The Star of Istanbul

4

She did look at me across the captain’s table. Most notably in the wine-sipping interval between the snipe en cocotte and the quarters of lamb. We sat directly beneath the apex of the dining room dome at a table for ten, a rectangle with four chairs on each long side and the ends curved for two more places, one of which held Captain Turner himself, a small, sailor-muscled man whose very few words were accented straight from the Liverpool docks. She’d been placed by the dining room steward next to a silly ass of a playboy millionaire, Alfred Vanderbilt, primary inheritor of the Cornelius Vanderbilt steamships-and-railroads millions, infamous, a few years back, for having to settle $10 million on a Cuban diplomat for having jazzed his wife, who subsequently divorced the Cuban and then killed herself, alone, in a London hotel. When Selene shot me the look, he was bending to her, whispering something.

The look on her face was too complex for me to understand. It was not What an ass, rescue me from his company. But neither was it I’m being charmed here by this guy, who’s in my league and you’re not, so stop looking at me like that. I felt it wasn’t about Vanderbilt at all, really. There was a stark resignedness in her look. A look of I’d lift my hand to you, reach across to you, but there’s no use. She looked at me the way she would if she’d fallen off the ship and was about to sink and she knew I could not save her.

All of this lasted only a few moments. She turned her face to Vanderbilt and instantly she portrayed a laugh, a laugh as false and oversized as any she had ever executed before the cranking of a movie camera.

“You’re a writer I should know,” a man’s voice said from my left.

I was ready to look away from Selene, and beside me was Elbert Hubbard, an eccentric jack-of-all-trades American writer with a pageboy haircut who’d sold forty million copies of a pamphlet brazenly exploiting the story of one of the few American war heroes from McKinley’s Cuban affair. So Hubbard could do what? Attack the lack of initiative in office clerks and secretaries and other hirelings in American business.

He knew me, knew my work, was heading to Europe to report on the “mastoid degenerate” Kaiser Wilhelm and his war. As Hubbard talked, I nodded and portrayed attention as falsely as a movie actress, and I prodded my mind to go where it should have been all along: to a table I could not see from across the dining room, to Walter Brauer. The Germans surely did not book him in first class out of a sense of his or any of their agents’ high standing in the world. He had business here. Something to do en route. Something that was naturally located in first class.

“Don’t you think?” Hubbard said, as if he’d already asked something and I’d ignored him. Which no doubt he just had.

“I rely on your judgment,” I said, a line I always found useful in getting phony intellectuals to say quotable things.

He was satisfied and talked on.

The orchestra above us was playing a ragtime piece. I hoped I had not just agreed that the music was degenerate.

Hubbard’s pageboy bangs were degenerate.

I also hoped he hadn’t asked if I liked his bangs.

I needed to get away. I wanted to observe Brauer at his table, even if it was in passing. Was he dining near someone intentionally? Was he engaged in conversation?

Selene Bourgani was engaged in conversation. Vanderbilt’s voice smarmed on in the background. Something, at the moment, about his ninety-horsepower Fiat, how he would drive it to London for a board meeting of the International Horse Show Association.

I leaned toward Hubbard slightly, interrupted him. “Sorry,” I said. “I have to visit the washroom.”

Hubbard nodded, but his “Of course” was snipped with disappointment. His wife was on his other side and I was a new ear for his socialist-utopian ideas.

I rose, ready to quietly excuse myself to anyone at the table who looked at me. I scanned the faces, passing quickly over Selene and Vanderbilt. Her head was angled toward Vanderbilt’s nearby moving lips, her eyes cast into the flower arrangement. The captain lifted his indifferent gaze to me.

“Excuse me, Captain,” I said, though as softly as I could and still have him hear me. “I’ll be right back.”

He nodded.

I began to turn away, but I did glance at Selene once more. Vanderbilt’s face was still drawn near hers; he was speaking of a prize high stepper. But she’d lifted her face and was looking at me with that opaque complexity I’d seen earlier.

I nodded.

She nodded in return, I thought, but if I was right, it was the merest possible nod, as if she did not want Vanderbilt to notice.

I moved away toward the portside forward door.

I soon saw Brauer. He sat at a round, corner table, facing in my direction, but he did not see me as I slowed to pass. He was turned and was speaking to the man sitting next to him: a thin-faced, clean-shaven man with a tall, brown but lightly graying, Brilliantined pompadour, nodding at Brauer’s words.

I looked away and kept moving. The steward was standing nearby, monitoring three members of the waitstaff who were simultaneously launching themselves from the sideboard with wine bottles for refills.

“Pardon me,” I said.

“Yes sir?” he said.

“I have a terrible memory for names, and I want to avoid a social offense. Please remind me of the name of the thin-faced man with the large hair in the corner.”

I nodded with careful precision toward the man next to Brauer, and the steward followed my gesture.

