• • •
The storm outside was far too heavy for anyone to leave that night, so William set Irene up on the pullout couch in the study. They waited until the girls had placed a bowl of black bean noodles on the edge of the fireplace for Harabeoji Santa, and then when they were safely asleep, Charles helped William build a fire in the fireplace. William apologized for the five hundredth time since dinner. Irene was back to acting normally, back to pretending that everything was “Fine! Absolutely fine!” but William knew better. He could see the panic behind her eyes, even after his mother brought down some old clothes for her to change into.
“I wish you could sleep down here with me tonight,” Irene said, pouting. But William could feel it—she was lying. There was this imposter look about her; it was hard for him to put his finger on. It was the way she’d sounded when she’d first called. Like Joan Fontaine in the movie.
“We’ll have to leave tomorrow for the hospital before the girls are even up to open presents. But I have something for you,” William said, taking a rectangular pile of silk out from the pile of extra clothes that his mother had given him for Irene. “Merry Christmas.”
“Oh, William,” she moaned, touching it. She unfolded the parcel, and it became a beautiful silk kimono, covered in butterflies and weeping trees and winding rivers. “It’s—”
“It’s a little old,” he apologized. “But I promise it’s never been worn.”
Irene began to cry a little, and William couldn’t think why. He moved in to comfort her, but she pulled away, as if she were contagious and might infect him.
“I feel awful,” she said. “I bought you something but I left it at my apartment.”
Irene slipped the loose kimono on over the billowing pajamas that Mrs. Cho had given her. William was stunned at how beautiful she looked in its folds. There were tears in her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she said, kissing him on the forehead tentatively, as if she weren’t sure it wouldn’t leave a mark.
“What for?” William asked. And though she had lied to him over and over, and though she had refused, again and again, to tell him the truths he wanted her to tell, he said, “You’ve done absolutely nothing wrong.”
“Give me time,” she said lightly, as if it could be a joke.
He left her there and went up to his old bedroom to sleep. In the morning, she was gone. The only sign of her was a little water on the floor by the front door where the snow had blown in on her way out and then melted.
William took the subway back down to her apartment, but the main entrance was locked and no one answered. He followed someone through the front door, went upstairs, and pressed his ear up against her door. It was ice cold, and there wasn’t a single sound inside. He called the hospital, hoping, but the nurses there said she hadn’t shown up yet for her appointment. Dr. Zarrani called back, worried, and told William that if Irene didn’t come in for the second half of her dose, they’d have to start all over again. She asked him if he might know where she would go. Was there anyone else she might be staying with? William said he didn’t know, that he didn’t really know that much about her. He didn’t know where she was from. Would she go to Sara’s, up north? Then he thought about the photograph and its inscription. He hopped in a cab and asked the driver to take him to Penn Station.
The train station was empty on Christmas morning. Silence hung in the open terminal like a kind of fog. Most of the shops and restaurants were closed, their grates rolled down and locked tight, garlands hanging heavy above the archways, as if they knew that by the next morning they would be taken down and thrown away. William found Irene sitting on a bench, still wearing the stained red dress. She sat by the big clapboard train schedule, reading William’s copy of the Iliad.
She looked up at him when she saw him coming. “Can’t you leave me alone?”
“Dr. Zarrani said you have to come in before noon today or they’ll need to start over.”
Irene shook her head and clapped the heavy book shut. “I’ll call her.”
“To tell her what exactly?”
“That I’m going away for at least a month, maybe more. I’m sorry, William, we both know it wasn’t going to work out with us. I can’t explain. I’m just like this. I’m—”
William looked down at his phone and read off the words he’d translated the day before.
“Tu es toujours sur le point de me quitter.”
Irene frowned as William sat down on the bench next to her. He knew he had badly mispronounced the line. “I went by your apartment to get you a dress the other day. There weren’t any bugs. And I saw the gift you got me . . .”
“It’s a scarf,” she said softly.
“And I saw the dirty pictures in your birdcage. I saw what that girl wrote to you.”
Irene didn’t seem upset or violated. She just looked tired. “See? It’s not just you, William.”
“I actually wouldn’t have thought that it was.”
She looked up at him. “Oh, no?”
“No,” William said, and then kissed her forehead once before patting the book as if to say goodbye to it. “I didn’t think I mattered that much to you, No Ears.”
He hadn’t really meant it to be cruel, only true. There was nothing about her that belonged to him. Everything he knew about her, he’d stolen.
• • •
Irene watched William walk away, and then for several more minutes she watched train after train departing. There was one heading for San Francisco, but she didn’t want to go there, not really. She didn’t want to go to Boston, St. Louis, Raleigh, or Chicago either. She’d been to all those places before, and there were other Williams in each of them. Irene kept reading about Ajax and Hector and Priam. Warriors lacing their armor on for battle in one refrain, only to lie slain and forgotten in the sands of the next. All for some “beautiful” woman whom none of them really cared about at all. Irene flipped backward and forward. The men all died and died again. Trains arrived; trains departed.
