The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

by Michael Chabon

  “You do that almost every night! Come on, Joe, don’t make me go alone. I’ll go mad, mad, I tell you.”

  “Rosa is right,” Joe said.

  “As usual, but this time about what?”

  “You need a girl.”

  It was cool and dark in the lobby of the RCA Building. The soft knocking of shoe heels on stone floors and the somber, reassuring pomposity of the Sert and Brangwyn murals allowed Sammy to experience what he dimly recognized as tranquility for the first time all day. A chubby young fellow was waiting for them at the guard’s desk, nibbling on a manicured finger. He introduced himself as Larry Sneed, assistant to the producer George Chandler, and showed them how to sign in and pin passes to their jackets.

  “Mr. Chandler’s really glad you could make it over,” Sneed said over his shoulder.

  “It was nice of him to invite us.”

  “Well, he’s become quite a fan of your work.”

  “He reads it?”

  “Oh, he studies it like the Bible.”

  They got out of the elevator, went down a stairwell and across a hall into another stairwell, this one gray cinder-block and iron stairs, then into a dingy white corridor, past the closed door of a studio with the ON AIR light illuminated, left, and into another studio. It was cool and smoky and dim. At one end of the big yellow room, three casually dressed groups of actors, holding scripts, were loitering around a trio of microphones. In the middle of the room, two men sat at a small table, listening. Pages of script lay everywhere, scattered on the ground and blown into drifts in the corners. There was a gunshot. Sammy was the only one in the room who jumped. He looked wildly around. Three men stood off to the left in the midst of an assortment of kitchen utensils, lumber, and scrap metal. One of them was holding a gun. They were all sweating profusely in spite of the air-conditioning.

  “Ooh, got me!” cried Larry Sneed. He clutched his silk-fronted potbelly and spun around. “Ha ha ha.” He pretended to laugh. The actor who was delivering his line stopped talking, and everyone turned to look. They seemed to welcome the distraction, Sammy thought, except for the director, who scowled. “Hi, folks, I’m sorry to interrupt you. Mr. Chandler, here’s a couple of bright young fellows like me who want to meet our marvelous cast. Mr. Sam Clay and Mr. Joe Kavalier.”

  “Hello, boys,” said one of the two men at the center table, rising from his chair. He was about the same age as Sammy’s father would have been, but tall and refined, with a trim Vandyke and extra-big black glasses that made him look, Sammy thought, like a man of science. He shook their hands. “This is Mr. Cobb, our director.” Cobb nodded. Like Chandler, he was wearing a suit and tie. “And this ragged bunch is our cast. Forgive their appearance, but they’ve been rehearsing all week.” Chandler pointed to the actors around the microphones, anointing each one from a distance with a momentary dab of his finger as he gave the name and role. “That’s Miss Verna Kaye, our Plum Blossom; Pat Moran, our Big Al; and Howard Fine as the evil Kommandant X. Over there may I present Miss Helen Portola, our Poison Rose; Ewell Conrad as Omar; Eddie Fontaine as Pedro; and our announcer, Mr. Bill Parris.”

  “But Poison Rose is dead,” said Joe.

  “We haven’t killed her on the radio yet,” said Chandler. “And that big, handsome fellow over there is our Escapist, Mr. Tracy Bacon.”

  Sammy was too distracted just then to notice Mr. Tracy Bacon.

  “Pedro?” he said.

  “The old Portuguese stagehand.” Chandler nodded. “For comic relief. The sponsor felt we ought to lighten things up a little.”

  “Nize to mitts your ekwentinz,” said Eddie Fontaine, with a tip of his imaginary Portuguese hat.

  “And old Max Mayflower?” Sammy wanted to know. “And the man from the League of the Golden Key? You aren’t having the League?”

  “We tried it with the League, didn’t we, Larry?”

  “Yes, we did, Mr. Chandler.”

  “When you’re debuting a series, it’s better to get right down to business,” said Cobb. “Skip the preliminaries.”

  “We take care of all that with the intro,” Chandler explained. “Bill?”

  “Armed with superb physical and mental training,” Bill Parris began, “a crack team of assistants, and ancient wisdom, he roams the globe, performing amazing feats—”

  The whole cast chimed in for the tag.

  “And coming to the aid of those who languish in tyranny’s chains!”

  “This—is—the Escapist!”

  Everyone laughed, except Joe, who clapped his hands. But for some reason, Sammy was irritated.

  “And what about Tom Mayflower?” he persisted. “Who’s going to be him?”

  A cheerful, scratchy teenage voice rang out from the corner.

