Red Dress in Black and White

by Elliot Ackerman

  Kristin is perched next to Catherine on the sofa, their knees angled toward one another, nearly touching. Catherine repeats her request for someone to take William outside. Kristin stalls for a moment, as if reluctant to allow anyone to leave the apartment after her efforts to unite this group. She then glances up at Deniz. Perhaps he would take William.

  Deniz comes to the window, where William sits contentedly with Murat. He suggests that they wander up to the İstiklal. “Your father will be here when we get back,” Deniz says, releasing the word father into the air like a noble concession, like the announcement of an entire fortune being gifted as charity. William turns a desperate stare toward Murat, who glances away.

  William then turns to his mother, who, like Murat, looks away, refusing to weigh in with a gesture or a remark as to whether or not William should follow Deniz outside. This decision, unlike any other William has known, is entirely his to make. He offers his hand to Deniz, who grips it firmly as they head for the front door.

  “Back in an hour?” Deniz asks Kristin, who nods in return.

  William and Deniz descend the apartment’s stairwell. Standing in the street, Deniz asks William what he usually does when he’s out with his parents. “My father,” says William, “takes me to look at buildings.”

  “At buildings?”

  “I tell him how much I think each is worth and he tells me if I’m right.”

  “And this is a fun game?”

  William considers the question for a moment as they wander down the block, toward a tangle of alleyways and tributary roads emptying onto İstiklal Caddesi. “Knowing what things are worth is how my father makes money. He says that someday I’ll make my money doing the same thing, by being the best at this. He says I’m already good at it, that I’m observant.”

  “Maybe you can teach me,” says Deniz, who still holds William’s hand.

  The echo of their steps carries cheerfully down the road. As they turn off the block of Deniz’s apartment, they pass by a large white Chevy parked at the corner. They both notice the car, which stands out among the few others scattered along the roadside. But neither of them notices the woman who waits in the passenger seat.

  * * *

  Kristin begins to explain herself. The men are on one sofa, the women on the other, the coffee table between them. They sit, the four of them—Murat, Peter, Catherine and Kristin—in the awkwardness of a moment, which each must have known their collective choices over the years had driven them toward. And as Kristin talks of their interests and of hers, the many points of intersection, the logic of what each of them should do next—whether it is Catherine giving up her plans to leave, or Murat agreeing to support Peter’s ambitions—Kristin realizes that she isn’t so much explaining herself to them, but rather explaining each of them to themselves. She attempts to speak in a level, even-mannered tone. She had hoped—and continues to hope as she feels their skeptical gazes boring into her—that they will subscribe to her logic of their best interests.

  They wait, their bodies settled in three different angles of repose. Murat thumbs through a magazine with his legs crossed one lazily over the other, while Peter sits plank straight like a child who with great effort is demonstrating good posture for an adult’s behalf, and Catherine is leaning forward with elbows perched on her knees as if she might lunge after Kristin, who prattles on:

  “Murat, if you’re willing to help reinstate Deniz to his position at the Istanbul Modern, I know Deniz would be willing to reconsider some of Peter’s photographs for an exhibit and perhaps even the permanent collection.” Murat doesn’t reply, but Kristin knows how to interpret his silence, which isn’t a manifestation of disagreement, but rather a quiet acquiescence to the inherent logic of the bargain. “And Peter,” Kristin continues, “an exhibit at the Istanbul Modern would be a significant opportunity. An opportunity I imagine you couldn’t afford to miss.”

  Like Murat, Peter doesn’t reply. And if Kristin doesn’t know Peter as well as she knows Murat, if she doesn’t understand the topography of his silences, Catherine surely does. Catherine turns her head toward Peter, so that her profile faces Kristin, who can see Catherine’s clenched jaw and the muscles in her cheek flickering like a candle near the end of its wick. Kristin imagines the flood of accusations screaming through Catherine’s mind as she stares Peter down, knowing that he is weighing the merits of betraying her happiness against the merits of assuring his own success.

