New York City, 1948
Charles Ambrose wasn’t even sure he wanted to go to Joey’s party—he had a hangover and a deadline—but Frankie wasn’t taking no for an answer. They were in Charles’s tiny apartment in Brooklyn, nursing the dregs of a pot of coffee because it was a little too early for gin. Also because Charles was out of gin.
‘You’ll only sit around here moping,’ Frankie said. ‘If you’re going to be miserable, you might as well do it in company.’
‘I am not miserable,’ Charles replied, unconvincingly. He was mourning the end of his latest fling, if you could even call it that: an Italian G.I. with thick forearms and a young wife back in Long Island. Charles wasn’t a fantasist: he knew the dangers that came with attachments for men like them, the risks they ran by meeting with the same person more than one or two times. But that didn’t stop him yearning for more. Not a white picket fence, exactly, just… more than the lot of his kind.
‘Hopeless romantic,’ Frankie sighed. ‘Come to the party. It will put some color back in your cheeks. Also, I heard somebody is going to be there that you might like to meet.’
‘Another of your hustler friends from the pier?’ Charles raised an eyebrow. ‘No thanks.’
Frankie laughed. ‘No, silly. That writer you like. The one you’re always talking about, deals in those dime store adventure stories. Ira something.’
‘Ira Hoffman?’ Charles turned his full attention to the conversation for the first time. ‘Ira Hoffman is going to be at Joey’s party? He’s not…’
Frankie shrugged. ‘An invert like us? Who’s to say. Maybe he’s just a drunk and less selective about the company he keeps. You know how these artistic types are.’ He nodded pointedly at the pencil in permanent residence behind Charles’s ear.
‘Alright,’ said Charles.
‘Alright?’
‘Yes, alright. I’ll go to the party.’
Frankie clapped his hands and blew Charles a kiss. ‘Then you’ll get the cab? I’m broke.’
***
The party was in a shabby apartment in the West Village. Joey had come from money, but fell from grace—or more specifically, from the Upper East Side—after his penchant for ladies’ clothing was discovered by his staunch Catholic parents. ‘I think it’s highly backward,’ Joey liked to say, ‘that they go to church every Sunday and listen to a man in a dress, but have no time for my ministry.’
Charles and Frankie were slightly out of breath by the time they’d walked the three flights to Joey’s door. When it opened, they were met by their hostess, statuesque in a silk robe, draped in scarves, short hair concealed beneath a turban.
‘Josephine,’ Charles said. ‘You look lovely.’
‘A vision in veils,’ Frankie agreed. ‘The Salomé of Sullivan Street, some might say.’
Joey, known to a select few as Josephine, smiled and allowed them ingress. It was one of the rules of these gatherings: once over the threshold, they were to refer to their friend as she. In these sacred walls, they could each to their own heart be true. The apartment on Sullivan Street was an oasis in a city increasingly rife with suspicion.
The two of them followed Josephine inside, where Nat King Cole crooned through the record player to a dozen or so people. Josephine gesticulated languorously, chiffon wingspan billowing as she introduced her guests. Often, Josephine’s gatherings consisted solely of men: the presence of women here lent proceedings a degree of plausible deniability. Charles wondered if their host was concerned about raids. The police rarely bothered driving down streets like this. Things in the city must be getting worse.
‘Jack, Quentin, Sammy, Wendy, Diane,’ Josephine sang. ‘Jonathan, Esther, Paul, Christopher—darlings, this is Frankie, and this is Charles. He’s an artist.’
‘An illustrator,’ Charles corrected. He was scanning the room; he hadn’t heard Josephine say Ira Hoffman’s name. Perhaps he wasn’t here yet. Charles accepted a drink from Josephine, and turned to Frankie to ask whether he was certain that the writer was coming, but his friend had already disappeared in pursuit of some pretty boy or other. Charles’s bet was on Quentin.
Left to his own devices, Charles felt a sudden wave of the same exhaustion he always experienced when he found himself alone, on the edge of things. He wished he had the spark of Frankie or Josephine, people who knew so exactly who and what they were that they felt no hesitation in introducing themselves to others, to diving right into the thick of it. It was a queer bravery—the kind that would one day no doubt get one of them arrested or beaten up—but bravery nevertheless.
Feeling less than heroic himself, Charles absconded with his drink to the window. He clambered out onto the fire escape, seeking a reprieve from the oppressively hot air and queeny squeals of the living room, only to discover somebody already perched on the railing. She was a striking woman, with auburn hair and bright, intelligent eyes. She raised her own glass to him in greeting.
‘Are you my date for the evening?’ She asked.
‘Pardon me?’ As opening gambits went, it was rather forward—especially from the kind of woman you might expect to meet at one of Josephine’s soirees.
‘Sorry,’ the woman said. ‘I just have this morbid fear of being set up.’
‘I feel a similar way,’ Charles told her. ‘But surely…’ He looked back through the window, then to the woman, ‘Joey wouldn’t mean to set you up with someone like me?’
‘Didn’t you hear?’ The woman grinned wolfishly. ‘We’re being paired off. Sleeper cells.’
‘You’ll have to help me out here,’ Charles said. ‘I appear to be rather lost.’
