It's Superman! A Novel (50 page)

And she has to admit, he does seem happy tonight. Just look at the big goofus waving from the stage. What’s he think, he’s the star of the show? Men.

No, Ben Jaeger doesn’t think he’s the star; he knows he is only a wedding guest and a dead guy, but gosh! Things look so different from up here on stage. All those bawling playgoers! And the farther back they sit—mezzanine, balcony—the more perturbed they seem. Naturally Ben too has become immunized to the play’s sentiment; how many times can a person get the shivers hearing good-bye to food and coffee, to new-ironed dresses and hot baths, and oh Earth, you’re too wonderful for anyone to realize you? But still, being in a real Broadway show is great fun and beats the heck out of being a cop! So Ben enjoys himself, waving, grinning, blowing a kiss to Skinny. And as much as he would like to blow a kiss to Lois Lane, seated only ten rows away, orchestra left, he’s afraid Skinny might notice. She can be jealous. But more than that he’s afraid Lois might not appreciate it. When a thing is over, it’s over. Whoever said that, brother, knew what he was talking about. When it’s over, it
is
over. But who’s that slickster she’s sitting with? Ben doesn’t like his looks, not one tiny bit. He’s too old for you, Lois! Don’t waste yourself on a guy like that! Oh, Lois, Lois, sweet Lois. He blows a big kiss in her direction.

Lois winks back, pressing out a tear that trickles down her cheek. Seeing that tear, John Gurney grunts with moral disappointment. He snaps closed his notepad and teasingly flicks it away. “Oh, for pete’s sake, Lois, surely not you!” She slaps his hand, reaches around behind her for her coat. He told her during intermission that he intended to “crucify” this “pseudo-Chinese wreck of a play,” and it is evident he hasn’t changed his mind.

Since returning in December from Washington, D.C. (a victim of WPA politics), Gurney has been writing theater criticism (some, however, call it carnage) for the
Daily Planet
while teaching journalism again at Columbia. He invited Lois to speak to his class in mid-January, and since then they’ve gone out on three dates, four counting tonight although Lois doesn’t know if she would—he just had an extra ticket. He didn’t buy her dinner.

She doesn’t know how she feels about dating Professor Gurney—
John!
He’s handsome and worldly, not a cheapskate, and a very good kisser. And she does believe, sincerely believe, that a modern girl ought to have a wide variety of experiences with men, older ones included. Still . . . “Would you just listen to all this weeping and gnashing of teeth,” says Gurney swiveling his head from side to side. Then he cups his hands to his mouth and says in a raised voice, “It’s only a play, ladies and gentlemen,
a very bad play
!”

“Oh, will you shut up,” says Lois. As she is sticking an arm into a coat sleeve she glances up, for about the fiftieth time this evening, to a rococo-embellished formal box that juts over the stage. But Clark Kent’s back is still turned to her, not that she
really
wants to see his stupid mug (seeing it every day at work is bad enough!). And now that dyed-blond human hippo he’s sitting with leans over and says something to Clark, blocking him entirely. One, Lois can’t believe he spent the money it cost to buy those seats (at
least
twenty dollars!), and two, she can’t believe he’d show up at the theater with that blowsy so-called jazz singer.

You don’t think that Clark and she . . . that she and Clark? Forget about
Ulysses, that’s
obscene. For a fact she knows Clark goes over to Soda (heaven help us: Soda) Wauters’s little nightclub at least once a week, and Lois knows it for a fact because he’s asked her repeatedly to go with him, even though she has made it abundantly clear that she has no interest in dating him. No interest in Clark, period.

Now, if Clark’s friend
Superman
(over the last three months it’s gotten much easier for Lois to call him that) asked her out to a jazz club in Newark, you’d better believe she’d say yes. With that guy she’d go to a jazz club in Antarctica! Pick me up at eight and don’t be late!

“You about ready to leave?” says Gurney. “I could use a drink.”

But the cast has returned to the stage and is taking another series of bows while the audience gives them a second ovation—and Lois joins in.

