Juliette Rossant

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TOO SOON TO TELL

Check Him Out

Calvin Trillin

My wife and I went to Istanbul. A friend of ours I'll call Colette sent us there to check out her daughter's new boyfriend. That seems odd, I suppose, unless you yourself have daughters of serious-linkage age who live far from home. It didn't seem odd to us at all.

I hasten to say that we have already planned a trip to Istanbul when we got our assignment from Colette. I had some business there, although Colette informed me that it would have to take a back seat to the real mission. "You are in Istanbul to check out Juliet's boyfriend and return with a full report," she said. "If that leaves you time for your other business, fine."

She said it rather like an intelligence officer in a World War II movie telling the American businessman who's about to leave for Zurich that he should carry on with his ordinary activities as well as he can while he tries to find out whether the Nazis are using Switzerland as a secret supply route for uranium.

In the movies the businessman usually begins by trying to turn down the intelligence officer twho wants to recruit him ("After I bailed out of that burning B-17, colonel, I swore to my wife that I wouldn't risk my neck once too often, so you'll have to get yourself another boy.") But we accepted our assignment from Colette cheerfully. We've never bailed out of a burning B-17, but we've check out plenty of boyfriends.

On the plane to Istanbul I told my wife that I had been looking forward to seeing Juliet even before we received our assignment, and that I was certain that checking out the new boyfriend would present no problem to two checker-outers of our experience. "I didn't hear Colette say what the lad's doing in Turkey?" I said. "Does he work at the embassy? Has he gone over there to study at the university?"

"He lives there," my wife said. "He's Turkish."

"Turkish!" I said. "Nobody said anything about his being Turkish. How are we supposed to check out a boyfriend who's Turkish?"

The boyfriends we have checked out have been American boyfriends. Our expertise is in American boyfriends. We know the field. We've established specific, easily applied standards. Take the questions of earrings, for instance. It goes back to when our own daughters were about the age the shampoo marketers call pre-teen. Out on a walk one day, I happened to pass a young man who was wearing four earrings in his left ear. When I got home, I said to my daughters, "I think you should know, for the future, that the answer to either one of you bringing home some guy with four earrings in his ear is a simple no. So don't even think about it."

"How about a guy with one earring?" my older daughter asked.

I considered that for a while. No parent wants to appear inflexible. "If he's enrolled in a fully accredited graduate or professional program, one earring is o.k.," I said.

I wouldn't claim that the earring standard has not been adjusted over the years. The point is that there is a standard, and it can be applied easily to American boyfriends. I know what I think about how an American boyfriend dresses and how he greets me ("Hiya, pops" is automatic grounds for not checking out) and what he's studying or what he does for a living. But a Turkish boyfriend! In Turkey, for all I know, four earrings in the left ear indicates membership in a student organization famous for producing eminent brain surgeons and distinguished supreme court justices.

"There's another problem," my wife said, when I told her all of this. "Apparently his English is not perfect."

"We're checking him out in Turkish!" I said. "It's impossible. We should have turned down the assignment. We should have told Colette that we gave up this sort of thing after we had to bail out of a burning B-17."

My wife said we had to carry out our assignment. As soon as we could arrange it, we had dinner with Juliet and her boyfriend..I'll call him Ahmet. He spoke English a lot better than we had been led to expect. My wife and I liked him instantly. It was obvious that he would have never said "Hiya, pops" in any language. When we got back to the hotel, after a lovely evening, I said, "Ahmet checks out."

She agreed. "You see, that wasn't so hard," she said. "It isn't necessary to have all those baselines and standards."

"Maybe not," I said. "Although you notice he wasn't wearing any earrings."

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