Yes three ways

And thoughts about a story by Ayşegül Savaş.

Author Ayşegül Savaş (piece on her book below.)

Yes, three ways (by Laurie Stone)

Jim was a liar, as am I. He liked wrapping things: books, a fountain pen, my ankle once when it was burned. He said, “In dreams, you’re all the characters, aren’t you?” I was in bed beside him. A strand of hair was caught in my mouth. I said, “Is this your way of saying you dreamt about me?” He said, “I dreamt about a small horse.” I said, “Close enough.”

I thought about him all the time. It was great. I knew it wouldn’t last. Believe me, I knew. I knew it wouldn’t last past when the skin on my ankle looked normal again. Did I really know? Yes. What does it mean to override what you know? It means you get to have a life.

We drank tequila and ate hard boiled eggs with salt and hunks of bread. It wasn’t me. I went with it. Such is love. I tore apart a lettuce and saw Jim’s face inside. I looked at nerve cells under a microscope, and there was his smile. A friend who wasn’t that nice told me he had a stupid smile, the expression of a car mechanic finding the problem with a carberator. I could see what she meant. Then I blinked.

I kissed his fingertips and the tiny hairs along the innocent-looking back of his neck. On the corner where he lived, the bagel shop smelled of poppy seeds. Trees smelled of jasmine. I liked to pass the noodle place, where cabbies hung out, because in five minutes I would be at his door. That summer, I walked until the sky turned white. I did this as often as I could. I was changed by knowing him. It’s easier to see this looking back. I don’t know how I was changed. It may have been in the bar with the mariachi music and plastic chairs. It may have been saying less.

When I say that Jim and I were both liars, do I mean we were social animals, trying to get along with other people, or do I mean we were unknown to ourselves? When I say, “I don’t care,” I’m looking for a sign. Human embryos are female until certain chemicals shoot in like gas in a ventilating system. Some male fish can transform themselves into females in order to reproduce. Have you ever thought you were a visitor in the place where you lived? It’s refreshing and alienating only briefly. There are spaces that lack rooms and walls and therefore don’t exist in architecture. For example, the word yes.

One day, my mother said to me, “I never understood sex, never. Do you?” I said, “No.” She said, “There is something I want to tell you. When you order pastrami, say you want it lean. And when you smile, don’t show your gums.” She was wearing a short skirt and a rust colored sweater that complimented her red hair. I wondered what she saw in my smile. Just this morning, I was thinking about how much I turned out to be the child in home movies my father shot, the child who falls back in defeat because she cannot get her hands on the toy flute her sister is playing. She falls back in defeat because she is six months old and can’t walk. She can crawl across a yellow blanket and rear up like a little pony to grab at the flute and miss it, and then she falls back and laughs. She doesn’t have any teeth. She’s all gums.

Thirty years after moving into my apartment, the refrigerator died. I sat across from Lola, the landlord, and heard a humming coming from her beehive hairdo. She said either she would install a wheezing relic from another apartment that might be the color of dried blood or day-old guacamole, or I could buy a new refrigerator and she would raise my rent forever. She raised my rent forever.

In 1978, when I first signed the lease on the apartment, the thin, wily manager I bribed to get the place glanced at the peeling walls and flickering fluorescent lights and predicted I’d soon get married and leave. He was hoping for that. The thought made him feel better about what he was doing. The prewar high-rise, with its dirty white bricks and crumbling gargoyles, its graffitied elevators and hallway floors crusted with unidentifiable layers of this shouldn’t be here, remained intentionally squalid so revolt could not spark in tenants too dampened by living in such a place. Still, I felt lucky to live in New York. Lucky to be a female fish. Lucky to fall in love. Lucky my mother gave me good advice. Lucky that nothing lasts, even though some things don’t fade from memory. Lucky that the things that don’t fade, no one can predict.

The day of the burn, by the time we got back to Jim’s apartment, my ankle was blistered and raw. He had borrowed a friend’s motorcycle, and we’d gone for a ride. He took me into the bathroom and lifted my foot onto his thigh. He said, “This is awful. I’m so sorry I didn’t warn you to wear boots.” I was on the bath mat while he swabbed peroxide on the burn, and it frothed up over the blood. When he was finished with the bandage, I followed him to the kitchen. He pulled food from the fridge, and I climbed on a stepladder for plates. That’s when he kissed my ankle. He said, “Poor baby, poor little girl,” and I was so happy I thought I would store the happiness for future generations of myself to look back on. In this sense, I saw an up side to the burn. Can there be an up side to a burn? No.

We moved to the living room and sat on the couch. He unzipped my pants and tugged them down. The fabric hit my ankle, and I said ouch. He took my foot in his hands and said, “This is the scar you’ll remember me by.” It turns out no, it was not. When the burn healed, no scar was left at all. I don’t even know which ankle it was on. Some people, as soon as they meet you, as soon as they hear the pilot light catch, they are looking forward to thinking of you as a memory. I’m not like that. I’m pretty sure I’m not. I like you now, just the two of us. In dreams, are you really all the characters, or is that something we do in real life?

