the photo he has taken to Peter, who toggles the camera from color to black and white, observing no discernible change between the two settings. Through either accident or instinct William has managed to create a photograph in which every color and shade stands in equilibrium with every other. The balance is perfect.

  “What are the two of you doing?” asks Catherine, who has padded barefoot into the living room. Her hair is drying in a towel that is turbaned around her head.

  Peter tells William to show his mother, and the boy holds the Nikon up to Catherine. “He’s getting the hang of this,” says Peter as her eyes dip into the viewfinder. “The photo’s pretty remarkable, every part of it is in perfect balance.” He smiles toward William and looks back at Catherine, who continues to examine the image of the two birds. Watching her, Peter realizes that he has hardly, if ever, seen her without makeup on. Over the run of their two-year affair, or “friendship” as Catherine insists on calling it, she has never once been able to stay an entire night with him, and because of this he has never seen her fresh from the shower, or just awake in the morning. Until last night, he had also never seen her with her son.

  When Catherine finishes looking at William’s photo, he raises the camera up to his mother and takes a candid of her. “Please,” she says, and her voice is tight in her throat, holding the same pitch Peter heard when she asked him to leave the bathroom. “Don’t point that thing at me.”

  She makes William delete the photo.

  He goes back to the windowsill. The pair of birds, which had left their perch together, continues to orbit over the street. Then they turn, beating a few powerful flaps of their wings as they flare backward and come to rest right in front of William. The boy raises his camera. He is ready. He would stay where he was. And he would watch them until they chose to take off.

  * * *

  They drive to Akmerkez, a shopping mall ten minutes away. When they exit the taxi, it is nearly time for lunch. William still wears his pajamas. He asked to bring Peter’s camera, which Peter has allowed, and so the Nikon hangs around the boy’s neck by its strap. Peter has never shopped for children’s clothing before and he hovers over a glass-enclosed map in the atrium. The mall has many of the same offerings as in the States. It also has most of the same brands. There is a Gap Kids on the ground level.

  They ride the elevator down and a family steps inside with them: mother, father, little girl. The girl is about William’s age, with a long dark braid running along her back and her foot planted on a red scooter. William snaps her picture. Catherine holds Peter’s hand. She also keeps stealing glimpses of the other family. When the doors open on the ground level, they head in opposite directions.

  From the display table inside of the store, Catherine picks out a few pairs of jeans for William. When presented with his options, he doesn’t like any. She asks him to choose something else on his own, but he refuses. “I want to wear my clothes from home,” he says.

  “How about these?” offers Catherine, holding up a pair of khakis.

  William creeps away, dipping beneath a rack of sweatshirts, where he sits cross-legged, his elbows propped on his knees and his face cradled in his palms. Catherine continues to browse. “Or these,” she says, crouching low and offering her son another alternative. He slinks into himself, fiddling with his camera, ignoring her.

  “Pick something or I’m picking for you.”

  He takes a photo of his feet.

  She holds up a pair of black jeans and a gray sweatshirt. “Fine, we’ll get these.”

  “I don’t like those,” he answers. “Stop choosing for me!”

  “Then you choose!” his mother shoots back.

  William lifts up the camera and fires off the flash in Catherine’s face. Wide eyed, he looks at Peter as he does it, as if he can’t believe the provocation he’s made toward his mother. This one act of rebellion is all William has to combat the complete reordering of his life.

  She lunges toward him. “What did I tell you about pointing that thing at me?”

  William scampers deeper beneath the rack of sweatshirts.

  Before she can take the
camera, Peter intervenes. “What about these?”

  William and Catherine freeze, and then cant their heads up toward Peter. He holds a pair of blue jeans and a red sweatshirt.

  “I like those,” says William.

  Peter hands the clothes to Catherine.

  “Let’s try them on,” she says, taking William by the wrist and guiding him out from beneath the rack of sweatshirts and toward the changing rooms.

  “I want some privacy,” he announces, tugging free from his mother’s grip.

  “Then go by yourself,” she says.

