The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

by Michael Chabon

  Sammy thrust his hand through the doors. “Wait.”

  Bacon waited, looking at Sammy, one eyebrow raised in the challenging manner of an auctioneer about to bring his gavel down. His jacket was a charcoal silk cutaway, with piped lapels, and his broad chest was plated in the largest and whitest dickie Sammy had ever seen. In his formal attire, he seemed to beam down from a greater height than usual, certain as ever that in the end he would be, even a thousand feet up, at one in the morning, and contrary to military regulations, welcome. Even with the incongruous pair of shopping bags, or perhaps because of them, he looked impossibly comfortable in his monkey suit, shoulders pressed against the back wall of the elevator, legs crooked at the knee, the great right foot in its long black Lagonda of a shoe twisting ever so slightly on its toe tip. The elevator sighed again.

  “Well,” Sammy said, “seeing as how your father’s a general …”

  Sammy stepped aside, keeping a hand on the door that was struggling to close. Bacon hesitated a moment longer, as if daring Sammy to change his mind again. Then he pushed himself off the elevator wall and sauntered out. The doors closed. Sammy was in gross violation of the code.

  “Only a brigadier,” Bacon said. “You all right, Clay?”

  “Fine, I’m fine, come in.”

  “That’s the lowest, you know.”

  “What is?”

  “Brigadier. It’s the lowest grade of general they make.”

  “That must chafe.”

  “Eats him away. Wow.” Bacon looked around the cool marble sweep of the observation floor’s lobby, kept dim at night to cut down on reflection and permit better viewing through the great dark windows, and he squinted a little as he peered off into the glints and shadows of the bar on one hand and the long bank of windows on the other. “Wow!”

  “Yeah, wow,” Sammy said, suddenly feeling less exhilarated than awkward, even slightly afraid. What had he done? What was Bacon up to? What was the faintly acrid but not unpleasant smell that seemed to be emanating from the actor’s direction? “So, uh. Welcome.”

  “This is great!” Bacon said. He strode toward the windows that looked out over the Hudson River, toward the black cliffs and neon billboards of New Jersey. There was something faintly lurching, Franken-steinian, in Bacon’s gait, and Sammy followed him closely to make sure nothing got broken. Bacon pressed his face to the window, smashing his straight, slightly pointed nose flat against it with a vehemence that made Sammy’s heart leap. The windows were made of thick tempered glass, but Tracy Bacon possessed that brand of glamorous stupidity—or so it would come to seem to Sammy—which acts as a charm against such technological safeguards. He would wriggle his way out onto a theater balcony that had been closed because it was on the verge of collapse, enter any stairway marked No Admittance, and, as Sammy would later learn, Bacon especially liked, when there was no one looking, to sneak from subway platforms down onto the tracks, penetrating some ways into the tunnels by the pale glow of his platinum cigarette lighter. It had been a terrible mistake letting him up here tonight. “I must say, I couldn’t figure out why anybody in his right mind would want to sign himself up for this kind of work … unpaid … but now … you have all this to yourself, every night?”

  “Three nights a week. Are you drunk?”

  “What kind of question is that?” Bacon said, without elaborating whether he found the question offensive or merely superfluous, or both. “I came up here my first day in New York City,” he continued, his breath fogging up the glass. “It was a lot different in the daylight. Kids running around. All that blue sky and steam out there. Pigeons. Boats. Flags.”

  “I’ve actually never been up here in the daytime. I mean, I’ve seen the sun come up. But I’m always gone long before they let the people in.”

  Bacon stepped back. A ghostly print of his skull lingered a moment on the window before evaporating. Then he slid down along the windows to the southeast corner, where, as at the three other corners of the observation floor, there was a coin-operated telescope. He stooped to peer through it. The shopping bags made a crinkling sound. Bacon seemed to have forgotten he was carrying them.

  “This is really something,” he said, squinting into the eyepiece. “You can see the Statue of Liberty.” Unless you fed it a dime, of course, you could see nothing at all. “How about that, she sleeps in a hair net.” He whirled around, the expression on his face at once innocent and reckless, for all the world like a toddler searching the nursery for something new to break.

