The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

by Michael Chabon

  Deasey reached out and took hold of his shoulder. “Just a minute, Clay,” he said.

  Sammy turned back. He had never seen the editor look so uncertain before.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Deasey said. “What am I doing?”

  “What are you doing?” said Joe.

  The editor reached into the breast pocket of his tweed jacket and took out a folded sheet of paper. “This was in my in box this morning.”

  “What is it?” Sammy said. “Who’s it from?”

  “Just read it,” Deasey said.

  It was a photostatted copy of a letter from the firm of Phillips, Nizer, Benjamin & Krim.

  DEAR MESSRS. ASHKENAZY AND ANAPOL:

  This letter is being written to you on behalf of National Periodical Publications, Inc. (“National”). National is the exclusive owner of all copyright, trademark, and other intellectual property rights in and to the comic book magazines “Action Comics” and “Superman” and the character of “Superman” featured therein. National has recently learned of your magazine, “Radio Comics,” featuring the fictional character “The Escapist.” This character represents a blatant attempt to copy the protected work of our client, namely the various series that feature the adventures of the fictional character known as “Superman,” which our client has been publishing since June of 1938. As such, your character constitutes a blatant infringement of our client’s copyrights, trademarks, and common-law rights. We hereby demand that you immediately cease and desist from any further publication of your comic book magazine “Radio,” and that all existing copies of these comic books be destroyed with a letter verifying destruction signed by an officer of your corporation.

  If you fail to cease and desist from such publication, or fail to submit such a verification letter within five days of this letter, National Periodical Publications, Inc., shall forthwith pursue all of its legal and equitable remedies, including seeking to enjoin your further publication of “Radio Comics.” This letter is written without waiver of any of our client’s rights and remedies, at law and in equity, all of which are hereby expressly reserved.

  “But he’s nothing like Superman,” Sammy said when he had finished. Deasey gave him a baleful look, and Sammy realized he was missing the point. He tried to work his way through to what the point might be. There was clearly something about this letter that Deasey felt would be helpful to them, though he was unwilling to go so far as to tell them what it was. “But that doesn’t matter, does it?”

  “They’ve already beaten Victor Fox and Centaur on this,” Deasey said. “They’re going after Fawcett, too.”

  “I heard about this thing,” Joe said. “They made Will Eisner go in there, Sammy, and he had to tell them that Victor Fox told him, ‘Make me a Superman.’ ”

  “Yeah, well, that’s what Shelly said to me, too, remember? He said—oh. Oh.”

  “It’s very likely,” Deasey said steadily and slowly, as if speaking to an idiot, “that you will be deposed as a witness. I imagine your testimony could be damaging.”

  Sammy slapped Deasey’s arm with the letter.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, hey, thanks, Mr. Deasey.”

  “What are you going to say?” Joe asked Sammy, as his cousin stared at the door to Anapol’s office.

  Sammy drew himself up and ran a hand across the top of his head.

  “I guess I’m going to go in there and offer to perjure myself,” he said.

  IN 1941, ITS BEST YEAR EVER, the partnership of Kavalier & Clay earned $59,832.27. Total revenues generated that year for Empire Comics, Inc.—from sales of all comic books featuring characters created either in whole or in part by Kavalier & Clay, sales of two hundred thousand copies apiece for each of two Whitman’s Big Little Books featuring the Escapist, sales of Keys of Freedom, of key rings, pocket flashlights, coin banks, board games, rubber figurines, windup toys, and diverse other items of Escapism, as well as the proceeds from the licensing of the Escapist’s dauntless puss to Chaffee Cereals for their Frosted Chaff-Os, and from the Escapist radio program that began broadcasting on NBC in April—though harder to calculate, came to something in the neighborhood of $12 to $15 million. Out of his twenty-nine thousand and change, Sammy gave a quarter to the government, then half of what remained to his mother to spend on herself and his grandmother.

