“I’m not sure I understand,” answers Kristin. “Where would she go?”
Peter, Murat and Catherine shuttle confused glances between themselves as if uncertain how Kristin could have suddenly become unaware of Catherine’s intention to leave with William, the very same intention which has triggered this current crisis.
“She would return to the U.S.,” says Peter.
Kristin allows Peter’s words to hang in the air for a moment. The idea of Catherine leaving can’t sustain itself and it dissipates the longer it goes unacknowledged, like a ribbon of clouds at dawn, or dew on the ground, or any number of whimsical and vanishing distractions.
“How would she do that?” Kristin asks.
Catherine straightens up. “It’s my right to return home.”
“That it is,” answers Kristin.
A beat of curious silence passes, in which Catherine glances at Murat and Peter, as if taking a final measure of what she might choose to leave behind and then, as if finding the pair of them insufficient reason to stay, she stands and asks Murat if she can have the passports.
“Those won’t do you any good,” answers Kristin.
Addressing Murat and not Kristin, Catherine stands with her hand extended. “If you don’t give them to me, I can always have another passport made—”
“For you,” interrupts Kristin.
“I’m sorry?” says Catherine.
“You can always have another passport made for you,” repeats Kristin. “William is a different matter.” Before Catherine can respond, Kristin continues, “Leave if you want, but you won’t bring your son along. Even that idea, that he is your son, is a matter that could easily be refuted. You’re an American woman taking away the adopted child of a Turkish citizen.” At the mention of William’s paternity, Catherine glances out the window, toward the İstiklal, where Deniz has taken him. “Don’t worry, they’ll be coming back,” adds Kristin. A tinge of malice sharpens her voice, an effect she believes Catherine deserves. Although a part of Kristin pities the manner in which events have conspired to trap Catherine, she also resents Catherine’s inability to appreciate—or at least to acknowledge—the web of other people’s interests, of which she is a part.
Kristin rises from the sofa and gestures for Catherine to join her by the window. They stand shoulder to shoulder and beneath them is the street, with the echoing conversations of passersby, with the trash huddled in piles under fluorescent bulbs, with the parades of stray cats either rummaging in those very same piles or sitting erect with a calm, cynical clairvoyance. “Do you see my car?” asks Kristin, pointing toward the corner, where she has parked the same white Chevy that had dented the door of the black Mercedes weeks before.
“I see it,” Catherine says.
“What if William’s mother knew that you were going to take him away?” asks Kristin, and she is no longer looking out the window, but rather at Catherine, whose stare is fixed on the white Chevy, where a meek, fidgeting silhouette sits in the front seat. “Do you think if she knew her son was going to be taken from the country that she might reconsider her decision of many years ago?”
“I have a right to go home.” Catherine repeats this several times, but each time she speaks her words, they are already long gone.
“And her?” asks Kristin, who nods toward the white Chevy.
“She gave up her right to my son.”
“Did your son give up his right to her?”
Catherine’s eyes narrow, and she looks out at the city with unshielded contempt, as if it isn’t Kristin, Peter or even Murat who has conspired to undermine her escape, but rather the monster of a city itself, the undulating skyline, the large buildings that look down on small ones and the small ones that had once been large, only to find themselves outpaced by newer, more innovative forms of construction. Arcing steadily across the evening sky the blinking signal lights of airliners trace irregular flight patterns, making it difficult to know which are returning and which are departing. Catherine stares upward, trying to solve the many riddles of their direction.
“Deniz and William will be back soon,” says Kristin, interrupting the mournful silence Catherine has escaped into. In a form of threat, Kristin tosses her eyes up the road, to where William and Deniz will return. Then she shifts her gaze to the parked white Chevy and its passenger. “I suppose we might be witness to a reunion of sorts,” mutters Kristin in almost an afterthought.
Catherine’s expression is alive with the implications of such a reunion, as if a synaptic jolt has, at last, forced a decision, and, upon recognizing that she needs to intervene to keep William from meeting this woman—at least at this moment—she also recognizes that she still needs her husband’s help to do this. Catherine bolts for the door, but not before offering a single pleading glance to Murat. What she is pleading for is forgiveness, or enough of it so that Murat won’t abandon her, so that he might come with her after their son. And upon his eyes meeting hers, Murat finally gets up from his seat. He has made his choice and it is to follow her. The patter of their footfalls descends the hallway, and then the stairs, and lastly their voices can be heard in the street as they walk head down with shoulders forward past the white Chevy and toward a fissure of narrow, ascending pedestrian thoroughfares which will take them to the İstiklal, where they might find William, only to take him home and to then, if they are lucky, find a way to resign the day’s events to a single episode in an otherwise fruitful, if at times uneven, marriage.
Kristin sits heavily on the sofa next to Peter. With her elbow propped on its arm, she leans her head into her hand and has an impulse to put her feet up on the coffee table but thinks better of it. Whatever future Peter and Catherine had with one another—no matter how improbable—has walked out of the apartment door. The vacuum of that loss leaves a silence in the room. Peter lights a cigarette.
“I never realized you smoked,” said Kristin.
He leans forward on the sofa, searching the coffee table for somewhere to put his ash. The cigarette dangles from his lips as he casts Kristin an incredulous sidelong glance. “So that’s the one thing about me you didn’t figure out,” he says, standing. He walks into the kitchen, where he smokes by the sink, finishing one cigarette and then lighting another as he tips his ash into the drain. He then crosses Deniz’s apartment and enters the room he had converted into a gallery the night before. His photographs still crowd the walls, a perimeter of faces, battered and unbattered impressions, lending to an effect Kristin wasn’t certain Peter ever quite achieved. Peter lingers in the exhibit’s center, as if to feel the weight of each glance on him for a final time before he takes his work down.
Kristin steps into the empty doorway to speak with Peter. What she wants to offer him are assurances: that Deniz will be in touch to begin plans for his exhibit at the Istanbul Modern, that she will ensure another grant is forthcoming to cover his expenses, and that, ultimately, he has done the right thing by supporting Catherine when she seemed poised to make a ruinous decision—even though that decision involved coupling up with him. However, before Kristin can say any of this, Peter gently lifts the first of his portraits off its hook. One by one the photographs are removed from the wall. As Peter stacks them in the center of the room, the somnolent dismantling of his work silences Kristin. Gathering her coat, she heads for the door. She has a great deal to tell Peter, but she will do it later.