You Are Always Safe With Me (16 page)

At home, women she knew through school or her various classes, women who were her age and in her unmarried state, often took lovers when the opportunity arose, but mostly for entertainment and temporary pleasure. Those who confided in Lilly admitted they expected nothing permanent, that most of the men who were not married were pretty reliably “the walking wounded.” (Two of the women she knew, both in their forties and believing they would never marry, had applied to adopt baby girls from orphanages in China.)

But here, in Turkey, Lilly seemed to have lost all cynicism and skepticism. She felt strangely newborn. She could be sixteen now and it wouldn’t surprise to discover she actually was.

*

She was quite good at kayaking. She was strong, and she followed close behind Izak as he skirted the edges of the cliffs, pointing out to her various ruins and tombs above, and below small yellow-nosed fish, swarming in schools among the shallows.

He called back to her, “I thought maybe I bring food for us, but I can’t leave boat for too long. No problem to worry though. Many pleasure boats in cove, no one will be doing harm to my boat, I think.”

“Shall we go back now?”

“First, follow me…just a little…”

He set forth again around the curve of the cove they had entered and when they rounded the edge of the cliff, she saw a fish fly out of the water, arc in the air, and splash down again. Suddenly others flew after the first; like a flurry of fireworks, the fish flew up, danced in the sky, and dove underwater again.

Izak glanced back and laughed at Lilly’s delight. “Now follow again.” He moved out toward deeper water, and she followed till he stopped paddling. When Lilly caught up with him, he pointed and she followed his direction. An enormous sea turtle was visible just under the surface of the sea, its fins flapping like wings and its great shell rising almost to where she could touch it.

“Oh, this is wonderful,” she called to Izak.

“Yes,” he said. “Very much wonderful. They live very long time, sea turtles. I show you many beautiful things.”

“Your wonderful world,” she said. “I love it.”

*

She followed him back, feeling her feet had grown into the kayak, that she was a kayak-mermaid, a woman from the waist up, a kayak below. She could give up walking and never miss it. Izak too could be soldered in his kayak, he and she could live together in the sea forever and have little kayak-babies.

It must be sun-stroke, or close to it, giving her these thoughts! But she was utterly elated and content. She was not tired at all, and she followed Izak back to the
Ozymandias
without faltering or missing a stroke of her paddle.

As Lilly approached the
Ozymandias
in her kayak, the boat looked to her like a fortress, solid and impervious. At the same time it appeared as a mirage, a floating continent, a dream universe. The water was so calm the boat sat as if perched upon a silver mirror. She saw twin images, itself and its reflection: two boats, with their tall masts, graceful bows, and sturdy hulls. Behind them was a hill of pine trees and above a brilliant blue sky.

Paddling slightly ahead of her, Izak seemed at one with these dream-like images, a man from the waist up and a boat below, as if he had merged physically with the sea.

All of Lilly’s perceptions were heightened. Had she swallowed some hallucinogen, some magic mushroom of the mind?

Izak called over his shoulder to her, “I get out first, Lilly. Then help you.”

There was no hurry, she wanted to tell him. She was happy to stay there, a kayak mermaid in her enchanted state. All too soon the clock would strike twelve, the kayak would turn into a pumpkin and the fairy tale would end.

*

He carried her up the ladder without effort, a feat of such balance, dexterity and acrobatic accuracy that she marveled at it. Why were prizes not given for gifts such as Izak’s? Oscars were awarded to actors who said words that others had invented, crowns were set on the heads of those who had merely been born into the right family, fortunes were conferred on those who bought lottery tickets. Yet in every small village and city in every country in the world were men and women who were skilled in their special knowledge, people who sang and danced and told stories, fished and jackhammered holes and strung wires and taught children and nursed others and received no recognition.

