They get hitched under his family chuppah in the window of a storefront theater in Andersonville, the same neighborhood where they’ll live with the baby, born two years later. There are candles and flowers, and strangers walk by, gawking; the woman wears a long dress. A week later, she’ll move to Istanbul and the man will stay here; but that night, they sing along to Tom Waits.
A flight attendant hands her a Turkish breakfast. Clotted cream, simit, tea. She would live in the lojmanlar, number yermi yeti kat iki; when he arrives, it is snowing. He writes poems in the guest room of the well-appointed two-bedroom condo, something like the Hilton, new and shiny and generic. Not home, but a home, he whispers. From the lojman window, she can glimpse the Black Sea.
