The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (with bonus content) (14 page)

“Maybe you’d better come down here, Jack,” he said. He hung up again and nodded in Joe Kavalier’s direction. “Is that your artist?”

“We both are,” said Sammy. “Artists, I mean.” He decided to match Anapol’s dubiety with a burst of self-confidence he was rapidly inducing himself to feel. He went over to the partition and rapped, with a
flourish, on the glass. Joe turned, startled, from his work. Sammy, not wanting to endanger his own display of confidence, didn’t let himself look too closely at what Joe had done. At least the whole page seemed to have been filled in.

“May I—?” he said to Anapol, gesturing toward the door.

“Might as well get him in here.”

Sammy signaled for Joe to come in, a ringmaster welcoming a famous aerialist into the spotlight. Joe stood up, gathering the portfolio and his stray pencils, then sidled into Anapol’s office, sketchpad clutched to his chest, in his baggy tweed suit, with his hungry face and borrowed tie, his expression at once guarded and touchingly eager to please. He was looking at the owner of Empire Novelty as if all the big money Sammy had promised had been packed into the swollen carapace of Sheldon Anapol and would, at the slightest prick or tap, come pouring out in an uncontrollable green torrent.

“Hello, young man,” said Anapol. “I’m told you can draw.”

“Yes, sir!” Joe said, in a voice that sounded oddly strangled, startling them all.

“Give it here.” Sammy reached for the pad and found, to his surprise, that he couldn’t pry it loose. For an instant, he was afraid that his cousin had done something so abominable that he was afraid to show it. Then he caught a glimpse of the upper left corner of Joe’s drawing, where a fat moon peered from behind a crooked tower, a crooked bat flapping across its face, and he saw that, on the contrary, his cousin simply couldn’t let go.

“Joe,” he said softly.

“I need a little more time with it,” Joe said, handing the pad to Sammy.

Anapol came around from behind his desk, lodged the burning cigarette in a corner of his mouth, and took the pad from Sammy. “Look at that!” he said.

In the drawing it was midnight, in a cobblestone alley crosshatched with menacing shadows. There were evocative suggestions of tiled roofs, leaded windows, icy puddles on the ground. Out of the shadows and into the light of the bat-scarred moon strode a tall, brawny man. His frame was as sturdy and thick as his hobnailed boots. For costume he
wore a tunic with deep creases, a heavy belt, and a big, shapeless stocking hat like something out of Rembrandt. The man’s features, though regular and handsome, looked frozen, and his intrepid gaze was empty. There were four Hebrew characters etched into his forehead.

“Is that the
Golem
?” said Anapol. “My new Superman is the Golem?”

“I didn’t—the conceit is new for me,” Joe said, his English stiffening up on him. “I just drawed the first thing I could think of that resembled … To me, this Superman is … maybe … only an American Golem.” He looked for support to Sammy. “Is that right?”

“Huh?” said Sammy, struggling to conceal his dismay. “Yeah, sure, but, Joe … the Golem is … well
 … Jewish
.”

Anapol rubbed his heavy chin, looking at the drawing. He pointed to the portfolio. “Let me see what else you got in there.”

“He had to leave all his work back in Prague,” Sammy put in quickly, as Joe untied the ribbon of the portfolio. “He just started throwing together some new stuff this morning.”

“Well, he isn’t fast,” Anapol said when he saw that Joe’s portfolio was empty. “He has talent, anyone can see that, but …” The look of doubtfulness returned to his face.

“Joe,” cried Sammy. “Tell him where you studied!”

“The Academy of Fine Art, in Prague,” said Joe.

Anapol stopped rubbing his chin. “The Academy of Fine Art?”

“What is that? Who are these guys? What’s going on in here?” Jack Ashkenazy burst into the office without warning or a knock. He had all his hair, and was a much snappier dresser than his brother-in-law, favoring checked vests and two-tone shoes. Because he had prospered, in a Kramler Building kind of way, more easily than Anapol, he had not been forced to develop the older man’s rumpled salesman’s charm, but he shared Anapol’s avidity for unburdening America’s youth of the oppressive national mantle of tedium, ten cents at a time. He plucked the cigar from his mouth and yanked the sketchpad out of Anapol’s hands.

