She shook her head.
“No, I’m really not a nurse,” she said briskly, as if skipping over some incident or emotion she preferred to keep to herself. “It was just something I—pursued.” She gave an explanatory sigh as if tired of her own tale. “I wanted to be a nurse in Spain. You know. In the war. I volunteered. I had a post in a hospital run by the A.C.P. in Madrid, but I … hey.” She let his hand fall. “How did you know …”
“I saw your business card.”
“My—Oh.” He was rewarded with a full new flush. “Yes, it’s such a bad habit,” she went on, resuming her big stage voice though there was no crowd to overhear the performance, “leaving things in men’s bedrooms.”
Joe wasn’t, in Sammy’s phrase, buying any of that. He would have been willing to bet not only that having left her purse behind in Jerry Glovsky’s room had mortified Rosa Luxemburg Saks but that her habits did not even encompass the regular visiting of men’s bedrooms.
“This is going to hurt,” she promised him.
“Badly?”
“Horribly, but only for a second.”
“All right.”
She looked at him, steadily, and licked her lips, and he had just noticed that the pale brown irises of her eyes were flecked with green and gold when abruptly she twisted his hand one way and his finger the other, and, crazing his arm to the elbow with instantaneous veins of lightning and fire, set the joint back into place.
“Wow.”
“Hurt?”
He shook his head, but there were tears rolling down his cheeks.
“Anyway,” she said. “I had a ticket from New York to Cartagena on the Bernardo. On March twenty-fifth, 1939. On the twenty-third, my stepmother died very suddenly. My father was devastated. I postponed sailing for a week. On the thirty-first, the Falangists took Madrid.”
Joe remembered the Fall of Madrid. It had come two weeks after the fall, uncapitalized, disregarded, of Prague.
“You were disappointed?”
“Crushed.” She cocked her head to one side, as if listening to the echo of the word she had just uttered. She gave her head a decisive shake. A curl slipped free of its pin and tumbled down the side of her face. She brushed it irritably to one side. “You want to know something? Honestly, I was relieved. What a coward, huh?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Oh, yes. I am. A big coward. That’s why I just keep daring myself to do things I’m afraid of doing.”
He had a notion. “Such things like?”
“Like bringing you up here to my room.”
This was unquestionably the moment to kiss her. Now he was the coward. He leaned over and started to flip with his good hand through a stack of paintings by the bed. “Very good,” he said after a moment. Her brushwork seemed hasty and impatient, but her portraits—the term “still life” did not suffice—of produce, canned foods, and the occasional trotter or lamb chop were at once whimsical, worshipful, and horrifying, and managed to suggest their subjects perfectly without wasting too much time on the details. Her line was very strong; she could draw as well as he, perhaps better. But she took no pains with her work. The paint was streaked, blotchy, studded with dirt and bristles; the edges of paintings often were left ragged and blank; where she couldn’t get something quite right, she just blotted it out with furious, petulant strokes. “I can almost to smell them. What murder?”
“Huh?”
“You said there was a murder.”
“Oh, yes. Caddie Horslip. She was a socialite or a debutante or—they hung my great-granduncle for it. Moses Espinoza. It was a huge sensation at the time, back in the eighteen-sixties, I think.” She noticed that she was still holding his hand. She let it go. “There. Good as new. Have you got a cigarette?”
He lit one for her. She continued to kneel in front of him, and there was something about it that aroused him. It made him feel like a wounded soldier, making time in a field hospital with his pretty American nurse.
“He was a lepidopterist, Moses,” she said.
“A—?”
“He studied moths.”
“Oh.”
“He knocked her out with ether and killed her with a pin. Or at least that’s what my father says. He’s probably lying. I made a dreambook about it.”
“A pin,” he said. “Ouch.” He waggled his finger. “It’s good, I think. You fixed it.”
“Hey, how about that.”
“Thank you, Rosa.”
“You’re welcome, Joe. Joe. You don’t make a very convincing Joe.”
“Not yet,” he said. He flexed his hand, turned it over, studied it. “Am I going to be able to draw?”
