Almost a Woman : A Memoir (9780306821110) (45 page)

I assured him he spoke well, that I understood everything he said. He thanked me with another self-effacing shrug. The phone rang again, and this time he spoke German. Although I couldn't understand the words, there was no hesitation in his voice, as there was in English.

When he finished his call, we discussed the film that had won the Golden Bear in Berlin. He said it was a love story, which he had produced and directed. He had also played the romantic lead. The lead actress was now a big star in Turkey. “But I discovered her,” he stressed.

He said he had spotted her sitting on the steps in front of his office building. She was waiting for her mother, the cleaning woman. She'd never acted in films, but as soon as he saw her, Ulvi could tell she had star potential. When he saw me at Woolworth's, he recognized the same qualities he saw in her.

I was flattered, but aware that we were alone in his apartment
decorated with posters of women masturbating. Arty or not, it was impossible to look anywhere in the apartment without my eyes landing on a nipple, an inverted navel, pubic hair. After a half hour with no film crew in sight, I stood up. “I should go.”

Ulvi suggested we take a walk. “They will be here by the time we get back,” he promised.

As we strolled down 58th Street toward Fifth Avenue, I asked him where he had learned German.

His eyes widened. “Do you speak too?”

“No,” I laughed. “Some of my friends . . .” I waved them away.

He nodded. He had lived in Germany for years and spoke the language fluently. “Better than Turkish, sometimes,” he chuckled. We lamented how hard it was to retain one's first language when there were few opportunities to practice. We agreed that the longing to go back to the home country, even after years of being away, never disappeared.

“But when you return,” he said, “they don't appreciate.” He became a celebrity in Turkey after his film won the awards. But the press attacked him. He held his hands palms up, seesawed them up and down, “They criticize me for this, for that, for nothing.” I appreciated his thoughtful answers, enjoyed our conversation, which meandered from one subject to the next. His soft voice and relaxed manner were comforting. As Shoshana had noticed, he watched me intently. At first, I was uncomfortable with his earnest attention. But then I realized he had to do that because he read lips. Not because he was hard of hearing, but because it was another clue to interpreting what I said. I did the same. Even after seven years of intensive English, I focused on the speaker for clues other than language to help me understand. When I spoke, I still translated simultaneously from Spanish, and I was certain Ulvi had to do the same from Turkish via German. No wonder he talked so slowly.

There was a parade on Fifth Avenue. Marching bands led acrobatic cheerleaders with colorful pompons. Slow-moving floats
trimmed with crepe paper streamers carried young women dressed in evening gowns. Their white-gloved hands wiped the air in perfect arcs, as they waved to the right, the left, the right again.

Later, I wondered at which point during the parade he took my hand. Or why, as a float went by filled with polka dancers, he put his arm around me. Or how it happened that, when the Middletown Police Athletic League Band marched by playing their version of “Winchester Cathedral,” my face was against his chest, and I smelled his skin, clean, a nonscent really, captivating.

We returned to his apartment. While I'd been kissed, touched, had known the contours of a man through his clothes, it was different when we were naked. His skin was the color of toasted walnuts. No tan lines marred the even tones from hairline to soles. His chest was furred with a heart of straight black hair which ended in a point under his ribs. His abdomen was flat but soft, undefined by muscles, a long, smooth, flesh table on which I laid my head to listen to his life. When I moved higher, his heart thuthumped against my ear, soothed me to sleep upon his chest. Or, if I snuggled down to his navel, the sounds of a noisy brook gurgled intermittently. I traced my fingers from the top of his head, down his broad forehead across the frown line etched from temple to temple, to his nose, a wide-based pyramid above soft, cool lips. At rest, he appeared sad and solemn, but I made him smile. His chin was dimpled in the center, a shallow depression where I stuck my tongue to feel fine, prickly stubble. His neck was long, with two deep furrows webbed from ear to ear, like scars. I caressed his chest, the fuzzy valentine of straight, black hair, a heart over his heart. And the flat expanse of his unblemished belly.

After we made love he made phone calls. Naked, I wrapped myself around him, his left arm under my head, mine across his chest. I pressed close until our brown skins were one. I could not think of what I'd just done, refused to answer the voice that asked, “Why him?” Why not Otto or Avery Lee or Jurgen? Why had I not resisted, had in fact joyfully thrown off my clothes on the black leather chair?

He spoke his foreign language and I listened to the muffled words, chuckles, whispers. Once he held the phone to my lips and said, “Say hello,” and I said “hi” into the speaker, not knowing who I greeted. After a while I grew jealous. I writhed this way and that, generated warmth, straddled him, rolled back onto my side until he engulfed me, until I felt his weight, until I sank under his long, dark body, until I couldn't breathe. It was when I pushed him off, gently, with a whimper, that he moved aside, stroked my face, and called me “Chiquita.”

“Who?” I pushed up on one elbow, searched his face.

“You are Chiquita,” he smiled, “my little one. That is what it means, the Spanish word
chiquita?”

“Yes,” I said, appeased. “Little one. Little girl,” I amended and lay back.

Sated, I returned to Brooklyn, tingling with secrets. Late at night, the A train was filled with workers returning from the evening shifts. Most of them dozed or read the papers with wary intensity, seeking confirmation for their worst fears. A man in overalls slept on the seat against the conductor's booth. A woman in a nurse's uniform pulled her purse close when I sat across the aisle. Another woman, thin and nervous, tugged at the tired curls around her shoulders, the window behind me a grimy mirror into which she peered desperately. From time to time both women stared at me, then averted their eyes. Can they tell what I've been doing? I wondered. Are there telltale signs?

