The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

by Michael Chabon

  “We’ll see about that,” Longman said, with deliberate indiscretion and a sideways look at Sammy. “Surrealism has agents at every level of the machinery of power. I sold a painting to the mayor’s mother last week.”

  Your father-in-law is kind of a blowhard, said Detective Lieber’s eyes. I know it, Sammy’s replied.

  “Excuse me.” There was a new visitor to the offices of Kornblum Vanishing Creams. He was young, good-looking in a featureless governmental way, wearing a dark blue suit. In one hand he held a long white envelope.

  “Sam Clay?” he said. “I’m looking for Mr. Sam Clay. I was told I might find him—”

  “Here.” Sammy came forward and took the envelope from the young man. “What’s this?”

  “That is a congressional subpoena.” The young man nodded to Lieber, touching the brim of his hat with two fingers. “Sorry to disturb you gentlemen,” he said.

  Sammy stood for a moment, tap-tap-tapping the envelope against his hand.

  “You better call Mom,” said Tommy.

  * Les Organes du Facteur moved to Fifty-seventh Street after the war, three doors down from Carnegie Hall, an inexorable journey uptown and into cultural irrelevance in the last moments before Surrealism was overwhelmed by the surging tribes of Action, Beat, and Pop.

  ROSE SAXON, the Queen of Romance Comics, was at her drawing board in the garage of her house in Bloomtown, New York, when her husband phoned from the city to say that, if it was all right with her, he would be bringing home the love of her life, whom she had all but given up for dead.

  Miss Saxon was at work on the text of a new story, which she intended to begin laying out that night, after her son went to bed. It would be the lead story for the June issue of Kiss Comics. She planned to call it “The Bomb Destroyed My Marriage.” The story would be based on an article that she had read in Redbook about the humorous difficulties of being married to a nuclear physicist employed by the government at a top-secret facility in the middle of the New Mexico desert. She was not writing so much as planning out her panels, one by one, at the typewriter. Over the years, Sammy’s scripts had grown no less detailed but looser; he never bothered with telling an artist what to draw. Rosa couldn’t operate that way; she hated working from Sammy’s scripts. She needed to have everything figured out in advance—storyboarded, they called it in Hollywood—shot by shot, as it were. Her scripts were a tightly numbered series of master shots, the shooting scripts for ten-cent epics that, in their sparse elegance of design, elongated perspectives, and deep focus, somewhat resemble, as Robert C. Harvey has pointed out,* the films of Douglas Sirk. She worked at a bulky Smith-Corona, typing with such intense slowness that when her boss and husband called, she did not at first hear the ringing phone.

  Rosa had gotten her start in comics soon after Sammy’s return to the business, after the war. Upon taking over the editor’s desk at Gold Star, Sammy’s first move had been to clear out many of the subcompetents and alcoholics who littered the staff there. It was a bold and necessary step, but it left him with an acute shortage of artists, in particular of inkers.

  Tommy had started kindergarten, and Rosa was just beginning to understand the true horror of her destiny, the arrant purposelessness of her life whenever her son was not around, one day when Sammy came home at lunch, harried and frantic, with an armload of Bristol board, a bottle of Higgins ink, and a bunch of #3 brushes, and begged Rosa to help him by doing what she could. She had stayed up all night with the pages—it was some dreadful Gold Star superhero strip, The Human Grenade or The Phantom Stallion—and had the job finished by the time Sammy left for work the next morning. The reign of the Queen had commenced.

  Rose Saxon had emerged slowly, lending her ink brush at first only now and then, unsigned and uncredited, to a story or a cover that she would spread out on the dinette table in the kitchen. Rosa had always had a steady hand, a strong line, a good sense of shadow. It was work done in a kind of unreflective crisis mode—whenever Sammy was in a jam or shorthanded—but after a while, she realized that she had begun to crave intensely the days when Sammy had something for her to do.

