The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (41 page)

"Safely in my twenties," Sammy said.

"I'm twenty-four," said Bacon. "Last week."

"Happy birthday."

"Mr. Clay—"

"Sammy."

"Tracy."

Bacon's grip was firm and dry, and he pumped Sammy's hand up and down half a dozen times.

"Sammy, I don't know if you could tell it or not," Bacon said, "but I'm having a little problem in there—"

The door opened again, and the other actors started to file out. Helen Portola sidled up to Bacon, took hold of his arm, and gazed up at him in the ardent manner Walter Winchell had alluded to. She could see that he had something on his mind and turned inquiringly to Sammy. She smiled, but Sammy thought he saw a waver of anxiety in her big green eyes.

"Trace? We're all going over to Sardi's."

"Save me a seat, all right, gorgeous?" said Bacon. He gave her shoulder a squeeze. "Turns out Mr. Clay and I have a mutual friend. We're just doing a little catching up."

Sammy was amazed by the ease and naturalness of Bacon's lie. Helen Portola looked Sammy over very carefully and coldly, as if trying to calculate what possible human could be the link between him and Tracy Bacon. Then she kissed Bacon on the cheek and, not without a show of reluctance, left. Sammy must have looked puzzled.

"Oh, I'm an awful liar," Bacon said airily. "Now, come on, let me buy you a drink, and I'll explain."

"Jeez," said Sammy, "I'd like to, but—"

Bacon actually took hold of Sammy by the elbow—gently enough— and put his arm around him, steering him down to the end of the hall by a fire door. He lowered his voice to a conspiratorial rasp.

"Sammy, I'm going to confess something to you." He paused, as if to give Sammy a moment to feel grateful for being taken into his confidence. Sammy was almost—almost—too taken aback to comply. "I'm in way over my head here. I'm no actor! I studied civil engineering in school. Two months ago I was swabbing out the mess on a cargo freighter. All right, I have an ideal voice for radio." He composed his features, his fair eyebrows and rather girlish mouth, into a stern, fatherly mien. "That isn't enough, and I know it. You can't get by in this business on natural ability alone." He looked so pleased by the harsh line he had taken with himself that all trace of it vanished at once. "This is my first big part. I want to be very, very good. If you could give me any, you know..."

"Insights?"

"Exactly!" He smacked Sammy on the chest with the palm of his right hand. "That's it! I was hoping we could sit down, see, and I could buy you a drink, and you could just talk to me a little bit about the Escapist. I'm not having any problems with Tom Mayflower."

"No, you seem to have him down pretty good."

"Well, I
am
Tom Mayflower, Mr. Clay, and that's the explanation for that. But the Escapist, jeez, I don't know. He just... he seems to take everything so damn
seriously."

"Well, Mr. Bacon, he has serious problems to deal with..." Sammy began, grimacing at his own pretension. He felt he ought to be glad for this chance Bacon was offering him to gain some small influence over the direction of the radio program, but instead he found that he was more afraid of Tracy Bacon than before. Sammy came from a land of intense, uninterruptable, and energetic speakers, and he was used to being harangued, but he had never before felt himself so addressed, with such a direct appeal, made not merely to his ears but to his eyes. No one who looked like Tracy Bacon had ever, to his memory, spoken to him at all. The lithe, knicker-clad golden halfback atop the football trophy, stiff-arming every obstacle in his path, was not a type stamped out in any great profusion by Brownsville, Flatbush, or the Manual Arts High School. Sammy had encountered one or two of these pink-skinned, cardigan-wearing, cultivated lunks with schoolboy haircuts during his brief dips into the world of Rosa Saks, but he had certainly never been addressed by one—or even acknowledged. "The world today has a lot of serious problems." God, he sounded like a school principal! He ought just to shut up. "I really can't," he said. He looked at his watch. It was nearly ten past five. "I'll be late for a dinner date."

"At five on a Friday night?" Bacon switched on his fifty-amp smile. "Sounds swank."

"You can't even begin to imagine," said Sammy.

