You Are Always Safe With Me (7 page)

“Izak, will you bring some wine to the table, please? We want to toast the parents-to-be?”

“Spill it,” Marianne said. “We don’t get it. This gorgeous girl is not pregnant in the least.”

“Oh, I see—you must be adopting,” Jane Cotton said.

“Not on your life,” Harrison told her. “Do you think we’d give up Gerta’s gorgeous genes and my genius genes for some unknown mystery kid?”

“So what’s going on?” Marianne stared him down. “What’s the joke?”

“Tell them,” Fiona O’Hara said. “You’ll never believe this.”

“You tell them,” Harrison said.

“Well, my son and Gerta are having their baby through a surrogate mother,” she said. “They’ve been working with a famous fertility doctor who got Harrison’s sperm and Gerta’s egg together—you know how they do that these days—and their baby daughter is growing in someone else’s belly. In a month she’ll be born. This way Gerta doesn’t lose her figure. And she doesn’t have the pain or danger of childbirth. It all works out perfectly.”

Lilly and her mother looked at one another. This was vanity in another dimension. This was insanity.

“So I guess you won’t be nursing,” Marianne said, dryly.

Gerta giggled.

“We wouldn’t want those glorious breasts of hers to lose their perfection,” Harrison said. Clearly he was serious and believed they all agreed with him.

Izak had just before this announcement brought small sugar cakes to the table and was setting them down on the table, one by one, beside each person. Lilly wondered if he had heard this revelation and had understood it.

What
she
would give to grow a baby in her womb. What she would give if…

But this fantasizing was pointless and useless. She filled her mouth with a sugar cake, stuffing it in, trying to take in all the sweetness at once to blot out the truth, to distract herself from her own hollowness.

*

When the dishes were cleared, only Fiona, Harriet and Lilly were left sitting at the table.

“Darling,” Fiona said. “I’ve been wanting to ask you something for a long time now. Don’t be offended, I’ve known you since the day you were born and you’re like a daughter to me. That’s why I worry about you. Don’t you think it’s time you found a husband and settled down?”

“Fiona!” Harriet said. “She’s my own daughter and I would never ask her such a question.”

“That’s because you can’t. But since I’m not her mother, I can. I just did.”

Lilly’s face was burning.

“It’s just that old biological clock,” Fiona said. “She has to recognize that it’s running down.”

“I’m sure Lilly can tell time,” Harriet replied. “Lilly knows exactly how old she is.”

“Oh please!” Lilly said, drawing her knees up on the foam bad and staring between them, keeping her head down.

“Sometimes it takes nudge from someone to make it clear,” Fiona said. “We women go along thinking ‘someday’ and then we look up and someday has passed and it’s too late. Look at me! I should have accepted any of a number of suitors after I was widowed and I didn’t. I’m still gorgeous, of course, but not as gorgeous as I was. But Lilly,
you’re
still gorgeous. Solid, but gorgeous. Voluptuous, if you stretch a point. Your eyes are a very excellent feature—though, if you don’t mind my saying, a little eye shadow, a little mascara, could do wonders for them. Your hair could use some highlights, a little frosting on the edges to play up the blonde.”

“I think that’s enough,” Harriet said. “You’ve embarrassed her.”

“Well, if she doesn’t want a man, there are other things a woman can do. She can have a one night stand and have herself a baby. I’d pick someone good-looking and smart, of course, but he doesn’t have to stay around. Just get a sperm donation, and send him on his way. Lots of older single women are doing this. Who needs a man anyway? A nanny, some good day care, will do the trick. Lilly must make a good salary. Am I right, darling?”

“Excuse me, I’m going down to the cabin,” Lilly said. “I appreciate your concern, Fiona, but I don’t really want to talk about it.

“I didn’t hurt your feelings, did I?”

“Don’t worry,” Lilly said. “Why would you think I had feelings?”

Just after sunrise the next day, Izak brought the
Ozymandias
out of its cove and motored to the next port city where he scanned the docking area for a slot to bring in his boat.

