Red Dress in Black and White

by Elliot Ackerman

  Kristin wasn’t pushy, but she was persuasive. Sitting behind her desk with her government-issue badge on a lanyard around her neck, she possessed an unquestionable authority. She was part of a diplomatic mission and, unlike Peter, had a profession, a real job, and one that didn’t require the pittance of grant money. Nothing about her was freelance. She spoke with the tenderness of an older sister advising a younger brother. But she also spoke with the same type of subtle, yet cruel, diminishment offered up between rival siblings.

  This country persisted as a riddle to him, a tangle of conflicting signs. And yet it seemed like the easiest of passages from his life in New York to his life here—a plane ticket, a month-to-month lease, a visa. The entirety of him, at least to her, was what appeared on her screen. She likely wondered what his family thought about his decisions. A decade after he had left university, did they feel as if he had squandered their investment in him? If they still supported his work, would he have found himself sitting at Kristin’s desk, broke and ready to return home? His credentials which so impressed Kristin were far in the past and as useless as everything else in the past. He wondered if she could understand why he had traded that world for this one.

  Her pen was still indexed on the grant payment printed across the contract.

  Peter took back the sheet of paper and read aloud from the mission statement: “The recipient will collaborate with the consulate to provide artistic programming that advances relations between the United States and the host country and which furthers cross-cultural dialogues.”

  “You got it,” said Kristin. “We call it soft power.”

  The same cellphone vibrated again on her desk. She ignored it, waiting for him to sign so that they could begin their work together. Then another cellphone went off right next to it. “Are you going to answer either of those?” Peter asked.

  “If they’re important, they call me on my landline.” She picked up one of the phones, giving it a cursory glance, and then she set it back on the desk as if confirming her suspicion that it was, in fact, no one of importance. “Are you still interested in the type of project you outlined in your proposal?”

  In his application, Peter had described in some detail his current project of portraiture, which was an expansive survey of the city’s inhabitants. Peter recognized that it lacked focus. He had been wandering the streets like a paparazzo, but instead of hounding out celebrities he was hounding out the most obscure citizens. He couldn’t say whether or not this work was any good. He hadn’t figured out the thrust of his project and he suspected this was why Kristin had selected his application among a multitude. If the project remained undefined, she could help craft it to her own purposes. While determining exactly how to answer Kristin’s question, he reviewed the paragraph he had submitted a few weeks before, the one headed “Scope of Work.” He could already see the flaws or, as Kristin phrased it, “What you have outlined is ambitious, Peter.”

  “You don’t think it’ll succeed,” he answered, not without some defensiveness.

  “That’s not what I said,” she corrected him, “but I want you to pare it down.”

  “Into what?”

  “Maybe a book? An exhibit? Or both? We don’t have to figure that out today. What we do have to figure out is whether or not we’re going to move forward together.” She glanced insistently at the contract.

  Peter leaned over her desk and signed.

  “The right choice,” said Kristin.

  Her comment did nothing to assure Peter. “What do we do now?” he asked.

  Kristin reached into her desk drawer and handed him a business card with the same eagle she wore on the lanyard around her neck embossed in gold. She scrawled a number across the back. “Use that if you need to be in touch.” She then turned to her keyboard and began crafting an email. “I’m going to make a few introductions for you. It will help get you momentum as you start your project.”

  “I’ve already started it,” Peter grumbled, reminding her of this.

  “Of course,” she replied. “Also, you should meet Catherine Yaşar, an American who’s lived here for some time, nearly a decade. She used to dance in the ballet, though I’m not sure which company, perhaps one in New York. She married a Turk and is now a patron of the arts. Her husband is a well-known developer. I’ll set it up. She’ll take an interest in your work.”

  “What makes you so certain?”

  “Because your work is interesting.”

  Kristin turned back to her computer and continued to craft the email to Catherine. While she typed, Peter punched the number on her business card into his cellphone. He pressed dial so that it would save to his contacts. The call connected. A cellphone in the batch that sat on Kristin’s desk began to ring. Without shifting her glance from the computer screen, Kristin reached over. She silenced the phone.

  * * *

  Peter’s head is still on the pillow. He continues to watch the bridge and with the least possible gesture the gray morning light reveals its spans. The traffic comes in an unsteady drip. He counts the cars, reaching one hundred. The headlights curve out of the snaking residential streets, up the on-ramp, and then hold steady, pressing straight ahead into the rush between the two continents. The road across is a lonely no-man’s-land.

  Peter keeps counting the cars.

  From the easternmost hills of Europe, he looks over the water and watches the westernmost hills of Asia take shape. These are the minutes before dawn. The lights on the First Bridge have served their purpose and, as if set to a timer, they extinguish. The buildings on the far bank, lightly sketched in fog, shine with the sun behind them. The strait is a mirror. His window has no curtains. This high above, who can see in? Traffic picks up. As the lanes begin to fill, Peter loses count of the cars and quits. He reaches for his phone on the bedside table to see the time. He needs to be up in an hour. His ringer has been off and he sees a half dozen missed calls. Before he can check who it is, there is a knock at his door—one long, two short.

