Gorgeous East

by null

  “Tamam,” Smith said. O.K.

  “Iyi, tamam.” The letter writer nodded. “So this man wishes me to say to you some things because he cannot say them himself, having no American to speak. With your permission. Evet?”

  “Yes, go ahead,” Smith said.

  “First the man say you make him sad because he think of his son, who was a foolish young man so much like you.”

  Smith didn’t respond to this.

  “He also say you must forget this woman who has a rich husband in the window—”

  “She’s not married,” Smith interrupted. “Not yet.”

  “Perhaps.” The letter writer nodded. “But she is the woman of another man. So much so true, yes?”

  Smith allowed that this was true.

  “Aha!” The letter writer wagged a finger. “Such a woman is bad poison for you. This good fellow”—he indicated the tea peddler—“wishes me to say something private about his only son, Hasan. Many years before today, his son was good, handsome, strong. But he throws himself under a railway carriage in Bursa for the love of a girl whose parents had betrothed her to another man. This is very terrible, but more terrible is that the boy did not die from such foolish act but he cuts off two legs at the knee. So now, he begs alms on the street in Bursa and is a very sad person and consistently remains unmarried.”

  “I’m really sorry to hear that,” Smith said.

  The letter writer translated these words of condolence and the tea peddler bowed his head.

  “So our good gentleman”—again the letter writer indicated the tea peddler—“wishes me to say you must not waste tears like so on this woman. That there are many other womans for a handsome young man like you, so strong and with such beautiful hair . . .”

  Smith’s hair, blond and thick and nearly as lustrous as Jessica’s, had been one of his chief attributes as an actor. In addition to his work on the stage, he’d done a couple of shampoo commercials; he’d been the “after” example in a national print campaign for Rogaine.

  The letter writer went on for some time, translating the tea peddler’s unsolicited advice, and Smith stood there and took it, moved by this concern from a total stranger. But they were wasting their breath. He’d already squandered everything, emotionally speaking. He had—to use an old-fashioned phrase—ruined himself. He’d let his show business career, already tenuous, slide further into the professional Dumpster while he moped and drank heavily at dive bars in Brooklyn. He hadn’t sung before an audience in a year, hadn’t gone to an audition in months; he’d fought with his manager at Tycho, Dunston Talent and been dumped by that venerable agency. He’d alienated all his friends in New York by his self-indulgent whining and monomaniacal obsession with all things Jessica. And now this ill-advised trip to Istanbul: the precious rent-controlled apartment in Brooklyn Heights sublet to an African student, nearly everything he owned sold to pay for tickets and travel expenses—to what end? Did he really think Jessica would renounce her gilded life with the very successful Kasim Vatran and come back to him? Just now, he couldn’t bear to answer that question.

  Shadows grew between the tombs among the fig trees in the old Ottoman cemetery visible on the other side of the tumbledown courtyard wall. Smith checked his watch—a classic old Rolex that had belonged to his father, one of the few things he hadn’t sold—and noticed with a surge of panic the lateness of the hour. He had to get back to the hotel, shave, bathe. Prepare himself.

  “I appreciate all your help, guys,” Smith interrupted, and he shook their hands warmly. “But I’ve really got to run.” He extracted a few thousand lirasi notes from his wallet and handed them over to the letter writer. The tea peddler protested—such advice as they were giving should not be paid for—but the letter writer, a more practical man, folded the bills quickly into his pocket.

  “Sagol,” he murmured. Thanks to you.

  “Teekkürler,” Smith responded, backing away. But the tea peddler found time for one last question.

  “You go to her now?” the letter writer said, translating.

  “I’m afraid so,” Smith admitted. “I’m sorry.”

  “Kotu,” the tea peddler said, shaking his head, wearily.

  “He said this bad for you,” the letter writer said. “He also say if you might need our help, so you come, you find us . . .”

  “You’re very good people,” Smith called to them. “I won’t forget your kindness.” Then he turned and hopped the courtyard wall and ran off through the tombs to the street, already forgetting them both.

  The tea peddler and the letter writer watched him go.

  “The boy is running to his doom,” the tea peddler said in Turkish.

