Almost a Woman : A Memoir (9780306821110) (49 page)

At dinner, Shoshana urged another bowl of chicken soup to chase away the sniffles that were no longer caused by tears for Ulvi but by the cold I caught after walking in the rain. By the time I told her the story, it no longer hurt to speak of him.

“I can tell you'll be over him soon,” Shoshana predicted. “It's not like you to suffer for long.” My head was so heavy I couldn't think fast enough to agree or disagree. On the subway to Brooklyn, I jotted down her words on a scrap of paper and folded them inside my wallet. No, it wasn't like me to hold on to pain for long. Why bother? A new setback was bound to come soon enough.

I missed three days of work. Tata and Mami nursed me with broths and the dreaded
tutumá
, which tasted no better now that I was twenty than when Mami had first invented it in my thirteenth year. I slept, lulled by the whirr of sewing machines. Mami had a business at home now. She brought in cut garments from a factory; then she, Titi Ana, and a couple of other women finished sewing them on the machines set up in the living room. Tata watched Charlie, Cibi, and Ciro, who sometimes wandered into the makeshift
fábrica
to be admired, cuddled, and cooed over by the women.

By Saturday morning I felt better but stayed in bed reading. Shoshana called to see how I was doing. At the end of the conversation she told me the real reason she called.

“I didn't want to say anything the other day, when you felt so bad....” She was returning to Israel to fulfill her military service, which she'd put off for some time. She'd be gone for months. “If the Arabs don't do something crazy, I might make it back,” she
joked, but I didn't laugh. She didn't have much time, but we arranged to meet for one last dinner. Losing my best friend at the same time as my lover sent me back to bed for another day, but on Monday I dragged myself to work. There was a stack of messages on my desk, most of them for Iris but a few for me. “Ulvi called,” the receptionist who handled the calls had written on at least five pink slips. On the most recent one she had scribbled “Urgent!” and in parentheses, “He told me to write that,” with an arrow pointing to the word. I didn't call him. Every time I looked at the slips, I remembered his fury, the cruel turn of his lips when he told me to get out of his apartment.

I met Shoshana for dinner, and afterwards we walked on Fifth Avenue as we had done so often, toward the Plaza, intending to retrace our steps to Grand Central and the subways. But in front of the fountain, a man approached us. He was a producer, he said. His film was being screened at the Paris Cinema across the street. Would we like to see it?

It was an inscrutable black-and-white film in a Slavic language neither of us could identify. The subtitles didn't help. Shoshana and I giggled through the whole thing, as serious moviegoers hushed us and the hapless producer walked nervously up and down the aisles peering into the faces of his audience, trying to determine who dared laugh at his masterpiece. We ran out of there as soon as the final credits rolled, no longer able to stifle our laughter. As we walked to Grand Central arm in arm, we knew that our free-spirited adventures ended that night. It would be months before Shoshana could return to the States, and by then who knew where I'd be? We hugged, and Shoshana promised to write as soon as she arrived in Haifa. I didn't remind her that every time she left for Israel, she swore to write but never did. Within minutes of our parting, I felt the loss of the best friend I'd ever had, the only person, I thought, who really knew me.

I hadn't forgotten Ulvi, but in the five days since he had slammed the door behind me, he'd become like the pain left after a cut. Most of the time I didn't feel it until I banged up against it. The day after my dinner with Shoshana, I answered Iris's phone.

“Chiquita?” His soft, tentative voice made me lightheaded, and my first instinct was to hang up. First he apologized for his behavior of the previous week. Then he wanted to see me because he had to explain. “Maybe you don't understand,” he guessed, “why I am upset.”

The use of the present tense didn't throw me off, because Ulvi frequently confused the present for the past. I insisted we meet in a restaurant, not his apartment. “If you want to talk,” I said, “it will be better.” When I saw him in front of the Magic Pan on East 57th Street, I almost flew into his arms, restrained myself, let him kiss my cheek, pulled away for fear of losing my resolve.

He thought about what happened last week. “You are a child,” he said. “I forget sometimes.”

I reminded him that I was twenty and a half years old, not ten. He showed his indulgent smile. “To me, you are my
chiquita,”
he said. “Always.”

He was angry that night, he continued, because we had a date and I broke it at the last minute to be with another man. I explained that Allan was not “another man” in the sense I understood Ulvi to mean, but my dear friend. The reason for the short notice was that Allan, as an understudy, didn't always know ahead of time when he'd perform.

“Why don't you tell me this?” Ulvi asked.

“Because you didn't ask. You never do. You don't want to know about my private life, remember?” It was impossible to keep the resentment from my voice, the sarcasm that crept into the final three syllables. Ulvi winced. We sat in silence for a few minutes. I felt him struggle with a response. There was no possibility of kissing my emotions away here, in a busy restaurant with fake French food. I couldn't be appeased with promises that he'd never hurt me. He already had.

It took him a long time to formulate what he wanted to say. He thought he was the only man in my life. It disturbed him that I felt free to see other men.

I answered that we'd never talked about our “relationship” in a way that made me feel I couldn't date others. If it made him feel better, I assured him, I hadn't had sex with any other man but him. The relief that swept over his face startled me. What did he expect?

We left the restaurant, circled the block, ended up on his street. He grinned, pulled me close, kissed me, and I dissolved through my thick winter coat. His arms felt familiar, his lips like mine. He was the perfect height, no need for me to stretch or scoot down to place my head on his shoulders, for him to wrap his arm around my waist. We walked with the same purposeful stride, our feet hit the pavement at the same time, synchronized through an internal mechanism neither of us controlled. Our lovemaking was a dance, each part of our bodies attuned to its complement in the other, as if we were not two but one. Afterwards, as I lay content in his arms, he said he wanted me always by his side. It wasn't a promise, a proposal, a declaration of love. But I understood it as all those things.

