William couldn’t quite tell if she was kidding, but in the shadows, he could imagine her on top of him, all wrinkled and bird-boned, with hair as gray as moonlight.
Not like you, she’d continued. Your soul’s very young. It’s a boy’s soul. Now don’t be angry—see, that’s just what I mean—there’s no reason to be angry. Your body’s plenty manly. But inside you’re boyish. The way you took my clothes off, for one example. Kind of awestruck. Slow. It’s what I like most about you. Your soul is so boyish actually that it is almost girlish.
He hadn’t reacted especially well to this comment, and he regretted it now, as he lay there, replaying it all, and watching her dreaming.
So? she’d replied, I like a girlish soul. And a girlish body too, if we’re going to be honest. In fact, you should feel special because I haven’t slept with many boys. Far more girls than boys.
William hadn’t covered his surprise at this well either, and he was so flustered that he didn’t shift his lap away from Irene in time to cover his inevitable reaction to the idea of Irene with another woman.
You see? she had teased. Boyish.
Later, he asked again about her real family, and why she’d left them, but she was either pretending to be falling asleep or really nodding off.
I left them because they weren’t my family, she mumbled. I thought Alis-ahh was my family, but she said I was always leaving her. These were the last words to fall from her mouth before she slept.
William wasn’t sure he’d heard her right. What sort of a name was “Alis-ahh”? Had she said Alissa or Alicia? Had he misheard?
So he sat, awake and unwilling to move, until the sun rose up over Queens.
• • •
Irene woke up at seven, vaguely aware she had only an hour to get to the hospital to begin her first day of treatment. She’d had one of the strangest dreams of her life—Dr. Zarrani had said it wasn’t uncommon for cancer patients to get them. Dreams like full-on acid trips. Surreal visions that didn’t always end right away when she woke up. The doctor had called them “healing dreams” but hadn’t explained what exactly was healing about them. Irene barely had time to think about it, however. She was hectically running around the apartment. When William asked why, she told him she had to get ready for her first infusion.
“Just wear what you had on yesterday,” he said.
“That’s—don’t be ridiculous.” She thought about taking back what she’d said about him being girlish, but she thought that might please him too much, and besides, when she opened up his wardrobe (made of real wood that was faux-weathered), she discovered that his closet was filled with clothes that she could easily wear. A pair of jeans that must not have fit William since college were a bit torn in the knees but looked quite good on her with the cuffs rolled and a yellow necktie as a belt. She spotted a pink dress shirt and rolled the sleeves around her elbows, cinched it in the back with a rubber band, and tucked that into the waistline of the jeans.
“If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you had a girl living here with you,” she said, detaching a silvery pull cord from his window shade and retying it as a necklace.
“We’re going to a hospital, No Ears. What does it matter what you look like?” William groaned. She saw his eyes were sunken and bleary.
“It’s my first day, I have to make a good impression! Do you have any makeup?”
“Why would I? Let’s go! You look beautiful!”
“What did I say about that word?” she chided. “Come on, you don’t have anything? Who doesn’t have some concealer lying around for bad skin days? Or some lipstick a girlfriend left somewhere?” She eyed him curiously as she lifted a white panama hat down from his hat rack. “I know you’ve had girlfriends. Don’t tell me you bought this for yourself.”
William placed it on her head. “It was a gift from my mother.”
Irene took the hat off and studied it. “It’s excellent. I’d like to meet this woman.”
“If you will hurry up and get to your appointment, you can meet her tonight.”
Her eyes widened. She hadn’t expected him to take her up on it, but suddenly she wanted to meet Mrs. Cho very badly—if anyone could help uncover the real William beneath all this showroom furniture, it would be her.
He went on. “We’re having a big family dinner for Christmas Eve. You’ll love it. It’s like my own personal circle of hell.”
Irene clapped eagerly.
William began to say firmly, “If you keep delaying and we miss your appointment, then we’ll never get there in time . . .” but Irene was already halfway out the door.
