Gorgeous East (11 page)

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.

They left Gomku about 1:00 A.M. Over Smith’s objections, Vatran took them in a cab to a taverna in Cihangir overlooking the Bosphorus. A more romantic spot couldn’t be imagined: the immortal dome of the Hagia Sophia illuminated in shades of gold and green across the strait of dark water, wind tousling the tops of the cypress trees. They drank raki and beer and talked; rather, Jessica and Vatran talked as Smith sat by, ignored, his bowels boiling. At about 3:00 A.M., after several trips to the taverna’s rudimentary facilities—a mere hole in the ground—Smith insisted Jessica return with him to the hotel. Jessica refused, and they argued as Vatran sat by, coolly smoking a cigarette.

“Look, it’s my last fucking night,” Jessica said. “I want to stay out.”

“No, tomorrow night’s your last fucking night,” Smith countered.

“Whatever. I’m having a good time, I’m meeting people, and I’m nicely buzzed. I’m not going back to that shithole right now and that’s what it is literally, a shithole, because you’re going to be in there shitting your guts out ’til who knows when.”

“Great,” Smith said bitterly. “Thanks for your concern. I’m sick and this is the kind of—”

“I’m not your mother,” Jessica interrupted. “I think you can take care of yourself.”

At this point, Smith pulled Jessica aside, beyond the Turk’s earshot. He took a deep breath—how would he put it exactly?

The moon, nearly full, hung just overhead. The Bosphorus gleamed splendidly in the moonlight, which shone also off the spires and minarets of the ancient city that had seen titanic seiges, chariot races, opulence beyond imagining, vast corruption, triumphs, massacres, the rise and fall of a thousand generations. Just then none of it looked beautiful to Smith, but hostile and barren and alien. He suddenly felt that awful vertiginous feeling, the same dizzy sensation of the ground slipping away from beneath his feet he’d felt when told of his sister Jane’s death from a misdiagnosed case of meningitis. She’d just turned thirteen. (All these years later Smith could still hear the approaching clack-clack of leather-soled shoes down the waxed corridor at Herbert Hoover Intermediate; then the principal, grim-faced, at the classroom door:
Excuse me for interrupting, Miss Woodward, but John’s mother
is waiting in the office
. . . . ) Smith was an orphan now—if such a term can be applied to a man in his thirties: His father dead from nothing, from depression and grief three years after his sister; his mother dead in a four-car pileup on I-80 during the murderous ice storm of ’00 that had caused twenty-seven fatalities across the Midwest. The life of an actor, necessarily itinerant, often impoverished, didn’t allow for the formation of many close friendships. Smith had no family except Jessica.

“We don’t even know this guy—” Smith began desperately.

“I know him,” Jessica insisted. “I met him.”

“Well, I’m going.”

“Fine. Go.”

“He wants to fuck you. That’s obvious.”

“Bullshit!”

“He does. Ask him.”

“Well, I’m not going to fuck him!”

But she did.

She fucked him in the backseat of a cab three hours later, at dawn, with the meter running as the driver, heavily tipped, stood off at a safe distance, pulling on a cigarette. This betrayal was confirmed in a catastrophic manner two months later, back in New York: Vatran, in the city for one of his consulting gigs, called the cell number Jessica had given him in Istanbul and took her to lunch at the Yale Club and then back to his room at the SoHo Grand, where they made love vigorously for hours. When Smith got home from work that afternoon—a tedious, poorly paid voice-over gig at a recording studio all the way out in Montclair—Jessica was already packing to leave with Vatran for Istanbul.

Smith stared at her, stunned, openmouthed, as she explained herself tersely: She’d been in love with Vatran since Istanbul. While she still loved Smith, she was no longer
in
love with him.

“I don’t know what else to say,” she concluded, a surgical
froideur
in her voice. “I’m sorry, but I’m Kasim’s woman now. I belong to him.”

“This is c-completely c-crazy!” Smith stuttered. “You can’t just, just . . .” He couldn’t say any more. He felt like tearing his hair out. He felt like a beetle, pin through its thorax, stuck to a card. He trailed after her out of the apartment in shock, stood speechless by her side as she waited for her cab, waved stupidly as she got in the back and the door slammed. It was like she’d suddenly died. There was the hearse taking her away.

“We can e-mail,” she called through the open window. “We won’t lose touch, I promise. Anyway, you need to know what to do with my stuff . . .”

6.

N
ow, Smith stood in the kitchen of Vatran’s house in the Beyoglu, in Istanbul, face-to-face with Jessica for the first time since that terrible afternoon. He lifted his second glass of wine to his lips and put it down again. He still couldn’t say what he had expected to accomplish with this foolish mission. Did he think Jessica was going to throw herself into his arms? Drop to her knees, as she said, and give him a blow job? Still, there had been odd hints in her last few e-mails, intimations of discord, vaguely delineated fights with Vatran. . . .

“Look, Jessica, let me ask you something straight-out,” Smith said suddenly. “Are you happy? I mean here in Istanbul, with him?”

She hesitated for a long moment and Smith’s heart did a crazy jump.

“No one’s happy all the time, moron,” she said, and she looked away. “That’s just not the way it works, so don’t get any funny ideas. This is my life now, I’m practically a fucking Turk, O.K.? I’m starting to think like a Turk. Last week, driving back from Ince Burun, from the beach, Kasim asked me to wear a headscarf, I mean the rednecks out there”—she made a gesture that meant the rest of the country, the vast, Anatolian hinterlands where the peasants still used oxcarts to get their produce to the market towns—“they see a woman’s hair uncovered, especially a blonde, first they cream their fucking panties, then they take out a big knife and cut your throat.”