  “I’m going to be Tom, Mr. Clay! And golly, I’m awful darn excited about it!”

  That busted everybody up again. Tracy Bacon was looking right at Sammy, grinning, his cheeks flushed, mostly with pleasure, it seemed, at the astonished look on Sammy’s face. Bacon was such a perfect Escapist that one would have thought he had been cast to play the role in a film, not on the air. He was well over six feet tall, broad-shouldered, with a dimple in his chin and glossy blond hair fitted to the top of his head like a polished brass plate. He wore an oxford shirt unbuttoned over a ribbed undershirt, blue jeans, and socks with no shoes. His muscles were not as large, perhaps, as the Escapist’s, but they were distinctly visible. Clean-favored, thought Sammy, and imperially slim.

  “Please, gentlemen, take a seat,” said Chandler. “Larry, find them a place to sit down.”

  “That guy looks exactly like the Escapist,” said Joe. “It gives me the creep.”

  “I know,” said Sammy. “And he sounds just like Tom Mayflower.”

  They sat in the corner and watched the rehearsal. The script had been adapted—very freely—from Sammy’s third Escapist story, which had introduced the character of Miss Plum Blossom’s evil sister Poison Rose, a straight steal from Caniff’s Dragon Lady whom Sammy, embarrassed by the blatancy of his theft, had killed off in Radio #4. In the Grand Opera House on the Bund in Shangpo, Rose had thrown herself between a bullet meant for Tom Mayflower and the pistol of a Razi agent with whom she had, until that moment, been allied. But the radio boys had revived her, and Sammy had to admit she certainly appeared to be well. Helen Portola was the only cast member not dressed casually, and in her bright green poplin dress she looked cool and refined and appetizing. When she growled her diabolical lines at the Escapist, whom she had rendered powerless with the stolen, legendary Eye of the Moon Opal, she looked at Tracy Bacon with accurate love in her eyes and made it sound like flirtation. Walter Winchell had already linked their names in his column.

  On the whole, Sammy found it a depressing couple of hours. It was his first experience, though by no means his last, with having one of his creations appropriated and made to serve the purposes of another writer, and it upset him to such a degree that he was ashamed. It was all pretty much the same stuff—except for Pedro, of course—and yet somehow it was all totally different. It all seemed to have a lighter, more playful tone than in the comic books, no doubt in part because of the audible brilliance of Tracy Bacon’s smile. The dialogue sounded a lot like the dialogue on Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons. This was logical, but somehow it, too, depressed Sammy. He had written dialogue as bad—although, at Deasey’s suggestion, he had been studying the work of snappy dialogue writers like Irwin Shaw and Ben Hecht—but spoken aloud, it sounded worse. All the characters seemed to be slow on the uptake, vaguely retarded. Sammy shifted uncomfortably in his chair. Joe got lost in the proceedings for a while, but then abruptly seemed to snap out of it. He leaned over.

  “Isn’t this great?” he said. He was whispering now, which meant that he was up to something. He looked at his watch. “Shit, five o’clock. I have to go, gate.”

  “You have to go, ‘gate’?”

  “Yes, ‘gate.’ It’s like ‘man.’ ‘What’s happening, ga
te?’ ‘Don’t be late, gate.’ You never say ‘gate’?”

  “No, that’s something I never say,” Sammy said. “Only Negroes say that, Joe. Ethel’s expecting us around six.”

  “Yes, okay. Six.”

  “That’s in an hour.”

  “Okay.”

  “You’re coming, aren’t you?” said Sammy.

  Mr. Cobb turned around in his chair and scowled at them again. They covered their mouths. Joe nodded his head toward the door. Sammy got up and followed him out into the hall. Joe closed the heavy studio door and leaned his shoulder against it.

  “Joe, you said you’d come.”

  “I was very careful not to say that.”

  “Well, I don’t have the transcript handy, but that was how it sounded.”

  “Sammy, please. Don’t make me. I don’t want to go. I want to go out with my girl. I want to have fun.” He blushed. Having fun was still a difficult thing for Joe to admit he was able to do. “It isn’t my fault that you don’t have anyone—”

  The studio door burst open, throwing Joe back against the wall.

  “Sorry!” said Tracy Bacon. He gingerly pulled back the door to see what had become of Joe. “Holy Eye of the Moon Opal, are you all right?”

  “Yes, thank you,” said Joe, rubbing his forehead.

  “I was in such a damn hurry to get out here I didn’t bother to look where I was going! I was afraid you two might have left before I got a chance to talk to Mr. Clay.”

