The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (with bonus content) (37 page)

“I—”

At this very moment, Joe’s attention was diverted by the sound of someone, somewhere in the drawing room, talking in German. He turned and searched among the faces and the blare of conversation until he found the lips that were moving in time to the elegant Teutonic syllables he was hearing. They were fleshy, sensual lips, in a severe way, downturned at the corners in a somehow intelligent frown, a frown of keen judgment and bitter good sense. The frowner was a trim, fit man in a black turtleneck sweater and corduroy trousers, rather chinless but with a high forehead and a large, dignified German nose. His hair was fine and fair, and his bright black eyes held a puckish gleam that belied the grave frown. There was great enthusiasm in the eyes, pleasure in the subject of his discourse. He was talking, as far as Joe could tell, about the Negro dance team the Nicholas Brothers.

Joe felt the familiar exultation, the epinephrine flame that burned away doubt and confusion and left only a pure, clear, colorless vapor of rage. He took a deep breath and turned his back on the man.
^*

“I would love to see your work,” he said.

T
HE PITCH
of the staircase was steep and the treads narrow. There were three stories above the ground floor, and she took him all the way to the top. It got darker and spookier as they climbed. The walls on either side of the stairs were hung with hundreds of framed portraits of her father, carefully fit together like tiles to cover every inch of available space. In each of them, as far as Joe could tell from a hasty inspection, the subject wore the same goofy suppressing-a-fart expression, and if there was any significant difference among them, apart from the fact that some people were evidently more adept at telepathically focusing a lens than others, it was lost on Joe. As they made their way up through the increasing gloom, Joe seemed to steer only according to the light shed by the action of her palm against his wrist, by the low steady flow of voltage through the conducting medium of their sweat. He stumbled like a drunken man and laughed as she hurried him along. He was vaguely aware of the ache in his hand, but he ignored it. As they turned the landing to the top floor, a strand of her hair caught in the corner of his mouth, and for an instant he crunched it between his teeth.

She took him into a small room in the middle of the house, which curved queerly where it backed up against the central tower. In addition to her tiny, girlish white iron bed, a small dresser, and a nightstand, she had crowded in an easel, a photo enlarger, two bookcases, a drawing table, and a thousand and one other items piled atop one another, strewn about, and jammed together with remarkable industry and abandon.

“This is your
studio
?” Joe said.

A smaller blush this time, at the tips of her ears.

“Also my bedroom,” she said. “But I wasn’t going to ask you to come up to
that
.”

There was something unmistakably exultant about the mess that Rosa had made. Her bedroom-studio was at once the canvas, journal, museum, and midden of her life. She did not “decorate” it; she infused it. Sometime around four o’clock that morning, for example, half-disentangled from the tulle of a dream, she had reached for the chewed stub of a Ticonderoga she kept by her bed for this purpose. When, just after dawn, she awoke, she found a scrap of loose-leaf paper in her left hand, scrawled with the cryptic legend “lampedusa.” She had run to the unabridged on its lonely lectern in the library, where she learned this was the name of a small island in the Mediterranean Sea, between Malta and Tunisia. Then she had returned to her room, taken a big thumbtack with an enameled red head from an El Producto box she kept on her supremely “cluttered-up” desk, and tacked the scrap of paper to the eastern wall of her room, where it overlapped a photograph, torn from the pages of
Life
, of Ambassador Joseph Kennedy’s handsome eldest son, tousled and wearing a Choate cardigan. The scrap joined a reproduction of a portrait of Arthur Rimbaud at seventeen, dreaming with chin in palm; the entire text of her only play, a Jarry-influenced one-act called
Homunculus Uncle;
plates, sliced from art books, of a detail from Bosch that depicted a woman being pursued by an animate celery, of Edvard Munch’s
Madonna
, of several Picasso “blue” paintings, and of Klee’s
Cosmic Flora;
Ignatius Donnelly’s map of Atlantis, traced; a grotesquely vibrant full-color photo, also courtesy of
Life
, of four cheerful strips of bacon; a spavined dead locust, forelegs arrested in an attitude of pleading; as well as some three hundred other scraps of paper bearing the numinous vocabulary of her dreams, a puzzling lexicon that included “grampus,” “ullage,” “parbuckle,” and some entirely fictitious words, such as “luben” and “salactor.” Socks, blouses, skirts, tights, and twisted underpants lay strewn across teetering piles of books and phonograph albums, the floor was thick with paint-soaked rags and chromo-chaotic cardboard palettes, canvases stacked four deep stood against the walls. She had discovered the surrealistic potential of food, about which she had rather pioneeringly complicated emotions, and everywhere lay portraits of broccoli stalks, cabbage
heads, tangerines, turnip greens, mushrooms, beets—big, colorful, drunken tableaux that reminded Joe of Robert Delaunay.

When they walked into the room, Rosa went over to the phonograph and switched it on. When the needle hit the groove, the scratches on the disk popped and crackled like a burning log. Then the air was filled with a festive wheeze of violins.

“Schubert,” said Joe, rocking on his heels.
“The Trout.”

“
The Trout
’s my favorite,” Rosa said.

“Me too.”

“Look out.”

Something hit him in the face, something soft and alive. Joe brushed at his mouth and came away with a small black moth. It had electric-blue transverse bands on its belly. He shuddered.

Rosa said, “Moths.”

“Moths more than one?”

She nodded and pointed to the bed.

Joe noticed now that there were a fair number of moths in the room, most of them small and brown and unremarkable, scattered on the blankets of the narrow bed, flecking the walls, sleeping in the folds of the curtains.