  Then one night, as they lay in bed, talking in the dark, Sammy told her that her brushwork already far exceeded that of the best people he could afford to hire at lowly Gold Star. He asked her if she had ever given any thought to penciling; to layouts; to actually writing and drawing comic book stories. He explained to her that Simon and Kirby were just then having considerable success with a new kind of feature they’d cooked up, based partly on teen features like Archie and A Date with Judy and partly on the old true-romance pulps (the last of the old pulp genres to be exhumed and given new life in the comics). It was called Young Romance. It was aimed at women, and the stories it told were centered on women. Women had been neglected until now as readers of comic books; it seemed to Sammy that they might enjoy one that had actually been written and drawn by one of their own. Rosa had accepted Sammy’s proposal at once, with a flush of gratitude whose power was undiminished even now.

  She knew what it had meant to Sammy to return to comics and take the editor’s job at Gold Star. It was the one moment in the course of a long and interesting marriage when Sammy had stood on the point of following his cousin into the world of men who escaped. He had sworn, screamed, said hateful things to Rosa. He had blamed her for his penury and his debased condition and the interminable state of American Disillusionment. If there were not a wife and a child for him to support, a child not even his own … He had gone so far as to pack a suitcase, and walk out of the house. When he returned the next afternoon, it was as the editor in chief of Gold Star Publications, Inc. He allowed the world to wind him in the final set of chains, and climbed, once and for all, into the cabinet of mysteries that was the life of an ordinary man. He had stayed. Years later, Rosa found a ticket in a dresser drawer, dating from around that terrible time, for a seat in a second-class compartment on the Broadway Limited: yet another train to the coast that Sammy had not been on.

  The night he offered her the chance to draw “a comic book for dollies,” Rosa felt, Sammy had handed her a golden key, a skeleton key to her self, a way out of the tedium of her existence as a housewife and a mother, first in Midwood and now here in Bloomtown, soi-disant Capital of the American Dream. That enduring sense of gratitude to Sammy was one of the sustaining forces of their life together, something she could turn to and summon up, grip like Tom Mayflower gripping his talisman key, whenever things started to go wrong. And the truth was that their marriage had improved after she went to work for Sammy. It no longer seemed (to mistranslate) quite as blank. They became colleagues, coworkers, partners in an unequal but well-defined way that made it easier to avoid looking too closely at the locked cabinet at the heart of things.

  The more immediate result of Sammy’s offer had been Working Gals, “shocking but true tales from the fevered lives of career girls.” It debuted in the back pages of Spree Comics, at the time the lowest-selling title put out by Gold Star. After three months of steadily increasing sales, Sammy had moved Working Gals to the front of the book and allowed Rosa to sign it with her best-known pseudonym.* A few months after that, Working Gals was launched in its own title, and shortly thereafter, Gold Star, led by three “Rose Saxon Romance” books, began to show a profit for the first time since the heady early days of the war. Since then, as Sammy had moved on from Gold Star to editorships at Olympic Publications and now Pharaoh House, Rosa, in a tireless and (for the most part) financially successful campaign to portray the heart of that mythical creature, the American Girl, whom she despised and envied in equal measure, had filled the pages of Heartache, Love Crazy, Lovesick, Sweetheart, and now Kiss with all the force and frustration of a dozen years of lovelessness and longing.

  After Sammy had hung up, Rosa stood for a moment holding the phone, trying to make sense of what she had just heard. Somehow—it was a little confusing—their truant son had managed to find the man who had fathered him. Joe Kavalier was
being fetched back, alive, from his secret hideaway in the Empire State Building (“Just like Doc Savage,” according to Sammy). And he was coming to sleep in her house.

  She took clean linens from the built-in cupboard in the hall and carried them toward the couch on which, a few hours from now, Joe Kavalier would lay down his well-remembered, unimaginable body. Where the hallway met the living room, she passed a kind of star-shaped atomic squiggle with a mirror at its nucleus, and caught sight of her hair. She turned around, went into the bedroom she and Sammy shared, put down her fragrant armful of sheets, and yanked out the variety of junk, office supplies, and small bits of hardware she used to keep her hair out of her face when she was at home. She sat down on the bed, got up, went to her closet, and stood there, the sight of her wardrobe filling her with doubt and a mild sense of amusement that she recognized as, somewhat magically, Joe’s. She had long since lost the sense of her dresses and skirts and blouses; they were rote phrases of rayon and cotton that she daily intoned. Now they struck her as, to a skirt, appallingly sensible and dull. She took off her sweatshirt and rolled dungarees. She lit a cigarette and walked into the kitchen in her underpants and brassiere, the bramble of her loosed hair flapping around her head like a crown of plumes.