Generally he preferred to drop anchor in the various coves of the southern tip of Turkey where it was clean and safe to swim, peaceful for the guests of the
Ozymandias
to read or rest on the deck, and far quieter to sleep at night then packed in among a hundred other pleasure boats. If they were near a city and the guests wanted to explore it, he would deploy the little inflated boat—the Zodiac—and run the guests in groups of four or five from the
Ozymandias
to shore. This transfer involved two of the crew, usually Barish, who held the boat firm against the ladder which the guests descended, one by one, and Izak, who helped them into the little boat and settled them onto its rounded edge.

This maneuver involved Izak’s reaching up to the ladder to support each person briefly while instructing her how to step in. One foot first, followed quickly by the other—or the result would be one foot in the boat, and one foot stranded on the step of the ladder. Too long a delay and the person would do an involuntary split as the little boat drifted outward. There was always much laughter and protesting while this transfer occurred, though Barish and Izak assisted each person in the businesslike way in which they always conducted themselves. The men usually got in quickly, without fuss and with a brief helping hand from Izak.

More than once as Lilly had stepped into the Zodiac she had felt herself lunge against Izak’s chest as he helped her get her balance and guided her to sit on the inflated boat’s edge, instructed her to grasp a rope to hold for security so as not to fall backwards into the sea when the boat began to motor toward shore.

Today, as he helped load the women first, Jane Cotton, Gerta, Marianne, Lilly’s mother, and then herself, Lilly felt Izak reach up for her with two arms. For a long few seconds, he held her close to himself, and then set her gently down on the rubberized seat. Briefly her head nestled into the curve of his neck as he leaned over her.

“Take the rope,” he said, as he instructed each person each time they did this maneuver, and she reached her hands under her knees to grab it. It seemed not to be there. She felt for it but did not find it.

“One moment,” Izak said, and knelt at her feet, his head almost in her lap as he reached behind her calves to pull on the taut rope for some slack so she could grasp it.

Marianne, who sat next to Lilly, watched him kneeling there and when he stood to start the outboard motor she elbowed Lilly with her arm.

“What?” Lilly said, surprised.

“Have any massages lately?” Marianne asked. Lilly turned her face into the wind, feeling the spray of water on her face as Izak revved up the outboard and headed toward shore. She did not reply.

*

They took a bus that afternoon to see the cliff tombs of Myra. The small hired van was driven by an older Turk who looked to Lilly remarkably like Sean Connery. Tied to his rearview mirror was a charm Lilly had seen all over Turkey, a single dark blue disc with a light blue “eye” in its center. “For luck,” a shopkeeper had told her when she asked its significance. “To ward off the evil eye. If one wishes evil to you and looks at it, it will shatter in many pieces.” In a gift shop Lilly had seen dozens of the glass eyes on sale “Ten For a Dollar.” She had bought thirty of them. Each had a pinhole in the charm, so that it could be worn on a chain or ribbon. After she bought them she felt foolish, yet she tucked them in a corner of her suitcase to take home.

The bus driver—when they had all boarded—indicated the air-conditioning vents and said “Cold enough? Yes?”

It was always too hot, everywhere in Turkey—on the boat, on buses, in cafes, in shops: Lilly had simply stopped comparing her comfort level here to that at home. The temperature in the bus was suffocating.

Harrison and Gerta raised their liter bottles of water toward the driver, to show they were well-prepared. The water in them was visibly half-frozen. “Izak gave us these from the freezer, to keep us cool,” he said proudly, to assert his special rights and privileges. He held his bottle to his cheek, and Gerta, sitting with him across the aisle from Lilly, pressed hers between her thighs.

Lilly—again astonished to feel tears rise behind her eyes (she cried so easily in this country, she seemed to have no control over her emotions)—looked away. She was the only person sitting alone on the small bus—her mother was beside Lance, with his wild gray hair and pale face, Jane and Jack Cotton were, as always, together, Fiona O’Hara and Marianne were sitting together toward the back of the little bus and Harrison and Gerta were rolling their ice water bottles around one another’s thighs to cool themselves and each other. Harrison could not keep his hands off Gerta. Today she wore a red elastic tank top and black leather shorts. Lilly, by contrast, wore her handmade Turkish seersucker “pajamas,” which promised to be light, but also to protect her legs from the rough terrain if she wanted to climb the mountain to explore the cliff tombs.

