The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (with bonus content) (83 page)

A
T THIRTY-FIVE
, with incipient wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and a voice grown husky with cigarettes, Rosa Clay was, if anything, more beautiful than the girl Joe remembered. She had surrendered her futile and wrongheaded battle against the ample construction of her frame. The general expansion of her rosy flesh had softened the dramatic rake of her nose, the equine length of her jaw, the flare of her cheekbones. Her thighs had a grandeur, and her hips were capacious, and in those first few days, a great goad to his renascent love was the glimpse of her pale, freckled breasts, brimming from the cups of her brassiere with a tantalizing but fictitious threat of spilling over, that was afforded him by one of her housedresses, or by a chance late-night encounter outside the bathroom in the hall. He had thought of Rosa countless times over the years of his flight, but somehow, courting or embracing her in his memory, he had neglected to dab in the freckles with which she was so prodigiously stippled, and now he was startled by their profusion. They emerged and faded against her skin with the inscrutable cadence of stars on the night sky. They invited the touch of fingers as painfully as the nap of velvet or the shimmer of a piece of watered silk.

Sitting at the breakfast table, lying on the couch, he would watch as she went about her household business, carrying a dust mop or a canvas bag of clothespins, her skirt straining to contain the determined sway of her hips and buttocks, and feel as if inside him a violin string were being tightened on its key. Because, as it turned out, he was still in love with Rosa. His love for her had survived the ice age intact, like the beasts from vanished aeons that were always thawing out in the pages of comic books and going on rampages through the streets of Metropolis
and Gotham and Empire City. This love, thawing, gave off a rich mastodon odor of the past. He was surprised to encounter these feelings again—not by their having survived so much as by their undeniable vividness and force. A man in love at twenty feels more alive than he ever will again—finding himself once more in possession of this buried treasure, Joe saw more clearly than ever that for the past dozen years or so, he had been, more or less, a dead man. His daily fried egg and pork chop, his collection of false beards and mustaches, the hasty sponge-baths by the sink in the closet, these regular, unquestioned features of his recent existence, now seemed the behaviors of a shadow, the impressions left by a strange novel read under the influence of a high fever.

The return of his feelings for Rosa—of his very youth itself—after so long a disappearance ought to have been a cause for delight, but Joe felt terribly guilty about it. He did not want to be that twinkle-eyed, ascot-wearing, Fiat-driving mainstay of Rosa’s stories, the home-wrecker. In the past few days, he had, it was true, lost all his illusions about Sammy and Rosa’s marriage (which, as we tend to do with missed opportunities, he had, over the years, come to idealize). The solid suburban bond that he had, from a distance, half-ruefully and half-contentedly conjured to himself at night, proved, at close range, to be even more than ordinarily complicated and problematic. But whatever the state of things between them, Sammy and Rosa were married, and had been so for quite a few years. They were unmistakably a couple. They spoke alike, employing a household slang—“pea-bee and jay,” “idiot box”—talking on top of each other, finishing each other’s sentences, amiably cutting each other off. Sometimes they both went at Joe at the same time, telling parallel, complementary versions of the same story, and Joe would become lost in the somewhat tedious marital intricacy of their conversation. Sammy made tea for Rosa and brought it to her in her studio. She ironed his shirt with grim precision every night before she retired. And they had evolved a remarkable system of producing comic books as a couple (though they rarely collaborated outright on a story as Clay & Clay). Sammy brought forth items from the inexhaustible stock of cheap, reliable, and efficient ideas that God had supplied him with at birth, and then Rosa talked him through a plot,
supplying him with a constant stream of refinements that neither of them seemed to realize were coming from her. And Sammy went over the pages of her own stories with her, panel by panel, criticizing her drawing when it got too elaborate, coaxing her into maintaining the simple strong line, stylized, impatient with detail, that was her forte. Rosa and Sam were not together much—except in bed, a place that remained a source of great mystery and interest to Joe—but when they were, they seemed to be very
involved
with each other.

So it was unthinkable that he should interpose himself and make the claim his reawakened love urged upon him; but he could think of nothing else, and thus he went around the house in a constant state of inflamed embarrassment. In the hospital in Cuba, he had conceived a grateful ardor for one of the nurses, a pretty ex-socialite from Houston known as Alexis from Texas, and had spent an excruciating month in the arid heat of Guantánamo Bay trying to keep himself from getting an erection every time she came around to sponge him down. It was like that with Rosa now. He spent all of his time squelching his thoughts, tamping down his feelings. There was an ache in the hinge of his jaw.

Furthermore, he sensed that she was avoiding him, shunning beforehand the unwelcome advances he could not bring himself to make, which caused him to feel like even more of a heel. After their initial conversation in the kitchen, he and Rosa seemed to find it hard to get a second one started. For a while, he was so preoccupied by his clumsy attempts at small talk that he failed to remark her own reticence whenever they were alone. When he finally did notice it, he attributed her silence to animosity. For days, he stood in the cold shower of her imagined anger, which he felt he entirely deserved. Not only for having left her pregnant and in the lurch, so that he might go off in a failed pursuit of an impossible revenge; but for having never returned, never telephoned or dropped a line, never once thought of her—so he imagined that she imagined—in all those years away. The expanding gas of silence between them only excited his shame and lust the more. In the absence of verbal intercourse, he became hyperaware of other signs of her—the jumble of her makeups and creams and lotions in the bathroom, the Spanish moss of her lingerie dangling from the shower-curtain rod, the irritable tinkle of her spoon against her teacup from the
garage, messages from the kitchen written in oregano, bacon, onions cooked in fat.

