“I have no right to be.”
“I hurt your feelings. I abandoned you. I left Sammy to do my job.”
“I don’t hold that against you,” she said. “Not at all. And neither does he, I don’t think, not really. We both understand why you left. We understood then.”
“Thank you,” Joe said. “Maybe you can explain it to me sometimes.”
“It was when you didn’t come home, Joe. It was when you jumped overboard, or whatever it was you did.”
“I’m sorry for that, too.”
“That was something that was very hard for me to understand.”
He reached for her hand, taken aback by his own daring. She let him hold it for nine seconds, then reclaimed it. Her eyes crossed a little with reproach.
“I didn’t know how to come back to you,” he said. “I was trying for years, believe me.”
He was surprised suddenly to find her mouth on his. He put his hand on her heavy breast. They fell sideways against the paneled wall, dislodging a photograph of Ethel Klayman from its nail. Joe began to dig around inside the zipper fly of her jeans. The metal teeth bit into his wrist. He was sure that she was going to pull down her jeans and he was going to climb on top of her, right there in the hallway before Tommy came home from school. He had been wrong all along; it was not anger that she had interposed between them but the pane of an inexpressible longing like his own. Then the next thing he knew, they were standing up again in the middle of the hall, and the various sirens and air-raid beacons that had been going wild all around them seemed to have fallen silent abruptly. She replaced the various things he had left in disarray, zipped her trousers, smoothed her hair. The color on her lips had smeared all over her cheeks.
“Hum,” she said. And then, “Maybe not yet.”
“I understand,” he said. “Please let me know.” He meant it to sound patient and cooperative, but somehow it came out as abject. Rosa started to laugh. She put her arms around him, and he rubbed the smeared lipstick into her cheeks until it was gone.
“How did you do it, anyway?” she said. The tips of her teeth were stained with tea. “Get off the boat in the middle of the ocean, I mean.”
“I was never on it,” Joe said. “I went out on a plane the night before.”
“There were orders. I don’t know, medical certificates. Sammy showed me the photostats.”
He put on a mysterious Cavalieri smile.
“Always true to the code,” she said.
“It was very cleverly done.”
“I’m sure it was, dear. You were always a clever boy.”
He pressed his lips to the parting of her hair. It had an intriguing match-head smell of the Lapsang she preferred.
“What are we going to do?” he said.
She didn’t answer at first. She let go and stepped away from him, head tilted to one side, arching a brow; a taunting look that he remembered very well from their previous time together.
“I have an idea,” she said. “Why don’t you try to figure out where we’re going to put all your goddamned comic books?”
NINETY-FIVE, NINETY-SEX, NINETY-SEVEN. NINETY-SEVEN.”
“A hundred and two.”
“I count ninety-seven.”
“You miscounted.”
“We’re going to need a truck.”
“This is what I have been telling you.”
“A truck and then a whole fucking warehouse.”
“I’ve always wanted a warehouse,” Joe said. “That’s always been the dream of mine.”
Though Joe preferred to remain vague on the subject of just how many comic books, crammed into pine crates of his own manufacture—complete runs of Action and Detective, Blackhawk and Captain America, of Crime Does Not Pay and Justice Traps the Guilty, of Classics Illustrated and Picture Stories from the Bible, of Whiz and Wow and Zip and Zoot and Smash and Crash and Pep and Punch, of Amazing and Thrilling and Terrific and Popular—he actually owned, there was nothing at all vague about the letter he had received from lawyers representing Realty Associates Securities Corporation, the owners of the Empire State Building. Kornblum Vanishing Creams, Inc., had been evicted for violating the terms of its lease, which meant that the ninety-seven or one hundred and two wooden crates, filled with comic books, that Joe had amassed—along with all of his other belongings—must either be transported or disposed of.
“So toss ’em,” Sammy said. “What’s the big deal?”
