Red Dress in Black and White

by Elliot Ackerman

  * * *

  His ambition, the same ambition that had allowed him to agree to Kristin’s proposal at the Çırağan Palace seven years before, had caused him to neglect his family, to set into place the conditions that would cause him to lose them. He had, in all that time, never once taken William swimming.

  “He’s going to learn about this one day,” says Kristin, standing by the stove in his kitchen. “He’ll know that you allowed him to be taken from you.” She calmly stirs the oats, turning them over in the milk with a wooden spoon. The more deliberate her movements, the thicker the oats become. Murat knows that she is right: William would learn, one day. He had failed his son, his wife, himself. He hadn’t known what combination of words he needed to say in order to keep them from leaving.

  “Where do you think she would go?” asks Kristin.

  The question humiliates Murat. Kristin knows the answer. He also suspects that she asks only because she wants to hear him say it, if for no other reason than to chasten him, to prove the control she’s exercised since their meeting at the Çırağan Palace those years before. Perhaps she also wants to hear him speak Peter’s name, so that he will acknowledge what’s been taken, so that he might muster the will to take it back.

  Murat pivots away from the counter. He leaves Kristin in the kitchen and climbs the stairs to his bedroom, where he takes off his shoes and pauses in the doorway of the walk-in-closet he shares with Catherine. His toes clutch the plush cream-colored wall-to-wall carpet she had picked nearly ten years before. Strong light rebounds off the Bosphorus, refracting into shards that angle inside through a pair of grand bay windows. Staring into the closet he is confronted by rows of his pressed suits, shirts, ties, and the sheen of polish on the black leather lace-ups he wears each day.

  He wanders inside. Ranks of her shoes are arranged in racks by height, flats to stilettos. Dresses and evening gowns hang along one wall. Slacks and blouses hang along another. From floor to ceiling an entire wall is made of cabinets. He opens them, rifling through her drawers. He begins slowly, lifting the folded jeans, T-shirts, her socks. What he is looking for isn’t here, but the pretense of a search allows him to violate her personal space. He empties the drawers and now tugs her clothes from their hangers. He stands in a pile of bright, expensive fabrics. He tosses her jewelry, too. He counts the pieces, each one given on an anniversary, a birthday, a holiday. An accounting of their years of marriage spills across the carpet.

  “Why don’t you come eat something?”

  Kristin stands behind him, surveying what he’s done. She steps into his side of the closet and unhooks a charcoal gray suit, a white shirt, and she takes a pair of socks out of a drawer. She lays them across the foot of his bed. Clutching a bouquet of his ties, she stands over the outfit. “There’s no shame in your wife leaving,” she says as she slides the shirt beneath the lapel of the jacket. “My husband left me once.” She holds a tie to the collar, rotating them one by one for a sense of which color will match best. “When I was first assigned here, he refused to come. He hated the idea of following me from posting to posting. He hated this city. And I came to hate him for that. Which led to an episode, one which was my fault. Eventually, though, we put it behind us. And he moved here. This will work itself out, too.” She settles on a conservative burgundy. “Get dressed,” she says, her back turned toward Murat as she rehangs the remaining ties. “You’re going into work today.”

  She leaves his bedroom and he dresses in the closet, stepping into his sharply creased trousers before reaching deep into a drawer. Long ago, he had hidden a manila envelope among his shirts. Clean-shaven, hair combed, wearing the suit Kristin has picked for him, Murat returns to the kitchen, where she sits at the counter. He clutches the envelope at his side. Then he places it in front of her.

  “What’s in that?” she asks.

  He dumps the contents: a red passport and two blue ones.

  Kristin glances at the inside pages, her fingers manipulating the documents with the precision of a veteran bureaucrat. Two of the passports are William’s. The third passport, the second blue American one, is Catherine’s. Kristin gathers them. “I guess they won’t get far.”

