The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (32 page)
Read The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay Online
Authors: Michael Chabon
Tags: #Fiction, #Action & Adventure, #Heroes in Mass Media, #Humorous, #Unknown, #Comic Books; Strips; Etc., #Coming of Age, #Czech Americans, #Suspense, #Historical, #Authorship
"Sorry about all that
racket
downstairs," he said with a hint of weariness.
"Is it really him?" Sammy said. "Inside that thing?"
"It really is. I've tried to coax him out of it. I told him it was a
marvelous
idea in the, you know, the abstract, but in
practice....
But he's a terribly stubborn man. I've never known a genius who was not."
The doorman had pointed Dali out to them when they came in, standing in the ballroom, just off the front hall. He was wearing a deep-sea diving costume, complete with rubberized canvas coverall and globular brass helmet. A striking woman whom Deasey identified as Gala Dali stood loyally by her husband's side in the middle of the empty room, along with two or three other people too stubborn, too sycophantic, or perhaps simply too deaf to mind the intolerable coughing hum of the large gasoline-powered air pump, to which the Master was connected by a length of rubber hose. They were all yelling at the top of their lungs. "No one at the party," as Kahn wrote in
The New Yorker,
was ill-mannered enough to ask Dali what he intended by this get-up. Most took it to be either an allusion to the tenebrous benthos of the human unconscious or else to "The Dream of Venus," which as everyone knows featured a school of live girls dressed up as mermaids swimming around half-naked in a tank. In any case Dali would not, in all likelihood, have been able to hear the question through the diving helmet.
"But never mind," Harkoo continued cheerily, "we're all quite cozy in here. Welcome, welcome. Comic books, is it?
Marvelous
stuff. Love it. Regular reader. Positively a devotee."
Sammy beamed. Harkoo slipped the camera from around his neck and handed it to Joe. "I'd be very honored if you would take my picture," he said.
"Please? I'm sorry?"
"Take a picture of me. With the camera." He looked at Deasey. "Does he speak English?"
"He has his own brand. Mr. Kavalier is from Prague."
"Very good! Yes, you must! I have a marked deficit of Czech impressions."
Deasey nodded to Joe, who raised the camera's viewfinder to his left eye and framed Longman Harkoo's big, cracked-baby face. Harkoo settled his jowls and eyebrows into a sober, nearly blank expression, but his eyes gleamed with pleasure. Joe had never in his life made anyone so happy so easily.
"How do I focus it?" Joe asked him, lowering the camera.
"Oh, don't bother about that. Just look at me and push the little lever. Your mind will do the rest."
"My mind." Joe snapped a photo of his host, then handed the camera back to him. "The camera is ..." He searched for the word in English. "Telepathic."
"All cameras are," his host said mildly. "I have been photographed now by seven thousand one hundred and ... eighteen ... people, all with this camera, and I assure you that no two portraits are alike." He handed the camera to Sammy, and his features, as if stamped from a machine, once more settled into the same corpulent happy mask. Sammy snapped the lever. "What possible other explanation can there be for this endless variation but interference by waves emanating from the photographer's own mind?"
Joe did not know how to reply to this, but he saw that a reply was expected, and as the intensity of his host's expectation increased, he realized somewhat belatedly what that reply must be.
"None," he said finally.
Longman Harkoo looked extremely pleased. He put one arm across Sammy's shoulders and the other across Joe's and, with a good deal of shoving and apologizing, managed to take them on a tour of their immediate neighbors, introducing them to painters and writers and various holders of cocktails, furnishing each, without even appearing to stop to organize his thoughts, with a miniature curriculum vitae that touched on the high points of their oeuvres, sex lives, or family connections.
"... her sister is married to a Roosevelt, don't ask me which one ... you must have seen his
Art and Agon...
she's standing right under one of her ex-husband's paintings ... he was publicly slapped by Siquieros..."