He pulled some papers from his inner pocket. “I’m still memorizing names myself,” he said. “Let me look, Mr. Cobb.”

He’d already memorized mine.

He looked at the table charts. “Ah, yes,” he said, pitching his voice low. “That’s Mr. Edward Cable.”

“Cable,” I said. “Of course. I met him in passing but he wanted to speak later. Do you know anything else about him?”

“He’s from Boston, Massachusetts. A prominent dealer in rare books.”

I began to pat the pockets of my tux. “I need to find that paper I made notes on,” I said. “He’s on A Deck, I think.”

The steward looked at his notes. “B Deck,” he said, though discreetly not speaking the number of his stateroom.

But he was accommodating. Like any reporter worth his salt, I would keep pumping till the source dried up. “And the name of the dark-haired man sitting to his left?” I asked.

The steward looked again at his chart. “That’s Mr. Walter Brauer of London. An academic, is what I understand.”

“Anything else about either of them?”

“No, sir.”

“Thanks,” I said and I discreetly pulled a half-dollar coin from my pocket and slipped it into his hand.

“Thank you, sir,” he said.

I looked back to the round table in the corner.

Brauer was the one listening now. Everyone else at the table was absorbed in other conversations, and these two men were posed in a tableau vivant entitled “Private Conversation Conducted in Public.” Both of them had leaned their torsos toward each other, Brauer angling his head still farther in the direction of the other man and casting his face downward, staring at the tabletop as if he were examining a rare book, with Cable likewise moving his head closer to his dinner companion’s but focusing on Brauer’s ear, putting words there.

The words flowed on and the two faces did not show any emotion during them. Cable stopped speaking and Brauer nodded and the two men straightened. This was not an off-color joke, gleaned from a rare book. Not a critical comment from one man of the mind to another about the vapid conversation going on across the table. This was just about them, and it was serious business.

I pushed through the dining room doors, across the deck’s entrance hall with its twin elevators, and down the portside corridor a few paces to the gentlemen’s room. I stepped in. I washed my hands at the marble basin. Going through the motions of what I’d publicly said I’d do. And I stood there with my hands dripping for a moment, thinking on the rare book dealer and the lecturer at King’s College, how I might befriend them. If Edward Cable was why Brauer was traveling first class on this ship, the loop was closed now, and my getting nearer to them would be difficult.

I dried my hands on one of the stacked hand towels and dropped it into the wicker basket. I stepped from the washroom and strode off down the corridor.

I smelled her perfume even before I saw her. Nothing of flowers. This was the smell of the green things in the world, the unadorned things of a field, of a forest, hay newly mown, and beneath this smell a musky scent, but something faintly sweet as well, lavender perhaps. And in its complex fullness, this was a familiar smell, as a matter of fact, though I did not pause to identify it. I emerged from the corridor and there stood Selene, not moving anywhere, not addressing herself to the elevators, just standing there.

I stopped.

Why had I not smelled this scent upon her earlier? Had she just now refreshed it while waiting for me?

She did look toward me without surprise. But also as if without recognition. Perhaps I’d misread the earlier look, at the dinner table, perhaps I’d imagined a complex yearning there that did not exist. At the beginning of the meal, after our Liverpudlian captain had rung three bells lightly on his wineglass with his salad fork and after most of the table offered him a charmed laugh in return — swells only too happy to embrace the social crudities of a man with power, particularly power over their mortal well-being in the middle of the ocean — he made a cursory introduction of each of us. When he spoke my name and my occupational justification for being at the table, I glanced at Selene and her look was the one I was confronting now: I can see that some person or other is present here before me.

So just outside the first-class dining room, Selene Bourgani and I stood alone, looking at each other, and as the moment stretched on and she did not resort to social boilerplate, nor did I, as we did not speak at all but neither did we turn away, the uninflected silence between us began to seem like actual, engaged communication.

But then she said, “I believe the washrooms are in this direction.”

Was I wrong about the initial silence? Or was it true and she had not fully realized what was happening? Or had she realized but not trusted that I was feeling the same way and it was up to me to open all this between us?

I’m not the sort of man who could answer such a thing. It was odd enough, under the circumstances, that I was even able to use the part of my brain that could rationally assess her outward signs and could pose these questions. This was my reporter’s brain, my reporter’s self. I was good at that, but I was very bad at that when I was simply being a man with a woman. A woman who knew something I wanted to know about a story: that was one thing. But not when a woman held some secret upon her body I could read only with mine, a secret I would never tell. In those circumstances, I tended to act first and assess later, if at all.

But Selene had me trying to figure her out. Had me thinking too much.

All right. It was up to me.

I said, “I had to get away from that table for a few minutes.”

“What are washrooms for?” she said.

