Last Boat to Kadıköy

You kept the coat.

I saw it before I saw you. It was on the third hook in your hall, where I had left it eight years ago on the last night, navy wool, a bit shiny at the cuffs, hanging with its shoulders squared as if it had been waiting to be asked back into the room. The light from the stairwell fell across it. Behind me the lift cage rattled down toward the street, and I stood in your doorway with rain running off my hair, and I thought, well, that’s one question answered, and I haven’t even opened my mouth.

“You’re wet,” you said.

You stood there in your socks, pushing your reading glasses up your forehead with one hand and holding a Turkish paperback, its spine broken, in the other, and I saw that your beard had gone almost entirely silver while I wasn’t looking. You filled the doorway. I had forgotten exactly how much of it you filled.

“I took the last boat,” I said. “From Karaköy. The man on the pier told me there wasn’t another one till morning, so I either had to come here or sleep on the quay with the cats.”

“And the cats were not an option.”

“They looked very judgemental.”

You didn’t smile. You studied me for a long time, from my wet hair down to my shoes, and then past me down the stairs as if there might be somebody else coming up behind. There wasn’t. I had come on my own, with no cameraman and no story. I had not even told my sister.

“The coat is still here,” I said, which was an idiotic thing to say.

“The moths and I have looked after it.” Your voice had barely changed, low and dry and in no hurry. “I took it to be cleaned twice. They wanted to throw it away. I said no.”

“Why?”

“It is a good coat.” You stepped back and held the door wider. “Come in, Hugh. You will catch cold. I do not want to spend the weekend nursing a sick Englishman.”

It was the weekend, then, and not just the night. I let that run through me like warm tea, and I came in, and I hung my wet jacket on the fourth hook, next to the coat, and I did not touch it.

I had rehearsed a speech on the boat, out on the open deck at the stern with the wind in my face and one old man feeding a gull his simit, and now, in your warm hall, every word was gone. All I had was the smell of your flat, which was onions and lemon cologne, the smell of those years. I stood there like a man who had come to read the meter.

---

You gave me a towel and a pair of your enormous woollen socks, and we sat on the balcony under the plastic awning with the rain tapping on it and the whole of the Marmara spread out in the dark beyond the roofs. A ferry lit up like a chandelier was crossing slowly toward Europe. There was a smell of wet pine and of coal smoke from somebody’s stove. You poured the tea into the little tulip glasses without asking whether I wanted any.

“Your mother,” I said. “I wrote when I heard. I should have come.”

“You wrote. It was a good letter.” You turned your glass a quarter turn on its saucer. “She did not know me for the last two years. She called me by my father’s name. I do not think it would have helped for you to be here.”

“It might have helped you.”

“Perhaps.” You looked out at the water. “I was angry with you for a long time, Hugh. Not because you left. I told you to go. Washington was your job, and you would have hated me in a year if you had stayed here and become a man who sold sweaters in the Grand Bazaar.” The ghost of a smile touched your mouth and went. “I was angry because you went so easily.”

“It wasn’t easy.”

“It looked easy.”

“I sat in a toilet cubicle at Heathrow for twenty minutes. I was forty-four years old and a man knocked to ask whether I was all right.” I found that I was holding the glass hard enough to hurt. “I thought if I asked you to come, you would say no, because of your mother, and I’d have to hear it. And if you said yes, I’d have taken you away from the only place you could be yourself, and I couldn’t do that either. So I didn’t ask. I’m sorry. I was a coward about it, and I called it respect.”

You said nothing. A foghorn sounded somewhere out on the water.

“I took the redundancy in October,” I said. “The newsroom is half the size it was, and my flat in Walthamstow is on the market. I’m not here for a story. I got on a plane on Friday with a bag, and I stayed in a hotel in Sultanahmet for one night and walked about until I couldn’t do it anymore, and tonight I took the boat.” I drew a breath. “I’m not asking for what we had. I know eight years is a long time. You may have someone. I should have asked that before I rang your bell. But I’d like to be in a room with you where nobody’s leaving. Just for tonight, if that’s what you’ve got.”

“I do not have someone,” you said. “There was a man for a year. A dentist. He wanted to go to Antalya.” You put your glass down. “I am fifty-seven. I snore. My knee is bad on the left. I will not move to Walthamstow.”

“I’m not asking you to.”

“I know what you are asking.” You reached over then and took my hand, which was cold, in yours, which was not. Your thumb moved over my knuckles. “Do you want this, or do you want what we had? They are different. I would like to know which one is knocking on my door.”

I thought about it honestly. The rain went on.

“This,” I said. “You, tonight, as you are now. Old and bad-kneed and snoring. I haven’t the faintest idea about anything after that.”

“Good,” you said. “That is the right answer. Come inside.”

