The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (79 page)

"I—I guess I could try to tell you—" he began.

"It's fine, I'm getting it." Sammy reached into the pocket of his overcoat, without looking, and took out his wallet. He pulled out a few bills, ones and a five. "Tell you what," he said. "I think I'm gonna be here for a while." He looked up. "Could you eat?"

"You're going to read this now?"

"Sure."

"All of it?"

"Why not? I give over fifteen years of my life to climbing a two-mile pile of garbage, I can spare a few hours for three feet of genius."

Joe rubbed at the side of his nose, feeling the warmth of Sammy's flattery spread to his legs and fill his throat. "Okay," he said at last. "So you can read it. But maybe you can wait till we get home?"

"I don't want to wait."

"I'm being evicted."

"Fuck them."

Joe nodded and took the money from Sammy. It had been a long time, a very long time, since he had allowed his cousin to boss him around in this way. He found that, as in the past, he rather liked it.

"And, Joe," Sammy said, without looking up from the pile of pages. Joe waited. "Rosa and I were talking. And she, uh, we think it's okay, if you want to ... that is, we think that Tommy ought to know that you're his father."

"I see. Yes, I suppose you're ... I will talk to him."

"We could all do it. Maybe we could sit him down. You. His mother. Me."

"Sammy," Joe said. "I don't know if this is the right thing to say, or what the right way to say it is. But—thank you."

"For what?"

"I know what you did. I know how it cost you something. I don't deserve to have a friend like you."

"Well, I wish I could say that I did it for you, Joe, because I'm such a good friend. But the truth is that, at that moment, I was as scared as Rosa. I married her because I didn't want to, well, to be a fairy. Which, actually, I guess I am. Maybe you never knew."

"Sort of a little bit, maybe I knew."

"It's that simple."

Joe shook his head. "That could be or is why you married her," he said. "But that doesn't explain how come you stayed. You are Tommy's father, Sammy. As much or really, I think, a lot more than I am."

"I did the easy thing," Sammy said. "Try it, you'll see." He returned his attention to the sheet of Bristol board in his hands, part of the long sequence at the end of the first chapter that offered a brief history of golems through the ages. "So," he said, "they make a goat."

"Uh, yes," Joe said. "Rabbi Hanina and Rabbi Oshaya."

"A goat golem."

"Out of earth."

"And then ..." Sammy's finger traced the course of the episode down and across the page. "After they go to all this trouble. It looks like it's kind of dangerous, making a golem."

"It is."

"After all that, they just... they eat it?"

Joe shrugged. "They were hungry," he said.

Sammy said that he knew how they felt, and even though he seemed to mean the remark to be taken only literally, Joe had a sudden vision of Sammy and Rosa, kneeling together beside a flickering crucible, working to fashion something that would sustain them out of the materials that came to hand.

He rode down to the lobby and sat at the counter of the Empire State Pharmacy, on his usual stool, though for once without the usual dark glasses and false whiskers or watch cap pulled down past his eyebrows to the orbits of his eyes. He ordered a plate of fried eggs and a pork chop, as he always did. He sat back and cracked his knuckles. He saw the counterman giving him a look. Joe stood up and, in a small display of theatrics, moved two stools down the line, so that he was sitting right beside the window that looked out on Thirty-third Street, where anyone could see him.

"Make that a cheeseburger," he said.

While he listened to the hissing of the pale pink leaf of meat on the grill, Joe looked out the window and mulled over the things that Sammy had just revealed. He had never given much consideration to the feelings that had, for a few months during the fall and winter of 1941, drawn his cousin and Tracy Bacon together. To the small extent that he had ever given the matter any thought at all, Joe had assumed that Sammy's youthful flirtation with homosexuality had been just that, a freak dalliance born of some combination of exuberance and loneliness that had died abruptly, with Bacon, somewhere over the Solomon Islands. The suddenness with which Sammy had swooped in, following Joe's enlistment, to marry Rosa—as if all that time he had been waiting, racked by a sexual impatience at once barely suppressed and perfectly conventional, to get Joe out of the way—had seemed to Joe to mark decisively the end of Sammy's brief experiment in bohemian rebellion. Sammy and Rosa had a child, moved to the suburbs, buckled down. For years they had lived, vividly, in Joe's imagination, as loving husband and wife, Sammy's arm around her shoulders, her arm encircling his waist, framed in an arching trellis of big, red American roses. It was only now, watching the traffic stalled on Thirty-third Street, smoking his way through a cheeseburger and glass of ginger ale, that he grasped the whole truth. Not only had Sammy never loved Rosa; he was not capable of loving her, except with the half-mocking, companionable affection he always had felt for her, a modest structure, never intended for extended habitation, long since buried under heavy brambles of indebtedness and choked in the ivy of frustration and blame. It was only now that Joe understood the sacrifice Sammy had made, not just for Joe's or for Rosa's or for Tommy's sake, but for his own: not a merely gallant gesture but a deliberate and conscious act of self-immurement. Joe was appalled.