  On the leftovers, he lived like a king. He ate lox at breakfast every morning for seven weeks. He went to baseball games at Ebbets Field and sat in a box. He might spend as much as two dollars on dinner, and once, on a day when his legs were feeling tired, he rode seventeen blocks in a taxi. He had an entire week’s worth of big, visible suits, five gray skyscrapers of pinstripe and worsted, made for himself at twenty-five dollars a pop. And he bought himself a Capehart Panamuse phonograph. It cost $645.00, nearly half as much as a new Cadillac Sixty-one. It was finished in a ridiculously beautiful Hepplewhite style, maple and birch inlaid with ash, and in the cousins’ otherwise modern, rather spartan apartment—soon after taking up with Joe, Rosa had begun to lobby him to move out of the Chelsea Rathole—it stood out disturbingly. It demanded that you play music on it and then maintain the respectful silence of a sinner being sermonized. Sammy loved it as he had never loved anything in his life. The sad flutter of Benny Goodman’s clarinet came so poignantly through its deluxe “panamusical” loudspeakers that it could make Sammy cry. The Panamuse was fully automatic; it could store twenty records and play them, in any order, on both sides. The marvelous operations of the record-changing mechanism, in the manner of the time, were on proud display inside the cabinet, and new guests to the apartment, like visitors to the U.S. Mint, were always given a look at the works. Sammy was smitten for weeks, and yet every time he looked at the phonograph, he was racked with guilt and even horror over the cost. His mother would die without ever having learned of its existence.

  The funny thing was that, after you threw in the large but still piddling sum Sammy spent every month on books, magazines, records, cigarettes, and amusements, and his half of the $110 monthly rent, there was still more money left over than Sammy knew what to do with. It piled up in his bank account, making him nervous.

  “You should get married,” Rosa liked to tell him.

  Her name was not on the lease, but Rosa had become the apartment’s third occupant, and in a very real sense its animating spirit. She had helped them find it (it was a new building on Fifth Avenue, just north of Washington Square), to furnish it, and, when she realized that she would never otherwise be able to share a bathroom with Sammy, to obtain the weekly services of a cleaning woman. At first she would just drop by once or twice a week, after work. She had quit her job at Life for a job retouching, in lurid hues, color pictures of prune-and-noodle casseroles, velvet crumb cakes, and bacon canapés for a publisher of cheap cookbooks that were given away as premiums in five-and-dimes. It was tedious work, and when things got really bad, Rosa liked to indulge minute Surrealist impulses. With an airbrush she would equip a pineapple in the background with a slick black tentacle, or conceal a tiny polar explorer in the frigid peaks of a meringue desert. The publisher’s offices were on East Fifteenth, ten minutes from the apartment. Rosa would often come in at five with a bag full of unlikely roots and leaves and cook strange recipes that her father had acquired a taste for in his travels: tagine, mole, something green and slippery that she called sleek. In general these dishes tasted very good; and their exotic dress served to conceal fairly well, Sammy thought, her fairly retrograde approach to winning Joe’s heart via the kitchen. She herself never took more than a bite of any of it.

  “There’s a girl at work,” Rosa said at breakfast one morning, setting in front of Sammy a plate of eggs scrambled with Portuguese sausage. She was a frequent guest at breakfast, too, if “guest” was the proper term to apply to someone who shopped for the meal, prepared it, served it to you, and cleaned up when you were through. Their across-the-hall neighbors were visibly outraged by this waywardness, and the doorman’s eyes would twinkle
crudely as he held the door for her in the mornings. “Barbara Drazin. She’s a dish. And she’s looking. You should let me introduce you.”

  “College girl?”

  “City.”

  “No thanks.”

  When Sammy looked up from the platter of pastry, which Rosa had as usual arranged with such photogenic artfulness that he was loath to disturb the cheese danish he had his eye on, he caught her giving Joe a look. It was a look he had seen them exchange before, whenever the subject of Sammy’s love life came up, as when Rosa was around it tended rather too often to do.

  “What?” he said.

  “Nothing.”

  She spread her napkin in her lap, pointedly somehow, and Joe went on tinkering with some kind of spring-loaded card-passing contraption that was part of his act; he had another of his magic gigs tomorrow night, a bar mitzvah at the Pierre. Sammy snatched the cheese danish, collapsing Rosa’s giveaway-cookbook pyramid.

