It's Superman! A Novel (36 page)

“Ben, this is, um, Clark Kent.”

Ben waits for a little bit more than that—Clark Kent
who
?

“Clark came by the
Planet
yesterday looking for a job. I gave him some advice.”

Ben Jaeger isn’t buying it, not entirely. But after giving Clark the quick once-over, he reaches up to shake hands. “Ben Jaeger.”

He grips Clark’s hand aggressively, too firmly and for several moments too long.

Clark resists the impulse to crunch his right back.

Really
crunch it.

“Good to meet you,” he says.

“Good to meet
you,”
says Ben.

A momentary change in his heart rate tells Clark he’s lying. Or at the very least being insincere.

“You still haven’t said how you got
this,”
says Lois. She waggles her pad.

“I was there. I saw you drop it. I picked it up. Oh.” He points. “Hope you don’t mind, but I took some notes for the parts you missed.”

Lois and Ben exchange an uncertain glance, then she hastily flips through the pad.

Her eyes open wide. “This is
true
? He actually resigned?”

“That’s what he said.”

“Ben, do you hear this? Luthor just quit as alderman.”

Ben Jaeger gets to his feet. “But why would he do that? Why not just stick around and
gloat?”

“And what’s he planning to do now?” says Lois.

Without another word to Clark—it’s as though they’ve completely forgotten he’s here—they cross Foley Square together and continue north on Lafayette Street into the dense hard shade cast by the Criminal Courts building.

Clark’s bliss is gone.

But at least she didn’t ask him for her stupid pencil back.

Willi gets the blues. Berenice Abbott.
Trick or treat. Ceil visits the Chrysler Building.
The Next Essential Thing. Soda’s Place.
●

1

It’s Halloween and Willi Berg has the blues. He should go jump in the river and drown. He has his pick of two, the East or the North, but the way that he’s feeling he can’t get out of
bed,
much less pick a
river.
He doesn’t have the energy. He sighs a lot and stares at the crackled ceiling, counts paint blisters. Clark keeps popping in. Can he get Willi something? He means a Pepsi-Cola or a cup of coffee, a bite to eat, but Willi says, Yeah sure, how ’bout my life back? In fact he doesn’t
say
it, just
thinks
it; he’s so far in the bushes that it seems pointless to speak. He just wallows, too blah, too whipped even to smoke.

While the news of Lex Luthor’s vindication surely played a major part in his gathering despair, as did the fact that Saturday came and Saturday went without another visit from Lois Lane, what really plunged Willi into full-blown wretchedness was a one-sentence plug in Ed Sullivan’s Saturday column for a new exhibit of Berenice Abbott’s photographs at the Museum of the City of New York.

Back in 1932 Willi had gone there to see Abbott’s first one-woman show and was amazed by her pictures of Manhattan’s bridges and piers and ferry slips, its car barns and railroad stations, hotels, theaters, flophouses, and skyscrapers. Except that they didn’t have any dead bodies or abandoned babies in them, and nobody in handcuffs, Abbott’s pictures, Willi felt, could easily have been
his.
And they were hanging in a fancy museum. Her prints made Willi feel special, like he was onto something, maybe something permanent, but for sure something more meaningful than a first-use fee. He loved her stuff.

Last night Willi tore Sullivan’s column from the paper and circled the item, found a tack, and stuck it to the kitchen wall—all done before it dawned on him: he couldn’t go to see Berenice Abbott’s new exhibition, was he nuts? He couldn’t just waltz into a
museum,
he’s a wanted man! That was a bad moment. But things got worse. He examined his predicament and his spirits crashed.

For two years he’s been drifting, and his name is no closer to being cleared than it was on the day he woke up in Roosevelt Hospital. He is still floating, still drifting. Worse, he is still running. He used to have a career, he used to
do
something,
be
somebody. He used to be Willi the Great.

Now he’s Willi the Lamster. Hiding out with the cockroaches, flopping a married woman for something to do, and counting on a freak from Kansas to be his lucky charm, his guardian angel. His way back.

He crawled into bed last night at eight. Now it’s seventeen hours later, going on one o’clock Sunday afternoon, and Willi is still in bed with a creaky back and a full bladder. By his count there are two hundred eighteen, two hundred nineteen, two hundred
twenty
discrete paint blisters on the ceiling. And six different places where plaster is missing and you can see the lathing.

