Paul flew in from Ankara to Istanbul, and we made plans to meet at Leb-i Derya, my favorite restaurant, which was perched on a steep hill and had glass walls overlooking the Bosporus. I was leaving for Tehran in the morning and preoccupied with preparations for my trip. At the time, I was dating an Iranian actor named Mehdi and couldn’t wait to see him again; he was so handsome that some mornings I would just watch him sleep, wondering how I had pulled off an affair with such visual candy. I wasn’t in love with him, and I was as consumed by my work as always. But some part of me still enjoyed these passionate love affairs I knew would never last.
Paul and I met on the street, and one word came to mind: Euro. He was handsome, too clean-cut and sharply dressed for my taste, and wore a flashy watch. He had a strong English accent (in fact, his mother was Swedish and his father British). Dark brown hair fell every which way around the top of his face, and I could tell his beard had been trimmed neatly to number 4 on an electric shaver. Paul was extremely self-confident, bordering on arrogant, but dinner was pleasant, and I sensed that he, too, was obsessed with work.
“I have great contacts all over the Middle East and North Africa,” he bragged. “Before coming to Turkey, I reopened the Reuters bureau in Algeria. It had been shut for almost a decade because of the civil war and the death of the last Reuters journalist based there. I was in charge of Algeria and all of North Africa. Before that I was in Sweden and Panama City and also spent time in Peru covering the Japanese hostage crisis in Lima.”
“Why are you based in Ankara?” I asked. Most foreign correspondents based themselves in Istanbul, the bigger, more beautiful city.
“Because the Reuters main bureau is there, close to the politicians,” he said. “Ankara is the political capital of the country, and I have to work my contacts there.”
He was inquisitive, like most journalists, but ultimately interested in talking about himself. We both intermittently checked our BlackBerries when there was a lull in conversation. I gave him a few tips about Turkey, passed along contacts for a bunch of friends, and left the next morning for Tehran.
By the time I returned to Istanbul a month later, Paul was already part of our regular crowd. Everyone loved him. He was funny and smart and a dedicated and talented journalist. Over the course of the next few months, Paul and I—both in long-distance relationships—ended up spending many weekends together. We would go out for dinner or make buffalo wings at Jason’s, and stay up late into the night talking and drinking far too much. All of my friends had each endured endless conversations with me about my doomed future with Mehdi, and they were bored out of their minds by my love life. Paul stepped in to alleviate the burden of playing love therapist.
By February 2006 Mehdi and I and Paul and his girlfriend had broken up. It was four months after Paul and I had dinner for the first time. Because of my string of failed relationships, along with the ever-increasing demands of my work, I was sure I would spend the rest of my life single. It was the one subject that filled me with a sense of failure.
“You were dating an Iranian, you’ve been dumped, and you can’t get a visa back to Iran to try to win him over,” Paul said with conviction. “I think it’s time you move on.”
By May, Paul and I spoke on the phone almost every night, catching up on the day’s events, the news, our respective personal lives. Paul had started dating a Turkish woman. I was dating everyone from New York to Istanbul. I must have logged 100,000 miles in a few months: From May through June 2006, I went from Istanbul to Beijing to Chicago to Florida to Mexico City to Istanbul to Damascus, photographing everything from investment bankers in Hong Kong to the former Yankee catcher Joe Girardi in Chicago to the presidential elections in Mexico. And almost every evening my phone would ring, no matter where I was, and it was Paul on the other end.
I started anticipating his calls. I felt a little flutter when the phone would ring in the early evening, knowing he had carefully calculated my time zone and when it would be convenient to call within my work and sleep schedule. I had never dated anyone who understood how my work and personal life were intricately bound.
Then the words “beautiful” and “kiss” started appearing on my once-platonic BlackBerry, and I was confused. I wasn’t sure I was even attracted to him.
“Marry your best friend,” my mother used to say. “You don’t want to marry for passion, because the passion fades. Marry someone who makes you laugh, who you can spend time with. Looks fade. Passion fades.”
Not that my mother, or I, had ever had much luck in love, but she did, on occasion, offer sage advice. And clearly the passionate route that my grandmother Nina had advised had not proved successful for me yet.
One day Paul came to Istanbul for work, and we went for dinner as usual. But something had changed between us. Jason didn’t tag along, I got dressed up, and Paul booked a table at an expensive sushi restaurant. When he walked me to my door that evening to say good night, we stood under the street lamp longer than usual, as if we might actually kiss.