The Lovers

by Vendela Vida

“Excuse me,” the man said in English. “I thought…”

  “You thought I was someone else,” Yvonne said.

  The man nodded, and as he did so he stared at Yvonne and she saw something peculiar wash over his face. Instead of being disappointed, he looked relieved. His eyes remained squinting—she understood this was their permanent state, which lent him the air of constantly observing something through a microscope—but his hand, still on her shoulder, relaxed.

  “Sorry,” he said, and removed it from her body.

  “It’s okay,” she said.

  “I’m Peter,” he said.

  She nodded. She knew this.

  “And you are?” he asked.

  “Yvonne,” she said. “From New Mexico.”

  He turned then and looked at the Grotta del Buontalenti. “I wish I could step over and go to the second room.”

  “I was planning on coming back at night,” confessed Yvonne.

  “I’ll join you,” he said, surprising them both. “I’m sorry if that was forward. I’ve just traveled from Egypt and I’m a bit…discombobulated.”

  Yvonne bit her lip. She was afraid of saying something too knowing. She made note of the fact that he had not mentioned Alexandria. She would have to make sure not to bring it up herself. They sat down on a bench placed before the Grotta.

  “What were you doing there?” she asked. “In Egypt?”

  “Teaching English,” he said, and smiled with one side of his face. “What have you been doing in Florence?”

  “Learning Italian.”

  They spoke easily, without pause, and she admired him for not looking around, for not telling her he was waiting to meet someone there, at this very spot. If he was discouraged, he didn’t show any sign.

  When three hours, maybe more, had passed, he stood and took her hands, bringing her to her feet. “What do we do now?” he said, though he had brought her so close their lips were almost touching.

  When Yvonne arrived at the main road that would take her to Datça, she pushed down on the accelerator, relieved to be free of turns and hills. But everyone around her was driving well below the speed limit, as though they were lost and looking. Soon she was driving faster than the other cars, which had started pulling off onto the shoulder of the road to let her pass. They honked their horns at her and flashed their lights as though saluting her speed. She felt bold, strong. Colors and shapes splashed against her windshield.

  She rolled down the window to feel the air rushing on her skin, and immediately smelled something bitter and burnt. Tar.

  Yvonne slowed the car enough to see tar had recently been poured on the road. Only now did she remember the tar trucks she had trailed that morning, the ones that had slowed traffic. She pulled to the side and hesitated before stepping out. When she did, she was more shocked than she expected to be. The white car was now a brown so deep it was almost black, purplish in the sun. She put her finger to the hood. The tar was thick, the top layer still malleable, while the bottom layers appeared to have already dried.

  Now her mind was full again, this time with practical questions: How would she remove the tar? How much would it cost? How would she get the tar off her finger? How could she be such an idiot?

  Yvonne drove back to the house slowly, which was unnecessary when she thought about it; the damage was done. But she didn’t want to face the blinks of headlights or the honks of horns now that she knew what they were really saying: Lady, are you insane?

  She pulled the car up to the front of the house. Leaving the motor running, she stepped out to the garage. She tried to lift the garage door by its silver handle. It wouldn’t budge. She tried inserting each of the keys on her ring into the lock. Nothing fit. She would have to park the ruined car on the street until she figured out what to do.

  The maid and her family had left—a relief. She didn’t want the woman to see the car and attempt to clean it. Yvonne wandered through the rooms—the clean floors had been mopped, the clean dishes washed. Upstairs, new sheets had been put on the master bed; the pillowcases, propped against the headboard, were blue with yellow birds. The maid had no reason to think Yvonne wouldn’t sleep in this room. The sheets on the twin bed where she had slept had not been changed.

  Yvonne washed her hands, and then opened the laptop Matthew and Callie had given her. Since arriving in Turkey she had resisted checking her e-mail; she was trying to avoid any news from Aurelia. At any given time Aurelia was bound to have been insulted on the street or fired from a job, or be suffering from an incurable earache, migraine, eye inflammation, or food poisoning.

