The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

by Michael Chabon

  “No,” she said. “I don’t think he’s out of his mind. You know? I just don’t know if there’s a sane reaction to what he … what happened to his family. Is your reaction, and mine … you get up, you go to work, you have a catch in the yard with the kid on Sunday afternoon. How sane is that? Just to go on planting bulbs and drawing comic books and doing all the same old crap as if none of it had happened?”

  “Good point,” Sammy said, sounding profoundly uninterested in the question. He worked his legs up toward his chest and laid the legal pad against them. The pencil began to scratch. He was through with this conversation. As a rule, they tended to avoid questions like “How sane are we?” and “Do our lives have meaning?” The need for avoidance was acute and apparent to both of them.

  “What is that?” she said.

  “Weird Planet.” He did not lift his pencil from the pad. “Guy lands on a planet. Exploring the galaxy. Mapping the far fringes.” While he spoke, he did not look at her, or interrupt the steady progress across the ruled lines of the tiny bold block letters he produced, regular and neat, as if he had a typewriter hand. He liked to talk through his plots for her, combing out into regular plaits what grew in wild tufts in his mind. “He finds a vast golden city. Like nothing he’s ever seen. And he’s seen it all. The beehive cities of Deneba. The lily-pad cities of Lyra. The people here are ten feet tall, beautiful golden humanoids. Let’s say they have big wings. They welcome Spaceman Jones. They show him around. But something is on their minds. They’re worried. They’re afraid. There’s one building, one immense palace he isn’t allowed to see. One night our guy wakes up in his nice big bed, the entire city is shaking. He hears this terrible bellowing, raging like some immense monstrous beast. Screams. Strange electric flashes. It’s all coming from the palace.” He peeled the page he had filled, folded it over, plastered it down. Went on. “The next day everybody acts like nothing happened. They tell him he must have been dreaming. Naturally our guy has to find out. He’s an explorer. It’s his job. So he sneaks into this one huge, deserted palace and looks around. In the highest tower, a mile above the planet, he comes upon a giant. Twenty feet tall, huge wings, golden like the others but with ragged hair, big long beard. In chains. Giant atomic chains.”

  She waited while he waited for her to ask.

  “And?” she said finally.

  “We’re in heaven, this planet,” said Sam.

  “I’m not sure I—”

  “It’s God.”

  “Okay.”

  “God is a madman. He lost his mind, like, a billion years ago. Just before He, you know. Created the universe.”

  It was Rosa’s turn to say, “I like it. Does He, what? I’m guessing he eats the spaceman?”

  “He does.”

  “Peels him like a banana.”

  “You want to draw it?”

  She reached out and laid a hand on his cheek. It was warm and still dewy from the shower, his stubble pleasantly scratchy under her fingertips. She wondered how long it had been since she had last touched his face.

  “Sam, come on. Stop for a minute,” she said.

  “I need to get this down.”

  She reached out for the pencil and arrested its mechanical progress. For a moment he fought her; there was a tiny creaking of splinters, and the pencil began to bend. Finally, it snapped in two, splitting lengthwise. She handed him her half, the skinny gray tube of graphite glinting like mercury rising in a thermometer.

  “Sammy, how did you get him off?”

  “I told you.”

  “My father called the mayor’s mother,” Rosa said. “Who was able to manipulate the criminal-justice system of New York City. Which she did out of her deep love of René Magritte.”

  “Apparently.”

  “Bullshit.”

  He shrugged, but she knew he was lying. He had been lying to her steadily, and with her approval, for years. It was a single, continuous lie, the deepest kind of lie possible in a marriage: the one that need never be told, because it will never be questioned. Every once in a while, however, small bergs like this one would break off and drift across their course, mementos of the trackless continent of lies, the blank spot on their maps.

  “How did you get him off?” Rosa said. She had never before so persisted in trying to get the truth out of him. Sometimes she felt like Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, married to a man with contacts in the underground. The lies were for her protection as well as his.

  “I talked to the arresting officer,” Sammy said, looking steadily at her. “Detective Lieber.”

  “You spoke to him.”

  “He seemed like an all right kind of guy.”

  “That’s lucky.”

  “We’re going to have lunch.”

  Sammy had been having lunch, on and off, with a dozen men over the past dozen years or so. They rarely displayed any last names in his conversation; they were just Bob or Jim or Pete or Dick. One would appear on the fringes of Rosa’s consciousness, hang around for six months or a year, a vague mishmash of stock tips, opinions, and vogue jokes in a gray suit, then vanish as quickly as he had come. Rosa always assumed that these friendships of Sammy’s—the only relations, since Joe’s enlistment, that merited the name—went no further than a lunch table at Le Marmiton or Laurent. It was one of her fundamental assumptions.

  “Well then, maybe Daddy can help you out with this Senate committee, too,” Rosa said. “I’ll bet Estes Kefauver is a terrific Max Ernst fan.”

  “Maybe we should just get hold of Max Ernst,” Sammy said. “I need all the help I can get.”

  “Are they calling in everyone?” Rosa said.

  Sammy shook his head. He was trying not to look worried, but she could tell that he was. “I made some calls,” he said. “Gaines and I seem to be the only comics men that anyone knows they’re calling.”

