The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (76 page)

"Couldn't you have just
called?"
Rosa said. "I'm sure I would have invited you."

Joe shook his head, and the color returned to his cheeks. "I couldn't. So many times I wanted to. I would call you and hang up the phone. I would write letters but didn't send them. And the longer I waited, the harder it became to imagine. I just didn't know how to do it, you see? I didn't know what you would think of me. How you would feel about me."

"Christ, Joe, you fucking idiot," Sammy said. "We love you."

Joe put his hand on Sammy's shoulder and shrugged, nodding as if to say, yes, he had acted like an idiot. And that would be it for them, Rosa thought. Twelve years of nothing, a curt declaration, a shrug of apology, and those two would be as good as new. Rosa snorted a jet of smoke through her nostrils and shook her head. Joe and Sammy turned to her. They seemed to be expecting her to come up with a plan of action for them, a nice tight Rose Saxon script they could all follow, in which they would all get just the lines they wanted.

"Well?" she said. "What do we do now?"

The silence that ensued was long enough for three or four of Ethel Klayman's proverbial idiots to enter this woebegone world. Rosa could see a thousand possible replies working themselves through her husband's mind, and she wondered which one of them he was finally going to offer, but it was Joe who finally spoke up.

"Is there any dessert?" he said.

12

With a sharpened Ticonderoga tucked behind his ear and a fresh yellow lawyer's pad pressed to his chest, Sammy got into bed with her. He wore a pair of stiff cotton pajamas—these were white with a thin lime stripe and a diagonal pattern of gold stags' heads—to which clung a sweet steam whiff of her iron. Normally he folded into the envelope of their bed an olfactory transcript of his day in the city, a rich record of Vitalis, Pall Mall, German mustard, the sour imprint of his leather-backed office chair, the scorched quarter-inch membrane of coffee at the bottom of the company urn, but tonight he had showered, and his cheeks and throat had a stinging mint smell of Lifebuoy. He transferred his relatively slight bulk from the floor of the bedroom to the surface of the mattress with the usual recitative of grunts and sighs. At one time Rosa would have inquired as to whether there was some general or specific cause for these amazing performances, but there never was—his groaning was either some involuntary musical response to the effects of gravitation, like the "singing" of certain moisture-laden rocks that she had read about in
Ripley's,
produced by the first shafts of morning sun; or else it was just the inevitable nightly release, after fifteen hours spent ignoring and repressing them, of all the day's frustrations. She waited out the elaborate process by which he effected a comprehensive rearranging of the mucus in his lungs and throat. She felt him settle his legs and smooth the covers over them. At last she rolled over and sat up on one arm.

"Well?" she said.

Given everything that had happened that day, there were a lot of different possible answers to her question. Sammy might have said, "Apparently our son is not, after all, a little school-skipping, comic-book-corrupted delinquent right out of the most lurid chapters of
Seduction of the Innocent."
Or, for the thousandth time, with the usual admixture of wonder and hostility: "Your father is quite a character." Or—she dreaded and longed to hear it: "Well, you got him back."

But he just snuffled one last time and said, "I like it."

Rosa sat up a little bit more.

"Really?"

He nodded, folding his hands behind his head. "It's very disturbing," he continued, and she realized that she had known all along that this was the answer she was going to get, or rather that this would be the line he would probably choose to take in reply to her open-ended invitation to fill her with longing and dread. She was, as always, anxious for his opinion of her work, and grateful, too, that he wanted to reckon things between them, for just a little longer, by the old calendar, as rife with lacunae and miscalculations as it may have been. "It's like the Bomb really is the Other Woman."

"The Bomb is sexy."

"That's what's disturbing," Sammy said. "Actually, what's disturbing is that you could think such a thing."

"Look who's talking."

"You gave the Bomb
a figure.
A womanly shape."

"That comes right out of Tommy's
World Book.
I didn't make that up."

Sammy lit a cigarette and then stared at the match head until it burned down almost to the skin of his fingers. He shook it out.

"Is he out of his mind?" he said.

"Tommy or Joe?"

"He's been leading a
secret life
for the last ten years. I mean, but
really.
Disguises. Assumed names. He told me only a dozen people knew who he was. Nobody knew where he lived."

"Who knew?"

"A bunch of those magicians. That's where Tommy first saw him. In the back room at Tannen's."

"Louis Tannen's Magic Shop," she said. That explained the intensity of Tommy's attachment, which had always irritated her, to that shabby cabinet of trite tricks and flummery, which, the time she had visited it, had left her feeling depressed.
He seems quite obsessed with the place,
her father had once observed. She crept back now along the span of lies that Tommy had stretched across the last ten months. The carefully typed price lists, all fakes. Perhaps the interest in magic itself had all been faked. And the perfect simulacra of her signature, on those appalling excuse notes that Tommy concocted: of course it was Joe who had done them. Tommy's own signature was brambly and uncouth; his hand was still decidedly wobbly. Why hadn't it occurred to her before that the boy never could have produced such a forgery on his own? "They were pulling a giant sleight of hand on us. The eye patch was like, what did Joe used to call it?"

"Misdirection."

"A lie to cover a lie."

"I asked Joe about Orson Welles," Sammy said. "He knew."

