“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.
As they ate, Sammy told Rosa the story of his day, from the time he had run into the boys at the Excelsior Cafeteria until the moment of Joe’s leap into the void.
“You could have died,” Rosa said in disgust, slapping gently at Joe’s shoulder. “Very easily. Rubber bands.”
“The trick was performed with success by Theo Hardeen in 1921, from the Pont Alexandre III,” Joe said. “The elastic band was specially prepared in that case, but I studied, and the conclusion was that my own was even stronger and more elastic.”
“Only it snapped,” Sammy said.
Joe shrugged. “I was wrong.”
Rosa laughed.
“I don’t say I wasn’t wrong, I’m just saying I didn’t think there was much chance I was going to die at all.”
“Did you think there was any chance they were going to lock you up on Rikers Island?” Sammy said. “He got arrested.”
“You got arrested?” said Rosa. “What for? ‘Creating a public nuisance’?”
Joe made a face, at once embarrassed and annoyed. Then he helped himself to another shovelful of casserole.
“It was for squatting,” Sammy said.
“It’s not anything.” Joe looked up from his plate. “I have been in a jail before.”
Sammy turned to her. “He keeps saying things like that.”
“Man of mystery.”
“I find it very irritating.”
“Did you make bail?” said Rosa.
“Your father helped me.”
“My father? He was helpful?”
“Apparently the elder Mrs. Wagner owns two Magrittes,” Sammy said. “The mayor’s mother. The charges were dropped.”
“Two late Magrittes,” said Joe.
The telephone rang.
“I’ll get it,” Sammy said. He went to the phone. “Hello. Uh-huh. Which paper? I see. No, he won’t talk to you. Because he would not be caught dead talking to a Hearst paper. No. No. No, that isn’t true at all.” Apparently, Sammy’s desire to set the record straight was greater than his disdain for the New York Journal-American. He carried the receiver into the dining room; they had just had an extra-long cord put on so that it could reach the dining table Sammy used as a desk whenever he worked at home.
As Sammy began to harangue the reporter from the Journal-American, Joe put down his fork.
“Very good,” he said. “I haven’t eaten anything like this in so long I can’t remember.”
“Did you get enough?”
“No.”
She served him another chunk from the dish.
“He missed you the most,” she said. She nodded in the direction of the dining room, where Sammy was telling the reporter from the Journal-American how he and Joe had first come up with the idea for the Escapist, on a cold October night a million years ago. The day a boy had come tumbling in through the window of Jerry Glovsky’s bedroom and landed, wondering, at her feet. “He hired private detectives to try to find you.”
“One of them did find me,” Joe said. “I paid him off.” He took a bite, then another, then a third. “I missed him, too,” he said finally. “But I used to always imagine that he was happy. When I would be sitting there at night sometimes thinking about him. I would read his comic books—I could always tell which ones were his—and then I would think, well, Sam is doing all right there. He must be happy.” He washed down the last bite of his third helping with a swallow of seltzer water. “It’s a very disappointment to me to find out that he is not.”
“Isn’t he?” Rosa said, not so much out of bad faith as from the enduring power of what a later generation would have termed her denial. “No. No, you’re right, he really isn’t.”
“What about the book, the Disillusioned American? I have often thought of it, too, from time to time.”
His English, she saw, had deteriorated during his years in the bush, or wherever he’d been.
“Well,” Rosa said, “he finished it a couple of years ago. For the fifth time, actually, I think it was. And we sent it out. There were some nice responses, but.”
“I see.”
“Joe,” she said. “What was the idea?”
“What was the idea of what? My jump?”
“Okay, let’s start with that.”
“I don’t know. When I saw the letter in the newspaper, you know, I knew that Tommy wrote it. Who else could it be? And I just felt, well, since I am the one to mention to him about it … I wanted … I just wanted to have it be … true for him.”
“But what were you trying to accomplish? Was the idea to shame Sheldon Anapol into giving you two more money, or …?”
“No,” Joe said. “I don’t guess that was ever the idea.”
She waited. He pushed his plate back and picked up her cigarettes. He lit two at once, then passed one to her, just the way he used to do, long, long ago.
“He doesn’t know,” he said after a moment, as if offering a rationale for his leap from the top of the Empire State Building, and although she didn’t grasp it at once, for some reason the statement started her heart pounding in her chest. Was she keeping so many secrets, so many different kinds of guilty knowledge from the men in her life?
“Who doesn’t know what?” she said. She reached, as if casually, to take an ashtray from the kitchen counter just behind Joe’s head.
“Tommy. He doesn’t know … what I know. About me. And him. That I—”
The ashtray—red and gold, stamped with the words EL MOROCCO in stylish gold script—fell to the kitchen floor and shattered into a dozen pieces.
“Shit!”
“It’s all right, Rosa.”