  “It’s just,” she continued, never requiring an actual rejoinder to sustain a conversation, “you always have an excuse.”

  “It’s not an excuse,” Sammy said. “It’s a disqualification.”

  “And why are college girls disqualified? I forget.”

  “Because they make me feel dumb.”

  “But you aren’t dumb. You are extremely well read, fairly well spoken, and you make your living by the pen or, in your case, the typewriter.”

  “I know this. It’s not a rational feeling. And I can’t stand stupid women. It’s just, I guess I feel bad that I don’t have a college education myself. And I’m embarrassed when they start asking me about what I do, and I have to tell them I write comic books, and then it’s either ‘Gee, aren’t they awfully, well, trashy,’ or else it’s that patronizing ‘Comic books! I adore comic books!’—which is even worse.”

  “Barbara Drazin would never make you feel bad about what you do,” Rosa said. “Besides, I told her you also wrote three novels.”

  “Oh my God,” Sammy said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Please, Rosa, how many times do I gotta ask you not to tell anybody that anymore, okay?”

  “I’m so sorry. It’s just that I—”

  “For God’s sake, those were pulps, I got paid by the yard. Why do you think they invented the pseudonym?”

  “All right,” said Rosa, “all right. I just think you ought to meet her.”

  “Thanks, but no thanks. I got too much work to do anyway.”

  “He’s writing a novel,” Joe said, peeling a Chiquita. He seemed to take a good deal of pleasure in the exchanges between his girlfriend and his best friend. His only contribution to the decor of the apartment had been the stack of wooden crates in which he kept his burgeoning collection of comic books. “In his spare time,” he added, through a big white mouthful of banana. “A real one.”

  “Yeah, well,” Sammy said, feeling himself blush. “At the rate I’m going, we’ll all be sitting around in the old-age home reading it.”

  “I’ll read it,” Rosa said. “Sammy, I’d love to. I’m sure it’s very good.”

  “It isn’t. But thank you. You mean it?”

  “Of course.”

  “Maybe,” he said, for the first but by no means the final time in their long association, “when I get chapter one into shape.”

  When Sammy arrived at the Empire offices on that textbook April morning—tufted sky, daffodils swinging like a big band on every patch of green, love in the air, et cetera—he took the oft-revised first (and sole) chapter of American Disillusionment out of his bottom desk drawer, rolled a fresh sheet of paper into his typewriter, and tried to work, but the conversation with Rosa had left him uneasy. Why didn’t he want to, at least, say, have a drink with a dish from City College? How did he even know that he didn’t like dating college girls? It was like saying he didn’t care for golf. He had a fairly good idea that it was not the game for him, but the fact was the closest he had ever been to a golf course was the peeling plaster windmills of the old Tom Thumb course at Coney Island. Why, for that matter, wasn’t he jealous of Joe? Rosa was a great-looking girl, soft and powdery-smelling. While it was true that he found her remarkably easy to talk to, tease with, confide in, and let down his guard around, easier than he had ever found any other girl, he felt only the faintest itch for her. At times this absence of prurient feeling, so marked and plain to both of them that Rosa had no compunction about lounging around the apartment with her underpants covered only by the flapping tails of one of Joe’s shirts, troubled Sammy, and he would try, lying in his bed at night, to imagine kissing her, stroking her thick dark curls, lifting those shirttails to reveal the pale belly beneath. But such chimeras invariably faded in the light of day. The real question was, why wasn’t he more jealous of Rosa?

  He was just happy to see his friend happy, he typed. It was an autobiographical novel, after all. There was a hole in the man’s life that no one person ever would have been able to fill.

  The phone rang. It was his mother.

  “I have the night off,” she said. “Why don’t you bring him and we’ll make Shabbes. He can bring that girlfriend of his, too.”

  “She’s kind of picky about food,” Sammy said. “What are you burning?”

  “All right, so don’t come.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “I don’t want you.”

  “I’ll be there. Ma?”

  “What?”