Izak never came on these “tourist trips”—always having something to do on the boat, or in the town, or perhaps he used the time off to swim or sleep, to have some respite from his duties. But Lilly now felt his absence keenly. He could have given
her
a little bottle of frozen water had he wanted to. She always took her own bottle of lukewarm water—her sun hat and water bottle were required for every trip off the boat—but that Izak had specially given Gerta and Harrison iced bottles, and not her, made her so foolishly cry.

Weren’t those two lucky enough already? Rich, beautiful, and about to have a baby? Amazed at her petty, adolescent jealousy, Lilly, sitting behind the driver, watched his evil-eye charm sway as the little van climbed the narrow mountain road. Each time he came to a hairpin turn, he pumped his horn in warning. Along the edge of the road were greenhouses covered with plastic sheeting, and inside were tomatoes, turning red in the sun alternating with columns of green cucumbers.

The few houses they passed looked mainly unfinished, made of cement block, as if a child had begun to build them and got bored. Now and then a woman would appear, her head covered, carrying an infant or holding a child by the hand, followed by a goat or two, as they walked along the side of the road.

Lilly leaned her head against the window and stared out, thinking of the lives of others, wondering at their simplicity, their complexity, their mystery. She felt herself to be hollow, without a life, without anything back home to which she might return. This feeling deepened, engulfed her without warning, so that the fields were blurred by her tears, the mountains made crooked and unreal. She was careful to turn her head away from the aisle so the others would not see her, but suddenly she realized that the driver had a clear view of her face in his side-view mirror. She knew this because he very quietly offered her a box of tissues behind his back, low to the floor, offering it with his left hand.

She took the box; she murmured “Thank you,” and she pressed her forehead to the window. She had witnessed a sensitivity in Turkish men she had not ever known elsewhere. (She had no contact with the women here—they were all in the background, their heads covered, their duties not so much in the shops or the streets or having to do with the tourist business.) One day in a port city, when her mother had wanted to spend time in a jewelry store and Lilly had wanted to look into a bakery, they’d agreed to meet on the corner in a half hour. When Lilly got there first and had been standing on the curb in the sun for ten minutes, a man hurried out of a rug shop carrying a folding chair and an umbrella and opened them both for her, insisting that she wait in comfort.

*

After a hard, bumpy ascent along a snaking road, the bus driver pulled up in front of a drink and ice cream stand on the mountainside—a slab of concrete, a few white plastic chairs, a post card stand, an ice cream freezer on wheels and a splintery picnic table. Across the road from the tourist stop advertising Coca-Cola, rising toward the sky, were the ruins of cliff tombs.

Marianne, always hungry, rushed from the bus to order an ice cream pop. They followed her and others gave their orders. Lance bought Lilly’s mother an orange soda. The driver of the bus came to sit in the shade and talk with the owner of the small business. They seemed to know one another well. After the business transactions were over, the owner went inside the building and brought out a backgammon set. The two men settled down to a game.

It was then that Lilly spotted two teenage girls sitting on the porch of their little house, just behind the ice cream stand. They were both crocheting something lacy. Both girls were startlingly pretty: long-haired, long lashed, lovely-featured young women.

Lilly had seen similarly pretty Turkish girls pull up to the
Ozymandias
just as the crepe boat had done: they climbed the ladder offering trays of scarves embellished with lace or fringes of colored thread, they proffered brightly colored bracelets of oddly shaped beads, “Only one million, please buy, only one million.”

Unable to resist, Lilly had bought a few scarves and bracelets, for whom she was not sure, but tucked them away in her suitcase with the “lucky” glass eyes. Now she said to the girls, “You make these to sell?”

“No for sell,” said the older girl. “Wait,” and she got up from her chair, went into the house, and came back holding a pink dishcloth with lace around its edges. “For us,” she said. “For Mama. For our house.” She took up her crotchet needle from where she had set it down on the chair, sat down, and resumed her handiwork.

From this simple wooden porch, Lilly could see the view the girls had as they sat on their porch looking across the road: the magnificent Lycian cliff tombs perched on one another, carved into the side of the mountain. It looked as if palaces had been hacked out of the granite, each tomb a house-shaped room, rich with scenes of family life, each boasting an intricate relief to indicate the activities that had gone on before the death which had taken place.