The Lovers (7 page)

But Deniz’s kindness, her eagerness to share Yvonne’s company, was reassuring to her. It felt like proof that this trip had been a good idea, and that Yvonne needed only to shed her cloak of mourning in order to be who she once was.

The water was murkier close to the beach, and Yvonne put her feet down to feel if it was shallow enough to stand. She almost scraped her knee on the rocks below. She staggered out of the water, trying to navigate the uneven surface between the weeds and, inexplicably, pieces of floating wood. Her body was cold as she emerged, but the warm air quickly blanketed her.

On the beach, a boy of about ten was laying something out on the sand.
Boys the world over had the same body,
she thought—narrow chests with protruding ribs and tiny paunches. He resembled Matthew at that age.

Yvonne walked past the boy, and saw he was organizing a collection of shells. He was setting them out with great care, the way a society hostess might arrange saucers and cups for a tea.

“What beautiful shells,” she said, pausing in front of them. For a moment, she had forgotten she was in Turkey. The boy turned to her. He had wide pink lips and a straight
nose and eyes that were moist and dark, as though they had recently teared.

Yvonne pointed to the shells and smiled, and he surprised her by not smiling back. She had had students like this boy, students who didn’t immediately respond to her. It was the reluctant ones whose respect or attention she most pointedly sought.

She picked up a shell before noticing it was chipped on its side.

“Nice,” she said, and smiled.

The boy said something and shook his head. He stood and pointed to the chip.

“Oh, I see,” she said, holding it in her hand and pretending she hadn’t already noticed it.

The boy said something else.

She was ashamed she hadn’t learned any Turkish before arriving here. She and Peter used to study the basics before visiting any country—
hello, thank you, excuse me, where is the
…?

“Pardon?” Yvonne said.

The boy held up his fingers. Two.

Of course—he was selling the shells. The elaborate layout on the beach was his shore-front display.

Yvonne tapped the sides of her hips, her hands grazing the edges of her swimsuit, as though to show she didn’t have money on her.

The boy stared.
I am an idiot
, she thought. She felt the boy with his dark eyes must think so too.

She pointed to her towel on the beach, her small bag, and started walking toward them. She realized she had left her belongings—her car keys, her money—on the beach while she had been on the boat. She sprinted toward her possessions as though hustling now could prevent any theft from having taken place in the past hour.

Everything was where she had left it. She turned to the boy and smiled at him, for she felt he was somehow responsible. He had not taken any of her possessions, nor had he let anyone else take them. She removed a five-lira note from her bag and handed it to him.

Now it was his turn to pat his hips—was he mocking her? He signaled to her to follow him back to the display of shells and began to speak Turkish again, as though if he continued speaking she might absorb his language during the very time he was talking to her.

Yvonne understood she was his first customer of the day, and because he had no change he wanted her to take more shells for her money. She pointed to one that more clearly resembled a sand dollar, and he nodded in approval. He knelt and, using a checkered cloth napkin, cleaned the sand from the shell before handing it to her.

“Thank you,” she said. “Tea and sugar.”

Yvonne returned to her beach towel, and as she sat down she again noticed the roughness of its texture. She closed her eyes to the sun, and her mind wandered to a fight she had had with Aurelia when Aurelia was a teenager. Aurelia had claimed that Yvonne loved her like any of her students,
that she would have loved her if she had been bubbly or even dumb.

“Exactly,” Yvonne said. “That’s what being a parent is.”

“But I want you to love me specifically for who I am,” Aurelia said.

“Well, who are you, specifically?” Yvonne asked.

“See! You don’t even know!”

Tears were forming in the corners of Yvonne’s eyes. She wiped them away with her damp and sandy hands.

She heard laughter, and opened her eyes. The boy. He was standing in front of her, his shells wrapped in his towel and tossed over his shoulder. It appeared he had been walking past Yvonne and then stopped when something she had done amused him.

“What?” she said.

