The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

by Michael Chabon

  The following day Rosa came straight to the Empire offices from the T.R.A. and burst into tears in Joe’s arms. She told Joe that Mr. Hoffman had, almost as an afterthought, placed a call that afternoon to the Washington offices of the President’s Advisory Committee on Political Refugees, just to make certain that everything was in order. To his astonishment, he had been told by the chairman of the committee that it looked as though all of the children’s visas were going to be revoked for reasons of “state security.” The head of the State Department’s visa section, Breckinridge Long, a man with, as the chairman carefully put it, “certain antipathies,” had long since established a clear policy of refusing visas to Jewish refugees. Hoffman knew that perfectly well. But in this instance, he argued, the visas had already been issued, the ship was about to depart, and the “security risks” were three hundred and nineteen children! The chairman sympathized. He apologized. He expressed profound regret and embarrassment at this unfortunate turn of events. Then he hung up.

  “I see” was Joe’s only response when Rosa, perched on his high stool, had finished her tale. With one hand he stroked mechanically at the back of her head. With the other he spun the striker of his cigarette lighter, sparking it over and over again. Rosa was ashamed and confused. She felt that she ought to be comforting Joe, but here she was, in the middle of the Empire workroom, with a bunch of guys staring at her over their drawing boards, bawling into his shirtfront, while he stood patting her hair and saying, “There, there.” His shoulders were tensed, his breathing shallow. She could feel the anger building inside him. Each time the lighter sparked, she flinched.

  “Oh, honey,” she said. “I wish there was something we could do. Someone we could turn to.”

  “Huh,” Joe said, and then “Look here.” He took hold of her shoulders and spun her around on the stool. On a low table next to his drawing board lay a stack of lettered but uninked comic book pages on big sheets of Bristol board. Joe shuffled through the stack of pages, passing them to her one by one. They presented a story that was narrated by the custodian at the Statue of Liberation, a tall, stooped man with a mop and a billed cap, drawn to look a lot like George Deasey. Apparently, the unfortunate fellow had a bone to pick with “that long-underwear bunch.” He then went on to describe how, just that morning, he had watched in horror as Professor Percival “Smarty” Pantz, hapless know-it-all rival of Dr. E. Pluribus Hewnham, the Scientific American, performed an “electro-brain implantation procedure” on the Lady. The idea was to enlist the statue in the effort to keep the skies of Empire City clear of enemy planes and airships. “She’ll be able to swat Messerschmitts like mosquitoes!” Pantz crowed. Instead, thanks to the usual miscalculation on the part of Dr. Pantz, she had, upon awakening, gone off striding across the bay toward Empire City, her spike-crowned electro-head filled with homicidal urges. Of course the Scientific American, employing a handy giant robot of his own manufacture that he quickly fitted out with an enormous Clark Gable mask, was able to lure her back to her pillar, and then neutralize her using “superdynamic electromagnets.” But it all made, to the exasperation of the janitor-narrator, an awful mess. Not only the island but the entire seaport lay in shambles. His brother janitors and sanitation workers were already overburdened cleaning up after the donnybrooks in which the super-beings regularly indulged. How would they ever manage to clean up this latest?

  At that moment, an airplane landed on Liberation Island, and a familiar figure in a broad-brimmed hat and belted topcoat climbed out, looking as if she meant business.

  “That looks like Eleanor Roosevelt,” said Rosa, pointing to the panel in which Joe had drawn a quite flattering version of the First Lady, waving from the top step of the plane’s gangplank.

  “She picks up a broom,” Joe said. “And starts sweeping. Soon all the women in the town come out with their brooms. To help.”

  “Eleanor Roosevelt,” Rosa said.

  “I’m going to call her,” Joe said, going to a telephone on a nearby desk.

  “Okay.”

  “I wonder if she’ll speak to me?” He picked up the receiver. “I should think she will. I get that picture from the things I read of her.”

  “No, Joe, I really don’t think she will,” Rosa said. “I’m sorry. I don’t know how it was in Czechoslovakia, but here you can’t just call up the president’s wife and ask her for a favor.”