  The wireless signal was strong—Yvonne now remembered “Internet” had been listed as one of the features of the rental—and she did a search for tar and car. A children’s rhyme, she thought. A child’s mistake. There were a number of solutions, the first involving applying peanut butter to the car and waiting twenty-four hours to remove it. If that didn’t work, WD-40 was recommended, though with it came the risk of damaging the paint.

  It was too far to walk to the supermarket, so Yvonne reluctantly drove. Fearful of making eye contact with anyone, she kept her gaze on the road in front of her. Ridiculous, she told herself. No one here knows who I am. I am anonymous. But then she corrected herself: no one is anonymous when they’re driving a car coated in tar.

  She sank lower in the driver’s seat. She was reminded of Matthew before the age of six, when Yvonne and Peter would find him under coffee tables and picnic benches, picking his nose or pulling down his underwear. “God can’t see me here,” he would say. That was shortly before they stopped going to church.

  At the supermarket, Yvonne searched for peanut butter but didn’t find any. No one in Turkey ate peanut butter, it appeared. She looked for WD-40, and when she couldn’t find it she selected what looked to be its closest equivalent, something called Power Creme. Buckets and rags were easy to locate, as were plain paper towels. One multipack came, inexplicably, with a small stuffed white elephant. She settled on this package even though it contained twelve rolls, more than she would ever need; she could give the elephant to the boy in Knidos.

  After parking in front of the house, she reassessed the damage she had done. Now that she had a potential plan for correcting her mistake, she could face the car without averting her eyes. It looked as though it had been dipped into a vat of chocolate. She lifted her plastic bags from the passenger seat, and the weight of her cleaning supplies stretched the handles uncomfortably over the tender skin of her palms.

  Yvonne almost never drank alone, but now as she entered the Datça house, she spotted the wine bottle on the kitchen counter and searched for a wine opener. There were three in a utensils drawer. The cork released itself from the bottle with the sound of a theatrical kiss.

  The sound of a liberated cork had disturbed Yvonne ever since the night she and Peter had returned from driving Aurelia to the first of many rehab centers. (As Aurelia’s dependency became more dire, they began taking her by plane to centers in Minnesota, then Arizona—as though the greater the distance they traveled, the more likely her recovery would be.) As soon as they walked in the door after the drive, Peter walked straight to the kitchen and opened a bottle of wine.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  Peter took a sip before responding. “I need a drink,” he said.

  “I don’t know if we should be doing this,” said Yvonne.

  “She’s the one with the problem. You and I, we’ve never had anything.”

  “But out of respect…”

  “Out of respect!” Peter stammered. For a moment his face looked as if it might break into laughter, before it transformed itself into an expression of anguish. “If she had any respect for this family, she wouldn’t have brought us to this point. Respect! She doesn’t care about anything!”

  “Don’t yell at me,” Yvonne said.

  “I’m sorry,” Peter said. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s not that she doesn’t care about anything,”
Yvonne said. “She cares about everything. Any comment that’s made to her, she holds onto it like it’s been knitted to her skin. She’s just trying to dull the pain of feeling everything.”

  “Well, at least she’s passionate about something,” Peter said. He hissed the word.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You’re the one who said you didn’t care if the kids played sports or piano or…planted gardens, as long as they were passionate.”

  “I still believe that,” Yvonne said.

  “Well, now look what your daughter’s passionate about.”

  “Are you saying the self-medicating is my fault? That her addiction is…please tell me what you’re saying.”

  They’d had versions of this conversation before, and this time Peter wasn’t listening. “Poor Matthew,” he said.

  “Poor Matthew? Poor Aurelia,” Yvonne said. “It isn’t easy for her to be his sister. It would be hard for anyone.”

  She wanted to add, Though I know it’s easy for you to be his father, but she didn’t. This wasn’t the time for that, though she resented the pride Peter took in Matthew, the way he put his arm around him after a lacrosse game as they walked to the car, as if to say to everyone, That’s right. This star is mine. The way Peter spoke too loudly when in his presence, so that every one around them—at a street fair, a pool, an airport—would know they were together, a unit. But when Peter was with Aurelia, his voice often dropped to a whisper. “What?” Aurelia would yell. She knew. She always knew. “I can’t hear you.”