2

Tonight just happens to be Soda Wauters’s thirty-seventh birthday, and she cannot imagine a grander, kinder, sweeter, more
thoughtful
gift than this! She has never been to a Broadway opening before, and this particular show was extra-special because it was written by Mr. Thornton Wilder. At Christmas, Clark gave her a copy of
The Bridge at San Luis Rey
and she’d loved it. Loved what it said, at least what it said to
her.
She is no literary expert, of course, and certainly no big reader, but what Soda took away from Mr. Wilder’s novel was this: everything is connected. And that includes every
body.
Everything and everybody is connected, and whatever happens, big or small, good or bad, happens for some reason. There are no accidents in the universe. It made sense. It comforted Soda. She even wrote a letter to Mr. Wilder to thank him for his wonderful book, and he wrote her back! Now she keeps his letter (“. . . I cannot tell you, dear lady, how much your kind note has meant to me . . .”) framed and hanging in her office at the club.

When she heard that Mr. Wilder had a new play previewing at the McCarter Theater in New Brunswick, Soda tried to get a ticket. But none were available. She told Clark how disappointed she was—and look what he did! Box seats on her birthday. She could kiss him! Instead she asks him now, “Are you all right?” and he nods.

But she’s not too sure of that.

He’s had a rough time of it lately, and since he came back last week from Kansas he’s been quiet and moody. Tonight he’s made every effort to be upbeat but hasn’t pulled it off. And he can’t sit still. Poor fidgety thing. Earlier she noticed him frowning, straining as if the actors weren’t speaking loud enough (which they most certainly were), then suddenly in a whisper he said, “Do you hear a fire engine?” A fire engine? No, Soda didn’t hear a fire engine. All she heard was the stage manager talking about how maybe once in a thousand times a marriage is interesting, and boy, could she relate to that! A fire engine? No, Soda didn’t hear any fire engine. And the next thing she knew Clark was gone! Didn’t get back till the intermission was nearly over. Hair disheveled, necktie askew, and if Soda didn’t know better she would have thought he sneaked out for a cigarette. His clothes reeked of smoke. He’d gotten a charley horse, he said, and had to walk it out.

She lays a hand on his shoulder. “Clark, thank you again, so much!”

He nods.

“I loved it. Did you love it?”

He nods.

“Oh, look, Clark! From here you can see the people backstage crowding around to peek out. You see them?”

He nods.

“See that skinny old man with the suspenders? Doesn’t he look exactly like a guy you’d see in those Dick Powell musicals? ‘Old Pop.’ Doesn’t he?”

Clark nods.

Soda takes a breath, applauds again as the little boy who delivered newspapers in act one and then was already dead (casualty of war) by act two steps forward to take another bow.

“Oh Clark, Clark! Look backstage, see where I’m pointing? Isn’t that your friend Willi?”

Clark nods.

“What’s he doing there?”

Clark shrugs, then leans forward and gently rests his forehead on the ledge of the box. Soda strokes his back in a wide circle . . .

3

Willi Berg is on assignment this evening for
Life
magazine, that’s why he’s backstage. Before tonight’s performance he spent two hours snapping candids of the actors. Even though Willi doesn’t particularly like Ben Jaeger, he nevertheless took three shots of the blond lummox. It rankles Willi that a guy like Jaeger—not a guy
like
Jaeger,
Jaeger
—ends up not only making time with Lois Lane but marrying Skinny Simon!

But Willi prides himself on being a professional and didn’t let his feelings for Jaeger interfere with his work. He was civil to the jerk and took three pictures of him: eating a sinker, scratching his nose, sticking his tongue out in front of a mirror. And he took a ton of pictures of Martha Scott, and got her telephone number while he was at it.

During the performance, Willi ate a sandwich and played a few hands of poker with the electricians, listened to “Old Pop” tell a funny story about walking in on Ethel Barrymore with her clothes off, and then strolled around snapping pictures of stagehands, asking the ones who weren’t smoking if they minded lighting up for his camera. He is amassing a collection of pictures that he hopes eventually to exhibit in an art gallery and later collect into a book. Both the exhibition and the book will be entitled
Smoking Metropolis.
To punctuate his people, he plans also to include pictures of leaves burning in gutters, buildings on fire, smokestacks, that sort of thing.

This is his fourth assignment for
Life
since December. So far he’s photographed a Beaux-Arts ball at the Hotel Navarro, a solemn High Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral (no flash bulbs permitted), and, notoriously, a feature called “The Birth of a Baby” that generated several thousand letters of “strong objection.” Willi couldn’t have asked for a better career boost! He was proud of that sequence of pictures, despite reservations about taking on the job in the first place. He didn’t know if he’d have the stomach for it. Up till the moment he walked into the delivery room at Doctor’s Hospital, either he’d been dreading the assignment or making crude jokes about it. Then he got to work and was awestruck. Afterward he held the swaddled baby; later still, he’d sent the mother and father a congratulatory card and the infant girl a flannel nightgown. Maybe he’s getting old or getting soft. Anyhow, the pictures came out great.