The boy pointed to her face. Then he dug down until he reached the darker patch of sand a few inches below the surface of the beach. He dipped his index finger and raised it and, with the wet sand, drew stripes on his face that started at his eyes and extended downward.

Yvonne understood. She took the edge of her towel and wiped away the sand on her cheeks. “All gone?” she said. “Better?”

The boy nodded. She was fine.

“Thank you,” Yvonne said. The boy switched his grip on his towel and lifted the makeshift sack to the other shoulder. He waved to Yvonne and continued walking.
Don’t leave
, she thought. She stared at his back, his small, narrow shoulders,
and wished he would turn around. But he continued walking, and Yvonne was left alone.

She pressed a finger to the skin of her arms. Pink, like the inside of a shell. It had been a long time since she had exposed herself like this, and for so long. After taking a final dip in the ocean to cool her skin, she dried off carefully and completely, and made her way toward the parking lot.

A waiter at the restaurant gave her what seemed to be an unkind look as she walked past. Was that possible?
No
, she told herself. She drove back through Yakaköy, and this time stopped at the side of the road where an old woman sat on a low stool, hammering nuts on a small tree trunk. Yvonne rolled down the window and the woman stood and held out a large plastic bag of almonds. Their hands met as they made the exchange, and then they each nodded before Yvonne drove off. She bit into a large almond and could taste sun and dust. She ate another, and another, and vowed that each day she returned to Knidos—for she already knew she would spend the remaining days of her vacation in Knidos, her nights in Datça—she would buy almonds from a different woman standing by the side of the road.

Soon there was no one on the road, and the mountains around her seemed both taller and farther away. She felt loneliness seeping into her stomach, her chest, and she tried to stop it from spreading. It wouldn’t be long before she saw Özlem and Deniz again, she told herself, and she was promptly rewarded with the small thrill that came with nascent friendship, with sharing life stories. Peter had been
the one who got to tell the good stories and now, suddenly, Yvonne longed for the opportunity to tell them herself. Or rather, she longed for the opportunity to see if she would tell them differently.

“Yvonne and I fell in love through the Italian postal service,” Peter would say to anyone who asked. And, for the first fifteen years of their marriage, people asked all the time.
How did you meet?
They wanted to believe the secret to a happy marriage could be passed along like a recipe or remedy. Yvonne couldn’t remember the last time she had told her version of how they met. Maybe this was what happened to any couple over the years: the anecdotes and family histories and jokes were divided up, much like household chores, and Peter had assumed the role of telling
their
story.

Yvonne was twenty-one and had been with someone else. Lawrence. Peter often left this name,
Lawrence,
out of the narrative. In fact, he left out everything to do with Lawrence, and just started the story midway through—after Yvonne and Lawrence had ended their relationship. If she had a chance to tell the story, Yvonne would start at the beginning.

Lawrence and Yvonne met at Stanford. Yvonne was there on a scholarship, the first in her family to go to college. He was there because all his relatives were Stanford alums, two of the buildings bearing his family’s name. They met while working at the student radio station—he had a slot from four to six
A.M
., when he would play Latin dance music, and she read news from the AP wire at six. She started coming in to the station earlier and earlier, and he began waiting for her
to finish her half hour of news so they could have breakfast together afterward.

A few times, they had gone away to his parents’ second—or third—home in the wine country. They had exchanged kisses, but always stayed in separate rooms—that was part of the story. Details of those weekends at the country house were coming back to Yvonne now. All the newspapers: the family had six subscriptions to each Sunday paper, local and national, so no one would have to fight over copies. And the old stale Cokes in the kitchen cabinets. It was as though they had stocked up for a party ten years before. All the sodas were flat, their cans bearing a previous design incarnation that no longer existed.