“No, it isn’t! I dropp
ed my El Morocco ashtray, god damn it.” They met on their knees, in the middle of the kitchen floor, with the pieces of the broken dish between them.
“So all right,” she said, as Joe started sweeping the shards together with the flat of his hand. “You know.”
“I do now. I always thought so, but I—”
“You always thought so? Since when?”
“Since I heard about it. You wrote me, remember, in the navy, back in 1942, I think. There were pictures. I could tell.”
“You have known since 1942 that you”—she lowered her voice to an angry whisper—“that you had a son, and you never—”
The rage that welled up suddenly felt dangerously satisfying, and she would have let it out, heedless of the consequences to her son, her husband, or their reputation in the neighborhood, but she was held back, at the very last possible moment, by the fiery blush in Joe’s cheeks. He sat there, head bowed, stacking the pieces of the ashtray into a neat little cairn. Rosa got up and went to the broom closet for a dustpan and broom. She swept up the ashtray and sent the pieces jingling into the kitchen trash.
“You didn’t tell him,” she said at last.
He shook his bent head. He was still kneeling in the middle of the kitchen floor. “We always never spoke very much,” he said.
“Why does that not surprise me?”
“And you never told him.”
“Of course not,” Rosa said. “As far as he knows, that”—she lowered her voice and nodded again toward the dining room—“is his father.”
“This is not the case.”
“What?”
“He told me that Sammy adopted him. He overheard this or some such thing. He has a number of interesting theories about his real father.”
“He … did he ever … do you think he …”
“At times I felt he might be leading up to asking me,” Joe said. “But he never has.”
She gave him her hand then, and he took it in his own. For an instant, his felt much drier and more callused than she remembered, and then it felt exactly the same. They sat back down at the kitchen table, in front of their plates of food.
“You still haven’t said,” she reminded him. “Why you did it. What was the point of it all?”
Sammy came back into the kitchen and hung up the phone, shaking his head at the profound journalistic darkness that he had just wasted ten minutes attempting to illuminate.
“That’s what the guy was just asking me,” he said. “What was the point of it?”
Rosa and Sammy turned to Joe, who regarded the inch of ash at the tip of his cigarette for a moment before tapping it into the palm of his hand.
“I guess this was the point,” he said. “For me to come back. To end up sitting here with you, on Long Island, in this house, eating some noodles that Rosa made.”
Sammy raised his eyebrows and let out a short sigh. Rosa shook her head. It seemed to be her destiny to live among men whose solutions were invariably more complicated or extreme than the problems they were intended to solve.
“Couldn’t you have just called?” Rosa said. “I’m sure I would have invited you.”
Joe shook his head, and the color returned to his cheeks. “I couldn’t. So many times I wanted to. I would call you and hang up the phone. I would write letters but didn’t send them. And the longer I waited, the harder it became to imagine. I just didn’t know how to do it, you see? I didn’t know what you would think of me. How you would feel about me.”
“Christ, Joe, you fucking idiot,” Sammy said. “We love you.”
Joe put his hand on Sammy’s shoulder and shrugged, nodding as if to say, yes, he had acted like an idiot. And that would be it for them, Rosa thought. Twelve years of nothing, a curt declaration, a shrug of apology, and those two would be as good as new. Rosa snorted a jet of smoke through her nostrils and shook her head. Joe and Sammy turned to her. They seemed to be expecting her to come up with a plan of action for them, a nice tight Rose Saxon script they could all follow, in which they would all get just the lines they wanted.
“Well?” she said. “What do we do now?”
The silence that ensued was long enough for three or four of Ethel Klayman’s proverbial idiots to enter this woebegone world. Rosa could see a thousand possible replies working themselves through her husband’s mind, and she wondered which one of them he was finally going to offer, but it was Joe who finally spoke up.
“Is there any dessert?” he said.
* In his excellent The Art of the Comic Book: An Aesthetic History.
* Among some dozen she is believed to have employed over the years.
WITH A SHARPENED Ticonderoga tucked behind his ear and a fresh yellow lawyer’s pad pressed to his chest, Sammy got into bed with her. He wore a pair of stiff cotton pajamas—these were white with a thin lime stripe and a diagonal pattern of gold stags’ heads—to which clung a sweet steam whiff of her iron. Normally he folded into the envelope of their bed an olfactory transcript of his day in the city, a rich record of Vitalis, Pall Mall, German mustard, the sour imprint of his leather-backed office chair, the scorched quarter-inch membrane of coffee at the bottom of the company urn, but tonight he had showered, and his cheeks and throat had a stinging mint smell of Lifebuoy. He transferred his relatively slight bulk from the floor of the bedroom to the surface of the mattress with the usual recitative of grunts and sighs. At one time Rosa would have inquired as to whether there was some general or specific cause for these amazing performances, but there never was—his groaning was either some involuntary musical response to the effects of gravitation, like the “singing” of certain moisture-laden rocks that she had read about in Ripley’s, produced by the first shafts of morning sun; or else it was just the inevitable nightly release, after fifteen hours spent ignoring and repressing them, of all the day’s frustrations. She waited out the elaborate process by which he effected a comprehensive rearranging of the mucus in his lungs and throat. She felt him settle his legs and smooth the covers over them. At last she rolled over and sat up on one arm.
