The Star of Istanbul by Robert Olen Butler Page B

“Please go gentle, Kit. Go slow. All this will end too soon as it is.”
    And I obeyed her. And she would be right.

7
    But for now, after we’d finished, we did not sleep but held each other close on one of the narrow beds, entwined like the two snakes on Hermes’ staff. We’d been silent for a long while, so I said, “We’re like the two snakes on Hermes’ staff.” She was Greek, after all. I was trying not to doze off.
    We were both lying mostly on our sides, facing each other; her cheek was against my chest; my throat was laid on the curve of her head. She moved her head when I said this, tilting her face upward, and though I could not see her eyes, I sensed she was looking up at me. “Of course,” she said. “He was the god of travelers and liars.”
    I’d bantered with smart women. I grew up the son of a very smart woman who bantered to beat the band. When a smart woman banters, she means at least half of everything she says. At least. My mother schooled me herself as we steamer-trunked from city to city, theater to theater, schooled me by giving me, through all my learning years, a good three thousand books to read and then asking me, all totaled, a good hundred thousand questions about them. I dared not forget a thing. And from what I remembered of the Greek deities, this was a very selective list of Hermes’ godly patronage, so I figured Selene thought I was a liar. Or she knew she was. Not that we’d had much of a chance to lie to each other yet.
    â€œGod of poets too,” I said.
    â€œAre you a poet, Kit Cobb?”
    â€œNah,” I said. “But if they’d been around at the time, he’d’ve been the god of newspaper writers as well.”
    â€œTo fit with the liars?” She lifted her face from my chest. I pulled my head back and looked her in the eyes. The electrical filaments of those phony candles were still burning in the room. I was glad. I liked looking at her face, even if she was ragging me. “He was the messenger of the gods,” I said. “I’m just a messenger, bringing the news.”
    She put her head back onto my chest.
    â€œAre you a liar, Selene?”
    â€œOf course,” she said. “I’m an actress.”
    I didn’t have an answer for that. We were quiet for a few moments.
    Then she said, “I’m sorry.”
    â€œBecause you’re an actress?”
    â€œBecause I’m a liar.”
    There was a little catch in her. “I’m sorry,” she said.
    This was about something else.
    â€œThat you’re an actress?”
    â€œYes. But your mother . . .”
    â€œIt’s all right.”
    â€œI didn’t mean to say . . .”
    â€œThat she’s a liar too.”
    â€œBut we do that.”
    Her head felt heavier on my chest, as if she were pressing in, burrowing, hiding. She grew still. I should’ve qualified calling my mother a liar. But I felt Selene struggling with something. I kept quiet.
    She said, “An actress is trained to be anyone, to do anything.” She paused and then, very low, Selene said, “An actress is a fallen woman.”
    Somewhere outside, distantly on the promenade, in the dark, a woman laughed. Perhaps the lovers from the lifeboat, emerging.
    I thought of the newspaper stories of Selene’s life, the few things known about her past. She was Greek, the firstborn of a fisherman and his wife on the island of Andros. Shortly before she was born, her father drowned in a storm in the Cavo d’Oro channel. A week later her mother gave birth, and after swaddling her daughter in a basket and placing her on the doorstep of the local monastery, she threw herself off the lighthouse.
    From then until she showed up on the doorstep of the Vitagraph Studios in Brooklyn in 1908, things were mysterious in the biography of Selene Bourgani, yielding to reporters, upon questioning, only her classic profile and her most