The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (with bonus content) (36 page)

The men around her had parted reluctantly as Harkoo, providing blocking for Joe and Sammy like a back for the latter’s beloved Dodgers, shoehorned them into the circle.

“We’ve met,” Rosa said. It was almost a question. She had a strong, deep, droll, masculine voice, turned up to a point that verged on speaker-rattling, as if she were daring everyone around her to listen and to judge. But then maybe, Joe thought, she was just very drunk. There was a glass of something amber in her hand. In any case, her voice went well, somehow, with her dramatic features and the wild mass of brown woolen loops, constrained here and there by a desperate bobby pin, that constituted her hairstyle. She gave his hand a squeeze that partook of the same bold intentions as her voice, a businessman’s
shake, dry and curt and forceful. And yet he noticed that she was, if anything, blushing more obviously than ever. The delicate skin over her clavicles was mottled.

“I don’t believe so,” said Joe. He coughed, partly to cover his discomfiture, partly to camouflage the suave rejoinder he had just been fed by the prompter crouching by the footlights of his desire, and partly because his throat had gone bone-dry. He felt a weird urge to lean down—she was a small woman, the top of whose head barely reached his collarbone—and kiss her on the mouth, in front of everyone, as he might have done in a dream, with that long optimistic descent across the distance between their lips enduring for minutes, hours, centuries. How
surreal
would that be? Instead, he reached into his pocket and took out his cigarettes. “Someone like you I would absolutely remember,” he said.

“Oh, good God,” said one of the men beside her in disgust.

The young woman to whom he was lying produced a smile which—Joe couldn’t tell—might have been either flattered or appalled. Her smile was a surprisingly broad and toothy achievement for a mouth that in contemplation had been compacted into such a tiny pout.

“Huh,” said Sammy. He, at least, sounded impressed by Joe’s suavity.

Longman Harkoo said, “That’s our cue.” He put his arm once more around Sammy’s shoulder. “Let’s get you a drink, shall we?”

“Oh, I don’t—I’m not—” Sammy reached out to Joe as Harkoo led him away, as though worried that their host was about to drag him off to the promised volcano. Joe watched him go with a cold heart. Then he held the pack of Pall Malls out to Rosa. She tugged a cigarette free and put it to her lips. She took a long drag. Joe felt constrained to point out that the cigarette was not lit.

“Oh,” she said. She snorted. “I’m such an idiot.”

“Rosa,” chided one of the men standing beside her, “you don’t smoke!”

“I just took it up,” Rosa said.

There was a muffled groan, then the cloud of men around her seemed to dissolve. She took no notice. She inclined toward Joe and peered up, curving her hand around his and the flame of the match. Her eyes shone, an indeterminate color between champagne and the green
of a dollar. Joe felt feverish and a little dizzy, and the cool talcum smell of Shalimar she gave off was like a guardrail he could lean against. They had drawn very close together, and now, as he tried and failed to prevent himself from thinking of her lying naked and facedown on Jerry Glovsky’s bed, her broad downy backside with its dark furrow, the alluvial hollow of her spine, she took a step backward and studied him.

“You’re
sure
we haven’t met.”

“Fairly.”

“Where are you from?”

“Prague.”

“You’re Czech.”

He nodded.

“A Jew?”

He nodded again.

“How long have you been here?”

“One year,” he said, and then, the realization filling him with wonder and chagrin, “one year
today
.”

“Did you come with your family?”

“Alone,” he said. “I left them there.” Unbidden, there flashed in his mind’s eye the image of his father, or the ghost of his father, striding down the gangplank of the
Rotterdam
, arms outstretched. Tears stung his eyes, and a ghostly hand seemed to clutch at his throat. Joe coughed once and batted at the smoke from his cigarette, as if it were irritating him. “My father has recently died.”

She shook her head, looking sorrowful and outraged and, he thought, entirely lovely. As his glibness had departed him, so a more earnest nature seemed to feel greater liberty to confess itself in her.

“I’m really sorry for you,” she said. “My heart goes out to them.”

“It’s not so bad,” Joe said. “It will be all right.”