“Beauteeful,” he said. “The head is too big.”

“The head is too big?” said Anapol. “That’s all you can say?”

“The body’s too heavy. Looks like he’s made out of stone.”

“He
is
made out of stone, you idiot, he’s a golem.”

“Clay, actually,” said Joe. He coughed. “I can do something more lighter.”

“He can do anything you want,” said Sammy.

“Anything,” Joe agreed. His eyes widened as an inspiration seemed to strike, and he turned to Sammy. “Maybe I ought to show them my fart.”

“He’s only ever read one comic book,” Sammy said, ignoring this suggestion. “But I’ve read them all, boss. I’ve read every issue of
Action
. I’ve studied this stuff. I know how it’s done. Look.” He picked up his own portfolio and untied the strings. It was a cheap pasteboard number from Woolworth’s, like Joe’s, but battered, scraped, and carefully dented. You couldn’t sit around in some art director’s waiting room with a brand-new-looking portfolio. Everyone would know you were a tyro. Sammy had spent an entire afternoon last fall hitting his with a hammer, walking across it in a pair of his mother’s heels, spilling coffee on it. Unfortunately, since purchasing it he had managed to land only two cartoons, one in a completely humor-free magazine called
Laff
and the other in
Belle-Views
, house organ of the psychiatric ward where his mother worked.

“I can do it all,” he boasted, pulling out a fistful of sample pages and passing them around. What he meant, more precisely, was that he could steal it all.

“It isn’t half bad,” Anapol said.

“It ain’t beauteeful, either,” said Ashkenazy.

Sammy glared at Ashkenazy, not because Ashkenazy had insulted his work—no one was ever more aware of his own artistic limitations than Sam Clay—but because Sammy felt that he was standing on the border of something wonderful, a land where wild cataracts of money and the racing river of his own imagination would, at last, lift his makeshift little raft and carry it out to the boundless freedom of the open sea. Jack Ashkenazy, whose watery eyes could easily, Sammy imagined, be stabbed out with the letter opener on Anapol’s desk, was threatening to get in his way. Anapol caught the look of visionary murder in Sammy’s eyes and took a chance on it.

“What say we let these boys go home over the weekend and try to
come up with a Superman for us.” He fixed Sammy with a hard look. “Our own kind of a Superman, naturally.”

“Of course.”

“How long is a Superman story?”

“Probably twelve pages.”

“I want a character and a twelve-page story by Monday.”

“We’re going to need a lot more than that,” said Ashkenazy. “They got typically five or six characters in there. You know, a spy. A private eye. A shadowy avenger of the helpless. An evil Chinaman. These two can’t come up with all that themselves
and
draw it. I got artists, Shelly. I got George Deasey.”

“No!” said Sammy. George Deasey was the editor in chief of Racy Publications. He was a tyrannical, ill-tempered old newspaperman who filled the Kramler Building’s elevators with the exacerbated smell of rye. “It’s mine. Ours, me and Joe. Boss, I can handle it.”

“Absolutely, boss,” said Joe.

Anapol grinned. “Get a load of this guy,” he said. “You just get me a Superman,” he went on, putting a placating hand on Sammy’s shoulder. “Then we’ll see about what you can handle or not. All right, Jack?”

Ashkenazy twisted his usually genial features into a grimace. “I have to tell you, Shelly. I got serious doubts. I’m going to have to say—”

“The radios,” Joe said. “The little radios outside.”

“Aw, forget the damn radios, Joe, will you?” Sammy said.

“What, the midgets?” Anapol said.

Joe nodded. “They are just wrong in the wires. All in the same way. One little wire is not, hmm. So.” He kissed the tip of one index finger with the other. “Stuck together to the resistance.”

“You mean to the
resistor
?”

“Okay.”

“You know from radios?” Anapol narrowed his eyes doubtfully. “You’re saying you could fix them?”

“Oh, assuredly, boss. It is simple to me.”

“How much is it going to cost?”

