Chapter 19
For the third time in as many weeks, in what was fast becoming an unspoken ongoing arrangement, Charles collapsed on top of Dickie with a wordless, guttural exclamation, robbed of human speech. A moment later, he rolled off him so that they lay side by side, legs entangled in sheets, glistening chests rising and falling in near unison as they caught their breath.
Dickie lit two cigarettes in his mouth, and then handed one to Charles, the same way Paul Henreid had done for Bette Davis in that picture. Now what was it called? He’d be damned if he could remember. Charles could barely remember his own name at this present moment, he was still so caught up in that devilishly clever thing Dickie had done with his tongue.
“You’ve learned a new trick or two since Istanbul,” he said.
Dickie laughed. It was a full and throaty sound, and once again Charles could not help but wonder what the last five years had held for Dickie, the ways in which they had changed him from that taciturn captain to this louche dispenser of ungodly pleasures.
“I will admit, I am more experienced than I was,” Dickie said. “When you and I first met, I was…well, let’s not be shy about it. I was a real pill.”
“You were not.”
“I was! I took life so seriously, and we were at war, life was a serious business. But since then, I’ve come to think of it as less of a business entirely, and more like…”
“Play?”
Dickie blew out a cloud of smoke, turned to him, and smiled. “Play. Precisely.”
“Well, in that case,” said Charles, “I am glad that you disappeared, and even gladder to have found this newly enlightened Dickie Oswin.”
Dickie’s smile settled into a thin line.
“I should have written,” he said. “After that night. When I was reassigned.”
“I could have, too,” said Charles. “When they sent me back.”
The rest was left unsaid between them. They each knew that they had been careful not to be followed that night in Istanbul, but they also knew that even the best spies were sometimes caught with their pants down. Charles doubted that a couple of men spending the night together was viewed as cause for incident given the larger scheme of things, but the timing of their separation had seemed conspicuous. Perhaps the English and the Americans had simply not wanted their operatives getting too close. They might have been on the same side, but that didn’t mean they’d ever stopped spying on each other.
But what did it matter, really? Dickie had found a way back to him. It was the kind of luck that Charles hadn’t ever dared to dream of. To have survived the war, to have found a friend and ally and partner in Iris, to not have been caught out in one of the bar raids that were happening with alarmingly increasing frequency…was all that not enough? To ask for more would be churlish, arrogant even.
Still, each time that Charles left Dickie’s hotel in Manhattan and made the journey back to Brooklyn, he would allow himself to indulge in a daydream of what it might be like if things were different. To not have to look over his shoulder when they arranged to meet. To be able to sleep in Dickie’s arms for more than a single night. To wake up and drink coffee and eat eggs and read the newspapers. To live. Together.
It was an idle fantasy, nothing more, but still he found himself giving voice to it.
“Wouldn’t it be something,” he said, “if the world were different for those like us?”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, if a man could kiss a man like he would his sweetheart.”
“I believe I did that mere moments ago.”
“You certainly did. But you know what I mean. If we could do that the way men kiss women. Freely. Openly. Without reprisal. As if it were…oh, I don’t know. Ordinary.”
The moment he said it, he felt foolish. The very idea of such a thing was a child’s imagining, even further beyond the limits of possibility than his and Iris’s flying captain.
“It would be quite the thing,” said Dickie. Charles watched the cigarette burn down until the embers were almost touching Dickie’s fingers, and yet the other man didn’t move. “Quite the thing,” he said again, eyes unreadable. A sudden sadness came over Charles, and a pang of guilt that he might have hurt this man—a man whom he held more dearly than even he had realized—by taunting him with the one thing they would never have.
The name of the movie finally came to him. Now, Voyager. Paul and Bette standing by the window, looking out onto the garden, smoking cigarettes and dreaming of what might have been, once upon a time. Charles reached over and took the now-dead cigarette from between Dickie’s fingers, placing it next to his own on the ashtray beside the bed.
“Don’t let’s ask for the moon,” he said. “We have the stars.”
Richard Ranger, the soldier, pilot, and hero known across the galaxy as Captain Kismet, has faced all kinds of challenges and trials: marauding aliens, robots from another dimension, and, of course, the perpetual machinations of his arch-nemesis, Omega Man. But he is about to face his greatest adventure—and danger—yet: LOVE.
