The Star of Istanbul

7

But for now, after we’d finished, we did not sleep but held each other close on one of the narrow beds, entwined like the two snakes on Hermes’ staff. We’d been silent for a long while, so I said, “We’re like the two snakes on Hermes’ staff.” She was Greek, after all. I was trying not to doze off.

We were both lying mostly on our sides, facing each other; her cheek was against my chest; my throat was laid on the curve of her head. She moved her head when I said this, tilting her face upward, and though I could not see her eyes, I sensed she was looking up at me. “Of course,” she said. “He was the god of travelers and liars.”

I’d bantered with smart women. I grew up the son of a very smart woman who bantered to beat the band. When a smart woman banters, she means at least half of everything she says. At least. My mother schooled me herself as we steamer-trunked from city to city, theater to theater, schooled me by giving me, through all my learning years, a good three thousand books to read and then asking me, all totaled, a good hundred thousand questions about them. I dared not forget a thing. And from what I remembered of the Greek deities, this was a very selective list of Hermes’ godly patronage, so I figured Selene thought I was a liar. Or she knew she was. Not that we’d had much of a chance to lie to each other yet.

“God of poets too,” I said.

“Are you a poet, Kit Cobb?”

“Nah,” I said. “But if they’d been around at the time, he’d’ve been the god of newspaper writers as well.”

“To fit with the liars?” She lifted her face from my chest. I pulled my head back and looked her in the eyes. The electrical filaments of those phony candles were still burning in the room. I was glad. I liked looking at her face, even if she was ragging me. “He was the messenger of the gods,” I said. “I’m just a messenger, bringing the news.”

She put her head back onto my chest.

“Are you a liar, Selene?”

“Of course,” she said. “I’m an actress.”

I didn’t have an answer for that. We were quiet for a few moments.

Then she said, “I’m sorry.”

“Because you’re an actress?”

“Because I’m a liar.”

There was a little catch in her. “I’m sorry,” she said.

This was about something else.

“That you’re an actress?”

“Yes. But your mother. .”

“It’s all right.”

“I didn’t mean to say. .”

“That she’s a liar too.”

“But we do that.”

Her head felt heavier on my chest, as if she were pressing in, burrowing, hiding. She grew still. I should’ve qualified calling my mother a liar. But I felt Selene struggling with something. I kept quiet.

She said, “An actress is trained to be anyone, to do anything.” She paused and then, very low, Selene said, “An actress is a fallen woman.”

Somewhere outside, distantly on the promenade, in the dark, a woman laughed. Perhaps the lovers from the lifeboat, emerging.

I thought of the newspaper stories of Selene’s life, the few things known about her past. She was Greek, the firstborn of a fisherman and his wife on the island of Andros. Shortly before she was born, her father drowned in a storm in the Cavo d’Oro channel. A week later her mother gave birth, and after swaddling her daughter in a basket and placing her on the doorstep of the local monastery, she threw herself off the lighthouse.

From then until she showed up on the doorstep of the Vitagraph Studios in Brooklyn in 1908, things were mysterious in the biography of Selene Bourgani, yielding to reporters, upon questioning, only her classic profile and her most famous quote, “What little I remembered, I have now forgotten.” She could indeed have become, in those lost years, a spectacularly fallen woman. Or, more likely, a Greek immigrant girl waiting tables in a Hoboken diner with a boyfriend at the coffee factory. As it was, she was billed by Vitagraph as the Most Mysterious Woman in the World. Of course she was a liar.

She shifted now against me, moved her hand along my side and then onto my back, pressed me closer to her.

“Were you really born on Andros?” I said.

This was the wrong thing to ask. I was continuing to learn. It did not occur to me till that moment: if a woman tells you she is a liar, it doesn’t mean she’s suddenly interested in telling the truth.

Selene untangled herself from me. Not angrily. Almost wearily. As if the night had ended and she was sorry for that but it was over.

