The house, when they reached it, was a vest-pocket Oriental fantasy, a miniature Topkapi, hardly bigger than a firehouse, squeezed onto its tiny site. It curled like a sleeping cat around a central tower topped with a dome that resembled, among other items, a knob of garlic. Through skillful use of forced perspective and manipulation of scale, the house managed to look much bigger than it really was. Its luxurious coat of Virginia creeper, the gloom of its courtyard, and the artless jumble of its gables and spires gave the place an antique air, but it had in fact been completed in September 1930, around the time that Al Smith was laying the cornerstone for the Empire State Building. Like that structure, it was a kind of dream habitation, having, like the Long Man of Harkoo himself, originally appeared to Longman Harkoo in his sleep, giving him the excuse he had long sought to pull down the dull old Greek Revival house that had been the country home of his mother’s family since the founding of Greenwich Village. That house had itself replaced a much earlier structure, dating to the first years of British dominion, in which—or so Harkoo claimed—a Dutch-Jewish forebear of his had entertained the devil during his 1682 tour of the colonies.
Joe noticed that Sammy was hanging back a little, looking up at the miniature tower, absently massaging the top of his left thigh, his face solemn and nervous in the light of the torches that flanked the door. In his gleaming pinstriped suit, he reminded Joe of their character the Monitor, armored for battle against perfidious foes. Suddenly Joe felt apprehensive, too. It had not quite sunk in until now, with all the talk of bombs and woolens and radio programs, that they had come downtown with Deasey to attend a party.
Neither of the cousins was much for parties. Though Sammy was mad for swing, he could not, of course, dance on his pipe-cleaner legs; his nerves killed his appetite, and at any rate, he was too self-conscious about his manners to eat anything; and he disliked the flavor of liquors and beer. Introduced into a cursed circle of jabber and jazz, he would drift helplessly behind a large plant. His brash and heedless gift of conversation, by means of which he had whipped up Amazing Midget Radio Comics and with it the whole idea of Empire, deserted him. Put him in front of a roomful of people at work and he would be impossible to shut up; work was not work for him. Parties were work. Women were work. At Palooka Studios, whenever there occurred the chance conjunction of girls and a bottle, Sammy simply vanished, like Mike Campbell’s fortune, at first a little at a time, and then all at once.
Joe, on the other hand, had always been the boy for a party in Prague. He could do card tricks and hold his alcohol; he was an excellent dancer. In New York, however, all this seemed to have changed. He had too much work to do, and parties seemed a great waste of his time. The conversation came fast and slangy, and he had trouble following the gags and patter of the men and the sly double-talk of the ladies. He was vain enough to dislike it when something he said in all seriousness for some reason broke up a room. But the greatest obstacle he faced was that he did not feel that he ought—ever—to be enjoying himself socially. Even when he went to the movies, he did so in a purely professional capacity, studying them for ideas about light and imagery and pacing that he could borrow or adapt in his comic book work. Now he drew back alongside his cousin, looking up at the scowling torchlit face of the house, ready to run at the first signal from Sam.
“Mr. Deasey,” Sammy said, “listen. I feel I’ve got to confess … I haven’t even started Strange Frigate yet. Don’t you think I better—”
“Yes,” Joe said. “And I have the cover for The Monitor—”
“All you need is a drink, boys.” Deasey looked greatly amused by their sudden qualms of conscience and courage. “That will make it go much easier when they pitch you both into the volcano. I presume you are virgins?” They scraped up the rough, clinker-brick front steps. Deasey turned, and all at once his face looked grave and admonitory. “Just don’t let him hug you,” he said.
THE PARTY HAD originally been planned for the pint-sized mansion’s ballroom, but when that room was rendered uninhabitable by the noise from Salvador Dalí’s breathing apparatus, everyone crowded into the library instead. Like all the rooms in the house, the library was diminutive, built to a three-quarter scale that gave visitors a disquieting sense of giantism. Sammy and Joe squeezed in behind Deasey to find the room packed to the point of immobility with Transcendental Symbolists, Purists, and Vitalists, copywriters in suits the color of new Studebakers, socialist banjo players, writers for Mademoiselle, experts on Yuggogheny cannibal cults and bird-worshipers of the Indochinese Highlands, composers of twelve-tone requiems and of slogans for Eas-O-Cran, the Original New England Laxative. The gramophone—and (of course) the bar—had been carried up to the library as well, and over the heads of the crammed-together guests there veered the notes of an Armstrong trumpet solo. Beneath this bright glaze of jazz and a frothy layer of conversation there was a low, heavy rumbling from the distant air compressor. Along with the smells of perfume and cigarettes, the air in the room had a faint motor-oil smell of the wharves.