  One-thirty that morning

  Three Persian rugs cover the wooden floor of the enormous room where the boy sleeps. His father rarely puts him to bed, and that night Murat stands at William’s dresser rifling through the drawers for a pair of pajamas. He eventually finds a matching set. William is old enough to dress himself, but it has been some time since Murat participated in the nighttime routine, so he strips off the boy’s shirt and bottoms, not allowing William to do it on his own.

  He stands naked in front of his father.

  Murat fumbles with the pajamas, putting the shirt on his son backward. William is fearful of further upsetting his father so he makes no correction. Murat finishes and crosses the room to the bed. He flings open the covers. William climbs beneath them. Murat does not kiss William or say good night, or say anything for that matter. Yet when Murat turns out the lights, he does remember to keep on the small lamp alongside William’s nightstand. There is a great deal in William’s life that Murat is oblivious to, but he never forgets that his son is afraid of the dark. He once had the same fear himself and, at times, in other situations, he still feels sweat breaking out on his forehead and the back of his neck, he still feels his mouth turn to cotton, and he still feels that tight panic in his center, as if a big, invisible hand were pressing open-palmed onto his rib cage.

  The door shuts behind Murat and William listens as his father’s heavy footfalls sound down the hallway and then down the stairs to the foyer. William strains to hear either of his parents in the silence of their grand house, yet he hears nothing. His eyes wander. Piles of untouched toys—train sets, stuffed animals, a thousand colors of molded plastic—jam the corners of the room like a fugitive’s wealth hoarded away in a cave. He has arrived at that age where, slowly, he has lost interest in these possessions. Above the dresser his mother has arranged photos of the three of them—a reminder not of her, or of h
is father, but rather of the general idea of a family.

  A door slams somewhere in the house. More footsteps. He hears his parents’ voices intermingling in sharp whispers. Another door slams. Then another. He no longer wants to hear anything. Or see anything. He wants to be hidden. He reaches over to his nightstand and turns off the lamp.

  He lies in the dark convincing himself that the dark can no longer hurt him.

  It is still dark when his mother wakes him. Her face is very close to his. The trace of her perfume lingers, it is the scent she had put on before Peter’s exhibit that evening. She gently shakes William by the shoulders. He rolls over and reaches for the bedside lamp, but she stops him. “We have to go,” she says. Before he can sit up, she has already flung away his blanket and is cramming his shoes onto his bare feet. He walks hand in hand with her, down the hallway, still in his pajamas, toward the stairs. He knows to step quietly—heel to toe, heel to toe. They make their way. The lights are out. They descend the stairs one at a time so that they don’t stumble in the dark, so that they don’t interrupt the early-morning silence. Then they stand in the foyer, next to the table with the porcelain vase filled with white orchids.

  The chandelier above them turns on.

  William is holding her hand and he can feel a jolt course through his mother’s entire body. She squeezes his palm in hers.

  “Where are you taking him?” His father has appeared at the top of the stairs.

  She backs up into the table. “We have to leave,” she tells William.

  The boy won’t look at her, or his father. He stares only at the white orchids in the blue-and-white vase. Murat descends the stairs two at a time. Catherine moves briskly toward the door, taking her son with her, but she never breaks into a run. It is almost as if she wants Murat to catch her. Her husband places himself between her and the door.

  “Tell me where you’re going?”

  “I don’t know where,” she says.

  “You know it’s no use.”

  “Move aside.”

  “Then take some of your things.”

  “These are all your things.”

  Catherine steps around him, trying to pass through the door. Murat grabs William by the elbow. In the strength of that grip, the boy can feel his father’s desperation. William thinks to snatch his arm free but doesn’t. He allows his father to hold on to him, though it hurts, until, slowly, he feels the grip release. Murat crouches next to his son, as he had done before, when the two of them had stopped to look at the vagrant lying in the street and he had tried to explain to William the many debts he owed.

  Catherine holds her son’s hand, but he is gently pulling away from her. Murat looks as if he has something to ask the boy. William waits for whatever that thing is and he won’t move from where he stands, not until he hears it. He isn’t yet ready to follow his mother, so he gives his father this last moment.

  Murat says nothing.

  Catherine takes her son and leaves. But when she tries to close the front door behind her, Murat won’t allow it. He sticks his foot in the jamb and makes certain that the door will remain open.

  * * *

  Dawn strikes all at once and the day sets in. The water trucks have already made their rounds, their sprinklers tamping down the morning dust. William and his mother stand at the bottom of the gravel driveway, on the edge of the street. The passing, indifferent traffic crowds them from the curb. Eventually, an off-duty taxi stops out of courtesy, or curiosity. When the driver rolls down his window, he gives Catherine a pitiful look, his eyes seeming to ask: Who is this stranded woman with her child wearing nothing but his pajamas? When Catherine and William climb into the backseat and the taxi pulls onto the road, the driver leaves his meter off.