  “Yes, talk! You talk,” Joe said, patting Bacon on the shoulder. “Unfortunately, I have to go. Mr. Bacon, it was nice meeting you, you are a perfect Escapist I think.”

  “Well, thank you.”

  Joe drew himself up. “So,” he said, pronouncing it in the German fashion. With Bacon interposed very carefully between them, he gave Sammy an awkward little wave and ducked around Bacon to make a dash for the end of the hall. Before reaching the stairwell, he stopped and turned back. He looked at Sammy right in the eyes, his expression grave and remorseful, as though he were on the verge of making a full confession of everything bad that he had ever done. Then he flashed his visitor’s badge, Melvin Purvis–style, and was gone. And that, Sammy knew, was about as close as Joe Kavalier could get to an apology.

  “So,” said Bacon, “what’s he so hot to trot about?”

  “His girl,” said Sammy. “Miss Rosa Luxemburg Saks.”

  “I see.” Bacon had a little bit of a southern accent. “She a foreigner, too?”

  “Yeah, she is,” Sammy said. “She’s from Greenwich Village.”

  “I’ve heard of it.”

  “It’s a pretty backward place.”

  “Is it.”

  “The people are little more than savages.”

  “I hear they eat dogs there.”

  “Rosa can do amazing things with dog.”

  When this burst of somewhat labored bantering flagged, they were embarrassed. Sammy rubbed at the back of his neck. For some reason, he was a little afraid of Tracy Bacon. He decided that Bacon was playing with him, condescending to him. Big, radiant, confident fellows with string-bass voices always made him feel acutely how puny, dark, and Jewish he was, a goofy little curlicue of ink stamped on a sheet of splintery paper.

  “You had something to ask me?” Sammy said coldly.

  “Yes, I wanted—look here.” He punched Sammy on the shoulder. Not painfully, but not gently, either. Not always knowing his own strength was eventually to become, thanks to Tracy Bacon, one of the Escapist’s characteristic traits. “Ordinarily I wouldn’t do something like this, but when I got a look at you and saw you weren’t any older than I am, maybe even younger—how old are you?”

  “Safely in my twenties,” Sammy said.

  “I’m twenty-four,” said Bacon. “Last week.”

  “Happy birthday.”

  “Mr. Clay—”

  “Sammy.”

  “Tracy.”

  Bacon’s grip was firm and dry, and he pumped Sammy’s hand up and down half a dozen times.

  “Sammy, I don’t know if you could tell it or not,” Bacon said, “but I’m having a little problem in there—”

  The door opened again, and the other actors started to file out. Helen Portola sidled up to Bacon, took hold of his arm, and gazed up at him in the ardent manner Walter Winchell had alluded to. She could see that he had something on his mind and turned inquiringly to Sammy. She smiled, but Sammy thought he saw a waver of anxiety in her big green eyes.

  “Trace? We’re all going over to Sardi’s.”

  “Save me a seat, all right, gorgeous?” said Bacon. He gave her shoulder a squeeze. “Turns out Mr. Clay and I have a mutual friend. We’re just doing a little catching up.”

  Sammy was amazed by the ease and naturalness of Bacon’s lie. Helen Portola looked Sammy over very carefully and coldly, as if trying to calculate what possible human could be the link between him and Tracy Bacon. Then she kissed Bacon on the cheek and, not without a show of reluctance, left. Sammy must have looked puzzled.

  “Oh, I’m an awful liar,” Bacon said airily. “Now, come on, let me buy you a drink, and I’ll explain.”

  “Jeez,” said Sammy, “I’d like to, but—”

  Bacon actually took hold of Sammy by the elbow—gently enough—and put his arm around him, steering him down to the end of the hall by a fire door. He lowered his voice to a conspiratorial rasp.

  “Sammy, I’m going to confess something to you.” He paused, as if to give Sammy a moment to feel grateful for being taken into his confidence. Sammy was almost—almost—too taken aback to comply. “I’m in way over my head here. I’m no actor! I studied civil engineering in school. Two months ago I was swabbing out the mess on a cargo freighter. All right, I have an ideal voice for radio.” He composed his features, his fair eyebrows and rather girlish mouth, into a stern, fatherly mien. “That isn’t enough, and I know it. You can’t get by in this business on natural ability alone.” He looked so pleased by the harsh line he had taken with himself that all trace of it vanished at once. “This is my first big part. I want to be very, very good. If you could give me any, you know …”

  “Insights?”

  “Exactly!” He smacked Sammy on the chest with the palm of his right hand. “That’s it! I was hoping we could sit down, see, and I could buy you a drink, and you could just talk to me a little bit about the Escapist. I’m not having any problems with Tom Mayflower.”

