“I think maybe I should go,” she said finally.
William looked sad. “Oh! Well. All right then. Wait here. I’ll call for a car.”
“The city’s full of cabs, William,” she said. “Cabs and sidewalks and trains. Christ, what I wouldn’t give to be on a train right now.”
“Sorry if you didn’t like the film,” he said stiffly.
“The film was fine,” she said.
“You’re upset.” He frowned without quite pouting.
“No, not at all,” Irene said, getting up to leave. She didn’t know just what sort of coaxing it was going to take to get him to relax, but she was pretty sure she had 68 percent less time for it now than she’d had a few weeks ago. It had been a ridiculous idea to come in the first place.
“Where are you going?” he asked, as she was putting her boots back on.
“Look, William—”
“No, I mean, I get that you’re leaving. It’s just, you said you couldn’t stay at your apartment tonight, and I know Sara said everyone was going out of town. I was worried that — well, do you have anywhere else to go?”
Irene tossed her coat over her shoulders angrily. “You don’t need to look after me, all right? I have lots of places to go.”
This always happened. Guys — especially nice ones like William — were always trying to persuade her she needed to be taken care of. It was only the losers and fuck-ups who left her to take care of herself. She tried to remind herself that William didn’t know her whole history. All the worse places she’d slept than a bug-bombed apartment, which hers wasn’t even, though again he didn’t know that.
Her left arm kept getting jammed in the sleeve. She couldn’t bend her elbow after all the blood they’d taken that afternoon, which only made her more upset.
“I’ve got friends all over! I’m serious. I could walk over to Penn Station right now, get on any train at all, and I’d be fine.”
William was standing there, nodding, rocking a little on his heels. Irene had her coat on and was at the door. Was he really just going to stare at the floor and not say anything?
“Well,” Irene said finally, “what?”
He looked up at her. “Well, what what?”
“What are you doing?” she specified.
He stopped rocking. “Sorry. Just thinking. Sorry.”
“What about?”
“The film. Movie. The ending,” he sighed. “Originally Hitchcock wanted Fontaine to write a letter to her mother saying she knows Grant’s a killer but she loves him so much that she’ll die for him. Then she drinks the poison, and it would have ended with Grant mailing the letter. But the studio felt that it should end with a killer being brought to justice — so they forced Hitchcock to change it so Grant attempts suicide.”
Irene couldn’t believe he was still talking about the film — movie. Whatever. “That’s completely absurd,” she said.
“Right. I agree. Someone that confident and controlled would never consider suicide—”
“No, that’s not absurd,” Irene interrupted. “He’s an arrogant prick. And killing yourself like that would be the ultimate act of arrogance.”
This brought out the red in William’s cheeks again.
“What I meant is it’s absurd to think he could really kill her.” The flush spread; Irene stepped closer to him and the couch. “In that first scene, right after I came in, where they’re walking outside together and it’s all very romantic and then he calls her Monkeyface, and she gets angry? No self-respecting murderer would call a woman Monkeyface like that. Hitchcock must have known that.”
Suddenly Mount Sinai felt miles and miles away.
Irene looked into his dark eyes and said, “So I think you should hurry up and give me a nickname like that right away, so I’ll be sure you’re not a murderer.”
William laughed. “I can’t! You’re, well, um — too beautiful to make fun of.”
She stepped back a little. She hated that word. Beautiful. It meant nothing; it was too unreliable. What if they took out her eye? If her hair fell out in chunks? If her facial muscles lost their grip? Would he still say she was beautiful?
But William kept going. “I guess, if you pressed me, I’d say your face is a little…”
“What?” Irene urged. “Come on, I can take it.”
“Well, it’s your ears, actually. They’re really tiny. It’s almost like they’re trying to climb back into your head.”
“They are not!” she shouted, jumping up to find a mirror.
“They are too. You’ve basically got no ears.”
“No ears?” she shrieked at her reflection in a black-framed mirror without any discernable character, but it wasn’t her ears she stared at. It was him, behind her, smiling shyly. She turned and he grabbed her, and they collapsed together against the couch.
“Don’t worry,” he said, pushing her hair back as if to study her more closely. “It’s really very becoming, No Ears.”
“You take it back!” she shrieked.
Gently he brushed her hair back and kissed one of her allegedly nonexistent ears.
“There they are!” he exclaimed.
“There you are,” she said. At last.
• • •
Irene slept heavily on top of William, right there on the mahogany leather couch, and he didn’t dare budge for fear of waking her. She’d told him all about her day at the hospital and the first treatment, which would begin in just a few hours. Just before she’d nodded off, he’d made the mistake of asking why she didn’t have any family to visit for the holidays, or to take her to the hospital, for that matter. I left home when I was sixteen, she’d explained. I won’t get into all the reasons I had to go. I just never belonged there. People get born into the wrong families sometimes. Just like souls wind up in the wrong bodies occasionally. I have a very old soul. I think my soul belongs in the body of someone who’s already a hundred and ninety-five.
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.