---

You took me to bed the way you always did, as though nothing in the world was urgent, which had always driven me mad. You switched on the lamp on the far side, hung my borrowed socks on the radiator, and sat on the edge of the mattress and held out your hand, and I stood in front of you in my shirt, fifty-two years old and unbelievably nervous, in a body that no longer resembled the one you remembered.

“Take off the shirt,” you said.

“I’ve got a belly now.”

“I have a belly. We will compare.” You unbuttoned me yourself, from the bottom, and the shirt fell open and you laid your big warm palm on my stomach and left it there. “Mine is better. Yours is very nice. I have wanted my face in it since 2017.”

My legs went soft. You caught me by the hips and pulled me onto the bed, and the next thing I knew we were kissing, and it was exactly as I remembered and also new, because your beard was silver and your mouth was greedier than it had been and you tasted of tea and your hands were everywhere. You got my trousers open. You got your own shirt off, and there was your chest, that great barrel of dark-silver fur, the old scar on your shoulder from a stone thrown at a protest in Taksim, and I put my mouth on it.

“Gel buraya,” you muttered. “Come here, come here.”

“God, I’ve missed this chest,” I said into it. “I’ve missed the weight of you on top of me. I’ve jerked off to the memory of your voice, you know. In Washington. In a hotel in Georgetown with the curtains shut.”

“Tell me,” you said, and your hand went into my trousers. “Tell me exactly how.”

So I told you, in my own words, a little breathless, while you stroked me slow, and you listened with your eyes shut and your mouth against my temple, and swore softly in Turkish at the best parts.

You sat back on the edge of the bed and I got down between your knees on the rug. You were already hard in your trousers, a heavy shape against the cloth, and I undid the buttons one at a time with my teeth out of sheer vanity, and you laughed. Then I had you in my hand, thick and hot, the same weight in my palm after eight years. I breathed you in. I licked you from the root to the head, slowly, the way I used to when I had all the time in the world and you were pretending not to care, and I felt your thighs shift on either side of me.

“Hugh.”

“Mm?”

“Do not be gentle, Hugh. Take your time and do it properly.”

“Then stop whispering,” I said, “and let me.”

I took you into my mouth.

I took my time over it, tongue flat and lips wet, taking as much as I could, drawing back to breathe, going down again with a noise I wasn’t proud of. You tasted of salt and warm skin. Your hand came down to rest on my head, not guiding, just there, heavy and warm, and your breathing slowed and deepened, and above me you said a long string of Turkish I’d never learned, low and hoarse.

“What does that mean?”

“It means,” you said, “that in my memory you were good at this, and tonight you are better than my memory. Your mouth is a sin, Hugh. Come here before I finish too soon.”

You pulled me up off the rug and onto the bed and rolled me under you, all that weight, all that heat, and I stopped being embarrassed about anything. Your mouth went down my chest and over my belly, and you did put your face in it, as promised, with your beard rough on the skin, and then you went lower, and I heard myself make a noise I had never made in front of a lamp.

“Orhan. Oh, God. Wait.”

“I do not wait,” you said into my thigh. “I have waited eight years. You taste the same. Spread for me, güzelim. Wider. Let me hear you.”

I let you hear me.

You took the water-based lube and a rubber from the bedside drawer and warmed the lube in your palm. When your finger touched me I flinched and then pushed into it, and you hummed, a low pleased sound, and said in English, “Yes. Good.” You were so patient. Your fingers worked into me, one, then two, then the slow stretch of a third while I clutched the headboard and swore in two languages. You never hurried and you never stopped talking, low and unbroken, mostly nonsense, mostly in Turkish, interrupted at intervals by “yes, good, like that, relax for me” in English. When I was shaking and wet and begging, you stopped.

“What do you want, Hugh? Say it plainly.”

“In me, Orhan. Take me until I can’t remember Washington.”

“How?”

I thought of the wardrobe. Of the long mirror on its door, a leftover of your mother’s from Kuzguncuk, that stood at the foot of your bed and had seen us a hundred times in a different life. I looked at it now across your shoulder and saw the two of us in the lamplight, a pair of big middle-aged men in a heap.

“On your back,” I said. “And I’ll sit on you. Facing the mirror. I want to watch.”

“Ah.” Something dark and delighted crossed your face. “You remember.”

“I remember everything.”

You rolled the rubber on, one plain practised movement, and lay back against the pillows with your hands behind your head and your belly rising and falling, grinning at me. I climbed over you, turned my back to you, and lowered myself slowly until the head of you was pressed against me.

“Slowly,” you said. “I have you.”

I sat. You went in slowly, a fierce wide stretch that made me hiss, and your hands came up and closed around my hips and held without pushing, steady as stone. I let my breath go, and then again. Then I was down on you completely, with your thighs under mine and the whole hot heavy length of you filling me, and I opened my eyes and saw us in the glass.

