The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (with bonus content) (95 page)

“That is,” said Joe. “But there may be someone here with something better.”

Mr. Landauer looked skeptical, but he turned to the classroom, an eyebrow raised.

One of the children raised his hand. He was a large, big-cheeked, towheaded boy, crammed into a desk at the back of the room. He opened his desk and took out a cigar box. He gave it a shake, and something hard thudded against the inside of it. “I found a fossilized eyeball.”

A number of the girls expressed a certain unwillingness to see this item, but Mr. Landauer nodded, his lower lip pushed out as if he were impressed. Joe liked the way he spoke and dealt with the children, mocking but in an appreciative and straight-faced kind of way. One of the girls raised her hand.

“I have a menu from Lindy’s restaurant signed by Joe Louis and Al Lopez,” she said. “It’s my brother’s.”

Mr. Landauer turned to Joe. “Mr. Clay?”

“Kavalier.”

“I’m sorry, of course.”

“When I performed on the stage,” Joe said, “we used to always say start them out with the fossilized eyeball.”

Mr. Landauer nodded. “Why don’t you take your seat, Tommy,” he said. “Mr. Kavalier, you may sit at my desk if you like.”

Tommy and Joe took their seats. Mr. Landauer picked up a notebook and, clutching it to his chest, went to stand at the window, perched half-sitting on the wide sill. The boy with the fossilized eyeball, whose name was Elliot Ottoman, went to the front of the room, opened his cigar box, and took out a large mottled chunk of quartz, veined in pink, with a cloudy blue chip of something else embedded in one of its oblong sides.

“I think it came from a horse,” Elliot Ottoman said in a speculative tone. “Maybe it was a British horse during the Revolution.”

The eyeball was passed around, and the girls made an elaborate display of their collective unwillingness to touch it. When Elliot had returned it to its box, he sat down. He was followed by the girl with the menu, Betty Capolupo. Betty pointed to the scrawled signature of Al Lopez, who, Joe gathered, played catcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers, and to the neat, careful signature of the great boxer. Then she read the names of several of the appetizers, explained—engendering a reprise of the petrified-eyeball response, in which many of the boys now joined—what sweetbreads were, and narrated lovingly in round tones the list of
desserts. After Betty Capolupo sat down came Huey Nordhoff with a miraculous potato chip in the image of Ed Wynn, and Susan Kearny, who had brought her collection of glass dolls dressed in the typical costumes of many nations. As each child stood up, Mr. Landauer asked questions, prompted them when their commentary faltered, and took careful notes in his book. Finally he nodded to Tommy and Joe. “May I move your desk?” Joe said.

Mr. Landauer helped him move the desk out from the corner and cleared away his blotter and basket of papers. Joe opened the valise, and quickly he and Tommy laid out a deck of cards, a water glass, a spoon, a piece of velvet cloth Rosa had given them for a blindfold, several sheets of tissue paper, and a small stack of one-dollar coins. Joe took off his jacket and hung it from the back of Mr. Landauer’s chair. He looked out at the roomful of children. All of the children, behind their spotless wooden desks, were staring at Joe, their faces blank and somehow menacing. Joe tried to gauge their potential responsiveness to the sleights and productions he and Tommy had planned. They were certainly old enough to know that a coin could not, say, pass through solid matter, and therefore, in theory, to be persuaded that somehow it had. The danger, he thought, was that these children had arrived at the brief interregnum between gullible, wondering childhood and the know-it-all watchfulness of adolescence; that they would view his act from the implacable middle stage where their own innocence and lack of understanding had begun to seem a burden to them, and a program of deceptions practiced upon them by a strange adult could inspire feelings of oppression.

“Good morning,” Joe said. “My name is Joe. Tommy asked me to come this morning and—”

Betty Capolupo raised her hand. Joe glanced at Mr. Landauer, then nodded to the girl, who addressed her question to Tommy. “Is he your uncle?” she said.

“Mr. Kavalier is Tommy’s
cousin
,” said Mr. Landauer. He looked at Joe as he said it, levelly, his brown eyes behind his thick lenses looking moist and oddly sympathetic. “His father’s first cousin. Do I have that right?” Joe looked at him. What was he saying? Why was he asking? What did he suspect? Had Tommy said something to him? “Mr. Kavalier
and Mr. Clay were partners at one time. Do I have that right?” Joe nodded, telling himself to relax. Mr. Landauer was just trying to sort out the random bits of information that had been passed along to him by an eleven-year-old boy. “When Mr. Clay came up with the idea for the famous comic book character, which I’m sure you all know, the Escapist, it was Mr. Kavalier, here, who did the pictures.”

