“Put the roses in a vase,” said her mother.

“Kemal Bey, you’ll have a raki, won’t you?” said her father.

“Tweet tweet tweet,” said her canary.

“Oh, yes, I’d love one, yes, I’ll have a raki.”

They gave me two rakis on the rocks and I knocked them both back, on an empty stomach, hoping they would take immediate effect. I remember speaking for a time about the tricycle I’d brought with me, and a few childhood memories, before we sat down to eat. But alas, I was still sober enough to know that because she was married, I could show none of that lovely brotherly feeling that I’d hoped the tricycle would evoke.

Füsun sat across from me, as if by chance (she’d asked her mother where she should sit), but she would not look me in the eye. During these first minutes I was shocked enough to believe she had no interest in me. I, in turn, tried to look as if I had no interest in her, as if I were a well-meaning, wealthy cousin, here to give a wedding present to a poor relation, while many more important things weighed on my mind.

“Soooo, when can we expect children?” I asked, still playing this role, looking Feridun in the eye first, but failing then to address Füsun.

“We’re not thinking of having children right away,” said Feridun. “Perhaps after we’ve moved into our own house.”

“Feridun is very young, but he is one of the most sought-after screenwriters in Istanbul today,” said Aunt Nesibe. “He’s the one who wrote The Old Lady Who Sells Simits.”

All night I struggled to get it through my skull-as people say. At intervals all evening I conjured up the hopeful dream that this wedding story was a joke, that they’d gotten some neighbor’s fat son to masquerade as a childhood sweetheart, dressing him up as her husband, a final lesson to me that they would, at evening’s end, own up to. Eventually, as I learned more about the couple, I did accept that they were married, but then it was the various details of that reality that, as they were disclosed, I found unacceptable: Feridun Bey, this son-in-law who was living with his wife’s family, was twenty-two years old, and interested in film and literature; though he wasn’t making much money yet, in addition to screenplays for Yeşilçam, he wrote poetry. I discovered that as a distant relation on her father’s side, he’d played with Füsun as a child, and that, when he was a child, he had even ridden on the tricycle I’d brought back to the house. Hearing all this, I felt my very soul shriveling up inside me, irritated by the raki that Tarık Bey poured so solicitously into my glass. Whenever I entered a new house, I would always feel uncomfortable until I knew how many rooms it had, and which backstreet the balcony looked out on, and why a table had been positioned in a particular way, but now there were no such questions in my mind.

The only consolation was to sit across from her, to admire her, like a painting. Her hands were always moving, just as I remembered. Although married, she still didn’t smoke in front of her father, and that, alas, meant that I could not watch her light her cigarette in that lovely way of hers. But twice, she pulled back her hair the way she used to, and three times, when she was trying to join the conversation, she took a deep breath-like those she had always drawn when we quarreled-and raised her shoulders just slightly, as if waiting for her chance. Each time I saw her smile, hope and joy rose up inside me with the force of blooming sunflowers. I was reminded by her beauty, and by her gestures, which were so dear to me, and by her luminous skin, that the center of the world, the center to which I must travel, was at her side. All other people, places, and pastimes were nothing but “vulgar distractions.” It wasn’t just in my mind that I knew this, it was in my body; and so sitting across from her I longed to stand up and throw my arms around her. But when I tried to contemplate my situation, and what would happen next, I felt such an ache in my heart that I could think no more, and then it was not just for the benefit of the others that I played the part of the relative come to congratulate the young couple: It was also for my sake. Though our eyes hardly met during that meal, Füsun caught on at once, and as I carried on acting, she did everything one would expect from a happy young newlywed entertaining a wealthy distant relation come to call in his chauffeur-driven car, teasing her husband, feeding him spoonfuls of fava beans. All this made the eerie silence in my head echo.

The rain that had been pelting down ever faster on the way to the house showed no signs of abating. Tarık Bey had already told me, at the very beginning of the meal, that the neighborhood of Çukurcuma was, as the name implied, a topographical bowl, and that only after buying the house last summer did they learn it had flooded many times in the past, and so I went with him to the bay window to watch the torrent pouring down the hill. Many of their neighbors were out there, with their trousers rolled up and barefoot, using zinc buckets and plastic washtubs to bail out the water rushing over the curbs right into their houses, and arranging piles of stones and rags into makeshift levees. As two barefoot men struggled to clear a blocked grate with their hands, two women, one wearing a green and the other a purple headscarf, were pointing insistently at something in the torrent and shouting. At the table Tarık Bey had commented mysteriously that the sewers dating back to Ottoman times could no longer cope. Whenever the drumming of the rain increased, someone would say something like, “The heavens have opened up,” or “It’s the flood!” or “May God protect us,” and then rise from the table to gaze anxiously through the window at the floodwaters and the neighborhood, now transfigured in the pale lamplight. I, too, felt compelled to rise, in solidarity with their fears of flood, but I was so drunk I was afraid of being unable to stay on my feet, and knocking over tables and chairs.

“I wonder how your driver is doing out there?” said Aunt Nesibe as she gazed out the window.

“Should we get him something to eat?” asked the bridegroom.

“I could take it down,” said Füsun.

But Aunt Nesibe, sensing that I might not like this, changed the subject. For a moment I felt myself to be a lonely drunk under the suspicious scrutiny of the family standing by the bay window. So I faced them and smiled. Just then there was a clatter in the street below-a barrel had overturned-and we heard someone cry in pain. Füsun and I came eye to eye. But she immediately looked away.

How could she manage to show so little interest? This was what I wanted to ask her. But I wasn’t asking this question like some addled abandoned lover, who, when asked why he won’t leave his beloved alone, claims, I just wanted to ask her something! Well, all right, I was.

She’d seen me sitting here alone, so why didn’t she come and sit beside me? Why didn’t she seize this perfect opportunity to explain everything? Again we exchanged glances and again she looked away.

Now Füsun will come to sit at your side, said an optimistic voice inside me. And if she came, it would be a sign that one day she would give up on this misalliance, divorce her husband, and be mine.

The sky rumbled. Füsun drew away from the window and taking five steps floated to the table like a feather to sit across from me in silence.

“I beg you to forgive me,” she said in a whisper that pierced my heart. “I wasn’t able to come to your father’s funeral.”

The blue glare of a lightning bolt flashed between us like a swath of silk in the wind.

“I was waiting for you,” I said.

“I guessed that, but I would never have been able to come,” she said.

“That illegal awning over the grocery shop has been blown off-did you see?” said her husband, Feridun, as he returned to the table.