The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (75 page)

Joe cleared his throat, or perhaps he was grunting in pain.

They looked at him.

"Where is his room?" Joe said.

"Oh, sorry," said Rosa. "God. Are you all right?"

"I'm fine."

"It's this way."

She led him down the hall and into Tommy's bedroom. Joe laid the boy on top of the bedspread, which was patterned with colonial tavern signs and with curl-cornered proclamations printed in a bumpy Revolutionary War typeface. It had been quite some time since the duty and pleasure of undressing her son had fallen to Rosa. For several years, she had been wishing him, willing him, into maturity, independence, a general proficiency beyond his years, as if hoping to skip him like a stone across the treacherous pond of childhood, and now she was touched by a faint trace of the baby in him, in his pouting lips and the febrile sheen of his eyelids. She leaned over and untied his shoes, then pulled them off. His socks clung to his pale, perspired feet. Joe took the shoes and socks from her. Rosa unbuttoned Tommy's corduroy trousers and tugged them down his legs, then pulled up his shirt and the sweatshirt until his head and arms were a lost bundle within. She gave a kind of slow practiced tug, and the top portion of her boy popped free.

"Nicely done," Joe said.

Tommy had apparently been plied with ice cream and soda pop at the police station, to loosen his tongue. His face was going to have to be washed. Rosa went for a cloth. Joe followed her into the bathroom, carrying the shoes in one hand and the pair of socks, rolled into a neat ball, in the other.

"I have dinner in the oven."

"I'm very hungry."

"You didn't break a tooth or anything?"

"Luckily, no."

It was crazy; they were just talking. His voice sounded like his voice, orotund but with a slight bassoon reediness; the droll Hapsburg accent was still there, sounding doctoral and not quite genuine. Out in the living room, Sammy had turned over the record she'd put on earlier; Rosa recognized it now: Stan Kenton's
New Concepts of Artistry in Rhythm.
Joe followed her back into the bedroom, and Rosa scrubbed the sweet epoxy from Tommy's baby-boy lips and fingers. An unwrapped Charms Pop that he had plunged, half-sucked, into his pants pocket had mapped out a sticky continent on the smooth hairless hollow of his hip. Rosa wiped it away. Tommy muttered and winced throughout her attentions; once, his eyes shot open, filled with alarmed intelligence, and Rosa and Joe grimaced at each other: they had woken him up. But the boy closed his eyes again, and with Joe lilting and Rosa pulling, they got him into his pajamas. Joe hefted him, groaning again, as Rosa peeled back the covers of the bed. Then they tucked him in. Joe smoothed the hair back from Tommy's forehead.

"What a big boy," he said.

"He's almost twelve," Rosa said.

"Yes, I know."

She looked down at his hands, by his sides. He was still holding on to the pair of shoes.

"Are you hungry?" she said, keeping her voice low.

"I'm very hungry."

As they went out of the room Rosa turned to look at Tommy and had an impulse to go back, to get into his bed with him and just lie there for a while feeling that deep longing, that sense of missing him desperately, that came over her whenever she held him sleeping in her arms. She closed the door behind them.

"Let's eat," she said.

It wasn't until the three of them were seated around the dinette in the kitchen that she got her first good look at Joe. There was something denser about him now. His face seemed to have aged less than Sammy's or than, God knew, her own, and his expression, as he puzzled out the unfamiliar sights and smells of the cozy kitchen of their Penobscott, had something of the old bemused Joe that she remembered. Rosa had read about the Einsteinian traveler at the speed of light who returned after a trip that had taken a few years of his life to find everyone he knew and loved bent or moldering in the ground. It seemed to her as if Joe had returned like that, from somewhere distant and beautiful and unimaginably bleak.

As they ate, Sammy told Rosa the story of his day, from the time he had run into the boys at the Excelsior Cafeteria until the moment of Joe's leap into the void.

"You could have died," Rosa said in disgust, slapping gently at Joe's shoulder. "Very easily.
Rubber bands."

"The trick was performed with success by Theo Hardeen in 1921, from the Pont Alexandre III," Joe said. "The elastic band was specially prepared in that case, but I studied, and the conclusion was that my own was even stronger and more elastic."

"Only it
snapped,"
Sammy said.

Joe shrugged. "I was wrong."

Rosa laughed.

"I don't say I wasn't wrong, I'm just saying I didn't think there was much chance I was going to die at all."

"Did you think there was any chance they were going to lock you up on Rikers Island?" Sammy said. "He got arrested."

"You got arrested?" said Rosa. "What for? 'Creating a public nuisance'?"

Joe made a face, at once embarrassed and annoyed. Then he helped himself to another shovelful of casserole.

"It was for squatting," Sammy said.

"It's not anything." Joe looked up from his plate. "I have been in a jail before."

Sammy turned to her. "He keeps saying things like that."

"Man of mystery."

"I find it very irritating."

"Did you make bail?" said Rosa.

"Your father helped me."

"My father? He was
helpful?"

"Apparently the elder Mrs. Wagner owns two Magrittes," Sammy said. "The mayor's mother. The charges were dropped."

"Two
late
Magrittes," said Joe.

The telephone rang.

