Leaving aside the man’s tool, what interested Füsun most was not my body, nor was it the “male body” in general. It was her own form and her own pleasure that most occupied her. She needed my body, my arms, my fingers, my mouth, to find the pleasure spots and potentials of her body, her soft skin. Lacking experience, Füsun was sometimes shocked by the possibilities of what I was teaching her as her eyes turned inward with a lovely haziness, pleasure spreading through her veins to the back of her neck and her head, like a gradually intensifying shiver, and she would follow pleasure’s flow with awe, sometimes letting out a blissful cry, then once more await my assistance.
“Do that again, please? Do it like that again!” she whispered now and again.
I was very happy. But this was not an elation I could weigh in my mind and understand. It was something that I felt on the nape of my neck when I answered the phone, or at the tip of my spine when running up the stairs, or in my nipples when ordering food at a Taksim restaurant with Sibel, to whom I was to become formally engaged in four weeks’ time. I would carry this feeling around with me all day, like a scent on my skin, sometimes forgetting it was Füsun who had given it to me, as when, on several occasions, I was in my office after hours, hurriedly making love to Sibel, and it seemed to me I was in the grace of one great, all-consuming beatitude.
13 Love, Courage, Modernity
ONE EVENING, as we were eating at Fuaye, Sibel gave me a fragrance called Spleen that she’d bought for me in Paris; I exhibit it here. Though in fact I didn’t like wearing fragrance, I dabbed some on my neck one morning, just out of curiosity, and after we’d made love, Füsun noticed it.
“Was it Sibel Hanım who bought this cologne for you?”
“No. I bought it for myself.”
“Did you buy it because you thought Sibel might like it?”
“No, darling, I bought it because I thought you might like it.”
“You’re still making love with Sibel Hanım, aren’t you?”
“No.”
“Please don’t lie to me,” said Füsun. An anxious expression formed on her perspiring face. “I would consider it normal. Of course you are having sex with her, aren’t you?” She fixed her eyes on mine, like a mother gently steering a child away from his lie.
“No.”
“Believe me, lying will hurt me a lot more. Please tell me the truth. So why aren’t you making love, then?”
“Sibel and I met last summer in Suadiye,” I said, wrapping my arms around Füsun. “Our winter home was closed for the summer, so we would come to Nişantaşı. Anyway, in the autumn she went to Paris. I visited her there a few times over the winter.”
“By plane?”
“Yes. This December, after Sibel finished university and returned from France to marry me, we used the summer house to meet through the winter. But the house in Suadiye would get so cold that after a while it took the pleasure out of sex,” I continued.
“So you decided to wait until you had found a warm house?”
“At the beginning of March, two months ago, we went back to the house in Suadiye one night. It was very cold there. While we were trying to light a fire the house filled with smoke, and we had an argument, too. After that Sibel came down with a bad case of the flu. She had a fever, wound up in bed for a week, and we didn’t ever want to go back there to make love.”
“Which of you didn’t want to?” asked Füsun. “Her or you?” As curiosity consumed her, compassion gave way to desperation, and her expression, which a moment ago was saying, Please tell me the truth, now was pleading, Please tell me a lie. Don’t hurt me.
“I think Sibel is hoping that if we make love less before we marry, I might prize the engagement, our marriage, and even her, a bit more,” I said.
“But you’re saying that before all this you did make love.”
“You don’t understand. This is not about making love for the first time.”
“You’re right, it isn’t,” said Füsun, lowering her voice.
“Sibel showed me how much she loved me, and how much she trusted me,” I said. “But the idea of making love before marriage still makes her uncomfortable… I understand this. She’s studied in Europe, but she’s not as modern and courageous as you are…”
There was a very long silence. Having spent years pondering the meaning of this silence, I think I can now summarize it in a balanced way. That last thing I’d said to Füsun had an implied meaning. I had suggested that what Sibel had done before marriage out of love and trust, Füsun had done out of courage and a modern outlook. I have suffered many years of remorse for labeling Füsun as “modern and courageous,” for the compliment also said that I would feel no special obligations to her just because she’d slept with me. If she was “modern,” she would not see sex with a man before marriage as a burden, and neither would she worry about being a virgin on her wedding day. Just like those European women we entertained in our fantasies, or those legendary women who were said to wander the streets of Istanbul. How could I have said those words believing Füsun would warm to them?
Though I may not have understood everything quite so clearly during that silence, these thoughts went through my mind as I watched the trees in the back garden slowly swaying in the wind. After making love, as we lay in bed chatting, we would look out the window at those trees, the apartment houses behind them, the random flights of crows among their branches.
“Actually, I’m not modern or courageous!” Füsun said, after a long while.
At the time I took these words to express her unease at discussing this weighty subject, and even humility, and I didn’t dwell on them.
“A woman can love a man like crazy for years without once making love to him,” Füsun added cautiously.
“Of course,” I said. There was another silence.
“Are you telling me that you’re not making love at all right now? Why weren’t you bringing Sibel here?”
“It never occurred to us,” I said, amazed that it hadn’t until after I’d met Füsun in the shop. “This used to be the place I’d come to study and listen to music with friends-whatever the reason, it was because of you that I remembered it.”
“I can certainly believe that it never occurred to you,” said Füsun with skepticism. “But there’s a lie in what you said before that. Isn’t there? I don’t want you to tell me any lies. I can’t believe you aren’t having sex with her these days. Swear to me, please.”
“I swear I’m not making love to her,” I said.
“So when were you going to start making love to her again? Will it be when your parents go to Suadiye this summer? When are they due to leave? Tell me the truth. I’m not going to ask you anything else.”
“They’re moving to Suadiye after the engagement party,” I mumbled shamefacedly.
“So did you tell me any lies just now?”