  “Oh,” Joe said. He set the receiver back down and stared at his hand, his head bowed.

  “But, oh, my God.” She climbed down from the stool. “Joe!”

  “What?”

  “My father. He knows her slightly. They met doing something for the W.P.A.”

  “Is he allowed to call up the president’s wife?”

  “Yes, I believe he is. Get your hat, we’re going home.”

  Longman Harkoo called the White House that afternoon and was told that the First Lady was in New York City. With some help from Joe Lash, whom he knew through his Red connections, Rosa’s father managed to track down Mrs. Roosevelt, and received a brief appointment to visit her at her apartment on East Eleventh Street, not far from the Harkoo house. For fifteen minutes, over tea, Harkoo explained the predicament of the Ark of Miriam and its passengers. Mrs. Roosevelt, Rosa’s father later reported, had seemed to become extremely angry, though all she said was that she would see what she could do.

  The Ark of Miriam, her course smoothed by the invisible hand of Eleanor Roosevelt, set sail from Lisbon on the third of December.

  The following day, Joe called Rosa and asked her if she could meet him on her lunch break at an address in the West Seventies. He wouldn’t tell her why, only that he had something he wanted to give her.

  “I have something for you, too,” she said. It was a small painting that she had finished the night before. She wrapped it in paper, tied it with string, and carried it onto the train. Shortly afterward, she found herself standing in front of the Josephine, a fifteen-story pile of cool blue-tinged Vermont marble. It had pointed parapets and took up more than half of an entire block between West End Avenue and Broadway. The doorman was uniformed like a doomed hussar in the retreat from Smolensk, down to his trim waxed mustache. Joe was waiting for her when she walked up, his coat slung over his arm. It was a pretty day, cold and bright, the sky as blue as a Nash and cloudless but for one lost lamb overhead. It had been a long time since Rosa had been in this neighborhood. The walls of high apartment houses stretching far away to the north, which had struck her in the past as self-important and stuffily bourgeois, now had a sturdy, sober look to them. In the austere light of autumn, they looked like buildings filled with serious and thoughtful people working hard to accomplish valuable things. She wondered if perhaps she had had enough of Greenwich Village.

  “What is this all about?” she said, taking Joe’s arm.

  “I just signed the lease,” he said. “Come on up and see.”

  “A lease? You’re moving out? You’re moving here? Did you and Sammy have a fight?”

  “No, of course not. I never fight with Sammy. I love Sammy.”

  “I know you do,” she said. “You guys are a good team.”

  “It’s first, well, he’s moving to Los Angeles. Okay, he says for three months only to write the movie, but I bet you good money after the bad he will stay there when he goes. What’s in the package?”

  “A present,” she said. “I guess you can hang it in your new apartment.” She was a little put out that he had said nothing to her about a move, but that was the way he was about everything. When they had a date, he would never tell her where they were going or what they were going to do. It was not so much that he refused as that he managed to communicate he would prefer it if she didn’t ask. “This is nice.”

  There was a marble fountain in the lobby, festooned with glinting Japanese carp, and an echoing interior courtyard of vaguely Moorish flavor. When the elevator door opened, with a deep and musical chime, a woman got out, followed by two small, adorable boys in ma
tching blue woolen suits. Joe tipped his hat.

  “This is for Thomas you’re doing this,” Rosa said, getting on the elevator. “Isn’t it?”

  “Ten,” Joe said to the elevator man. “I just thought this might be a, well, a better neighborhood. You know, for me … for me to …”

  “For you to raise him in.”

  He shook his head, smiling. “That sounds very strange.”