“I don’t know, can you draw now?”
“I’m not bad. What’s a dreambook?”
She set the burning cigarette down on a phonograph record that lay on the floor beside her and went to her desk. “Would you like to see one?”
Joe bent over and picked up the cigarette, holding it upright between the very tips of his fingers as though it were a stick of burning dynamite. It had melted a small divot into the second movement of Mendelssohn’s Octet.
“Here, this is one. I can’t seem to find the Caddie Horslip.”
“Really?” he said dryly. “What a surprise.”
“Don’t be smart, it’s unattractive in a man.”
He handed the cigarette to her and took from her a large, clothbound book, black with a red spine. It was an accounts ledger, swollen to twice its normal thickness, like a book left out in the rain, from all the things pasted into it. When he turned to the first page, he found the words “Airplane Dream #13” written in an odd, careful hand like a scattering of spindly twigs.
“Numbered,” he said. “It’s like a comic book.”
“Well, there are just so many. I’d lose track.”
“Airplane Dream #13” told the story, more or less, of a dream Rosa had had about the end of the world. There were no human beings left but her, and she had found herself flying in a pink seaplane to an island inhabited by sentient lemurs. There seemed to be a lot more to it—there was a kind of graphic “sound track” constructed around images relating to Peter Tchaikovsky and his works, and of course abundant food imagery—but this was, as far as Joe could tell, the gist. The story was told entirely through collage, with pictures clipped from magazines and books. There were images from anatomy texts, an exploded musculature of the human leg, a pictorial explanation of peristalsis. She had found an old history of India, and many of the lemurs of her dream-apocalypse had the heads and calm, horizontal gazes of Hindu princes and goddesses. A seafood cookbook, rich with color photographs of boiled crustacea and poached whole fish with jellied stares, had been thoroughly mined. Sometimes she inscribed text across the pictures, none of which made a good deal of sense to him; a few pages consisted almost entirely of her brambly writing, illuminated, as it were, with collage. There were some penciled-in drawings and diagrams, and an elaborate system of cartoonish marginalia like the creatures found loitering at the edges of pages in medieval books. Joe started to read sitting down in her desk chair, but before long, without noticing, he had risen to his feet and started pacing around the room. He stepped on a moth without noticing.
“These must take hours,” he said.
“Hours.”
“How many have you done?”
She pointed to a painted chest at the foot of her bed. “A lot.”
“It is beautiful. Exciting.”
He sat down on the bed and finished reading, and then she asked him about what he did. Joe permitted himself, for the first time in a year, to consider himself, under the pressure of her interest in him and what he did, an artist. He described the hours he had put into his covers, lavishing detail on the flanges and fins of a death-wave generator, distorting and exaggerating his perspectives with mathematic precision, dressing up Sammy and Julie and the others and taking test photographs to get his poses right, painting luscious plumes of fire that, when printed
, seemed to burn the slick ink and paper of the cover itself. He told her about his experiments with a film vocabulary, his sense of the emotional moment of a panel, and of the infinitely expandable and contractible interstice of time that lay between the panels of a comic book page. Sitting on Rosa’s moth-littered bed, he felt a resurgence of all the aches and inspirations of those days when his life had revolved around nothing but Art, when snow fell like the opening piano notes of the Emperor Concerto, and feeling horny reminded him of a passage from Nietzsche, and a thick red-streaked dollop of crimson paint in an otherwise uninteresting Velázquez made him hungry for a piece of rare meat.
At some point, he noticed that she was looking at him with a strange air of expectancy, or dread, and he stopped. “What is it?”
“Lampedusa,” she said.
“What’s that? Lampedusa?”
Her eyes widened as she waited, in expectancy or dread. She nodded.
“You mean the island?”
“Oh!” She threw her arms around his neck, and he fell backward on the bed. Moths scattered. The sateen coverlet brushed against his cheek like a moth’s wing.
“Hey!” said Joe. Then she settled her mouth on his and left it there, lips parted, whispering an unintelligible dreambook sentence.
“Hello? Hey! Joe, you up here?”