“A headscarf?” Smith managed, astounded. “What’s next? A veil? A burka?”

“Oh, fuck you! Turks don’t wear burkas. That’s an Afghan thing.”

“O.K. A chador.”

“That’s, like, Iranian, shithead. Here it’s a hijab. And fuck you!” Suddenly, she tilted her head back and laughed, showing a row of orthodontically perfect white teeth. “God, why am I swearing so much? I don’t swear anymore. It’s your goddamned fault! Kasim says it’s ugly and unfuckinglady-like and blah-blah-blah. But it feels good to say fuck again.
FUCK!
”

She shouted this last explicative at the top of her lungs and stepped around the beam and gave Smith an unexpected hug. He hugged her back and caught the flowery scent of her hair—different from the way it used to smell, some new Turkish shampoo, he guessed, but also the same. She pushed him away after a moment, an affectionate shove that nearly sent him crashing into a rack full of expensive copper pots and pans.

“Come on,” she said. “Kasim’s waiting.”

“No way.” Smith shook his head. “I don’t want to see him. Absolutely not.”

“Too bad, fucker.” Jessica smirked. “He wants to see you.” And she finished her wine and went for her jacket.

7.

T
hey caught up with Vatran at seven thirty on Nevizade Sokuk. It was just dark, and in Istanbul people eat very late, but tonight, perhaps because of the excellent spring weather, the terraces of the
meyhanes
were already crowded with diners and a cacophony of live, instrumental
fasil
—like klezmer, only more so—pumped out of the brightly lit restaurant interiors up and down the narrow street.

Vatran sat talking emphatically on his cell phone at the VIP table outside at Boncuk, the table farthest from the curb, elevated on a narrow platform six inches above everyone else. Clearly, here was a successful man (pin-striped Savile Row shirt, tailored cream sports jacket, neatly pressed dark trousers, Italian crocodile loafers) doing very important business over his cell phone. He saw Jessica and Smith coming toward him out of the crowd and jerked his head away quickly, as if offended by the sight. Jessica stepped up and kissed him on the cheek and sat next to him and put a hand on his thigh. Smith stood by hesitantly, for a moment. Did he really want to break bread with this bastard? But he sat down anyway.

“
Evet
,” Vatran was saying into the cell phone. “
Evet, lazim . . . gitmeliyim
. . .” Then Smith heard the phrase “
budala geri zekali
,” which he knew—from the little Turkish phrasebook he kept in his pocket—meant stupid idiot or cretinous moron and which he assumed referred to himself. Meanwhile, the waiter hovered. He wore a white coat with blue epaulets and a blue and white military-style cap like a soldier in some two-bit road production of
Carmen
.

“
Raki, lutfën
,” Smith said, ordering the booze, a command for which he didn’t need to consult the phrasebook.

“
Hamm?
” the waiter bowed to Jessica.

“
Bardak beyaz sarab.
” She nodded, ordering a glass of white wine, and the waiter went off smartly.

Vatran snapped his cell phone shut. “Hey, I don’t want you getting drunk!” He turned to Jessica.

She rolled her eyes. “Give me a break, Kasim,” she said. “Having a glass of wine and getting drunk is not the same thing. A glass of wine is good for you. All the doctors say that.”

“Drinking is bad, period,” he said. “It adds weight here”—he tapped two fingers against the underside of her chin—“and here”—he pinched her thigh roughly.

“Oww!” Jessica said. “Fucker!”

“And I told you not to swear!” He pinched her again and this time, she pinched him back, and they tussled more or less playfully for a long minute, pinching and tugging at each other until the waiter set down the drinks.

Smith watched this display of rough affection with a jaundiced eye. He mixed his raki slowly with water and the potent stuff turned milky in the glass and he drank off the top half, the sharp, anise-flavored liquor warming his throat on the way down. It was true, he and Jessica looked like brother and sister; they were both from Iowa, of similar Midwestern English-German stock, and perhaps their relationship had been, in some fundamental way, slightly incestuous. It was also true that Jessica and Vatran seemed the perfect complement: her big, blond Midwestern good looks; the Turk’s Levantine complexity, olive skin, and sleek dark pelt of hair, his sideburns, architecturally perfect. These two will make exotic, beautiful offspring—a rueful thought that occurred to Smith like a stab in the heart.

Food arrived somehow, a dozen oblong plates, the usual meze—peppers stuffed with rice and meat; small, deep-fried sardines sprinkled with coarse salt; a selection of strong cheeses; spicy vegetable dips and
pide
bread; unknown pickled items in small white bowls; a variety of olives—more of the same kind of stuff Smith had eaten back at the house.

Vatran ate heartily, crunching the sardines whole between his teeth, bones and all, bent over his plate like a truck driver, elbows on the table. Jessica also ate well, but, as if she had taken Vatran’s admonishment to heart, barely sipped her wine. Smith ate almost nothing, nibbling on a little bit of this or that, but ordered two more rakis for himself.

“Be careful, son.” Jessica winked at him across the table. “You don’t eat, you’re going to get yourself drunk.”

Vatran grunted at this. He didn’t talk much; when he spoke, speaking in Turkish and only to Jessica, he pointedly avoided meeting Smith’s eyes. Smith didn’t try to make conversation. He knew now why Vatran had insisted on meeting for dinner—the man wanted to humiliate him in front of Jessica, to let her know that this old boyfriend was nothing, a nuisance, to make clear that Smith’s presence didn’t matter one way or another.