I was ready to think she was here because she wanted us to meet alone. In this last exchange we had both crept closer to each other, close enough to comfortably speak on. Would we banter now? Was that how it was done in her circle? It felt as if we’d begun, but I was hearing something in her voice: the words slid downward at the end of her question. They should have been light; they should have risen up, as if to say: Here I am; we know how this game is played. But I heard something else in them, that faintly sad resignedness I’d seen in her eyes at the table: This is how it’s done, but it’s not going to work.

I did not know what to do. So we looked at each other awhile longer. Then she took a step in my direction and said, “Mr. Cobb, isn’t it?”

“Christopher,” I said.

“Do your friends call you Kit?”

She was the only woman I’d ever met who assumed that.

“My middle name is Marlowe,” I said.

She laughed.

“Christopher Marlowe Cobb. Kit then,” she said. “May I?”

“Of course,” I said.

“You’re a famous war correspondent, as I understand it.”

“You’re a famous film actress,” I said, “as I’ve learned firsthand.”

“An actress,” she said, softly.

And my mother swirled into my head, draped in ivory himation and chiton but with long black sleeves, playing Medea, perhaps as I first saw her on stage as a child.

I hesitated even to introduce the thought of her to the woman standing before me. But Selene Bourgani was a widely celebrated woman. Though for some reason — perhaps that very celebrity — Selene was making me think like a reporter, what I really wanted to do was put my hands upon her. And so a famous mother could be helpful, given Selene’s apparent obliviousness to my own wide demi-celebrity among Chicago cabdrivers and shoe shine boys and shop owners and ballplayers and bowlered-and-bespoken politicians and their equivalents in a hundred syndicated cities, all of whom knew my name pretty well. Maybe film stars didn’t read the papers, at least not past the gossip columns.

So I said, “My mother was an actress.”

“And Kit Marlowe was her favorite playwright.”

“Close to. She was kind enough not to name me William Shakespeare Cobb.”

Selene nodded at this, but distractedly, since her brow had furrowed ever so slightly a moment earlier as she began to put my surname with the possibilities; not that my name would necessarily be part of my mother’s stage name, though it happened to be. Selene’s brow unfurrowed and she narrowed her eyes at me and I knew what she was about to ask.

“Yes,” I said. “Her.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“Isabel Cobb?”

“I am her son.”

It was the right thing to tell her, as it turned out.

Selene thumped the back of her right wrist against her forehead and swayed to the side. She provided her own title card: “She swoons,” she said.

But instantly she straightened and reached out and touched my forearm. “How foolish of me,” she said. “To do a cheap, film-actress emotion at that news. I loved your mother. I wanted to be your mother when I was a girl.”

That came out wrong and instantly she heard it. She straightened abruptly as if she’d been startled by an unknown sound.

“Those aren’t the feelings I hoped to inspire,” I said.

I expected another film-actress gesture. Wide-eyed abashed, perhaps, or flutteringly flirtatious. But a dark something passed over her, leaving her face as I’d seen it across the table: subtle outwardly; unreadable without knowing the full context of her present life; perhaps numbingly bored, perhaps inexpressibly sad.

Her hand was still on my forearm. She removed it.

She seemed as if she wanted to say something from that darkness. I felt I’d done the wrong thing to try to sneak in a reference to possible feelings between us. It had only made her take her hand from me, after all.

But instead, she managed a smile. I felt her exertion. She said, “Your mother is a very great actress. I wish I’d been able to do what she has done.”

“Your films. .”

She cut me off, which was just as well, as I’d plunged into a comment I did not know how to complete; I had no idea how to intelligently compliment her on her films.

She said, “My films are melodrama at best. And there’s always the terrible silence. Not that I ever came close to doing what she did, in the time I spent striving for the stage, even with Shakespeare’s words in my mouth.”

“Many people love you,” I said.

She ignored the comment. “All I have is my life,” she said.

By which she seemed to suggest that making films was not part of her life. I thought to ask her if that’s what she meant, but I did not. It would sound as if I disagreed. I didn’t want to disagree with her about anything at the moment.

“The lamb,” she said.

I didn’t understand at first. Things had suddenly gotten serious enough that my first thought was that she was segueing into speaking of religion.

But it was simply dinner.

“They’re surely serving it by now,” she said.

“Ah, the lamb,” I said. “Yes.”

“Can you give me a moment?” she said.

I didn’t understand.

“I am always subject to instant and widespread gossip,” she said.

This seemed at first like a non sequitur. My puzzlement must have shown on my face.

“If we walk back into the dining room together,” she said. And she waited to see if she needed to explain further.

She did not.

“I understand,” I said.

She nodded faintly.

I finished her sentence: “They might think you’re my mother.”

She laughed at this. A low, sharp bark of a laugh, a laugh I was sure she never unleashed in public. It felt like a sudden kiss.

And she reached out and touched my forearm once more, and then she was gone.