“Aren’t they
ever
gonna quit applauding?” he says now backstage, peering out from the wings, seeing the cast take still more bows.

“Ah, let the kids enjoy themselves,” says Old Pop. “They deserve it.”

“I guess,” says Willi, going up on his toes and checking out Martha Scott’s fine little fanny. “What’s the play about anyway?”

Old Pop looks at him, surprised. “Boy meets girl. They get married. She dies in childbirth.”

“What’s so great about
that
?”

Old Pop makes a face and walks away.

Willi picks up his camera and takes another picture of the cast taking their—what?—nine hundredth bows. As he lowers it he looks past the actors and sees Clark up in a fancy-schmancy box, arms folded on the railing, his face pressed against a forearm.

Poor guy. The poor guy.

He just hasn’t been the same since he got back from Kansas.

4

Clark doesn’t know what’s come over him. But he just feels so sad, so hopeless and sad. He can understand the play making him feel sad—but hopeless? There was nothing hopeless about
Our Town.
It was neither hopeless nor hopeful, just a play about how things are, how things go, for human beings on the planet, in the solar system, in the universe, in the mind of God. You’re born, you grow older, you live in a family, you go to school, you make friends, you get a job, you fall in love, you marry, you start another family, your eyes start to dim, your body fails, and you die. That’s all. Grovers Corner was a lot like Smallville, but also a lot like the dozens of towns he and Willi had passed through, drifted into, drifted out of. He could recognize Grovers Corner too in the filthy shantytowns and terrible hobo jungles he remembered, and in Hollywood as well, and in New York. Even in Panterville. Even in Panterville.

And all of the characters, all of the
people
in the play—the doctor, the editor, the wife who pined to go to Paris, the melancholic choirmaster, the gossips, the milkman, the soda jerk, the geologist, all of them—Clark recognized them all, had met them all and knew them all, young as he was. Those ordinary, ordinary, fortunate ordinary people.

He loved them, lived among them, but was not of them.

How could he be?

Would
his
eyes ever dim?
His
body ever fail?

Would
he
ever die?

He looks human and he tries hard, as hard as he can, to behave as he believes a human being ought to, but it is only playacting. If he isn’t human, though, what
is
he? He doesn’t know, just as he doesn’t really know anymore
who
he is—is he Clark Kent or is he this person called Superman? Only three months and he’s lost his way, lost his bearings.

There is nobody to teach him what to do, how to act, how to feel about the actions that he takes. He is alone, more now than he’s ever been. He hates it whenever he reads about himself in the newspaper or goes to the movies and sees himself in
The March of Time.
“Unique.” “Unparalleled.” “One of a kind.” “In a class by himself.”

Alone.

All by himself in the world, in the solar system, in the universe . . .

Lex Luthor, at least, seemed to get it.

But nobody else does.

Okay: Willi. But Willi is a big-shot photographer now, always busy. And when he isn’t, he’s off chasing showgirls, or drinking at the Stork Club, hobnobbing with guys like Alfred Eisenstaedt and Ernest Hemingway. Not that Clark disapproves (well, he does, but it’s none of his business), he just misses Willi’s steady company.

And no matter how often he lets her know that he’s interested in her, not just as a girlfriend (hopeless) but as a
friend,
Lois Lane spurns him.

When it comes to Lois, no matter what Clark does it’s always the wrong thing. Like the time she checked into the Rockland State Hospital for the Insane to expose its deplorable conditions. She used an alias and faked a serious mental depression. She intended to stay for thirty days, but after less than a week she had insomnia and dropped fifteen pounds; she was diagnosed with incipient dementia praecox and confined to an isolation wing, denied visitors. When Clark came to see her and was told of her “deteriorating” condition, he promptly informed the doctors of her real identity and she was released. Lois was in such a bad state she had to spend the Christmas holidays in a private sanatorium. But when she came home, shortly after New Year’s, she immediately phoned Clark and called him every name in the book of insults. He’d ruined her story, he’d humiliated her. He was jealous, that’s all, jealous—because she was the better reporter, the
real
reporter, and he shouldn’t even
think
of speaking to her ever again!