  In the kitchen she took out a saucepan, melted half a cup of butter, and thickened it with flour to a paste. To the paste she added milk, a little at a time, then salt, pepper, and onion powder. She took her roux off the stove and started a pot of water for noodles. Then she went into the living room and put a record on the hi-fi. She had no idea what record it was. When the music began she did not listen, and when it finished she took no notice. It puzzled her to see that there were no sheets on the couch. Her hair was in her face. When flakes of ash had fallen into her roux, she now perceived, she had stirred them right in, as if they were dried bits of parsley. She had, however, forgotten to add the actual dried parsley. And for some reason, she was walking around in her bra.

  “All right,” she told herself. “And so what?” The sound of her voice calmed her and focused her thoughts. “He doesn’t know from suburbia.” She ground out her cigarette in an ashtray that was shaped like an eyebrow arched in surprise. “Get dressed.”

  She went back into the bedroom and put on a blue dress, knee-length, with a white waistband and a collar of dotted swiss. Various contradictory and insidious voices arose within her at this point to say that the dress made her look stout, hippy, matronly, that she ought to wear slacks. She ignored them. She brushed out her hair till it shot from her head in all directions like the mane of a dandelion, then brushed it back and tucked it up at the nape and fastened it there with a silver clasp. A dazed hesitancy returned to her manner over the question of makeup, but she settled quickly on lipstick alone, two plum streaks not especially well applied, and went out to the living room to make up the bed. The pot in the kitchen was boiling now, and she shook a rattling box of macaroni into the water. Then she began to shred into a mixing bowl a block of school-bus-yellow cheese. Macaroni and cheese. It seemed, as a dish, to exist at the very center of her sense of embarrassment over her life; but it was Tommy’s favorite, and she felt an impulse to reward her son for the feat he had performed. And somehow she doubted that Joe—had he really been cooped up in an office in the Empire State Building since the nineteen-forties?—would be sensitive to the socioeconomic message inherent in the bubbling brown-and-gold square, in its white Corning casserole with the blue flower on the side.

  After she had slid the casserole into the oven, she returned to the bedroom to put on a pair of stockings and blue pumps with white buckles that were covered in the same glossy fabric as the waistband of the dress.

  They would be here in two hours. She went back to her table and sat down to work. It was the only sensible thing she could think of to do. Sorrow, irritation, doubt, anxiety, or any other turbulent emotion that might otherwise keep her from sleeping, eating, or, in extreme cases, speaking coherently or getting out of bed, would disappear almost completely when she was in the act of telling a story. Though she had not told as many as Sammy over the years, working, as she did, exclusively in the romance genre, she had told them perhaps with greater intensity. For Rosa (who, from the first, and uniquely among the few women then working in the business, had not only drawn but, thanks to the indulgence of her editor husband, also written nearly all of her own texts), telling the story of pretty Nancy Lambert—an ordinary American girl from a small island in Maine who put all her foolish trust in the unstable hands of handsome and brilliant Lowell Burns, socialite and nuclear physicist—was an act that absorbed not merely the whole of her attention and craft but of her senses and memories as well. Her thoughts were Nancy’s thoughts. Her own fingers turned white at the knuckles when Nancy learned that Lowell had lied to her again. And little by little, as she peopled and developed the world she was building out of rows and columns of blocks on sheets of eleven-by-fifteen Bristol board, Nancy’s past was transformed into her own. The velvet tongues of tame Maine deer had once licked her childish palms. The smoke from burning piles of autumn leaves, fireflies writing alphabets against the summer night sky, the sweet jets of salt steam escaping from baked clams, the creaking of winter ice on tree limbs, all of these sensations racked Rosa’s heart with an almost unbearable nostalgia as, contemplating the horrific red bloom of the bomb that had become her Other Woman, she considered the possible destruction of everything she had ever known, from kindly Miss Pratt in the old island schoolhouse to the sight of her father’s old dory among the lobster boats returning in the evening with the day’s catch. At such moments, she did not invent her plots or design her characters; she remembered them. Her pages, though neglected by all but a few collectors, retain an imprint of the creator’s faith in her creation, the beautiful madness that is rare enough in any art form, but in the comics business, with its enforced collaborations and tireless seeking-out of the lowest common denominator, all but unheard of.