Joe sighed. Although all the world—even Sammy Clay, who had spent most of his adult life making and selling them—viewed them as trash, Joe loved his comic books: for their inferior color separation, their poorly trimmed paper stock, their ads for air rifles and dance courses and acne creams, for the basement smell that clung to the older ones, the ones that had been in storage during Joe’s travels. Most of all, he loved them for the pictures and stories they contained, the inspirations and lucubrations of five hundred aging boys dreaming as hard as they could for fifteen years, transfiguring their insecurities and delusions, their wishes and their doubts, their public educations and their sexual perversions, into something that only the most purblind of societies would have denied the status of art. Comic books had sustained his sanity during his time on the psychiatric ward at Gitmo. For the whole of the fall and winter following his return to the mainland, which Joe spent shivering in a rented cabin on the beach at Chincoteague, Virginia, with the wind whistling in through the chinks in the clapboard, half-poisoned by the burned-hair smell of an old electric heater, it was only ten thousand Old Gold cigarettes and a pile of Captain Marvel Adventures (comprising the incredible twenty-four-month epic struggle between the Captain and a telepathic, world-conquering earthworm, Mr. Mind) that had enabled Joe to fight off, once and for all, the craving for morphine with which he had returned from the Ice.
Having lost his mother, father, brother, and grandfather, the friends and foes of his youth, his beloved teacher Bernard Kornblum, his city, his history—his home—the usual charge leveled against comic books, that they offered merely an easy escape from reality, seemed to Joe actually to be a powerful argument on their behalf. He had escaped, in his life, from ropes, chains, boxes, bags, and crates, from handcuffs and shackles, from countries and regimes, from the arms of a woman who loved him, from crashed airplanes and an opiate addiction and from an entire frozen continent intent on causing his death. The escape from reality was, he felt—especially right after the war—a worthy challenge. He would remember for the rest of his life a peaceful half hour spent reading a copy of Betty and Veronica that he had found in a service-station rest room: lying down with it under a fir tree, in a sun-slanting forest outside of Medford, Oregon, wholly absorbed into that primary-colored world of bad gags, heavy ink lines, Shakespearean farce, and the deep, almost Oriental mystery of the two big-toothed, wasp-waisted goddess-girls, light and dark, entangled forever in the enmity of their friendship. The pain of his loss—though he would never have spoken of it in these terms—was always with him in those days, a cold smooth ball lodged in his chest, just behind his sternum. For that half hour spent in the dappled shade of the Douglas firs, reading Betty and Veronica, the icy ball had melted away without him even noticing. That was magic—not the apparent magic of the silk-hatted card-palmer, or the bold, brute trickery of the escape artist, but the genuine magic of art. It was a mark of how fucked-up and broken was the world—the reality—that had swallowed his home and his family that such a feat of escape, by no means easy to pull off, should remain so universally despised.
“I know you think it’s all just crap,” he said. “But you should not of all people think this.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Sammy said. “Okay.”
“What are you looking at?”
Sammy had edged his way out into Miss Smyslenka’s office and was untying one of the stacked portfolios. At nine o’clock that morning, on his way into the Pharaoh offices, he had dropped Joe off here, to begin the laborious process of clearing himself out. It was
nearly eight P.M. now, and Joe had been dragging, packing, and repacking, without a break, all day. His shoulders ached, and his fingertips were raw, and he was feeling out of sorts. It had been disorienting to come back here and find everything as he had left it—and then to have to begin to dismantle it. And he was stung by the look in Sammy’s eye just now when he walked in and found Joe still at work, finishing the job. Sammy had looked pleasantly surprised—not that the job was finished, Joe thought, so much as to find that Joe was still there. They all thought—all three of them—that he was going to leave them again.
“I’m just taking another look at these pages of yours,” Sammy said. “This is beautiful stuff, I have to tell you. I’m really looking forward to reading it all.”
“I don’t think you will like that. Probably nobody will like that. Too dark.”
“It does seem dark.”
“Too dark for a comic book, I think.”
