They stand by the door of Deniz’s apartment, where Peter has guided Catherine so that they might speak in private. He says softly, “I thought we’d both decide when I should meet him.” He can feel the boy staring at them.
Catherine’s hair is the plainest sort of brown, but with a single blond streak, which she was born with and which will likely be the first to gray. It falls in front of her face. She nervously tucks the loose strand behind her ear. “I wanted him to see your work.”
As he thinks of that work, Peter’s eyes traverse the apartment. On the other side of the door, his photos hang in the gallery. But it isn’t a gallery, just a bedroom he has painted white with Deniz’s permission. Nothing about this exhibit feels legitimate to him. Kristin has subsidized the entire event with consulate funds and for purposes Peter won’t question. He has chosen subjects who crave attention, which he can give. And he is there with a woman he can never possess.
A pair of Deniz’s guests stumble drunkenly toward the apartment door, debating which bar along the İstiklal they should head to for after-party drinks. When they remove their coats from the rack, they are men’s coats—a heavy parka, a shapeless rain jacket. What has my exhibit revealed? Peter wonders. That these gay men and transgender women are forced to lead a double life? This is as obvious as their coats by the door. If he was trying to make some point about modes of coexistence, or double lives, he could have just photographed Deniz’s friends standing by the coatrack. Or photographed himself. Either would have spared everyone the trouble of an exhibit.
He dips his eyes into the viewfinder around his neck. Peter had told William that a photographer has to take hundreds of bad photos to get a single good one. A thought comes to him very clearly: Some photographers just take hundreds of bad photos.
He stares up at Catherine. “It isn’t fair for William to meet me.”
“I wanted him to.” She gently rests her fingertips on his forearm.
Two years before, he had been in a period of self-doubt. He had been grasping for reasons to stay in Istanbul. Meeting Catherine had given him a reason when otherwise he likely would have left. His work progressed, and although this exhibit wasn’t the show he’d long hoped for at the Istanbul Modern, it had nevertheless become another reason. Now that it is over, he’s left with only her. And he feels increasingly certain that she isn’t enough. But he doesn’t know how to tell her that he is leaving.
Then he suspects she has anticipated this. Out of desperation she’s brought her son so Peter might pity her—or them both—and stay.
“Will I see you tomorrow?” she asks, coaxing him.
“What is tomorrow?”
She hesitates, as though it is a trick question, one that can be interpreted and then answered with infinite variety. “Wednesday,” she says.
The moment to tell her about his plans to leave has passed. It will return again and he will do better with his next chance. “Let’s talk in the morning,” he says.
She has been gently holding his arm. With this answer, she releases him.
The party has begun to empty. The young woman, Deniz’s date, disappears deeper into the apartment, luring one of the guests toward a bedroom where Deniz has already gone. William has wandered back over to the window. He sits looking down to where the other guests—the Hayals, Nurs and Öyküs—have gathered outside beneath the pale light of the streetlamps. They are on their way to the bars on the İstiklal. Their voices echo through the maze of alleys, whose narrow, ricocheting bends allow sound to travel further, and it seems as if they might wake the whole neighborhood with their deliberations as they struggle to decide in which direction they should go.
One o’clock that morning
She lingers at the party. While William waits for his mother to cycle through her many goodbyes, he wanders off and falls asleep on a bed littered with coats. Catherine heaves him off the bed and onto her shoulder as she climbs precariously down the many flights of stairs toward the street. In the backseat of the cab, William’s head is in her lap and they will soon be home. She gently nudges him awake. William jolts upright, causing the black silk blazer Catherine had draped across him as a blanket to fall to the taxi’s floor. She reaches between her legs, recovers her jacket and folds it into a pillow, which William rests his head against as he leans on her shoulder. She strokes his black hair.
William fixes his attention outside his window. They have descended from the hills and now idle at an empty intersection. A single, stubborn traffic light holds them in place. When it turns, they take a left onto Cevdet Paşa Caddesi. On one side is the incomplete stadium for Beşiktaş football club, a construction site frozen by indefinite delay. Rust encroaches on the steel I beams, whose vertical spans rend a skyward grid into the partially laid foundation. A black-and-white pennant idles in a weak wind from a flagpole that marks the stadium’s entrance, but that also marks a congregation point for pallets of expired sod, stacked one upon another. The rotting sod can no longer cover a football pitch and instead it stains the freshly laid concrete. William has driven by this stadium many times with his father, who owns a majority share in its reconstruction and who usually grows silent and dismayed as they pass by.
A similar silence fills the taxi as they come up on Dolmabahçe Palace, the former home of the sultans, which remains hidden behind its unscalable limestone walls. At its entrance a towering wrought-iron gate is hinged into a pair of hulking columns, each adorned with lashing Arabic script, the remnants of the country’s defunct Ottoman alphabet, which is now the unreadable language of a vanished empire. Long ranks of birch trees clutch at the star-riddled sky with their trunks white as bone and their branches obscuring a half-moon. Statues flank the wide avenue below. They stand, sentries hidden in ambush among the trees, their bronze-cast expressions frozen miserably into their vigil. Sleeping vagrants encircle the statues’ granite pedestals. They keep a separate vigil, obedient as dogs.
* * *
A week or so before, William and his father had passed such a vagrant on the street. It was a Monday, and Murat was stuck taking the metro. Usually, he was driven to work. The international school was on the way to Murat’s office so, on occasion, he would drop off his son. The two of them would sit in the backseat of the glistening black Mercedes. The driver would crank the wheel, wending through Pera, Cihangir, Taksim, those ancient neighborhoods built into the terraced hills, and Murat would play a guessing game with the boy. He would pick out a few buildings on their route and ask William to arrange their value from lowest to highest. He would then tell William that his job, as his son, was to become the best at this game. When William would ask why, Murat would explain that this was because his job, as his father, was to be the best at it now. And Murat believed that he was the best. He knew the names of every doorman, custodian and construction site foreman. He even knew their children’s names. He could look at the glittering tarnish of the horizon from İstinye on the European side to Kadıköy on the Asian side and rattle off the loan rate, scheduled completion date and likely completion date of any project. Across Istanbul’s two continents, he would read the skyline like a ticker of deals, those completed, those under way and his future. This was how Murat Yaşar saw the city.