Luminous Airplanes. Paul Farge La
wrote that game, didn’t you? We played it for days. We played it all summer.” Actually Kerem hadn’t played it at all. I was amused at what his memory was doing to the past, how he was making me grander than I had ever been. One look at Yesim and I decided to let his misrepresentations stand.
We finished the bottle of wine, and Kerem remembered another, a gift from the Karmans last Christmas. Soon I was telling Kerem and Yesim that content management was a misnomer, actually what I had managed was discontent, my own, mostly. Every project was the same, every client was looking for a way to turn the Internet into one of those ads you see on late-night television, for the carrot peeler that also makes soup. The only difference among them was that some clients wanted to give you the peeler for free and charge for the carrots, whereas others wanted you to pay for the peeler up front. Yesim’s lips and teeth were stained purple. She wiped her mouth with her napkin, and our eyes met. She seemed to be asking me, what do you want? A question to which I had no answer.
Finally the meal was over. Kerem said, “How about some coffee, sis?” and Yesim carried our plates into the kitchen. “We have this great Chilean coffee,” Kerem told me. “Can you believe it, great coffee in Thebes? We get it from the new grocery, they have everything.” He grinned. “You know who owns that place?” I couldn’t imagine why he thought I would care, but before he could tell me, Yesim came in with the coffee. I asked what she had been doing since I saw her last.
“Oh, me,” she said. “Actually, there isn’t much to tell. I was living in Albany, then my father got sick, and I came back up here. Now I’m a ski-resort administrator.” She looked at Kerem, as if, oddly, she were judging him.
I asked what she had been doing in Albany, but Yesim didn’t answer, and it fell to Kerem to wave his hand vaguely over his glass. “Yesim is a born manager. She’s the one who keeps things going. I like to think of myself as an idea guy, but the truth is, without Yesim, I’d be nowhere. Snowbird would be nowhere. Even my father admits it.”
“My brother is a little drunk,” Yesim said.
Kerem lifted his glass. “Drunk enough to tell the truth. To my sister!” But the glass was empty. “Yesim, there’s a bottle of Scotch in the cabinet over the refrigerator . . .”
“You can get it. I’m going upstairs.” Yesim touched my shoulder as she went past and said I shouldn’t leave without saying goodbye.
Kerem got the bottle of Scotch and two glasses and I followed him into the living room, where he poured us about half a glass each. He used to hate the stuff, he said, but there was some kind of rule that lawyers had to drink Scotch. He stuck his hands into the tangles of his hair. “Holy shit, I’m a lawyer,” he said, and collapsed into his recliner. This time the footrest came up.
I slumped on the sofa, and we drank what he told me was a very good Scotch, from an island where they fertilized the soil with goat shit, could I believe that, goat shit? No, it wasn’t goat shit, really, you can’t trust what lawyers say, lawyers are always making up the most fantastic crap. The conversation slipped away from me. Kerem was talking about how his wife had been freaking out ever since someone broke into her Lincoln Navigator, and wanted to bring Max to live with Kerem in the mountains, the mountains, she said, as though these were real mountains, as though this was fucking Colorado, and of course it wasn’t going to happen, in a couple of weeks she’d calm down and tease him again for being a survivalist, which, in fact, she’d already called him, as though his move to Thebes had been part of some plan, Kerem said, as though he had planned any of this.
Then he was telling me about his sister, who was, he said, a poet, and had been in trouble. “What she needs,” Kerem said, “is encouragement.” He made me promise that I would encourage her. “We’re going to get through this,” he said, and he told me that, if I stayed around, I would see, the glory days were coming back to Thebes, but by this point the conversation had escaped from me entirely, and all I remember are images: rosy clouds against a pale-blue sky, trumpets, people dancing in a tent, things Kerem can’t have said. I had to go to the bathroom, so I stood up and hit my shin against the coffee table. The pain was unbearable. I hopped around the living room, and when I stopped I was sober again, but exhausted, as though I’d just sat through a very long film. Yesim had already gone to bed. I said goodbye to her brother and staggered across the little gulf that separated the Regenzeits from the Rowlands. I lay on the sofa, got up, took off my clothes and lay down again. I thought of Yesim, and what it would have been like if I had followed her into the kitchen, reached around from behind and cupped her breasts, and if I had just, and if I had only.
REGENZEIT
Kerem was four years older than I was; in the beginning he was my champion, my protector. In the stories I told myself, which were largely plagiarized from J.R.R. Tolkien and Lloyd Alexander, Kerem was the prince and I was the squire. I trudged across the wilderness in his footsteps, because even my most fantastic daydreams involved a fair amount of trudging, and when the imaginary wind froze me, Kerem loaned me his cloak and I was warm. This went on until puberty stripped Kerem of his princely qualities. One summer he went away to a soccer camp and returned with formidable legs, a slouch and a new way of talking, or, more precisely, of not talking. I had no claim on his attention; the most I could get from him was “Unh,” as he noodled past on his way to some incomprehensible teenage activity. That summer I was friends only with Yesim, who was just my age. She was willing to try my games, but with her for a companion all our quests got muddled. We trudged across the landscape, but I didn’t know what we were trudging toward or what we’d do when we got there. Then it became clear that we were headed toward Yesim’s bedroom.
“You are Prince Charming,” she said, “and I am Sleeping Beauty.”
She threw herself onto her twin bed and closed her eyes. For a long time neither of us moved. Then Yesim looked at me and said, “What are you waiting for?”
“I don’t know. What happens now?”
“You kiss me, and I wake up.”
She returned to her slumber. I leaned forward and kissed her forehead. Yesim burst out laughing. “That’s not how you do it.”
“You’re awake,” I pointed out.
“If you can’t do better than that,” she said, “I’m going to make you a dwarf.”
I didn’t have anything against dwarves, who were, in Tolkien’s work at least, noble and tough, dwarves who had their own runic alphabet and their kingdom underground, but I didn’t want Yesim to be unhappy. “OK,” I said. I leaned toward her.
Yesim recoiled. “What are you doing? You have to wait for me to go to sleep.”
We tried the whole thing again. I leaned in and kissed her lips. Yesim opened her eyes. “Finally,” she said. “Now, go out, and come back in.”
“Why?”
“Narcolepsy,” Yesim hissed, a word I didn’t understand.
I knew we were playing a strange game, but I didn’t know what was strange about it until Mrs. Regenzeit caught me coming down the stairs and said, “You are a leetle beet in love with my daughter. That is all right. Just you do not try to marry her.”
“I’m not in love with her,” I said. “Besides, I’m too young to be married.”
“This is true, fortunately for us all.”
I asked if Yesim was engaged, which sent Mrs. Regenzeit into a coughing fit of malicious amusement. “No,” she said. “She is too young, also. But when the time comes, she will marry a Turkish boy.”
I accepted her proclamation dutifully. Besides, I knew for a fact that there were no Turkish boys in Thebes but her brother. I had time. So I played along with Yesim’s stories, which only got stranger as the summer went on. I sat for an afternoon at the foot of the forbidden tower (or bed), listening to the princess read aloud from Nancy Drew’s Dos and Don’ts for Girls; I stumbled around in the enchanted forest (Yesim’s bedroom, with the lights off) and was thwacked with cushions by