  Matthew was never unkind to Aurelia, which in some ways, Yvonne believed, further infuriated his sister. Aurelia wanted him to be unfair to her so she could tell on him. She wanted him to exclude her from his parties, his lunch table, so she could hate him. But he did none of these things. As their mother, Yvonne was alone in seeing the truth: that in his own way, Matthew was terrified of his sister. He treated her like she was already gone. He spoke of her with deference and empathy, as one speaks of the dead.

  Yvonne stood at the kitchen counter in the rented house in Datça, swallowing large gulps of Mr. Çelik’s wine. It was viscous, simultaneously sour and sweet, like cherry juice. Her thighs were suddenly sore, trembling. Her body was tired from the swim, the sun, the drive; her physical fatigue yet another reminder that she was no longer young. She filled her glass again.

  The doorbell rang. A neighbor, Yvonne thought, coming to complain about the eyesore parked outside. Her head was light and she walked with small steps to the door. Özlem. Yvonne was so relieved to see Özlem that she fell into her arms.

  “What happened?” Özlem said. “Tell me.” There was urgency in her voice, as though Yvonne had just been robbed and there was still a chance of catching the thief.

  Yvonne couldn’t speak. When she released herself from the embrace, she saw Özlem’s dress was damp on the shoulder where Yvonne had rested her cheek. She lifted her fingers to her own face, and only then did she know she had been crying.

  “Did you see the car outside?”

  Özlem shook her head. “Did you have an accident?”

  Yvonne shook her head too. “I just…I’m sorry.”

  Özlem went to the window and looked outside. “I see. Should we clean the car?”

  Yvonne was grateful she was taking the initiative, that she was using the word we. She followed Özlem into the kitchen. She had to remind herself that this was not Özlem’s kitchen, but that of her husband’s lover. Özlem removed a roll of paper towels, frowned, and then pursed her lips as though looking for something else.

  “I’ll bring this out,” Yvonne said, reaching for the Power Creme. Özlem raised her eyebrows into a quizzical expression.

  “From the Internet,” Yvonne explained. “They recommended this.”

  The two women walked outside together in silence. There was only the slapping of Özlem’s sandals on the steps.

  “It’s okay. We’ll fix this,” said Özlem.

  Yvonne opened the Power Creme. The scent was strong and stung her eyes.

  Özlem was wearing a brown-and-white checkered shift dress that reached mid-thigh. When she lifted her arms up, the dress followed, just barely covering the edge of her underwear. And yet she set to work right away, her thin arms working the towels over the car. She let out a few small and primal grunts, the kind a tennis player might make when returning a serve.

  Yvonne scrubbed one side of the car and Özlem the other. The Power Creme appeared to be working. Each time they were finished with a paper towel, they tossed the loose sticky ball of it into a pile on the side of the road. It was Özlem who thought to go inside and get garbage bags. Yvonne watched her as she returned down the steps. She didn’t sprint carelessly the way Yvonne would have done at her age, but instead walked almost at a diagonal down the stairs, with poise, as though she were competing in the swimsuit portion of a beauty contest. They went back to scrubbing the car.

  “I’m feeling this in my arms,” Yvonne said. “What about you?”

  “I like being sore,” said Özlem. “It makes me feel like I’ve done something.”

  Yvonne wondered how Özlem passed her days. “I can’t thank you enough for helping me,” she said. “You really didn’t need to.”

  “It’s not a problem,” said Özlem, stopping to wipe her brow with the back of her forearm.

  “Almost done,” Yvonne said as they carried the trash down the road to the large garbage bins. A striped cat was perched on the edge of one, peering inside. Together they stood, assessing their work from afar.

  “Perfect,” Özlem said.

  Yvonne laughed. It was far from perfect.

  “Should we celebrate?” Özlem said.

  “What, finishing the car?”