There’s a knock on the apartment door. Willi’s mouth turns dry.

Clark sticks his head into the bedroom. “Don’t worry, it’s just some kids trick or treating.”

“How do
you
know?”

Clark squints at him in amusement.

Oh. Right. Those eyes.

After Clark has gone and dispensed penny candy into several open paper sacks, he returns to Willi’s bedside. “Why don’t you get up? It’s a beautiful day.”

“Leave me alone.”

“Want to play Parcheesi?”

“Beat it.”

With a shrug, Clark goes back to the kitchen. Soon Willi can hear him fiddling with the midget radio. He selects the Metropolitan Opera broadcast, which in ordinary circumstances Willi would tell him to turn
off.
But the way that he feels now he just can’t be bothered. So he folds his pillow around his head to block out some tenor’s booming aria.

A minute later Clark is back again. “I’m going to wash some clothes in the tub, anything you need done?”

“No!”

Ten minutes later Willi hears him walking around on the roof, hanging his wet laundry on one of the clotheslines strung up there.

Another half an hour goes past and by this point Willi knows if he doesn’t pee soon he’s going to burst. With reluctance he sits up and swings his legs to the floor. His joints and cartilage pop when he stands, then he stumbles because his right foot has got pins and needles. He’s still wearing yesterday’s clothes.

Limping into the kitchen, he finds Clark dressed in his Superman costume. But it’s been newly accessorized with one of Willi’s size-34 black belts cinched around his waist. The belt is narrow and braided, and has a dull pewter buckle.

“What do you think?”

“The belt’s got to be wider.”

“I think so, too. But
in general
—you like?”

“Yeah, it’s not too bad.”

Clark beams.

“I got to take a leak,” says Willi, heading for the door. The toilet’s down the hall.

When he comes back he lets Clark fix him a cup of tea. Sitting down at the kitchen table, he flicks a finger through a clogged ashtray until he finds a butt with a good inch left. He lights up while Clark is sprinkling loose pekoe into a tea ball. “You think a belt looks good, though, right?”

“Yeah. Terrific. But get your own.”

“I will. And I’ll get one that’s a little wider, like you said.”

There’s another knock on the door.

“More kids,” says Clark, picking up the sack of candy.

“Hey! You can’t open the door dressed like
that.”

Clark glances down at himself. “Why not? It’s Halloween,” he says and opens the door to a trio of boys in Brooklyn Dodger uniforms. In unison they say, “Anything for Halloween?”

But then their mouths all fall open.

“Holy smokes!” says one of the boys, the tallest and the one wearing basketball sneakers, not regulation cleats. “Who’re
you
supposed to be?”

“Me?” says Clark, distributing wax lips, chocolate babies, and bubble-gum cigars. “I’m the Saucer-Man from Saturn.”

The kids traipse off laughing and Clark shuts the door. “I just had the greatest idea,” he says, striding purposely into the bedroom and pulling the sheet off the bed. He begins ripping it into long strips.

“Clark, what do you think you’re doing? Hey!”

“You want to go to that museum, right? Let’s go today. Let’s go now.”

“You’re nuts. I can’t go to any museum.”

“I know
you
can’t,” he says, bending over Willi and wrapping one of the strips around the top of his head. “But what’s to stop the Invisible Man? It’s
Halloween,
Willi, don’t you get it? Trick or treat.
Dress up
.”

When he catches on, Willi laughs—but then makes a wincing face and crabs, “
Looser
; for crying out loud, you wanna
smother
me . . . ?”

2

Like everyone else, for the past seven years Ceil Stickowski has admired the tall and graceful new Chrysler Building with its helmetlike spire, its dramatic setbacks and decorative stainless-steel eagles. But being a New York City native she never would have considered going there just to see it. Tourists do that, it’s a dead giveaway, and Ceil would have felt disloyal to her city’s culture of indifference had she ever strolled into the lobby without a compelling reason. Today, however, she has an excellent—a very excellent—reason.

After the taxi drops her off on the corner of Lexington Avenue and Forty-second Street she throws back her shoulders, glances to both sides, and then enters the building.

