Red Dress in Black and White

by Elliot Ackerman

  They saw one another several times a week. They limited their communications, texting only when they would meet: usually four o’clock in the afternoon. In the hours before he saw her, Peter’s work would come to a near standstill, distracted as he was. He would often lose the morning as he browsed the shop fronts around Cihangir and Galata, searching out some trifle for her, hoping that it might serve as an accelerant to her affection.

  Wandering one morning, he discovered the cigarette case. It didn’t cost much. He asked the engraver to chisel four little dashes into its back, a reminder of the usual time of their encounters. When Peter presented the gift to her that afternoon, she ran her finger along the case; a blue and black geodesic design was inlaid on its front, on its back she found the dashes. “What’s this little hangman game?” she asked. Peter had shut the front door behind her and they were standing by the coatrack. “Are you asking me for a four-letter word?” she added. Then Catherine pressed her body against his. The time—four o’clock—didn’t seem to be an adequate explanation for what those four dashes might mean.

  Love? he had wondered.

  “Fuck,” she had whispered in his ear.

  * * *

  Catherine sets her phone on the menu so that Peter can see the price of a ticket back to the States. “How am I going to organize all of this?”

  He glances back at William, who is hunched over the arcade game in a trance, working furiously at the joystick and buttons as he defends against a cascade of space invaders. His body contorts in a choreography of moves and countermoves. The little girl from before, with the red scooter and dark braid, has wandered over to him from the table where she had been sitting alongside her parents. She leans next to the controls, watching William as intently as he watches the screen. He ignores her, completely immersed in his game.

  Catherine sits quietly next to Peter. Her eyes remain on her phone.

  “You can pay me back,” says Peter, and he hands her his credit card.

  “It’s not that. The passports are at the house.”

  “At the house?”

  “Murat keeps them.”

  The starship on the arcade screen explodes in a pixelated cloud of smoke, dust and debris. The sound of a deflating chime comes from where William has lost at his game. His shoulders go slack over the controls. The little girl who had been watching him wanders away, back to her parents. William’s eyes jealously follow her. On the screen, a timer counts down from ten. Above it is a question: CONTINUE?

  PART III

  2012 and 2013

  March 8, 2012

  Kristin had received a text that morning from Catherine, asking if she was available for one of their lunches, “just to check in.” Kristin already had plans, a meeting with a midlevel functionary at the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism who needed help with a visa application and whose sister-in-law happened to be a member of parliament who sat on the Public Enterprise Committee. Nevertheless, Kristin canceled and arranged to meet Catherine instead at Kafe 6, a trendy restaurant in Cihangir which didn’t accept reservations and had only a dozen or so tables. Kristin arrived a few minutes ahead of time, not only to ensure they got a table but also because she was anxious to hear about Catherine’s dinner with Peter at the Istanbul Modern the night before. Kristin left her name with the hostess. She was told the wait would be about forty minutes, so she loitered out on the sidewalk among a gaggle of hopefuls who also aspired to lunch there.

  Catherine soon appeared, ambling down the street in a black felt hat with a floppy brim. Her dark, bug-eyed sunglasses covered her face as though she’d selected them to conceal her features for a masquerade ball. She removed her hat and glasses at the door, kissed Kristin on both cheeks and then suggested they grab a table inside.

  “I already left our name,” offered Kristin. “They said forty minutes.”

  “Let me double-check,” said Catherine. She wove gracefully through the crowd, which seemed to part owing to her demeanor alone. On approaching the hostess, she spoke in English, dropping the owner’s name, and reiterated the request for a table. The hostess disappeared into the back of the restaurant and then emerged with a pair of menus cradled beneath her arm. “Right this way, Mrs. Yaşar,” she said apologetically. “We’ll open up the garden for you.”

  Catherine glanced over her shoulder at Kristin, as if asking whether the garden would be a suitable option. Kristin nodded, and the two women followed the hostess through the restaurant, where any number of Istanbul’s cultural elites—media personalities, actors, politicians—sat elbow to elbow, preferring to be seen in each other’s company among the closely packed tables, which felt like a galley, as opposed to eating in any of the more lavish but less trendy establishments in other parts of the city.

  A sprinkling of freezing rain had passed through that morning and the hostess called over a server, who wiped down their seats and set up around their table a circle of space heaters as if they were the lights and audio equipment of a television studio where Kristin and Catherine were about to sit for an on-air interview. The hostess left them with their menus. A fountain bubbled in a far corner. Aside from this the garden was very quiet.

  “It’s nice back here,” Kristin said. “So how are you? How’s Murat?”

  “We’ve been okay,” said Catherine. “William’s fallen behind a bit this semester at the lycée, so that’s been stressful. His Turkish still isn’t where it should be. What do you think of IICS?” she asked, referring to the Istanbul International Community School, where most members of the consulate sent their children and where Kristin’s daughter had enrolled in pre-K that fall.

  “How concerned are his teachers?” interjected Kristin, who’d always taken an interest in William.

  “It isn’t his teachers who are worried, it’s Murat.”