  Murat looks away from her, toward a photo of William that sits on the end of the counter. He was not much more than four years old. He and Murat stood at the Kabataş ferry terminal. A storm had ruined a beach day they had planned to the Princes’ Islands, an hour’s boat ride away. A fine-beaded rain drizzled down, so airy that it diffused to almost a mist. The pavement was slick. Behind them a flock of hovering seagulls surveyed the fishermen who snatched sardines from the Bosphorus with their long poles threaded with a dozen or more pin-size hooks. William sat on his shoulders, looking skyward, through a transparent plastic umbrella. But Murat wasn’t holding the umbrella, his son was. He was the one who protected them from the weather.

  April 30, 2012

  The Istanbul Modern’s renovation was far from complete. Murat’s firm had drawn up conceptual sketches that envisioned a sleek restructuring in glass, plus a new administrative annex to house all of the museum’s back office. During construction the museum staff had been housed in a series of trailers along the Karaköy dockyard next to the visitor parking lot. The construction crews housed in the adjoining trailers made erratic progress based upon the delivery of materials, the status of labor negotiations and renegotiations, and the restrictions on noise pollution enforced by the municipality. In recent months work on the annex had come to a standstill, the labor crews ceased arriving at their trailers and the museum’s administrative staff was forced to settle into offices whose electricity was run by chugging diesel generators that they needed to refill twice daily from large red jerricans in the parking lot.

  Nearly two months after her dinner in the museum’s restaurant with Peter, Catherine found herself standing next to a stable of those jerricans as she searched for the door to Deniz’s office. She had seldom wandered around the ad hoc administrative annex for fear that a member of the museum staff might question her about the renovation, probing to see if she had some information through her husband on its progress, or lack thereof. Murat rarely spoke to her about his business, most of what she knew came from reports in the papers, so whatever answers she had for her colleagues—this is how she wanted to think of her relationship to them—were unsatisfying, segregating her further from them, for she was, after all, in her position at the museum only by dint of her husband’s largesse.

  As she waited, Catherine heard a whistle from across the parking lot, a sharp catcall. Her eyes fell to the ground on reflex. She then searched a bit more desperately for Deniz’s office, tugging on a locked doorknob. The whistle repeated. When she glanced up, her scowl instantly relaxed: it was Deniz. He approached her with a broad smile that revealed the slot between his two front teeth, which were bound by a nearly invisible picket of braces, an extravagance which had not been available to him in childhood and which he had only recently been able to afford due to his rapid ascent through the museum’s administrative hierarchy.

  “Cat,” he said, as he glided up alongside her. “To what do I owe the pleasure?” Before she could answer, he continued boisterously, “And why did you scowl at my whistle? Aren’t I allowed to appreciate a beautiful woman?” The day was muggy and overcast, prematurely warm after a cold winter, and the stale taste of the night before still lingered in the air. Deniz wore a pair of sunglasses despite the lack of sun, and he wore a calf-length trench coat despite the stifling heat. Catherine noted his jeans, which peeked from beneath the coat’s hem: they were an eccentric red. Several months before, after his promotion to curatorial director, Deniz had moved from his rented apartment in Esenler to a place off İstiklal Caddesi. The new apartment needed work, but he now owned it, an idea that had yet to settle in. The trench coat was a habit from his old commute, when he had needed to hide his peacocking appearance as he took two buses and then
a train through the more conservative parts of the city. The fact that he no longer needed to hide, or at least needed to hide less, also had yet to settle in.

  “Could we speak inside?” Catherine asked.

  Deniz unlocked the flimsy door to his trailer. A steel foldout chair sat behind a plastic desk and in front of it was another chair. Deniz swiveled the rod on the blinds, releasing a ladder of light into the shadowy confines of the office, which was completely bare except for the wall behind the desk, where a poster hung, a Rothko, entitled No. 3, 1967, taken from the gift shop, a hazy cube of orange balanced on an equally hazy cube of red. Even on a poster the paint looked heavy and textured. Deniz draped his coat over a steel hanger on the back of the door. In the far corner a stand-up fan kicked up motes of dust as it circulated the thick, soupy air. His shirt was orange linen and its several unfastened top buttons exposed his chest and its hair, a masculinity he expressed in tandem with his other eccentricities, which read so feminine. Worn with his red jeans, the orange shirt replicated the color scheme of the Rothko, which Deniz noticed as he crossed the room. “Clearly, I’ve been in this trailer too long,” he said. Deniz then tossed his sunglasses on the desk, revealing his eyes, which were crowded with red fissures. He sighed heavily as he settled into his uncomfortable chair. On his desk were two neat stacks of paper. He began to review the one on his left.