  “No, you seem to have him down pretty good.”

  “Well, I am Tom Mayflower, Mr. Clay, and that’s the explanation for that. But the Escapist, jeez, I don’t know. He just … he seems to take everything so damn seriously.”

  “Well, Mr. Bacon, he has serious problems to deal with …” Sammy began, grimacing at his own pretension. He felt he ought to be glad for this chance Bacon was offering him to gain some small influence over the direction of the radio program, but instead he found that he was more afraid of Tracy Bacon than before. Sammy came from a land of intense, uninterruptable, and energetic speakers, and he was used to being harangued, but he had never before felt himself so addressed, with such a direct appeal, made not merely to his ears but to his eyes. No one who looked like Tracy Bacon had ever, to his memory, spoken to him at all. The lithe, knicker-clad golden halfback atop the football trophy, stiff-arming every obstacle in his path, was not a type stamped out in any great profusion by Brownsville, Flatbush, or the Manual Arts High School. Sammy had encountered one or two of these pink-skinned, cardigan-wearing, cultivated lunks with schoolboy haircuts during his brief dips into the world of Rosa Saks, but he had certainly never been addressed by one—or even acknowledged. “The world today has a lot of serious problems.” God, he sounded like a school principal! He ought just to shut up. “I really can’t,” he said. He looked at his watch. It was nearly ten past five. “I’ll be late for a dinner date.”

  “At five on a Friday night?” Bacon switched on his fifty-amp smile. “Sounds swank.”

  “
You can’t even begin to imagine,” said Sammy.

  WHERE IS the actual flat bush?” Bacon said as they came up out of the subway. He stopped and looked across the avenue at the entrance to Prospect Park. “Do they keep it in there?”

  “Actually, they move it around,” said Sammy. They’d had two drinks apiece, but for some reason, Sammy didn’t feel in the least intoxicated. He wondered if fear forestalled the effects of alcohol. He wondered if he were more afraid of Tracy Bacon or of showing up for dinner at Ethel’s late, reeking of gin, and with the world’s largest piece of trayf in tow. In the subway station, he had bought a roll of Sen-Sen and eaten four. “It’s on wheels.” He gave a pull on the sleeve of Bacon’s blue blazer. “Come on, we’re late.”

  “Are we?” Bacon arched an eyebrow. “You hadn’t mentioned it.”

  “You don’t even know me,” said Sammy. “How can you presume to razz me?”

  As he buzzed for 2-B—he had misplaced his key—he realized that he must be very, very drunk. It was the only possible explanation for what he was about to do. He wasn’t sure exactly when the invitation had been extended, or at what point it became clear to Sammy that Bacon had accepted it. In the bar at the St. Regis, under the jovial gaze of Parrish’s King Cole, their conversation had veered so quickly from Bacon’s difficulties with the character of the Escapist that Sammy could not remember now what wisdom, if any, he had been able to offer on that score. Almost at once, it seemed, Bacon had launched, unprompted, into a recitation (one that, while practiced, obviously still held great interest for him) of his upbringing, education, and travels, an extravagant tale—he had lived in Texas, California, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and, most recently, Seattle; his father was a brigadier general, his mother was a titled Englishwoman; he had sailed on a merchant ship; he had broken horses on Oahu; he had attended a boarding school where he played hockey and lacrosse and boxed a little—which, paradoxically, he himself claimed to view as sadly lacking in some fundamental underpinning of sense or purpose. All the while, Sammy’s own upbringing and education and his travels from Pitkin Avenue to Surf Avenue, alerting him to the unmistakable smell of bullshit, had been at war with his native weakness for romance. As he sat and listened, with the ointment flavor of gin in his mouth, at once envious and unable to shake the echo of Bacon’s blithe avowal—“I’m such an awful liar”—there seemed to emerge, in spite of Bacon’s good looks and his actor pals and his cool gin-and-tonic of a girlfriend, and regardless of the truth or falsehood of the claims he was making, an unmistakable portrait that Sammy was surprised to find he recognized: Tracy Bacon was lonely. He lived in a hotel and ate his meals in restaurants. His actor pals took him and his tale at face value not because they were credulous, but because it was less effort to do so. And now, with an unerring instinct, he had sniffed out the loneliness in Sammy. Bacon’s presence at Sammy’s side now, waiting for an answer from 2-B, was testimony to this. It didn’t occur to Sammy that Bacon was just drunk and twenty-one (not twenty-four) and making everything up as he went along.