  The letter writer agreed. “But what can we do?” He shrugged. “He’s an American and not a Muslim and therefore misguided. And possibly, like most Americans, addicted to drugs and alcohol.”

  The tea peddler made a gesture that meant such matters were beyond him. He strapped the tin-lined apparatus to his shoulders and followed Smith’s path out into the street, leaving the letter writer in the courtyard, dusk fast descending, with his ribbonless Remington Rand and a few sleeping cats for company.

  4.

  Smith showered quickly in his cavernous not-quite-clean bathroom at the old Stamboul Palace Hotel and dressed in his best shirt and jeans and a soft cashmere tan blazer and slipped his feet into the comfortable down-at-the-heels cowboy boots he always wore when traveling. His room, also cavernous and not quite clean, had fancy plaster rosettes molded into the walls, the whorls and petals trailing long, spidery strands of dust.

  The Stamboul Palace had been the hotel of choice in Istanbul in the 1920s and ’30s—Garbo once stayed here for a few days and Graham Greene for the three months it took him to write one of his lesser known novels. Turkish schoolchildren trooped down the main hall on Smith’s floor twice a week to have a look at the room where Kemal Atatürk—the Father of Modern Turkey—stayed for a single night in 1922. This room, its doorway blocked by a thick glass panel, hadn’t been touched since the day he checked out. A rotting towel hung in shreds on the brass bedstead where the Great Turk had tossed it; a scrap of paper bearing his hasty scrawl lay yellow and curled beside the ancient two-piece phone on the nightstand.

  Smith knocked back a couple of shots of raki in the bar downstairs for courage, set his iPod on shuffle, and worked his way through the crowds up Mesrutiyet listening to an unlikely combination of the thousand eclectic tunes stored in digital memory: This included himself singing a sea shanty from the score of Behold Me Once More (he’d done that popular all-male review off-off Broadway back in ’02); the pounding house of Academy 16; Frank Sinatra from the Nelson Riddle era (a phrase jumped out at him: Hey jealous lover!); the Jam; Fred Astaire; Sisters of Mercy; Hank Williams; the Decemberists; one of Ástor Piazzolla’s experimental tangos. It was like having old friends around him, friends from home.

  He arrived at Vatran’s house at a quarter after six. Soft green light glowed from the fish tank of the third floor, empty now except for its uncomfortable furniture and bad, expensive art. Smith rang the buzzer twice and waited. After what seemed like a long while, a servant answered the door. He was a short, barrel-chested man, powerfully built, with a square, thuggish face. On his feet, red Turkish slippers with the toes curled up like elf shoes.

  “Iyi aksalam,” Smith said. Good evening. “Isti yourm Hamm Jessica.”

  The servant looked up at him suspiciously through scraggly, owlish eyebrows that desperately needed trimming.

  “I speak English,” he said at last.

  “Great!” Smith said brightly. “Jessica is expecting me.”

  The servant brought him into the foyer; the traditional Ottoman interior of hand-carved wood and mother-of-pearl inlay was gone here too, replaced with vinyl, rubber, polished granite, and steel. The walls had been taken down to bare brick, the central stairway gone to make way for a stainless-steel elevator. The servant ushered Smith into the elevator and pressed t
hree. As they ascended slowly, he continued his appraisal, studying Smith frankly and without embarrassment.

  “So, what’s shaking?” Smith said.

  “You are her brother?” the servant said.

  “No,” Smith said.

  “You look much alike.”

  “People say that,” Smith said, slightly annoyed. “But it’s just because we’re both tall and blond. You’ve got to get past that. Take our skulls, for example. Totally different—she’s round, I’m more of an oval. And our belly buttons—she’s an innie, I’m an outie.”

  The servant frowned. He didn’t understand. But before he had a chance to inquire further, the elevator doors opened smoothly to reveal a large room, its floors composed of smooth marble paving stones robbed from the rubble of some other luckless old building. There was no furniture to speak of, only a few large cushions strewn about. Two priceless eighteenth-century kilim rugs hung suspended in shadow boxes on the wall.

