The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

by Michael Chabon

  As with all great salesmen, Anapol’s past comprehended tragedy and disappointment. He was an orphan of pogrom and typhus, raised by unfeeling relations. His physical bulk, inherited from generations of slab-jawed, lumbering Anapols, had for much of his early life rendered him the butt of jokes and the object of women’s scorn. As a young man, he had played the violin well enough to hope for a musical career, until a hasty marriage and the subsequent upkeep on his two dreadnought daughters, Belle and Candace, forced him into a life of commercial traveling. All of this left him hardened, battered, rumpled, and addicted to the making of money, but not, somehow, embittered. He had always been welcome, during his days on the road, in the lonely shops of the dealers in jokes and novelties, men who were often in their third or fourth line of work and almost universally broken, after years of guessing and disaster, of the ability to know what was amusing and what was not. The unambiguously comical sight of Anapol, with his vast, unbuttoned suits and mismatched socks, his sad violinist’s eyes, modeling a blond horsehair wig or demonstrating a dentifrice that turned the teeth of victims black, had been the keystone of many a big sale in Wilkes-Barre or Pittsfield.

  In the last decade, however, he had traveled no farther than Riverdale; and over the past year, following an intensification in his perennial “difficulties” with his wife, Anapol had rarely even left the Kramler Building. He had a bed and nightstand brought in from Macy’s, and he slept in his office, behind an old crewelwork coverlet draped over a length of clothesline. Sammy had received his first raise the previous fall when he found an empty pushboy’s clothes rack idling on Seventh Avenue one night and rolled it across town to serve as Anapol’s clothes closet. Anapol, who had read widely in the literature of sales and was in fact eternally at work on a treatise-cum-autobiography he referred to sometimes as The Science of Opportunity and other times, more ruefully, as Sorrow in My Sample Case, not only preached initiative but rewarded it, an ethos on which Sammy now pinned all his hopes.

  “So talk,” said Anapol. He was wearing, as usual at this early hour, only socks, garters, and a pair of brightly patterned boxer shorts wide enough to qualify, Sammy thought, as a mural. He was bent over a tiny sink at the back of his office, shaving his face. He had been up, as every morning, since before dawn, settling on a move in one of the chess games he played by mail with men in Cincinnati, Fresno, and Zagreb; writing to other solitary lovers of Szymanowski whom he had organized into an international appreciation society; penning ill-concealed threats to particularly recalcitrant debtors in his creaky, vivid, half-grammatical prose in which there were hints of Jehovah and George Raft; and composing his daily letter to Maura Zell, his mistress, who was a chorine in the road company of Pearls of Broadway. He always waited until eight o’clock to begin his toilet, and seemed to set great store in the effect his half-naked imperial person had on his employees as they filed in for work. “What’s this idea of yours?”

  “Let me ask you this first, Mr. Anapol,” Sammy said. He was standing, clutching his portfolio, on the threadbare oval of Chinese carpet that covered most of the wooden floor of Anapol’s office, a large room set off from the desks of Mavis Magid, Anapol’s secretary, and the five shipping, inventory, and account clerks by partitions of veneered presswood and glass. A hat rack, side chairs, and rolltop desk were all secondhand, scavenged in 1933 from the offices of a neighboring life-insurance company that went belly-up, and trucked on dollies down the hall to their present location. “What are they charging you over at National for the back cover of Action Comics this month?”

  “No, let me ask you a question,” Anapol said. He stepped back from the mirror and tried, as he did every morning, to induce a few long strands of hair to lie flat across the bald top of his head. He had said nothing so far about Sammy’s portfolio, which Sammy had never before had the courage to show him. “Who is that kid sitting out there?”

