The Favorites of the Sun by Mac Pope

Author:Mac Pope
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
Published: 2019-06-19T16:00:00+00:00

Part 1

Downstairs

Just before dawn, before the first yearning wails from the muezzins high up in slender towers all around Izmir, Barney and Isabel walked, bundled together from their bed, outside on to the wide, cool, marble floor of their apartment terrace. At that hour they were still naked, although she’d wrapped herself in the top sheet and he had pulled the blanket around himself. They went out every morning, into the clear air under diamond stars, to smell Izmir. The great ovens of the city’s factory bakeries were at high production then and filled the air with sweet, milky, yeasty odors of browning bread and rolls. Izmir and all of Turkey was peaceful under a white moon still as a hanging ball.

Always at that hour, the air was balmy and sensual as light ether, the views spectacular—from the dimly lit boats bobbing on the navy blue, glittering wash of open bay below them, to the palm-lined streets that radiated up from the bay, past their building, and on upwards to the hills overlooking Izmir. Those hills crowned by Kadif—Kale, the ancient ‘Castle of Cushions’—the crumbling walls of Alexander the Great’s summer palace.

Isabel spoke the first words of the day as they embraced, leaning against the balcony’s low wall, “Y’know, Herodotus wrote that Izmir—Smyrna back then, had the finest climate on the Earth…”

“Herodotus,” Barney whispered while nuzzling her ear, “didn’t know Maui.”

“Well, dahlin, time for you to get dressed and go get us a warm loaf. I’ll have coffee ready and the peanut butter and jelly ’n some orange juice…” her smiling, untanned face glowed iridescent blue under moonglow—she was hard to leave. “How about some goat cheese and sweet olives, Dollin’?” Barney asked, still kissing her.

“Those too,” she said, kissing him back.

“We’ll eat on the veranda, OK?”

“Out here on the terrace, dahlin.”

“I’ll get some fresh yogurt too, babaganush…” he broke off the kiss.

“Umm, whatever,” Isabel said as he padded off.“I guess I’m lucky!” she smiled to herself walking into the kitchen. “No woman, except ‘Blondie’ in the comics, gets called ‘Darling’ these days.” She recalled that they started calling each other ‘dahlin’ and ‘hunny’ the same week they met Jamel and Shamika, the young African American couple who lived in the apartment above theirs.

Before them, that kind of talk would have seemed superficial, goofy, but after watching those two clutch and merge on impulse whenever they came near one another, after hearing Jamal call Shamika sugar names in his Barry White low register and hearing her feminine high, southern—sexy responses, both Barney and Isabel came away believing that after a whole year of marriage, they were looking at real human love for the first time.

They had decided to copy Jamel and Shamika whole. Before that, they had modelled themselves on a couple in a 1930’s movie, sporting around in tuxedo and a silk dress. I think we started our bogus lifestyle with that movie, she thought as she measured coffee grounds. “But don’t knock bogus,” she warned herself, “bogus got us where we wanted to go, so far,” she grinned and balled her fists for emphasis.

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