“Hello, George.” Harkoo fought his way toward them, a round, broad, not at all long man, with thinning coppery hair cropped close. “I was hoping you would show.”
“Hello, Siggy.” Deasey stiffened and offered his hand in a way that struck Joe as defensive or even protective, and then, in the next instant, the man he called Siggy had put a wrestling hold on him, in which seemed to be mingled affection and a desire to snap bones.
“Mr. Clay, Mr. Kavalier,” Deasey said, fighting free of the embrace like Houdini jerking and thrashing his way out of a wet straitjacket. “May I—present—Longman Harkoo, known to those who prefer not to indulge him as Mr. Siegfried Saks.”
Joe had an uneasy feeling, as if the name meant something to him, but he could not quite get hold of the connection. He searched his memory for “Siegfried Saks,” shuffling through the cards, trying to pop the ace that he knew was in there somewhere.
“Welcome!” The former Mr. Saks let go of his old friend and turned smiling to the cousins; they each took a step back, but he just offered them his hand, with a mischievous twinkle in his mild blue eyes that seemed to suggest he subjected to his demonic hugs only those who least liked to be touched. At a time when an honorable place in the taxonomy of male elegance was still reserved for the genus Fat Man, Harkoo was a classic instance of the Mystic Potentate species, managing to look at once commanding, stylish, and ultramundane in a vast purple-and-brown caftan, heavily embroidered, that hung down almost to the tops of his Mexican sandals. The little toe of his horny right foot, Joe saw, was adorned with a garnet ring. A venerable Kodak Brownie hung from an Indian-beaded strap around his neck.
“Sorry about all that racket downstairs,” he said with a hint of weariness.
“Is it really him?” Sammy said. “Inside that thing?”
“It really is. I’ve tried to coax him out of it. I told him it was a marvelous idea in the, you know, the abstract, but in practice.… But he’s a terribly stubborn man. I’ve never known a genius who was not.”
The doorman had pointed Dalí out to them when they came in, standing in the ballroom, just off the front hall. He was wearing a deep-sea diving costume, complete with rubberized canvas coverall and globular brass helmet. A striking woman whom Deasey identified as Gala Dalí stood loyally by her husband’s side in the middle of the empty room, along with two or three other people too stubborn, too sycophantic, or perhaps simply too deaf to mind the intolerable coughing hum of the large gasoline-powered air pump, to which the Master was connected by a length of rubber hose. They were all yelling at the top of their lungs. “No one at the party,” as Kahn wrote in The New Yorker,
was ill-mannered enough to ask Dalí what he intended by this get-up. Most took it to be either an allusion to the tenebrous benthos of the human unconscious or else to “The Dream of Venus,” which as everyone knows featured a school of live girls dressed up as mermaids swimming around half-naked in a tank. In any case Dalí would not, i
n all likelihood, have been able to hear the question through the diving helmet.
“But never mind,” Harkoo continued cheerily, “we’re all quite cozy in here. Welcome, welcome. Comic books, is it? Marvelous stuff. Love it. Regular reader. Positively a devotee.”
Sammy beamed. Harkoo slipped the camera from around his neck and handed it to Joe. “I’d be very honored if you would take my picture,” he said.
“Please? I’m sorry?”
“Take a picture of me. With the camera.” He looked at Deasey. “Does he speak English?”
“He has his own brand. Mr. Kavalier is from Prague.”
“Very good! Yes, you must! I have a marked deficit of Czech impressions.”
Deasey nodded to Joe, who raised the camera’s viewfinder to his left eye and framed Longman Harkoo’s big, cracked-baby face. Harkoo settled his jowls and eyebrows into a sober, nearly blank expression, but his eyes gleamed with pleasure. Joe had never in his life made anyone so happy so easily.
“How do I focus it?” Joe asked him, lowering the camera.