  Anapol did not turn around, and he hadn’t taken his eyes from the tiny shaving mirror since Sammy had come into the room, but he could see Joe in the mirror. Joe and Sammy were sitting back to back, separated by the glass and wood partition that divided Anapol’s office from the rest of his empire. Sammy craned around to get a look at his cousin. There was a pine drawing board on Joe’s lap, a sketchpad, and some pencils. On the chair beside him lay a cheap pasteboard portfolio they had bought in a five-and-dime on Broadway. The idea was for Joe to fill it quickly with exciting sketches of muscular heroes while Sammy pitched his idea to Anapol and played for time. “You’ll have to work fast,” he had told Joe, and Joe had assured him that in ten minutes he would have assembled an entire pantheon of crime-fighters in tights. But then on the way in, as Sammy was talking up Mavis Magid, Joe had wasted precious minutes rummaging through the shipment of Amazing Midget Radios whose arrival yesterday morning from Japan had sent Anapol into a rage; the whole shipment was defective and, even by his relaxed standards, unsaleable.

  “That’s my cousin Joe,” said Sammy, sneaking another glance over his shoulder. Joe was bent over his work, staring at his fingers and craning his head slowly from left to right, as if some invisible force beam from his eyes were dragging the tip of the pencil across the page. He was sketching in the bulge of a mighty shoulder that was connected to a thick left arm. Other than this arm and a number of faint, cryptic guidelines, there was nothing on the page. “My mother’s nephew.”

  “He’s a foreigner? Where’s he from?”

  “Prague. How did you know?”

  “The haircut.”

  Anapol stepped over to the pushboy’s rack and took a pair of trousers from their hanger.

  “He just got here last night,” Sammy said.

  “And he’s looking for a job.”

  “Well, naturally—”

  “I hope, Sammy, that you told him I have no jobs for anybody.”

  “Actually … I may have misled him a little on that score, boss.”

  Again Anapol nodded, as another of his unerring snap judgments was confirmed. Sammy’s left leg started to twitch. It was the worst-lamed of the two and the first to weaken when he was nervous or about to be caught in a lie.

  “And all this has something to do,” Anapol said, “with how much they charge me over at National for the back cover of Action Comics.”

  “Or Detective.”

  Anapol frowned. He lifted his arms and then disappeared into a huge linen undershirt that did not exactly look freshly laundered. Sammy checked Joe’s work. A massive frame had begun to emerge, a squarish head, a thick, almost tubular chest. While confidently rendered, the figure had something bulky about it. The legs were mighty and booted, but the boots were stout workman’s boots, laced prosaically up the front. Sammy’s leg began to shake a little harder now. Anapol’s head reemerged from his undershirt. He tucked it over his furred walrus belly and down into his trousers. He was still frowning. He lifted his suspenders up over his shoulders and let them snap into place. Then, his eyes fixed on the back of Joe’s head, he went over to his desk and flicked a switch.

  “I need Murray,” he said into the speaker. “It’s a slow week,” he added to Sammy. “That’s the only reason I’m indulging you this way.”

  “I understand,” said Sammy.

  “Sit down.”

  Sammy sat and rested the portfolio against his legs, relieved to set it down. It was stuffed almost to bursting with his own sketches, concepts, prototypes, and finished pages.

  Mavis Magid got Murray Edelman on the phone. The advertising manager for Empire Novelty told him, as Sammy had known he would because he voluntarily worked extra hours in Edelman’s department every week, absorbing what he could of the old man’s skewed and exclamatory slant on the advertising game, that National was charging almost seven times the going rate for the space on the back cover of its bestselling titles—the August issue of Action, the last for which there were figures, had sold close to a million and a half copies. There was, according to Murray, one reason and one reason alone for the skyr
ocketing sales of certain titles in the still relatively inchoate comic book market.

  “Superman,” said Anapol when he hung up the phone, with the tone of someone ordering an unknown dish in an outlandish restaurant. He started to pace behind his desk, hands clasped behind his back.

  “Think of how much product we could sell if we had our own Superman,” Sammy heard himself saying. “We can call them Joy Buzzer Comics. Whoopie Cushion Comics. Think of how much you’ll save on advertising. Think—”

  “Enough,” said Anapol. He stopped pacing and flicked the switch on his telephone console again. The cast of his face had altered, taking on a taut, faintly squeamish expression Sammy could recognize, after a year in his employ, as the repressed foreconsciousness of money. His voice was a hoarse whisper. “I need Jack,” he said.