  “Late night?” asked Catherine.

  “Out late, up early, that seems to be my rhythm.” Deniz raised his stare from the forms. “These are complaints against our exhibits,” he said, holding up a sheet of paper from the largest stack. He then gestured to the other stack. “And those are portfolio samples from new artists whose work we’re considering.”

  “Daunting,” replied Catherine.

  Deniz returned to his stacks of paper.

  “Remember my friend Peter,” she added. “What did you think of his work?”

  “Perhaps he should submit a portfolio,” Deniz answered.

  “How many new artists have you shown?”

  “Not one yet.”

  “So …”

  “So perhaps he should submit a portfolio,” said Deniz.

  Catherine stepped next to Deniz, her body bent at the waist so she could read over his shoulder. “If you say no to all of them,” she asked, “then why do you review their portfolios? Why not show only established artists?”

  “Because that wouldn’t be fair. Even if I never take one of these, the process of rejection is fair. If we shut that down, what do we have? A museum that closes out certain people instead of inviting them in, even if they never get in.” Deniz drummed his fingers against the desk, each one hitting with an impatient thud. His hands were large, like a strangler’s hands. His knuckles were crosshatched with scars. Both of his pinkies bent out at slightly obtuse angles, the products of dozens of neighborhood brawls. And now that he was grown, no matter how he dressed, or what work he did, or what interests he developed, from Caravaggio to Jasper Johns, nothing could conceal those hands, which had carried him through his youth and which, from time to time, he still relied upon. “You have never been much for process, have you, Cat?” he added.

  “And how is your new apartment?” she asked.

  He turned over his shoulder to where Catherine ominously lingered. He offered her a sharp, reproachful look. “Fine,” he said, allowing the word’s single syllable to depart in one suspicious breath.

  “And the job?” she added.

  “Also fine,” he said. “And how is William?”

  She didn’t reply, but now fixed her gaze on Deniz.

  “Are we threatening one another?” he asked.

  “Are we?” she asked, pausing for a beat before answering her own question. “We’re not, but I need your help.”

  “If we show Peter’s work, it is my reputation, not yours. It’s no small favor.”

  “You owe me this favor.”

  Deniz went back to his forms, considering the claim she made. An account of favors exchanged did exist between the two of them, yet the balance of who was in debt to the other lay in dispute. Sitting across the desk from Deniz, Catherine began to speak, reiterating the history between them and the terms upon which they had first met in Esenler, six years before. “I gave your son a home,” said Catherine. “I found you a first job. How is it that I’m in your debt?” But even as Catherine laid out her argument, she knew that it was only one half of the ledger.

  * * *

  Catherine had traveled to Esenler alone on the afternoon she first met Deniz. Her secrecy was born not from her shame about adopting a child, but from Murat’s shame at not being able to conceive one. In those days she had wanted to protect her husband. She knew that Murat would’ve come with her had she asked, but she hadn’t wanted to ask. She had wanted the child just to appear, like an immaculate conception, and she thought that if Murat were exposed to none of the back-and-forth concerning the adoption, the child might eventually feel as if it had been theirs all along.

  The house Catherine had arrived at in Esenler wasn’t really a house but a gecekondu, a shanty with two cinder-block walls, two plywood walls and a corrugated tin roof. The gecekondu didn’t have an address. All Catherine had was a road intersection and a cellphone number with a name. “Call when you arrive,” she’d been told by an intermediary with vague connections to the U.S. consulate. “He will come to meet you.” It had taken her nearly two hours to cross the city. It would have been half that time had she driven in a taxi, but she hadn’t wanted anyone, not even a cabdriver, to know about the trip.

