Gorgeous East (12 page)

At last the coffee arrived, along with a plate of Turkish sweets drenched in honey. Smith felt himself to be drunk suddenly; his ears burned, he saw little drunken squiggles out of the corners of his eyes. He drank his coffee and ate a sweet in a vague stab at sobriety.

Jessica stood up. “Got to go to the little girls’ room,” she said, and she wagged a finger at Vatran. “I don’t want to come back and find you boys at each other’s throats.” She walked around the table and into the bright, humming interior.

An old woman in a voluminous skirt came up from the sidewalk a moment later peddling silver earrings off a piece of cardboard covered in black velvet.

“
Cok guzel kupe
,” she said in a singsong voice, pushing the board at Vatran.

“
Kakmak, fahisehise!
” Vatran snarled and knocked the woman’s board to the ground; other diners looked over, startled, then looked away. The earring peddler gasped and let out a stream of invective, but Vatran ignored her and she gathered her spilled earrings and went away, cursing. Now, he leveled a hostile scrutiny at Smith; it was the first extended eye contact all evening. Smith, just drunk enough for a confrontation, stared back.

“Hey, Kasim”—he gave a little wave—“what’s up?”

Vatran nodded to himself, muscles in his jaws tightening angrily. “So tell me, buddy,” he said. “Why the fuck are you here?”

Smith flinched, taken aback by the naked hostility in the man’s voice.

“Vacation,” he said.

Vatran nodded. Then he lunged forward and jabbed a finger in Smith’s face. This time, Smith didn’t flinch, though the finger came a bare half inch from the end of his nose.

“We both know why you’re here,” Vatran hissed. “You’re here to fuck Jessica! You think maybe you fuck her, she’s going to come crawling back to New York with you. Is that it?”

“Not exactly,” Smith said, and he scraped his chair back, away from the accusing finger, trying to keep calm. “I was in Paris, in the neighborhood, so to speak. Thought I’d drop down to Istanbul, see how you two were getting along.”

“That right?” Vatran grinned mirthlessly. “Paris is two thousand kilometers from here—”

“Actually, it’s a pretty easy deal,” Smith interrupted. “You get on the Orient Express at the gare de l’Est, it’s a nice ride, the food’s great, and you catch up on your sleep. Wake up a couple of days later in Istanbul.”

“You took the Orient Express,” Vatran said like he didn’t believe it.

“You bet,” Smith said. “Man, what a great ride!”

Of course it was a lie. He’d flown into Paris because flights to Istanbul were prohibitively expensive just now and he got a deal to Paris; those rattletrap local trains through the Balkans were the cheapest way after that. He had exhausted his savings. He didn’t have much money left; barely enough scratch to make it back home.

“The Orient Express costs something like five thousand U.S.” Vatran waved a hand. “Jessica told me you were a bum, some broken-down hack actor without two fucking cents in his pocket. That you still live in the same piece of shit apartment in Brooklyn, that you don’t—”

“Jessica says a lot of things that aren’t exactly true,” Smith interrupted again. “First of all, I’m a great singer. All the critics say so. And I’m a pretty damn good actor. I sing, I dance, I emote. Classic triple threat.”

“—don’t know when it’s time to quit the acting bullshit and get a real job. Is that right, buddy?”

“Utter crap,” Smith said, though it was all true. “I just did
Les Miz
off-Broadway.” Then: “And I guess she didn’t mention my trust fund.”

“What?” Vatran seemed startled by this.

“Oh, yeah,” Smith said, improvising freely. “At the moment it’s just interest off a couple of million. That is, until 2010. Then I get the whole bundle, which amounts to a lot more.”

Vatran sat back and crossed his arms. “Lies,” he said. “Hack actor lies.”

“I’m from Iowa,” Smith said. “Know what they’ve got in Iowa? Timber. My great-grandfather, Carstairs Wellington Smith, cornered the timber market back in the 1880s. You should see my parents’ place. They call it Smith Castle, a huge Victorian smack in the middle of town, right across from the courthouse. Got our own lake out back, stocked with carp . . .” He grinned. “And you gotta admit, carp’s a pretty tasty fish.”