At last, when he could stand it no longer, he decided he had to say
something
, but the only thing he could think of to say was
Please forgive me
. He would make a formal apology, as long and abject as need be, and throw himself on her mercy. He mulled and planned and rehearsed his words, and when he happened to be passing her in the narrow hallway, Joe just blurted it out.

“Look,” he said, “I’m sorry.”

“What did you do?”

“I’m sorry for everything, I mean.”

“Oh. That,” she said. “All right.”

“I know you must be angry.”

She crossed her arms over her chest and stared at him, brow wide and smooth, lips compressed into a doubtful pout. He could not read the expression in her eyes—it kept changing. Finally, she looked down at her freckled arms, rosy and flushed.

“I have no right to be.”

“I hurt your feelings. I abandoned you. I left Sammy to do my job.”

“I don’t hold that against you,” she said. “Not at all. And neither does he, I don’t think, not really. We both understand why you left. We understood then.”

“Thank you,” Joe said. “Maybe you can explain it to me sometimes.”

“It was when you didn’t come home, Joe. It was when you jumped overboard, or whatever it was you did.”

“I’m sorry for that, too.”

“That was something that was very hard for me to understand.”

He reached for her hand, taken aback by his own daring. She let him hold it for nine seconds, then reclaimed it. Her eyes crossed a little with reproach.

“I didn’t know how to come back to you,” he said. “I was trying for years, believe me.”

He was surprised suddenly to find her mouth on his. He put his hand on her heavy breast. They fell sideways against the paneled wall, dislodging a photograph of Ethel Klayman from its nail. Joe began to dig around inside the zipper fly of her jeans. The metal teeth bit into his
wrist. He was sure that she was going to pull down her jeans and he was going to climb on top of her, right there in the hallway before Tommy came home from school. He had been wrong all along; it was not anger that she had interposed between them but the pane of an inexpressible longing like his own. Then the next thing he knew, they were standing up again in the middle of the hall, and the various sirens and air-raid beacons that had been going wild all around them seemed to have fallen silent abruptly. She replaced the various things he had left in disarray, zipped her trousers, smoothed her hair. The color on her lips had smeared all over her cheeks.

“Hum,” she said. And then, “Maybe not yet.”

“I understand,” he said. “Please let me know.” He meant it to sound patient and cooperative, but somehow it came out as abject. Rosa started to laugh. She put her arms around him, and he rubbed the smeared lipstick into her cheeks until it was gone.

“How
did
you do it, anyway?” she said. The tips of her teeth were stained with tea. “Get off the boat in the middle of the ocean, I mean.”

“I was never on it,” Joe said. “I went out on a plane the night before.”

“There were orders. I don’t know, medical certificates. Sammy showed me the photostats.”

He put on a mysterious Cavalieri smile.

“Always true to the code,” she said.

“It was very cleverly done.”

“I’m sure it was, dear. You were always a clever boy.”

He pressed his lips to the parting of her hair. It had an intriguing match-head smell of the Lapsang she preferred.

“What are we going to do?” he said.

She didn’t answer at first. She let go and stepped away from him, head tilted to one side, arching a brow; a taunting look that he remembered very well from their previous time together.

“I have an idea,” she said. “Why don’t you try to figure out where we’re going to put all your goddamned comic books?”

N
INETY-FIVE, NINETY-SEX, NINETY-SEVEN
. N
INETY-SEVEN
.”

“A hundred and two.”

“I count ninety-seven.”

“You miscounted.”

“We’re going to need a truck.”

“This is what I have been telling you.”

“A truck and then a whole fucking warehouse.”

“I’ve always wanted a warehouse,” Joe said. “That’s always been the dream of mine.”

Though Joe preferred to remain vague on the subject of just how many comic books, crammed into pine crates of his own manufacture—complete runs of
Action
and
Detective, Blackhawk
and
Captain America
, of
Crime Does Not Pay
and
Justice Traps the Guilty
, of
Classics Illustrated
and
Picture Stories from the Bible
, of
Whiz
and
Wow
and
Zip
and
Zoot
and
Smash
and
Crash
and Pep and
Punch
, of
Amazing
and
Thrilling
and
Terrific
and
Popular
—he actually owned, there was nothing at all vague about the letter he had received from lawyers representing Realty Associates Securities Corporation, the owners of the Empire State Building. Kornblum Vanishing Creams, Inc., had been evicted for violating the terms of its lease, which meant that the ninety-seven or one hundred and two wooden crates, filled with comic books, that Joe had amassed—along with all of his other belongings—must either be transported or disposed of.

“So toss ’em,” Sammy said. “What’s the big deal?”

Joe sighed. Although all the world—even Sammy Clay, who had spent most of his adult life making and selling them—viewed them as
trash, Joe loved his comic books: for their inferior color separation, their poorly trimmed paper stock, their ads for air rifles and dance courses and acne creams, for the basement smell that clung to the older ones, the ones that had been in storage during Joe’s travels. Most of all, he loved them for the pictures and stories they contained, the inspirations and lucubrations of five hundred aging boys dreaming as hard as they could for fifteen years, transfiguring their insecurities and delusions, their wishes and their doubts, their public educations and their sexual perversions, into something that only the most purblind of societies would have denied the status of art. Comic books had sustained his sanity during his time on the psychiatric ward at Gitmo. For the whole of the fall and winter following his return to the mainland, which Joe spent shivering in a rented cabin on the beach at Chincoteague, Virginia, with the wind whistling in through the chinks in the clapboard, half-poisoned by the burned-hair smell of an old electric heater, it was only ten thousand Old Gold cigarettes and a pile of
Captain Marvel Adventures
(comprising the incredible twenty-four-month epic struggle between the Captain and a telepathic, world-conquering earthworm, Mr. Mind) that had enabled Joe to fight off, once and for all, the craving for morphine with which he had returned from the Ice.