• • •
They made it into the hospital just in time, and Irene enjoyed the holiday decorations much more now that William was there to look aghast alongside her. After filling out some more paperwork, they met with Dr. Zarrani, who guided them around the chemotherapy suite as if it were an apartment they might be interested in buying.
“No elves or reindeer in here!” Irene said.
“The design was done around the concept of a Japanese Zen garden,” she said. “You come in over here past the waterfall sculpture to check in each morning.”
All the light came from great brass lanterns, and to one side of the waiting area was an actual sandbox filled with rocks and little rakes, which two children were busy attempting to demolish. The tables, covered in magazines and catalogs, were all made of polished stone, and trimmed bonsai trees divided the waiting area to make it more peaceful.
Dr. Zarrani stood stiffly. “I know it seems silly, but studies have shown an improvement in patient recoveries.”
William balked. “What, like through some ancient Shinto magic or something?”
The doctor led them back into the infusion area. “It has to do with the patient being more relaxed and inspired to face the hard work ahead.”
“Aesthetics are important, William,” Irene snapped. “Hence, why I wanted to look nice.”
“You look very nice,” Dr. Zarrani said to her as William raised his hands in apology. “Now take a seat here by this blue . . . pagoda thing. The nurses will be out soon to begin you on doxorubicin and cisplatin. It takes a few hours, so I hope you brought a good book.”
Irene eyed the nearby Vogues and Cosmopolitans suspiciously. She’d read the same ones yesterday in the waiting room.
“I can run out to a bookstore and find you something,” William offered.
“Well . . . ,” Irene said, looking mischievous as she pulled a heavy volume out of her purse. “I took this off your shelf this morning. I hope that’s all right.”
He did look a bit startled at the sight of his copy of the Iliad, the Jacob-disapproved-of Lattimore translation, surely filled with old college notes and underlinings, but he shrugged, not knowing, Irene was sure, that the notes and underlinings were precisely why she wanted to read it.
“Can I wait here with her?” William asked the doctor.
“For eight hours? Don’t be absurd. Go buy your mother something for Christmas. And get some sleep. I know you were wide awake all night.”
William wanted to stay until they started, but Irene wouldn’t hear of it.
“You go or I go,” she said. So William went.
Dr. Zarrani came in to start the drip. “The doxorubicin distorts the shape of the helix, which prevents it from replicating, and then the cisplatin binds the DNA to itself, which triggers a kind of self-destruct order inside your cells.”
Irene felt her nervousness quieting in the comforting hands of the doctor, as she scrubbed the crook of Irene’s elbow with a cotton ball soaked in yellow antiseptic. Irene had thought that they’d inject something into her face, not her arm.
“How do the drugs know to go from there all the way up to my eye?”
“Unfortunately, they don’t,” Dr. Zarrani explained. “Normally we’d do surgery
first, but in the interest of not damaging your eye, we’ll start with this and hope it shrinks the tumor a little. The chemo drugs go into your bloodstream and go everywhere. They’ll get the tumor but also everything else.”
Irene sat up straighter in her chair. Not a surgical strike then, she thought, just a full-on scorched-earth policy. And then she remembered her dream from the night before. She’d been crawling, for what seemed like hours and hours, through a barren desert. Finally she’d come across a great black leaf, and she’d hidden in its shade. But once there, safe, something very strange happened. She’d begun to spit, uncontrollably. Great threads of saliva flowed uncontrollably from her mouth, and she’d felt drier than ever as she’d writhed about, trying to stop. Only when she’d thought she’d desiccate completely like a mummy in a tomb did she realize the great threads she’d released weren’t saliva but silk. And while she’d been writhing, she’d inadvertently, or perhaps instinctually, woven this silk into a great shimmering womb, its walls glistening with cool dew. She’d been just about to climb inside and sleep for a thousand years, when she’d woken up on top of William.
