The Lovers

by Vendela Vida

  “It’s okay,” said Yvonne. “I don’t like it either.”

  They both laughed.

  “So are you sad you came here? Maybe you regret not going somewhere nicer?”

  “No, I don’t regret it,” Yvonne said. “I’ve been here before. Many years ago.”

  Özlem nodded, as though she knew this. “You must have liked it if you come back.”

  “I did. I liked it very much. It was different then too.”

  “That’s what everybody says. It used to be better.” Özlem picked an invisible piece of something off her jeans. “Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?”

  Yvonne paused. “Okay.”

  “What do you plan to do all day?”

  Yvonne laughed. “I want to remember.”

  “You want to remember your honeymoon?” Ali must have told her.

  “I guess the honeymoon. I just want to remember him, the days we spent here. We lived in the same house for twenty-six years and sometimes when I’m home, walking through the rooms, I think, ‘Did he take the splinter out of my daughter’s foot, or was it my foot?’ I’ll think, ‘Did we go through a phase where we listened to this record for a year, or was it that record?’ Everything gets jumbled. Too many things happened in each of those rooms, on the stairway, in the garden. And I can’t ask him.”

  “Did you have a good marriage?” Özlem asked.

  Yvonne nodded. She had decided long ago that it had been good. And after his death, it felt unnecessary to question the storyline. They had met in a fantastically romantic way. They had beautiful twins together. They lived comfortably in the comfortable state of Vermont, they had good teaching jobs at the same high school, they traveled well together, and often. If you excluded Aurelia, as Peter often had, things had been perfect, hadn’t they?

  “How long you are together?”

  “We were going to celebrate our twenty-sixth anniversary when he died.”

  “You celebrate twenty-six?”

  “We never had a twenty-fifth anniversary because our daughter was going through a tough time, so we were going to celebrate our twenty-sixth—”

  “With a party?”

  “Yes.”

  “A big one?” Özlem asked. She seemed like someone who would be fond of festive occasions.

  “Sort of. We aren’t big on parties. I mean we never were—except for our kids’ birthdays, of course. But for our anniversary, we were going to invite my sisters in New Mexico, and our friends from all over, and have a big party in the backyard. We were going to have a piñata and.. .” Yvonne couldn’t recall the other plans they had made. All the details—the music, the guest list, the food—had been subsumed by funeral arrangements.

  “That sounds fun,” said Özlem, rescuing her from trying to remember.

  “It would have been, yes.” Yvonne smiled. She had experienced a strange sensation, though, a week after his death, or maybe sooner: relief that she would not have to plan and put on this party. She could not admit the relief, just as she could not admit that she took a tiny bit of pleasure in the newness of certain things—of eating breakfast food for dinner, of shoveling the snow on the front steps herself, of not having to talk about Aurelia with Peter, of not having to avoid talking about Aurelia with Peter. But at the two-year mark even the new had turned old, and the realization had settled in, like the creak of a floorboard that never goes away, that she was, in fact, a widow. No, the realization was not a floorboard. It was a house. The grief fell in on her like a house collapsing.

  “I hope I didn’t upset you,” Özlem said, and leaned her hands forward. They were slender hands, with large but tasteful rings on three fingers.

  “No,” said Yvonne. “No.”

  “I’d like to come see you again, if that is all right.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Maybe tomorrow?”

  Yvonne nodded. She was pleased Özlem seemed to have taken to her as quickly as she had taken to Özlem.

  “Is it strange being in this house?” Yvonne asked while walking her to the door.

  “A little,” Özlem said without hesitating. “Maybe next time, you’ll give a tour for me?”

  “Sure,” Yvonne said, briefly wondering if it was the house, not Yvonne, that interested Özlem.

  They kissed good-bye on both cheeks, and Yvonne closed the door. She brought their cups to the sink, cleaned them, set them upside down to dry, and went outside to the patio with a magazine she’d brought on the flight. She tried to follow the words on the page, but couldn’t concentrate. Something about Özlem’s visit nagged at the back of her head, and hunger sounded in her stomach.

