Although Catherine saw Murat as he wished to see himself, not even she could provide him an escape from his family. Like his father, Catherine’s father presided over a dwindling business empire, though his business wasn’t construction but rather construction materials export. When the two patriarchs and occasional associates realized their children lived within an hour’s train ride of New York, it was they who had brokered the introduction. Like Murat, Catherine wanted to reinvent herself outside the confines of her wealthy family. She had danced as a girl and this was where her ambitions had always dwelled. After high school, Catherine’s father had given her a year’s allowance to make something of her dream. When she met Murat, that fruitless year was dwindling to its end. Without her having found her way into a dance company or any steady work, the expectation was that she would attend university.
It was Catherine’s body—her height (slightly too tall), her frame (slightly too shapely)—which betrayed the promise she’d shown for dance as a girl. The same limitations nature had placed on her ambitions caused Murat to feel a corporeal draw to her, at least at first, in the freedom of his university days. Catherine’s father had hoped that Murat’s influence might help her to resume her studies, to relinquish one dream for another. To the contrary, she soon moved in with Murat and he supported her, which liberated Catherine from her father’s expectations. So she continued to dance, even though her efforts amounted to little. With Murat she too felt free, as if glancing at a menu she could choose her life. After yet another year, when it came time for Murat to return home, she agreed to join him. “What do you think your father will say?” Murat had asked. “I’ll be his finest export,” Catherine had responded, but malice lingered behind her words, and had Murat been a more mature person, a less trusting person, in short, the person he was now, that malice would have cautioned him. Catherine had no ambition beyond escape. And once she made that escape, it terrified Murat when he slowly realized that her ambition to escape endured, captive as her life had become to his.
When Murat returned from university and took over the family company, immersing himself in what he had once considered the apprentice work of business, he learned of the burden his father had carried all of his life: the uncertainty of labor schedules, the corruption of contracting agents and the tyranny of balance sheets. And this is when his anxiety began, a tension that despite her efforts not even Catherine could calm. Murat also learned that he had never convinced his father of the importance of his study, or his art. His father had humored him, a few last years of self-expression, the gift of a doting parent on a frivolous child.
Murat had come to understand that the architect with his pencil and paper was not the creator. The creator was the foreman, the contract negotiator, those whose hands touched brick and mortar. “A real job means you shower at the end of the day, not at the beginning,” his father had been fond of saying. Life was not reflected in buildings, as Murat had once thought. Life was earning enough to live. He learned this before his father died, and when he assumed his father’s burden, he came to regret those wasted years of study, and Catherine.
* * *
Pacing his living room Murat can’t help but find something amusing or, perhaps, ironic about his situation, in which Catherine is the expatriate in his country. It has been almost ten years and she has never accepted Murat as her guide, even though he had once accepted her as his. When Murat’s cousins used to invite her to lunch, Catherine always had an excuse, until those invitations vanished. When he and Catherine decided on William’s education, Catherine insisted on an international lycée instead of the strictly Turkish one Murat had attended. And Catherine quit her language lessons years ago, often phoning Murat in the middle of the day, interrupting his business meetings, just for him to translate directions from her to a cabdriver. Murat has long wondered if the draw to Peter is that he knows less of this place than she does.
He must seem more like me then than I am now, thinks Murat. Except in one important way, one she doesn’t yet know, or even suspect. Peter is a man of limited means, but I am far worse off than he is. I am deeply in debt.
A gust of wind enters through an open window.
If Murat were not waiting for Catherine, he would still be awake, pacing their house with a head full of troubles. Before the protests at Gezi Park, his unfaithful wife had been the largest of his problems. He longs for such simple concerns. But the riots, the politics, they have corrupted a system that was once reliably corrupt. A construction license can no longer be bought. He has a half dozen stalled projects—a glass tower in Zeytinburnu, acreage of underground parking lots, a controlling share in a new stadium for Beşiktaş football club—all of them, at this moment, little more than holes in the ground. When each project finances the other, and when none of them progress, this is a far greater problem.
Tonight she has taken their son, so he does consider phoning the police. Long ago he had the appropriate legal authorities explain to her that if she ever tried to remove the boy from the country, take him back to her home, the required papers had already been prepared so that divorce and custody would be settled in this, “their home,” as Murat instructed those same authorities to precisely inform her. Although Murat has faith in the legal precautions he has made, he does not rule out the police entirely. They would certainly send a car to return her, never mentioning a word of it, but in these days it is wise to be spare in the favors you ask. However, there is one other person he could contact, someone who assures discretion.
Murat stubs out his last cigarette in the full ashtray. Peter’s book rests beneath it on the coffee table, surrounded by Catherine’s unread magazines. He checks the time. It is late. No matter. He punches out a text message. While Murat waits for a response, he again flips through the pages of Peter’s photographs.
Tasteless, tasteless, tasteless, he thinks.
How like him I once was.
I am being beaten by myself.
Twelve-thirty that morning
Peter can’t believe that she brought her boy. You don’t see many second graders at house parties off the İstiklal on a school night, let alone one hosted by the luminaries of the police-brawling gay and gender-fluid community. Bringing him was yet another of Catherine’s little rebellions. When he saw William wandering around the wilted crudités, Peter felt protective of the boy. He also realized that Catherine’s rebellion wasn’t that she brought her son to this neighborhood to be with these people, but that she wanted Peter to meet him—something the two of them had not agreed upon.
She had always said that she hoped Peter would get to know William. She had always picked her words carefully when speaking about him. “It is important for William to know men with a broad worldview,” she had told Peter. This was at the beginning, before they had spent entire afternoons sprawled naked across his bed in the sunlight, wordlessly communicating and validating small emotional contracts. This then evolved into “William needs a figure in his life with a worldview that isn’t as narrow as his father’s.” The journey between those two statements had taken nearly two years. Bringing William to the exhibit was her way of announcing to Peter that they had reached a destination.