  After two transfers on the metro and one on the bus, she had arrived. The streets were wet with filth. The residents would take their plastic garbage bags and empty them into the choked gutters simply to save the expense of another bag. Staged next to one empty lot she found stacks of building materials—boxes of nails, scraps of plastic roofing, paper sacks of unmixed cement, a wooden door painted red on one side for luck—all lined up in preparation for a frantic night of building, for gece meant “at night” and kondu meant “settled,” and this warren of hastily built homes existed due to a legal loophole that stipulated if one starts building after dusk and moves into a completed home before dawn the next day without having been noticed by the authorities, then the structure cannot be torn down without a proceeding being registered in court—a difficult thing to do—and in this way entire neighborhoods had been populated.

  She called Deniz’s cellphone and then waited for him in the street. She had dressed modestly in a hijab and abaya tailored in the Turkish style so it looked more like an ankle-length trench coat. Her eyes were hidden by the only set of sunglasses she owned, made by Versace. As much as she had tried to fit in, she stuck out, and knew it. Yet he stuck out, too. She placed him immediately. This wasn’t due to anything Deniz wore, but rather the manner in which he carried himself, his demeanor. He was powerfully built but also effete, with strong arms, those strangler’s hands and a mouth shaped like a kiss. When he approached, she could feel the foot traffic around them slowing as his neighbors or even an anonymous passerby brushed them with an extended gaze, as if she and Deniz had entered a film where they moved at one frame speed and the rest of the world moved at another.

  In a single evening at his home they had agreed on the terms of the adoption. They had sipped tea at a simple wooden farmer’s table in one corner of the gecekondu, which was partitioned in half by a bedsheet slung across a wash line. On one side were the kitchen and table, on the other Deniz’s bed and a wicker bassinet for the newborn, who slept peaceably through the night. Stacked in the kitchen were tins of formula. Two empty bottles lolled in the half-filled washbasin. A jute rug covered the floor and at its edges the floor was dirt. An electric camping lantern hung from a bent nail in the ceiling.

  “I don’t want to give him up,” Deniz had told Catherine.

  The next morning,
she would register his son as her son with the Central Authority. In return she would find Deniz some steady work and from time to time she would permit him to see the child.

  “We didn’t give him a name,” Deniz said. “We thought whoever took him would want to do that.”

  “Who is we?”

  “We is no one now. Just me.” He stepped to a small burner in the kitchen. Its flame sputtered erratically as the gas seeped through a snaking hose fastened onto a propane tank. The kettle had come to a boil. He reached for the handle and at that moment an uneven surge of gas caused the flame to leap over his wrist before it snuck away. Deniz dropped the kettle back onto the burner and cursed, clutching his hand to his chest.

  Catherine found a dish towel and dipped it into the sudsy washbasin with the two bottles. “Let me see that,” she said, reaching for Deniz, who slowly unhinged his arm toward her. The dark hair around his wrist had been singed and a finger-length welt already spread across a strip of burnt skin that was turning translucent. She wrapped and then tied the wet dish towel around his wrist while he gritted a single curse as she cinched it down.

  Catherine shushed Deniz, glancing toward the wicker bassinet. “You’ll wake him. Keep that cloth pressed there.” The kettle steamed heavily and she carefully lifted it from the burner and poured them both their cups of tea. They returned to the table.

  Deniz cast his eyes toward his son, who had begun to stir but was now settling back to sleep. “Already you’re taking care of him.”

  Catherine nodded.

  “You don’t have to worry about his mother …” Deniz said and paused, searching for a sufficient explanation. “It’s my fault. I allowed her to think I was one way when clearly I am another. I never meant for this to end so badly.” Deniz sipped his tea, his stare shifting from Catherine to the infant who slept in the corner. “If a man trapped on a sinking ship handed off his son to a stranger, you wouldn’t judge him, would you?”