This was getting good. Iowa was rolling prairie, practically treeless, except for the occasional windbreak and along the rivers, which were mostly full of trout, not carp, but how would a Turk know that? Smith’s real great-grandfather, also named John, had been a dirt-poor farmer, mostly barley and rye, an original Iowa sodbuster; his grandfather, the same, though a little more successful, diversifying into soybeans, alfalfa, and corn. His father had broken the mold, finished high school, done two years at Iowa State in Ames and ended up as postmaster in Montezuma—which as everyone knows is the administrative hub of Poweshiek County—and there Smith and his sister were born and raised.

Smith’s mother, after a quick night-school course in shorthand, worked for years part time and underpaid as secretary to the dean of the English department at Cornell College, an hour away up in Mt. Vernon, just so her kids would be able to get a college education, tuition-free. Life wasn’t bad for a long time, through middle school. But immediately following Jane’s death, Smith’s father fell into a deep depression he couldn’t come out of, was institutionalized for six months, and retired from the postal service on a meager disability pension. When he died, that pension got cut in half. There had been winters, brutal, 75 below, with the wind off the plains, when his mother could barely afford the price of heating oil, living in one room, the rest of the tiny, white three-bedroom clapboard house on Blue Bird Lane closed off with plastic sheeting.

“So, tell me, Kasim,” Smith continued, “what other absolute crap has Jessica laid on you?”

But the Turk, still digesting Smith’s jazzed-up Iowa pedigree, didn’t seem to be listening. Gypsies, their filthy clothes sewn with coins, came through the crowd on the street, playing the santour, a kind of elaborate zither, and the
kemence
, a long-necked lute stroked with a bow like a violin. A Gypsy girl, no more than six or seven, strutted around snapping tiny cymbals between her thumb and forefingers. When Vatran looked back at Smith at last, his eyes were black, murderous.

“I want you to get the fuck out of here right now,” he said in a low voice, and a black something in his tone made Smith feel afraid. “Get up and get out and don’t you ever call her, don’t you fucking ever come to Istanbul again! If you do, I’ll fucking . . .”

He rose out of his seat, about to lunge at Smith, his thick fingers curling to choke the life out of him; Smith casting about for a weapon—a bottle, a plate a fork, anything—when Jessica’s voice came from behind.

“Kasim! Stop it right now!”

Smith allowed himself a sigh of relief.

The Turk looked up, glowering, as Jessica stepped back around the table.

“I want this bastard
gone
!” he said, raising his voice. “He came here from Paris on the Orient Express just to fuck you!”

“Kasim, stop it!” Jessica said, horrified. “That’s out of line! John and I have known each other for years. We went to grad school together, we starved in New York together. We’re always going to be friends.”

Vatran made a broad, denunciatory gesture, reminiscent of an actor in a silent melodrama. Then he seized her arm in a brutal grip. “You’re coming home with me!”

But Jessica pulled away angrily. “Like hell I am!” she said between her teeth. “Not when you’re acting like a real Turkish son of a bitch!”

Smith smiled to himself at this, remembering the similar scene, roles reversed, at that taverna in Cihangir. One thing about Jessica—she couldn’t be coerced into doing anything she didn’t want to do.

“
Yalanci orospu!
” Vatran shouted and a gasp went up from surrounding tables.

Smith knew the second word meant whore; the first he didn’t know, but figured it was probably bad.

With a quick swipe, Vatran knocked the remaining meze plates to the pavement in a dramatic spray of white crockery shards and olive oil, and, still shouting in Turkish, stormed off. Two waiters ran after him shaking their fists, their blue-and-white comic opera caps askew, but he was already gone and they turned around and came back. The manager, an elaborately mustachioed fellow wearing the unlikely combination of business suit and white apron, emerged from the interior and began yelling at Smith.

“What’s he saying?” Smith said.

“You don’t want to know,” Jessica said, turning to engage the furious little man. “
Yavas, yavas . . .
” she began, trying to calm him. And she managed to resolve the dispute after a few minutes haggling, using a combination of personal beauty, effusive apologies, and 375 Turkish lirasi—a little under 200 U.S. dollars.

“Sorry about all that,” Jessica said as they were walking away.

“Don’t you think you should go after Vatran?” Smith asked, though he didn’t mean it.

Jessica considered this for a moment. “He needs to cool his jets for a while,” she said. “That kind of juvenile-slash-macho-slash-asshole behavior is completely unacceptable.”

“I don’t get it,” Smith said. “I thought the dinner was his idea.”

“Well, sort of,” she equivocated. “I mean you can’t visit a Turk’s woman without visiting the Turk, right?”