“Is this the beginning? God, look at that splash.” Sammy, his overcoat slung over one arm, sank to the floor beside the broad pile of black cardboard portfolios that they had bought this morning at Pearl Paints, so that Joe could pack up his five years of work. His voice turned dark and cobwebbed. “The Golem!” He shook his head, studying the first splash page—there were forty-seven splash pages in all—at the head of the first chapter of the 2,256-page comic book that Joe had produced during his time at Kornblum Vanishing Creams; he had just begun work on the forty-eighth and final chapter when Tommy gave him up to the authorities.
Joe had arrived in New York in the fall of 1949 with a twofold intention: to begin work on a long story about the Golem, which had been coming to him, panel by panel and chapter by chapter, in his dreams, in diners, on long bus rides all across the south and northwest, since he had set out from Chincoteague three years before; and, gradually, carefully, even at first perhaps stealthily, to see Rosa again. He had reestablished a few tentative connections to the city—renting an office in the Empire State Building, resuming his visits to the back room at Louis Tannen’s, opening an account at Pearl Paints—and then settled in to implement his double plan. But while he had gotten off to a fine and rapid start on the work that would, he hoped at the time, transform people’s views and understanding of the art form that in 1949 he alone saw as a means of self-expression as potent as a Cole Porter tune in the hands of a Lester Young, or a cheap melodrama about an unhappy rich man in the hands of an Orson Welles, it proved much harder for him to return himself, even a little at a time, to the orbit of Rosa Saks Clay. The Golem was going so well; it absorbed all of his time and attention. And as he immersed himself ever deeper into its potent motifs of Prague and its Jews, of magic and murder, persecution and liberation, guilt that could not be expiated and innocence that never stood a chance—as he dreamed, night after night at his drawing table, the long and hallucinatory tale of a wayward, unnatural child, Josef Golem, that sacrificed itself to save and redeem the little lamplit world whose safety had been entrusted to it, Joe came to feel that the work—telling this story—was helping to heal him. All of the grief and black wonder that he was never able to express, before or afterward, not to a navy psychiatrist, nor to a fellow drifter in some cheap hotel near Orlando, Florida, nor to his son, nor to any of those few who remained to love him when he finally returned to the world, all of it went into the queasy angles and stark compositions, the cross-hatchings and vast swaths of shadow, the distended and fractured and finely minced panels of his monstrous comic book.
At some point, he had begun to tell himself that his plan was not merely twofold but two-step—that when he was finished with The Golem, then he would be ready to see Rosa again. He had left her—escaped from her—in grief and rage and a spasm of irrational blame. It would be best, he told himself—wouldn’t it?—for him to return to her purged of all that. But while there might have been at first some merit in this rationalization, by 1953, when Tommy Clay had stumbled upon him in the magic shop, Joe’s ability to heal himself had long since been exhausted. He needed Rosa—her love, her body, but above all, her forgiveness—to complete the work that his pencils had begun. The only trouble was that, by then, as he had told Rosa, it was too late. He had waited too long. The sixty miles of Long Island that separated him from Rosa seemed more impassable than the jagged jaw of one thousand between Kelvinator Station and Jotunheim, than the three blocks of London that lay between Wakefield and his loving wife.
“Is there even a script?” Sammy said, turning over another page. “Is it, what, is it like a silent movie?”
There were no balloons in any of the panels, no words at all except for those that appeared as part of the artwork itself—signs on buildings and roads, labels on bottles, addresses on love letters that formed part of the plot—and the two words THE GOLEM! which reappeared on the splash page at the start of each chapter, each time in a different guise, the eight letters and exclamation point transformed now into a row of houses, now into a stairway, into nine marionettes, nine spidery bloodstains, the long shadows of nine haunted and devastating women. Joe had intended eventually to paste in balloons and fill them with text, but he had never been able to bring himself to mar the panels in this way.
“There is a script. In German.”
“That ought to go over big.”
