Robert Butler - The Star of Istanbul

Then she said, very softly, “Should I assume by your stopping to clear your throat that we’ve emerged from the fog?”

And though she was guying me, these words came out of her as if it was the saddest thing in the world. As if she was playing Juliet, as if she was saying “O happy dagger, this is thy sheath.”

I firmly pushed that thought away, lest the great Isabel Cobb, whose Juliet I saw a hundred times as a boy, should start filling my head with her voice. The curtain has fallen, Mother. Go away.

Selene’s hands rose, but not to me. She undid her hair and it tumbled down before me, and as far as my body was concerned, she might as well have just sloughed off the kimono: to see the long, black, cascaded fullness of her hair was to see her naked.

And still another remarkable thing: her eyes were filling with tears.

I didn’t know if it was stupid or wise, but I had long before come to the conclusion that you did not ask a woman why she was crying. You didn’t stop her from telling you, if she must, but you did not ask.

I did not ask.

But I did care about this. I lifted my hand, though I wasn’t sure what to do with it. Before I could lower my hand again, she took it. And she turned and led me into her suite. I closed the door behind me.

I had sense enough to keep my mouth closed as well.

She led me from the parlor of her suite to her bedroom, ivory walled and roseate furnished, with settee and dressing table on one side of the room and two single beds on the other, placed foot to foot, one of which she set me on as she stepped back and squared around to face me. The electric lamps burning in sconces on the walls were made to look like candles and she left them on for me to see. She sloughed off the kimono and now she truly was naked, tumbled hair and lamp-ambered skin and tear-sparkled eyes and all.

Though in Mexico I’d begun to learn that this was one of my stupidities with a woman, I still tended, in these matters, simply to pound and then to sleep. But Selene Bourgani would not let that happen on this night. Soon after we’d begun, she whispered to me, “Please go gentle, Kit. Go slow. All this will end too soon as it is.”

And I obeyed her. And she would be right.

But for now, after we’d finished, we did not sleep but held each other close on one of the narrow beds, entwined like the two snakes on Hermes’ staff. We’d been silent for a long while, so I said, “We’re like the two snakes on Hermes’ staff.” She was Greek, after all. I was trying not to doze off.

We were both lying mostly on our sides, facing each other; her cheek was against my chest; my throat was laid on the curve of her head. She moved her head when I said this, tilting her face upward, and though I could not see her eyes, I sensed she was looking up at me. “Of course,” she said. “He was the god of travelers and liars.”

I’d bantered with smart women. I grew up the son of a very smart woman who bantered to beat the band. When a smart woman banters, she means at least half of everything she says. At least. My mother schooled me herself as we steamer-trunked from city to city, theater to theater, schooled me by giving me, through all my learning years, a good three thousand books to read and then asking me, all totaled, a good hundred thousand questions about them. I dared not forget a thing. And from what I remembered of the Greek deities, this was a very selective list of Hermes’ godly patronage, so I figured Selene thought I was a liar. Or she knew she was. Not that we’d had much of a chance to lie to each other yet.

“God of poets too,” I said.

“Are you a poet, Kit Cobb?”

“Nah,” I said. “But if they’d been around at the time, he’d’ve been the god of newspaper writers as well.”

“To fit with the liars?” She lifted her face from my chest. I pulled my head back and looked her in the eyes. The electrical filaments of those phony candles were still burning in the room. I was glad. I liked looking at her face, even if she was ragging me. “He was the messenger of the gods,” I said. “I’m just a messenger, bringing the news.”

She put her head back onto my chest.

“Are you a liar, Selene?”

“Of course,” she said. “I’m an actress.”

I didn’t have an answer for that. We were quiet for a few moments.

Then she said, “I’m sorry.”

“Because you’re an actress?”

“Because I’m a liar.”

There was a little catch in her. “I’m sorry,” she said.

This was about something else.

“That you’re an actress?”

“Yes. But your mother. .”

“It’s all right.”

“I didn’t mean to say. .”

“That she’s a liar too.”

“But we do that.”

Her head felt heavier on my chest, as if she were pressing in, burrowing, hiding. She grew still. I should’ve qualified calling my mother a liar. But I felt Selene struggling with something. I kept quiet.

She said, “An actress is trained to be anyone, to do anything.” She paused and then, very low, Selene said, “An actress is a fallen woman.”

Somewhere outside, distantly on the promenade, in the dark, a woman laughed. Perhaps the lovers from the lifeboat, emerging.

I thought of the newspaper stories of Selene’s life, the few things known about her past. She was Greek, the firstborn of a fisherman and his wife on the island of Andros. Shortly before she was born, her father drowned in a storm in the Cavo d’Oro channel. A week later her mother gave birth, and after swaddling her daughter in a basket and placing her on the doorstep of the local monastery, she threw herself off the lighthouse.

From then until she showed up on the doorstep of the Vitagraph Studios in Brooklyn in 1908, things were mysterious in the biography of Selene Bourgani, yielding to reporters, upon questioning, only her classic profile and her most famous quote, “What little I remembered, I have now forgotten.” She could indeed have become, in those lost years, a spectacularly fallen woman. Or, more likely, a Greek immigrant girl waiting tables in a Hoboken diner with a boyfriend at the coffee factory. As it was, she was billed by Vitagraph as the Most Mysterious Woman in the World. Of course she was a liar.

She shifted now against me, moved her hand along my side and then onto my back, pressed me closer to her.

“Were you really born on Andros?” I said.

This was the wrong thing to ask. I was continuing to learn. It did not occur to me till that moment: if a woman tells you she is a liar, it doesn’t mean she’s suddenly interested in telling the truth.

Selene untangled herself from me. Not angrily. Almost wearily. As if the night had ended and she was sorry for that but it was over.

However, she simply sat up and leaned back against the wall. I was happy to find she was disengaging no further. And I was happy to be looking at her naked, ambered breasts tipped in coffee brown, a part of her I had so far failed to concentrate on as I’d intended.

“You’ve been reading the movie magazines,” she said.

“Newspapers,” I said.

“All lies.” She turned her face to me.

I didn’t answer.

“Willful,” she added.

“The only kind you can trust,” I said.

“Can you get me a cigarette and my wrap?”

“I’m happy to smoke with you, but can’t I look at you a little longer?”

“I’m cold,” she said.

“All this will end too soon as it is,” I said.

She smiled. “Okay. The cigarette will do.”

I moved to the other bed where she and I had thrown the pieces of my tux. I found my cigarettes and matches in my coat and turned back to her. I was also still naked and she was looking at me openly. Was this a pleasure for her — I’d never really considered the possibility of this impulse in a woman — or was she just instructing me some more? I took a step toward our bed and the kimono was lying crumpled on the floor. I bent to it, picked it up, straightened. I was facing her and feeling pretty uncomfortable now, to be dangling nakedly before her watchful eye, which is what I figured she intended.