  She had no desire to return to Datça’s promenade, to its restaurants, so she took the car and drove until she found a grocery store. She stocked up on food she would have been able to find in Burlington, but never ate at home: Nutella, granola cereal, pomegranates, olives, small apples, frozen pizzas, and a pint of ice cream with nuts.

  Back at the house, she ate her pizza on the patio, and watched a young couple with suitcases walking up and down the street, studying the numbers on houses and consulting a piece of paper. After a few minutes, they must have decided they were in the wrong place altogether. They placed their luggage in the trunk of a car and drove away.

  After dinner, Yvonne quickly grew tired. As she drifted off to sleep in the room with the twin beds, she knew what it was that had been disturbing her. When Özlem said Ali hit her, she had a challenging expression on her face and her eyes said, What, you don’t believe me? It was a frequent expression of Aurelia’s, used both when she was lying and when she was telling the truth.

  The first time Yvonne had picked her up at the police station—there had been two times—Aurelia had dared her mother to doubt her story. “You really think I would have gone out of my way to steal those earrings? Did you see those earrings? They’re the kind of thing Becca would wear.” Becca was Matthew’s girlfriend at the time—a doe-eyed girl who wore pink pants and pearls with sweatshirts. She embodied everything Aurelia claimed to hate, though Yvonne suspected she was secretly jealous another girl had stolen Matthew’s attention, his help with homework, his rides to school. “Really, Mom. Think about it.”

  Yvonne was awoken by the sound of people in the house below. Something falling to the floor. A man’s voice. A woman’s voice.

  It was already light out. Yvonne walked downstairs. “Hello?” she called out. She heard more voices. In the living room, a man and a boy were sitting on the couch, watching television.

  “Can I help you?” she said. The boy looked at her. A lock of hair, the shape of a comma, bisected his forehead. The man called for someone else, and for a moment Yvonne felt scared. What if there was a team of burglars? But what had they broken in for? To watch TV?

  A woman emerged from the kitchen wearing a head scarf and carrying a broom. When she smiled at Yvonne, her sadness was made more profound. She mimed sweeping and scrubbing. Of course, the maid. It must be Wednesday.

  “Oh, hello,” Yvonne said. She wanted to take the broom from the woman and tell her to go home. Yvonne had been in the house for less than thirty-six hours, and had left little trace of being there. But she worried that if she did ask the maid to leave, it would mean she wouldn’t work, and wouldn’t be paid by Mr. Çelik.

  The boy was standing at the edge of the living room, peering at Yvonne with parted lips.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Hello,” he said, and giggled. “Where you?” he said.

  “Where am I from?” Yvonne asked.

  The boy didn’t say anything.

  “America.”

  The boy smiled.

  “Vermont.”

  The boy’s face was blank.

  “Let me show you,” Yvonne said. She stepped into the living room and retrieved an atlas she had seen on the bookshelf. The boy’s father was watching what looked like a danceathon on TV.

  The atlas opened to Turkey. She searched for the peni
nsula in the southwest corner of the country. Datça was a small black dot on the farthest edge, at the point where the Mediterranean and the Aegean came together.

  She turned the pages until she got to the United States, and showed the boy Vermont. She was always surprised by how far away she now lived from New Mexico, where she had been raised. The boy studied the map with great seriousness and carried it to his father, who glanced at the image and then said something stern to the boy. Yvonne knew he was instructing the boy not to bother her, and she didn’t know how to tell the father it was okay, that it was the simple company of kids she now missed. That it was her children’s childhoods she missed. The boy sat down on the couch, his legs straight out, and picked at a scab on his elbow. From the kitchen came the clank of dishes being washed by hand.

  Yvonne knew she needed to leave. She felt uncomfortable letting the woman clean a clean house, and she felt more uncomfortable watching the man watch TV while his wife scrubbed and mopped and did whatever else she was going to do.