Irene flipped to the page where William had written his note. Was there some God or gods who knew her fate? She stared up at the wide empty space above the clapboard. Bakersfield. Albuquerque. Pittsburgh. Burlington. Two dozen tracks to the end. Twenty-four places to die. Man must have free will, William had written, or else why would the gods themselves bother?
She sat up straight and closed the book. She rested her hand on her hip. There was still a faint fishy taste on the back of her tongue. She stood up and walked past the tracks to the tunnel for the subway. She rode to the hospital. She apologized to Dr. Zarrani and said there had been an accident on the 5 train and she’d been stuck, underground, for an hour. The doctor said she’d make some adjustments, but they hadn’t lost too much time. Before the nurses hooked her up to the IV, Irene changed into the kimono. Its loose arms fell gently over the elbow where the tube went in, and she felt a great freedom as she drew and drew, nothing but fish eyes. Cold, with dead black pupils staring out at her.
When the dose was over, Irene took the subway home, and was so flushed she had to pull her coat open with only the kimono underneath. People stared, but she didn’t care. It was New York, and there were stranger people than her in every neighboring car. The thought comforted her.
She had already arrived in the place she belonged. Once she was safely inside her apartment, she turned on the heater. There was a loose thread at the sleeve of the kimono that had been tickling her all day long. She tugged, and more silk came away in her hand without breaking. She pulled and pulled at the thread for minutes, until there was no cuff, and then only half a sleeve, and then no sleeve at all. She let the thread fall around her feet.
William called. She didn’t answer. Sara called. She didn’t answer. In a week Sara would be back in the city and she would have to tell her everything, but not yet. She kept pulling until the collar and the bodice and the hem and t
he other sleeve were all entirely unraveled. Soon the silk thread was piling up to her naked waist. She unraveled the rivers and trees and the carp that swam in circles. At last she unraveled the final stitch. She felt safe and warm as she burrowed into the nest of silk. She had eaten almost nothing since the fish eyes, but she wasn’t hungry. She closed her eyes as she pulled the silk in around her. She wanted nothing more than to rest there in that enormous cocoon, for days and weeks, and then emerge—free of poisons and tumors and heartsickness. With wings, she thought to herself, as sleep finally came.
A SUBJUNCTIVE MARCH
Sara could no longer tell one day from the last or the next. Irene had told her about the biopsy results right after she and George had returned from New Year’s, and now it was March. What had happened to the intervening weeks was a mystery worthy of study by George’s counterparts at the theoretical physics laboratory. Sara suspected that something had happened to the very fabric of time itself. It was always March. Sara didn’t even need to see the gray dawn outside the one tiny window in George’s apartment to know it was out there, dismal and petulant.
She woke up each morning to the sound of her husband-to-be trying to extract himself from the Murphy bed without waking her. She dreamed of it closing up like a Venus flytrap with her inside. With her eyes nine-tenths shut, she breathed heavily so George would believe she was still dozing as he moved around the tiny apartment, from the toilet-in-the-closet to the shower-in-the-kitchen. Coffee dripped behind the spray of the shower. She peeked when George emerged, sopping wet, and proceeded to barrel about the apartment in his towel, trying to simultaneously pour the coffee, check the weather on his phone, and (on alternate days) water the plant. There was a hard deadline, always, of seven o’clock, because that was when George’s car was due for ticketing, and his panic grew and grew as the minute hand worked its way around. Already there were four parking tickets that George was fighting, plus a speeding ticket he’d gotten on the LIE, another from Riverside Drive, and a third he hadn’t yet told her about but that she’d seen hiding under a notebook and seemed to involve driving the wrong way down a one-way block in Tribeca.
Lying in bed, she imagined how much more smoothly things would go if people just listened to her. If her roommate, Karen, saw reason and moved out of their bigger apartment, regardless of whose name was technically on the lease. If Irene would not always wait until the last possible minute to text to say if she needed someone to take her to the hospital or pick her up. If Jacob would read the book she’d bought him for Hanukah. If Irene would hurry up and tell Jacob about the whole cancer thing, instead of always waiting for the “right time,” which was clearly never. If she and George would find the perfect glamorous yet intimate place to hold their wedding so she could finally mail the save-the-date cards she’d already bought and addressed. If William would sign on to Facebook again because even though she was mad at him for leaving Irene at the train station, she was also sure that they would make a great couple once she was all better.
Sara snapped to as George, showered and dressed at last, kissed her cheek to say goodbye. “Hey. When will I see you?” he whispered in her ear.
She opened her eyes. It was nearly seven. How had that happened?
“Irene’s meeting me to see an apartment in Morningside Heights during my lunch break, and then I’m going to try and get down to Battery Park tonight to see a place for the wedding. But I still have the ‘Hip Spring Break Destinations’ column to edit. Sheldon quit last week, so it got reassigned.”
“You’re already doing the six articles that Meegan left behind when she quit.”