This information made no impression on the children that Joe could see, and in spite of his efforts to calm himself, the sense of hesitation, of doubt, that he had experienced on the steps of the school began rapidly to intensify into outright dread. They were going to flop.

“Are you ready?” he asked Tommy, working his face into a tight smile. Tommy nodded.

Joe reached for the deck of cards. Another child, one of the Hazzard twins, raised his hand.

“Yes?”

“Why does the Escapist pretend to be that crippled guy?”

Joe looked at him. “He doesn’t pretend,” he said. “He really is crippled.”

“But why doesn’t he just hold on to that key all the time, then? Why does he
want
to be crippled?”

“I guess because if he was strong and powerful all the time, he would forget how it feels to be weak and helpless.”

The value in this moral discipline appeared to be lost on them.

“
I
don’t know,” Joe said, dismissing the question with a wave of his hand like a cloud of smoke. “I just drew the pictures!”

The children laughed. It was the perfect note to begin on. Calmly, slowly, he worked his way through the tricks he had prepared, calling on Tommy to help him when a confederate was required, and on one of the other children when all he needed was a pigeon. He guessed their chosen cards and vanished their milk money and seemed truly to astonish them when the sodden wad of tissue paper bloomed into a crisp neat Japanese fan.

“Thank you,” Joe said, taking a bow. “Thank you very much.”

Mr. Landauer propelled himself from the window ledge and came toward them, notebook tucked under his arm, applauding. The children joined in, but their response, given the degree to which they had
appeared to enjoy the show, seemed halfhearted. One of the Hazzard twins did not applaud at all.

“What is it?” Mr. Landauer said, perceiving that something was amiss.

There was no reply at first. Then one of the Hazzard twins raised his hand. “What about the safe?” he said.

Mr. Landauer looked first at Joe, then at Tommy, then back at Joe. “Some of the children have been …”

Tommy started to look down at his shoes, but this time he stopped himself and looked at Joe. His cheeks were red, and Joe saw that he might begin to cry at any moment, and yet the expression in his eyes seemed to Joe to be one of neither anger nor embarrassment but rather of challenge. He had made, once again, extravagant claims on Joe’s behalf, claims that were in themselves a kind of imprisoning cask of steel and rivets from which it was now incumbent on Joe, somehow or other, to free himself. You get out of anything, the boy’s look said. Get me out of this.

“The safe,” Joe began, rubbing at his chin. “Unfortunately, the, uh, the school commission—”

“The school board,” Mr. Landauer put in.

“Yes, the
school board
has regulations that, unfortunately, prevent me from being able to perform such a dangerous escape at this time. I am very sorry for that.”

The children expressed their profound disappointment with the school board. But one of the Hazzard boys said, “Right.” He turned to his brother. “I told you it was just a lot of stuff.” He looked at Tommy. “Pudge. You big liar.”

“Frank,” Mr. Landauer said in an admonitory tone.

“But—” Joe said. “I am willing—” He started for the back of the room, the children turning their heads to follow his progress as he headed toward the door at the back, between Duke Ellington and Albert Einstein. “Mr. Landauer, do you happen to have the key to this closet back here?”

“Why, yes, Mr. Kavalier. I do.”

Joe tried the knob and opened the utility closet. Like the rest of Mr. Landauer’s classroom, it was orderly. There were shelves on either side of it, neatly stacked with supplies, and a wheeled cart in the center,
bearing some kind of complicated projector. The lock looked like a simple enough affair, though Joe noted that there was no keyway on the inside knob. Somehow he would have to move aside the latch bolt. He grabbed a roll of packing tape from one of the shelves, and a ball of twine, and two skeins of yarn.

“Who would like to tie me up?”

The children burst from their chairs and ran to the back of the room. With Mr. Landauer’s supervision, they tied and wrapped and wove a lumpy cocoon around Joe, who stood with his arms at his sides, maintaining an expression of professional amusement. Tommy, he noticed, looked delighted.