Lawrence invited her to go on a trip to Europe together after they graduated. Europe! Her sisters had never been there, and spent months picking out outfits for her to wear along the Champs-Élysées, at the Prado, at canal-side dinners in Venice. She wrote postcards to her sisters from each city they visited. “Having a great time!” she’d scribble. That was all she said—anything else would reveal she was lying. She spent most of the days alone. Lawrence wanted to go off in the afternoons by himself—“It’s good for us to have our space,” he’d say. And strange things started happening. He came back to the hotel later and later, always with an excuse for his tardiness: he had been mugged, he had gotten lost, he had run into an old friend of his from Andover.

Yvonne would listen to his excuses, express her frustration, her worry, her concern, and then he’d say, “Darling, let
me take you to dinner.” And there they would drink red wine or white wine or champagne and eat three courses and talk and discuss and laugh and flirt—and then, before parting with her at her hotel door, he’d give her a firm but not unloving kiss.

Oh, she supposed she should have been thankful that he was a gentleman. Her sisters had told her she would owe him for the trip, that every night he would expect something from her. But the truth was Yvonne expected it too. She loved Lawrence for not fully wanting her, because it made her desperate and confused—all the things that in her youth she mistook for passion. And so one night in Florence, in their hotel by the Uffizi Palace, she washed herself with a pink shell-shaped soap he had bought her that day and dressed in the negligee her sisters had given her. With a hotel robe draped around her body and hotel slippers on her feet, she walked down the hall to his room. She wanted to believe she was playing the part, a woman unveiling herself to her intended for the first time.

She heard something behind the door, music and laughter, and took a step back to check that she had the right room. Room 19, his room. She knocked lightly and then more assertively—a strange panic was growing like a vine up her legs. Lawrence opened the door, his shirt off, and Yvonne forgot to adjust her plan. She let her robe open and drop to the floor behind her. And then she saw Lawrence was not alone. She should have known by Lawrence’s face—he was not happy to see her. But behind him she saw a man pulling
a robe around his naked body. The same hotel robe—the Florentine flower stitched in gold on the pocket over the heart—that Yvonne had just let drop from her shoulders. A sound escaped her throat, passing through her lips before she could stop it. She ran back to her room, where she splashed her face with water and sat on the balcony for an hour, repeatedly counting the bridges of the Arno River, until the knocking at the door had finally stopped.

In the morning she saw him at breakfast.

“I’m sorry you found us,” he said.

“You’re sorry I found you, but not sorry about what you did.”

“We could have had a great trip.”

She did not tell him her parents expected that the European trip, for which his family was paying, meant they would return engaged. Yvonne and her sisters had shared the same room growing up, and when they had reunited in Albuquerque the previous Christmas, they’d spent the night in their old beds, in their old room, with their photos of prom nights and roller coaster rides, and invitations to high-school graduation parties still thumbtacked to the large, porous corkboard on their wall. It was there in that room, among these photos, that her sisters had planned her wedding for her—the ice with the mint leaf frozen within each cube, the dahlias, the million tiny silver stars that would be thrown instead of rice. She was surprised by how eagerly she greeted their conviction that she and Lawrence would marry.

She checked his face for signs of regret, and she saw it there in his eyes and his cheeks, which had slackened into jowls overnight. He had plenty of regret, but all of it for himself. He regretted bringing her. Some other girl would have accepted the bargain, and gratefully.

“How I pity you,” she said, and only a moment later, when he began to cry, did she realize this was true.

They spent the rest of the day in their separate rooms, writing notes to each other on hotel stationery. She would write three pages of a letter, fold it into quadrants, and slip it under the thick door to his room. Then she would pace around her bed, run the bathtub and fill it with bubbles (as though she could actually sit in a bathtub when waiting for his response) until his reply slid beneath her door. His letters were unfolded single sheets.

At the end of the day a decision had been reached. He would continue on the trip without her and she would remain in Florence until her scheduled flight home, in three weeks’ time. She didn’t want to return early because she didn’t yet know what explanation she would give to her family. Nor did she have any interest in continuing on their planned itinerary, as he suggested. He could see Switzerland and its mountains and Austria and its white horses with out her.