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.
“You are always about to leave me,” he said aloud to no one.
William had had enough. He stacked the photographs together again as neatly as he could, slipped them into the back pages of the address book, and wedged the whole thing between the jewelry boxes again. It’s too much, he told himself, as he stepped out of the apartment. “It’s too much,” he said to himself. It’s too much. Shutting it all behind him, he trudged back down the half-collapsed staircase and pushed out onto the snowy sidewalks of East Fourth Street.
He made it all the way to Fifty-third Street before he changed his mind again. By Seventy-eighth, he saw a high-necked red dress in a shop window. He bought it and had it gift-wrapped.
• • •
Irene thought she’d never been happier than she was walking down the streets of suburban Flushing with William’s arm on her recently bandaged one, heading toward the home of Mr. and Mrs. Cho. William was flustered, she imagined because they were late. Still, she didn’t even mind that he’d asked her “How do you feel?” five times and “Are you feeling all right?” six times since she’d checked out of the hospital. For she was telling him the truth: she felt spectacular. In the eight hours she’d been stuck in the chemotherapy chair, she’d done five preliminary sketches for new sculptures, read six chapters of the Iliad (and William’s touching accompanying thoughts), and — the pièce de résistance! — had found a certain page twelve of the fall 2007 Pottery Barn catalog.
“J’accuse!” she’d cried, when he’d come to collect her at the end of the day. She’d flung the open catalog into his worried-looking face.
“How do you feel?” he’d asked, batting it away.
“I feel,” she said with a deep breath, “incredible.”
William looked confused and studied the catalog a moment. “I don’t understand.”
“This is your apartment, William! What — did you just pick up the phone and call the eight hundred number and say, ‘Give me a page twelve, please’?”
He blushed again. “Not exactly, I—”
“William!” she cried, pulling at her hair with both hands. The other patients in the room were staring at them, delighted for a bit of real drama after several dull hours of talk shows. “William, you are a person! You possess, within you, a personality. A personality that can — no, which must—be expressed in the things that surround you!”
She lifted up his copy of the Iliad like a battle-ax.
“Listen to this, Mr. Cho! ‘If the gods actually know our fates and still try to meddle and wage their wars in us, then there must be some purpose in our choosing one of the many paths to that end. Man must have free will, or else why would the gods themselves bother?’”
“So?” he’d said. “Just some notes. They don’t mean anything.”
“They mean,” Irene shouted happily, “that you aren’t a page twelve, William Cho!”
This victorious cry still rang in her ears as she rushed arm in arm with William over the icy pavement, wearing the new red dress that he had bought for her as a Christmas gift. Somehow he had managed not only to select something she might have bought herself but also to get the proper size. She wondered if he had slyly checked the label on her clothes the night before as he’d undressed her, already planning this gracious surprise. And as he fumbled with the stack of gifts beneath his arm and hurriedly tried to warn her about his parents, she felt that he was her very own dark horse — that she would bring him out of himself and into the world, just as she had been herself, once.
“My father is quiet. Silent, generally, so don’t be offended if he doesn’t say anything. And my mother is — strange. She works in the community here as a sort of a healer, I guess. Not like a doctor. It’s a family thing — back in Korea her mother was a mudang… like a shaman-kind-of-medicine-woman-kind-of-thing. So she’s bonkers, basically. I don’t know. She thinks she talks to spirits and gods, and people pay her to, like, channel—”
“William. Everyone’s got a crazy family. Take a breath.”
“Well, not all of them speak to the dead, that’s all I’m saying. Actually there’s one other thing,” he whispered as he stood awkwardly a few inches from her. “My parents won’t like it if they think we’re dating. Because you aren’t Korean. Not that we are dating. But we should make sure they don’t think we are.”
Irene knew she ought to be upset at this but simply couldn’t feel it. She looked at him mischievously. “You know I’m just using you for your body.”
Again William turned six shades of red. She dragged him up the steps of his own house and rang his doorbell. In moments they were greeted by a tall woman who studied them from behind the screen door.
“Come in, hurry!” she said. “You’ll get caught in the storm!”
“It’s beautiful out!” William said as she took the presents from him and bustled them both inside. Irene looked up at the sky, which was soft and pink from the cast-off light of their city. There wasn’t a dark cloud anywhere in sight.
Inside, they took off their coats and laid them on top of an old washer and dryer, atop a heap of others. Irene shook Mrs. Cho’s hand, which was covered in large rings. As the woman turned to address her son in stern Korean, Irene was delighted to see that the woman’s hair was dotted with more of these tiny rings, glinting like silver salmon backs leaping upstream.
“Mom, this is Irene.” William said.
Mrs. Cho looked up at her. “We are so glad you could come. It’s always good when William has a friend.”
He blushed.
“I love your hair,” Irene said to Mrs. Cho.
She blushed, a slighter shade than her son, and gripped Irene’s hands between her own pair, giving them a shake. She seemed about to say something when she pulled away, her eyes filling with curiosity and worry. “Not feeling well?” she asked.
Irene tried to smile. “I’ve never felt better, Mrs. Cho. Honestly.”
But Mrs. Cho stood there, lips pursed, inspecting Irene as if she were a thin crack in a wall that might get larger. William hissed something at her in Korean, which she ignored, and then he hissed again, and she sharply spoke back to him without taking her eyes off Irene. Something about it made Irene feel as if she were back at the hospital, being scanned in the echo chamber of the MRI machine. She felt a quick dizziness, as if the tiles beneath their feet had lurched an inch upward, and then it was gone.