Just then Ivan walked by. He looked at us, stopped, folded his arms across his chest, and stood on the corner across the street from us.
“You two cannot kiss!” he yelled. “Because if you get together, Lynsey is inevitably going to break up with you, and then we can’t be friends with Paul anymore. Lynsey only dates assholes, and you are too nice and normal for her. And we like you, Paul. So I am not leaving this corner until Paul walks away and gets into a cab.”
That’s how much faith my friends had in me when it came to men. My years of putting work first or having dalliances with manifestly unreliable people—all of it had affected them. Ivan stood there for ten minutes until Paul finally went home.
? ? ?
A FEW WEEKS LATER Karl had a weekend-long slumber party in his house along the Bosporus. We gathered there on Saturday to swim and barbecue, and every few hours Paul texted me from a friend’s wedding in Rome. I didn’t reply to all of them. On Sunday he called from the airport in Istanbul and came directly to Karl’s house.
We were all in the kitchen cooking dinner. I was washing lettuce when he slipped up behind me, pressed his front side against my back, put his hands on my waist, and leaned into my ear: “I am taking you home tonight.”
An electric jolt passed through my body. In all the months we had been friends—all those up-all-night boozy conversations—Paul had never touched me. The simple act of his hands on my hips, with his body pressing against me, changed the dynamic.
“No, you are not.”
“Yes, I am. And you are not arguing with me.”
His confidence that we would be right for each other removed the question marks in my head.
And at the end of the evening—it was the night the French soccer player Zidane had head-butted the Italian player Materazzi, leading Italy to the 2006 World Cup—Paul and I got in a taxi together and went back to my apartment. The next morning, as we sat drinking coffee on my little balcony overlooking the green mosque in Cihangir, I knew we would probably spend the rest of our lives together.
? ? ?
I HAD NEVER DATED someone I could envision marrying before. Paul, like me, was completely driven by his career. He was constantly dealing with deadlines and understood my own long hours. He worked as a foreign correspondent in places like Algeria and understood the challenges and allure of covering big, often dangerous stories. I never had to explain to him why I was away for several weeks out of every month or why I had to stay up on my computer, editing and filing, late into the night. With every assignment that took me off to Darfur or Congo or Afghanistan, he simply said, “I love you. I am here. Do your work, and come back when you finish. I will be here waiting for you.”
It wasn’t just that Paul was accepting of my work—he was energetically supportive, excited to help me plan my reporting, fascinated by the next possible story, and visibly proud of my accomplishments. Few men were this engaged in their girlfriends’ careers. I couldn’t help but be suspicious.
A few months before I was taking him home to my crazy family for Christmas, I wanted to make sure he would be fine with hanging out with gay men as well as loud Italian Americans. Socially Paul was an affable, relaxed guy, but he was also somewhat refined, in that European, proper, polite sort of way. I explained to Paul that everyone was bound to ask him a million questions. I joked that if he had any secrets, he needed to tell me, because my family was capable of prying anything out of anyone. He got a bit fidgety.
“Well, I have something I should probably tell you,” he said, in his forest-green V-neck sweater. “I have a title. I’m a count.”
Me and Paul on the Turkish coast, July 2007.
“You’re what?”
“I am a count.”