  Bill Gaines was the publisher and chief pontiff of Entertainment Comics. He was a slovenly, brilliant guy, excitable and voluble the way that Sammy was—when the subject was work—and, like Sammy, he harbored ambitions. His comic books had literary pretensions and strove to find readers who would appreciate their irony, their humor, their bizarre and pious brand of liberal morality. They were also shockingly gruesome. Corpses and dismemberments and vivid stabbings abounded. Awful people did terrible things to their horrible loved ones and friends. Rosa had never liked Gaines or his books very much, though she adored Bernard Krigstein, one of the E.C. regulars, refined and elegant in both print and person and a daring manipulator of panels.

  “Some of your stuff is pretty violent, Sam,” she said. “Pretty close to the limit.”

  “It might not be the stabbings and vivisections,” Sammy said. And then, licking his lips, “At least not only that.”

  She waited.

  “There’s, well, there’s, sort of a whole chapter on me in Seduction of the Innocent.”

  “There is?”

  “Part of a chapter. Several pages.”

  “And you never told me this?”

  “You said you weren’t going to read the damn thing. I figured you didn’t want to know.”

  “I asked you if Dr. Wertham mentioned you. You said …” She tried to remember what exactly he had said. “You said that you looked, and you weren’t in the index.”

  “Well, not by name,” Sammy said. “That’s what I meant.”

  “I see,” Rosa said. “But it turns out there is a whole, actual chapter about you.”

  “It’s not about me personally. It doesn’t even identify me by name. It just talks about stories I wrote. The Lumberjack. The Rectifier. But not just mine. There’s a lot about Batman. And Robin. There’s stuff about Wonder Woman. About how she’s a little … a little on the butch side.”

  “Uh-huh. I see.” Everyone knew. That was what made their particular secret, their lie, so ironic; it went unspoken, unchallenged, and yet it did not manage to deceive. There was gossip in the neighborhood; Rosa had never heard it, but she could feel it sometim
es, smell it lingering in the air of a living room that she and Sam had just entered. “Does the U.S. Senate know that you wrote these stories?”

  “I seriously doubt it,” Sammy said. “It was all nom de plume.”

  “Well, then.”

  “I’ll be fine.” He reached for his pad again, then rolled over and rifled the nightstand drawer for another pencil. But when he was back under the covers, he just sat there, drumming with the eraser end on the pad.

  “Think he’ll stay for a while?” he said.

  “No. Uh-uh. Maybe. I don’t know. Do we want him to stay?” she said.

  “Do you still love him?” He was trying to catch her off guard, lawyer-style. But she was not going to venture so far, not yet, nor poke so deeply into the embers of her love for Joe.

  “Do you?” she said, and then, before he could begin to take the question seriously, she went on, “Do you still love me?”

  “You know I do,” he said at once. Actually, she knew that he did. “You don’t have to ask.”

  “And you don’t have to tell me,” she said. She kissed him. It was a curt and sisterly kiss. Then she switched off her light and turned her face to the wall. The scratching of his pencil resumed. She closed her eyes, but she could not relax. It took her very little time to realize that somehow she had forgotten the one thing she had wanted to talk to Sammy about: Tommy.

  “He knows that you adopted him,” she said. “According to Joe.” The pencil stopped. Rosa kept her face to the wall. “He knows that somebody else is really his dad. He just doesn’t know who.”

  “Joe never told him, then.”

  “Would he?”

  “No,” said Sammy. “I guess he wouldn’t.”

  “We have to tell him the truth, Sam,” Rosa said. “The time has come. It’s time.”

  “I’m working now,” Sammy said. “I’m not going to talk about this anymore.”

  She knew from long experience to believe this. The conversation had officially come to an end. And she had not said anything that she wanted to say to him! She put a hand on his warm shoulder and left it there a little while. Again, there was a tiny shock of remembered coolness at the touch of his skin.

  “What about you?” she said, just before she finally drifted off to sleep. “Are you going to stay for a while?”

  But if there was a reply, she missed it.

  AT THIRTY-FIVE, with incipient wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and a voice grown husky with cigarettes, Rosa Clay was, if anything, more beautiful than the girl Joe remembered. She had surrendered her futile and wrongheaded battle against the ample construction of her frame. The general expansion of her rosy flesh had softened the dramatic rake of her nose, the equine length of her jaw, the flare of her cheekbones. Her thighs had a grandeur, and her hips were capacious, and in those first few days, a great goad to his renascent love was the glimpse of her pale, freckled breasts, brimming from the cups of her brassiere with a tantalizing but fictitious threat of spilling over, that was afforded him by one of her housedresses, or by a chance late-night encounter outside the bathroom in the hall. He had thought of Rosa countless times over the years of his flight, but somehow, courting or embracing her in his memory, he had neglected to dab in the freckles with which she was so prodigiously stippled, and now he was startled by their profusion. They emerged and faded against her skin with the inscrutable cadence of stars on the night sky. They invited the touch of fingers as painfully as the nap of velvet or the shimmer of a piece of watered silk.