“Now this will sting a little bit,” the doctor said.
There was a terrific pinch, and then Irene could feel something alien inside her arm. It would be there for hours, and she would keep on feeling it there, long after.
• • •
William had already found gifts for everyone in his family except his mother. So he stopped at a Salvation Army a few blocks from the hospital, where he spotted an enormous and truly heinous pink vase covered in golden chrysanthemum blossoms, on sale for five dollars. The gift itself wasn’t as important as how little he’d paid for it. Any present that came from a retail store she’d return later and then complain about how much money he’d spent. Always she had seen the exact same item for a tenth of the price at some church sale just a few weeks earlier.
As a boy, he had once spotted a beautiful silk kimono on sale at the gift shop of the Guggenheim, where he was taken on a class trip to see an exhibit on Eastern Art. He’d sold his collection of Aqualad comic books to Mi-cha Yu so he could buy it. But then Christmas morning arrived and his mother opened the gift. “What is this?” she’d asked, so he’d told her, “A kimono” and she’d given him a withering look. “Kimonos are Japanese. We are Korean.” She’d dragged him all the way back to the Upper East Side to return it, but since the Eastern Art had gone out and the Monets had come in, they no longer stocked the kimonos. Furious, his mother had flung it deep into a guest-room closet, where it hung still.
William walked down Third Avenue with the vase under one arm for blocks and blocks, trudging over the snow that was still unshoveled in many places. As cold as he was, William kept on walking without fully thinking about just where he was heading, though his feet seemed to have some idea. The storefronts were quiet; the roads were empty. It wasn’t often, he thought, that you got to have the city to yourself.
By the time he realized where his feet were taking him, he was far closer to Fourth Street than to the hospital, where he knew he ought to turn around and go. Something about the way that she had taken his Iliad off the shelf had struck him, as if it actually belonged to her. Without thinking, he had found himself lifting the keys from her purse while the doctor had been explaining the chemotherapy to her. He’d thought he could surprise her—run inside, despite the bug-bombing, and bravely grab a bag of clothes to wear to dinner that evening. She couldn’t show up wearing William’s old blue jeans and a necklace made from a curtain chain. As he came down Avenue A toward her block, he told himself that she’d be delighted.
But by the time he got to her building, he knew he was kidding himself. Irene would surely not appreciate what he was about to do, but his mind was unquiet with questions. Where was she from, and why had she run away? The thought that maybe she had been abused, or worse, was difficult to push aside—even though she’d assured him it hadn’t been that. Who was “Alis-ahh”? Had he even heard her properly? Was she one of these girls that she claimed to have slept with?
Irene’s building was a crumbling brownstone with trash cans around the entrance that were chained up and overflowing. The ground floor windows were covered with boards, and the boards were covered in long-faded concert posters. He opened the door and walked up three flights of crooked stairs; the railing became more bent the higher he climbed. Hadn’t she said her whole building was being fumigated? There was no sign on the front door, and he could hear people in the other apartments. He climbed all the way to the fifth floor and came to her door, expecting to find a department of health sticker, or caution tape on the knob, but there was nothing out of the ordinary. The cheap vase still tucked under his left arm, he slowly unlocked the door and stepped into Irene’s apartment.
Looking around, William could see haphazardly discarded blankets and workout clothes heaped on the floors and over the top of the bathroom door. The apartment was filthy, from the overfilled sink to the paint-peeled ceiling. He stepped over the remains of a Sunday Observer and several brown boxes filled with flea market objects: glittering marbles, rusty doorknobs, a tangle of wiring, old movable type letters, several novelty wristwatches, bookends shaped like cartoon faces, dozens of Barbie dolls still in their individual packages, empty mirror frames, children’s soccer trophies, and a plethora of silk flowers. He was just about to ask himself what on earth it was all for when he saw the far end of the room.