  All this is by way of explaining why Rosa, who had been stricken with panic and confusion at the telephone call from Sammy, gave so little thought to Josef Kavalier once she had sat down to work. Alone in her makeshift studio in the garage, she smoked, listened to Mahler and Fauré on WQXR, and dissolved herself in the travails and shapely contours of poor Nancy Lambert, as she would have on a day that included no reports of her son’s wild truancy or revenants from the deepest-buried history of her heart. It was not until she heard the scrape of the Studebaker against the driveway that she even looked up from her work.

  The macaroni and cheese turned out to be a superfluous gesture; Tommy was asleep by the time they got him home. Sammy struggled into the house with the boy in his arms.

  “Did he have dinner?”

  “He had a doughnut.”

  “That isn’t dinner.”

  “He had a Coke.”

  He was deeply asleep, cheeks flushed, breath whistling through his teeth, mysteriously lost in an extra-large Police Athletic League sweatshirt.

  “You broke your ribs,” Rosa told Joe.

  “No,” Joe said. “Just a bad bruise.” There was a fiery welt on his cheek, partially covered by a taped square of gauze. His nose looked luminous at the nostrils, as if it had recently been bleeding.

  “Out of my way,” Sammy said, through his teeth. “I don’t want to drop him.”

  “Let me,” Joe said.

  “Your ribs—”

  “Let me.”

  I want to see this, thought Rosa. In fact, there had been nothing in her life that she had ever wanted to see more.

  “Why don’t you let him?” she said to Sammy.

  So Sammy, holding his breath, wincing in sympathy and wrinkling his brow, tipped the sleeping boy into Joe’s arms. Joe’s face tightened in pain, but he bore it and stood holding Tommy, gazing with alarming tenderness down at his face. Rosa and Sammy stood ardently watching Joe Kavalier look at his son. Then, at the same instant, they each seemed to notice that this was what
the other was doing, and they blushed and smiled, awash in the currents of doubt and shame and contentment that animated all the proceedings of their jury-rigged family.

  Joe cleared his throat, or perhaps he was grunting in pain.

  They looked at him.

  “Where is his room?” Joe said.

  “Oh, sorry,” said Rosa. “God. Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “It’s this way.”

  She led him down the hall and into Tommy’s bedroom. Joe laid the boy on top of the bedspread, which was patterned with colonial tavern signs and with curl-cornered proclamations printed in a bumpy Revolutionary War typeface. It had been quite some time since the duty and pleasure of undressing her son had fallen to Rosa. For several years, she had been wishing him, willing him, into maturity, independence, a general proficiency beyond his years, as if hoping to skip him like a stone across the treacherous pond of childhood, and now she was touched by a faint trace of the baby in him, in his pouting lips and the febrile sheen of his eyelids. She leaned over and untied his shoes, then pulled them off. His socks clung to his pale, perspired feet. Joe took the shoes and socks from her. Rosa unbuttoned Tommy’s corduroy trousers and tugged them down his legs, then pulled up his shirt and the sweatshirt until his head and arms were a lost bundle within. She gave a kind of slow practiced tug, and the top portion of her boy popped free.

  “Nicely done,” Joe said.

  Tommy had apparently been plied with ice cream and soda pop at the police station, to loosen his tongue. His face was going to have to be washed. Rosa went for a cloth. Joe followed her into the bathroom, carrying the shoes in one hand and the pair of socks, rolled into a neat ball, in the other.

  “I have dinner in the oven.”

  “I’m very hungry.”

  “You didn’t break a tooth or anything?”