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Long Distance

In the title story in Long Distance—the new collection by Ayşegül Savaş—a woman named Lea awaits the first visit of her new lover Leo. He’s flying to Rome, where she has moved. They are both academics or researchers in some field or other, who have started up a thing in California before she left for her next residency.

Between meeting and this visit, they’ve been emailing each other, and Lea reports that in her letters to Leo, she tried to create a person more adventurous and freewheeling than she is. For example, she visited off-the-grid site A instead of touristy site B, so she could write to Leo about these places. Before his arrival, she’s stocked her apartment with more food than they can possibly eat in the days he’ll be there, and she imagines them eating in bed, even though there would be crumbs. She sees a scene with light streaking in on crumpled sheets, and she smiles to herself.

The visit is a torture, and it’s almost a torture to read, partly because it so perfectly creates the disconnection between a woman who has imagined a man without knowing him, really. Did he write anything in his letters that would give her hope he would want to be in that bed, with the streaking light and crumpled sheets? Did she stop to ask herself this question? She did not, and that is partly the kind of character Savaş, who is very skillful, means to show us. Only partly. As you read along, you wonder if the author, like Lea, stopped to ask this question about her character.

Leo is an inexpressive dud. When he arrives at the airport, he texts Lea: “Just landed. Will take a taxi over as soon as I’m out.” At the beginning of a relationship, every text and every step forward is a scrap of evidence for an unfolding story in your head. Writes Savaş: “I can’t wait to get there, she thought, alternatively. Or, Finally. But maybe this was Leo’s way of elevating the anticipation further, not allowing any release with words.”

Sister, you want to scream at the screen, are you nuts? You don’t go in the basement alone when a werewolf is roaming the neighborhood and you hear a noise. What is wrong with you, girl? He’s not “elevating” anything. He’s telling you loud and clear is’s not thinking about you.

When Leo gets there, he shows no signs of knowing who Lea is, despite all the emails she’s sent, despite her effort to show how her mind moves around, forming connections and revealing its wishes. We don’t know why he’s come. It’s as if he’s found himself cast in a movie, and the visit is what his character must do. To learn more about Lea? To know if he might love her? To know if he might love any woman? To know the place loving a woman holds in his sense of planning a life?

Being with an inexpressive dud drives Lea a little crazy. The more he goes about the inexpressive—though not mean or aggressive—business of being himself, a man who shuts down without any external fuss if he bumps into an obstacle, like a Roomba hitting a brick in the middle of a living room floor, the more he simply exists with no spark or juice rising off him, the more Lea gives herself the job of figuring him out. She becomes a wildlife interpreter, wondering if behavior A means she must rethink how not only to approach him but rethink everything she gets wrong about connecting to other people. It’s in her, she thinks, and then she unthinks that, and then thinks it again. What is she doing that causes him to be an inexpressive dud?

Jeremy Allen White as Carmy in The Bear, perfecting his morose thing.

Nothing. She’s doing nothing. She just dreamed him up, and then when he arrived he turned out to be Carmy, the talented chef and central character in The Bear. Not Carmy in the sense of a man who wears his unhappiness like a case of Covid and moves around the world without a mask, not that inobservently extreme. The Bear makes the mistake of believing that a man who is unhappy for this reason or that reason and wears the face of befuddled and mopey unhappiness is intrinsically interesting. Will he or won't he? Can he or can't he? Why is he that way? Will everyone wait? How often will people stop what they are doing to prop him up or wonder to themselves—but not with conviction, alas—what am I doing with this guy? There are so many more compelling ways to be a human being than the way this guy is a human being, and yet again and again the cameras of the world draw our attention to this guy, in one version or another. This guy with his nice hair and blank expression.

In “Long Distance,” the focus is not on the Carmy clone. It’s on the woman contorting herself to accommodate the Carmy clone. In Lea’s mind, the Carmy clone—Leo or another one—is a large piece of furniture that gets delivered. You didn’t quite know what you were ordering, and there it is, in your house. You put a plant next to it to see if that will make it easier for you to live with it, and it doesn’t help. Nothing will make it easier for you to live with it. You think you are required to live with it because, in the boyfriend section, Carmy clones are pretty much all that’s stocked.

Is that what Savaş means to convey? Maybe. It didn’t feel that way to me. It felt like the author isn’t clued to the fact that the Carmy factor or the Leo factor is a social problem in the world, not the misfortune of any one woman in the dating circus. Once you know how many clown cars are going to open in your life, spilling out Carmys and Leos—men the world cares about and who bore you to death—once you realize this, you write comedy.

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