The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (53 page)

"Okay now, what do you have for me?" She couldn't refrain from asking anymore. She didn't see any obvious bulges in his pockets, but whatever it was might be concealed under the drape of his coat. Or it could be something very, very small. Was he about to propose to her? What was she going to say if he did?

"No," he said. "You first."

"It's a portrait," she said. "A portrait of you."

"Another one? I didn't sit for it."

"How odd," she said teasingly. She untied the wrapping and carried the painting over to the mantel.

She had done two previous portraits of Joe. He sat for the first in shirtsleeves and vest, sprawled in a leather chair in the dark-paneled parlor where they had first become acquainted. In the piece, his doffed jacket, with a curled newspaper in its hip pocket, hangs from the back of the chair, and he leans against the arm, his head with its long wolfhound face cocked a little to one side, the fingers of his right hand lightly pressed to his right temple. His legs are crossed at the knee, and he ignores a cigarette in the fingers of his left hand. Rosa's brush caught the rime of ash on his lapel, the missed button of his waistcoat, the tender, impatient, defiant expression in his eyes by means of which he is clearly trying to convey to the artist, telepathically, that he intends, in an hour or so, to fuck her. In the second portrait, Joe is shown working at the drawing table in his and Sammy's apartment. A piece of Bristol board lies before him, partly filled in with panels; careful examination reveals the discernible form, in one panel, of Luna Moth in flight. Joe is reaching with a long slender brush toward a bottle of ink on the taboret beside him. The table, which Joe had bought sixth- or seventh-hand shortly after his arrival in New York, is crusted and constellated with years of splattered paint. Joe's sleeves are rolled to the elbow and a few dark coils of hair dangle over his high forehead. The end of his necktie can be seen to lie precariously close to a fresh stroke of ink on the paper, and on his cheek he wears an adhesive bandage over some faint pink scratches. In this picture, his expression is serene and almost perfectly blank, his attention focused entirely on the bristles of the brush that he is about to dip into the bright black ink.

The third portrait of Joe Kavalier was the last painting Rosa ever made, and it differed from the first two in that it was not painted from life. It was executed with the same easy but accurate draftsmanship of all her work, but it was a fantasy. The style was simpler than in the other two portraits, approaching the cartoonish, slightly self-conscious naivete of her food pictures. In this one, Joe is posed against an indeterminate background of pale rose, on an ornate carpet. He is naked. More surprisingly, he is entirely entangled, from head to toe, in heavy metal chains from which, like charms on a bracelet, dangle padlocks, cuffs, iron clasps, and manacles. His feet are shackled together with leg irons. The weight of all this metal bows him at the waist, but his head is held high, staring out at the viewer with a challenging expression. His long, muscular legs are straight, his feet spread as if he is ready to spring into action. The pose was borrowed from a photograph in a book about Harry Houdini, with the following crucial differences: unlike Houdini, who in the photo guarded his modesty with his manacled hands, Joe's genitals, with their forlorn expression, though heavily shadowed with fur, are plainly visible; the big lock in the middle of his chest is shaped like a human heart; and on his shoulder, in black overcoat and men's galoshes, sits the figure of the artist herself, holding a golden key.

"That's funny," he said. He reached into his trousers pocket. "This is what I have for you." He held out a fist to her, knuckles up. She turned the hand over and pried the fingers apart. On the palm of his hand lay a brass key. "I'm going to need help to do this," he said. "I hope with all my heart, Rosa, that you will want to help me."

"And what is this the key to?" she said, her voice sharper than she wanted it to be, knowing perfectly well that it was the key to this apartment, and that Joe was now asking her for the very thing she had been on the verge of asking for herself—that she be allowed to act as a mother, or at least a big sister, to Thomas Kavalier. She was disappointed in the same measure that she had been expecting a ring, and thrilled to the degree that she was horrified by her desire for one.

"Like in the painting," he said, in a kidding way, as if he could see she was upset, and was trying to figure out what tone to adopt with her. "The key to my heart."

She took the key and held it in her hand. It was warm from his pocket. "Thank you," she said. She was crying, bitterly and happily, ashamed of herself, thrilled to be able to really do something for him.

"I'm sorry," Joe said, taking the handkerchief from his jacket pocket.

"I wanted you to have a key, because ... but I did the wrong thing." He gestured toward the painting. "I forget to say I love it. Rosa, I love it! It's incredible! It's a whole new thing for you."