“You know we’re getting into this war,” she declared. She wasn’t blushing now. The brass-voiced party girl of a moment before, telling a story on herself that ended in an oath, seemed to have vanished. “We have to, and we will. Roosevelt will arrange it. He’s working toward it now. We won’t let them win.”

“No,” Joe said, though Rosa’s views were hardly typical of her countrymen,
most of whom felt that the events in Europe were an embroilment to be avoided at any price. “I believe …” He found himself, to his mild surprise, unable to finish the sentence. She reached out and took his arm.

“What I’m saying is just, I don’t know. I guess ‘don’t despair,’ ” she said. “I really, really do mean that, Joe.”

At her words, the touch of her hand, her pronouncing of his short blank American name devoid of all freight and family associations, Joe was overcome with a flood of gratitude so powerful that it frightened him, because it seemed to reflect in its grandeur and force just how little hope he really had left. He pulled away.

“Thank you,” he said stiffly.

She let her hand fall, dismayed at having offended him. “I’m sorry,” she said again. She lifted an eyebrow, quizzical, bold, and on the verge, he thought, of recognizing him. Joe averted his eyes, his heart in his throat, thinking that if she were able to recollect him and the circumstances of their first meeting, his chances with her would be ruined. Her eyes got very big, and her throat, her cheeks, her ears were flooded with the bright heart’s blood of humiliation. Joe could see her making an effort not to look away.

Just then a series of sharp metallic sounds cut the air, as if someone had thrust a spanner into the blades of a giant fan. The room fell silent, and everyone stood listening as the harsh chopping sounds ceased and were followed by an oscillating mechanical whine. A woman screamed, her musical horror carrying all the way up from the ballroom on the ground floor. Everyone turned to the door of the library.

“Help!” came a cry from downstairs, a man’s hoarse voice. “He’s drowning!”

S
ALVADOR
D
ALÍ
lay on his back in the middle of the ballroom floor, smacking ineffectually at the helmet of his diving suit with his gloved hands. His wife knelt beside him, working fiercely at a wingnut that kept the helmet bolted to the brass collar of the suit. A vein bulged in her forehead. A heavy lump of black onyx that she wore at the end of a thick gold chain kept clapping against the bell of the diving helmet.

“
Il devient bleu
,” she observed in a calm panic. Two of the guests ran to Dalí’s side. One of them—it was the composer, Scott—brushed Señora Dalí’s hands away and took hold of the wings of the nut. Longman Harkoo barreled across the room, showing surprising alacrity for one of his girth. He began to slap at the whining air pump with the sole of his sandaled right foot.

“It’s jammed! It’s overloaded! Oh, what’s the matter with this thing!”

“He’s not getting any oxygen!” offered someone.

“Get that helmet off him!” another suggested.

“What the fuck do you think I’m trying to do!” shouted the composer.

“Stop shouting!” cried Harkoo. He pushed Scott out of the way now, grabbed the wingnut in his meaty fingers, and threw all of his bulk and momentum into a single great twist. The nut turned. He grinned. The nut turned again, and the grin faded. The nut turned, and turned, and turned again, never loosening; it had become fused to the bolt.

Joe stood in the doorway beside Rosa, watching, and as the nut turned helplessly in her father’s fingers, she took hold of Joe’s arm with both hands, without seeming to notice that she was doing so,
and squeezed. The plea for his help implicit in the gesture thrilled and alarmed him. He reached into his pocket and took out the Victorinox knife that had been a gift from Thomas on his seventeenth birthday.

“What are you doing?” she said, letting go of him.

He didn’t answer. He walked quickly across the room and knelt down beside Gala Dalí, whose armpits smelled oddly of fennel seed. After ascertaining that Salvador Dalí was indeed beginning to turn blue, Joe opened the screwdriver blade of the knife. He jammed it into the slot on the bolt head to hold the bolt steady. Then he worked the nut. Through the wire grid of the face plate, his eyes met Dalí’s, abulge with terror and asphyxia. A stream of muffled Spanish rattled against the far side of the inch-thick glass. As near as Joe could tell—his Spanish was poor—Dalí was calling abjectly for the intercession of the Holy Mother of God. The bolt held. Joe bit down hard on his lip and twisted until his fingers felt that they would split at the tips. There was a snap, and the nut began to protest and grow warm. Then, slowly, it gave. Fourteen seconds later, with a loud Dom Pérignon pop, Joe yanked the helmet off.