  Mavis placed a call upstairs to the offices of Racy Publications, Inc., home of Racy Police Stories, Racy Western, and Racy Romance. Jack Ashkenazy was summoned to the phone. He confirmed what Murray Edelman had already said. Every pulp and magazine publisher in New York had taken notice of the explosive sales of National’s Action Comics and its caped and booted star.

  “Yeah?” Anapol said. “Yeah? You are? Any luck?”

  He took the receiver from his ear and stuffed it under his left armpit.

  “They’ve been looking around for a Superman of their own upstairs,” he told Sammy.

  Sammy jumped out of his chair.

  “We can get him one, boss,” he said. “We can have him his very own Superman by Monday morning. But just between you and me,” he added, trying to sound like his great hero, John Garfield, tough and suave at the same time, the street boy ready to wear fancy suits and go where the big money was, “I’d advise you to keep a little piece of this for yourself.”

  Anapol laughed. “Oh, you would, would you?” he said. He shook his head. “I’ll bear that in mind.” He kept the receiver tucked under his arm and took a cigarette from the box on his desk. He lit it and inhaled, mulling things over, his big jaw tensed and bulging. Then he rescued the receiver and blew smoke into the mouthpiece.

  “Maybe you’d better come down here, Jack,” he said. He hung up again and nodded in Joe Kavalier’s direction. “Is that your artist?”

  “We both are,” said Sammy. “Artists, I mean.” He decided to match Anapol’s dubiety with a burst of self-confidence he was rapidly inducing himself to feel. He went over to the partition and rapped, with a flourish, on the glass. Joe turned, startled, from his work. Sammy, not wanting to endanger his own display of confidence, didn’t let himself look too closely at what Joe had done. At least the whole page seemed to have been filled in.

  “May I—?” he said to Anapol, gesturing toward the door.

  “Might as well get him in here.”

  Sammy signaled for Joe to come in, a ringmaster welcoming a famous aerialist into the spotlight. Joe stood up, gathering the portfolio and his stray pencils, then sidled into Anapol’s office, sketchpad clutched to his chest, in his baggy tweed suit, with his hungry face and borrowed tie, his expression at once guarded and touchingly eager to please. He was looking at the owner of Empire Novelty as if all the big money Sammy had promised had been packed into the swollen carapace of Sheldon Anapol and would, at the slightest prick or tap, come pouring out in an uncontrollable green torrent.

  “Hello, young man,” said Anapol. “I’m told you can draw.”

  “Yes, sir!” Joe said, in a voice that sounded oddly strangled, startling them all.

  “Give it here.” Sammy reached for the pad and found, to his surprise, that he couldn’t pry it loose. For an instant, he was afraid that his cousin had done something so abominable that he was afraid to show it. Then he caught a glimpse of the upper left corner of Joe’s drawing, where a fat moon peered from behind a crooked tower, a crooked bat flapping across its face, and he saw that, on the contrary, his cousin simply couldn’t let go.

  “Joe,” he said softly.

  “I need a little more time with it,” Joe said, handing the pad to Sammy.

  Anapol came around from behind his desk, lodged the burning cigarette in a corner of his mouth, and took the pad from Sammy. “Look at that!” he said.

  In the drawing it was midnight, in a cobblestone alley crosshatched with menacing shadows. There were evocative suggestions of tiled roofs, leaded windows, icy puddles on the ground. Out of the shadows and into the light of the bat-scarred moon strode a tall, brawny man. His frame was as sturdy and thick as his hobnailed boots. For costume he wore a tunic with deep creases, a heavy belt, and a big, shapeless stocking hat like something out of Rembrandt. The man’s features, though regular and handsome, looked frozen, and his intrepid gaze was empty. There were four Hebrew characters etched into his forehead.

  “Is that the Golem?” said Anapol. “My new Superman is the Golem?”

  “I didn’t—the conceit is new for me,” Joe said, his English stiffening up on him. “I just drawed the first thing I could think of that resembled … To me, this Superman is … maybe … only an American Golem.” He looked for support to Sammy. “Is that right?”

  “Huh?” said Sammy, struggling to conceal his dismay. “Yeah, sure, but, Joe … the Golem is … well … Jewish.”

  Anapol rubbed his heavy chin, looking at the drawing. He pointed to the portfolio. “Let me see what else you got in there.”

