For a year I never knew his name. I want you to understand that this was the best part.
The 7:40 from Kadıköy to Karaköy takes twenty minutes if the sea is kind. I sat on the upper deck, outside, left side, third bench from the back, because from there you see the old city come up out of the mist like something being remembered. He sat on the same bench. Always the right end. I was the left. Between us, a space exactly the width of a folded newspaper.
He wore a wedding ring. So did I.
The tea boy came round with his tray of tulip glasses and we each bought one, every day, and he paid for mine once in March when I had no change, and after that we took turns without discussing it. That was our whole relationship for months: whose turn it was. The steam off two glasses. His knee in grey wool, my knee in black tights, a newspaper’s width apart.
* * *
You can learn a body without touching it. I learned that on the 7:40.
I knew he cut himself shaving on Mondays because he was tired from the weekend. I knew the shape of his wrist when he lifted the glass, the dark hair on the back of his hand, the vein that stood up when he was cold. I knew he smelled of lemon cologne and, under it, warm, like a bed just left. I knew that when the boat rocked hard past Haydarpaşa, his thigh tightened and he braced one shoe against the bench leg, and every time it happened I felt it in my own stomach, low, like a missed step.
I thought about that thigh at night. I’m not going to pretend I didn’t. I lay next to my husband, who is a decent man and snores like a ferry horn, and I thought about grey wool and the warmth that must be under it, and I put my own hand flat on my stomach under the sheet and held it there and didn’t sleep.
* * *
In November there was a storm. The ferry pitched so hard that everyone went inside except us. Spray came over the rail in white sheets. My hair was soaked, my coat was soaked, and I was laughing like a girl because the whole sea was standing up and falling down, and the tea boy had disappeared, and he turned to me — for the first time in eight months, turned his whole body toward me — and put his coat around both of us.
Inside the coat it was warm and smelled of lemon and wet wool and him. His arm was across my back. My face was against his neck because there was nowhere else for it to go. I could feel his pulse under my lips. It was going as fast as mine.
Neither of us moved for the whole crossing.
When the boat bumped into the pier at Karaköy he took the coat off me and folded it over his arm and said, very quietly, the first sentence he ever said to me: “Your turn tomorrow.”
* * *
The next day he didn’t go to his office. I didn’t go to mine.
We walked up the hill without speaking, up the steep streets to Cihangir, past the cats and the antique shops and the cafés putting out their chairs. He had a key to a flat that belonged to a cousin who was in Germany. Fourth floor, no lift. On the stairs my legs were shaking and I told myself it was the stairs.
The flat had white sheets over all the furniture like a house of ghosts, and one window with the whole Bosphorus in it, grey and shining. He shut the door. He leaned against it, breathing hard from the climb, and looked at me the way I had wanted to be looked at for a year, the way you look at the sea from the upper deck — like you are trying to remember all of it at once.
“I don’t know your name,” he said.
“Good,” I said. “Don’t.”
He kissed me against the door. His mouth was hungry and careful at the same time, and his hands went into my hair, still damp from the morning, and then down my back, slowly, as if he were counting the buttons of my coat through the cloth. I pulled his tie loose. I put my hand on that thigh at last, the grey wool, and it was exactly as warm as I had imagined, warmer, and he made a sound into my mouth like a man setting down something very heavy.
We pulled the sheet off the sofa. The dust rose and shone in the window light. That’s where I’ll stop, because some things belong to the room they happened in.
* * *
All winter. Every Thursday. The cousin never came back from Germany.
I bought new underwear for Thursdays, black and red, things my husband had never seen and never would. I learned the rest of him — the scar on his ribs from a childhood fall, the way he laughed with his eyes closed, how he liked to lie afterwards with his head on my stomach and listen to the ships. He never said my name and I never said his. In that flat we were nobody. Nobody has no husband, no wife, no mother-in-law coming for dinner. Nobody can do anything.
On the ferry in the mornings we still sat a newspaper apart. We still took turns paying for tea. Only sometimes now his little finger lay against mine on the wooden bench, under the newspaper, and that was more than the whole flat. That was the most dangerous thing in my life.
* * *
In April a woman sat between us.
She was elegant, fifty perhaps, a silk scarf, good shoes, a face that had decided long ago not to be surprised by anything. She sat down in the newspaper-width space as if it were reserved for her. He went pale. I saw him go pale — I knew his skin by then better than my own — and he stood up and went inside without a word.
She bought two teas from the boy. She handed one to me.
“He likes to sit outside,” she said, in a pleasant voice, looking at the old city coming up out of the mist. “Left side. Third bench from the back. Always the right end.” She sipped. “He did it for me too, you know. Fourteen years ago. The 8:10, in those days. There was a cousin in Germany then as well.”
I could not feel my hands.
“I’m not angry,” she said. “Truly. I only wanted to see you. Every few years I like to see who it is.” She looked at me with something almost like tenderness. “You have nice hair. She had nice hair too, the last one. The sea is good for hair.”
The boat bumped into Karaköy. She stood, smoothed her scarf, and put a coin on the bench for my tea.
“Your turn tomorrow,” she said, and walked off down the gangway into the crowd.
* * *
I still take the 7:40. I don’t know what else to do with my mornings.
He sits inside now. I sit outside, left side, third bench from the back. Some days there is a young woman on the right end — dark coat, wedding ring, a book she doesn’t read. She looks at the door to the saloon every few minutes, the way I used to look at the grey wool.
I buy two teas. I put one down beside her, a newspaper’s width away.
I haven’t decided yet what I’m going to say.