“Oh, don’t bother about that. Just look at me and push the little lever. Your mind will do the rest.”
“My mind.” Joe snapped a photo of his host, then handed the camera back to him. “The camera is …” He searched for the word in English. “Telepathic.”
“All cameras are,” his host said mildly. “I have been photographed now by seven thousand one hundred and … eighteen … people, all with this camera, and I assure you that no two portraits are alike.” He handed the camera to Sammy, and his features, as if stamped from a machine, once more settled into the same corpulent happy mask. Sammy snapped the lever. “What possible other explanation can there be for this endless variation but interference by waves emanating from the photographer’s own mind?”
Joe did not know how to reply to this, but he saw that a reply was expected, and as the intensity of his host’s expectation increased, he realized somewhat belatedly what that reply must be.
“None,” he said finally.
Longman Harkoo looked extremely pleased. He put one arm across Sammy’s shoulders and the other across Joe’s and, with a good deal of shoving and apologizing, managed to take them on a tour of their immediate neighbors, introducing them to painters and writers and various holders of cocktails, furnishing each, without even appearing to stop to organize his thoughts, with a miniature curriculum vitae that touched on the high points of their oeuvres, sex lives, or family connections.
“… her sister is married to a Roosevelt, don’t ask me which one … you must have seen his Art and Agon … she’s standing right under one of her ex-husband’s paintings … he was publicly slapped by Siquieros …”
Most of the names were unfamiliar to Joe, but he did recognize Raymond Scott, a composer who had recently hit it big with a series of whimsical, cacophonous, breakneck pseudo-jazz pop tunes. Just the other day, when Joe stopped in at Hippodrome Radio, they had been playing his new record, Yesterthoughts and Stranger, over the store PA. Scott was feeding a steady diet of Louis Armstrong platters to the portable RCA while explaining what he had meant when he referred to Satchmo as the Einstein of the blues. As the notes fluttered out of the fabric-covered loudspeaker, he would point at them, as if to illustrate what he was saying, and even tried to snatch at one with his hands. He kept turning the volume up, the better to compete with the less important conversations taking place all around him. Over there, under the saguaro cactus, was the girl painter Loren MacIver, whose luminous canvases Joe had admired at the Paul Matisse gallery. Tall, overly thin by Joe’s lights, but with a New York kind of beauty—sharp, tense, stylish—she was chatting with a tall, striking Aryan beauty who was holding a tiny baby to her breast. “Miss Uta Hagen,” Harkoo explained. “She’s married to José Ferrer, he’s around here someplace. They’re doing Charley’s Aunt.”
The women offered their hands. MacIver’s eyes were kohled, her lips painted a surprising shade of cocoa.
“These gentlemen make comic books,” Harkoo told them. “The adventures of a fellow named the Escaper. Wears a union suit. Big muscles. Vapid expression.”
“The Escapist,” said Loren MacIver. Her face lit up. “Oh, I like him.”
“You do?” said Sammy and Joe together.
“A man in a mask, who likes to be tied up with ropes?”
Miss Hagen laughed. “Sounds racy.”
“It’s quite surreal,” Harkoo said.
“That’s good, right?” Sammy said to Joe in a whisper. Joe nodded. “Just checking.”
They made their way past several more curricula vitae holding cocktails, as well as a number of actual Surrealists, like raisins studded in a pudding. For the most part these seemed to be a remarkably serious, even sober bunch of fellows. They wore dark suits with waistcoats and solid neckties. Most of them seemed to be Americans—Peter Blume, Edwin Dickinson, a shy, courtly fellow named Joseph Cornell—who shared an air of steel-rimmed, Yankee probity that surrounded like a suburb their inner Pandemonium. Joe tried to keep all the names straight, but he was still not sure who Charley was or what was being done by Uta Hagen to his aunt.
At the far end of the library, a number of men had gathered into a tight, jostling ring around a very pretty, very young woman who was talking at what must have been the top of her lungs. Joe could not really understand what she was telling them, but it appeared to be a story that reflected poorly on her own judgment—she was blushing and grinning at the same time—and it unquestionably ended with the word “fuck.” She tugged on the word, drawing it out to several times its usual length. She wound it all the way around her in two or three big loops and reveled in it as if it were a luxuriant shawl.