Sara was too tired to get into that. “So I might just do that at the coffee shop until they close.”
George nodded, “Allen got us time on the Gerber satellite tonight, and he wants to go over the materials for the conference next month. And somewhere in there I have to find ten minutes to talk to that guy at Cornell. Someone’s on leave and might not come back. They don’t know when they’ll know.”
“You want to move back to Ithaca?”
“I don’t want to move anywhere. I just want a job.”
“Okay. We’ll just live in this closet forever then.”
“I like this closet. As closets go, this is a good one.”
Sara arched an eyebrow. “Oh yeah? Why’s that?”
“Well, I’ve been checking, but so far, this is the only closet in the city that has you in it.”
She couldn’t help laughing at the thought of George bursting into an apartment, opening the closet doors, and doing an apologetic about-face.
“Run away with me,” Sara said suddenly.
George laughed. “You want to elope?”
“I want to go to France.”
“Oh, is that all?”
“Come on. I’m serious. We’ve been talking about this forever! You, me, Irene, Jacob. Freshman year we found those berets at the Salvation Army, and we promised we would go someday. Remember? We watched all those Godard movies.”
George groaned, still pained by the memory.
“We’ve put this off for a third of our lives already. And I’m saying we should really think about going while we still have the—while we all still can.”
George checked his watch nervously. “Well, okay, but only if you have a few thousand dollars lying around I don’t know about.”
The thing was, she did. And while she loved that George always forgot, he did know she did. Before her grandfather, C. F. Sherman, had completely lost his marbles, his accountants had set up various accounts for her and her sisters. Trust funds, essentially, though she never called them that because it gave people the wrong idea: snobby and spoiled were immediate conclusions. In college, even though she’d worked part time every single semester and interned in the summers and paid for all her own books and meals, the fact that she didn’t have to, technically, had still occasionally caused friction when Jacob panicked about his loans and Irene had needed to sometimes sleep on their couches or raid their pantries when her latest fling had kicked her out.
Sara found it much easier to simply pretend the money wasn’t real and to live paycheck to paycheck like everyone else. Her mother kept telling her to just get a broker, hire a wedding planner, get a cleaning service, go to the tailor. But Sara refused to pay others to do what she could manage to do herself. If everyone else could do it, then she could too. Twice as much of it, even. And meanwhile she always looked forward to the days ahead of them, when everyone’s hard work would pay off, and George would have tenure somewhere, and Jacob would get a Fulbright, and Irene would sell her art for thousands, and they could all finally travel together, with all their future children tagging along behind them.
Sara stroked George’s cheek. “Hurry up. You’re going to get a ticket.”
He groaned. “See you at the end of time, then.”
“See you at the end of time,” she replied, with another quick kiss before he dashed out the door. When the door finally closed behind him, Sara cautiously untangled herself from the sheets, closed the bed, fixed her hair, brushed her teeth, and pulled on the clothes she had laid out carefully the night before.
• • •
Sara had learned of Irene’s cancer in the back of a taxi, sandwiched between the door and a human-sized cocoon made of iridescent silk. She had come down to Fourth Street to help extract Irene’s latest artistic creation from the living room and transport it to the K Gallery, where Irene intended to hide it in the back of the storeroom until she figured out just what the hell to do with it. They had been heading up Sixth Avenue when Sara observed that it was an unusually large piece for Irene.
She had sighed. “I know. Any bigger, and it’d be installation art.”
Sara had complimented the cocoon, which really was quite stunning and had an almost wet texture somehow, from the way the silk shone in the murky January daylight.
“So what happened?” Sara had asked.
“What do you mean?” Irene had replied.
“I mean what came over you? Why’d you make it?”
Sara realized now (knowing what she knew by March) that Irene must have been about to tell her the story of Mrs. Cho’s kimono, but couldn’t do so without explaining how she’d spent Christmas Eve at the Cho household, and that she couldn’t explain that without first explaining how she’d broken down and called William from the MetroStop Bakery by the hospital, and that she couldn’t explain that without first explaining why she’d been in the hospital. Irene had traced this long invisible thread of events back and had landed where she needed to begin, which was to say, “Well, the biopsy results came back positive.”
Sara ignored the apparent non sequitur and hugged Irene firmly. She had been ready for this since before the holiday party.
“Everything’s going to be okay. We’re going to beat this thing, no problem.” She pulled her phone from her purse to start hunting for the relevant numbers. “Luther said he knows someone at Sloan Kettering and someone else at Montefiore. We should make appointments right away for a second opinion, and then our health columnist, Dr. Sammy, he said he’d talk to us about treatment options anytime.”
But Irene had actually seemed annoyed by this. “Actually,” she said, “I started chemo a few weeks ago. At Mount Sinai.”
“A few weeks ago?”
“It only took a few hours for three days. Now I’ve got a little time off before the next round. It wasn’t so bad. I feel pretty good, and they’re very optimistic. I just didn’t want to ruin everyone’s holiday. It’s silly.”
Why We Came to the City Page 11