a story about a woman tricked and trapped in a marriage
A novella set in Turkey about a real estate developer from the USA who gets caught in a romantic trap once she sets her sights on a piece of property outside Marmaris in the land of the peargrowers.
Excerpt
The trouble is that once caught in the net, the bird doesn’t know if he is himself or one of his too many duplicates. --Eugenio Montale
Paradise cannot but be
An amphitheater. (And the curtain’s been lowered on someone...) --Marina Tsvetaeva
I.
The first time I saw Betsy she was standing on the wharf in Marmaris with a child on one hip and a smile fixed on her face like a grommet, as if lipstick had been applied not so much for color as for reinforcement, to hold her welcome in place. Actually I wasn’t included in that bold red smile; it was put on for her aunt and uncle I found out later on, although she said of course she’d spotted me on board straight away. “We Anglos do glow in the dark here.”
Betsy had me pegged from a hundred feet out to sea, and
I didn’t know how, maybe my appearance, more likely my money. People always assume wealth is an American trait, like mustaches on Turks. I am American by birth rather than choice, since the man who raised me, my great uncle Etienne de Biche, was an unabashed snob about being French and made sure I grew up aware that all my advantages sprang from this. He never married nor had children of his own. In fact, he scoffed at marriage, calling it a capitulation, as if the opposite sex were the enemy and passion but a lure. It was rumored that he’d once been engaged to a woman who died tragically young in a riding accident and that he gave up racing horses and took to travel to escape a broken heart, but I don’t buy any of that. If he was escaping anything, it was probably his own eligibility. At any rate, my great uncle died a bachelor. And I inherited many things from him, including money, but it is this trait more than anything, this suspicious rejection of ordinary forms of love for romantic adventure, this inherent need to prowl around the world looking for new places to experience old pleasures, or even old pains, that took me to the Mediterranean resort of Marmaris in Turkey.
When I saw Betsy standing on the dock as still and solitary as a statue I may have had an inkling of the importance she would have.
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