“Now,” Joe said. “You can see how I am tied. And please look to notice that on the inside of the doorknob, there is no way or place to put a key. After I step in, my assistant will close the door. You will place a chair or other object against it.” He paused; the chair was purely for effect, of course. “In five minutes I will be free.”

They pushed him into the closet and closed the door. By dint of wriggling and squirming and using the edge of a metal shelf bracket to saw through the twine, Joe made short work of the bindings. Then he realized that he had left his wallet in the pocket of his jacket, out in the classroom, and hence the laminated card—his green card—that he had planned to slip between the faceplate and the strike plate of the lock, depressing the latch bolt. He began to feel around in the darkness for a piece of cardstock or other stiff, thin object he could craft into the proper size and shape. He picked up a series of boxes and rattled them, listening: pipe cleaners; celluloid beads; bottles of mucilage; wooden sticks. Ah. He lifted the lid of this box and found that it was filled, according to his fingers, with tongue depressors; nothing could have been more appropriate for pushing aside the poked-out metal tongue of the lock. He smiled, took a depressor, and stuck it into the crack alongside the door, feeling for the spot. He found the latch bolt and pushed. It gave a millimeter, then refused to move. He renewed his grip on the tongue depressor and pushed again: a millimeter. The lock was jammed. He pushed again, and the stick broke off in the crack. Joe pressed a shoulder against the door and gave a shove, but it held fast. He grabbed the
knob and twisted as hard as he could. He felt for the hinges, but the door opened outward. Joe fell backward and leaned against the rear wall of the closet, recalling the defiant look in the boy’s eyes.

Three and half minutes later, as the vice principal of William Floyd, Mr. Ebell, was walking down the second-floor corridor, he heard a burst of cheering from Mr. Landauer’s classroom. When he paused to peer in through the oblong window in the classroom door, he saw the children gathered around the closet at the back of the room. Some of them actually appeared to be inside the closet, searching for something. Mr. Ebell opened the door and poked in his head. “What’s going on here?” he said.

Mr. Landauer grinned. “We seem to have lost Tommy’s cousin,” he said.

“Well,” Mr. Ebell said. “Settle down, now.”

The children dragged themselves somewhat histrionically back to their desks. Mr. Landauer closed the closet door.

At the end of the day, after Tommy and all the other children had left the classroom, Mr. Landauer went back to the supply closet and pulled open the door.

“Mr. Kavalier?” he called. “They’re gone.”

There was a scraping sound overhead, and as Felix Landauer looked up, he saw a foot emerge from the ceiling of the closet. There, in the far corner, above the highest shelf and invisible to anyone, he imagined, shorter than five and a half feet or so, was a crude, jagged hatch cut—torn in places—from the particleboard ceiling, out of which Joe Kavalier now emerged. He was dusty and cobwebbed, and a bloody scratch had congealed on his cheek. Mr. Landauer helped him down, then took him to the boys’ bathroom. He wet paper towels and, while Joe Kavalier washed his face and hands, brushed away the dust and spider silk from the magician’s white suit as well as he could.

“Thank you,” said Joe Kavalier. “They were pleased?”

“They were,” Mr. Landauer said. “Particularly Tommy.”

“I’m glad of that, then,” Joe said. “It’s not too fun, I can tell you, being in a closet all day.”

Mr. Landauer stood up, brushing the dust from his hands, his eyebrows
raised and his careful mouth pursed, and said that he could well imagine. “I have my car,” he said. “If we left now, we could probably beat him home.”

When Tommy came around the corner from Marconi Avenue, Joe was standing out in front of the house, holding the valise in one hand, looking dusty and travel-stained, as if he had just arrived from Czechoslovakia that morning. The boy carried his satchel of books slung across his shoulder, looking bowed under the weight. When he saw Joe, he stopped and raised a hand. He stood up straight and hitched his satchel a little higher. “Hey,” he said.

“Hello,” said Joe.

They stood there on the sidewalk, about twenty feet apart, separated by some new shyness, the boy knowing only that the man whom he glancingly believed to be his father had delivered on the boy’s own wild promise, Joe knowing only how abjectly he had failed.

“Tell me how you did it, Joe.”

“You know that I can’t,” Joe said.

When they walked into the house, Rosa was stretched out on the sofa in the living room, reading a magazine, her head pillowed on the neat stack of Joe’s bedclothes.