  “What about Catherine?” Murat interrupts the silence. He has uncrossed his legs and come forward on the sofa. Leaning toward Kristin, he asks her again, “If Peter remains here for work—and if Catherine chooses to stay as well—then what happens to her?” Catherine turns away from Peter and toward her husband. The tension in her jaw eases, her shoulders relax.

  “I’m not sure I understand,” answers Kristin. “Where would she go?”

  Peter, Murat and Catherine shuttle confused glances between themselves as if uncertain how Kristin could have suddenly become unaware of Catherine’s intention to leave with William, the very same intention which has triggered this current crisis.

  “She would return to the U.S.,” says Peter.

  Kristin allows Peter’s words to hang in the air for a moment. The idea of Catherine leaving can’t sustain itself and it dissipates the longer it goes unacknowledged, like a ribbon of clouds at dawn, or dew on the ground, or any number of whimsical and vanishing distractions.

  “How would she do that?” Kristin asks.

  Catherine straightens up. “It’s my right to return home.”

  “That it is,” answers Kristin.

  A beat of curious silence passes, in which Catherine glances at Murat and Peter, as if taking a final measure of what she might choose to leave behind and then, as if finding the pair of them insufficient reason to stay, she stands and asks Murat if she can have the passports.

  “Those won’t do you any good,” answers Kristin.

  Addressing Murat and not Kristin, Catherine stands with her hand extended. “If you don’t give them to me, I can always have another passport made—”

  “For you,” interrupts Kristin.

  “I’m sorry?” says Catherine.

  “You can always have another passport made for you,” repeats Kristin. “William is a different matter.” Before Catherine can respond, Kristin continues, “Leave if you want, but you won’t bring your son along. Even that idea, that he is your son, is a matter that could easily be refuted. You’re an American woman taking away the adopted child of a Turkish citizen.” At the mention of William’s paternity, Catherine glances out the window, toward the İstiklal, where Deniz has taken him. “Don’t worry, they’ll be coming back,” adds Kristin. A tinge of malice sharpens her voice, an effect she believes Catherine deserves. Although a part of Kristin pities the manner in which events have conspired to trap Catherine, she also resents Catherine’s inability to appreciate—or at least to acknowledge—the web of other people’s interests, of which she is a part.

  Kristin rises from the sofa and gestures for Catherine to join her by the window. They stand shoulder to shoulder and beneath them is the street, with the echoing conversations of passersby, with the trash huddled in piles under fluorescent bulbs, with the parades of stray cats either rummaging in those very same piles or sitting erect with a calm, cynical clairvoyance. “Do you see my car?” asks Kristin, pointing toward the corner, where she has parked the same white Chevy that had dented the door of the black Mercedes weeks before.

  “I see it,” Catherine says.

  “What if William’s mother knew that you were going to take him away?” asks Kristin, and she is no longer looking out the window, but rather at Catherine, whose stare is fixed on the white Chevy, where a meek, fidgeting silhouette sits in the front seat. “Do you think if she knew her son was going to be taken from the country that she might reconsider her dec
ision of many years ago?”

  “I have a right to go home.” Catherine repeats this several times, but each time she speaks her words, they are already long gone.

  “And her?” asks Kristin, who nods toward the white Chevy.

  “She gave up her right to my son.”

  “Did your son give up his right to her?”

  Catherine’s eyes narrow, and she looks out at the city with unshielded contempt, as if it isn’t Kristin, Peter or even Murat who has conspired to undermine her escape, but rather the monster of a city itself, the undulating skyline, the large buildings that look down on small ones and the small ones that had once been large, only to find themselves outpaced by newer, more innovative forms of construction. Arcing steadily across the evening sky the blinking signal lights of airliners trace irregular flight patterns, making it difficult to know which are returning and which are departing. Catherine stares upward, trying to solve the many riddles of their direction.