  “Ma?”

  “What?”

  “Ma?”

  “What?”

  “I love you.”

  “Big joker.” She hung up.

  He put American Disillusionment back in the drawer and started to work on the script for Kid Vixen, the crime-fighting female boxer feature, with art by Marty Gold, that he had put in as a backup for All Doll, along with the Glovsky brothers’ Venus McFury, about a hard-boiled girl detective who was the reincarnation of one of the classical Erinyes, and Frank Pantaleone’s Greta Gatling, a cowgirl strip. The first issue of All Doll Comics had sold out its entire run of half a million copies; #6 was in production now, and orders were extremely strong. Sammy had half of an idea for the latest Vixen story, involving a catfight between the Kid and a champion Nazi girl boxer whom he was thinking of calling Battling Brunhilde, but he could not seem to get his mind into it this morning. The funny thing was that, as hard as he had fought with Sheldon Anapol for them to be able to keep plugging away at the Nazis, fighting the funny-book war was getting tougher all the time; though futility was not an emotion Sammy was accustomed to experiencing, he had begun to be plagued by the same sense of inefficacy, of endless make-believe, that had troubled Joe from the first. Only there was nothing Sammy saw to do about it; he wasn’t about to start picking fights at ball games.

  He kept at the script, starting over three times, drinking Bromo-Seltzer through a straw to keep down the pang of dread that had begun to gnaw at his belly. Much as Sammy did love his mother, and craved her approval, five minutes of conversation with her was all it took to induce a matricidal rage in his breast. The large sums of money he gave over to her, though she was gratifyingly astonished by them and always managed, in her curt way, to thank him, proved nothing to her about anything. To get paid vast sums for wasting one’s life, in her view, only added to the cosmic tallying of wastefulness. Most maddening of all to Sammy was the way that, in the face of the sudden influx of money, Ethel steadfastly refused to change any element of her life, except to shop for better cuts of meat, buy a new set of carving knives, and spend a relatively lavish amount on new underwear for Bubbie and herself. The rest she socked away. She viewed each fat paycheck as the last, certain that eventually, as she put it, “the bubble gets popped.” Each month that the comic book bubble not only continued to float but expanded exponentially just confirmed Ethel’s belief that the world was insane and growing madder, so that when the pin finally went in, the pop would be all the more terrible. Yes, it was always loads of fun dropping in on old E
thel, to share in the revelry and good times, to banter and sing and sup on the delicious fruits of her kitchen. Bubbie would have baked one of her bitter, brittle Bubbie babkas that they all had to make a fuss over even though each tasted as if she had baked it in 1877 and then mislaid it in a drawer until yesterday.

  The only bright prospect for the day was that he and Joe had also been invited to come down to the radio studio to meet the cast of The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist, in run-throughs for the debut next Monday afternoon. Hitherto, Burns, Baggot & DeWinter, the advertising agency, had not involved Sammy or Joe or any of the Empire people in the production, though Sammy had heard that several of the first few episodes were being adapted directly from the comic books. Once, Sammy had met the show’s writers by chance, as they were coming out of Sardi’s. They knew him from the unflattering drawing that had run in the Saturday Evening Post, and stopped him to say hello and shed the gentle luster of their scorn upon him. They all seemed to Sammy like college-boy types, with pipes and bow ties. Only one would admit to ever having read a comic book, and probably all of them considered the form beneath contempt. One had written previously for Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons, another for Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch.

  But there was to be a party on Monday after the first broadcast, to which Sammy and Joe were invited; and on this balmy Friday, they went over to Radio City to get a look, if that was the right way to put it, at the vocal embodiments of their characters.

  “Shabbes dinner,” Joe said, as they passed the Time-Life Building. Joe claimed to have once seen Ernest Hemingway coming out of it, and Sammy looked for the writer as they went by.

  “I saw him, I tell you.”

  “Sure you did. Yes, Shabbes dinner. At my mother’s. Bad food. House like an oven. You don’t want to miss that.”

  “I have a date with Rosa,” Joe said. “I think we’re supposed to eat with her father at the house.”