Over the next few days and nights we drew closer. Reluctantly, Ulvi opened up, talked about himself and his obsession with his film,
Dry Summer.
Its success had surprised him, because the favorite for the top prize at Berlin had been
The Pawnbroker,
with Rod Steiger. “No one expect me to win,” he laughed. “Not even me.” He became famous overnight, traveled around the world for festivals and competitions, made money. He bought a white Rolls Royce, which he drove from New York to Hollywood. There, he met Kim Novak and Angie Dickinson. The Hollywood producer Sid Solow let Ulvi spend a few weeks in his guest house while Ulvi tried to get a film deal. In spite of his efforts, however,
Dry Summer
couldn't pick up a distributor in North America. Wherever Ulvi went, he was told that the film was lovely but that if he wanted to show it in the United States, it needed more sex and better music. He sold the Rolls Royce, invested the money in
the film. He hired the Greek composer Manos Hadjidakis, who'd scored
Never on Sunday,
to create new music for
Dry Summer.
Ulvi found a girl who looked like Hulya Kocigit, the love interest opposite him in the film. They drove out with a cinematographer to Long Island and shot new scenes. He was now reediting the film to incorporate the sex.

“Did Hulya agree to that?” I wondered.

“She's a big star in Turkey now. She doesn't have time.”

The editing suite was on the second floor of a rundown office building half a block from Woolworth's, where Ulvi had first seen me. His editor was a long-legged older man with white hair, sad eyes, a deeply lined face that seldom smiled. Hans reminded me of Bela Lugosi, both in the way he looked and in his speech, which was heavily accented. He worked at an upright Movieola, his fingers flying from the editing machine to the ashtray at his side. In a back room was another Movieola rented to another filmmaker.

Every day after work I met Ulvi at the editing room, a few blocks from my office. Once he was done, we went to his place, ate, took long, frigid walks down Fifth Avenue or through Central Park, and talked—or rather, he did. I cherished his every word, his intonation, the pauses and hesitations of his speech. He prefaced many of his confidences with “I don't tell anyone this, Chiquita,” which made me feel included in his life, privy to secrets.

Ulvi hired a writer to create new subtitles for the film. He worried that the money he had left was dribbling away into making the movie attractive to American audiences. Evenings, after he walked me to the train station, he went to Manos's apartment above the Acropolis restaurant on West 57th Street to work on the score. Manos didn't like to compose during the day, Ulvi said, so their sessions began after eleven at night and ended in the early hours. It was an exhausting schedule, but Manos claimed his creativity was at its peak late at night. Since Manos had won an Academy Award for
Never on Sunday,
Ulvi felt he must indulge him. He hoped that Manos's score would increase interest in his film.

When I worried about his health because he worked so hard, Ulvi thanked me but said he had no choice. “This is my only chance, Chiquita,” he confided.

Over the next few weeks my days, evenings, and weekends were consumed by Ulvi. I didn't spend time with anyone else—not my family, not my friends, not my cousin Alma. Able to afford dance classes again, I stopped going to them after Ulvi and I went to a Satyajit Ray movie.

“That's the kind of dance I do,” I told him, referring to the Bharata Natyam sequence at the beginning of the film.

“Is ridiculous dance,” was Ulvi's opinion. “Not for you.”

The next time I went to a workshop, I watched myself in the studio mirror, self-conscious about the stylized movements, the affected expressions, the atonal music. I looked ridiculous in my sari and ankle bells, the dot in the middle of my forehead.

From then on, every free moment was devoted to him. While Ulvi worked on his film, I read in a corner of the editing room. Sometimes I was sent out for coffee or lunch, or to pick up or deliver a package. Johan, who rented the other Movieola in the suite, asked me to translate his film. He and his brother Fritz had documented an archaeological expedition into the Colombian jungle. Many of the scenes were in Spanish, a language neither Johan nor Fritz understood. I translated the Spanish scenes into English, then translated the whole film into Spanish so that he could have a movie in each language.

While he and Hans edited, I saw scenes with a younger, ardent Ulvi but never viewed the entire movie from beginning to end. The nude scenes were skillfully shot, one in a cornfield, another in front of a loom on which was stretched a half-finished carpet. The actress looked enough like Hulya that, through clever lighting and positioning of her face, the transitions were smooth, if not perfect.

Days in the garment center, I failed to come up with evocative names for primary colors. I couldn't type a letter without wasting ten sheets of stationery. Iris's busy schedule meant that I
was often alone in the office, overcome with boredom, willing the phone to ring so that I could take a message. It felt wrong to collect a salary when I had nothing to do, so I decided to improve my secretarial skills. I bought the book
Teach Yourself the Gregg Shorthand Method,
but between Spanish, English, Spanglish, high school French, the Turkish that came backwards and forwards from the Movieola, and the German that Ulvi, Hans, and Johan spoke among themselves, there was no more room in my brain for another language.

Mami no longer asked where I'd been, who I'd been with, what I'd been doing. It was as if, with ten other children to look after, my activities held no interest for her as long as I was home every night. I seldom saw my sisters and brothers, because I made it a point to leave the house as early as possible and returned way past everyone's bedtime. One Sunday, Ulvi couldn't see me because he had to visit friends in Long Island. I planned to stay home that day, but two hours after I woke up, I left the house, suffocated by the clutter and disarray, the confusion, the people running in and out of rooms, up and down the stairs. I longed for Ulvi's quiet, austere room, its systematic order no longer sinister but soothing. Without him there, however, I couldn't go to his apartment. I spent the day at the movies, watched the double feature twice, and came home at the same time as always.