No, he was careful not to mark me. My skin left hotter than it arrived, but there were no marks, no signs that we'd been naked for hours. I sought his smell on me, but that too was gone. He had insisted we shower after sex. We went in together, my hair wrapped inside a thirsty towel, and on his knees, he soaped and rinsed. His hands sometimes a caress, sometimes a probe, he erased all traces of our lovemaking, all evidence that he'd been with me, inside me. Hot water pounding my back, I closed my eyes and let his fingers, slippery with soap, explore, between my toes, behind my knees, across my buttocks. I dripped with desire, but he whispered,
“Not now, no more. Enough for today.” He wrapped me in his huge black towels, rubbed the corners against my skin until every drop was soaked away. I returned to Mami's house hungry, thirsty, impatient for the next day, when I'd return to his black-and-white apartment and strip down to nothing and let him touch me again where no one ever had.

“You did what?” Shoshana's long lashes fluttered. “When? How?”

It was hard to explain
how
it had happened. Not the mechanics of sex, but how I went from fledgling movie actress to the director's . . . what? I couldn't name what I'd become.

“Why him?” Shoshana wanted to know.

There was no way to answer that question either. No, he wasn't as handsome as Neftalí, Otto, Avery Lee, or Jurgen. In the week we'd been together he hadn't taken me to any restaurants, the theater, not even the movies. He'd spent no money on me. He hadn't asked me to be his girlfriend, his mistress, his wife. He'd made no promises whatsoever. He seemed to have no expectations except that I show up at his apartment at the agreed time. When I suggested I should get birth control, he told me not to worry. “I take care,” he said, and he did.

“So,” Shoshana smiled wickedly, “did you get the part?”

Ulvi admitted that he had never had any intention of putting me in a movie. “I want you for me,” he said, “nobody else.”

“Wow!” Shoshana was impressed.

In order to spend more time with Ulvi, I changed my schedule at work. I checked ads mornings, then spent the afternoon with Ulvi. I was usually home for dinner, then hid out in the room I shared with Delsa in our new house on Fulton Street. I didn't want to give Mami a chance to study me, afraid that she suspected, that my secret life with Ulvi showed in the way I moved or behaved.

One day I ran into Shanti on Fifth Avenue. He'd been meaning
to call me, he said, because he wanted to take color photographs of me. His fingertips on my chin, he moved my face from side to side to capture the light. “Your face is no longer innocent,” he concluded.

“Neither am I,” I snapped back. He winced. “I have to go.” I left him on the corner of Fifth and 44th, my throat tight. I ran into the Algonquin Hotel, through the bar, downstairs to the cramped ladies' room. I stared into the mirror for a long time but couldn't see what he saw. Was it only visible to others?

Vera called to discuss the Children's Theater International season. They wanted me back as Soni in
Babu
and as a Japanese princess in a play inspired by kabuki theater. After the read-through at the rehearsal studio on Christopher Street, Bill gave a couple of us a ride uptown. I was on my way to Ulvi.

“How was your summer?” Bill asked, and the others shared stories of summer stock and dinner theaters. I was the last to leave the VW van. “You've been quiet,” Bill remarked as he pulled up to the corner of 58th Street and Third Avenue. I was about to tell him where I was going but was unable to speak his name.

“I can't even begin,” I stammered.

He squeezed my hand, “It's amazing how one summer can change your life.” I leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. I loved him, I loved Allan, I loved so many people. Did I love Ulvi? I must have, to give myself so willingly to him. Yet what I felt for him was nothing like what I felt for Bill and Allan, for my family, for Shoshana. I could easily say I loved them. About him the best that I could say was, “I make love with him.”

What did that make me? After years of fantasizing about romantic love, I had landed on the black-and-white sheets of a man who was not romantic in the traditional sense. No flowers, no candlelit dinners, no talk of the future beyond the next day, when we'd be together again. Being with Ulvi was like being suspended in time. After the first long conversation we had, there were no more discussions about our lives.

“I don't care about your family, your friends,” he said when I
tried to tell him. “I only want you.” It was freeing not to have a past with him. But it bothered me that if he weren't interested in my life away from him, how could I justify asking about his life away from me?

One Monday afternoon, I met Shoshana at the Automat. We put our coins into the slot and the square glass doors unlocked so we could pull out bowls of macaroni and cheese.

“I have to tell you something,” Shoshana said, excited. Soon as I sat across from her, she spilled her news. “I did it!”

It wasn't hard to guess what “it” was. “When? Who?”

She went to a party that weekend, met a Turkish man. “Younger than your guy,” she added. “Now we've both lost our virginity to Turks,” she giggled.

When I told Ulvi the story, imagining he'd enjoy the coincidence, his eyebrows crept together, his lips tightened. “She is a very dumb girl,” he said.

“What do you mean? Should she worry about Ali? Do you know him?”

“There are a thousand Alis,” Ulvi yelled. I'd never heard him raise his voice above a murmur, and the change scared me. “How can you have such a friend?” he continued. I didn't understand what he meant. When I pointed out that she wasn't doing anything worse than what we did, Ulvi looked at me sternly. “It is not the same. She is cheap girl.”

I was stunned. His assessment of Shoshana was so unfair, I argued. He'd only met her once. She was a wonderful person, warm, funny, intelligent. How could he say such a thing?

“I know million girls like that,” Ulvi muttered, and the contempt in his voice made me shiver. He took me in his arms, stroked my hair, kissed me. “You are such naive girl,” he said. “There are so many things I must teach you, Chiquita.” He was tender, gentle. The circle within his arms was a world in which I felt protected, a place where I could admit my ignorance. Yes, I was naive, but in his arms my innocence was treasured. In his arms, I didn't have to think, didn't have to plan, didn't have to do
anything but respond to his caresses. When he held me, I didn't question or challenge him, because I knew nothing. Not even the true nature of my best friend.