  “He had to leave all his work back in Prague,” Sammy put in quickly, as Joe untied the ribbon of the portfolio. “He just started throwing together some new stuff this morning.”

  “Well, he isn’t fast,” Anapol said when he saw that Joe’s portfolio was empty. “He has talent, anyone can see that, but …” The look of doubtfulness returned to his face.

  “Joe,” cried Sammy. “Tell him where you studied!”

  “The Academy of Fine Art, in Prague,” said Joe.

  Anapol stopped rubbing his chin. “The Academy of Fine Art?”

  “What is that? Who are these guys? What’s going on in here?” Jack Ashkenazy burst into the office without warning or a knock. He had all his hair, and was a much snappier dresser than his brother-in-law, favoring checked vests and two-tone shoes. Because he had prospered, in a Kramler Building kind of way, more easily than Anapol, he had not been forced to develop the older man’s rumpled salesman’s charm, but he shared Anapol’s avidity for unburdening America’s youth of the oppressive national mantle of tedium, ten cents at a time. He plucked the cigar from his mouth and yanked the sketchpad out of Anapol’s hands.

  “Beauteeful,” he said. “The head is too big.”

  “The head is too big?” said Anapol. “That’s all you can say?”

  “The body’s too heavy. Looks like he’s made out of stone.”

  “He is made out of stone, you idiot, he’s a golem.”

  “Clay, actually,” said Joe. He coughed. “I can do something more lighter.”

  “He can do anything you want,” said Sammy.

  “Anything,” Joe agreed. His eyes widened as an inspiration seemed to strike, and he turned to Sammy. “Maybe I ought to show them my fart.”

  “He’s only ever read one comic book,” Sammy said, ignoring this suggestion. “But I’ve read them all, boss. I’ve read every issue of Action. I’ve studied this stuff. I know how it’s done. Look.” He picked up his own portfolio and untied the strings. It was a cheap pasteboard number from Woolworth’s, like Joe’s, but battered, scraped, and carefully dented. You couldn’t sit around in some art director’s waiting room with a brand-new-looking portfolio. Everyone would know you were a tyro. Sammy had spent an entire afternoon last fall hitting his with a hammer, walking across it in a pair of his mother’s heels, spilling coffee on it. Unfortunately, since purchasing it he had managed to land only two cartoons, one in a completely humor-free magazine called Laff and the other in Belle-Views, house organ of the psychiatric ward where his mother worked.

  “I can do it all,” he boasted, pulling out a fistful of sample pages a
nd passing them around. What he meant, more precisely, was that he could steal it all.

  “It isn’t half bad,” Anapol said.

  “It ain’t beauteeful, either,” said Ashkenazy.

  Sammy glared at Ashkenazy, not because Ashkenazy had insulted his work—no one was ever more aware of his own artistic limitations than Sam Clay—but because Sammy felt that he was standing on the border of something wonderful, a land where wild cataracts of money and the racing river of his own imagination would, at last, lift his makeshift little raft and carry it out to the boundless freedom of the open sea. Jack Ashkenazy, whose watery eyes could easily, Sammy imagined, be stabbed out with the letter opener on Anapol’s desk, was threatening to get in his way. Anapol caught the look of visionary murder in Sammy’s eyes and took a chance on it.

  “What say we let these boys go home over the weekend and try to come up with a Superman for us.” He fixed Sammy with a hard look. “Our own kind of a Superman, naturally.”

  “Of course.”

  “How long is a Superman story?”

  “Probably twelve pages.”

  “I want a character and a twelve-page story by Monday.”

  “We’re going to need a lot more than that,” said Ashkenazy. “They got typically five or six characters in there. You know, a spy. A private eye. A shadowy avenger of the helpless. An evil Chinaman. These two can’t come up with all that themselves and draw it. I got artists, Shelly. I got George Deasey.”

  “No!” said Sammy. George Deasey was the editor in chief of Racy Publications. He was a tyrannical, ill-tempered old newspaperman who filled the Kramler Building’s elevators with the exacerbated smell of rye. “It’s mine. Ours, me and Joe. Boss, I can handle it.”