The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover (51 page)

Mary Beth said her father had never mentioned such a man and she was sorry to hear
Dottie so distressed and Dottie told Mary Beth to tell her father that she would never
forgive him. You tell him, Dottie sobbed and stammered. Tell him
never
. Be sure to tell him that. You fucking tell him.

All right, said Mary Beth, her voice infuriatingly neutral. There’s one more thing
you need to do. Call your mother, please.

You call her, said Dottie. Tell her I’m staying here. Tell my parents to go to hell.

Okay, said Mary Beth. Will do.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

She had slammed down the phone and stamped out of the building and found Osman waiting
for her on the marble steps, forlorn and smoking a cigarette with manic puffs, his
face as bloodless as it had been throughout the morning and he would not say what
was troubling him. Perhaps it was only a particularly bad case of
huzun
yet by now she knew she had arrived back into his life as a complication. She took
a ragged deep breath to calm herself before she explained the calamity of her situation
and told him what she wanted to do, although it wasn’t much of a plan, as plans go,
and waited for his reply. Yet her fate was not what she had in mind at the moment—she
only wanted an answer. Osman, seeming to understand the power she had assigned to
him, looked stricken.

I don’t understand what is happening, he said. It’s simple, she told him. I’m choosing
you and I’m choosing Istanbul.

It will be very difficult to do this, he said but his eyes gradually warmed and he
took each of her hands in his and gripped them and that was it—that was their pact.
They would be together, coauthors of a fairy tale about a boy and a girl and a brilliant
place called Istanbul and happiness and love and defiance.

They walked across the campus of the academy and through its gate back into the city,
farther inland up its slopes and into Asia until she began to feel light-headed with
hunger and they bought fish kebobs and bread rings and cherry juice from a kiosk on
the edge of a children’s park and sat on a bench in a grove of pines and ate in silence
while they watched the mothers scamper after their laughing toddlers through the sunny
playground. It would never have been the same anyway, she said as they stood up to
leave and he said, What wouldn’t be the same? I just mean school, she said carefully,
mentioning that the headmistress told her Jacqueline would not be returning from Paris
for her final year, either. But if you don’t go to school, what will you do? Osman
asked and she shrugged and heard herself laugh in a way that was too giddy and unbalanced
and told him she didn’t want to think about that today.

They turned back down toward the center of the old city and its scribble of alleys,
looking for a small hotel or pensione where she could rent a room for a few days but
there were immediate obstacles she had not considered: the nature of her relationship
with this young man by her side, the suspicious absence of luggage, her sudden absolute
fear of exposing the counterfeit passport to Osman. She began to make Osman wait outside
while she inquired at the desk, but her inability to pay in lira or with a card and
the very fact that she was a teenage
yabanci
dressed in a strange manner made even the most open-minded proprietor leery of taking
her in. The streets were filled with women shrouded in black, though, and wearing
the
kara carsaf
seemed like the right tactic in this ongoing game, staying as low as possible under
her father’s radar, and she refused to take it off no matter how much Osman despised
the garment and what it symbolized.

I need to change some money, she told him, and the search for a bank or black-market
hustler took them closer to the train station and its squalid neighborhoods. Osman
objected when she slowed in front of a decrepit hulk of weather-beaten clapboard taking
up most of a block, a shabby Edwardian mansion grafted onto a structure resembling
a warehouse that had been converted, according to a sign above a ridiculously pretentious
entrance with curving balustrades and a grandiose portico, into a nightclub. F. Nightengale’s,
surely a joke on the nurse who became famous in an Uskudar hospital during the Crimean
War. Another, less ostentatious, sign advertised rooms for rent.

Osman said no, this was not a place for reputable women.

She could not tell if he was being prudish or merely condescending. I have to sleep
somewhere, she said, her voice stripping away the frustration she felt because he
had not offered her a room or a couch or anything in his family’s building and, too
proud or just too unwilling to trap him into excuses, she would not stoop to ask to
be taken in, she did not want to become anybody’s responsibility. Here, she said preemptively,
removing a hundred-dollar bill from her purse. Lira, okay? Before he could say anything
else, she moved up the warped steps and disappeared through the establishment’s massive
oak door, its panels graying and blistered with old varnish, her mood lightened by
the stuffy, cigar-smelling, old-fashioned atmospheric campiness of the salon in which
she found herself.