I had never seen myself like that, flushed and open-mouthed, my chest hair dark with sweat, and behind me in the wardrobe door was you, huge and silver-bearded against the pillows, with your eyes fixed on mine in the glass.

“Watch us,” you said.

“I am.”

“Move.”

I moved. I rose up on my knees and came down again, and the motion was slow at first and then not, and every drop was a long, filthy drag that made me gasp aloud. In the mirror my face did things I had no control over. You watched it, and your fingers dug into my hips, and you started to talk.

“That is how you look when you take me. You never knew. Eight years I have thought about this face. You are so hot inside, my love. You hold me as if you do not want to let go.” You rocked up under me, short and deep, and I yelped. “Do you want to let go?”

“No.”

“Say it in English.”

“No. Fuck. Don’t let me.” I couldn’t hold on to my own sentences. “Oh, Orhan, there, right there, that’s it.”

“Güzelim.” Beautiful. You said it into my back, hoarse. “Faster. Show me how much you want me. Use me, Hugh. Fuck yourself on my cock.”

“Like this?” I said. “Is this what you wanted? Christ, Orhan, you’re so deep.”

“Deeper, canım. Sit down on my balls.” You said it low, almost conversationally, and I whimpered and did as I was told.

I braced my hands on your knees and drove myself down on you, over and over, as hard as my thighs would allow, and the bed slammed against the wall and the wardrobe door shivered in its frame, and the two of us shook in the glass like something seen through water. I heard myself gasping out loud, half laughing at the plain astonishment of it, held and fucked by the one man who had never made me feel there was anything to hide. My cock was bobbing wet against my stomach, red and desperate.

“Do not touch it,” you said.

“I want to.”

“I know. Do not. Come from me. Let me watch you do it.” You reached up and turned my chin with two fingers so I faced the mirror. “I want your face in the glass, Hugh. I have waited so long.”

I couldn’t have touched myself. I’d have missed. I rode you with everything I had, the pleasure climbing, my thighs burning and my cock leaking down my belly, and you held my hips and rocked up to meet me with each stroke, deep and wicked, your breath coming rough against my spine.

“Orhan,” I said. “I’m going to…”

“Yes.”

“I can’t stop it. Oh, God, I’m…”

“Now, Hugh. Let me watch.”

I came. I came helplessly, my whole body clenching and shaking, and it burst out of me in long white pulses that streaked my own chest and splashed the sheet between your knees. I saw it all happen in the mirror, the wild open mouth, the heave of the shoulders, your face behind me going slack with awe. Then you swore in Turkish, and sat up behind me all at once and wrapped both arms around my chest and dragged me back against you, and thrust up once, twice, hard, and cried out, a great hoarse broken sound that I felt in my own ribs, and was shaking against me, pouring into me through the rubber, your forehead pressed between my shoulder blades.

For a long time we were still. The rain tapped on the roof. Down at the foot of the bed, in the mirror, two men sat in a heap with their arms around each other and their grey heads together.

“Hugh,” you said eventually, into my back.

“Yes.”

“You are heavier than before.”

“So are you.”

“I know.” I felt you laugh against my spine. “It is a very good thing. We are heavy together.”

---

In the morning I woke before you. It was a clear bright cold day, the sky washed clean, and the light through the balcony door lay across the bed in a long bar. You were on your back with one arm flung over your head, snoring gently, with your mouth a little open. I lay a while and listened to it. A good, ordinary sound, and I had missed it.

At some point in the night you had pulled the quilt up over us both, and I had never noticed. On the bedside table, next to a glass of water I did not remember pouring, lay the book you’d been reading when I rang, still marked with a bus ticket at page forty. I thought, you stopped reading when I arrived, and I turned that over for a minute like a coin.

At the end of the street a man was selling simit from a glass-fronted cart, a stack of sesame rings with the steam coming off them. I could smell them from the bed. I got up, found my clothes, and then stood in the hall with the clean cold light on my face and put on the old navy coat.

It still fitted. It smelled of camphor and cold and, very faintly, of you.

I was halfway down the stairs when I heard the balcony door above me scrape open, and your voice rolled down the stairwell, rough with sleep, in Turkish and then in English.

“Hugh! Where are you going in that terrible coat?”

I went out into the street, and stood on the pavement in the sunshine, and looked up. You were leaning on the balcony rail in your underpants with your hair standing up, a great grey sleepy bear against the blue sky, and the whole street could see you. “For simit!” I shouted. “I’ll be back in five minutes. Put the kettle on, you old bastard.”

“Which kettle?” you called down. “You broke it in 2017!”

“Then buy another one!”

You laughed. I heard it all the way down the street, big and bright, and I walked toward the cart in the best coat I owned, with my hands in the pockets, and in the left-hand pocket I found something that had not been there when I left: a brass ferry token, from a boat that no longer ran. I did not need to ask who had put it there.

I kept it. I’ve got it here. It’s on the kitchen table, next to the kettle you bought.