  “Hamm Jess,” the servant called, and in the next moment, Jessica stepped out of a concealed door from another room that looked like the kitchen. She carried two glasses of red wine and wore a white silk shirt, vaguely Turkish, and flouncy tan pants embroidered all over with tan paisleys, so subtle you could hardly see them. A gold mesh belt slung low around the waist matched her gold chandelier earrings. She had turned Turk, Smith could see—it was not an outfit she would ever wear in New York; still, she looked great. She had put on a little weight, but looked healthier for the extra pounds. Her skin, nicely tanned, held a faint golden luster. She had just returned from a private beach resort on the Black Sea, where she’d gone with Vatran and his parents (so she’d said in her last e-mail) rambling on at length about the luxurious hotel where they’d stayed in separate suites for the sake of Vatran’s mother: its polite, efficient service, its white courtyards and deep green awnings, everything surrounded by high protective hedges of thornbushes and brambles. And the beach itself, not sand but small, glossy stones, guarded by men carrying submachine guns. It was becoming increasingly dangerous in Turkey for men and women to cavort together in public wearing bathing suits.

  “Hey, Jessica honey,” Smith said in the casual tone he’d practiced for months now in front of a mirror. “You look really great!”

  He flashed her a fond smile and kissed her on both cheeks. All his acting ability would be required to pull off this role, the most difficult of his life: the easygoing ex-boyfriend, who just happened to be traveling in Europe and thought he’d drop by. After all, weren’t they still good friends?

  Jessica pulled away from him quickly. It seemed she could smell his desperation, but maybe not.

  “Here,” she said, pushing the glass of wine into his hands. “We’re going to need this. Well, Johnny”—she raised her glass—“success to crime!” It was one of their old toasts, something Bogart says to the cops in The Maltese Falcon, and they clinked glasses and both took a long swallow. “Hey, Ahmet! Iyi gunler, tefeci!” she called sharply over Smith’s shoulder. He turned, startled, to see the servant malingering obstinately by the elevator door, thick, muscled forearms crossed over his barrel-chest like an opprobrious genie. Apparently, she wanted him gone and he refused to go.

  “Out, old uncle!” Jessica called again. “Rahat fucking burakmak!” The servant, grumbling, reluctantly left the room.

  “What is he, the butler?” Smith said.

  “That’s Ahmet,” Jessica said. “He’s Kasim’s creature. Loves the man like a, like an I don’t know what. Sort of like a slave, if you ask me, been with the family for years. Thinks he’s got to stick around just in case I decide to drop to my knees and give you a blow job.”

  Smith grinned at this. She was as endearingly foulmouthed as ever. “Sounds like a good idea to me,” he said in a jokey tone, but his spine tingled at the thought.

  “Ho-ho,” Jessica said. “Don’t you fucking wish.”

  Smith followed her into the kitchen, a long narrow galley fitted with the latest European appliances and an island of beautifully grained rose-colored wood, a single solid piece like an oversized balance beam that must have come out of the heart of a large and very old tree. The kitchen was thus far the coziest room in the house. Smith knew from e-mails that Jessica had designed it herself with a little technical assistance from one of Vatran’s engineers. She pulled up a stool at the beam end and handed over a small plate of meze—marinated olives, stuffed grape leaves, pickled tongue, fried cheese encased in flake pastry.

  “Wow,” Smith said, taking a stuffed grape leaf. “Very impressive.”

  “Don’t get too excited,” she said. “I just bought this shit at a little place around the corner.”

  An uncomfortable silence followed. They were catching up with themselves quickly, with the awkwardness of seeing each other after nearly two years and everything that had happened. Jessica picked olives out of the dish daintily one by one and popped them into her mouth. She deliberately kept the beam between them, one arm crossed over her breasts. Smith didn’t want to eat, wasn’t hungry, his stomach burning from stress, but he made a decent show of it. Desire sounded in his heart like the booming of a great brass bell. He stuffed a handful of olives into his mouth and almost choked on a stray pit, which he spit out after much coughing.

  “Jesus, you all right?” Jessica said, alarmed.

  “I’m fine,” he said, an unintended tremor in his voice. “It’s the pits . . .” Then he looked at her and felt himself weakening, and pain and resentment shone in his eyes.

  “Oh, God,” Jessica moaned. “Here we go. I knew you shouldn’t have come. I mean you hate Istanbul, right? All you did was whine and complain the whole time we were here.”

