The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (with bonus content) (82 page)

“You gave the Bomb a
figure
. A womanly shape.”

“That comes right out of Tommy’s
World Book
. I didn’t make that up.”

Sammy lit a cigarette and then stared at the match head until it burned down almost to the skin of his fingers. He shook it out.

“Is he out of his mind?” he said.

“Tommy or Joe?”

“He’s been leading a
secret life
for the last ten years. I mean, but
really
. Disguises. Assumed names. He told me only a dozen people knew who he was. Nobody knew where he lived.”

“Who knew?”

“A bunch of those magicians. That’s where Tommy first saw him. In the back room at Tannen’s.”

“Louis Tannen’s Magic Shop,” she said. That explained the intensity of Tommy’s attachment, which had always irritated her, to that shabby cabinet of trite tricks and flummery, which, the time she had visited it, had left her feeling depressed.
He seems quite obsessed with the place
,
her father had once observed. She crept back now along the span of lies that Tommy had stretched across the last ten months. The carefully typed price lists, all fakes. Perhaps the interest in magic itself had all been faked. And the perfect simulacra of her signature, on those appalling excuse notes that Tommy concocted: of course it was Joe who had done them. Tommy’s own signature was brambly and uncouth; his hand was still decidedly wobbly. Why hadn’t it occurred to her before that the boy never could have produced such a forgery on his own? “They were pulling a giant sleight of hand on us. The eye patch was like, what did Joe used to call it?”

“Misdirection.”

“A lie to cover a lie.”

“I asked Joe about Orson Welles,” Sammy said. “He knew.”

She pointed to the pack of cigarettes, and Sammy handed her one. She was sitting up now, legs crossed, facing him. Her stomach hurt; that was nerves. Nerves, and the impact of years and years of accumulated fantasies collapsing all at once, toppling like a row of painted flats. She had imagined Joe not merely run down by passing trucks on a lonely road but drowned in remote Alaskan inlets, shot by Klansmen, tagged in a drawer in a midwestern morgue, killed in a jail riot, and in any number of various suicidal predicaments from hanging to defenestration. She could not help it. She had a catastrophic imagination; an air of imminent doom darkens much of even her sunniest work. She had guessed at the presence of violence in the story of Joe’s disappearance (though she had mistakenly thought it lay at the end and not the beginning of the tale). One heard more and more of suicides—suffering from “survivor’s guilt,” as it was called—among the more fortunate relatives of those who had died in the camps. Whenever Rosa read or was told of such a case, she could not prevent herself from picturing Joe performing the same act, by the same means; usually it was pills or the horrible irony of gas. And every newspaper account of somebody’s ill fate in the hinterlands—the man she had read about just yesterday tumbled from a sea cliff at the edge of San Francisco—she recast with Joe in the lead. Bear maulings, bee attacks, the plunge of a bus full of schoolchildren (he was at the wheel)—the memory of Joe underwent them all. No tragedy was too baroque or seemingly inapplicable for her to conceive
of fitting Joe into it. And she had lived daily, for several years now, with the pain of knowing—
knowing
—all fantasy aside, that Joe really would never be coming home. But she could not seem to get hold, now, of the apparently simple idea that Joe Kavalier, secret life and all, was asleep on her couch, in her living room, under an old knit afghan of Ethel Klayman’s.

“No,” she said. “I don’t think he’s out of his mind. You know? I just don’t know if there’s a sane reaction to what he … what happened to his family. Is
your
reaction, and mine … you get up, you go to work, you have a catch in the yard with the kid on Sunday afternoon. How sane is that? Just to go on planting bulbs and drawing comic books and doing all the same old crap as if none of it had happened?”

“Good point,” Sammy said, sounding profoundly uninterested in the question. He worked his legs up toward his chest and laid the legal pad against them. The pencil began to scratch. He was through with this conversation. As a rule, they tended to avoid questions like “How sane are we?” and “Do our lives have meaning?” The need for avoidance was acute and apparent to both of them.

“What is that?” she said.

