The Star of Istanbul

6

This sank the conversation.

Brauer grew even less willing to speak. Cable grew thoughtful. I understood I had to take other measures to learn anything more about these two.

I stubbed my cigarette and excused myself and went out of the Smoking Room at the promenade door.

The night was bright with stars.

I walked forward a ways, in the direction of the entrance door to the stateroom corridor.

I could take the most obvious of the next measures right now. I had a small leather roll of picks, rakes, and miniature torque wrenches and a few weeks of intensive training and rehearsal in their use. I’d pick Brauer’s cabin lock and go in.

But I didn’t know how long the boys would linger in the Smoking Room. They weren’t having a swell experience there so far. I didn’t want Brauer walking in on me. Better to wait till the dinner hour tomorrow so I had a substantial and predictable block of time.

A couple approached, leaning into each other and talking low, and they straightened abruptly as they saw me. I passed. They were, I was willing to bet, a shipboard romance just beginning, from their new ardor risking a public show of their feelings but not wanting anyone to actually notice. A little farther along, the canvas cover of Lifeboat 10 was in place but undone at the prow. I listened as I went by. I could hear rustlings inside. Still another couple. They’d been careful to put the tarp back into place, but of course they couldn’t refasten it from the inside. These two were young. Each of them traveling with parents or siblings, sharing their staterooms, stealing some privacy.

I liked the nascent romances. Liked it professionally. I thought a good activity tonight would be to go to my Corona Portable Number 3—which was a swell companion who never failed to take me by the fingertips and lead me to my newswriter self — and work on the lead paragraphs of my feature story. Young love blooming, ragtime playing, and the swells of London and New York dolling up as we rushed toward the War Zone.

I reached the aft doorway into the A Deck stateroom corridors. I stopped. Before me in the deck wall were the portholes — rectangular, with iron flower filigrees crowning them — proper windows at sea. I counted them along: one for the first small stateroom and then a gap for the vent and for, I suspected, the en suite bathroom, and then the two windows of the suite. Selene’s suite. They were lit. I stepped toward the railing and I could see that the curtains were drawn in both. She was inside. She was awake.

I was grinding a bit now in places on my body I did not want to think about. I’d exchanged words with her. One could even consider that we’d flirted ever so slightly, ever so preliminarily. But what took no consideration at all was that she’d vanished. She’d known where to find me, if she’d been so inclined, but she’d vanished.

I entered at the door and turned down the immediate forward-leading corridor — which, however, led straight past her suite — and I started to stride along, conscious of my first two footfalls, hearing the clear squinch of them on the rubberized floor tiles, wondering if she heard them, and I stopped abruptly, as if to quiet the racket I was making. Not incidentally, however, I was standing now before her door. But I did not knock. I did not make a further sound, except perhaps for a quick intake of air. And perhaps a brief clearing of the throat. Loud enough, I supposed. But I strode on, forgetting to walk softly — I was beyond her suite anyway now — and then I was at the turning of the corridor. I stopped again. Without a plan. Intending — sincerely — simply to take another buck-up-boy big breath or two and then vanish into my stateroom.

And I heard the click of an opening door behind me.

I turned.

Selene was standing just outside her suite, her crimson kimono wrapped around her, her golden dragons plunging down her chest. Her hair was up. Her legs and feet were bare. She saw it was me. She’d suspected it was me. She’d come out because it was me.

I began to walk toward her. She wasn’t moving.

I stopped before her.

I’m stupid about women more often than not, but I’m not stupid. I made sure I was standing very close to her. She hadn’t budged.

Selene Bourgani was looking up into my eyes, saying nothing. She didn’t smell of the forest anymore. She’d found some bed of flowers to lie down in. I didn’t feel like trying to name them. She smelled damp. Freshly damp like she’d just come in out of the rain.

I wasn’t saying anything either.

I stopped trying to read her eyes, which were on me, which was enough.

Then she said, very softly, “Should I assume by your stopping to clear your throat that we’ve emerged from the fog?”

And though she was guying me, these words came out of her as if it was the saddest thing in the world. As if she was playing Juliet, as if she was saying “O happy dagger, this is thy sheath.”

I firmly pushed that thought away, lest the great Isabel Cobb, whose Juliet I saw a hundred times as a boy, should start filling my head with her voice. The curtain has fallen, Mother. Go away.

Selene’s hands rose, but not to me. She undid her hair and it tumbled down before me, and as far as my body was concerned, she might as well have just sloughed off the kimono: to see the long, black, cascaded fullness of her hair was to see her naked.

And still another remarkable thing: her eyes were filling with tears.

I didn’t know if it was stupid or wise, but I had long before come to the conclusion that you did not ask a woman why she was crying. You didn’t stop her from telling you, if she must, but you did not ask.

I did not ask.

But I did care about this. I lifted my hand, though I wasn’t sure what to do with it. Before I could lower my hand again, she took it. And she turned and led me into her suite. I closed the door behind me.

I had sense enough to keep my mouth closed as well.

She led me from the parlor of her suite to her bedroom, ivory walled and roseate furnished, with settee and dressing table on one side of the room and two single beds on the other, placed foot to foot, one of which she set me on as she stepped back and squared around to face me. The electric lamps burning in sconces on the walls were made to look like candles and she left them on for me to see. She sloughed off the kimono and now she truly was naked, tumbled hair and lamp-ambered skin and tear-sparkled eyes and all.

Though in Mexico I’d begun to learn that this was one of my stupidities with a woman, I still tended, in these matters, simply to pound and then to sleep. But Selene Bourgani would not let that happen on this night. Soon after we’d begun, she whispered to me, “Please go gentle, Kit. Go slow. All this will end too soon as it is.”

And I obeyed her. And she would be right.