Penny Haven, the humble and loyal scientist, has been by his side through thick and thin, and knows his heart and his bravery even better than his friend and companion Axel, the extraterrestrial prince known also as Kid Crimson. But Penny’s inquisitive nature may be her downfall. Ever since Ranger was first imbued with his cosmic gifts in the wormhole, Penny has sought to understand how such things are possible, and her search for knowledge has led to experiments that are beyond even her talents. On her secret moon base, Penny is building a machine capable of tapping into the unfathomable powers of the universe. But what she doesn’t know is that the slightest miscalculation could tear open a hole in reality and propel her through time and space, where she will be lost forever. Will her hubris, like Icarus’s, lead to her downfall? Or can Captain Kismet reach Penny in time and bring her back from the brink of destruction by finally confessing his true feelings?
And all the while, Omega lurks, ready to strike when Kismet and those around him are at their most vulnerable…
“Are we sure we want to turn Penny into some kind of mad scientist?” asked Charles. “She’s Ranger’s girl Friday. The readers seem to really like her.”
“It’s a metaphor,” said Iris. “For how women are constantly being told they’re overreaching whenever they try to pursue their own ambitions.”
“Hmm.” Charles rubbed his stubble. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t have to know,” said Iris. “You just have to make it look good. Eleanor, what do you think?”
Eleanor jumped at being called on, having seemingly given up on trying to follow their conversation from her position on the couch. Charles had been so engrossed in his and Iris’s work at the desk that he had almost forgotten she was even there. Eleanor was a rather pretty young thing who had the tendency to giggle like a schoolgirl, and Charles found her mildly irksome, but he knew Iris was fond of her, and so he tried not to let his irritation show.
“I think it’s very like a man,” said Eleanor, after a moment’s thought, “to see it as his job to rush in and interrupt a woman’s business. To think he knows better.” She looked at Charles pointedly, and Iris smirked.
“I can see I am outnumbered,” said Charles. “I shall make it look splendid,” he added to Iris, and she blew him a kiss.
Charles knew it had never been Iris’s plan for him and Eleanor to be in the same room at the same time, just as he had absolutely no intention of her ever meeting Dickie. But Iris and Eleanor had no other place: Eleanor lived with her husband, and it might raise more suspicion for two women to go to a hotel than two men, so Iris had started inviting her over to the apartment in Brooklyn.
When Charles had walked in a few days earlier to find Eleanor cradled in Iris’s lap, girlish face flushed as Iris worked away under her skirt, they had all been mortified. Iris could probably see the surprise flit across his face as the two of them had sprung apart like a couple during a bar raid, and she had braced herself. Instead Charles had simply laughed. It was only after the horror at being caught gave way to relief that they joined him in his mild hysteria, Iris’s laughter low and throaty, Eleanor’s tinkling like a bell.
After that, Charles had begrudgingly accepted Eleanor’s occasional presence, although Iris did her best to keep them separate. They never dined together, for instance, and so later that evening, when Charles suggested they go out for dinner to talk more about Kismet, Iris gave Eleanor a discreet peck on the cheek good night and sent her out of the apartment.
“Where are we going?” Iris asked Charles later, holding on to his arm as he led her through a neighborhood she said she didn’t think she had ever visited before.
“You’ll see soon,” he replied, and true enough, just a few minutes later they were walking down some stone steps and into a narrow doorway under a small sign marked The Vanguard.
The woman onstage was dressed in a dinner jacket, dark hair slicked back like a man’s, every inch the heartbreaker. There was a time not so long ago that such a sight would have scandalized them both, when the notion of a girl dressed as a boy would have been as far-fetched as a masked man taking flight, but they knew now that there were more true things in heaven and earth than could be dreamed up.
They were led by the hostess to their table, Charles pulling out Iris’s seat for her before taking his own, and they each ordered a cocktail. Tonight was a celebration of a sort; Captain Kismet was a roaring success, and Walter had hinted that he would commission more from them if he liked the way they concluded the saga of Ranger’s feud with Omega…and if they gave Axel a nickname other than Kid Crimson.
“All that red,” he had said, shaking his head. “It’s too Commie. Kid Kismet sounds better.” They had agreed to the change immediately: He was the one signing the checks, after all.