  “Mind if I look around?”

  “Well …”

  “This where you sit?”

  Still carrying the bags, trailing a now-unmistakable odor of asparagus, Bacon walked over behind the broad podium that served during the day as a station for the guards who took tickets and gave informal tours of the celebrated panorama. This was where the Interceptor Command had installed the telephone that would, in the event of an aerial attack, connect Sammy immediately to Cortlandt Street. Sammy kept his lunch box here, his spare pencils, cigarettes, and extra log forms.

  “I don’t really sit.… Bacon, maybe you’d better not … no!”

  Bacon had set down one of the bags and lifted the receiver of the emergency phone. “Hello, Fay? It’s Kong. Listen, sweetheart—hey. It’s ringing.”

  Sammy ran around behind the guard station, snatched the phone from his hand, and slammed it back into place.

  “Sorry.”

  “Can I ask you something, Bacon?” said Sammy. “Besides not to touch anything, I mean?” He leaned against Bacon as against a stuck door, getting his shoulder into it, and dislodged him from behind the guard station. “What’s in the bags?”

  Bacon looked down at his left hand, a little surprised, then at the bag he had set beside him. He picked it up and then hefted the bags in Sammy’s direction. Sammy caught a whiff of something buttery and winy and green, shallots maybe.

  “Dinner!” Bacon said.

  They went into the dark café, bristling with the upturned legs of chairs. The polished stone floor whispered against their feet. The chrome bands that ringed the long bar glinted at one end in the light from the lobby. The refrigerators hummed softly to themselves. The muted atmosphere of the bar seemed to dampen, or at least to still, Bacon’s spirits somewhat. He spun two chairs floorward, and then, without a word, began to unpack his shopping bags. One bag, it turned out, contained three lidded silver platters, of the type that hotel waiters in the movies were always wheeling in on linen-draped carts. The other bag held two more of the platters and a small tureen drizzled with pale green soup. After Bacon had arranged the platters and tureen on the table, he took out a somewhat random fistful of forks, knives, and spoons, an ornate, heavy pattern, and a pair of cloth napkins somewhat soiled by juices and liquids that had escaped the various platters. He also took out a bottle of wine, a corkscrew, and two glasses, one of which had broken along the way.

  “We’ll have to share,” he said. “Or I can just drink from the bottle.”

  “What, no baked Alaska?” said Sammy.

  Bacon looked hurt. With a curt gesture, he lifted the lid on one of the platters, revealing a sad little puddle of brown-streaked white sugary ooze. “What do you take me for?”

  “Sorry,” Sammy said. They sat down to eat. There were quails stuffed with oysters, steamed asparagus in sauce hollandaise, a Macedonian salad, and dauphin potatoes. The pale soup was cream of watercress. Sammy could not quite bring himself to dismember one of the little bird bodies, but he picked out the stuffing and found it quite delicious. “What did you do?” said Sammy. “Order room service to go?” Bacon lived well beyond his means, according to him, at the Mayflower Hotel.

  “Not exactly.”

  “It’s good. Could be hotter.”

  “Salt?” Bacon reached into the shopping bag once more, took out a silver salt cellar of a design even more ornate than the flatware, and set it on the table. It was empty. “Oops.” He leaned down again, peered into the ba
g, then lifted it up and tipped it, dipping one corner to the mouth of the salt cellar. A thin stream of lumpy salt poured down from the bag. “There. Good as new. So,” he continued, gesturing to Sammy’s clipboard and spotter’s badge. “You just wanted to do your part, is that it? Help the Escapist in his unending fight against the Iron Chain and their Axis stooges?”

  “A lot of people ask me that,” Sammy said, sprinkling his potatoes with salt. “That’s usually what I say.”

  “But you’ll tell me the truth, won’t you?” Bacon said, his voice mocking, but with just the slightest hint of an earnest plea.