  “You are going to be like a father to him, you know,” she said. And I could be like a mother. Just ask me, Joe, and I’ll do it. It was on the tip of her tongue to say this, but she held back. What would she be saying if she did? That she wanted to marry him? For ten years, at least, since she was twelve or thirteen, Rosa had been declaring roundly to anyone who asked that she had no intention of getting married, ever, and that if she ever did, it would be when she was old and tired of life. When this declaration in its various forms had ceased to shock people sufficiently, she had taken to adding that the man she finally married would be no older than twenty-five. But lately she had been starting to experience strong, inarticulate feelings of longing, of a desire to be with Joe all the time, to inhabit his life and allow him to inhabit hers, to engage with him in some kind of joint enterprise, in a collaboration that would be their lives. She didn’t suppose they needed to get married to do that, and she knew that she certainly ought not to want to. But did she? When her father had gone to see Mrs. Roosevelt, he had told the First Lady, explaining his connection to the matter, that one of the children on the ship was the brother of the young man his daughter was going to marry. Rosa had carefully neglected to pass that part of the story on to Joe. “I think it’s very sweet of you. Sensible and sweet.”

  “There are good schools nearby. I have an interview for him at the Trinity School which I am told is excellent and takes Jews. Deasey said he would help me get him into Collegiate where he attended.”

  “Goodness, you’ve been making a lot of plans.” She really ought to know better than to take offense at his secretiveness. Keeping things to himself was just his nature; she supposed it was what had drawn him to the practice of magic in the first place, with its tricks and secrets that must never be divulged.

  “Well, I have a lot of time. It is eight months I have been waiting for this to happen. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking.”

  The elevator operator braked the car and hauled the door aside for them. He waited for them to step out. Joe was gazing at her with a strange, fixed look, and she thought, or perhaps she only wished, that she saw a glint of mischief there.

  “Ten,” said the operator.

  “A lot of thinking,” Joe repeated.

  “Ten, sir,” the elevator man said.

  In the apartment there were views of New Jersey out the windows all along one side, gilded fixtures in the larger of the two bathrooms, and the parquetry of the floors was dizzying and mathematical. There were three bedrooms, and a library with shelves on three walls reaching from floor to ceiling; every room had at least one bookshelf built in. She visited all the rooms twice, unable to prevent herself, as she did so, from imagining a life in these elegant rooms, high over this cultivated swath of Manhattan with its Freudian psychoanalysts, first cellists, and appellate-court judges. They could all live here, she and Joe and Thomas, and maybe in time there would be another child, imperturbable and fat as a putto.

  “Okay now, what do you have for me?” She couldn’t refrain from asking anymore. She didn’t see any obvious bulges in his pockets, but whatever it was might be concealed under the drape of his coat. Or it could be something very, very small. Was he about to propose to her? What was she going to say if he did?

  “No,” he said. “You first.”

  “It’s a portrait,” she said. “A portrait of you.”

  “Another one? I didn’t sit for it.”

  “How odd,” she said teasingly. She untied the wrapping and carried the painting over to the mantel.

  She had done two previous portraits of Joe. He sat for the first in shirtsleeves and vest, sprawled in a leather chair in the dark-paneled parlor where they had first become acquainted. In the piece, his doffed jacket, with a curled newspaper in its hip pocket, hangs from the back of the chair, and he leans against the arm, his head with its long wolfhound face cocked a little to one side, the fingers of his right hand lightly pressed to his right temple. His legs are crossed at the knee, and he ignores a cigarette in the fingers of his left hand. Rosa’s brush caught the rime of ash on his lapel, the missed button of his waistcoat, the tender, impatient, defiant expression in his eyes by means of which he is clearly trying to convey to the artist, telepathically, that he intends, in an hour or so, to fuck her. In the second portrait, Joe is shown working at the drawing table in his and Sammy’s apartment. A piece of Bristol board lies before him, partly filled in with panels; careful examination reveals the discernible form, in one panel, of Luna Moth in flight. Joe is reaching with a long slender brush toward a bottle of ink on the taboret beside him. The table, which Joe had bought sixth- or seventh-hand shortly after his arrival in New York, is crusted and constellated with years of splattered paint. Joe’s sleeves are rolled to the elbow and a few dark coils of hair dangle over his high forehead. The end of his necktie can be seen to lie precariously close to a fresh stroke of ink on the paper, and on his cheek he wears an adhesive bandage over some faint pink scratches. In this picture, his expression is serene and almost perfectly blank, his attention focused entirely on the bristles of the brush that he is about to dip into the bright black ink.