Oh my lord! The lobby is finished in spectacular marble, and there is a revolving display of Chrysler motorcars, both classic and new, that she would like to spend some time admiring, but she isn’t here to gawk. She is here on business. And for it to be transacted on a Sunday afternoon, she thinks, it must surely be very special, very important business indeed. She has no idea what that business might be; all she knows is that Lex Luthor has requested her presence and that is good enough for her.

She feels self-conscious and trivial when she joins four middle-aged men also waiting for an elevator. Their immobile faces all share that poreless quality, that shell-pink glow you find only in the pampered well-to-do. They carry leather briefcases unmarred by the pettiest scratch or scuff. Lawyers? Possibly. But
corporate
lawyers. Or executives. Bigwigs. When the elevator comes they stand back and let Ceil precede them in. The marquetry is gorgeous, like nothing she has ever laid eyes on before. She struggles to keep her face bland and unimpressable. But wow. Some veneer.

Ceil has not seen Lex Luthor since the evening her poor husband died. She’s talked to him on the telephone several times, however, their longest conversation being the one they had a week after Herman’s funeral. (Mr. Luthor, bless his soul, paid for everything, including a granite headstone with a polished area for Herman’s name and dates.) During that particular conversation Ceil readily agreed to take over the running of one of Mr. Luthor’s “entertainment establishments” in Chelsea, and while she initially felt some misgivings about the work, she was in no position to turn it down. The salary was generous. Besides, Lex Luthor was the finest man she’d ever known. If he asked her to do something, she would do it. She made only one demand. Well, it wasn’t a demand exactly, she’d never demand anything from Lex Luthor. It was more in the nature of a request. She said she hoped there would be no colored girls working on the premises. And she said colored girls, that was the term she used, she wasn’t being
derogatory.
Even so, Mr. Luthor chided her. “Colored girls are human beings too, Mrs. Stickowski. Just like yourself.” She said of course they were, she understood that, it was just—“But rest assured, Mrs. Stickowski, the girls in your charge will all be white.” She was upset, feeling that she’d disappointed Mr. Luthor, who was surely more advanced than anyone alive in his social attitudes and his sympathies.

Ceil enjoyed operating the house, a four-story, seven-bedroom brownstone on West Twenty-third Street. And she felt motherly toward the girls, who were mostly Scotch-Irish. And they all behaved themselves. They followed instructions, had regular physician checkups, and avoided dangerous narcotics. You could ask them to do anything, with anyone, and they did it gladly. It was a pleasant time in Ceil’s life and a good way to get over the loss of her beloved husband.

So it was awfully perturbing when, just a month ago, she received another call from Lex Luthor, one that lasted only a few seconds. He merely spoke the code word she’d hoped never to hear. He said, “Blue,” and at once Ceil followed the protocols. Immediately upon hanging up the telephone receiver, she hurried downstairs to her office and drew out cash packets and open airplane tickets from the wall safe. She next emptied the house of clients, then summoned her girls to the front parlor, gave them each a thousand dollars and a plane ticket. They were packed, kissed good-bye, and gone by taxicabs in under an hour. Before they had even left the premises a crew of carpenters arrived, then a team of movers who carried in a dozen hospital beds and carried out the canopied and sleigh beds, as well as the long mechanized bed that did double duty as a torture rack. By morning the first patients were delivered, a contingent of destitute geriatric felons gathered from lord only knows where.

A manager is a manager, Ceil knows, and it really shouldn’t matter what she manages, but a nursing home just doesn’t have quite the zest of a cathouse.

When the elevator operator announces, “Forty-seventh floor,” Ceil is surprised to discover that it is also the destination of the four men sharing the car with her. An attractive slender woman with piled white hair and dressed in a royal blue dress stands waiting in the corridor. She holds a clipboard. Behind her on the wall, to the right of the entrance to a reception area, Ceil can see where the name of a former tenant—company name and logo limned ghostly by adhesive—once was fastened. There is no signage for a current occupant.

The woman presents a formal smile and pulls open the glass door by its tubular handle. “Gentlemen,” she says, “go right in, please.” Is that a brogue Ceil hears? The woman halts her with an expression both mild and despotic. Ceil takes a breath and holds it. “Mrs. Stickowski? Would you mind coming with me?” Leading Ceil down the corridor, she adds over a shoulder, “I’m Helen O’Shea, Mr. Luthor’s personal assistant.”