The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (with bonus content) (43 page)

“Yes, god damn it, I want the money,” Joe said. “But I can’t stop fighting now.”

“Okay,” Sammy said. He sighed and looked around the workroom with a slump in his shoulders and a valedictory expression on his face.
It was the end of the dream that had flickered into life a year ago, in the darkness of his bedroom in Brooklyn, with the scraping of a match and the sharing of a hand-rolled cigarette. “That’s what we’ll tell them, then.” He started to walk back into Anapol’s office.

Deasey reached out and took hold of his shoulder. “Just a minute, Clay,” he said.

Sammy turned back. He had never seen the editor look so uncertain before.

“Oh, Jesus,” Deasey said. “What am I doing?”

“What are you doing?” said Joe.

The editor reached into the breast pocket of his tweed jacket and took out a folded sheet of paper. “This was in my in box this morning.”

“What is it?” Sammy said. “Who’s it from?”

“Just read it,” Deasey said.

It was a photostatted copy of a letter from the firm of Phillips, Nizer, Benjamin & Krim.

“But he’s nothing
like
Superman,” Sammy said when he had finished. Deasey gave him a baleful look, and Sammy realized he was missing the point. He tried to work his way through to what the point might be. There was clearly something about this letter that Deasey felt would be helpful to them, though he was unwilling to go so far as to tell them what it was. “But that doesn’t matter, does it?”

“They’ve already beaten Victor Fox and Centaur on this,” Deasey said. “They’re going after Fawcett, too.”

“I heard about this thing,” Joe said. “They made Will Eisner go in there, Sammy, and he had to tell them that Victor Fox told him, ‘Make me a Superman.’ ”

“Yeah, well, that’s what Shelly said to me, too, remember? He said—oh. Oh.”

“It’s very likely,” Deasey said steadily and slowly, as if speaking to an idiot, “that you will be deposed as a witness. I imagine your testimony could be damaging.”

Sammy slapped Deasey’s arm with the letter.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, hey, thanks, Mr. Deasey.”

“What are you going to say?” Joe asked Sammy, as his cousin stared at the door to Anapol’s office.

Sammy drew himself up and ran a hand across the top of his head.

“I guess I’m going to go in there and offer to perjure myself,” he said.

I
N 1941, ITS BEST YEAR EVER
, the partnership of Kavalier & Clay earned $59,832.27. Total revenues generated that year for Empire Comics, Inc.—from sales of all comic books featuring characters created either in whole or in part by Kavalier & Clay, sales of two hundred thousand copies apiece for each of two Whitman’s Big Little Books featuring the Escapist, sales of Keys of Freedom, of key rings, pocket flashlights, coin banks, board games, rubber figurines, windup toys, and diverse other items of Escapism, as well as the proceeds from the licensing of the Escapist’s dauntless puss to Chaffee Cereals for their Frosted Chaff-Os, and from the Escapist radio program that began broadcasting on NBC in April—though harder to calculate, came to something in the neighborhood of $12 to $15 million. Out of his twenty-nine thousand and change, Sammy gave a quarter to the government, then half of what remained to his mother to spend on herself and his grandmother.

On the leftovers, he lived like a king. He ate lox at breakfast every morning for seven weeks. He went to baseball games at Ebbets Field and sat in a box. He might spend as much as two dollars on dinner, and once, on a day when his legs were feeling tired, he rode seventeen blocks in a taxi. He had an entire week’s worth of big, visible suits, five gray skyscrapers of pinstripe and worsted, made for himself at twenty-five dollars a pop. And he bought himself a Capehart Panamuse phonograph. It cost $645.00, nearly half as much as a new Cadillac Sixty-one. It was finished in a ridiculously beautiful Hepplewhite style, maple and birch inlaid with ash, and in the cousins’ otherwise modern, rather spartan apartment—soon after taking up with Joe, Rosa had begun to lobby him to move out of the Chelsea Rathole—it stood out disturbingly.
It demanded that you play music on it and then maintain the respectful silence of a sinner being sermonized. Sammy loved it as he had never loved anything in his life. The sad flutter of Benny Goodman’s clarinet came so poignantly through its deluxe “panamusical” loudspeakers that it could make Sammy cry. The Panamuse was fully automatic; it could store twenty records and play them, in any order, on both sides. The marvelous operations of the record-changing mechanism, in the manner of the time, were on proud display inside the cabinet, and new guests to the apartment, like visitors to the U.S. Mint, were always given a look at the works. Sammy was smitten for weeks, and yet every time he looked at the phonograph, he was racked with guilt and even horror over the cost. His mother would die without ever having learned of its existence.

The funny thing was that, after you threw in the large but still piddling sum Sammy spent every month on books, magazines, records, cigarettes, and amusements, and his half of the $110 monthly rent, there was still more money left over than Sammy knew what to do with. It piled up in his bank account, making him nervous.

“You should get married,” Rosa liked to tell him.