*

As Lilly rested on the deck pad, she could smell broiling meat that Izak was cooking for lunch in the galley. The silence of the empty cove, the stilled motors of the boat, the delicate breeze in her hair, the vista of blue-green water, conferred on her such a deep sense of peace that she wanted to give thanks for it. She was not in the habit of imagining there was “someone to thank.” The world was a random accident, so far as she could see, yet to look upon its beauty at this moment was to imagine that it had been created: (“‘My name is
Ozymandias
, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’”)

But if each life and its beauties were created, there was also built into the plan a perfect, timed destruction. If she could only
stop
time, arrest the moment and not allow it to grind mercilessly on. Could not a moment so sweet as this be prevented from passing? Was it the
movement
of time that made life so precious? An old conundrum, she knew, but at times a common idea would strike her mind with enormous force, as if no one had ever thought it before. Why
not
be here forever? Would life be as precious as it now was, or then seem no better than a prison sentence?

Izak came up the stairs, smiling in a new way she’d not seen before, a bolder smile, holding a tray above his head. He set a feast before her at the table. Broiled lamb, cheese crepes, melon salad, cucumber and yogurt sauce.

“How did you make this so fast?”

“I chef, also. For three years I work in famous restaurant in Antalya.”

He sat beside her on the foam pad and poured her cold pear juice from a carton. They ate hungrily, not talking till they had finished the food.

“It’s so strange, with everyone gone away,” Lilly said, finally.

“But good, yes?”

“Very good.”

“Saklikent Gorge. All day walking, climbing. You must have two good feet. Another time, maybe.”

“There won’t be another time, Izak. We all leave the boat in two days.”

“Another year then. You can come back.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “There will never be another cruise like this.”

“Turkey be here. I be here.”

“
Be here now,”
she reminded herself, but said, “Oh, please don’t make me feel sad.” She meant to say it lightly, but something convulsed in her throat and her eyes filled with tears.

“Oh Lilly, I hate for you to be sad,” Izak said, and put his arm around her, pulling her to his chest. She let him cradle her head against him and inhaled the smell of his salty sweat, felt his steady heartbeat next to her cheek.

“You know, I want this the whole time,” he said. “Holding you.”

“Me, too.”

“I never feel this before. I work many cruises. Many women sailing. None like you. None like my soul. None like my
family
.”

“I am not even Moslem,” Lilly said. “How can I be like you?”

“Atatürk made new world. Two hearts the same—this okay for him.”

They were sitting awkwardly at the table till Izak gently pulled her back against the bolsters of the deck pad. She rested her head on his shoulder. Both of them looked up at the sky.

“I don’t know anything about your life,” Lilly said. “If you have a mother and father, sisters, brothers?”

“Three brothers, younger and I am oldest. We care for our mother. She has house in Bodrum. You also care for mother, I see. So in this way we are the same.”

“My father died a few months ago.”

“My father dead a long time. Your mother, she has kind heart. She sleeps on bench on deck, like me.”

“I watch you both every night,” Lilly said. “The two of you: my mother and you, the two people I…” She could not finish the sentence.

“Yes?”

“Love! The two people I love! Because you are also someone I love.” She heard herself say this and considered it exactly the truth, not because of too much sun or because this was one of those shipboard romances about which her mother had warned her. It was simply a fact of her existence.

“I have love for you, also,” he said. “What we can do I don’t know.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know either.”

They stopped talking. She kissed his neck, his cheek, and turned her face upward for him to kiss her mouth.

“Oh,” she said after he had kissed her.

“You are afraid now. I’m sorry. I don’t want…”

“No! No! Not afraid! Oh God, no.”

Neither of them were children, they had lived in their bodies and understood them. The sensation she felt was not so much one of physical hunger—though she felt it strongly—but a sense of resolution, of coming home after years of wandering. Of peace.

She invited him further by lying back on the canvas of the pad and lifting her arms to him, summoning him into them.

“I would like,” he said. “So much to do this.”

“But?”

“But I am not safe.”