Most of the names were unfamiliar to Joe, but he did recognize Raymond Scott, a composer who had recently hit it big with a series of whimsical, cacophonous, breakneck pseudo-jazz pop tunes. Just the other day, when Joe stopped in at Hippodrome Radio, they had been playing his new record,
Yesterthoughts and Stranger,
over the store PA. Scott was feeding a steady diet of Louis Armstrong platters to the portable RCA while explaining what he had meant when he referred to Satchmo as the Einstein of the blues. As the notes fluttered out of the fabric-covered loudspeaker, he would point at them, as if to illustrate what he was saying, and even tried to snatch at one with his hands. He kept turning the volume up, the better to compete with the less important conversations taking place ail around him. Over there, under the saguaro cactus, was the girl painter Loren MacIver, whose luminous canvases Joe had admired at the Paul Matisse gallery. Tall, overly thin by Joe's lights, but with a New York kind of beauty—sharp, tense, stylish—she was chatting with a tall, striking Aryan beauty who was holding a tiny baby to her breast. "Miss Uta Hagen," Harkoo explained. "She's married to Jose Ferrer, he's around here someplace. They're doing
Charley's Aunt."
The women offered their hands. MacIver's eyes were kohled, her lips painted a surprising shade of cocoa.
"These gentlemen make comic books," Harkoo told them. "The adventures of a fellow named the Escaper. Wears a union suit. Big muscles. Vapid expression."
"The Escapist," said Loren MacIver. Her face lit up. "Oh, I
like
him."
"You do?" said Sammy and Joe together.
"A man in a mask, who likes to be tied up with ropes?"
Miss Hagen laughed. "Sounds racy."
"It's quite surreal," Harkoo said.
"That's good, right?" Sammy said to Joe in a whisper. Joe nodded. "Just checking."
They made their way past several more curricula vitae holding cocktails, as well as a number of actual Surrealists, like raisins studded in a pudding. For the most part these seemed to be a remarkably serious, even sober bunch of fellows. They wore dark suits with waistcoats and solid neckties. Most of them seemed to be Americans—Peter Blume, Edwin Dickinson, a shy, courtly fellow named Joseph Cornell—who shared an air of steel-rimmed, Yankee probity that surrounded like a suburb their inner Pandemonium. Joe tried to keep all the names straight, but he was still not sure who Charley was or what was being done by Uta Hagen to his aunt.
At the far end of the library, a number of men had gathered into a tight, jostling ring around a very pretty, very young woman who was talking at what must have been the top of her lungs. Joe could not really understand what she was telling them, but it appeared to be a story that reflected poorly on her own judgment—she was blushing and grinning at the same time—and it unquestionably ended with the word "fuck." She tugged on the word, drawing it out to several times its usual length. She wound it all the way around her in two or three big loops and reveled in it as if it were a luxuriant shawl.
"Fuuuuuuuck."
The men around her burst out laughing, and she blushed even more deeply. She had on a loose, sleeveless kind of smock, and you could see the flush reaching all the way down past her shoulders to the tops of her arms. Then she looked up, and her eyes met Joe's.
"Saks," Joe said, producing the card at last. "Rosa Luxemburg Saks."
"Nah," Sammy said. "Is it?"
8
It was fascinating to see her face again after so long. Although Joe had never forgotten the girl whom he had surprised that morning in Jerry Glovsky's bedroom, he saw that, in his nocturnal reimaginings of the moment, he had badly misremembered her. He never would have recalled her forehead as so capacious and high, her chin as so delicately pointed. In fact, her face would have seemed overlong were it not counterbalanced by an extravagant flying buttress of a nose. Her rather small lips were set in a bright red hyphen that curved downward just enough at one corner to allow itself to be read as a smirk of amusement, from which she herself was not exempted, at the surrounding tableau of human vanity. And yet in her eyes there was something unreadable, something that did not want to be read, the determined blankness that in predator animals conceals hostile calculation, and in prey forms part of an overwhelming effort to seem to have disappeared.
The men around her had parted reluctantly as Harkoo, providing blocking for Joe and Sammy like a back for the latter's beloved Dodgers, shoehorned them into the circle.