She laughed, taking the hankie from him, and dabbed at her eyes. "No, Joe, it's not that," she said, though in fact the painting did represent a new direction for Rosa's work. It had been years since she had attempted to draw from her imagination. Her talent for capturing a likeness, a contour, her innate sense of shadow and weight, had biased her toward life drawing early on. Though she had worked partly from a photograph this time, the details of Joe's body and face were filled in from memory, a process she had found challenging and satisfying. You had to know your lover very well—to have spent a lot of time looking at him and touching him—to be able to paint his picture when he was not around. The inevitable mistakes and exaggerations she had made struck her now as proofs, artifacts, of the mysterious intercourse of memory and love. "No. Joe. Thank you for the key. I want it very much."

"I'm glad."

"And I'm happy to help in every way. Nothing would make me happier. But if you're saying you want to move in here ..." She looked at him. Yes. He had been. "Well, I don't think I should. For Thomas. I don't think it would be right. He might not understand."

"No," he said. "I
was
thinking—but no. You're right, of course."

"But I will absolutely be here whenever you need me. As much as you need me." She blew her nose into his handkerchief. "As long as you need me."

"That's good," he said. "I think we may be talking about a very long time."

She held out the soiled handkerchief uncertainly, smiling a wincing little apologetic smile at the mess.

"It's fine. You keep it, darling."

"Thank you," she said, and this time burst unrestrainedly into a ridiculous, even bizarre, fit of uncontrollable sobbing. She knew perfectly well that the handkerchief was expressly intended for the comforting of women, and that Joe always kept another, reserved for his own personal use, tucked into the back pocket of his trousers.

13

MANY years afterward, most of the aged boys at whose long-ago bar mitzvah receptions, in a vanished New York City, a young magician named Joe Kavalier had performed his brisk, lively, all but wordless act, could summon only fragmentary memories of the entertainer. Some of the men were able to recall a slender, quiet young man in a fancy blue cutaway who spoke accented English and seemed hardly older than they. Another, an avid reader of comic books, recalled that Joe Kavalier had invited him to drop by the Empire offices one day with his parents. Joe had given him a tour and sent him home with an armload of free comic books and a drawing, which he still had, of himself standing next to the Escapist. Yet another remembered that Joe worked with an entire menagerie of artificial animals: a collapsible fake-fur rabbit; goldfish carved from a carrot; a rather mangy stuffed parakeet that, to the surprise of spectators, remained perched on the magician's hand while its
cage
vanished into thin air. "I saw him cutting up the carrots in the men's room," this gentleman recalled. "In the bowl of water, they really did look like little fish." Stanley Konigsberg, however, whose bar mitzvah reception marked the last known appearance of the Amazing Cavalieri, retained for the rest of his life—like young Leon Douglas "Pipe Bomb" Saks—an ineradicable memory of our hero. An amateur magician himself, he had first seen Joe performing at the St. Regis for his classmate at Horace Mann, Roy Cohn, and had been impressed enough by Joe's natural movements, his solemnity, and his flawless presentations of the Miser's Dream, Rosini's Location, and the Stabbed Deck to insist that Joe be engaged to baffle his own relatives and schoolmates at the Hotel Trevi two months later. And if Mr. Konigsberg's youthful admiration, and the unfailing kindness shown him by its object, had not sufficed to preserve the Amazing Cavalieri in his memory for the next sixty years, then the singular performance Joe gave at the Hotel Trevi on the evening of December 6, 1941, undoubtedly would have been enough.

Joe arrived an hour before the reception began, as was his habit, to check the disposition of the Trevi's ballroom, salt a few aces and half-dollars, and go over the order of events with Manny Zehn, the bandleader whose fourteen Zehnsations, riotous in their mariachi shirts, were setting up on the bandstand behind them.

"How are they hanging?" said Joe, trying out an expression he had just heard in the subway on his way uptown. He pictured a row of pages from a calendar, hanging on a shiny string. He was young, he was making money hand over fist, and his little brother, after six months of quarantine, bureaucratic dithering, and those terrible days last week when it seemed that the State Department might, at the last moment, cancel all the children's entry visas, was on his way. Thomas would be here in three more days. Here, in New York City.

"Hey, kid," Zehn said, squinting a little mistrustfully at Joe, but finally shaking the hand Joe proffered. They had worked together twice before. "Where's your sombrero?"

"Sorry? I didn't—?"