A beautiful Ottoman-era rug covered most of the floor, muffling the tread of her steps.
Period furniture: leather armchairs and divans upholstered in melon-green velvet,
tea tables and ashtray stands, water pipes on brass trays, everything arranged in
cozy groups along walls that had been papered a deeper green with flocked patterning.
An impressive cut-glass chandelier hung from the high tin ceiling, a banistered, foot-worn
stairway ascended to a second story. The mahogany reception desk, a grand survivor
of more opulent times, was unattended, the convenience of a small brass temple bell
left on its countertop. She picked it up and rang for help and waited, admiring the
freakish voluptuousness of a row of framed divas, their photographs hung on the wall
in front of her, a gallery of belly dancers, sinewy feline flesh and man-smothering
tassled tits and prized sequined buttocks and grotesque gobs of circus makeup and
swooping Roman coiffures circa the 1960s.

A woman’s unfriendly voice asked what she wanted and when she turned to answer she
found herself confronted by a big-boned giantess nearly twice her size, thanks in
part to the woman’s outlandish hair, corn-colored with platinum highlights, stacked
and lacquered into a Babylonian ziggurat of seashell whorls towering straight up off
the top of her skull. She wore an equally outlandish caftan, broad-striped purple
and orange, pink ballet slippers on her large feet, her very long fingers ringed with
clusters of jewels, a hardware store of bangles above each knobby wrist, her pouched
dark eyes outlined with flaring tails of kohl and her face, glistening and heart-shaped,
had been denied its natural beauty by an outsized Levantine nose hooked over the hypersensual
protrusion of her lips, camel-like and scowling. She barked at Dottie as if she were
an intruder, her presence an affront to a virtuous person’s sensibilities.

You. What is your business here?

Unlike her mother, Dottie was capable of planting herself, undaunted, in the face
of unexpected hostility. And indeed the woman’s rudeness seemed arrested by what she
saw as she peered more closely at the girl, the severity of her countenance cracking
open with wonder and then tightening with acquisitive interest. I am Zubedye, she
declared without further prejudice, and then the questions flowed in a more amiable
tone.

Are you a religious person? No. Are you lost? No. Dancer? No. My dear, don’t take
offense—are you a prostitute? No, said Dottie, but I need a room where my boyfriend
can visit me.

Ah, I see, said the giantess Zubedye, her rubbery lips stretching into a prurient
smile. And for how long would you like this room?

Dottie took a hundred-dollar bill from her clutch and asked how many days it would
buy and the woman, used to the cowering pliable obsequiousness of girls who came to
her from the poverty of the countryside, eyed her shrewdly and snatched the bill from
her fingers and said five. It was also necessary to show proof of identity to register
lawfully but as Dottie began to hand over her passport she hesitated and sighed. There’s
a small problem, she said. It’s a long story, but my boyfriend doesn’t know my real
name.

The woman reached out and took the passport and opened it. Italian?

Yes.

Carla Costa?

It’s better for me if you call me Dottie.

I will call you Dottie, the woman agreed and then frowned and corrected her. Not a
small problem, she said. You are only sixteen.

Seventeen.

Where are your parents?

Rome. They come here all the time. To work.

And what am I to think about this? You have run away from home?

She almost said if anyone had run away it was her parents but the story she told was
close enough to the truth—she was a student, enrolled in the girl’s academy on the
other side of town, determined to enjoy a week’s liberty with her boyfriend until
the new term began and she was locked up like a nun in the dormitory. Mmmm, purred
Zubedye indulgently. Okay, I understand. You are a very clever girl.

But still there was a problem. The proprietress of F. Nightengale’s enjoyed a good
relationship with the police, a relationship, for obvious reasons, essential to preserve.
Dottie was not of legal age, too young, in fact, to sit in the nightclub and drink
alcohol. My business has many hidden costs, said Zubedye, rubbing the tips of her
fingers together.