She understood at once what he meant. Amazing that she hadn’t thought of this, that this kind of safety had not crossed her mind. What could she say? She was in fact not safe, either. She was mid-cycle, at her most fertile time, though how likely was she to conceive this one time? Teenagers thought this way, and after their one time, they learned—all too often—exactly how likely it was. But teenagers were teenagers and she was forty. And what
if
she were to conceive? The thought brought her a thunderbolt of joy! The possibility astonished her and filled her with longing.

She was about to tell him this when he pulled himself to his feet, turned his back to her and went quickly below to the galley. His pulling away was like a vacuum sucking out her air. She felt hollow, short of breath, as if she’d been punched. She fell back against the hot green cloth and let the sun make black shapes under her eyelids.

*

When he came back, he was carrying bowls of chocolate and vanilla ice cream. His face was composed. He was offering her, instead of himself, something sweet, a consolation. He fed the ice cream to her with a delicacy and attention that was a mixture of apology and protection.

“We think more about what we can do. Rest here with me. I hold you quietly. Then we swim,” he said.

*

They dozed in the warmth till they were too hot to lie any longer in the sun. Lilly, still in her swimsuit from the morning of kayaking, said she wanted to swim.

“I carry you down,” Izak said, standing, and swinging her into his arms.

“Oh, I am too heavy,” she said.

“Then maybe I throw you over rail. Yes, you like that?”

“I’m too scared,” she said, laughing.

“You are always safe with me,” he said. “I will never let a bad thing happen to you.”

He carried her to the edge of the boat and pretended to throw her over the side. She clutched him around the neck. They were both laughing like children, giddily, for pure joy. She felt the smile on her face as wide as the sea. “
Remember this
,” she instructed herself. “
What it feels like to smile this way.”
Then he carried her halfway down the ladder, but only halfway. “Now I throw you, yes?”

“Yes,” she agreed. He flung her forward and she sank under the water, feeling it rush over her head and then reverse her direction so that she bobbed up, her hair in her mouth, laughing. He was still above her, on the ladder, and then dove perfectly into the sea.

They swam beside one another easily in the buoyant water; she thought perhaps whales or dolphins might feel this way—swimming with their mates in the turquoise spaces of the sea. What freedom this was, the purest kind, pure existence: sun, water, wind, and love.

They swam a long distance, side by side, pausing to rest in water that lifted them up and allowed them to stand almost upright without effort. Izak pointed out some ruins high on a cliff, another Roman city, another society left in rubble. So many lives, lived and ended. Lilly had the sense that all the spirits who had ever lived here were circling the cove where they swam. The richness of life was renewable, though not everlasting. Babies were the only recourse to continuation. Babies who were fresh as new flowers, precious as all of life. They began to swim back toward the boat; she was aware of fish below, birds above, and babies crying and laughing in all the little villages perched on the hillsides.

*

When they had rested a while on the deck, Izak said, “I would like now to give you massage,” he said. “But only that. Don’t worry, you know how I mean.”

“Yes, I know how you mean. And I would love that—just a massage.”

He helped her to the foredeck and settled her carefully face down on one of the single lounge cushions, then opened the little trap door to his quarters and disappeared below. He returned with a bottle of lotion that he spread on his hand and then rubbed into her back. She gave herself up to it, his fingers, the pressure of his thumbs along her spine, the sense of him kneeling first beside her on the deck, and then, when he straddled her body, the overwhelming sense of surrender to his strength, his superiority. She had known nothing like this in her life, this willingness to give herself over to another person, to
trust absolutely
.

“You like this?” he said.

“Oh yes, but I don’t want to talk.”

“Then good, we are silent.” He continued to move his hands along her skin, he covered the map of her body with his markers, his touch, his smell, his control. And suddenly she was overcome with limpness, drowsiness. She wanted to hang on but she could not, she was slipping, falling into a velvet envelope, a royal blue darkness filled her, she was experiencing an ecstasy, and she felt herself slip into sleep.

*

When she woke, the sun had set. She sat up, faced into the breeze and let the night air cool her face. The deck lights had not been turned on as they usually were at this hour; she could see the shore clearly, the lit windows of homes on the hills and the bright signs of cafes below in the town.