"I'll get it," Sammy said. He went to the phone. "Hello. Uh-huh. Which paper? I see. No, he won't talk to you. Because he would not be caught dead talking to a Hearst paper. No. No. No, that isn't true at all." Apparently, Sammy's desire to set the record straight was greater than his disdain for the New York
Journal-American.
He carried the receiver into the dining room; they had just had an extra-long cord put on so that it could reach the dining table Sammy used as a desk whenever he worked at home.

As Sammy began to harangue the reporter from the
Journal-American,
Joe put down his fork.

"Very good," he said. "I haven't eaten anything like this in so long I can't remember."

"Did you get enough?"

"No."

She served him another chunk from the dish.

"He missed you the most," she said. She nodded in the direction of the dining room, where Sammy was telling the reporter from the
Journal-American
how he and Joe had first come up with the idea for the Escapist, on a cold October night a million years ago. The day a boy had come tumbling in through the window of Jerry Glovsky's bedroom and landed, wondering, at her feet. "He hired private detectives to try to find you."

"One of them did find me," Joe said. "I paid him off." He took a bite, then another, then a third. "I missed
him,
too," he said finally. "But I used to always imagine that he was happy. When I would be sitting there at night sometimes thinking about him. I would read his comic books—I could alwavs tell which ones were his—and then I would think, well, Sam is doing all right there. He must be happy." He washed down the last bite of his third helping with a swallow of seltzer water. "It's a very disappointment to me to find out that he is not."

"Isn't he?" Rosa said, not so much out of bad faith as from the enduring power of what a later generation would have termed her denial. "No. No, you're right, he really isn't."

"What about the book, the
Disillusioned American?
I have often thought of it, too, from time to time."

His English, she saw, had deteriorated during his years in the bush, or wherever he'd been.

"Well," Rosa said, "he finished it a couple of years ago. For the
fifth
time, actually, I think it was. And we sent it out. There were some nice responses, but."

"I see."

"Joe," she said. "What
was
the idea?"

"What was the idea of what? My jump?"

"Okay, let's start with that."

"I don't know. When I saw the letter in the newspaper, you know, I knew that Tommy wrote it. Who else could it be? And I just felt, well, since I am the one to mention to him about it... I wanted... I just wanted to have it be ...
true
for him."

"But what were you trying to
accomplish?
Was the idea to
shame
Sheldon Anapol into giving you two more money, or ... ?"

"No," Joe said. "I don't guess that was ever the idea."

She waited. He pushed his plate back and picked up her cigarettes. He lit two at once, then passed one to her, just the way he used to do, long, long ago.

"He doesn't know," he said after a moment, as if offering a rationale for his leap from the top of the Empire State Building, and although she didn't grasp it at once, for some reason the statement started her heart pounding in her chest. Was she keeping so many secrets, so many different kinds of guilty knowledge from the men in her life?

"Who doesn't know what?" she said. She reached, as if casually, to take an ashtray from the kitchen counter just behind Joe's head.

"Tommy. He doesn't know ... what I know. About me. And him. That I—"

The ashtray—red and gold, stamped with the words el morocco in stylish gold script—fell to the kitchen floor and shattered into a dozen pieces.

"Shit!"

"It's all right, Rosa."

"No, it isn't! I dropped my El Morocco ashtray, god damn it." They met on their knees, in the middle of the kitchen floor, with the pieces of the broken dish between them.

"So all right," she said, as Joe started sweeping the shards together with the flat of his hand. "You know."

"I do now. I always thought so, but I—"

"You
always
thought so? Since when?"

"Since I heard about it. You wrote me, remember, in the navy, back in 1942, I think. There were pictures. I could tell."

"You have known since 1942 that you"—she lowered her voice to an angry whisper—"that you had a son, and you never—"

The rage that welled up suddenly felt dangerously satisfying, and she would have let it out, heedless of the consequences to her son, her husband, or their reputation in the neighborhood, but she was held back, at the very last possible moment, by the fiery blush in Joe's cheeks. He sat there, head bowed, stacking the pieces of the ashtray into a neat little cairn. Rosa got up and went to the broom closet for a dustpan and broom. She swept up the ashtray and sent the pieces jingling into the kitchen trash.

"You didn't tell him," she said at last.

He shook his bent head. He was still kneeling in the middle of the kitchen floor. "We always never spoke very much," he said.

"Why does that not surprise me?"

"And you never told him."

"Of course not," Rosa said. "As far as he knows, that"—she lowered her voice and nodded again toward the dining room—"is his father."

"This is not the case."

"What?"

"He told me that Sammy adopted him. He overheard this or some such thing. He has a number of interesting theories about his real father."

"He ... did he ever ... do you think he ..."

"At times I felt he might be leading up to asking me," Joe said. "But he never has."

She gave him her hand then, and he took it in his own. For an instant, his felt much drier and more callused than she remembered, and then it felt exactly the same. They sat back down at the kitchen table, in front of their plates of food.

"You still haven't said," she reminded him. "Why you did it. What was the point of it all?"

Sammy came back into the kitchen and hung up the phone, shaking his head at the profound journalistic darkness that he had just wasted ten minutes attempting to illuminate.

"That's what the guy was just asking me," he said. "What was the point of it?"