“Meaning them. Don’t be cute.”
He tilts the viewfinder toward Catherine. She tugs the camera closer so that its strap cinches against his neck as she takes a deeper look. On reflex, her two fingers come to her mouth. “This whole thing was a setup for that photo?”
He takes his camera back and nods.
She glances into the exhibit, to where Deniz’s guests revel at being the center of attention, for once. “Don’t show them,” she says.
“Catherine, I need to talk to you about something.” Peter rests a hand on William’s shoulder. “Give us a minute, buddy.”
Catherine and Peter cross the room. They speak quietly by the front door while the party continues in the gallery. William reaches into his pocket and removes the Simon game. He plays for a few minutes, trying to match the elaborate patterns set before him, but he comes nowhere close to his father’s high score. While he presses at the flashing panels, he begins to think about what Peter had told him, about contrast, about how one color might change another. He glances up from his game. As he watches Peter standing next to his mother, the two of them speaking close together, she is like the blue. William can see the effect Peter has on her. While Peter looks the same, unchanged by her, like the black or the white.
That night, two hours later
Murat Yaşar usually doesn’t smoke in the house, but he is waiting. It is almost midnight. And he knows that she is out with him.
He has seen Peter’s photographs and he finds them tasteless. Because he is an architect, Murat’s taste is a matter of business, for it has been proven in the marketplace. His family name, Yaşar, affixes itself to enough of Istanbul’s acreage that he hears it spoken as a destination more than he hears it spoken in reference to his person. So he feels more than qualified to render judgment with regard to Peter’s taste. A book of his work—cheaply bound by a publisher Murat has never heard of—had been inscribed to her by Peter. When Murat read the slashing, unconstrained cursive on the inside page, he viewed it as Peter’s solicitation of his wife:
For Catherine, I hope you find the same pleasure in these photographs as I found in our meeting. Yours, Peter
Nearly two years before, on the night of that meeting, she had also stayed out past midnight. When she stepped through the front door and handed her husband the book, she offered it to him as if he were a child, as if by occupying his hands she might occupy his mind and keep him from probing about her evening. Thumbing through the pages, Murat asked if she’d had a nice time. He didn’t ask the obvious questions, the ones he suspected she possessed no answers for: why she had arrived four hours late, or why she smelled of cigarettes, or why she had insisted on taking a taxi when Murat had texted offering to send a car for her. Provoking her lies would only put her on guard. Murat merely shook his head, mumbling “Very interesting” as he leafed through Peter’s photographs. Unable to restrain herself, Catherine leaned over his shoulder and pointed to a few of the prints that she admired most.
After Catherine came home with the book, Murat chose to say nothing of her other encounters with Peter, which he never learned of directly from her, but rather heard about in one instance from the maître d’ at one of his favorite restaurants, who casually mentioned that his wife had been there with “a young gentleman,” and in another instance when Murat happened upon his wife’s pocket calendar spread across the kitchen counter. In her rounded, girlish cursive, which had never matured into the handwriting of a grown woman, she had scribbled P, Kafe 6, Cihangir, with an hour blocked off in the afternoon beginning at four o’clock.
In each instance, Murat decided that a confrontation would weaken his position. A shared antagonist would only drive her closer to Peter, and it was their closeness that had first alarmed him. She had taken lovers before—or so he assumed, given his limitations as a husband—but she had never spoken openly of another man in their home, gone to lunch with him in public, in short, shown such carelessness. The nearest Murat ever came to challenging Catherine about this affair was when he threatened to throw out Peter’s book after finding their son, William, sitting on the living room sofa with it spread across his lap. “He’s an impressionable boy,” Murat said, scolding his wife with the book flopped open in one hand as if he were delivering a sermon from its pages. Though there was nothing lewd in the images, Catherine certainly knew how she had overstepped by bringing something of Peter’s into their home. She also must have known how, slowly, she was provoking her husband. Whether she knew to what end this provocation might come, Murat couldn’t say, not even to himself. When she snatched the book from his outstretched palm and returned it to its place on the coffee table, among a growing collection of exclusively American magazines—Vogue, Vanity Fair, Architectural Digest—to which she subscribed but never read, Murat felt an inexcusable urge to hurt her. He then left the room.
It hadn’t always been this way between them. When they were younger, things had been different. In the morning she used to make them breakfast while he made the bed. In the afternoon they would cross the city to meet on a bench and share from a single packed lunch. And at night—at night she would carefully wake him, her hands pleading for him, and his pleading equally for her. Murat doubts she would concede any of this to Peter. The portrait Catherine paints of their marriage must make him enough of a monster to justify her infidelity. But their past is as real as their present. Even if she says it wasn’t love, or claims it wasn’t happiness, Murat has proof that it existed: their son. Murat knows that each time she looks at William that past will assert itself. So always they will be married.
Years ago, when they met, Murat was living in her country, attending university, a choice his father did not support. Not because his father objected to an American education, but because Murat pursued a degree in architecture. Construction was the family business, and business was what Murat’s father wished him to study. Murat believed that spreadsheets, leasing forms, labor contracts—the bureaucracy of putting up a building—could be apprenticed in any office. To make a beautiful building, or to use the words that had won over his father, “a superior product,” took devout study. It was often said of the elder Yaşar that he would take the dimes off a dead man’s eyes and return nickels, so it surprised everyone, and Murat most of all, when he convinced his father that a slightly frivolous degree in architecture would be more advantageous to the family’s business interests. Though he had presented a convincing argument, Murat hadn’t been entirely forthcoming with his father about his ambitions, which transcended the family business and its financials. He wanted to have enough skill so that the buildings he would design in his life might reflect something of it. Soon after meeting Catherine, he confided this to her. Soon after that, she stopped referring to his floor plans, technical drawings and schematics as his work. She began referring to them as his art.