“Well?” she said.
Given everything that had happened that day, there were a lot of different possible answers to her question. Sammy might have said, “Apparently our son is not, after all, a little school-skipping, comic-book-corrupted delinquent right out of the most lurid chapters of Seduction of the Innocent.” Or, for the thousandth time, with the usual admixture of wonder and hostility: “Your father is quite a character.” Or—she dreaded and longed to hear it: “Well, you got him back.”
But he just snuffled one last time and said, “I like it.”
Rosa sat up a little bit more.
“Really?”
He nodded, folding his hands behind his head. “It’s very disturbing,” he continued, and she realized that she had known all along that this was the answer she was going to get, or rather that this would be the line he would probably choose to take in reply to her open-ended invitation to fill her with longing and dread. She was, as always, anxious for his opinion of her work, and grateful, too, that he wanted to reckon things between them, for just a little longer, by the old calendar, as rife with lacunae and miscalculations as it may have been. “It’s like the Bomb really is the Other Woman.”
“The Bomb is sexy.”
“That’s what’s disturbing,” Sammy said. “Actually, what’s disturbing is that you could think such a thing.”
“Look who’s talking.”
“You gave the Bomb a figure. A womanly shape.”
“That comes right out of Tommy’s World Book. I didn’t make that up.”
Sammy lit a cigarette and then stared at the match head until it burned down almost to the skin of his fingers. He shook it out.
“Is he out of his mind?” he said.
“Tommy or Joe?”
“He’s been leading a secret life for the last ten years. I mean, but really. Disguises. Assumed names. He told me only a dozen people knew who he was. Nobody knew where he liv
ed.”
“Who knew?”
“A bunch of those magicians. That’s where Tommy first saw him. In the back room at Tannen’s.”
“Louis Tannen’s Magic Shop,” she said. That explained the intensity of Tommy’s attachment, which had always irritated her, to that shabby cabinet of trite tricks and flummery, which, the time she had visited it, had left her feeling depressed. He seems quite obsessed with the place, her father had once observed. She crept back now along the span of lies that Tommy had stretched across the last ten months. The carefully typed price lists, all fakes. Perhaps the interest in magic itself had all been faked. And the perfect simulacra of her signature, on those appalling excuse notes that Tommy concocted: of course it was Joe who had done them. Tommy’s own signature was brambly and uncouth; his hand was still decidedly wobbly. Why hadn’t it occurred to her before that the boy never could have produced such a forgery on his own? “They were pulling a giant sleight of hand on us. The eye patch was like, what did Joe used to call it?”
“Misdirection.”
“A lie to cover a lie.”
“I asked Joe about Orson Welles,” Sammy said. “He knew.”
She pointed to the pack of cigarettes, and Sammy handed her one. She was sitting up now, legs crossed, facing him. Her stomach hurt; that was nerves. Nerves, and the impact of years and years of accumulated fantasies collapsing all at once, toppling like a row of painted flats. She had imagined Joe not merely run down by passing trucks on a lonely road but drowned in remote Alaskan inlets, shot by Klansmen, tagged in a drawer in a midwestern morgue, killed in a jail riot, and in any number of various suicidal predicaments from hanging to defenestration. She could not help it. She had a catastrophic imagination; an air of imminent doom darkens much of even her sunniest work. She had guessed at the presence of violence in the story of Joe’s disappearance (though she had mistakenly thought it lay at the end and not the beginning of the tale). One heard more and more of suicides—suffering from “survivor’s guilt,” as it was called—among the more fortunate relatives of those who had died in the camps. Whenever Rosa read or was told of such a case, she could not prevent herself from picturing Joe performing the same act, by the same means; usually it was pills or the horrible irony of gas. And every newspaper account of somebody’s ill fate in the hinterlands—the man she had read about just yesterday tumbled from a sea cliff at the edge of San Francisco—she recast with Joe in the lead. Bear maulings, bee attacks, the plunge of a bus full of schoolchildren (he was at the wheel)—the memory of Joe underwent them all. No tragedy was too baroque or seemingly inapplicable for her to conceive of fitting Joe into it. And she had lived daily, for several years now, with the pain of knowing—knowing—all fantasy aside, that Joe really would never be coming home. But she could not seem to get hold, now, of the apparently simple idea that Joe Kavalier, secret life and all, was asleep on her couch, in her living room, under an old knit afghan of Ethel Klayman’s.