  “No, life!” Özlem said this with such strained enthusiasm that it was clear she too was going through a difficult time.

  Inside the house, Yvonne carried a glass of wine out to Özlem. She was sitting on the couch, and Yvonne felt ashamed that she had not yet moved the naked picture of Ali’s lover from underneath.

  “I brought you something,” Özlem said as she rummaged through her bag.

  “Thank you.”

  “You don’t know what it is yet.” Özlem handed a book to Yvonne. “It’s for writing down everything you want to remember. The people from Dove gave me a few. I don’t want you to think I’m pretending I bought it.”

  “Thank you,” Yvonne said, holding it in her hands. The book had a mirror on its cover. “It’s still a lovely thought, whether you bought it or not.”

  They sat in silence for a moment.

  “Can I ask you something?” said Yvonne.

  “Yes.”

  “About the car…I can’t expect you to keep secrets from your husband, but would you consider not telling him?”

  Özlem laughed. Someone must have told her she had a nice laugh because she seemed to know it. Her laugh lasted for a few seconds longer than it needed to.

  “My husband doesn’t own the car. I think maybe he just asked someone he knew who rents cars. Why would I tell him? Besides, I have better secrets to keep from him.”

  “What do you mean?” Yvonne said.

  Özlem was making it clear she was going to take her time with this one. Even the air between them seemed to be dented, waiting to be straightened again.

  At last Özlem spoke. “I found out today. I’m pregnant.”

  Yvonne searched Özlem’s face for a sign of how she felt about this. Yvonne wasn’t sure how she felt about this. “Congratulations!” she said.

  Özlem nodded.

  “I met a man in Istanbul. And it could belong to him. I do not know.”

  Yvonne tried not to let her mouth drop. “Does Ali know about the man in Istanbul?”

  “No,” said Özlem, and then said it again. She pushed the glass of wine away from her. “I don’t know what I’m going to do. What do you think?”

  “I think you have to tell the truth,” said Yvonne. �
��I think sooner or later you have to.”

  “But maybe he won’t find out it’s not his.”

  “Well, would you tell him it’s his when it’s not?” Yvonne said.

  “If I tell him the truth, Ali will leave me,” Özlem said, as though it had just occurred to her.

  “Didn’t you already leave him?” Yvonne said, suddenly lost. She was easily exhausted by the romantic dramas of the young.

  “You probably never kept secrets from your husband,” said Özlem.

  “That’s not true,” Yvonne said, and paused.

  Özlem looked at her expectantly. “Tell me.”

  This was Yvonne’s chance to tell a story to someone who hadn’t known Peter. She thought of what example to give, of where to start. There was a period when they began hiding things from each other, when the twins were sixteen.

  “You really want to hear about my marriage right now?”

  Özlem nodded convincingly.

  “It was maybe eight years ago,” Yvonne said before she knew which story she was going to tell. “I was taking my students to D.C. on a field trip. An educational trip to Washington, D.C. Where the White House is?”

  Özlem closed her eyes as though to show she knew this, of course she did, and that she would let the offense pass if Yvonne continued quickly.

  “There are a lot of museums there and I was taking my advanced students—I teach history. There was another teacher at our high school at the time who was teaching a similar class, and he was co-chaperoning the trip, making sure the boys didn’t get into trouble. His name was Joseph. A couple times, Peter suggested Joseph had a crush on me. I always brushed it off, told him he was crazy, but mostly because I knew he was right. I could feel Joseph stare at me for too long, and once, before we were supposed to meet for coffee to discuss the syllabus, I saw him combing his hair in front of the side mirror of his car.”

  “Did you like him?” Özlem said.

  “He was charming. He was from New Zealand and had a lovely accent. He made me feel that whatever I said was very, very important.”

  “And you were on a trip together?”

  “Well, it was us and twenty-two students,” said Yvonne. “But that night, at four in the morning, the phone rang in my hotel. At first I thought it was an emergency, that one of the students was in trouble. But when I picked up the phone there was no one there. Just a click as the caller hung up. I couldn’t go back to sleep after that.”