Before Catherine could answer, the waiter emerged with their check, which was inside a fist-size wooden box inlaid with semiprecious stones. He set the box between them. “What you’ve said about me isn’t fair. I want what’s best for my son. I want what’s best for Peter. I even want what’s best for my husband, and I’m not certain that you can say the same.”
“So what does that mean?”
“It means if Peter stays then I will.”
“How do we do that?”
“Help him get his work shown,” said Catherine, “so he doesn’t give up on it.”
“I have helped.”
“Not enough. Perhaps you could speak with Deniz? When I asked him to show Peter’s photographs at the Modern, he refused. Perhaps there’s something the consulate could do that would convince him otherwise.”
“I’m not certain that would work.”
“Why not?” asked Catherine. “You haven’t even tried.”
“I guess you didn’t hear.”
Catherine shook her head.
“Deniz was fired two days ago, after word got out about his arrest.” Kristin opened the small wooden box with the bill. She dipped her eyes and gave it a quick once-over as she pulled a credit card from her purse. “Listen, as long as you and I have an understanding, we’ll figure something out regarding Peter.”
Catherine removed a few banknotes from her pocketbook.
“My treat,” said Kristin. “I’m the one who invited you to lunch.”
But as much as Kristin insisted, Catherine refused. Standing from her seat, Catherine examined the bill. She made absolutely certain to leave no less than her half of the cash on the table.
Four o’clock on that afternoon
They leave Bebek Park and ascend the terraced folds of the city. The Bosphorus disappears from view and the urban sprawl of the interior swallows them. The rain gentles into a mist, which lingers like disappearing crowns among the uppermost stories of the darkened skyscrapers that line their route with shadows. Their taxi has come to a standstill in the traffic. While William waits for them to inch forward, he traces the cityscape on his window’s fogged glass. The outline appears like an uneven staircase, climbing and then falling for no discernible reason. The traffic eases as they pull onto Barbaros Boulevard, which leads them out of the city’s interior, back to the Bosphorus, toward the Kabataş ferry terminal, where on the overcrowded decks rush-hour commuters finish their day huddling beneath a black mosaic of umbrellas.
The Kabataş ferry terminal reminds William of his father and the afternoon of their failed excursion to the Princes’ Islands. Staring out of his window, through the cityscape he has traced, William asks if his father will be where they’re going. But Catherine doesn’t answer him. She sits with her hands in her lap, clutching her broken phone with its dark, cracked screen, as if she believes that a call from Peter still might come.
Past the Beşiktaş football club’s incomplete stadium, their taxi enters a warren of incomprehensible side streets, which eventually dumps them onto İstiklal Caddesi. “This is where we were last night,” William observes.
Catherine turns toward her son. “Yes, it is,” she says, and then leans forward from her seat, passing the driver some last instructions on where exactly to drop them. Glancing back at William, she explains that they are going to see if Deniz is at home.
“Are we going to stay there?” William asks.
“Maybe.”
“Why can’t we stay at our home? Or with Peter?”
Catherine reaches into the pocket of her blazer. She clutches the single bill that the parking attendant had given her. It won’t be quite enough to take them to Deniz’s apartment, so she asks the driver to stop. They will walk the remainder of the way. As they step out of the cab onto the İstiklal’s cobblestones, William asks once again about his father. “Am I going to see him?” he wants to know.
“Yes,” says Catherine. And she sounds certain of it.
* * *
“Cat, I wish you hadn’t come.” As Deniz opens the front door, his voice is flat, constricted, as though these words are the first he has spoken after a long sleep. The figure in the doorway bears little resemblance to the glamorous man William had met the night before. A day’s coating of stubble has collected along Deniz’s cheeks like some leveled ruin. A freshly lit cigarette dangles nervously from his lips. He kneads his palms against his reddened eyes, which betray that he has just woken from a nap. Deniz allows his gaze to dip toward William. He offers the boy a smile, exposing his perfectly arrayed and brilliantly white teeth, which with wiring, bands and bleach he has hewn into something more presentable than the misaligned smile he was born with.
“I’m sorry to impose,” says Catherine. She drapes an arm over William’s shoulder, pressing the boy beside her. “We had nowhere else to go.”
“You should come inside,” says Deniz, but the tired edge in his voice no longer seems to indicate a nap interrupted, but rather a defeat. With this slight change of inflection, Deniz pushes the front door all the way open. Sitting on the sofa is Murat. He still wears his coat and it doesn’t seem as if he has been waiting for very long. Then, from the white painted room where he had displayed his photographs the night before, Peter emerges.
Catherine turns around, as if she might run out the back of the apartment with William. But before she can take a first step, she hears the rhythmic tick-tock of heel strikes coming from down the corridor. Someone else is ascending the stairs toward Deniz’s front door.
July 7, 2013
Kristin did her best thinking at the gym. Her most original ideas occurred to her while she was exercising. Perhaps it was the clarity associated with early mornings, or maybe it was the meditative qualities of listening to her heart pound out its beats as she struggled to maintain a certain speed on the treadmill, or hold a specific rpm on the stationary bike. She had read articles about how endorphin releases and highly oxygenated blood led to revelatory thinking, although she absorbed such conclusions with a healthy dose of skepticism.
She logged the progress of her workouts carefully. By her calculations she was a first-rate triathlete, posting many of the same times as professional competitors. About once every two months she would wake impossibly early on a Sunday morning and put herself through an Olympic-distance race. She would begin in the lap pool, then move to the stationary bike, and finish on the treadmill. Her overall times—all of which she tracked on the digital watch clasped to her wrist—she kept only for herself, allowing her the quiet satisfaction of knowing the many unclaimed medals, sponsorships and accolades to which she would have been entitled had she ever chosen to compete.