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By Sandra J. Goldstein

April 30, 1999 | In a place with a name usually associated with cat food, I had my first man. Kalkan, it was called, a whitewashed seaside resort on the Turkish coast. It was there where my preference for boyish good looks gave way to the hardened features of a real man. Actually, he was only 28. But that seven-year difference -- and that mustache, a trait I would never go for on an American -- only added to the seductive cultural gulf between us.

It was the summer before my last year of college. For three weeks, a high-school friend and I did the Greek islands in the manner that only 21-year-olds can. We got up at noon and spent hours on the beach, ridding ourselves of those unsightly American tan lines. We ate dinner late, and hit the bars and nightclubs later still. On Ios and Mykonos and Santorini we drank and danced and flirted with men from a United Nations' worth of countries.

But this flurry of fun had to end, and my friend and I said our goodbyes. She flew home, and I to Istanbul, to meet my parents. I was a rare breed at that age, voluntarily traveling with Mom and Dad, and on an organized tour no less. It was an opportunity to get to a place I wouldn't otherwise see. My only condition for the Turkey trip was that they pay the single supplement so that I would have my own room. Having spent too many sleepless nights abroad counting the snores of a fellow traveler sharing my room, I put my foot down. This time, however, a completely different situation would keep me awake.

Since my flight from Athens was scheduled to arrive a few hours earlier than the rest of the group, the tour company sent a representative to meet me. As a 21-year-old blond suddenly alone in Istanbul, I didn't mind the company. From the moment I felt the heavy stare of the man who stamped my passport, I felt I was being watched, and this feeling only intensified as I made my way through the airport. I felt somewhere between a supermodel and a leper, and I was on edge. But it was a certain kind of edge: As violated as I felt by these intrusive stares, I sometimes found myself staring back. And in doing so I made my first discovery: Instead of the familiar duo of brown skin and brown eyes, many Turks have the unusual combination of dark skin with piercing eyes of blue or green.

After a few hours in Istanbul, I returned to the airport, where I joined the rest of the group for a domestic flight to Ankara. I gave my parents an abridged version of my time in Greece and got my first glimpse of my fellow travelers. After taking one look at my companions for the next three weeks and realizing that my parents were the closest in age to me, I had the sinking thought: "What have I done?"

We met our guide and our bus driver in Ankara. By lunch of the second day, the bus driver's olive-green eyes had been noticed and remarked upon by all of the single women on the trip. I was amused by their comments, but in those early days, I was too busy hating Turkish men for their leering, and he was included in this group.

In ensuing days my hostility began to wane, and he could sense it. The flirting began slowly, in broken French -- so subtle I barely noticed it. I was bored with my companions and ripe for adventure and foreign intrigue; it's amazing what can happen when the hint of illicit possibility is in the air -- especially with someone as beautiful and, dare I say it, exotic as him. (Forgive me, Edward Said, for being guilty of Orientalism and objectifying the "other" -- as I had just read about in anthropology class the semester before.)

By the end of the first week, when we arrived in Cappadocia, my mom's jokes about the phallic rock formations only agitated what was already going on in my brain. This was the first time in my journal I made note of our flirtation, but I dismissed the possibility because, well, boinking the bus driver under everyone's noses was just too out there, even for me.

My father was one of the few fluent French-speakers on the trip, and therefore talked to the bus driver more than the rest of us did. Mom and Dad were surely unaware of what was taking place right in front of them, but one afternoon, Dad innocently mentioned the fact that my partner in flirting had said that he was married and had two children. While he drove the tour groups over the summer, his family stayed with his wife's parents. "Really," I said. At that moment, I decided that I had imagined our flirtations; a married man simply wouldn't be making eyes at me.

That night after dinner, the bus driver asked me if I wanted to take a walk. I said sure, and told my dad that I was going. Dad was still at the dinner table, engaged in conversation with a professor in our group. Somewhat in jest, this professor blurted out, "You're letting your young blond daughter go off with the handsome Turkish bus driver?" My father and I both looked at him blankly. Good old Dad waved his hand in dismissal. "At this age, she's an adult. I let her do what she wants," he said. But no doubt, he too was comforted by the fact that the man was married.

We took off down the beach, making silly small talk as I grew increasingly frustrated that I hadn't tried harder in those long-ago French classes. I managed to ask him what he did when he wasn't driving a bus. He mumbled an answer that revealed nothing, thus revealing everything: I had been right about our flirting. We came to a bench and sat, and watched as several stars shot their way across the sky. I hadn't seen many shooting stars before, and here, sitting inches from this fine species of a man who could not have been more different from anyone I'd been with before, everything was too crazy for me to fathom. I'd never considered flirting with a married man in real life, and certainly hadn't considered an affair with one. But this wasn't real life. This is what I thought when he finally kissed me.

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