The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (with bonus content) (80 page)

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?”

“Luckily, no.”

It was crazy; they were just talking. His voice sounded like his voice, orotund but with a slight bassoon reediness; the droll Hapsburg accent was still there, sounding doctoral and not quite genuine. Out in the living room, Sammy had turned over the record she’d put on earlier; Rosa recognized it now: Stan Kenton’s
New Concepts of Artistry in Rhythm
. Joe followed her back into the bedroom, and Rosa scrubbed the sweet epoxy from Tommy’s baby-boy lips and fingers. An unwrapped Charms Pop that he had plunged, half-sucked, into his pants pocket had mapped out a sticky continent on the smooth hairless hollow of his hip. Rosa wiped it away. Tommy muttered and winced throughout her attentions; once, his eyes shot open, filled with alarmed intelligence, and Rosa and Joe grimaced at each other: they had woken him up. But the boy closed his eyes again, and with Joe lifting and Rosa pulling, they got him into his pajamas. Joe hefted him, groaning again, as Rosa peeled back the covers of the bed. Then they tucked him in. Joe smoothed the hair back from Tommy’s forehead.

“What a big boy,” he said.

“He’s almost twelve,” Rosa said.

“Yes, I know.”

She looked down at his hands, by his sides. He was still holding on to the pair of shoes.

“Are you hungry?” she said, keeping her voice low. “I’m very hungry.”

As they went out of the room Rosa turned to look at Tommy and had an impulse to go back, to get into his bed with him and just lie there for a while feeling that deep longing, that sense of missing him desperately, that came over her whenever she held him sleeping in her arms. She closed the door behind them.

“Let’s eat,” she said.

It wasn’t until the three of them were seated around the dinette in the
kitchen that she got her first good look at Joe. There was something denser about him now. His face seemed to have aged less than Sammy’s or than, God knew, her own, and his expression, as he puzzled out the unfamiliar sights and smells of the cozy kitchen of their Penobscott, had something of the old bemused Joe that she remembered. Rosa had read about the Einsteinian traveler at the speed of light who returned after a trip that had taken a few years of his life to find everyone he knew and loved bent or moldering in the ground. It seemed to her as if Joe had returned like that, from somewhere distant and beautiful and unimaginably bleak.