Her name was not on the lease, but Rosa had become the apartment’s third occupant, and in a very real sense its animating spirit. She had helped them find it (it was a new building on Fifth Avenue, just north of Washington Square), to furnish it, and, when she realized that she would never otherwise be able to share a bathroom with Sammy, to obtain the weekly services of a cleaning woman. At first she would just drop by once or twice a week, after work. She had quit her job at
Life
for a job retouching, in lurid hues, color pictures of prune-and-noodle casseroles, velvet crumb cakes, and bacon canapés for a publisher of cheap cookbooks that were given away as premiums in five-and-dimes. It was tedious work, and when things got really bad, Rosa liked to indulge minute Surrealist impulses. With an airbrush she would equip a pineapple in the background with a slick black tentacle, or conceal a tiny polar explorer in the frigid peaks of a meringue desert. The publisher’s offices were on East Fifteenth, ten minutes from the apartment. Rosa would often come in at five with a bag full of unlikely roots and
leaves and cook strange recipes that her father had acquired a taste for in his travels:
tagine, mole
, something green and slippery that she called
sleek
. In general these dishes tasted very good; and their exotic dress served to conceal fairly well, Sammy thought, her fairly retrograde approach to winning Joe’s heart via the kitchen. She herself never took more than a bite of any of it.

“There’s a girl at work,” Rosa said at breakfast one morning, setting in front of Sammy a plate of eggs scrambled with Portuguese sausage. She was a frequent guest at breakfast, too, if “guest” was the proper term to apply to someone who shopped for the meal, prepared it, served it to you, and cleaned up when you were through. Their across-the-hall neighbors were visibly outraged by this waywardness, and the doorman’s eyes would twinkle crudely as he held the door for her in the mornings. “Barbara Drazin. She’s a dish. And she’s looking. You should let me introduce you.”

“College girl?”

“City.”

“No thanks.”

When Sammy looked up from the platter of pastry, which Rosa had as usual arranged with such photogenic artfulness that he was loath to disturb the cheese danish he had his eye on, he caught her giving Joe a look. It was a look he had seen them exchange before, whenever the subject of Sammy’s love life came up, as when Rosa was around it tended rather too often to do.

“What?” he said.

“Nothing.”

She spread her napkin in her lap, pointedly somehow, and Joe went on tinkering with some kind of spring-loaded card-passing contraption that was part of his act; he had another of his magic gigs tomorrow night, a bar mitzvah at the Pierre. Sammy snatched the cheese danish, collapsing Rosa’s giveaway-cookbook pyramid.

“It’s just,” she continued, never requiring an actual rejoinder to sustain a conversation, “you always have an excuse.”

“It’s not an excuse,” Sammy said. “It’s a disqualification.”

“And why are college girls disqualified? I forget.”

“Because they make me feel dumb.”

“But you aren’t dumb. You are extremely well read, fairly well spoken, and you make your living by the pen or, in your case, the typewriter.”

“I know this. It’s not a rational feeling. And I can’t stand stupid women. It’s just, I guess I feel bad that I don’t have a college education myself. And I’m embarrassed when they start asking me about what I do, and I have to tell them I write comic books, and then it’s either ‘Gee, aren’t they awfully, well,
trashy
,’ or else it’s that patronizing ‘
Comic books!
I
adore
comic books!’—which is even worse.”

“Barbara Drazin would never make you feel bad about what you do,” Rosa said. “Besides, I told her you also wrote three novels.”

“Oh my
God
,” Sammy said.

“I’m sorry.”

“Please, Rosa, how many times do I gotta ask you not to tell anybody that anymore, okay?”

“I’m
so
sorry. It’s just that I—”

“For God’s sake, those were
pulps
, I got paid by the
yard
. Why do you think they invented the
pseudonym
?”

“All right,” said Rosa, “all right. I just think you ought to
meet
her.”

“Thanks, but no thanks. I got too much work to do anyway.”

“He’s writing a novel,” Joe said, peeling a Chiquita. He seemed to take a good deal of pleasure in the exchanges between his girlfriend and his best friend. His only contribution to the decor of the apartment had been the stack of wooden crates in which he kept his burgeoning collection of comic books. “In his spare time,” he added, through a big white mouthful of banana. “A
real
one.”

“Yeah, well,” Sammy said, feeling himself blush. “At the rate I’m going, we’ll all be sitting around in the old-age home reading it.”

“I’ll read it,” Rosa said. “Sammy, I’d love to. I’m sure it’s very good.”

“It isn’t. But thank you. You mean it?”

“Of course.”

“Maybe,” he said, for the first but by no means the final time in their long association, “when I get chapter one into shape.”

When Sammy arrived at the Empire offices on that textbook April morning—tufted sky, daffodils swinging like a big band on every patch
of green, love in the air, et cetera—he took the oft-revised first (and sole) chapter of
American Disillusionment
out of his bottom desk drawer, rolled a fresh sheet of paper into his typewriter, and tried to work, but the conversation with Rosa had left him uneasy. Why didn’t he want to, at least, say, have a drink with a dish from City College? How did he even
know
that he didn’t like dating college girls? It was like saying he didn’t care for golf. He had a fairly good idea that it was not the game for him, but the fact was the closest he had ever been to a golf course was the peeling plaster windmills of the old Tom Thumb course at Coney Island. Why, for that matter, wasn’t he jealous of Joe? Rosa was a great-looking girl, soft and powdery-smelling. While it was true that he found her remarkably easy to talk to, tease with, confide in, and let down his guard around, easier than he had ever found any other girl, he felt only the faintest itch for her. At times this absence of prurient feeling, so marked and plain to both of them that Rosa had no compunction about lounging around the apartment with her underpants covered only by the flapping tails of one of Joe’s shirts, troubled Sammy, and he would try, lying in his bed at night, to imagine kissing her, stroking her thick dark curls, lifting those shirttails to reveal the pale belly beneath. But such chimeras invariably faded in the light of day. The real question was, why wasn’t he more jealous of
Rosa
?