“What does it matter how she died, all that matters is—”
Kristin cuts him off. “A suicide, Peter. The girl whose name you saw was a suicide. But she wasn’t William’s mother, just a name, one that everyone else was ready to forget.” At the foot of the stage, a small, impenetrable circle of celebrants has once again formed around Catherine, Murat and William and a ripple of laughter rises up from the group. Deniz climbs down the stage behind them, again avoiding his son.
But regardless of whatever claims Kristin makes about this anonymous girl’s suicide, Peter continues to fixate on the Çırağan Palace, on catching Kristin in this lie. Why would she tell her husband that she’d never been? And the language he’d used to describe the place, that it “had the best view in the city.” Peter had heard that before. It was how Deniz talked about sunrise from a suite …
“So who is William’s mother?” Peter asks clumsily, wishing to retract his words as soon as they depart, because he has already answered the question for himself. Kristin meets his awkwardness with a conversely elegant silence. “But why?” Peter eventually says, but he hardly speaks, it is as though he only mouths the sentence. “Why?” he repeats a bit louder.
“Why,” answers Kristin, as if how is the question she’s prepared for, and had it been asked she would’ve explained her single night’s indiscretion with Deniz at the Çırağan during a low point in her marriage after her husband had refused to follow her here, how she had thought to get rid of the child but couldn’t bring herself to, how her husband had eventually agreed to stay with her but only if she’d register the child at the Central Authority under a phony name and never speak of it again, how she had used her position in the consulate to find Catherine and Murat, and, lastly, how from there she had arranged everything—Murat’s relationship with her, Peter’s relationship with Catherine, all of the events that had led up to this night. She had arranged it all to create a stable framework for her son, one that would keep him proximate to her, one that would allow her to glimpse him from time to time at her meetings with Murat, or to hear about him at her lunches with Catherine, a structure that allowed her to hold at least a tangential influence over his life, and now that he was grown, or at least grown enough, she had to move on. But Peter’s question, why? She struggles with the word.
“I made a mistake,” she says.
“A mistake?” says Peter.
Kristin explains to him the how, but he is unsatisfied.
“Why?” he asks again.
“Is it so improbable,” she says, “that a well-planned life can be built around one single mistake?”
“We’re all bound up in one another.”
“And … ?” asks Kristin.
“And I thought you were, too,” says Peter. “But you’re not. You can leave.”
“So can you,” she says.
Peter’s racing mind catalogs all that he would lose if he chose to abandon this place and, as he unhinges his jaw to speak, Deniz rejoins them. “It’s come off beautifully, hasn’t it?” says Deniz. And for a moment, Peter feels uncertain as to what Deniz is referring to. Peter casts his gaze out over the crowd, at Murat, at William and at Catherine in her elegant gown. Then he looks beyond them, to the Bosphorus, which reflects the ceaseless, churning lights of the city. There is nowhere else he can go—or Catherine can go, or William, or Murat, or even Deniz—where in some way they won’t be diminished from what they are now. No place can match this one, he decides, and because of this they would remain.
“Yes, it came off beautifully. A lovely evening,” says Kristin. “Congratulations.” She glances across the reception, to where her husband is approaching with their three drinks cradled in his large grip.
“Did she tell you her news?” Deniz asks Peter.
“Yes, she told me. I guess we’ll have to get along without her.”
“It’s not that bad,” says Deniz, and then he turns to Kristin. “Didn’t you say your replacement was coming soon?”
“Three weeks.”
“Nothing will change too much,” says Deniz. “Will it?”
Kristin turns to Peter. “No,” she says. “Nothing will change at all.”
* * *
The frames are stacked in the middle of the gallery. Peter unwraps them from their plastic packaging and leans them one by one against the wall. He can hear the dissipating conversation and laughter from the museum’s atrium as the party ebbs to its conclusion. He works slowly, evaluating each of his photographs in context with the others before selecting its position. The photos aren’t portraits and this is something different for him, a change. Their composition is more complex and in each of the frames he has shot there is movement. In some of the pictures there is so much movement that the image appears as a blur. He isn’t certain who might appreciate images that convey so little clarity.
His glasses are perched down his nose. He had long ago pulled loose his bow tie and he had dropped his rented tuxedo jacket in a corner of the gallery. With his attention deep in his work, he is interrupted by a set of footsteps approaching the door. It is William.
The boy stands on the threshold. It has been months since Peter has seen him, perhaps even a year. He has grown. Perhaps it is just the tuxedo William wears, but Peter doubts it. William seems to have crossed some frontier of awareness, and when their eyes meet across the gallery, Peter feels with complete certainty that William understands everything and that, perhaps, the boy had come to understand long before he had.
“Come in,” says Peter. “You’ll be the first one to see it.”
William crosses the gallery so that he stands in its center. Unlike Peter, the boy had not removed his tuxedo jacket as the night wore on and the knot of his bow tie remains set tightly in place where an Adam’s apple will soon form. Standing next to Peter, he folds his arms and examines the first few photographs in the exhibit. “Were these taken from your apartment?” William asks.
“You remember,” says Peter.
Hanging in front of them, or stacked neatly on the floor or against the walls, are dozens of images of birds in various degrees of flight. The shots had all been observed from Peter’s window, but with different exposure lengths and in different seasons and light conditions. “What I like about the birds in these prints,” says Peter, “is that it’s difficult to tell whether they’re taking off or landing. There is lots of movement in the frame, but you’re not sure exactly what direction it’s going in.”
William continues to browse through the photographs. Then he stops at one. He looks intently into the frame. “I took this,” he says, glancing over his shoulder toward Peter. It is of a perfectly black bird and a flawlessly white one, the pair of them lifting into flight.