The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (with bonus content) (81 page)

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 always 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?”

Rosa and Sammy turned to Joe, who regarded the inch of ash at the tip of his cigarette for a moment before tapping it into the palm of his hand.

“I guess this was the point,” he said. “For me to come back. To end up sitting here with you, on Long Island, in this house, eating some noodles that Rosa made.”

Sammy raised his eyebrows and let out a short sigh. Rosa shook her head. It seemed to be her destiny to live among men whose solutions were invariably more complicated or extreme than the problems they were intended to solve.

“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.

W
ITH 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.”