  The third portrait of Joe Kavalier was the last painting Rosa ever made, and it differed from the first two in that it was not painted from life. It was executed with the same easy but accurate draftsmanship of all her work, but it was a fantasy. The style was simpler than in the other two portraits, approaching the cartoonish, slightly self-conscious naïveté of her food pictures. In this one, Joe is posed against an indeterminate background of pale rose, on an ornate carpet. He is naked. More surprisingly, he is entirely entangled, from head to toe, in heavy metal chains from which, like charms on a bracelet, dangle padlocks, cuffs, iron clasps, and manacles. His feet are shackled together with leg irons. The weight of all this metal bows him at the waist, but his head is held high, staring out at the viewer with a challenging expression. His long, muscular legs are straight, his feet spread as if he is ready to spring into action. The pose was borrowed from a photograph in a book about Harry Houdini, with the following crucial differences: unlike Houdini, who in the photo guarded his modesty with his manacled hands, Joe’s genitals, with their forlorn expression, though heavily shadowed with fur, are plainly visible; the big lock in the middle of his chest is shaped like a human heart; and on his shoulder, in black overcoat and men’s galoshes, sits the figure of the artist herself, holding a golden key.

  “That’s funny,” he said. He reached into his trousers pocket. “This is what I have for you.” He held out a fist to her, knuckles up. She turned the hand over and pried the fingers apart. On the palm of his hand lay a brass key. “I’m going to need help to do this,” he said. “I hope with all my heart, Rosa, that you will want to help me.”

  “And what is this the key to?” she said, her voice sharper than she wanted it to be, knowing perfectly well that it was the key to this apartment, and that Joe was now asking her for the very thing she had been on the verge of asking for herself—that she be allowed to act as a mother, or at least a big sister, to Thomas Kavalier. She was disappointed in the same measure that she had been expecting a ring, and thrilled to the degree that she was horrified by her desire for one.

  “Like in the painting,” he said, in a kidding way, as if he could see she was upset, and was trying to figure out what tone to adopt with her. “The key to my heart.”

  She took the key and held it in her hand. It was warm from his pocket. “Thank you,” she said. She was crying, bitterly and happily, ashamed of herself, thrilled to be able to really do something for h
im.

  “I’m sorry,” Joe said, taking the handkerchief from his jacket pocket. “I wanted you to have a key, because … but I did the wrong thing.” He gestured toward the painting. “I forget to say I love it. Rosa, I love it! It’s incredible! It’s a whole new thing for you.”

  She laughed, taking the hankie from him, and dabbed at her eyes. “No, Joe, it’s not that,” she said, though in fact the painting did represent a new direction for Rosa’s work. It had been years since she had attempted to draw from her imagination. Her talent for capturing a likeness, a contour, her innate sense of shadow and weight, had biased her toward life drawing early on. Though she had worked partly from a photograph this time, the details of Joe’s body and face were filled in from memory, a process she had found challenging and satisfying. You had to know your lover very well—to have spent a lot of time looking at him and touching him—to be able to paint his picture when he was not around. The inevitable mistakes and exaggerations she had made struck her now as proofs, artifacts, of the mysterious intercourse of memory and love. “No. Joe. Thank you for the key. I want it very much.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “And I’m happy to help in every way. Nothing would make me happier. But if you’re saying you want to move in here …” She looked at him. Yes. He had been. “Well, I don’t think I should. For Thomas. I don’t think it would be right. He might not understand.”

  “No,” he said. “I was thinking—but no. You’re right, of course.”

  “But I will absolutely be here whenever you need me. As much as you need me.” She blew her nose into his handkerchief. “As long as you need me.”

  “That’s good,” he said. “I think we may be talking about a very long time.”

  She held out the soiled handkerchief uncertainly, smiling a wincing little apologetic smile at the mess.

  “It’s fine. You keep it, darling.”

  “Thank you,” she said, and this time burst unrestrainedly into a ridiculous, even bizarre, fit of uncontrollable sobbing. She knew perfectly well that the handkerchief was expressly intended for the comforting of women, and that Joe always kept another, reserved for his own personal use, tucked into the back pocket of his trousers.