“It will not go over at all. It’s not to sell.” Something paradoxical had occurred in the five years he had worked on The Golem: the more of himself, of his heart and his sorrows, that he had poured into the strip—the more convincingly he demonstrated the power of the comic book as a vehicle of personal expression—the less willingness he felt to show it to other people, to expose what had become the secret record of his mourning, of his guilt and retribution. It made him nervous just to have Sammy paging through it. “Come on, Sam, hey? Maybe we’d better go.”
But Sammy was not listening. He was flipping slowly through the pages of the first chapter, deciphering the action from the flow of wordless images across the page. Joe was aware of a strange warmth in his belly, behind his diaphragm, as he watched Sammy read his secret book.
“I—I guess I could try to tell you—” he began.
“It’s fine, I’m getting it.” Sammy reached into the pocket of his overcoat, without looking, and took out his wallet. He pulled out a few bills, ones and a five. “Tell you what,” he said. “I think I’m gonna be here for a while.” He looked up. “Could you eat?”
“You’re going to read this now?”
“Sure.”
“All of it?”
“Why not? I give over fifteen years of my life to climbing a two-mile pile of garbage, I can spare a few hours for three feet of genius.”
Joe rubbed at the side of his nose, feeling the warmth of Sammy’s flattery spread to his legs and fill his throat. “Okay,” he said at last. “So you can read it. But maybe you can wait till we get home?”
“I don’t want to wait.”
“I’m being evicted.”
“Fuck them.”
Joe nodded and took the money from Sammy. It had been a long time, a very long time, since he had allowed his cousin to boss him around in this way. He found that, as in the past, he rather liked it.
“And, Joe,” Sammy said, without looking up from the pile of pages. Joe waited. “Rosa and I were talking. And she, uh, we think it’s okay, if you want to … that is, we think that Tommy ought to know that you’re his father.”
“I see. Yes, I suppose you’re … I will talk to him.”
“We could all do it. Maybe we could sit him down. You. His mother. Me.”
“Sammy,” Joe said. “I don’t know if this is the right thing to say, or what the right way to say it is. But—thank you.”
“For what?”
“I know what you did. I know how it cost you something. I don’t deserve to have a friend like you.”
“Well, I wish I could say that I did it for you, Joe, because I’m such a good friend. But the truth is that, at that moment, I was as scared
as Rosa. I married her because I didn’t want to, well, to be a fairy. Which, actually, I guess I am. Maybe you never knew.”
“Sort of a little bit, maybe I knew.”
“It’s that simple.”
Joe shook his head. “That could be or is why you married her,” he said. “But that doesn’t explain how come you stayed. You are Tommy’s father, Sammy. As much or really, I think, a lot more than I am.”
“I did the easy thing,” Sammy said. “Try it, you’ll see.” He returned his attention to the sheet of Bristol board in his hands, part of the long sequence at the end of the first chapter that offered a brief history of golems through the ages. “So,” he said, “they make a goat.”
“Uh, yes,” Joe said. “Rabbi Hanina and Rabbi Oshaya.”
“A goat golem.”
“Out of earth.”
“And then …” Sammy’s finger traced the course of the episode down and across the page. “After they go to all this trouble. It looks like it’s kind of dangerous, making a golem.”
“It is.”
“After all that, they just … they eat it?”
Joe shrugged. “They were hungry,” he said.
Sammy said that he knew how they felt, and even though he seemed to mean the remark to be taken only literally, Joe had a sudden vision of Sammy and Rosa, kneeling together beside a flickering crucible, working to fashion something that would sustain them out of the materials that came to hand.
He rode down to the lobby and sat at the counter of the Empire State Pharmacy, on his usual stool, though for once without the usual dark glasses and false whiskers or watch cap pulled down past his eyebrows to the orbits of his eyes. He ordered a plate of fried eggs and a pork chop, as he always did. He sat back and cracked his knuckles. He saw the counterman giving him a look. Joe stood up and, in a small display of theatrics, moved two stools down the line, so that he was sitting right beside the window that looked out on Thirty-third Street, where anyone could see him.