  Yvonne retreated to the bedroom and changed into her new swimsuit. In the catalogue, the one-piece had appeared to be an innocuously pale yellow. But the package had arrived at her door two days before her trip—too late to be exchanged—and the swimsuit had turned out to be the pungent yellow of a yield sign. She called her next-door neighbor, Anita, and asked her to come over so she could get her opinion. Anita, who was wearing a hat rimmed with flowers, had pronounced the suit “fun.”

  Fun, Yvonne repeated to herself as she stood in front of the mirror in Datça, tightening the straps, lifting the suit higher on her chest. She pulled on a shapeless turquoise sundress Aurelia had dubbed her “missionary attire,” packed a bag, and set off in the car with no destination in mind. She drove down the hill to the main road with the air-conditioning on high and the windows down low. Despite the maid, or perhaps in part because she had escaped from witnessing the maid, Yvonne was in good spirits. Upon further consideration, she attributed the bulk of this feeling to her conversation with Özlem. While she suspected Özlem of lying to her about being hit, this only made her more intriguing. Özlem was not Yvonne’s problem to solve, and so she could listen, gasp, advise—all without having to watch the consequences unfold.

  Since Peter’s death, Yvonne had come to value friendship more than romance. On the phone with old classmates, she asked probing questions, far more curious about her friends’ jobs and children than she’d ever been before. But Yvonne was certain she wouldn’t love again—not a man, not sexually. She couldn’t picture a man other than Peter lying next to her at night. It seemed as natural as sleeping next to a bear. Nor could she imagine adjusting to the feel of another man’s thumb on her nipple, those particular pink marks etched onto his skin by the waistband of his underwear, the frequency of how often he rose in the night to pee.

  Seventeen months after Peter’s death, she had agreed to go on a date set up by a woman who owned the neighborhood health-food store. This was the same woman who had told Yvonne about a website that e-mailed subscribers a new vocabulary word every morning, and Yvonne had signed up for the service because it was free, and she liked the non-surprise of its arrival in her inbox. She could never be sure what any other e-mail might say, which long-lost friends or colleagues would have only just learned of Peter’s passing, and written to offer their condolences, their platitudes. But the word of the day was uncomplicated in its anonymity and consistency.

  Edward had seemed promising: a former mayor of a small town, he had broad shoulders and hair that appeared to always have just been washed. Yvonne soon understood that Edward was also a subscriber to the word-of-the-day e-mail, most likely at the store owner’s prompting as well. Each time they had gone out together—to a Sunday brunch, to dinner, to a graduation ceremony for Seeing Eye dogs for the blind (his daughter was an instructor at the school)—he had incorporated a recent word-of-the-day into his conversation. At first Yvonne thought he was kidding, gently mocking their mutual friend. But he was not kidding. By the third date, Yvonne’s elbows locked into her side in agitated anticipation as she listened to him steer the conversation in a direction that would allow him to incorporate pleonexia. At a bus stop bench she sat him down. “Whatever is happening between us is fugacious,” she told him, knowing he would understand. It was Saturday, and fugacious had been Thursday’s word.

  When Yvonne reached the main road, she drove out of Datça without knowing the speed limit, or how fast she was going. She didn’t care to convert kilometers to miles, just as she didn’t want to convert the temperature, digitally provided in Celsius on the Renault’s control panel, to Fahrenheit.

  Rather quickly, the stations on the Renault’s radio began to fade to static. All except one that broadcast a woman telling jokes in Turkish, each joke punctuated by a laugh track. She told a joke every minute, and the laughter lasted for six seconds, never more, never less. It made Yvonne happy to hear the laughter, as perfunctory as it was. Other people’s happiness pleased her, now more than ever. Why?

  She sped past gas stations—so many gas stations, each with its owner’s name printed at the bottom of the list of prices for diesel, prices for premium gas. She drove past olive trees, sleeping cows, and roadside stands displaying row upon row of porcelain swans, their beaks all turned in the direction of the sun.

  She was slowed by trucks doing roadwork ahead, and from the burn in her nostrils she surmised they were pouring tar. As she trailed a slow line of cars, she grew increasingly impatient. At an intersection a small sign caught her eye. KNIDOS 35 KILOMETERS, it said, with an arrow pointing to the left. She turned.