  “Deniz and William will be back soon,” says Kristin, interrupting the mournful silence Catherine has escaped into. In a form of threat, Kristin tosses her eyes up the road, to where William and Deniz will return. Then she shifts her gaze to the parked white Chevy and its passenger. “I suppose we might be witness to a reunion of sorts,” mutters Kristin in almost an afterthought.

  Catherine’s expression is alive with the implications of such a reunion, as if a synaptic jolt has, at last, forced a decision, and, upon recognizing that she needs to intervene to keep William from meeting this woman—at least at this moment—she also recognizes that she still needs her husband’s help to do this. Catherine bolts for the door, but not before offering a single pleading glance to Murat. What she is pleading for is forgiveness, or enough of it so that Murat won’t abandon her, so that he might come with her after their son. And upon his eyes meeting hers, Murat finally gets up from his seat. He has made his choice and it is to follow her. The patter of their footfalls descends the hallway, and then the stairs, and lastly their voices can be heard in the street as they walk head down with shoulders forward past the white Chevy and toward a fissure of narrow, ascending pedestrian thoroughfares which will take them to the İstiklal, where they might find William, only to take him home and to then, if they are lucky, find a way to resign the day’s events to a single episode in an otherwise fruitful, if at times uneven, marriage.

  Kristin sits heavily on the sofa next to Peter. With her elbow propped on its arm, she leans her head into her hand and has an impulse to put her feet up on the coffee table but thinks better of it. Whatever future Peter and Catherine had with one another—no matter how improbable—has walked out of the apartment door. The vacuum of that loss leaves a silence in the room. Peter lights a cigarette.

  “I never realized you smoked,” said Kristin.

  He leans forward on the sofa, searching the coffee table for somewhere to put his ash. The cigarette dangles from his lips as he casts Kristin an incredulous sidelong glance. “So that’s the one thing about me you didn’t figure out,” he says, standing. He walks into the kitchen, where he smokes by the sink, finishing one cigarette and then lighting another as he tips his ash into the drain. He then crosses Deniz’s apartment and enters the room he had converted into a gallery the night before. His photographs still crowd the walls, a perimeter of faces, battered and unbattered impressions, lending to an effect Kristin wasn’t certain Peter ever quite achieved. Peter lingers in the exhibit’s center, as if to feel the weight of each glance on him for a final time before he takes his work down.

  Kristin steps into the empty doorway to speak with Peter. What she wants to offer him are assurances: that Deniz will be in touch to begin plans for his exhibit at the Istanbul Modern, that she will ensure another grant is forthcoming to cover his expenses, and that, ultimately, he has done the right thing by supporting Catherine when she seemed poised to make a ruinous decision—even though that decision involved coupling up with him. However, before Kristin can say any of this, Peter gently lifts the first of his portraits off its hook. One by one the photographs are removed from the wall. As Peter stacks them in the center of the room, the somnolent dismantling of his work silences Kristin. Gathering her coat, she heads for the door. She has a great deal to tell Peter, but she will do it later.

  * * *

  When Kristin steps from the apartment, the street is empty. She fumbles through her purse searching for her keys. After a couple of seconds, she finds them in the interior pocket of her suit jacket. The day had been a busy one, stressful, leaving her preoccupied. Misplacing keys has become too common a tic, like a geriatric placing dishes in the laundry hamper or books in the dishwasher. To Kristin it’s a sign she’s slipping. It frightens her, this slippage, for Kristin has lived continually not only on her guard against others, but also on guard against herself.

  As soon as she resolves the detail of her misplaced keys, she unlocks the white Chevy. When she hears steps approaching, Kristin glances up—it is Deniz, returning from the İstiklal. Kristin now realizes that she has made another and far more severe oversight. With the door to the Chevy open, Deniz can clearly see the woman inside, the petite silhouette which Kristin had used to menace whatever equilibrium still existed in Murat’s and Catherine’s lives.

  “You’re leaving?” Deniz calls out.