2

Where is the actual flat bush?" Bacon said as they came up out of the subway. He stopped and looked across the avenue at the entrance to Prospect Park. "Do they keep it in there?"

"Actually, they move it around," said Sammy. They'd had two drinks apiece, but for some reason, Sammy didn't feel in the least intoxicated. He wondered if fear forestalled the effects of alcohol. He wondered if he were more afraid of Tracy Bacon or of showing up for dinner at Ethel's late, reeking of gin, and with the world's largest piece of trayf in tow. In the subway station, he had bought a roll of Sen-Sen and eaten four. "It's on wheels." He gave a pull on the sleeve of Bacon's blue blazer. "Come on, we're late."

"Are we?" Bacon arched an eyebrow. "You hadn't mentioned it."

"You don't even know me," said Sammy. "How can you presume to razz me?"

As he buzzed for 2-B—he had misplaced his key—he realized that he must be very, very drunk. It was the only possible explanation for what he was about to do. He wasn't sure exactly when the invitation had been extended, or at what point it became clear to Sammy that Bacon had accepted it. In the bar at the St. Regis, under the jovial gaze of Parrish's
King Cole,
their conversation had veered so quickly from Bacon's difficulties with the character of the Escapist that Sammy could not remember now what wisdom, if any, he had been able to offer on that score. Almost at once, it seemed, Bacon had launched, unprompted, into a recitation (one that, while practiced, obviously still held great interest for him) of his upbringing, education, and travels, an extravagant tale—he had lived in Texas, California, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and, most recently, Seattle; his father was a brigadier general, his mother was a titled Englishwoman; he had sailed on a merchant ship; he had broken horses on Oahu; he had attended a boarding school where he played hockey and lacrosse and boxed a little—which, paradoxically, he himself claimed to view as sadly lacking in some fundamental underpinning of sense or purpose. All the while, Sammy's own upbringing and education and his travels from Pitkin Avenue to Surf Avenue, alerting him to the unmistakable smell of bullshit, had been at war with his native weakness for romance. As he sat and listened, with the ointment flavor of gin in his mouth, at once envious and unable to shake the echo of Bacon's blithe avowal—"I'm such an awful liar"— there seemed to emerge, in spite of Bacon's good looks and his actor pals and his cool gin-and-tonic of a girlfriend, and regardless of the truth or falsehood of the claims he was making, an unmistakable portrait that Sammy was surprised to find he recognized: Tracy Bacon was lonely. He lived in a hotel and ate his meals in restaurants. His actor pals took him and his tale at face value not because they were credulous, but because it was less effort to do so. And now, with an unerring instinct, he had sniffed out the loneliness in Sammy. Bacon's presence at Sammy's side now, waiting for an answer from 2-B, was testimony to this. It didn't occur to Sammy that Bacon was just drunk and twenty-one (not twenty-four) and making everything up as he went along.

"That is the most angry-sounding door buzz I've ever heard," Bacon said when it finally came.

Sammy held the lobby door for him. "That was actually the voice of my mother," he said. "There's a little wax cylinder in there."

"You're just trying to scare me," Bacon said.

They climbed the steps that had wearied Sammy's legs for so many years now. Sammy knocked. "Stand back," he said.

"Stop it now."

"Watch your fingers. Ma!"

"Look who it is."

"Don't look so excited."

"Where's your cousin?"

"They already had plans. Ma, I brought a friend. This is Mr. Tracy Bacon. He's going to be playing the Escapist. On the radio."

"Look out you don't bump your head" was the first thing Ethel said to Bacon. Then "My goodness." She smiled and held out her hand, and Sammy saw that she was impressed. Tracy Bacon made quite an impression. She stepped back to get a better look and stood there like one of the tourists Sammy waded through on his way in and out of work every day. "You're very good-looking." it just missed sounding like a wholehearted compliment; there might have been some comment intended on the deceptiveness of attractive packages.

"Thank you, Mrs. Clay," said Bacon.

Sammy winced.

"That isn't my name," Ethel said, but not unkindly. She looked at Sammy. "I never cared for that name. Well, come in, sit down, I made too much, oh well. Dinner was ready once already, and you missed the candles, I'm sorry to say, but we can't postpone sundown even for big-shot comic book writers."