  “Well, IICS is great, but the curriculum’s only in English. They teach Turkish as a foreign language, so I doubt William would come out fluent. Do you think Murat would go for that?” asked Kristin, who knew full well the challenges Catherine had faced with her husband when first enrolling William in the lycée, which was less traditional than Murat preferred even though the majority of its curriculum was taught in Turkish. Then Kristin added, “What about a tutor? I could help you find one.”

  “Maybe,” answered Catherine, noncommittally. “I’ll figure it out.” There was an awkward pause as she changed the subject. “I met your friend Peter,” she added. “We had dinner.”

  “Oh,” said Kristin, averting her eyes down at her menu. “And what do you think?”

  “I wanted to tell you that I plan to help him.”

  “That’s good news,” said Kristin. “Thank you.”

  “And I was wondering what else you could tell me about him.”

  They both placed their menus on the table. Before Kristin could answer, their server appeared. Kristin ordered a salad and Catherine ordered the same but removed and then added enough ingredients that she might as well have ordered off menu. The server tucked his notepad into his apron and Kristin waited for him to leave before answering Catherine’s question. Kristin then reviewed in greater detail what she knew about Peter: his East Coast education, the publications in which his journalistic work had appeared and his ambitions, as she understood them.

  Catherine listened impatiently. She seemed to already know most of this.

  Kristin, feeling obliged to offer up something more, began to list a few of the photographers and artists Peter had placed on his grant application as influences. “He likes the hyperrealist painter Taner Ceylan quite a bit,” she said. “His work is being featured in a gallery opening next week. Fair warning, his paintings are—um—avant-garde. But you could bump into Peter there.”

  Catherine’s attention fixed on this detail. She immediately removed her phone and Googled the opening. “This one, correct?”

 
Kristin glanced at the screen. “That’s the one. The gallery is just on the far side of the First Bosphorus Bridge.”

  Catherine removed her calendar from her handbag and scribbled down the appointment. Having secured a time and place where she might see Peter again, she placed the calendar back into her bag and seemed to relax, as if she had achieved her objective and could now enjoy her lunch, which the server soon laid in front of them. The two women took the first bites of their food in awkward silence, until Catherine offered what else was on her mind. “I suggested Deniz show Peter’s work at the Modern.”

  Kristin finished chewing her food. “And?”

  “He doesn’t seem convinced … Maybe you could help convince him?”

  Kristin slowly shook her head. “That wouldn’t be appropriate.”

  Catherine didn’t quite understand what wasn’t appropriate about Kristin putting in a word with Deniz. Promotion had come rapidly for Kristin, each rise coming with an approved tour-extension request, so that she was entering the seventh year of what should’ve been a two- or at most three-year posting. And although Catherine couldn’t explain the reason for her friend’s rapid ascent, it evidenced her influence within the consulate, a power Catherine had hoped to leverage to Peter’s benefit, though it seemed she would be disappointed, so she began impatiently to tap her well-manicured fingers against the table. “Why would putting a word in with Deniz be inappropriate?” she asked, but received no answer, and so repeated herself. “What’s inappropriate in this? I’ve always been a good wife and have never wandered far from Murat,” she stated firmly, feeling the need to defend herself against an attack that Kristin hadn’t initiated, or at least not directly. “The few men I’ve met along the way, like your friend Peter, they’re all that’s made things tolerable. And Peter—” she added, “well, he’s special, isn’t he?”

  “Yes, he is,” said Kristin. “You should go to the Taner Ceylan opening.”

  A slight smile pursed Catherine’s lips, as if she were thinking of Peter and glad to have Kristin’s blessing to see him again, even if Kristin wouldn’t intervene with Deniz. “I’ll be discreet,” she said. “If I ever left Murat, the scandal would probably destroy his business. Who knows if I’d wind up with William …” She knew she was speaking dangerously now and allowed her voice to trail off while the chain reaction of events such a decision would precipitate played across her mind. Then she switched the subject back to Peter “And he’s quite ambitious, too.”

  “I think he is completely invested in his career, which doesn’t seem to be going anywhere at the moment,” said Kristin. “I don’t know if that makes him ambitious or not—”

  “But he is talented,” interjected Catherine.

  Kristin nodded, not certain if Catherine was making a statement or asking a question, looking for an affirmation of Peter’s artistic talent, which was by definition a subjective judgment. “He is one of those people who’re capable of investing their entire identity into their careers,” said Kristin. “So be careful.”

  “You make him sound like you.”

  “I’m not like that,” said Kristin, leaning back in her chair.

  Catherine shot her back an accusing glance.

  Before Kristin could respond, Catherine explained that she would, of course, help Peter only to a point. Certain contacts of hers would not be on offer, at least not right away. Had she wanted to, she could have arranged for his work to be considered at venues like Art Basel or Paris Photo, or so she boasted. But she knew—or at least told Kristin she knew—that such high-level introductions would confuse whatever relationship she hoped to cultivate with Peter. First, she would work on convincing Deniz to show him at the Istanbul Modern.