  “Well,” Sammy said, flattered. “I just felt like I … ought to. I—I did something that I—I wasn’t proud of. And when I got back from doing it, there was a small group of these volunteer spotters in the lobby, they were being given a tour, and I just kind of blended in with them. Before I really stopped to think about what I was doing.”

  “A guilty conscience.”

  Sammy nodded, although it was true that his stint as a plane spotter had also roughly coincided with the period when Joe began to spend more and more of his time with Rosa Saks, leaving Sammy alone with hours to kill nearly every night. “And don’t ask me what was the thing I did, because I can’t tell you.”

  “Okay, I won’t,” Bacon said with a shrug. He shoved a forkful of asparagus into his mouth.

  “All right,” said Sammy, “I’ll tell you.”

  Bacon waggled his eyebrows. “Is it something kind of racy?”

  “No.” Sammy laughed. “No, I—I committed perjury. In a legal deposition. I told the lawyers for Superman that Shelly Anapol never asked me to copy their character. When he really just out-and-out had.”

  “My God!” Bacon said, looking perfectly aghast.

  “Pretty bad, huh?”

  “Hanging is too good for you.”

  Sammy saw then that Bacon had been teasing him. But he found that the memory of his uncomfortable and tedious afternoon in a conference room at Phillips, Nizer could still bring a flush of humiliation to his cheeks.

  “Well, it was wrong,” he said. “I had a good reason, but still. I guess I felt like I wanted to make up for it somehow.”

  “If that’s the worst thing you ever did,” Bacon said, shaking his head.

  “So far,” Sammy said. “I think it is.”

  Some unknown memory swam briefly into Bacon’s eyes and saddened them. “Lucky you,” he said.

  “So, uh, where were you?” Sammy said, changing the subject. “Dressed like that. A party?”

  “A little party. Very little.”

  “Where at?”

  “Helen’s. Today’s her birthday.”

  “Helen Portola?”

  “You forgot to say ‘the lovely.’ ”

  “The lovely Helen Portola?”

  Bacon nodded, studying or affecting to study the thigh joint of one of his quail, as if there were a spot of blood that troubled him.

  “Who was there?”

  “I was there. The lovely Helen Portola was there.”

  “Just the two of you?”

  He nodded again. He was so uncharacteristically terse on the subject that Sammy wondered if Bacon and Helen had quarreled. Sammy had little direct experience of actresses but shared in the conventional notion that by and large they possessed the sexual mores of estrous chinchillas. Surely if Helen Portola had invited her leading man to celebrate her birthday à deux in the privacy of her home, it was not because she expected the evening to end with her boyfriend out wandering around midtown with a couple of shopping bags full of tepid gourmet food.

  “So how old is she?” said Sammy.

  “Seventy-two, actually.”

  “Bacon.”

  “The old gal’s remarkably well preserved.”

  “Bacon!”

  “What’s her secret? Liver, folks, and lots of it.”

  “Tracy!”

  Bacon looked up from his food, pretending an innocent surprise.

  “Yes, Clay?”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Sammy gave him a hard look.

  “Well, I didn’t want to waste all this great food. Helen’s cook went to a lot of trouble.”

  “Helen’s cook?”

  “Yes. I think you really ought to write her a little note.”

  “You mean, it was a dinner party?”

  “Originally.”

  “Did you and Helen have a fight?”

  Bacon nodded.

  “A big one?”

  He nodded again, looking genuinely miserable. “But it wasn’t my fault,” he said.

  Sammy was dying to ask what they had fought about, but felt that they didn’t know each other well enough for that. It did not occur to him that under similar circumstances, with anybody else, he would not have hesitated, in his best Brooklyn manner, to inquire. But Bacon enlightened him of his own accord.

  “For some reason,” Bacon continued, “she was under the misapprehension that I intended to propose marriage to her this evening. God knows who told her that.”

  “It was in Ed Sullivan,” said Sammy. He had chanced upon the item in the News with an odd sense of regret; his friendship with Bacon had had so little room in which to flourish—the tiny area that marked the intersection of their separate worlds; and he sensed that it could not survive once Bacon had married his leading lady and gone off to Hollywood to be a star. “Yesterday morning.”