Joe sat up. “Shit.”
“Is that your brother?”
“My cousin Sam. My partner. In here, Sam,” he said. Sammy stuck his head in the door of the bedroom. “Oh, hi,” he said. “Jeez, I’m sorry. I was just—”
“She’s a nurse,” Joe said, feeling oddly culpable, as if he had somehow betrayed Sammy and must excuse his presence here. He held up his repaired hand. “She fixed it.”
“That’s great, uh, hi. Sam Clay.”
“Rosa Saks.”
“Listen, Joe, I was uh—I was just wondering if you were ready to leave this—excuse me, Miss, I know you live here and all—creepy place.”
Joe could see that something had upset Sammy. “What is it?”
“The kitchen …”
“The kitchen?”
“It’s black.”
Rosa laughed. “True,” she said.
“I don’t know. I just—I just want to get home, you know. Get to work on that thing. The uh, sorry. Forget about it. I’ll see you.”
He turned and started out. In Joe’s absence, he had undergone a strange experience. He had wandered through the ballroom and a small conservatory behind it and into the mansion’s kitchen, where the walls and floor were covered in gleaming black tile and the countertops coated with black enamel. There were a fair number of people crowded in there as well, and, hoping to find a place where he could be alone for just a moment and perhaps use the toilet, he had turned into a large butler’s pantry. Here he had come upon the unlikely sight of two men, each wearing, with the overdetermination of a dream, a necktie and a mustache, embracing, their mustaches interlocked in a way that had reminded Sammy, for some reason, of the way his mother used to fit his comb into the bristles of the brush on top of his dresser when he was a kid.
Sammy had backed quickly out of the kitchen and come looking for Joe; he felt that he wanted to leave, right away. He knew about homosexuality, of course, as an idea, without ever having really connected it to human emotion; certainly never to any emotion of his own. It had never occurred to him that two men, even homosexual men, might kiss in that way. He had assumed, to the degree he had ever permitted himself to give it any thought it all, that the whole thing must be a matter of blow jobs in dark alleyways or the foul practices of love-starved British sailors. But those men with the neckties and mustaches—they had been kissing the way people kissed in the movies, with care and vigor and just a hint of showiness. One fellow had caressed the other’s cheek.
Sammy rummaged through the riot of furs and overcoats draped on hooks in the front hall until he located his own. He settled his hat on his head and went out. He stopped and lingered on the top step. His thoughts were disordered and strange to him. He was appallingly jealous; it was like a heavy round stone had lodged in the center of his chest, but he could not have said for sure whether he was jealous of Joe or of Rosa Luxemburg Saks. At the same time, he was glad for his cousin. It was marvelous that in this big town he had managed to rediscover, a year later, the girl with the miraculous behind. Perhaps she would be able, as Sammy had not, to find a way to distract Joe at least a little from his evident project of getting his clock cleaned by every last German in the city of New York. He turned and looked back at the doorman, a raffish-looking fellow in a greasy gray jacket who leaned against the front door, smoking a cigarette. What had so rattled Sammy about the scene he had witnessed? What was he afraid of? Why was he running away?
“Forget something?” said the doorman.
Sammy shrugged. He turned and went back into the house. Not entirely sure of what he was doing, he forced himself to walk back through the ballroom that was, now that Dalí had abandoned his diving costume, filled with happy and confident people who knew what they wanted and whom they loved, and into the black-tiled kitchen. A group of people were standing around the stove arguing about the proper way to make Turkish coffee, but the two men in the pantry had gone, leaving no trace of their presence. Had he imagined the whole thing? Was such a kiss really possible?
“Is he a fairy?” Rosa was, at that moment, asking Joe. They were still sitting on her bed, holding hands.
Joe was at first shocked by this suggestion, and then suddenly not. “Why would you say that?” he said.
She shrugged. “He has the feel,” she said.
“Hmm,” Joe said. “I don’t know. He is—” He shrugged. “A good boy.”
“Are you a good boy?”
“No,” Joe said.