Smith realized suddenly that it hadn’t been Vatran’s idea at all. That it had been part of some obscure scheme of Jessica’s—to make the man jealous; to relieve the boredom of living a settled life in Istanbul with an hour’s worth of of psychodrama.

They came down Nevizade Sokuk onto the main thoroughfare and walked along past the European-style shops with scantily clad mannequins in the windows or sleek, white kitchen appliances. And suddenly, it was two years ago. They were in Istanbul again, on vacation, with the night ahead of them. Smith closed his eyes and imagined she was his once more.

“Well, ex-boyfriend,” Jessica murmured at last. It seemed she had read his thoughts. “What do you want to do with me now?”

8.

S
aturday night and all the bars and clubs this side of town were packed with Westerners—the usual mix of tourists and backpackers, leavened with the occasional secular Turk. Smith and Jessica went to several popular spots up and down Istiklal Caddesi: First to the Argentine-themed Bescini Peron, which was like a bar in Buenos Aires, with vino tinto by the carafe and framed photos of Argentine celebrities on the walls (Evita, Borges, Juan Manuel Fangio, Carlos Gardel). Then to the Cafe Salonika, a Greek place where divorced, middle-aged European women on package tours drank too much ouzo and danced on tables. Then Cicek Bar, a sleek modern lounge favored by Turkish media types, all steel and glass, grafted uncomfortably into the remains of a gutted Byzantine-era chapel. The antiseptic postmodern interior, Jessica pointed out proudly, had been designed by Vatran himself.

“What do you think?” she asked.

“Horrible,” Smith said. “Awful.”

“You’re just jealous,” she said.

“True,” Smith said. “But it’s still awful.”

Jessica turned away, annoyed, and spent a half hour talking to an acquaintance, an Istanbul television personality, a balding, shifty-eyed man who did canned government-scripted political commentary on Istanbul Dokuz. Jessica didn’t bother to introduce Smith, who sat by pouring more raki down his throat. When they exited Cicek after a while, Jessica left a barely touched glass of white wine on the counter. She’d done this at each stop so far, remaining—at least to Smith’s increasingly drunken perspective—obstinately sober. He was beginning to slur his words, approaching that maudlin, sodden hour after which he’d remember nothing in the morning.

“I never did get why you left me, Jess,” he said, trying to keep the obvious whine out of his voice. “What happened to us?”

“Let’s not go there,” Jessica said, taking a dainty sip of her new glass of wine.

They were at Buyuk Londra now, a dead-on imitation of an English pub: warm bitters on tap, rugby on the tele, tasteless pub grub (broiled chicken and creamed peas) wilting under heat lamps on a steam cart.

“Come on,” Smith persisted. “I just want to know. For my own peace of mind.”

Jessica sighed. “Haven’t you been reading my e-mails for the last two years? I thought we went through all that.”

“Oh, I read them,” Smith said. “Then I printed them out and stapled them to my chest.”

“One thing’s clear”—she couldn’t suppress a grin—“you’re a fucking masochist.” Then: “Seriously, Johnny, you’ve got to move on.”

“I know that,” Smith said. “But I still love you.”

“You don’t love me,” Jessica said. “You love the idea of me.”

“O.K.,” Smith said. “What idea’s that?”

“You know—healthy, big-titted, friendly blond slut. Like Anna Nicole Smith, only with some brains.”

“You’re thinking of Vatran,” Smith said. “That’s his idea.”

“So you’d still love me if I were some skinny, ugly chick with no tits at all?”

“Actually, no.”

“Fucker,” Jessica said, but she laughed.

“So what about Vatran,” Smith persisted. “Does he love you?”

“Honey.” Jessica wagged her head. “He loves every piece of me.” Then she looked away, and when she looked back, her eyes were serious. “I needed a huge change, Johnny. That’s what happened to us. I couldn’t take that bohemian bullshit anymore. Disgusting tiny apartments and no money, no health insurance. You on the road half the time. A gig here, a gig there, nothing steady. And me, waitressing. How I fucking hated waitressing. And you know what? You can’t take it anymore either. Look at yourself—you look positively haunted. You need to call it quits, go to law school, join the Marines. Anything.”

“I’m an actor-singer-dancer,” Smith said grandly. “That’s what I am. Triple threat!”

“An unsuccessful actor-singer-dancer,” Jessica corrected.

“I’ve got a great voice. Perfect for musical comedy—the Cleveland
Plain Dealer
said so. Hell, I’ve done LORT A! One step, baby, one step below Broadway!”