"We've met," Rosa said. It was almost a question. She had a strong, deep, droll, masculine voice, turned up to a point that verged on speaker-rattling, as if she were daring everyone around her to listen and to judge. But then maybe, Joe thought, she was just very drunk. There was a glass of something amber in her hand. In any case, her voice went well, somehow, with her dramatic features and the wild mass of brown woolen loops, constrained here and there by a desperate bobby pin, that constituted her hairstyle. She gave his hand a squeeze that partook of the same bold intentions as her voice, a businessman's shake, dry and curt and forceful. And yet he noticed that she was, if anything, blushing more obviously than ever. The delicate skin over her clavicles was mottled.
"I don't believe so," said Joe. He coughed, partly to cover his discomfiture, partly to camouflage the suave rejoinder he had just been fed by the prompter crouching by the footlights of his desire, and partly because his throat had gone bone-dry. He felt a weird urge to lean down— she was a small woman, the top of whose head barely reached his collarbone—and kiss her on the mouth, in front of everyone, as he might have done in a dream, with that long optimistic descent across the distance between their lips enduring for minutes, hours, centuries. How
surreal
would that be? Instead, he reached into his pocket and took out his cigarettes. "Someone like you I would absolutely remember," he said.
"Oh, good God," said one of the men beside her in disgust.
The young woman to whom he was lying produced a smile which— Joe couldn't tell—might have been either flattered or appalled. Her smile was a surprisingly broad and toothy achievement for a mouth that in contemplation had been compacted into such a tiny pout.
"Huh," said Sammy. He, at least, sounded impressed by Joe's suavity.
Longman Harkoo said, "That's our cue." He put his arm once more around Sammy's shoulder. "Let's get you a drink, shall we?"
"Oh, I don't— I'm not—" Sammy reached out to Joe as Harkoo led him away, as though worried that their host was about to drag him off to the promised volcano. Joe watched him go with a cold heart. Then he held the pack of Pall Malls out to Rosa. She tugged a cigarette free and put it to her lips. She took a long drag. Joe felt constrained to point out that the cigarette was not lit.
"Oh," she said. She snorted. "I'm such an idiot."
"Rosa," chided one of the men standing beside her, "you don't smoke!"
"I just took it up," Rosa said.
There was a muffled groan, then the cloud of men around her seemed to dissolve. She took no notice. She inclined toward Joe and peered up, curving her hand around his and the flame of the match. Her eyes shone, an indeterminate color between champagne and the green of a dollar. Joe felt feverish and a little dizzy, and the cool talcum smell of Shalimar she gave off was like a guardrail he could lean against. They had drawn very close together, and now, as he tried and failed to prevent himself from thinking of her lying naked and facedown on Jerry Glovsky's bed, her broad downy backside with its dark furrow, the alluvial hollow of her spine, she took a step backward and studied him.
"You're
sure
we haven't met."
"Fairly."
"Where are you from?"
"Prague."
"You're Czech."
He nodded.
"A Jew?"
He nodded again.
"How long have you been here?"
"One year," he said, and then, the realization filling him with wonder and chagrin, "one year
today."
"Did you come with your family?"
"Alone," he said. "I left them there." Unbidden, there flashed in his mind's eye the image of his father, or the ghost of his father, striding down the gangplank of the
Rotterdam,
arms outstretched. Tears stung his eyes, and a ghostly hand seemed to clutch at his throat. Joe coughed once and batted at the smoke from his cigarette, as if it were irritating him. "My father has recently died."
She shook her head, looking sorrowful and outraged and, he thought, entirely lovely. As his glibness had departed him, so a more earnest nature seemed to feel greater liberty to confess itself in her.
"I'm really sorry for you," she said. "My heart goes out to them."
"It's not so bad," Joe said. "It will be all right."
"You know we're getting into this war," she declared. She wasn't blushing now. The brass-voiced party girl of a moment before, telling a story on herself that ended in an oath, seemed to have vanished. "We have to, and we will. Roosevelt will arrange it. He's working toward it now. We won't let them win."