  “I was sick,” Smith said hotly. “Remember? Anyway, I don’t hate Istanbul! How could anyone hate Istanbul? It’s got all that Byzantine crap, all that Ottoman crap, you name it, utterly fascinating. What I hated was you and him. What I hated about Istanbul has nothing to do with the city itself, which is beautiful. I hated that this was the place where—”

  Smith stopped himself just in time, gulped down the rest of his wine and poured another glass. The place where that bastard stole you from me, he wanted to say. The place where my heart is buried, where my life started to go off a cliff.

  5.

  Two years before, Smith and Jessica visited Istanbul at the tail end of a monthlong Mediterranean vacation—Athens, Crete, Rhodes, and Turkey—blowing the money he’d saved from his lucrative League of Regional Theatres gig at the Guthrie, singing “On the Street Where You Live” ten times a week for overstuffed, sweater-wearing Minnesotans. They hung out in the city for three days, took a side trip to Hisarlik and the ruins of Troy, and were in Istanbul a second time for the final two days before their flight back to the States.

  It was a Saturday, sunny, but with a sharp, stinging wind blowing off the Sea of Marmara. They got up early and visited the Topkapi Palace, paid extra admission to see the Harem of the Sultans along with an unacceptable number of tourists, shoving their way through the narrow hallways, through the Room with a Hearth and out into the courtyard of the Valide. They’d been bickering all morning, nothing serious, the inevitable result of being constantly together for almost a month; then Smith came down with a case of diarrhea caught, he guessed, from a bad pastrima roll bought off a street vendor near the Hippodrome. He decided to stay in bed that night; they had a small, airless room in a cheap hotel not far from the Hagia Sophia. Jessica did nothing but bitch about the accommodations—particularly the roaches she found crawling in the bathroom sink—and just after nine o’clock threw aside the Candace Bushnell paperback she’d been reading and announced her intention to go dancing. Something about her fevered, erotic energy (she was, Smith imagined in his diarrheal delirium, throwing off visible pheremones like electrical sparks) made him swallow two more extra-strength Immodiums and drag his sore, sorry ass along to a series of dance clubs with expensive covers where a horde of beautiful Turks—pop stars, soap opera divas,
gay, straight, the gilded youth of Istanbul—danced the night away.

  The pounding of Euro-Turk techno only gave Smith a headache that seemed to reverberate in the depths of his tortured bowels. While Jessica danced in the crush at Babylon, Cubuklu, 2C Club, Laila, Smith got to know the crudely appointed bathrooms of these otherwise opulent establishments. They ended up at Gomku, a mixed/trans/gay place in the Karakoy district just after midnight. Jessica plunged into the omnisexual crowd on the dance floor—a gyrating swirl of club kids, preop transsexuals (their balloonlike silicon implants flopping out of tight tank tops), and the quasi-straight cartoonishly macho men who loved them. Meanwhile, Smith slumped down on a stool at the bar, glass of soda water in hand, clenching his anus to keep the bile inside. He held out as long as he could, then couldn’t hold out any longer and ran for the bathroom, there interrupting an outrageous scene: two transvestites giving a third a blow job like something out of a shemale porn film, in full view, right against the sink. When he returned to his stool ten minutes later, though he didn’t know it yet, his world had changed beyond recognition.

  Jessica, now at the bar, beer in hand, stood shouting over the pounding beat into the ear of a well-dressed Turkish man, his silk suit jacket impeccably tailored, his black hair slick as a beaver pelt. When he responded, Jessica held her own ear a little too close to his lips, laughed loudly, touched his arm. She introduced Smith as “my friend Johnny,” even though they’d lived together for three years in Brooklyn and were considered by her parents to be more or less engaged. The Turk’s name was Kasim Vatran. He wasn’t typically handsome—the nose slightly crooked, the eyes a little bulgy—but he possessed a direct forcefulness, a natural authority that was at the same time controlled and aggressively sexual. He was, he said, an architect who had studied in New Haven; he often traveled back and forth between Istanbul and Manhattan, where he did consulting work for the well-known architectural firm of Stern, Potts. All this was very impressive, Vatran’s manners were above reproach, and he insisted on paying for everything, but his attitude toward Jessica was one of carnivorous intensity. Smith just wanted to go home.