Osman inconveniently reappeared, casting a look of extreme disapproval in Dottie’s
direction as he shouldered open the heavy oak door and stopped, gaping at the spectacle
of the flamboyant Zubedye and then moped, a hangdog droop to his face, his authority
somehow unmanned, when both women glanced his way and then quickly ignored him. Without
protesting Zubedye’s extortion, Dottie slipped her passport back inside the clutch
next to all that now remained of the perverted
signori
’s money. There was yet one last problem, the giantess told her. You must remove this
garbage you are wearing. People who come here to my club don’t like to see this on
women. Osman returned to life, agreeing vigorously and self-importantly, his judgment
finally honored. Dottie tried to explain—it wouldn’t do to have a schoolmate or teacher
or a friend of her parents recognize her on the streets—but Zubedye remained adamant.
Okay, I have a solution, she said, now we go upstairs and I will show you your room
and I will introduce you to Dena and Dena will help you. You come, too, she commanded
Osman, who plodded upstairs after the females with glowering reluctance.

Then they were in a nondescript book-lined room with a wardrobe and dressing table,
not much different than her drab dormitory room except for the double bed and the
darkly attractive, wispy-voiced Dena sitting on its edge in jeans and a football jersey,
painting her toenails, her coal-black hair tied back with a white ribbon, sloe-eyed
and sleek and unremittingly cheerful. If she had a tail, Dottie thought, she’d never
stop wagging.

Osman, though, was not the least receptive to Dena’s effusive friendliness. Smirking,
he scanned the titles nearest him and said, Excuse me, picking up a copy of a textbook
on Marxism from a stack on the floor. I am confused—
You
are a prostitute?

Dottie whipped her head around and seethed in English, Why are you being so uptight?

Dena gave him an inquisitive look, not unlike an adoring pet ready to please its master
if it only understood what its master wanted. I am a university student, Dena said
with a flicker of self-consciousness. Second year, okay?

Also a hair cutter, said Zubedye. To pay her education, she added with her jaw thrust
accusingly at Osman, pronouncing each word with an inflection reserved for someone
unusually dense. She snapped her fingers to order Dottie out of her torn black dress
and gathered it into a ball as though it were the hide of some repugnant animal and
stepped back through the door to leave the three of them alone. Dena began spreading
newspaper on the floor and centered her desk chair on the paper and arranged the tools
of her trade on the cosmetic-laden dressing table, talking all the while, playing
an adolescent version of a game called Dreams Come True, a fantasyscape of accumulation—cars,
villas, travel, clothes, shoes, jewelry—Dottie politely approving all the elusive
luxuries that inspired a girl from the slums of Bursa to flee to the metropolis. I
like this very much, chirped Dena, tracing her index finger along the cheap
nazar
bracelet on Dottie’s wrist. Osman gave it to me, said Dottie, and Dena beamed at Osman,
hapless and brooding on the edge of the bed, as though he were the most exemplary
of providers. Dottie dumped herself into the chair on the paper and the banter continued
and finally Osman had had enough of it.

Be serious, he said. What university do you attend? What are you studying? and Dena
responded to his skepticism with answers that required Osman himself to abandon his
ridiculous sense of superiority. The scissors snicked away while Dottie half-listened
to the two of them engage in a spirited discussion about the transformative miracles
of secularism and modernism, not exactly what she was accustomed to hearing from Osman.
On they chattered like flag-waving cousins elected to parliament, Dena deftly lifting
Dottie’s chin as her head nodded forward, woozy with a fatigue that crept up on her
from every direction in her life.

After a while she felt the wetness of the henna dribble down the back of her bared
neck and the exquisite toweling and brushing and then the nuisance of blow-drying
and from far off she heard Dena say, Finished! What do you think? and Osman’s answer,
amazed, It’s like another person—do I know this gorgeous girl? Dena shook her shoulder
gently and she opened her eyes to a hand mirror held in front of her face and saw
Carla incarnate and Dena was asking in an opportunistically timid voice if it was
okay if she kept the hair on the paper. You know, said Dena, to sell. For my education.

Yes, take it, sell it, said Dottie, blocking a sarcastic impulse to say,
for your education.

She stared into the mirror and thought, I am the invention of other people.

They went across the hall to her own room and flopped on the bed and Osman was suddenly
afire with erotic zeal, flinging his hips against hers, madly kissing her face and
kneading her breasts and she wanted to lie in bed with him but not for sex, she did
not want to have to think about sex for a while or feel sexual or let her body be
itself. When he slipped his fingers halfway under the waistband of her jeans she stiffened
and gripped his wrist instinctively and was stunned to feel the insistence of his
hand, pushing down beneath her panties.