  Catherine gives him an address. She puts her arm around William, whom she has again covered with her blazer. As she holds him, she slips a hand into its pocket. In her rush to leave she has brought nothing other than her phone and wallet. She dials a number. It rings and rings. No answer. She taps out a text message. Then she dials the number again. Voicemail picks up. “Hi, it’s me,” she says, and then she swallows away the emotion that threatens to overtake her voice. “I don’t know where you are … I need to come over … something’s happened. And I have William. Please call.”

  She hangs up and clutches the phone to her chest as if it is a rope that she has ascended halfway but no longer has the strength to climb.

  “Where are we going?” her son asks.

  She cradles his head in her lap, and then bends over and kisses its top. Above them, big thick clouds hurry east, toward the country’s interior. William gazes up, tracking their navigation across the sky.

  PART II

  2006 through 2013

  July 25, 2006

  Murat held a paper ticket in his hand. It read 319, his number in the queue. He sat in a row of four metal chairs bolted to the linoleum floor in the consular services waiting area. A digital counter hung on the wall and a television played Hollywood comedies on mute with a ticker of subtitles. A few people watched. Nobody was laughing. Every minute or so, the digital counter advanced by one. Murat wore a khaki summer suit, which he had found at a Brooks Brothers outlet while attending university in the States. It was many seasons out of fashion and seldom left his closet. The jacket needed to be let out and also the pants, and although the suit no longer fit he thought it was the right choice for an appointment with an American embassy official.

  He had come on behalf of his newly adopted son. The boy was ten weeks old, but they had had him for only two weeks. Murat looked forward to a month and a half from now, when the boy would be sixteen weeks and one day old. That’s when he and his wife, Catherine, would have had him for more than half of his life and in Murat’s mind they would then be majority shareholders.

  Murat’s secretary had made this morning’s appointment for him online. The consulate’s website had assigned him a single time slot—10:30 a.m.—over which he had no say. He had a conflicting appointment, a meeting with a potential investor. He had called the consulate personally to request a different, more convenient time. After he’d been placed on hold for what he felt was unreasonably long, an operator had connected Murat with an official in Immigration Services. Before requesting another appointment, Murat liberally aired his grievances about the wait. When he eventually did make his request, the official predictably refused.

  The morning of his appointment Murat’s driver dropped him as close as he could to the consulate’s entrance, which still didn’t prevent Murat from having to walk through a vast serpentine of concrete barricades until he eventually encountered a Turkish security guard who wore the navy blue uniform of a private contracting firm and who stood, with metal-detecting wand in hand, grumbling to Murat that regulations prohibited foreign nationals from carrying cellular devices on the premises. The security guard then took Murat’s phone and handed him a plastic token, like those used for a coat check. Without his phone and stranded in the waiting room, which had no clock, but only the red digital counter, Murat had no way of telling the time. A Filipina woman sat next to him, her arms crossed over her chest. He asked if she had a watch.

  She glanced at Murat’s wrist. He wore a slim white gold Patek Philippe on an alligator-skin band with two indentations from the clasp. The first indentation was for a very substantial wrist. The second indentation, which was where Murat wore it, was on the slightest setting. While he was alive, Murat’s father had never given him the watch. It had come later, as a de facto inheritance, gifted without any parting message that might have validated it as an heirloom passed from father to son. He held its face to the woman, to show her that its second hand didn’t move. And although the watch was broken, Murat put it on each morning. A few jewelers had examined it for him. If it would ever again tell time, the entire internal mechanism would need to be replaced. This would leave behind
only the original casing and watch face. Murat preferred the old parts, even if none of them worked.

  “A man who wears a broken watch is a—” said the Filipina woman.

  “Is a sentimental man,” answered Murat, finishing her sentence.

  “Is an idle man,” she replied. She then read from her digital Casio. “It is twelve forty-two.” She wore a Mickey Mouse T-shirt with the word Orlando etched in an excited, looping script across the bottom. Murat thanked her and the two of them sat silent alongside one another, he in his Brooks Brothers suit and she in her Disney T-shirt, both of them having had a similar idea of how to dress in order to impress an American diplomatic official.

  Murat resented the idea of having to impress anyone, particularly a government functionary—no matter the nationality—whose work happened out of a waiting room with linoleum floors and among a crowd who had to take numbers on tickets in order to be seen. That Murat was part of that crowd had no bearing on this prejudice. He had suggested on several occasions that Catherine handle this appointment. “William can, after all, only become American because of you,” he had told his wife. “If you came, we could skip waiting in line and just go straight to U.S. Citizen Services.”

  Predictably, her refusal assumed the form of inaction and silence. Within days of adopting William, Catherine had fallen into a depression. Murat could not give her a child and he would not allow her to use a donor, which he likened to her having another man’s child, so they had chosen to adopt. Her son committed her to Murat and to the resulting fate of being left childless.