  Knidos. She had not known it was so close. She remembered the name, would always remember it. Knidos was penciled onto the back of the photo Peter had taken of her there on the last day of their honeymoon. In the photo she was smiling in front of an ancient white amphitheater, wearing a sundress patterned with halved pomegranates. Peter had the photo framed and propped on his desk for his entire career at the high school, and not a semester passed without him telling her a fellow teacher had commented on Yvonne’s beauty, her youth, on the way the photo had captured something they hadn’t seen before, but now could not believe had escaped their notice.

  For the first fifteen minutes of the drive to Knidos, Yvonne wound up a hill, the top of which she could not see. She felt dwarfed by the mountains around her, which were spotted with short trees at their base, dotted with white rocks in their middle, and bald at their peaks.

  Soon the road grew curvier and Yvonne seemed to be emerging above the surrounding mountains. She passed roadside stalls where village women sold honey and almonds. The women wore scarves around their heads, and had thick walking sticks by their sides. Yvonne stopped the car to allow a woman to amble across the road. The woman was bent at the hips, her back horizontal, her cane short. Yvonne would have bought anything from her, but the woman had nothing to sell.

  Yakaköy said a sign, and a minute later, Yvonne was in the heart of the village. The road turned narrow and bumpy, lined on either side with crumbling and gray buildings that had once been white. Aging men in baseball hats stood in the shade of a bar, watching as she passed. Donkeys seemed to squeeze her car from either side, and the old women gathered in front of the town’s two deteriorating mosques narrowed the road further. Yvonne drove slowly, the tires of the Renault barely turning, and when she was released from the claustrophobia of the town she picked up speed.

  The landscape was more rugged now, the hills whiter with rock. She felt she was approaching something wondrous. Any minute now, she thought, and there it was suddenly spread below her: the Aegean, gleaming in the sun. The road descended and she paused at a turn and looked down on Knidos. The land itself had an hourglass shape, and, where it narrowed at the middle, a harbor had formed on each side. One harbor was empty except for a small fishing boat. The other was wide, majestic; eight or nine yachts docked there, all with tall white masts bearing flags. As she watched, a wooden boat glided
in smoothly, like a prop being pulled by invisible strings across a stage. On the radio, the laughter continued.

  The road ended at a lot where only six other cars were parked—most people arrived at Knidos by small boats descended from larger boats. As Yvonne stepped out of the car, she was relieved to feel a light wind quivering through the heat; she was pleased she would be spending the day here rather than in Datça. More than pleased, she was proud of herself for coming here, proud of the road for leading her here. Knidos contained all the beauty of worlds old and new.

  There was the amphitheater, facing the harbor. She had taught Ancient Civilizations for two years, and now she imagined performances and staged battles taking place on the water. She walked past a restaurant—the only building in Knidos—where waiters pushed open large umbrellas, as though offering them to the sun. Above her, among the ruins, she could make out visitors posing for photos. Yvonne made her way to the beach and then she was alone.

  She stretched out her faded towel, its texture rough from having dried on a clothesline. The boats in the harbor were bigger and more beautiful than the ones docked in Datça. Many had two masts and sharp bows, their wood polished and smooth, simultaneously golden and dark. Each bore a different flag: Turkish, Italian, German, French, and one Yvonne couldn’t readily identify—Montenegro?

  The vessels were close enough to shore that she could make out passengers on the decks with their bikinis and magazines and dark tans—nothing like the orange shades of skin in Datça. At the boats’ sterns, fully dressed women were busy setting tables with plates, glasses, and utensils that reflected silver-white light in the sun. It was approaching lunchtime.

  The sea made a sound like breath, inhaling and exhaling steadily. Yvonne stood, removed her sundress, dipped one heel in the water, and then carefully molded her feet over the rocks and the moss until she was waist-deep in the ocean. The temperature was perfect, cool enough to wash away the heat of the day. She dove in with her eyes closed and swam for a few strokes before flipping onto her back and then to her side. The salt content was so high that she felt the ocean was ejecting her, as though she would soon rise above it.