‘The government is hunting communists, we all know that.’ She caught his alarmed glare and shushed him. ‘No, don’t worry, you haven’t wandered into some cluster of comrades. But it’s true: they’re terrified that the reds are infiltrating American communities, masquerading as real families, hiding in plain sight. And… well, a few of our friends in there,’ she nodded to the window, ‘have had the same idea.’
Charles suddenly understood.
‘This is a marriage market,’ he said, agog.
‘Indeed! The deviants in there are being matched up, man and woman, like all the good books say. So they can blend in. Be like everyone else.’
‘Hiding in plain sight,’ Charles echoed.
‘Go about our depraved business in secrecy.’ The woman winked.
‘Well I’m sorry to disappoint,’ Charles said, ‘and no offence intended at all, but I’m not in the mood to find a wife. I only came here tonight because… well, because I’d heard there was going to be a man here. A man I was very much hoping to meet.’
‘Oh? Which man?’
‘A writer,’ Charles said. ‘Ira Hoffman.’
His companion laughed. It wasn’t the tinkling, girlish giggle that so many women seemed to put on, thinking it was what men liked: it was a heaving, almost-mannish kind of snort. Whatever had amused her had done so genuinely.
‘What’s so funny?’ Charles asked.
The woman regained her composure, and said: ‘That would be me.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘I’m Ira Hoffman,’ she said. ‘Or rather, he is I.’ Seeing he was still confused, she placed her drink on the railing and held out her hand in introduction. ‘Iris Hoffman, pleased to meet you.’
‘Charles Ambrose.’ He shook her hand, aware he was grinning like a schoolboy. ‘You wrote The Thief and the Bride?’
‘Sure did.’ She nodded. ‘But the rags that put out these stories aren’t awful keen on letting their readers know that all that violence and villainy comes direct from a pretty little head like mine. Women are the fairer sex, as I keep hearing.’ She reached down to the purse at her feet and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. Before taking one out for herself, she offered the pack to Charles. Something about her manner was so gallant, Charles forgot for a moment that he didn’t like women that way. The next thing he thought, a familiar refrain, was that he wished he weren’t inclined the way he was; were he your regular variety of red-blooded American male, he would have asked Iris out already.
The two of them spent much of the evening out on the fire escape, smoking and talking, occasionally re-entering the party to refill their cups with the nasty wine Josephine was serving. To naïve eyes, they might have been sweethearts. And when the end of the night came, and Charles asked Iris if he could call on her, he was almost nervous for the second it took her to say ‘yes.’
They each knew the other for what they truly were, of course. Josephine was very selective about who she let into her home: the last thing you wanted was some curious princess (Joey’s own term for a man not quite ready to be a queen) losing their nerve and running out to blab and the next thing you knew you had the law breaking down your door.
So there was no misunderstanding between man and woman, no expectation left unmet. But in the days and weeks following the party, their friendship did unfold rather like a romance. Each time they went to lunch or out for drinks, Charles would walk away feeling giddy, invigorated by Iris’s company, her wit. What’s more, he felt inspired.
He was working up the courage to ask her if she wanted to collaborate, if she might consent to him illustrating her next story, when she telephoned him with the news about Frankie.
‘Has he been arrested?’ Charles asked, rubbing the bridge of his nose. It would be Frankie’s third strike.
‘No. Not arrested.’ He had never heard Iris sound like this before, and before she said anything else, he knew.
It had happened down at the pier. Frankie would go there some nights when he needed money, which had been more and more lately. Charles always told him to be safe, but that wasn’t always advice you could follow. It wasn’t always within a person’s control. Frankie might have stood a chance against the man who seemed interested then turned nasty, but not against the man’s two friends who appeared out of nowhere.
It wasn’t a fair fight. It was never a fair fight.
Iris held Charles’s hand all through the funeral. The next day, she told him she thought they should get married.
‘I like you as much as I’ve liked any man,’ she said. ‘And I know you feel the same way about me. And it would be… safer.’
It was so like her, Charles would think afterwards, that she should be the one to propose to him. He agreed, and accepted her unconventional proposal. They were married a fortnight later, and Iris moved into the tiny apartment in Brooklyn. Charles had very little money, and a honeymoon was out of the question, but he insisted on taking Iris to the Bossert Hotel for a celebratory lunch. They ate well, and toasted to their new future, and when the pianist in the restaurant began to sing ‘Nature Boy’ by Nat King Cole, they took a turn around the floor, just like real newlyweds.
‘Now that that’s resolved,’ Iris said, swaying gently, ‘let me tell you this new idea I’ve had. It’s classic hero’s journey stuff. A little silly, but I can’t stop thinking about it.’
Charles dipped her, and said: ‘Tell me.’
‘It’s about a boy,’ Iris began, ‘who learns to fly…’
***
Happy Pride! We Could Be Heroes is out now in paperback wherever you buy books.
FYI: Now that I’ve left journalism and gone full-time with the author thing, Substack is where I’ll be sharing the essays, short fiction, book recommendations and general brainrot that I would previously have saved for thinkpieces and Twitter (RIP). Who knows. Maybe this will end up being just another platform where I share cat pics. A paid tier for the really good shit where he shows toe beans for coin, perhaps?