He leaned forward to kiss her again. They bumped teeth, and it made him weirdly aware of all the bones in his head. Her tongue was milk and salt, an oyster in his mouth. She put her hands on his shoulders, and he could feel her getting ready to push him away, and then after a moment she did.
“I’m worried about him,” she said. “He looked a little lost. You should go after him.”
“He will be fine.”
“Joe,” she said.
“Oh.” She wanted him, he understood, to leave. They had taken it as far as she was prepared to go now. It was not what he expected from a foulmouthed flower of bohemia, but he had a feeling there was both more and less to her than that. “Okay,” he said. “Yes. I—I have work to do, too.”
“Good,” Rosa said. “Go work. Will you call me?”
“May I?”
“UNiversity 4-3212,” she said. “Here.” She got up and went over to her drawing table and scrawled the number on a sheet of paper, then tore it off and handed it to Joe. “Get whoever it is to absolutely promise to take a message because they’re horribly unreliable around here about that kind of thing. Wait a minute.” She wrote out another number. “This is my number at work. I work at Life, in the art department. And this is my number at the T.R.A. I’m there three afternoons a week and on Saturdays. I’ll be there tomorrow.”
“The tea array?”
“Transatlantic Rescue Agency. I’m a volunteer secretary there. It’s a small operation on this end. Shoestring. Really it’s just me and Mr. Hoffman. Oh, he is a wonderful man, Joe. He has a boat, he bought it himself, and he’s working right now to get as many Jewish children out of Europe as the boat can fit.”
“Children,” Joe said.
“Yes. What are—is there—do you have children—in your family? Back in—”
“Where is it?” Joe said. “The T.A.R.?”
Rosa wrote out an address on Union Square.
“I would like to see you there tomorrow,” Joe said. “Would that perhaps be possible?”
WE HAVE ONE SHIP,” said Hermann Hoffman. He was dimpled and plump, with a trim Vandyke, bags under his eyes that had an air of permanence, and a shiny black hairpiece almost aggressive in i
ts patent falsity. His office at the Transatlantic Rescue Agency overlooked the iron-black trees and rusty foliage of Union Square. He had spent twenty times on his gray worsted suit what Joe, whose economy grew more draconian as his income increased, had spent on his own. With the precision of someone cutting a deck of cards, Hoffman drew three brown cigarettes from a pack that featured a gilt pharaoh and dealt one to Joe, one to Rosa, and one to himself. His nails were clipped and pearly, and his brand of cigarette, Thoth-Amon, imported from Egypt, was excellent. Joe could not imagine why such a man would wear a toupee that looked as if it had been ordered from the back cover of Radio Comics. “One ship, twenty-two thousand dollars, and half a million children.” Hoffman smiled. It was, on his face, an expression of defeat.
Joe glanced at Rosa, who raised an eyebrow. She had warned him that Hoffman and his agency, struggling to achieve the impossible, operated on the perpetual brink of failure. In order to avoid having his heart broken, she said, her boss adopted the manner of an inveterate pessimist. She nodded, once, urging Joe to speak.
“I understand,” said Joe. “I knew, of course—”
“It’s a very nice ship,” Hoffman continued. “She was called the Lioness, but we’ve renamed her the Ark of Miriam. Not large, but extremely well maintained. We bought her from Cunard, which had her on the Haiphong-to-Shanghai run. That’s a picture of her.” He pointed to a tinted photograph on the wall behind Joe. A trim liner, its plimsoll colored bold red, steamed across a bottle-green sea under a heliotrope sky. It was a very large photograph, in a platinum frame. Hermann Hoffman regarded it lovingly. “She was originally built for the P&O Company in 1893. A good deal of our initial endowment went toward her purchase and refitting, which, due to our emphasis on hygiene and humane treatment, proved to be quite costly.” Another hangdog smile. “Most of the remainder went into the bank accounts and mattresses of various German officers and functionaries. After we take out pay for the crew and documentation, I don’t honestly know how much we’ll be able to accomplish with the little we have left. We may not be able to underwrite passage for half the children we have already arranged to bring over. It’s going to cost us more than a thousand dollars per child.”