"I heard they changed that rule," said Sammy.

"You smell like Sen-Sen."

"I had a little drink," he said.

"Oh, you had a drink. That's good."

"What? I can have a drink if I want."

"Of course you can have a drink. I have a bottle of slivovitz someplace. Would you like me to get it out? You can drink the whole bottle if you want."

Sammy whirled around and made a face at Bacon: What'd I tell you? They followed Ethel into the living room. The electric fan was going in the window but, in accordance with Ethel's personal theories of hygiene and thermodynamics, faced outward, so as to draw the warm air out of the room, leaving an entirely theoretical zone of coolness behind. Bubbie was already on her feet, a big confused grin on her face, her spectacles glinting. She was wearing a loose cotton dress printed with scarlet poppies.

"Mom," said Ethel, in English, "this is a friend of Sammy's, Mr. Bacon. He's an actor on the radio."

Bubbie nodded and grabbed hold of Bacon's hand. "Oh, yes, how are you?" she said in Yiddish. She seemed to recognize Tracy Bacon at once, which was odd, since she had not seemed to recognize anyone in years.

It was never clear afterward who she thought Bacon was. She shook his hand vigorously with both of hers.

For some reason, the sight of Bubbie shaking Bacon's large pink hand made Ethel laugh. "Sit down, sit down," she said. "Ma, let go of him." She looked at Sammy. "Sit down." Sammy started to sit down. "What, I don't get a kiss from you anymore, Mr. Sam Clay?"

Sammy kissed his mother.

"Ma, you're hurting me! Ouch!"

She let go.

"I'd like to break your neck," she said. She seemed to be in a very good mood. "I'll get dinner on the table."

"Careful with the shovel."

"Funny."

"Is that how you talk to your mother?" said Bacon.

"Oh, I like your new friend," said Ethel. She took hold of his arm and gave his huge right biceps a pat. She looked supremely vindicated. The shock on Bacon's face appeared to be genuine. "This young man loves his mother."

"Boy, do I," said Bacon. "Can I help you in the kitchen, Mrs., uh—"

"It's Klayman. K-L-A-Y-M-A-N. Period."

"Mrs. Klayman. I have a lot of experience peeling potatoes, or whatever you might need me to do."

Now it was Ethel's turn to look shocked.

"Oh ... no, it's already fixed. I'm just reheating everything again."

Sammy wanted to point out that reheating everything several times in order to remove as much flavor as possible was an integral part of Ethel's culinary technique, but he held his tongue. Bacon had embarrassed him.

"You wouldn't fit in my kitchen," Ethel said. "Sit down."

Bacon followed her into the kitchen. Sammy had yet to see his "new friend" take no for an answer. In spite of his height and his swimmer's shoulders, it was not a confidence in his own abilities that seemed to direct Tracy Bacon so much as an assuredness of being welcome wherever he went. He was golden and beautiful, and he knew how to peel a potato. To Sammy's surprise, Ethel let Bacon follow.

"I can never reach that bowl up there," he heard her say. "The one with the toucan."

"So, Bubbie," Sammy said. "How are you?"

"Fine, darling," she said. "I'm fine. How are you?"

"Come sit down." He tried to steer her into the other yellow chair. She pushed him away.

"Go. I want to stand. All day I'm sit."

From the kitchen Sammy could hear—could hardly miss—the cheerful thumping of Bacon's voice, with its lyric upper register. Like Sammy's, the constant barrage of chatter Bacon maintained seemed designed to impress and to charm, with a key difference: Bacon was impressive and charming. Ethel's burned-sugar laugh came drifting out of the kitchen. Sammy tried to hear what Bacon was saying to her.

"So what did you do today, Bubbie?" he said, flopping on the couch. "Belmont's open. Did you go out to the track?"

"Yes, yes," Bubbie said agreeably. "I went to the races."

"Did you win any money?"

"Oh, yes."

You were never sure with Bubbie whether you were really teasing her or not.