“Weird Planet.”
He did not lift his pencil from the pad. “Guy lands on a planet. Exploring the galaxy. Mapping the far fringes.” While he spoke, he did not look at her, or interrupt the steady progress across the ruled lines of the tiny bold block letters he produced, regular and neat, as if he had a typewriter hand. He liked to talk through his plots for her, combing out into regular plaits what grew in wild tufts in his mind. “He finds a vast golden city. Like nothing he’s ever seen. And he’s seen it all. The beehive cities of Deneba. The lily-pad cities of Lyra. The people here are ten feet tall, beautiful golden humanoids. Let’s say they have big wings. They welcome Spaceman Jones. They show him around. But something is on their minds. They’re worried. They’re afraid. There’s one building, one immense palace he isn’t allowed to see. One night our guy wakes up in his nice big bed, the entire city is shaking. He hears this terrible bellowing, raging like some immense monstrous beast. Screams. Strange electric flashes. It’s all coming from the palace.” He peeled the page he had filled, folded it over, plastered it down. Went on. “The next day everybody acts like nothing happened. They tell him he
must have been dreaming. Naturally our guy has to find out. He’s an explorer. It’s his job. So he sneaks into this one huge, deserted palace and looks around. In the highest tower, a mile above the planet, he comes upon a giant. Twenty feet tall, huge wings, golden like the others but with ragged hair, big long beard. In chains. Giant atomic chains.”

She waited while he waited for her to ask.

“And?” she said finally.

“We’re in heaven, this planet,” said Sam.

“I’m not sure I—”

“It’s God.”

“Okay.”

“God is a madman. He lost his mind, like, a billion years ago. Just before He, you know. Created the universe.”

It was Rosa’s turn to say, “I like it. Does He, what? I’m guessing he eats the spaceman?”

“He does.”

“Peels him like a banana.”

“You want to draw it?”

She reached out and laid a hand on his cheek. It was warm and still dewy from the shower, his stubble pleasantly scratchy under her fingertips. She wondered how long it had been since she had last touched his face.

“Sam, come on. Stop for a minute,” she said.

“I need to get this down.”

She reached out for the pencil and arrested its mechanical progress. For a moment he fought her; there was a tiny creaking of splinters, and the pencil began to bend. Finally, it snapped in two, splitting lengthwise. She handed him her half, the skinny gray tube of graphite glinting like mercury rising in a thermometer.

“Sammy, how did you get him off?”

“I told you.”

“My father called the mayor’s mother,” Rosa said. “Who was able to manipulate the criminal-justice system of New York City. Which she did out of her deep love of René Magritte.”

“Apparently.”

“Bullshit.”

He shrugged, but she knew he was lying. He had been lying to her steadily, and with her approval, for years. It was a single, continuous lie, the deepest kind of lie possible in a marriage: the one that need never be told, because it will never be questioned. Every once in a while, however, small bergs like this one would break off and drift across their course, mementos of the trackless continent of lies, the blank spot on their maps.

“How did you get him off?” Rosa said. She had never before so persisted in trying to get the truth out of him. Sometimes she felt like Ingrid Bergman in
Casablanca
, married to a man with contacts in the underground. The lies were for her protection as well as his.

“I talked to the arresting officer,” Sammy said, looking steadily at her. “Detective Lieber.”

“You spoke to him.”

“He seemed like an all right kind of guy.”

“That’s lucky.”

“We’re going to have lunch.”

Sammy had been having lunch, on and off, with a dozen men over the past dozen years or so. They rarely displayed any last names in his conversation; they were just Bob or Jim or Pete or Dick. One would appear on the fringes of Rosa’s consciousness, hang around for six months or a year, a vague mishmash of stock tips, opinions, and vogue jokes in a gray suit, then vanish as quickly as he had come. Rosa always assumed that these friendships of Sammy’s—the only relations, since Joe’s enlistment, that merited the name—went no further than a lunch table at Le Marmiton or Laurent. It was one of her fundamental assumptions.

“Well then, maybe Daddy can help you out with this Senate committee, too,” Rosa said. “I’ll bet Estes Kefauver is a terrific Max Ernst fan.”

“Maybe we should just get hold of Max Ernst,” Sammy said. “I need all the help I can get.”

“Are they calling in
everyone
?” Rosa said.