  Catherine’s bluster was something Kristin hadn’t observed before, as if there existed within her some latent and now manifesting insecurity. Kristin listened patiently, watching with wonder at the projections Catherine was able to make about Peter, someone whom at this moment she hardly knew. This was a woman, Kristin thought, whose equilibrium was held in delicate balance. What Kristin didn’t know was that as Catherine thought of Peter, she felt grounded, rooted in a way she hadn’t experienced in the many years since she’d come to this city. “Sounds like you’d make him a kept man,” said Kristin, after listening to Catherine’s proposed support of Peter’s ambitions.

  “That’s an awful way to put it,” said Catherine. “I prefer an ambitious man, one whose strength is huge, even at the risk of being broken by him.”

  “That’s probably true of Peter, but don’t you think your husband is strong?” asked Kristin. “You can’t turn down a street in this city without seeing one of his buildings.”

  “He is,” conceded Catherine. “But his is a different type of strength: it’s the strength of one who is struggling not to drown.”

  Nine o’clock on that morning

  Murat returns to the living room and lies down on the sofa. He can’t bring himself to close the front door. The action feels too final, as if he would be shutting out all that had just walked away. He leaves it open and listens to the morning’s gathering traffic. A draft blows from the driveway into the foyer. The crystal pendants on the chandelier glance against one another, the familiar noise of his empty house. He pulls a throw off a nearby chair and gathers it around his shoulders. As he attempts to sleep, his son’s image appears against his lidded eyes. He tries to see himself or Catherine in the boy, yet he sees neither.

  The tick-tock sound of heel strikes crosses the marble entry.

  Murat sits up, retucking his shirt and smoothing out his crumpled suit pants. He straightens the sofa pillows. Kristin stands on the other side of the living room, hands planted on her hips. Her eyes dip toward Peter’s book on the coffee table, as well as Catherine’s unread magazines and the full ashtray, which she snatches away and brings into the kitchen. “Sit up,” she calls over her shoulder as she empties it in the trash. The steady pitch in her voice is familiar to Murat. It refuses to indulge his weaknesses. It rejects the lesser parts of him. He’s known it since shortly after he met her colleague from Cultural Affairs at the consulate. He believes it is the tone of a firm, unshakable love. It is a tone that reminds him of his father, and he hears it with equal parts reassurance and resentment.

  Murat stands from the sofa. The two of them go to the kitchen to fix breakfast. When Murat had returned from work at around ten o’clock the evening before and realized that Catherine had taken William, he had immediately dialed Kristin. When she didn’t pick up, he had texted her over and over until finally she replied, and Murat could imagine her pulling his phone from the bank of other phones he knew she kept on her desk.

  From her wedding ring, Murat knows that Kristin has a husband, and from a photo saved to her phone’s background screen, he knows that she has a daughter. He has met neither of them and he long ago realized that he never would. He has, on occasion, imagined their lives in one of the walled housing compounds leased by the consulate in nearby İstinye, a development no doubt chosen for its resemblance to America’s pastures of prefab shopping malls and rambling bungalows. Based on the hours Kristin keeps, Murat has inferred that her husband doesn’t work, for who else would be at home with their daughter, and Kristin, with her overbearing, controlling personality, doesn’t seem like the sort who would entrust her child’s care to a nanny. Kristin once let slip that she and her husband had endured a brief separation; perhaps this was the point when balancing two careers became too much. Murat doesn’t know, he can only surmise. What he does know is that she has left her family this morning to be with him, and that she is now caring for him as though he were one of them.

  Murat sits at the island in his kitchen while Kristin rummages through the cupboards with a frown etched to her face. She pulls down cereals high in sugar. She removes canned soups of questionable nutrition. Packets of cookies, bags of chips, she arrays the goods in c
omplicit rows. “I work more than full-time,” says Kristin, “and you won’t find this junk in my house. How’s William supposed to grow up strong eating this garbage?” She again opens the trash.

  She then finds a cupboard stocked with expensive, imported health foods—kale chips, chia seeds, agave syrup—items that can’t be bought at the local Migros supermarket. Each packet has Catherine’s name written beneath the label with a black marker. Kristin reaches deep into a back shelf and removes a tin of raw oats. She fills a pot with milk and places it on the stove. She then measures out the oats. Murat and Kristin watch the burner’s blue flame instead of looking at one another.

  “I’m not surprised,” she says.

  Murat nods, unable to meet her gaze.

  “Why didn’t you stop them?” Kristin asks.

  The milk comes to a boil. She flings the oats into the pot.

  “How was I supposed to stop them?”

  “She’s your wife. He’s your son. You could have figured something out.”

  Murat crosses the kitchen toward the trash. He opens the lid and quickly examines all that Kristin has discarded. What did she mean that she’s not surprised? he wonders. She isn’t surprised that Catherine has left with William? Or that he was unable to stop them? “I did try,” Murat says, while a hard stone of regret sets in his stomach. He had built all of this for his wife and their son. Or so he had thought. Only when she threatened to leave him did he realize that he would never allow her to and that everything he had built he had built for himself alone.

  “How is William’s swimming coming along?”

  “You know how it’s coming along,” says Murat.

  * * *

  “I’m not trying to pry,” she’d said when they first met, “but my colleague thought it was a little unusual that you and not your wife had come on your son’s behalf.”