The end nearest the window was relatively cleared of junk. It seemed to be a working area. Sketch pads lay open on a low coffee table, with pages covered by rough lines of blue ink. Against the paint-flecked walls of the apartment were perhaps a dozen paintings of different cities and landscapes, neatly stacked from smallest to largest. Badlands and prairie grass. Arching, shadowy bridges and marshes at twilight. An Albuquerque desert and an icy Alaskan plateau. Against the opposite wall were several half-finished collages and combines, made from odds and ends. Marbles, painted like eyeballs, were pressed into putty, numbers and bits of maps were connected by hairy bits of yarn, above a backdrop of still, mounted butterflies and gigantic death’s-head moths. It was all assembled on a heavy plywood base. William thought it looked like a corkboard belonging to an elegant serial killer.
William looked through a few of the dresses on the floor but couldn’t tell which, if any, were clean. He noted her size on one of the labels, thinking that if he just bought her a new one, he wouldn’t have to admit he’d broken in. Didn’t you have to put things away if someone was spraying for bugs? Wouldn’t it smell weird, only half a day later? The more he thought about it, the surer he was there had never been a pill fly infestation. But why had she lied to him? If she had just wanted to come over, she hardly had to make up a reason. She must have known that.
Just then he saw a box wrapped in white ribbon, with a card on top that said “For William.” He picked it up and gently shook it, but there was no rattling inside. What could it be? Should he have bought something for her? He wanted to open the box, but then she’d surely know he’d broken into her apartment, so he set it back down where he’d found it.
His eyes fell on a brass birdcage by the window that was filled with jewelry boxes. He stepped lightly over to the cage and carefully searched for any kind of door. Puzzled, he reached through the bars, but they were barely spaced enough for a single finger to go in and fish out an earring or a necklace.
“How the hell did you get the boxes inside?” he asked the empty room.
Then, just as he was about to back up again, he noticed a small book covered with soft black leather, wedged between two of the jewelry boxes. He tried to snag the book, but no matter how he tipped or turned it, it wouldn’t pass between the cage’s bars. Sweating despite the pervasive chill in the apartment, he stood on his tiptoes to try to make out what was inside. If he squinted, he could just see what appeared to be—yes, names and addresses! An address book! Perhaps, somewhere in
side there was an entry for an Alissa or an Alicia or an Alis-ahh.
Where on Earth are you from? he asked as he tried to flip the pages through the bars. Who are you? Then the book slipped a bit from his hand, and a half-dozen black-and-white photographs slipped out and fluttered to the bottom of the cage. There were some old train ticket stubs in there too. William felt around to gather them. Baby photos? Old school photos? A bucktoothed, no-eared middle-schooler, not yet run away from home? William had to crane his neck awkwardly in order to see clearly, but by bracing his foot against the windowsill, he was able to inch upward a little further and get a good look at—Irene’s naked body.
William dropped the photos in his surprise, and they fell again, some now outside the birdcage, getting utterly and hopelessly out of order. Extracting his hand from the cage door, he bent over to scoop up the risqué photographs. Irene’s body was ethereal and light against dark sheets. The poses were seminatural and rather unpornographic. In one, her breasts were exposed but blurry, the focus on her lips and the tip of her nose, her eyes crossed daringly as she studied the ash trembling at a cigarette’s end. In another, she twisted sideways in a black river of sheets as if it were carrying her off. In a third, Irene lay with her back to the camera, eyes fixed out of a window, as if she were planning an escape. William could see the photographer’s apparently female hand reaching out at the bottom of the frame, as if trying to coax her back. He flipped the photograph over and saw handwriting—not Irene’s:
Tu es toujours sur le point de me quitter. —Alisanne
Alisanne! That was the thing, the name she’d been saying as she fell asleep. He fumbled with his phone a minute, typing the inscription into Google. It struggled a little until he found a second bar of signal closer to the window, at which point it spat out the result.
Why We Came to the City Page 9