“To princes who fall from the sky,” said Charles, raising his drink, “and other impossible things!”
Iris touched her glass to his and smiled weakly.
“What is it?” Charles asked. “You were quiet on the way.”
“It’s nothing,” she said, but of course even a man of Charles’s persuasion could deduce that this wasn’t true.
“I am sorry for what I said earlier,” Charles continued. “About the Penny story. I think it’s a good idea, I really do. I suppose I just didn’t exactly understand where you were coming from.”
“I shouldn’t have expected you to,” said Iris. “I know you and I are franker with each other than a lot of husbands and wives, and you certainly understand how it feels to not quite fit the role you were given, but you are still a man.”
Charles smiled ruefully. “Yes,” he said, “I am.”
“For women, it’s…” Iris shook her head. “From the moment we are old enough to walk and talk, there is a set of rules we are expected to follow. A gospel we are all to know by heart, taught to us by our mothers, who learned it from their mothers, and none of them ever seemed to like it or agree with it, but that’s just the way things are. To be a woman is to be confined. But, well, what if I don’t feel like a woman all of the time?”
“I see,” said Charles, taken aback. He wasn’t sure he saw at all. “And what do you feel like, then?”
She paused for a sip of her martini, trying to articulate her meaning. For all her talents as a writer, this seemed to be something she didn’t quite have the words for, words that Charles imagined might not have even been invented yet.
“I feel like her,” Iris said, nodding over to the sliver of black and white onstage singing “The Very Thought of You.” “Trussed up and pretending to be someone else.”
“I could have lent you a suit tonight,” Charles joked. “Although it might drown you.”
“You’re making fun of me.”
“I’m not. I promise, I’m not.” The mirth left Charles’s eyes. He had gleaned, from Iris’s infrequent remarks, that her brother, Axel, had been of their same persuasion, and that the two had been close. Charles couldn’t help but think he made a rather inadequate confidant by comparison. “Are you…” He took a sip of his Gibson, for courage. “Are you saying you would like it if you were free to dress how you pleased?”
He hoped she would hear the question in his question.
Would you rather live as a man?
“Firstly,” she said, “ask any woman, and I am certain she’d tell you she would like more freedom to dress howsoever she pleases. But…I don’t know. I don’t think so, at any rate. I enjoy so much of the artistry that goes into being a woman. It makes me feel like I am both Pygmalion and Galatea at the same time. But I like it even more on others.”
She took another steeling sip of her own drink, and Charles was aware that they rarely spoke about these things in such direct terms. Introduced at a mutual friend’s dinner due to their shared creative interests, they had each discerned the other for what they truly were; had seen the sense in a marriage of—if not convenience—mutual safety. Their entire arrangement had, up until now, been predicated on an unspoken understanding. But the more she spoke, the more freely words came, far more easily than either could have expected, like they had been brewing inside her all along, waiting for the opportunity to make themselves known.
“When I am with a woman, I feel more of a woman myself,” she said, careful to keep her voice low, even in these friendly surroundings. “Then there are the instances when I am wearing trousers with my hair pinned up, and I catch sight of myself in a store window or the rear mirror of a cab and I think…” Her eyes tingled with the threat of tears. “Well, I think: Don’t I look handsome?”
Charles said nothing. It struck him then, somewhat incredibly for the first time, that for all of the things they shared, the entire little world she and he had created together, they remained strangers to each other.
“I have been toying with an idea for another character,” Iris said, smoothing away the infinitesimal creases in the tablecloth. “A shapeshifter. Somebody who can take on the form of anything or anyone they please. Sometimes they may look like a man. Other times, a woman.”
“That sounds like it could be confusing to the reader,” said Charles.
Iris shrugged. “It was just an idea.”
Charles felt a pang of affection for her, then. He held her so dear, as much as any other husband did his wife. He downed his Gibson, rose from his chair, and extended his hand.
“May I have this dance?” he asked.
Iris looked to the stage, where the crooner was singing “Blue Moon.” She put her hand in his, and he assisted her to her feet and led her to the small area in front of the band where sweethearts swayed like dandelions in the breeze. He noticed as he placed his hand on her waist that they were the only man and woman dancing together. He grinned. What a pair of inverts they were!
Charles leaned in closer and whispered in his wife’s ear: “Why don’t you lead.”