He thought of the boxes of comics that he had accumulated, upstairs, in the two small rooms where, for five years, he had crouched in the false bottom of the life from which Tommy had freed him, and then, in turn, of the thousands upon thousands of little boxes, stacked neatly on sheets of Bristol board or piled in rows across the ragged pages of comic books, that he and Sammy had filled over the past dozen years: boxes brimming with the raw materials, the bits of rubbish from which they had, each in his own way, attempted to fashion their various golems. In literature and folklore, the significance and the fascination of golems— from Rabbi Loew's to Victor von Frankenstein's—lay in their soullessness, in their tireless inhuman strength, in their metaphorical association with overweening human ambition, and in the frightening ease with which they passed beyond the control of their horrified and admiring creators. But it seemed to Joe that none of these—Faustian hubris, least of all—were among the true reasons that impelled men, time after time, to hazard the making of golems. The shaping of a golem, to him, was a gesture of hope, offered against hope, in a time of desperation. It was the expression of a yearning that a few magic words and an artful hand might produce something—one poor, dumb, powerful thing—exempt from the crushing strictures, from the ills, cruelties, and inevitable failures of the greater Creation. It was the voicing of a vain wish, when you got down to it, to escape. To slip, like the Escapist, free of the entangling chain of reality and the straitjacket of physical laws. Harry Houdini had roamed the Palladiums and Hippodromes of the world encumbered by an entire cargo-hold of crates and boxes, stuffed with chains, iron hardware, brightly painted flats and hokum, animated all the while only by this same desire, never fulfilled: truly to escape, if only for one instant; to poke his head through the borders of this world, with its harsh physics, into the mysterious spirit world that lay beyond. The newspaper articles that Joe had read about the upcoming Senate investigation into comic books always cited "escapism" among the litany of injurious consequences of their reading, and dwelled on the pernicious effect, on young minds, of satisfying the desire to escape. As if there could be any more noble or necessary service in life.

"You need something else?" said the counterman, as Joe wiped his mouth and then threw his napkin to his plate.

"Yes, a fried-egg sandwich," Joe said. "With extra mayonnaise."

An hour after he had left, carrying a brown paper bag that contained the fried-egg sandwich and a package of Pall Malls, because he knew that by now Sammy would be out of cigarettes, Joe returned for the last time to Suite 7203. Sammy had taken off his jacket and his shoes. His necktie lay coiled around him on the floor.

"We have to do it," he said.

"Have to do what?"

"I'll tell you in a minute. I think I'm almost done. Am I almost done?"

Joe bent forward to see how far Sammy had gotten. The Golem appeared to have reached the twisting and jerry-built stairway, all splintered wood and protruding nails—it was almost, deliberately, like something out of Segar or Fontaine Fox—that would lead him to the tumbledown gates of Heaven itself.

"You're almost done."

"It goes faster when there aren't words."

Sammy took the bag from Joe, unrolled it, and peered inside. He took out the foil-wrapped sandwich, and then the pack of cigarettes.

"I worship at your feet," he said, tapping the pack with a finger. He ripped it open and drew one out with his lips.

Joe went over to a stack of boxes and sat down. Sammy lit up the cigarette and flipped—a bit carelessly, to Joe's mind—through the last dozen or so pages. He set his cigarette down atop the still-wrapped sandwich and tied the pages back into the last portfolio. He jabbed the cigarette back into his mouth, unwrapped the sandwich, and bit away a quarter of it, chewing while he smoked.

"So?"

"So," Sammy said. "You have an awful lot of Jewish stuff in here."

"I know it."

"What's the matter with you, did you have a relapse?"

"I eat a pork chop every day." Joe reached over into a nearby box and pulled out the jacketless book with its softened pages and cracked spine.

"Myth and Legend of Ancient Israel,"
Sammy read. "By Angelo S. Rappoport." He flipped through the pages, eyeing Joe with a certain respectful skepticism, as if he thought he had found the secret to Joe's salvation, which he was now obliged to doubt. "You're into all this now?"

Joe shrugged. "It's all lies," he said mildly. "I guess."

"I remember when you first got here. That first day we went into Anapol's office. Do you remember that?"

Joe said that naturally he remembered that day.

"I handed you a
Superman
comic book and told you to come up with a superhero for us and you drew the Golem. And I thought you were an idiot."

"And I was."

"And you were. But that was 1939. In 1954, I don't think the Golem makes you such an idiot anymore. Let me ask you something." He looked around for a napkin, then picked up his necktie and wiped his shining lips. "Have you seen what Bill Gaines is doing over there at E.C.?"

"Yes, of course."

"They are not doing kid stuff over there. They have the top artists. They have Crandall. I know you always liked him."

"Crandall is the top, no doubt."

"And the stuff they are doing, grown-ups are reading it. Adults. It's dark. It's also mean, I think, but look around you, this is a mean age we're living in. Have you seen the Heap?"

"I love the Heap."

"The Heap, I mean, come on, that's a comic book character? He's basically, what, a sentient pile of mud and weeds and, I don't know, sediment. With that tiny little beak. He breaks things. But he's supposed to be a
hero."

"I see what you're saying."

"This is what I'm saying. It's 1954. You got a pile of dirt walking around, the kids think that's admirable. Imagine what they'll think of the Golem."

"You want to publish this."

"Maybe not quite like it is here."

"Ah."

"It is awfully Jewish."

"True."

"Who knew you knew all that stuff? Kabbalah, is that what it's called? All those angels and ... and, is that what they are, angels?"

"Mostly."

"This is what I'm thinking. There's something to all this. Not just the Golem character. Your angels—do they have names?"

"There's Metatron. Uriel. Michael. Raphael. Samael. He's the bad one."

"With the tusks?"

Joe nodded.

"I like that one. You know, your angels look a little like superheroes."

"Well, it's a comic book."

"This is what I'm thinking."

"Jewish superheroes?"

"What, they're all Jewish, superheroes. Superman, you don't think he's Jewish? Coming over from the old country, changing his name like that. Clark Rent, only a Jew would pick a name like that for himself."

Joe pointed to the stack of bulging portfolios on the ground between them. "But half the characters in there are rabbis, Sammy."

"All right, so we tone it down."

"You want us to work together again?"

"Well... actually ... I don't know, I'm just talking off the top of my head. This is just so
good.
It makes me want to ...
make
something again. Something I can be just a little bit proud of."