“My mom makes delicious snapper soup.” As soon as the words came out of his mouth, the young man knew he had said something wrong; he clammed up.
Cavidan Hanım pretended she hadn’t heard him. What was the point of embarrassing the poor boy? He already regretted having said it anyway. “I just learned how to make it. But Pygmy loves it.”
Curious, Tolga asked: “Pygmy?”
“My cat. She loves my snapper soup.” She laughed again. “She’s so black, I bet you’d be scared of her if you saw her in the dark; she walks around like a pair of bodiless green eyes.”
“Come on, why would I be afraid? I’m sure she’s adorable...”
Beaten black-and-blue by the wind, the sea churned and foamed. The bus in front of them let out a hiss as it lurched forward, and they followed. Launched from the terrace of one of the seafront houses, an umbrella, a remnant from summer, blew over the road and toward the water. Spared, by the grace of God! The incident brought them closer; it was that special affinity shared by people who have survived an accident together. Just then the young man’s cell phone started ringing.
“What’s that, Pınar?... Yes, I left early, I had a few errands... To Akmerkez... To buy a present for Mom... Unbelievable... I couldn’t find anything... What’s that?... Pınar, can I call you a little later? I can’t hear you...” He felt obliged to offer an explanation: “My girlfriend.”
Cavidan Hanım found an excuse for joy in this revelation; so he wasn’t married after all! “She was worried, I suppose. I can’t blame her, I’d be worried about you too.” Was that a spark of desire she saw in his eyes? No, it couldn’t be, she must be mistaken.
“Should we keep going? Is there any particular place you’d like to stop?” For the first time in his life he felt the comfort of being with an assertive woman, a woman in charge, a woman who made decisions for him. But then, there were many firsts in store for him that evening. Feeling submissive to the core, he waited for an answer.
“There’s a parking lot by the water, across from the graveyard. Let’s go there. It’s always deserted after dark.” The traffic abated. She unzipped the jacket of her jogging suit a little further, just to get some air. The medallion hanging from her neck glinted for a brief second, catching the young man’s eye; Cavidan Hanım promptly took notice. The lodos was blowing through the giant trees along the roadside.
Now that they had left the noisy traffic behind, the sound of the radio came to the fore: “We’ve reached the end of tonight’s program, dear listeners. We leave you until tomorrow — same time, same place — with Lena Horne and ‘Mad about the Boy’...”
Cavidan Hanım felt a tingling in her loins. Don’t tell me to give you a break; I’m a human being, and I know human beings have a tendency to lose it every now and then. Actually, it was pretty understandable. She’d never really had much of a sex life, other than a few rather tasteless flings with colleagues, and that was so far in the past now, her conspirators had faded into pale ghosts of her imagination. And throughout those long years, whenever she attempted to satisfy the urges of her body by herself, leaning against the cold walls of her shower stall, it wasn’t those inadequate lovers but her male students that she fantasized about. She loved the way they smelled so fresh, how their voices still cracked, their unruly attitudes, and their black-haired arms peeking out from rolled-up sleeves; she loved it all, at least as much as she loved this city. She threw her head back, draining the can of beer in her hand. She’d grown silent, perhaps out of shame for her thoughts.
Tolga slowed down next to the cemetery, turned on his right-turn signal, and then parked by the water. The headlights illuminated the sea one last time before going out; the seagulls, caught in the circles of light, flitted about the sky like giant snowflakes.
“I can have a beer now, too, can’t I?”
Without breaking her silence, Cavidan Hanım reached down into the black plastic bag next to her foot. She took out a can, opened it, and handed it to the young man. She had avoided his eyes. The jazz program ended, and Tolga switched the radio off. For a while, they just sat there, listening to the wind howling wildly.
I keep referring to the wind, I know, and perhaps you find it annoying, but there’s no way around it, because for me it’s the main character of the story. It was bolting through the sky in fits of madness, lunging down and surging back up, sending shivers through the evening lights, absorbing the familiar sounds of the city into its own roar. It dried lips, hurled anything and everything that failed to match its strength, weighed down upon souls, made skin crawl. Tolga sipped on his beer, contemplating Cavidan Hanım’s profile, while she contemplated the seagulls lowering themselves toward the sea. One wonders what was on their minds just then. But then, it’s not hard to guess. Perhaps a jumble of thoughts coursed through Tolga’s mind — how he could possibly explain this delay to his girlfriend; his eleventh grade English teacher; the fact that he had to buy a present for his mother; how awful it would be to be out at sea in this weather; whether or not Cavidan Hanım’s medallion was in fact a locket, and if there was a picture in it; his girlfriend again; his mother again; even the project he’d turned in that day, and the likelihood of its success. Though these may not have been his exact thoughts, they were certainly something along those lines. He didn’t try to focus on anything in particular, and that was comforting to him somehow.
He leaned back in his seat, took a big gulp from his beer, and got lost in thought again. He was back to pondering the matter of the presents; in fact, he was on the verge of actually making a decision. And he would have, for sure, if only he hadn’t felt Cavidan Hanım’s hand settle onto his crotch just then. At least he had finally eliminated the perfume, narrowing his options down to two: either the laptop bag or the cashmere sweater.
“Do you mind if I touch you?” she asked nonchalantly, as though asking if she could roll down the window. Moreover, she went ahead and began unzipping the young man’s pants, without even waiting for an answer. And unzip them she did.
Tolga looked in amazement at the fingers pulling at his boxer shorts. Would it be rude to ask her to take her hands off of me? he wondered. His manhood, though, growing beneath the woman’s touch, was betraying him. But she just wanted to feel around a little, right? It was hardly the end of the world now, was it? He slid down a little, made himself more comfortable. The woman’s hand was brushing over the heat of his flesh; she had lowered her head and was scrutinizing the thing in her hands with the curiosity of a child observing an insect. Tolga grew uneasy and glanced around. There wasn’t another person or car in sight. He tried not to think about the cemetery that extended up the hill on the other side of the road. He cleared his throat and, in a voice he thought sounded normal, asked, “Would you like me to turn on the radio?”
“Oh yes,” said Cavidan Hanım, “but find another jazz program, will you?” She lowered her head and began stroking him again, picking up where she’d left off.
His hands shaking, the young man turned the radio on and tuned in to a jazz station. The sound of a rebellious, unrepentant saxophone filled the car. Had to be John Coltrane.
At that moment, Cavidan Hanım lowered her head further and took the young man’s penis into her mouth. I know, it sounds almost pornographic when I put it like this, but these things are just a part of life, they come so naturally. And as long as I’m telling you the whole story, why should I succumb to puritanical pressures and skip the details? Okay, so what was Cavidan Hanım thinking all this time? Well, first of all, she was wondering why on earth she had never done this before, and thinking how many more things there were that she had never done before, and how the world was just full of things she had never done before... She was intrigued by the taste; he must be a clean man, she thought, because she couldn’t detect even the faintest scent of urine. Curious, with the tip of her tongue she touched the clear fluid oozing from the tip of the penis; perhaps it was due to the aftertaste of beer in her mouth, but she found it to be rather sour. She cleansed her tongue on the shaft of the young man’s manhood, which was as hard as it could possibly get by now. Its skin, wrinkled at first, was now stretched tight, as if a larva inside was struggling to escape.