Dalí gave great sobbing gasps as they helped him out of his suit. New York, though lucrative, was in many ways a dangerous place for him: in the spring of 1938, he had made all the papers by falling through a display window at Bonwit Teller. A glass of water was brought; he sat up and drained it. The left brachium of his famous mustache had wilted. He asked for a cigarette. Joe gave him one and held a match to it. Dalí inhaled deeply, coughed, picked a flake of tobacco from his lip. Then he nodded to Joe.

“Jeune homme, vous avez sauvé une vie de très grand valeur,”
he said.

“Je le sais bien, maître,”
said Joe.

He felt a heavy hand on his shoulder. It was Longman Harkoo.

He was beaming, fairly rocking up and down in his sandals at the turn things had taken. The near death of a world-famous painter in a diving accident, in a Greenwich Village drawing room, contributed an unimpeachable Surrealist luster to the party.

“Hot stuff,” he said.

Then the party seemed to close its fingers around Joe, treasuring
him in its palm. He was a hero.
^*
People gathered around, tossing handfuls of hyperbolic adjectives and coarse expostulations at his head, holding their pale tin-pan faces up to his as if to catch a splash of his rattling-jackpot moment of glory. Sammy managed to swim or shoulder his way through the people slapping and grabbing at Joe, and gave him a hug. George Deasey brought him a drink that was bright and cold as metal in his mouth. Joe nodded slowly, without speaking, accepting their tributes and acclaim with the sullen, abstracted air of a victorious athlete, breathing deep. It was nothing to him: noise, smoke, jostling, a confusion of perfumes and hair oils, a throb of pain in his right hand. He looked around the room, rising on tiptoe to see over the waxy tops of men’s heads, peering through the dense foliage of the plumes on women’s hats, searching Rosa out. All his self-denial, his Escapist purity of intentions, were forgotten in the flush of triumph and a sense of calm very like that which pervaded him after he had taken a beating. It seemed to him that his fortunes, his life, the entire apparatus of his sense of self were concentrated only on the question of what Rosa Saks would think of him now.

“She fairly bounded across the room to him,” as E. J. Kahn would afterward describe it—referring in his item to Rosa (whom he knew slightly) only as “a fetching Village art maiden”—and then, after managing to reach him, she seemed to grow suddenly shy.

“What did he say to you?” she wanted to know. “Dalí.”

“ ‘Thank you,’ ” said Joe.

“That’s all?”

“He called me
‘jeune homme.’
 ”

“I thought I heard you speaking French,” she said, hugging herself to still a tremor of unmistakable, almost maternal pride. Joe, seeing his exploit so richly rewarded by the flush in her cheeks and her unwavering
regard, stood there scratching at the side of his nose with the thumb of his right hand, embarrassed by the ease of his success, like a fighter who mats his opponent nineteen seconds into the first round.

“I know who you are,” she said, coloring again. “I mean, I … remember you now.”

“I remember you, too,” he said, hoping it did not sound salacious.

“How would you … I’d like you to see my paintings,” she said. “If you want to, I mean. I have a—a studio upstairs.”

Joe hesitated. From the time of his arrival in New York City, he had never permitted himself to speak to a woman for pleasure. It was not an easy thing to do in English, and anyway, he had not come here to flirt with girls. He didn’t have time for it, and furthermore, he did not feel that he was entitled to such pleasures, or to the commitments that they would inevitably entail. He felt—it was not an articulated feeling, but it was powerful and, in its way, a comfort to him—
that he could justify his own liberty only to the degree that he employed it to earn the freedom of the family he had left behind. His life in America was a conditional thing, provisional, unencumbered with personal connections beyond his friendship and partnership with Sammy Clay.