She pointed to the pack of cigarettes, and Sammy handed her one. She was sitting up now, legs crossed, facing him. Her stomach hurt; that was nerves. Nerves, and the impact of years and years of accumulated fantasies collapsing all at once, toppling like a row of painted flats. She had imagined Joe not merely run down by passing trucks on a lonely road but drowned in remote Alaskan inlets, shot by Klansmen, tagged in a drawer in a midwestern morgue, killed in a jail riot, and in any number of various suicidal predicaments from hanging to defenestration. She could not help it. She had a catastrophic imagination; an air of imminent doom darkens much of even her sunniest work. She had guessed at the presence of violence in the story of Joe's disappearance (though she had mistakenly thought it lay at the end and not the beginning of the tale). One heard more and more of suicides—suffering from "survivor's guilt," as it was called—among the more fortunate relatives of those who had died in the camps. Whenever Rosa read or was told of such a case, she could not prevent herself from picturing Joe performing the same act, by the same means; usually it was pills or the horrible irony of gas. And every newspaper account of somebody's ill fate in the hinterlands—the man she had read about just yesterday tumbled from a sea cliff at the edge of San Francisco—she recast with Joe in the lead. Bear maulings, bee attacks, the plunge of a bus full of schoolchildren (he was at the wheel)—the memory of Joe underwent them all. No tragedy was too baroque or seemingly inapplicable for her to conceive of fitting Joe into it. And she had lived daily, for several years now, with the pain of knowing—
knowing
—all fantasy aside, that Joe really would never be coming home. But she could not seem to get hold, now, of the apparently simple idea that Joe Kavalier, secret life and all, was asleep on her couch, in her living room, under an old knit afghan of Ethel Klayman's.

"No," she said. "I don't think he's out of his mind. You know? I just don't know if there's a sane reaction to what he ... what happened to his family. Is
your
reaction, and mine ... you get up, you go to work, you have a catch in the yard with the kid on Sunday afternoon. How sane is that? Just to go on planting bulbs and drawing comic books and doing all the same old crap as if none of it had happened?"

"Good point," Sammy said, sounding profoundly uninterested in the question. He worked his legs up toward his chest and laid the legal pad against them. The pencil began to scratch. He was through with this conversation. As a rule, they tended to avoid questions like "How sane are we?" and "Do our lives have meaning?" The need for avoidance was acute and apparent to both of them.

"What is that?" she said.

"Weird Planet."
He did not lift his pencil from the pad. "Guy lands on a planet. Exploring the galaxy. Mapping the far fringes." While he spoke, he did not look at her, or interrupt the steady progress across the ruled lines of the tiny bold block letters he produced, regular and neat, as if he had a typewriter hand. He liked to talk through his plots for her, combing out into regular plaits what grew in wild tufts in his mind. "He finds a vast golden city. Like nothing he's ever seen. And he's seen it all. The beehive cities of Deneba. The lily-pad cities of Lyra. The people here are ten feet tall, beautiful golden humanoids. Let's say they have big wings. They welcome Spaceman Jones. They show him around. But something is on their minds. They're worried. They're afraid. There's one building, one immense palace he isn't allowed to see. One night our guy wakes up in his nice big bed, the entire city is shaking. He hears this terrible bellowing, raging like some immense monstrous beast. Screams. Strange electric flashes. It's all coming from the palace." He peeled the page he had filled, folded it over, plastered it down. Went on. "The next day everybody acts like nothing happened. They tell him he must have been dreaming. Naturally our guy has to find out. He's an explorer. It's his job. So he sneaks into this one huge, deserted palace and looks around. In the highest tower, a mile above the planet, he comes upon a giant. Twenty feet tall, huge wings, golden like the others but with ragged hair, big long beard. In chains. Giant atomic chains."

She waited while he waited for her to ask.

"And?" she said finally.

"We're in heaven, this planet," said Sam.

"I'm not sure I—"

"It's God."

"Okay."

"God is a madman. He lost his mind, like, a billion years ago. Just before He, you know. Created the universe."

It was Rosa's turn to say, "I like it. Does He, what? I'm guessing he eats the spaceman?"

"He does."

"Peels him like a banana."

"You want to draw it?"

She reached out and laid a hand on his cheek. It was warm and still dewy from the shower, his stubble pleasantly scratchy under her fingertips. She wondered how long it had been since she had last touched his face.

"Sam, come on. Stop for a minute," she said.

"I need to get this down."

She reached out for the pencil and arrested its mechanical progress. For a moment he fought her; there was a tiny creaking of splinters, and the pencil began to bend. Finally, it snapped in two, splitting lengthwise. She handed him her half, the skinny gray tube of graphite glinting like mercury rising in a thermometer.

"Sammy, how did you get him off?"

"I told you."

"My father called the mayor's mother," Rosa said. "Who was able to manipulate the criminal-justice system of New York City. Which she did out of her deep love of Rene Magritte."

"Apparently."

"Bullshit."

He shrugged, but she knew he was lying. He had been lying to her steadily, and with her approval, for years. It was a single, continuous lie, the deepest kind of lie possible in a marriage: the one that need never be told, because it will never be questioned. Every once in a while, however, small bergs like this one would break off and drift across their course, mementos of the trackless continent of lies, the blank spot on their maps.

"How did you get him off?" Rosa said. She had never before so persisted in trying to get the truth out of him. Sometimes she felt like Ingrid Bergman in
Casablanca,
married to a man with contacts in the underground. The lies were for her protection as well as his.

"I talked to the arresting officer," Sammy said, looking steadily at her. "Detective Lieber."

"You spoke to him."

"He seemed like an all right kind of guy."

"That's lucky."

"We're going to have lunch."

Sammy had been having lunch, on and off, with a dozen men over the past dozen years or so. They rarely displayed any last names in his conversation; they were just Bob or Jim or Pete or Dick. One would appear on the fringes of Rosa's consciousness, hang around for six months or a year, a vague mishmash of stock tips, opinions, and vogue jokes in a gray suit, then vanish as quickly as he had come. Rosa always assumed that these friendships of Sammy's—the only relations, since Joe's enlistment, that merited the name—went no further than a lunch table at Le Marmiton or Laurent. It was one of her fundamental assumptions.