  Sitting at the breakfast table, lying on the couch, he would watch as she went about her household business, carrying a dust mop or a canvas bag of clothespins, her skirt straining to contain the determined sway of her hips and buttocks, and feel as if inside him a violin string were being tightened on its key. Because, as it turned out, he was still in love with Rosa. His love for her had survived the ice age intact, like the beasts from vanished aeons that were always thawing out in the pages of comic books and going on rampages through the streets of Metropolis and Gotham and Empire City. This love, thawing, gave off a rich mastodon odor of the past. He was surprised to encounter these feelings again—not by their having survived so much as by their undeniable vividness and force. A man in love at twenty feels more alive than he ever will again—finding himself once more in possession of this buried treasure, Joe saw more clearly than ever that for the past dozen years or so, he had been, more or less, a dead man. His daily fried egg and pork chop, his collection of false beards and mustaches, the hasty sponge-baths by the sink in the closet, these regular, unquestioned features of his recent existence, now seemed the behaviors of a shadow, the impressions left by a strange novel read under the influence of a high fever.

  The return of his feelings for Rosa—of his very youth itself—after so long a disappearance ought to have been a cause for delight, but Joe felt terribly guilty about it. He did not want to be that twinkle-eyed, ascot-wearing, Fiat-driving mainstay of Rosa’s stories, the home-wrecker. In the past few days, he had, it was true, lost all his illusions about Sammy and Rosa’s marriage (which, as we tend to do with missed opportunities, he had, over the years, come to idealize). The solid suburban bond that he had, from a distance, half-ruefully and half-contentedly conjured to himself at night, proved, at close range, to be even more than ordinarily complicated and problematic. But whatever the state of things between them, Sammy and Rosa were married, and had been so for quite a few years. They were unmistakably a couple. They spoke alike, employing a household slang—“pea-bee and jay,” “idiot box”—talking on top of each other, finishing each other’s sentences, amiably cutting each other off. Sometimes they both went at Joe at the same time, telling parallel, complementary versions of the same story, and Joe would become lost in the somewhat tedious marital intricacy of their conversation. Sammy made tea for Rosa and brought it to her in her studio. She ironed his shirt with grim precision every night before she retired. And they had evolved a remarkable system of producing comic books as a couple (though they rarely collaborated outright on a story as Clay & Clay). Sammy brought forth items from the inexhaustible stock of cheap, reliable, and efficient ideas that God had supplied him with at birth, and then Rosa talked him through a plot, supplying him with a constant stream of refinements that neither of them seemed to realize were coming from her. And Sammy went over the pages of her own stories with her, panel by panel, criticizing her drawing when it got too elaborate, coaxing her into maintaining the simple strong line, stylized, impatient with detail, that was her forte. Rosa and Sam were not together much—except in bed, a place that remained a source of great mystery and interest to Joe—but when they were, they seemed to be very involved with each other.

  So it was unthinkable that he should interpose himself and make the claim his reawakened love urged upon him; but he could think of nothing else, and thus he went around the house in a constant state of inflamed embarrassment. In the hospital in Cuba, he had conceived a grateful ardor for one of the nurses, a pretty ex-socialite from Houston known as Alexis from Texas, and had spent an excruciating month in the arid heat of Guantánamo Bay trying to keep himself from getting an erection every time she came around to sponge him down. It was like that with Rosa now. He spent all of his time squelching his thoughts, tamping down his feelings. There was an ache in the hinge of his jaw.

  Furthermore, he sensed that she was avoiding him, shunning beforehand the unwelcome advances he could not bring himself to make, which caused him to feel like even more of a heel. After their initial conversation in the kitchen, he and Rosa seemed to find it hard to get a second one started. For a while, he was so preoccupied by his clumsy attempts at small talk that he failed to remark her own reticence whenever they were alone. When he finally did notice it, he attributed her silence to animosity. For days, he stood in the cold shower of her imagined anger, which he felt he entirely deserved. Not only for having left her pregnant and in the lurch, so that he might go off in a failed pursuit of an imposs
ible revenge; but for having never returned, never telephoned or dropped a line, never once thought of her—so he imagined that she imagined—in all those years away. The expanding gas of silence between them only excited his shame and lust the more. In the absence of verbal intercourse, he became hyperaware of other signs of her—the jumble of her makeups and creams and lotions in the bathroom, the Spanish moss of her lingerie dangling from the shower-curtain rod, the irritable tinkle of her spoon against her teacup from the garage, messages from the kitchen written in oregano, bacon, onions cooked in fat.

  At last, when he could stand it no longer, he decided he had to say something, but the only thing he could think of to say was Please forgive me. He would make a formal apology, as long and abject as need be, and throw himself on her mercy. He mulled and planned and rehearsed his words, and when he happened to be passing her in the narrow hallway, Joe just blurted it out.

  “Look,” he said, “I’m sorry.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I’m sorry for everything, I mean.”

  “Oh. That,” she said. “All right.”

  “I know you must be angry.”

  She crossed her arms over her chest and stared at him, brow wide and smooth, lips compressed into a doubtful pout. He could not read the expression in her eyes—it kept changing. Finally, she looked down at her freckled arms, rosy and flushed.