Sammy shook his head. He was trying not to look worried, but she could tell that he was. “I made some calls,” he said. “Gaines and I seem to be the only comics men that anyone knows they’re calling.”

Bill Gaines was the publisher and chief pontiff of Entertainment
Comics. He was a slovenly, brilliant guy, excitable and voluble the way that Sammy was—when the subject was work—and, like Sammy, he harbored ambitions. His comic books had literary pretensions and strove to find readers who would appreciate their irony, their humor, their bizarre and pious brand of liberal morality. They were also shockingly gruesome. Corpses and dismemberments and vivid stabbings abounded. Awful people did terrible things to their horrible loved ones and friends. Rosa had never liked Gaines or his books very much, though she adored Bernard Krigstein, one of the E.C. regulars, refined and elegant in both print and person and a daring manipulator of panels.

“Some of your stuff is pretty violent, Sam,” she said. “Pretty close to the limit.”

“It might not be the stabbings and vivisections,” Sammy said. And then, licking his lips, “At least not only that.”

She waited.

“There’s, well, there’s, sort of a whole chapter on me in
Seduction of the Innocent
.”

“There is?”

“Part of a chapter. Several pages.”

“And you never told me this?”

“You said you weren’t going to read the damn thing. I figured you didn’t want to know.”

“I asked you if Dr. Wertham mentioned you. You said …” She tried to remember what exactly he had said. “You said that you looked, and you weren’t in the index.”

“Well, not by name,” Sammy said. “That’s what I meant.”

“I see,” Rosa said. “But it turns out there is a whole, actual
chapter
about you.”

“It’s not about me
personally
. It doesn’t even identify me by name. It just talks about stories I wrote. The Lumberjack. The Rectifier. But not just mine. There’s a lot about Batman. And Robin. There’s stuff about Wonder Woman. About how she’s a little … a little on the butch side.”

“Uh-huh. I see.” Everyone knew. That was what made their particular secret, their lie, so ironic; it went unspoken, unchallenged, and yet it did not manage to deceive. There was gossip in the neighborhood; Rosa
had never heard it, but she could feel it sometimes, smell it lingering in the air of a living room that she and Sam had just entered. “Does the U.S. Senate know that you wrote these stories?”

“I seriously doubt it,” Sammy said. “It was all nom de plume.”

“Well, then.”

“I’ll be fine.” He reached for his pad again, then rolled over and rifled the nightstand drawer for another pencil. But when he was back under the covers, he just sat there, drumming with the eraser end on the pad.

“Think he’ll stay for a while?” he said.

“No. Uh-uh. Maybe. I don’t know. Do we
want
him to stay?” she said.

“Do you still love him?” He was trying to catch her off guard, lawyer-style. But she was not going to venture so far, not yet, nor poke so deeply into the embers of her love for Joe.

“Do you?” she said, and then, before he could begin to take the question seriously, she went on, “Do you still love me?”

“You know I do,” he said at once. Actually, she knew that he did. “You don’t have to ask.”

“And you don’t have to tell me,” she said. She kissed him. It was a curt and sisterly kiss. Then she switched off her light and turned her face to the wall. The scratching of his pencil resumed. She closed her eyes, but she could not relax. It took her very little time to realize that somehow she had forgotten the one thing she had wanted to talk to Sammy about: Tommy.

“He knows that you adopted him,” she said. “According to Joe.” The pencil stopped. Rosa kept her face to the wall. “He knows that somebody else is really his dad. He just doesn’t know who.”

“Joe never told him, then.”

“Would he?”

“No,” said Sammy. “I guess he wouldn’t.”

“We have to tell him the truth, Sam,” Rosa said. “The time has come. It’s time.”

“I’m working now,” Sammy said. “I’m not going to talk about this anymore.”

She knew from long experience to believe this. The conversation had officially come to an end. And she had not said anything that she
wanted to say to him! She put a hand on his warm shoulder and left it there a little while. Again, there was a tiny shock of remembered coolness at the touch of his skin.

“What about you?” she said, just before she finally drifted off to sleep. “Are you going to stay for a while?”

But if there was a reply, she missed it.