“Not anything. Some few pence for the—I do not know the word.” He angled his fingers into the form of a pistol. “
Weichlöte
. You must to melt it.”

“Solder? A soldering gun?”

“Okay. But perhaps I can to borrow that.”

“Just a few pence, huh?”

“Maybe one penny for the radio, each radio.”

“That’s cutting it pretty close to my cost.”

“But okay, I don’t charge to do the work.”

Sammy looked at his cousin, amazed and only a little put out at his having shanghaied the negotiation. He saw Anapol raise a meaningful eyebrow at his brother-in-law, promising or threatening something.

At last Jack Ashkenazy nodded. “There’s just one thing,” he said. He put a hand on Joe’s arm, restraining him before he could sidle out of the office, with his blank-eyed Golem and his empty portfolio. “This is a comic book we’re talking about, okay? Half bad is maybe better than beauteeful.”

T
HE FIRST OFFICIAL MEETING
of their partnership was convened outside the Kramler Building, in a nimbus compounded of the boys’ exhalations and of subterranean steam purling up from a grate in the pavement.

“This is good,” Joe said.

“I know.”

“He said
yes
,” Joe reminded his cousin, who stood patting idly with one hand at the front of his overcoat and a panicked expression on his face, as though worried that he had left something important behind in Anapol’s office.

“Yes, he did. He said yes.”

“Sammy.” Joe reached out and grabbed Sammy’s wandering hand, arresting it in its search of his pockets and collar and tie. “This is
good
.”

“Yes, this is good, god damn it. I just hope to God we can
do
it.”

Joe let go of Sammy’s hand, shocked by this expression of sudden doubt. He had been completely taken in by Sammy’s bold application of the Science of Opportunity. The whole morning, the rattling ride through the flickering darkness under the East River, the updraft of Klaxons and rising office blocks that had carried them out of the subway station, the ten thousand men and women who immediately surrounded them, the ringing telephones and gum-snapping chitchat of the clerks and secretaries in Sheldon Anapol’s office, the sly and harried bulk of Anapol himself, the talk of sales figures and competition and cashing in big, all this had conformed so closely to Joe’s movie-derived notions of life in America that if an airplane were now to land on Twenty-fifth Street and disgorge a dozen bathing-suit-clad Fairies of Democracy come to award him the presidency of General Motors, a
contract with Warner Bros., and a penthouse on Fifth Avenue with a swimming pool in the living room, he would have greeted this, too, with the same dreamlike unsurprise. It had not occurred to him until now to consider that his cousin’s display of bold entrepreneurial confidence might have been entirely bluff, that it was 8°C and he had neither hat nor gloves, that his stomach was as empty as his billfold, and that he and Sammy were nothing more than a couple of callow young men in thrall to a rash and dubious promise.

“But I have belief in you,” Joe said. “I trust you.”

“That’s good to hear.”

“I mean it.”

“I wish I knew why.”

“Because,” said Joe. “I don’t have any choice.”

“Oh ho.”

“I need money,” Joe said, and then tried adding, “god
damn
it.”

“Money.” The word seemed to have a restorative effect on Sammy, snapping him out of his daze. “Right. Okay. First of all, we need horses.”

“Horses?”

“Arms. Guys.”

“Artists.”

“How about we just call them ‘guys’ for right now?”

“Do you know where we can find some?”

Sammy thought for a moment. “I believe I do,” he said. “Come on.”

They set off in a direction that Joe decided was probably west. As they walked Sammy seemed to get lost quickly in his own reflections. Joe tried to imagine the train of his cousin’s thoughts, but the particulars of the task at hand were not clear to him, and after a while he gave up and just kept pace. Sammy’s gait was deliberate and crooked, and Joe found it a challenge to keep from getting ahead. There was a humming sound everywhere that he attributed first to the circulation of his own blood in his ears before he realized that it was the sound produced by Twenty-fifth Street itself, by a hundred sewing machines in a sweatshop overhead, exhaust grilles at the back of a warehouse, the trains rolling deep beneath the black surface of the street. Joe gave up trying to think like, trust, or believe in his cousin and just walked, head abuzz, toward the Hudson River, stunned by the novelty of exile.