  He turns toward the back of the store but doesn’t move.

  Catherine glances over at Peter, who then leads William by the hand to the changing rooms, where they step into a stall and he pulls the curtain shut behind them. William strips off his pajama shirt and takes high-kneed marching steps out of the cuffs of his pajama pants while he asks, “How long are we going to stay with you?”

  Peter tugs William’s large feet through the jeans, while the boy leans on his shoulder to keep balance. “You should ask your mother,” answers Peter.

  “I don’t think she knows.”

  “Well, I don’t know either.”

  “We’re not going home,” says William.

  Peter stops his work and straightens himself so that he looks directly at the boy. “What makes you say that?” Peter wonders about the night before, about Catherine’s plans, and what has led William to conclude that returning home is no longer an option. William doesn’t answer Peter’s question. Instead he pulls away and finishes dressing on his own.

  The two of them leave the changing rooms and find Catherine by the cash register. She jerks the plastic tags off the back of William’s shirt and pants, handing them to the checkout girl. But when Catherine goes to pay, her card doesn’t work. “Funny,” she mutters, “try this one.” It doesn’t work either. The two other cards she presents are also declined. Peter offers to pay, but she refuses and then digs through her wallet and change purse. Her hand trembles slightly as she spreads the bills and coins across the counter until at last she realizes she doesn’t have quite enough.

  Peter passes the girl at the register his debit card.

  “I’ll find a cash machine and pay you back,” Catherine insists.

  Peter signs the receipt and hands Catherine the bag with the pajamas. William wears his new clothes out of the store. The three of them walk through the mall’s gleaming corridors. William keeps a few paces ahead of Catherine and Peter. He makes a close inspection of each of the shop windows, pressing his nose right up to the glass. The jeans and sweatshirt had cost around ninety lira, or thirty dollars as Peter did the conversion. And it seems like such a bargain—not the jeans and sweatshirt—but rather the idea of it, the satisfaction it gave him. He had, after all, put clothes on this little boy’s back.

  When they pass a bank of cash machines, Catherine insists on stopping.

  “Please, don’t worry about the clothes,” says Peter.

  She ignores him, punching her PIN into the keypad. A minute passes, no cash. She tries again. Nothing. She won’t say it, so Peter does: “He’s frozen your accounts.”

  With the heel of her palm, she strikes the cash machine’s keypad.

  Peter grabs her by both shoulders. “Catherine.”

  She takes a breath and stands up straight. “I’m sorry,” she says. Then she takes another breath and wipes her eyes once quickly with the back of her hand. “What now?”

  Peter glances down at his watch. It is well past noon. The food court isn’t far off. They continue their walk through the mall. The sun pours its light through the glass vestibule. Ahead of them, Peter sees the little girl from before, the one from the elevator. She rides her scooter through the mall, trailing after her parents, who have ducked into a restaurant. “Let’s get a bite in there,” suggests Peter.

  “I don’t want you to pay for anything else,” says Catherine.

  “Buy me lunch with what you’ve got left and we’ll call it even.”

  She counts out a crumpled handful of bills. “Fifty lira,” she says.

  “I don’t know if that’ll be quite enough.”

  They walk a bit further. Then they come to the restaurant’s front, where a menu is perched on a chalkboard easel. Fifty lira would be enough. They were offering a family special.

  March 7, 2012

  They had intended to meet for lunch. Lunch was casual. Yet Peter and Catherine wound up having dinner instead.

  It was Kristin who had arranged everything. As soon as Peter had signed for the grant money and left her office at the consulate, she had followed up her email to Catherine with a phone call explaining that she had spoken with “a fantastic American photographer,” and that she thought the two of them should meet. Catherine wasn’t antisocial, but when it came to new acquaintances she had always been discerning. Her friendships were few and deep. Not long after Catherine adopted William, Kristin had come into her life. At first the relationship was professional, Kristin’s duties in cultural affairs intersecting with Catherine’s philanthropic interests. But their relationship soon migrated to the personal. The two women, both young mothers in a new and unfamiliar city, struggled with the role and this struggle became the basis of a friendship. Neither would call what they were experiencing depression—and never did to the other—but they could feel how through twice weekly lunches, or an afternoon coffee, or in certain instances a spontaneous phone call, the one was lifting the other out of the pit into which they had both fallen. In short, Catherine trusted Kristin, and if Kristin thought she should meet this other American, then she should.