“It’s an annoyance,” she said. “They’re all over the upstairs of the house. Nobody’s really sure why. Sit down.”

He found a moth-free spot on the bed and sat down.

“Apparently there were moths all through the last house, too,” she said. She knelt down before him. “And in the one before that. That was the one where the murder happened. What’s the matter with your finger?”

“It’s sore. From when I was turning the screw.”

“It looks dislocated.”

His right index finger was curled a little to one side, in a queer parenthetical crook.

“Give me your hand. Come on, it’s all right. I was almost a nurse once.”

He gave her his hand, sensing the thin strong rod of obdurate competence that was the armature of her artsy Village style. She turned his
hand over and over, probed delicately with the tips of her own fingers at the joints and skin.

“Doesn’t it hurt?”

“Actually,” he said. The pain, now that he attended to it, was fairly sharp.

“I can fix it.”

“You really are a nurse? I thought you worked at
Life
the magazine.”

She shook her head.

“No, I’m really not a nurse,” she said briskly, as if skipping over some incident or emotion she preferred to keep to herself. “It was just something I—pursued.” She gave an explanatory sigh as if tired of her own tale. “I wanted to be a nurse in Spain. You know. In the war. I volunteered. I had a post in a hospital run by the A.C.P. in Madrid, but I … hey.” She let his hand fall. “How did you know …”

“I saw your business card.”

“My—Oh.” He was rewarded with a full new flush. “Yes, it’s such a bad habit,” she went on, resuming her big stage voice though there was no crowd to overhear the performance, “leaving things in men’s bedrooms.”

Joe wasn’t, in Sammy’s phrase, buying any of that. He would have been willing to bet not only that having left her purse behind in Jerry Glovsky’s room had mortified Rosa Luxemburg Saks but that her habits did not even encompass the regular visiting of men’s bedrooms.

“This is going to hurt,” she promised him.

“Badly?”

“Horribly, but only for a second.”

“All right.”

She looked at him, steadily, and licked her lips, and he had just noticed that the pale brown irises of her eyes were flecked with green and gold when abruptly she twisted his hand one way and his finger the other, and, crazing his arm to the elbow with instantaneous veins of lightning and fire, set the joint back into place.

“Wow.”

“Hurt?”

He shook his head, but there were tears rolling down his cheeks.

“Anyway,” she said. “I had a ticket from New York to Cartagena on the
Bernardo
. On March twenty-fifth, 1939. On the twenty-third, my stepmother died very suddenly. My father was devastated. I postponed sailing for a week. On the thirty-first, the Falangists took Madrid.”

Joe remembered the Fall of Madrid. It had come two weeks after the fall, uncapitalized, disregarded, of Prague.

“You were disappointed?”

“Crushed.” She cocked her head to one side, as if listening to the echo of the word she had just uttered. She gave her head a decisive shake. A curl slipped free of its pin and tumbled down the side of her face. She brushed it irritably to one side. “You want to know something? Honestly, I was relieved. What a coward, huh?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Oh, yes. I am. A big coward. That’s why I just keep daring myself to do things I’m afraid of doing.”

He had a notion. “Such things like?”

“Like bringing you up here to my room.”

This was unquestionably the moment to kiss her. Now he was the coward. He leaned over and started to flip with his good hand through a stack of paintings by the bed. “Very good,” he said after a moment. Her brushwork seemed hasty and impatient, but her portraits—the term “still life” did not suffice—of produce, canned foods, and the occasional trotter or lamb chop were at once whimsical, worshipful, and horrifying, and managed to suggest their subjects perfectly without wasting too much time on the details. Her line was very strong; she could draw as well as he, perhaps better. But she took no pains with her work. The paint was streaked, blotchy, studded with dirt and bristles; the edges of paintings often were left ragged and blank; where she couldn’t get something quite right, she just blotted it out with furious, petulant strokes. “I can almost to smell them. What murder?”

“Huh?”

“You said there was a murder.”

“Oh, yes. Caddie Horslip. She was a socialite or a debutante or—they hung my great-granduncle for it. Moses Espinoza. It was a huge sensation at the time, back in the eighteen-sixties, I think.” She noticed that
she was still holding his hand. She let it go. “There. Good as new. Have you got a cigarette?”

He lit one for her. She continued to kneel in front of him, and there was something about it that aroused him. It made him feel like a wounded soldier, making time in a field hospital with his pretty American nurse.

“He was a lepidopterist, Moses,” she said.

“A—?”

“He studied moths.”

“Oh.”

“He knocked her out with ether and killed her with a pin. Or at least that’s what my father says. He’s probably lying. I made a dreambook about it.”

“A pin,” he said. “Ouch.” He waggled his finger. “It’s good, I think. You fixed it.”

“Hey, how about that.”

“Thank you, Rosa.”

“You’re welcome, Joe. Joe. You don’t make a very convincing Joe.”

“Not yet,” he said. He flexed his hand, turned it over, studied it. “Am I going to be able to draw?”

“I don’t know, can you draw now?”

“I’m not bad. What’s a dreambook?”

She set the burning cigarette down on a phonograph record that lay on the floor beside her and went to her desk. “Would you like to see one?”

Joe bent over and picked up the cigarette, holding it upright between the very tips of his fingers as though it were a stick of burning dynamite. It had melted a small divot into the second movement of Mendelssohn’s
Octet
.

“Here, this is one. I can’t seem to find the Caddie Horslip.”

“Really?” he said dryly. “What a surprise.”

“Don’t be smart, it’s unattractive in a man.”