However, she simply sat up and leaned back against the wall. I was happy to find she was disengaging no further. And I was happy to be looking at her naked, ambered breasts tipped in coffee brown, a part of her I had so far failed to concentrate on as I’d intended.

“You’ve been reading the movie magazines,” she said.

“Newspapers,” I said.

“All lies.” She turned her face to me.

I didn’t answer.

“Willful,” she added.

“The only kind you can trust,” I said.

“Can you get me a cigarette and my wrap?”

“I’m happy to smoke with you, but can’t I look at you a little longer?”

“I’m cold,” she said.

“All this will end too soon as it is,” I said.

She smiled. “Okay. The cigarette will do.”

I moved to the other bed where she and I had thrown the pieces of my tux. I found my cigarettes and matches in my coat and turned back to her. I was also still naked and she was looking at me openly. Was this a pleasure for her — I’d never really considered the possibility of this impulse in a woman — or was she just instructing me some more? I took a step toward our bed and the kimono was lying crumpled on the floor. I bent to it, picked it up, straightened. I was facing her and feeling pretty uncomfortable now, to be dangling nakedly before her watchful eye, which is what I figured she intended.

She did not take her eyes off the center of me. And she whispered, “I said the cigarette will do,” but in the actress way that filled the room, that would reach the back of the mezzanine. In the way that sounded as if she were lying. I was sorry we’d talked about lies.

But I dropped the kimono at my feet and stepped naked to her and I offered a cigarette, and she lifted her gaze from my body to my eyes, and she took a cigarette and put it between her lips, and I bent to her and I lit it and she sucked deeply on it, keeping her eyes fixed on mine, and then she turned her profile to me as if I’d just asked about the secrets of her life, and she blew a long, thin slip of smoke into the room.

I sat down beside her, putting my back to the wall as well. I lit a cigarette, and we smoked for a few moments, and then she said, “Have you ever killed a man?”

I’d been around a lot of killing in my professional life. And in Mexico last year it had finally become necessary that I do some myself. I’d not been asked this question before, and I found the simple, true answer difficult to speak. It had been necessary. I had done it without pleasure. But I had done it. More than once. My hesitation now was that killing a man was a private act. Even if it was done publicly. It was between him and me. But I would not lie. And to stay silent, as I was now doing, was also an answer, except it implied things about the doing of it and the having done it that were not true.

“Yes,” I said.

Selene took a drag on her cigarette. She held the smoke inside her for a long moment. Then she exhaled slowly, filling the air directly before her. “Why?” she said.

I was not getting into this. “It had to be done,” I said, hoping this would be sufficient for her.

It seemed to be. She nodded. She said nothing more.

We sat side by side in silence for a long moment, and I realized she was trembling slightly.

I touched her quaking arm. “You’re cold.”

“I believe I mentioned that before,” she said.

“Sorry,” I said, and I instantly got up from the bed and picked up her kimono and turned back to her.

She’d risen to her knees, and she took the wrap from me, the cigarette dangling at the corner of her mouth like she was a Chicago street thug. “You stopped looking anyway,” she said.

I was surprised to realize that she was right. I didn’t know how to explain that. It was the pound-and-sleep in me, I supposed. I didn’t know how to explain that either. So I said nothing.

She pulled her kimono around her tightly, her hands crossed on her chest.

I went to the other bed and put on my pants and shirt.

When I returned to her, she was still holding her wrap against her. She did not look up. I understood I was supposed to go.

I picked up the rest of my clothes and threw them over my arm.

I stopped before her one last time.

She lifted her face to me. The tears had returned to her eyes. But she said, “It’s all right. Thank you for tonight.”

I nodded and I left her there on the bed, where she held herself close and said nothing — but at least was not lying — where she was perhaps trying to forget whatever it was that she remembered.

And as I stepped into the empty corridor and closed Selene Bourgani’s door, I could not help but wonder who she might be thinking of killing.