  “Yes, but we’ll be in touch about everything,” says Kristin, sliding into the car. Their voices carry and Kristin thinks that perhaps their conversation won’t travel as far if she sits inside the Chevy.

  “And who’s this?” asks Deniz, stepping beside Kristin’s door.

  The slight woman in the hijab glances at Kristin like an actress who has forgotten her lines, or worse, like an actress dealing with another actor who has gone off script. Kristin shifts her eyes to Deniz, answering as she turns on the ignition. “She works with me at the consulate.”

  Kristin puts the Chevy into gear. Deniz straightens himself and then, as if sensing shifting weather overhead, he glances up, to where he catches a glimpse of Peter, who is standing in the open window of the apartment. Deniz waves at him good-naturedly. Peter has been watching the entire time and he shuts the window behind him.

  PART V

  An evening in early July 2016

  How it glimmers. Encased in glass, the renovated wing of the Istanbul Modern invites the light. During the day it shines and shines along the bank of the Bosphorus, radiating like a second sun. At night the boat lights, the bridge lights, even the passing gridlock along Cevdet Paşa Caddesi reflect kaleidoscopically from its windows, behind which a priceless mélange of contemporary and classic collections hang the interior walls, adding their value to the exterior glass walls, which Murat Yaşar has built to house them. A year before, Peter had his first show in the Istanbul Modern’s old wing, which by all accounts was a wild success. Scheduled to run for two weeks, it was extended to three months. The coverage Deniz arranged in the Turkish press had been both rampant and generous. Venerable European auction houses took notice and began to inquire about Peter’s work, and the museum had gone on to purchase a half dozen of his photographs for its permanent collection while the consulate had purchased a half dozen more, even providing him with another grant, which he no longer needed but happily pocketed and then used to purchase his rented apartment.

  On opening night of the Istanbul Modern’s new wing, Peter dresses next to his bed in that apartment. His sheets are predictably mussed, the evidence of another afternoon spent with Catherine, who still insists on their series of knocks and counterknocks, even though on the occasions when she cannot easily find a cab she’s had Murat’s driver deliver her straight to Peter’s front door in the black Mercedes. Standing in front of a full-length mirror, Peter struggles to articulate the series of cinches, twists and pulls that will construct his bow tie, the last detail on the tuxedo he has rented a half dozen times over the past year, a fact which has led Catherine—
and the tailor who rents him the tuxedo—to ask why he simply doesn’t purchase one. A question he has yet to find a satisfactory answer to, except his nagging hunch that each celebration of his talents might well be the last in what has become an unsettling string of successes.

  In the back of the taxi Peter steals glances at himself in the rearview mirror, specifically at his bow tie, of which he has made a shoddy job. Something is off about the knot, which isn’t quite straight, so the bow tie keeps unscrewing a few degrees to the left. Peter twists it back to center, but it then stubbornly propellers to its natural, off-kilter position. Changing lanes, the taxi driver glances in his rearview mirror. A laugh escapes him as he notices Peter’s determined effort. Peter slinks into his seat. From his interior coat pocket, he removes the engraved invitation which Catherine had hand-delivered to him several weeks before. It is printed on heavy stock, the edges brushed with gold paint and lettering to match. Listed in a curlicuing font on the back of the invitation are the dinner’s cochairs in alphabetical order, aside from Catherine and Murat, who despite the first initial of their last name have been placed on the top, as in Murat and Catherine Yaşar, along with…invite you to…and so forth.

  Peter touches his bow tie. It has again unwound into its off-kilter position. He knows that he cannot fix it in the back of the cab and that he will have to remember to tend to its stubborn unwinding until he finds an opportunity to retie it himself. It occurs to him that if Catherine had been in the cab, if the two of them were traveling together to this opening like any normal couple, she would have simply turned to him and fixed his tie in the backseat. But things have never been and will never be this way between them. He returns the engraved invitation to his coat pocket.