  The initial plan was for her and Peter to have lunch at the terrace restaurant at the Istanbul Modern. However, that changed when William stayed home from kindergarten with the flu. Before Catherine could cancel the engagement, Murat volunteered to finish work early and care for William, so Catherine shifted her plan with Peter to that evening. Murat had, in recent months, closed on a number of highly profitable real estate deals in partnership with the government and, with the earnings from those deals secure in his account, he was, from time to time, curtailing his hours at the office. He had begun taking William to school once a week and, on Catherine’s behalf, he had even made a sizable donation to the Istanbul Modern, financing both the planned construction of a new wing and exhibitions by well-known and lesser-known contemporary artists—a subject that may have once interested him, but no longer did. Most essentially, though, his donation had assured his wife a role at the museum. She had sporadically volunteered there for the last few years, but now became a trustee. Although Catherine had emerged from her depression, she knew how Murat worried about a relapse if she were not sufficiently occupied.

  The night she met Peter, Catherine arrived at the terrace restaurant early, giving the hostess her name so that she might wander among the adjacent galleries. The museum was a cavernous, echoing space. The walls were insubstantial, no more than wood-framed partitions painted white. Above them the ceiling was a crosshatch of pipework, wiring, exposed air ducts, and halogen lights aimed at whatever assemblage of artwork the overworked curator had shotgunned into place. The museum was housed in a converted warehouse in Karaköy, a gentrifying neighborhood which had only a couple of years before been a deteriorating dockyard. Now its streets smelled like paint, wet concrete, sawdust, as construction companies like her husband’s built cafés, artisanal bakeries and luxury apartments along the waterfront. The eastern face of the museum was partially constructed of glass and boasted an unobstructed view of the Bosphorus. It was a clear night, and winter. Outside the air was sharp and the boat and bridge lights reflected strongly off the chinked surface of the water, which glimmered like coins. The hills across the strait, in Asia, were pitch-dark along the folds, like dozing bodies ensconced under thick blankets.

  “Catherine Ya�
�ar … ?”

  She startled.

  Peter apologized and introduced himself. He stood regarding Catherine with eyes so dark and shining and alive, that she felt she had said something quite wonderful. He wore the one sports coat he owned, at least the only one he had brought with him when he moved to the city. It was brown corduroy, so didn’t wrinkle easily. He had worn a tie also, but when he saw how Catherine was dressed—jeans, black silk blazer, white T-shirt—he loosened its knot and then took it off, affecting that he had come from some other, more formal engagement, and would now dress down, relax even.

  “Karsh is one of my favorites,” said Peter, as he pushed up his glasses and craned his neck toward the series of photographs hung against the wall. Catherine had been looking out the window, at the water and the city. She had hardly noticed the gallery she had wandered into. A placard also hung on the wall, summarizing the life and the portraiture of Yousuf Karsh: born during Ottoman times in Mardin, an ancient city in the Armenian southeast, Karsh grew up during the genocide; his sister died of starvation as the Turks drove his family from village to village, until, finally, at the age of sixteen he fled to Canada.

  “He was an expatriate, like you,” said Catherine.

  “And like you,” said Peter.

  She laughed. “No, not like me, I think.”

  He then pointed to one of the portraits: a man in a three-piece suit who wore a thin set of spectacles, his arms crossed jauntily along the back of a leather-upholstered chair. The subject brimmed with an early-twentieth-century dignity, as if inviting the camera to look as deep as it wanted, confident that its lens could reveal nothing except what he had chosen to lay before it: an unshakable claim to wealth, empire, social standing. Peter read aloud from the placard, “Prince Bernhard of Lippe-Biesterfeld.”