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“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.