  “Oh, yeah.” He gave his big handsome head a rueful shake.

  “You saw it?”

  “No, but I remember running into Ed Sullivan at Lindy’s a couple of nights ago.”

  “Did you tell him you were going to ask Helen to marry you?”

  “Could have.”

  “But you aren’t.”

  “Didn’t.”

  “And she got upset.”

  “Ran into her bedroom and slammed the door. Hit me first, actually.”

  “Good for her.”

  “Sucker punched me.”

  “Ouch.” There was something exciting about this narrative to Sammy, or rather about the scene as he reconstructed it in his imagination. He felt that old stirring of desire he had often experienced, growing up to have … not Tracy Bacon, but rather his life, his build, his beautiful and temperamental girlfriend and the power to break her heart. When in fact what he had was a pair of binoculars, a clipboard, and the most solitary perch in the city three nights a week. “So then you took her food.”

  “Well, it was just sitting there.”

  “And brought it up here.”

  “Well, you were just sitting here.”

  The lull that this observation introduced into their talk was filled all of a sudden by a dark purple stirring in the sky all around them, a long, low summery sound, at once menacing and familiar. There was an answering murmur of bells from the stacked glasses on the bar.

  “Jeez,” Bacon said, getting up from the table. “Thunder.”

  He went over to the windows and looked out. Sammy rose and followed him.

  “This way,” he said, taking Bacon by the arm. “It’s blowing in from the southeast.”

  They stood side by side, shoulders pressed together, watching the slow black zeppelin as it steamed in over New York, trailing long white guy wires of lightning. Thunder harried the building like a hound, brushing its crackling coat against the spandrels and mullions, snuffling at the windowpanes.

  “It seems to like us.” A feather of laughter fluttered in Bacon’s voice. Sammy saw that he was afraid.

  “Yeah,” Sammy said. “We’re its favorite.” He lit a cigarette, and at the spark of his lighter, Bacon jumped. “Relax. They’ve been coming all month. They come all through the summer.”

  “Huh,” Bacon said. He took a swallow from the bottle of Burgundy, then licked his lips. “And I am relaxed.”

  “Sorry.”

  “That stuff doesn’t ever, you know, hit the building.”

>   “Five times so far this year, I think it is.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “Relax.”

  “Shut up.”

  “They’ve recorded strokes that were more than twenty-two thousand amperes.”

  “Hitting this building.”

  “Ten million volts, or something like that.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Don’t worry,” Sammy said, “the whole building acts like one gigantic—Oh.” Bacon’s breath was sour with wine, but one sweet drop of the stuff lingered on his lips as he pressed his mouth against Sammy’s. The stubble on their chins scraped with a soft electric rasp. Sammy was so taken by surprise that by the time his brain with its considerable store of Judeo-Christian prohibitions and attitudes could begin sending its harsh and condemnatory messages to the various relevant parts of his body, it was too late. He was already kissing Tracy Bacon back. They angled their bodies half toward each other. The bottle of wine clinked against the window glass. Sammy felt a tiny halo, a gemstone of heat burning his fingers. He let the cigarette drop to the floor. Then the sky just beyond the windows was veined with fire, and they heard a sizzle that sounded almost wet, like a droplet on a hot griddle, and then a thunderclap trapped them in the deep black caverns of its palms.

  “Lightning rod,” said Sammy, pulling away. As if in spite of all he had been told one evening last week by the bland and reassuring Dr. Karl B. MacEachron of General Electric, who had been studying the electrical atmospheric phenomena associated with the Empire State Building, from Saint Elmo’s fire to reverse lightning that struck the sky, he was suddenly afraid. He took a step back from Tracy Bacon, stooped to retrieve his smoldering cigarette, and sought refuge by unconsciously adopting the dry manner of Dr. MacEachron himself. “The steel structure of the building attracts but then totally dissipates the discharge.…”

  “I’m sorry,” Bacon said.

  “That’s all right.”

  “I didn’t mean to—wow, look at that.”