Free Gorgeous East by null

the aquariumlike box of the third floor. From this vantage Smith could make out every detail: the barely functional stylized furniture, the austere lighting fixtures, the asymmetrical wall hangings made from shredded pop cans interwoven with strands of pure, beaten gold, bought by Vatran and Jessica at the Gagosian Gallery, Mayfair, during their last junket to London. Who could live in such a room? Smith thought bitterly, even though he knew the answer. Who could rip out one-hundred-and fifty-year-old hand-carved cabinets and crenelated alcoves and install this postmodern bullshit?
    Then, a black metal door opened and Jessica, fresh from the bath, entered carrying a large-format fashion magazine and Smith’s heart missed a beat. Her gold-blond hair was wrapped in a blue towel. She was still wearing the plush, expensive terry-cloth robe he had bought her at Barney’s two Christmases ago, when they were still in love. She folded herself onto the uncomfortable sofa in sunlight reflected as green shade through the tinted glass, shook her still-damp hair from the towel and opened the magazine. Long minutes passed as she turned the pages slowly. Smith could see, or perhaps only imagined he saw, water droplets drying on her flesh in the sun, the blond strands of her hair curling as they dried. Desire and pain twisted in his gut; he became conscious of an uncomfortable stiffening in his travel-stained khakis. God, he wanted to fuck her. He’d thought about little else, all throughout the slow, miserable train ride from Paris—across Europe second class, then down through the Balkans on rickety locals, stopping at every sad, one-goat town, the sullen platforms full of half-starved Gypsies and hard-eyed ethnic cleansers in surplus military fatigues, rusty rabbit guns slung over their shoulders.
    Without knowing how it started, Smith felt tears on his face. His emotions in charge suddenly, his heart racing. What the fuck’s wrong with me? he thought desperately. Why am I such miserable bastard? Then control, motherfucker, get control!—these words echoing in his skull like the shrill warning bleat of a diving submarine—but he couldn’t control himself or didn’t want to, and his tears fell to splotch the cobbled pavement. He was thirty-two years old, physically fit, attractive, a moderately successful actor/singer/dancer with ten years of stage experience under his belt—he’d played Freddie for LORT A scale in an Equity production of My Fair Lady at the Guthrie in Minneapolis just a couple of years ago—how many working actors could say they’d done LORT A?—the only place to go from there was Broadway, name-in-lights stuff. And yet he felt finished, spent. Weak as a child with leukemia. And now the tears wouldn’t stop.
    Meanwhile, Jessica basked up there in the warm aquarium sunlight, still turning the big pages of her magazine. The Tünel-Taksim tram rattled along Istiklal Caddesi, packed to the doors with Turks on their way home to the working-class tenements of Dolapdere as the high, thin wail of the muezzin called all pious men to evening prayer.

    2.
    A few minutes later, an old Turkish man, wearing a ribbed woolen cap on his head and a dirty tweed jacket full of holes, clanked up the steps from Istiklal. Strapped to his back was a strange apparatus—a tin-lined wooden box with various brass domes and pipes attached, like a crazy homemade version of a scuba diver’s air tanks. From beneath his left arm protruded a long spigot; tin cups dangled from hooks on the thick belt around his waist. He saw Smith standing half hidden in the shadows and stopped.
    “ Iyi aksamlar ,” the Turk said. “ Nasalsiniz? Çay? Su ?”
    Smith knew enough Turkish to know the Turk wanted to sell him a cup of tea. The old man was one of a dying breed—the itinerant urban tea peddler. They used to wander the byways of Istanbul by the thousands, selling tin cups full of Turkey’s favorite beverage for a few lirasi, less than a penny,