"Our theme is 'South of the Border.' " Zehn reached behind his head and lifted a black sombrero embroidered with silver thread up onto his balding pate. He was a good-looking, portly man with a pencil mustache. "Sid?" The trombonist had been chatting up one of the waitresses, in a pink beribboned dress with Latin flounces. Sid turned around, an eyebrow arched. Manny Zehn raised his hands in the air and threw his head back. "Number three."

The trombonist nodded. "Hit it," he said to the band. The Zehnsations broke into a spirited bounce version of "The Mexican Hat Dance." They played four bars and then Manny Zehn cut his throat with a finger. "So where's your Mexican hat?"

"No one told me," said Joe. He smiled. "Beside to which I'm permitted only to use the topper," he added, pointing to the "loaded" silk hat on his head, which he had purchased secondhand at Louis Tannen's. Or else maybe the Mexican magicians' union will complain."

Zehn narrowed his eyes again. "You're drunk," he said.

"Not at all."

"You're acting goofy."

"My brother is coming," said Joe, and then, just to see how it sounded, added, "and I am getting married. That is, I hope I am. I have decided I am going to ask her tonight."

Zehn blew his nose. "Mazel tov," he said, giving the blot on his handkerchief a chiromantic squint. "Only I thought you guys were experts at getting
out
of chains."

"Excuse me, Mr. Cavalieri?" said Stanley Konigsberg, appearing rather magically at Joe's side. "But that's what I wanted to ask you?"

"You can call me Joe."

"Joe. Sorry. Okay, I was wondering. Do you ever do escapes?"

"At one time," said Joe. "But I had to give it up." He frowned. "How long have you been standing there?"

"Don't worry, I won't tell anyone you hid a queen of hearts in the centerpiece of table seven," said Stanley. "If that's what you're worried about."

"I did not do any such thing," said Joe. He winked at Manny Zehn and, with a firm hand on Stanley's shoulder, steered the boy out of the ballroom and into the gilded corridor. Guests were taking off their coats, shaking the rain from their umbrellas.

"What kinds of things could you escape from?" Stanley wanted to know. "Chains? Ropes? Boxes? Trunks? Bags? Could you do it jumping off of a bridge? Or a building? What's so funny?"

"You remind me of someone," Joe said.

14

That same evening, Rosa shoved her paint box, a folded canvas tarp, a yardstick, and a small stepladder into the back of a taxi, and headed uptown to the apartment at the Josephine. The echoing emptiness of the place, a tin-plate rattle in the ears, unnerved her, and although with Joe's approval she had hastily called Macy's to order a dining table and chairs, some basic kitchen things, and bedroom furniture, there would be no time to furnish the rooms properly before Thomas arrived. It occurred to her that, having gone from the cramped jumble of a two-family flat on Dlouha Street, to the provisional pandemonium of a convent refectory, to the packed-in-oil tin of a stateroom on the
Ark of Miriam,
the boy might actually welcome a bit of space and emptiness, but all the same she wanted him to feel that the place at which he had arrived, at long last, was home, or a kind of home. She had tried to think of ways she could accomplish this. She knew enough about thirteen-year-old boys to be fairly certain that a plush bathrobe, a bouquet of flowers, or a ruffled canopy on the bed was not going to do the trick. She thought that a dog or a kitten might have been nice, but pets were not allowed in the building. She asked Joe about his brother's favorite meal, color, book, song; but Joe had proven quite ignorant of such preferences. Rosa was irritated with him—she had said he was impossible—until she saw that he was, for once, pained by his ignorance. It was the mark not of his usual luftmensch obliviousness but of the chasm of strange separation that had opened up between the brothers in the last two years. She apologized at once and went on trying to think what she could do for Thomas, until finally she'd had the idea, which struck them both as a nice one, of painting the blank expanse of his bedroom with a mural. It was not just that she wanted Thomas to feel at home; she wanted him to like her—instantly, right away—and she hoped that the mural, whether it softened the edges of his arrival or not, would at the very least stand as an offer of friendship, as a hand extended in welcome from his American big sister. But intermingled with, secretly bubbling beneath, these other motives for the gesture was concealed a desire that had nothing to do with Thomas Kavalier. Rosa was
practicing
— beginning to dabble, on the walls of a boy's bedroom, with the idea of becoming a mother. This morning, her doctor had called to confirm the tale of a missed period and of a week of sudden squalls and unexpected flare-ups of emotion such as the one that had sent her into hysterics over the loan of an old pocket square. Thomas was going to be an uncle. That was how she had decided that she was going to put it to Joe.