“Fuuuuuuuck.”
The men around her burst out laughing, and she blushed even more deeply. She had on a loose, sleeveless kind of smock, and you could see the flush reaching all the way down past her shoulders to the tops of her arms. Then she looked up, and her eyes met Joe’s.
“Saks,” Joe said, producing the card at last. “Rosa Luxemburg Saks.”
“Nah,” Sammy said. “Is it?”
IT WAS FASCINATING to see her face again after so long. Although Joe had never forgotten the girl whom he had surprised that morning in Jerry Glovsky’s bedroom, he saw that, in his nocturnal reimaginings of the moment, he had badly misremembered her. He never would have recalled her forehead as so capacious and high, her chin as so delicately pointed. In fact, her face would have seemed overlong were it not counterbalanced by an extravagant flying buttress of a nose. Her rather small lips were set in a bright red hyphen that curved downward just enough at one corner to allow itself to be read as a smirk of amusement, from which she herself was not exempted, at the surrounding tableau of human vanity. And yet in her eyes there was something unreadable, something that did not want to be read, the determined blankness that in predator animals conceals hostile calculation, and in prey forms part of an overwhelming effort to seem to have disappeared.
The men around her had parted reluctantly as Harkoo, providing blocking for Joe and Sammy like a back for the latter’s beloved Dodgers, shoehorned them into the circle.
“We’ve met,” Rosa said. It was almost a question. She had a strong, deep, droll, masculine voice, turned up to a point that verged on speaker-rattling, as if she were daring everyone around her to listen and to judge. But then maybe, Joe thought, she was just very drunk. There was a glass of something amber in her hand. In any case, her voice went well, somehow, with her dramatic features and the wild mass of brown woolen loops, constrained here and there by a desperate bobby pin, that constituted her hairstyle. She gave his hand a squeeze that partook of the same bold intentions as her voice, a businessman’s shake, dry and curt and forceful. And yet he noticed that she was, if anything, blushing more obviously than ever. The delicate skin over her clavicles was mottled.
“I don’t believe so,” said Joe. He coughed, partly to cover his discomfiture, partly to camouflage t
he suave rejoinder he had just been fed by the prompter crouching by the footlights of his desire, and partly because his throat had gone bone-dry. He felt a weird urge to lean down—she was a small woman, the top of whose head barely reached his collarbone—and kiss her on the mouth, in front of everyone, as he might have done in a dream, with that long optimistic descent across the distance between their lips enduring for minutes, hours, centuries. How surreal would that be? Instead, he reached into his pocket and took out his cigarettes. “Someone like you I would absolutely remember,” he said.
“Oh, good God,” said one of the men beside her in disgust.
The young woman to whom he was lying produced a smile which—Joe couldn’t tell—might have been either flattered or appalled. Her smile was a surprisingly broad and toothy achievement for a mouth that in contemplation had been compacted into such a tiny pout.
“Huh,” said Sammy. He, at least, sounded impressed by Joe’s suavity.
Longman Harkoo said, “That’s our cue.” He put his arm once more around Sammy’s shoulder. “Let’s get you a drink, shall we?”
“Oh, I don’t—I’m not—” Sammy reached out to Joe as Harkoo led him away, as though worried that their host was about to drag him off to the promised volcano. Joe watched him go with a cold heart. Then he held the pack of Pall Malls out to Rosa. She tugged a cigarette free and put it to her lips. She took a long drag. Joe felt constrained to point out that the cigarette was not lit.
“Oh,” she said. She snorted. “I’m such an idiot.”
“Rosa,” chided one of the men standing beside her, “you don’t smoke!”
“I just took it up,” Rosa said.
There was a muffled groan, then the cloud of men around her seemed to dissolve. She took no notice. She inclined toward Joe and peered up, curving her hand around his and the flame of the match. Her eyes shone, an indeterminate color between champagne and the green of a dollar. Joe felt feverish and a little dizzy, and the cool talcum smell of Shalimar she gave off was like a guardrail he could lean against. They had drawn very close together, and now, as he tried and failed to prevent himself from thinking of her lying naked and facedown on Jerry Glovsky’s bed, her broad downy backside with its dark furrow, the alluvial hollow of her spine, she took a step backward and studied him.