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Dickie had not visited the new apartment, just as he had never been to the old one. To this day, they had only ever rendezvoused at the hotel near Washington Square where Dickie stayed when he was in town.
That would change tonight, Charles reminded himself. And right then, as if responding to a cue now that the stage of his and Iris’s little domestic play was set, there came a knock at the door.
Dickie and Eleanor stood side by side, making such a dashing couple that for one disorienting moment Charles grew confused.
“I hope we’re not early!” Eleanor said. “I just happened to walk into the elevator at the exact same moment as this gentleman here, and he offered to push the button for me, and I said, ‘Four please,’ and he said, ‘What a coincidence, that’s where I’m heading, too,’ and I thought, well, how many apartments on the fourth floor can be hosting dinner and drinks that start at eight sharp? And how many would have invited such a handsome fellow? So I held out my hand”—here, Eleanor extended her hand, inviting her new companion into the reenactment, and Dickie gamely took it—“and I said, ‘I’m Eleanor, pleased to make your acquaintance, might you by any chance be Dickie?’ And he said, ‘Well, I’m sure you can guess.’ Hello, my love.”
She waited for Charles to close the door behind them before delivering a breathless kiss to Iris and surprising him by giving him a peck on the cheek as well.
“It’s good to see you, Charles.” She seemed to mean it.
Dickie stood with his hands behind his back, and Charles was suddenly overcome with an odd shyness.
“You need a cocktail,” he informed Eleanor, crossing the room to the cart, where he busied his hands with liquor and ice. Eleanor accepted the drink and took it into the kitchen, where he heard a soft “Oh dear.”
“Don’t worry,” said Iris, marching into the kitchen behind her. “We have potatoes.”
And then he was alone with Dickie, in the home that he shared with his wife, and occasionally with his wife’s girlfriend.
“Oswin,” he said.
“Ambrose.”
Dickie brought his hands out from behind his back, smiling bashfully as he held out his offering: a rose-colored plant. A housewarming gift, Charles realized. The gesture was so quotidian and yet so unexpected that it took him a moment to recognize the bright, latticed petals, initially mistaking it for a carnation before recognizing it as the camellia, the flower Bette Davis adored so much in Now, Voyager. Charles had recounted the entire plot to Dickie in bed one afternoon upon hearing the other man had not seen it.
“You have a beautiful home,” said Dickie, holding his gaze, the furthest edges of that damned mustache curling in pleasure.
“Oh, how thoughtful!” Iris said, reappearing and extracting the plant from Dickie’s hands. “Charles, don’t just stand there, take Dickie’s coat and pour his martini.”
It did not matter, in the end, that the roast was ruined. With Iris’s enthusiastic permission, Dickie chopped away at the charred exterior of the beef and carved what remained edible inside. They slathered the dry meat with horseradish and washed down hastily made sandwiches with wine, and lots of it. They sat around the dinner table that was so shiny and new it contained a coppery image of the four of them within its surface, and laughed over how awful a cook Iris was.
It was a quintessentially American activity. McCarthy himself, that gray-faced angel of death, could have peered through their window and passed right over their house. For so many years Charles had wanted to take a match to the linen and lace framing his parents’ dinners, and now here they were! Something about having Dickie and Eleanor over like they were one ordinary couple socializing with another felt like such a delicious inversion, the cleverest sort of trick. That they had all found one another was remarkable enough; that they sat here now, mirthful doubles suspended in the amber of the table, was nothing short of miraculous. He could, as his darling wife might have said, plotz.
“To Kismet,” Iris said, holding up her glass. She was prone to toasting their child once they reached a certain point in the evening, when her consonants would begin to soften and drip like the candles she always lit for dinner. Charles didn’t think his wife especially superstitious, but it was almost as if she felt compelled to thank the fictional superhero for everything he had given them, raising her glass in pagan offering for fear that it would all be taken away.
Charles understood the impulse, even if he did not share it. Privately, he saw their good fortune as a dare. He and Iris had lost so much—her brother to the war, his parents to their unforgiving Christian convictions—that any change in their circumstances felt deserved. They had come by their newfound means through honest work, had carved out a tiny corner of happiness in the world’s most indifferent city. He was sometimes overcome by a sensation of snowballing momentum, and the urge to see how much further they could take this, wondering if it were possible to chart the limits to their luck. If they would ever be able, through sheer dogged determination, to live the kind of lives that other people took for granted.
What if nobody stops us? What then? What can’t we do?
“To Kismet,” the table echoed, but as Eleanor brought her glass to her lips, she froze and her breathing quickened.
“Excuse me,” she blurted, bolting from the table.
“Poor thing,” said Dickie. “Not everybody has the stomach for gin.”
“I’ll check on her,” said Iris. “I suspect we’ve rather led her astray. She was such an innocent when I met her.” She gave them both a devilish wink and left the table.
“It’s getting late. I should go,” said Dickie, pushing back in his chair but not yet standing.
“Won’t you have one more drink?” Charles asked. The conviviality of dinner was burning down to embers, but he felt the desire to attempt to stoke the flames, all the same. He didn’t want this night with Dickie and Iris and Eleanor—yes, even Eleanor!—to end; could almost believe that if they only kept laughing and lighting cigarettes and opening cheaper bottles of wine, it might just go on forever.
“Stay,” he said. “Just one more.” Pleading shamed him mildly, but his body had developed quite the high tolerance for that particular poison.
Iris and Eleanor returned from the bathroom, Eleanor’s face bright and freshly scrubbed, her smile refreshed.
“I don’t know what came over me,” she giggled. “It must have been the beef.”
They all laughed, and Charles realized that everybody he loved was in this room.
