The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (with bonus content) (47 page)

Sometimes, when he was making arrangements with the parents beforehand, the name of Houdini came up, and Joe would be asked if he might (naturally with a commensurate increase in his fee) perform an escape; but here he drew the line.

“I escaped from Prague,” he would say, looking down at his bare wrists as if for the reddened trace of a manacle. “I think maybe that is enough.”

Here the parents, exchanging looks with Rosa, would invariably agree and write him out a check for a hundred dollars. It had never seemed to occur to Joe that the reason for his sudden popularity on the West Side bar mitzvah circuit was neither the erratic skill of his prestigious digits, nor the unwavering fervor of his young fans, but rather the sympathy those parents felt for a homeless Jewish boy who had somehow managed to get out from under the shadow of the billowing black flag that was unfurling across Europe, and who was known to donate his entire fee to the Transatlantic Rescue Agency.

“I’m not getting any better,” he said now, watching abstractly as he expanded in her hand. “Really, it’s embarrassing. At Tannen’s they all make fun of me.”

“You’re much better than you used to be,” she said, and then added, with just a hint of self-servingness: “Everything’s much better, isn’t it?”

“Much better,” he said, moving a little in her grasp. “Yes. Much.”

When she first met him, he had been such a forlorn, solitary figure, bruised and broken from all his street fighting, with the little fireplug, Sammy Clay, his lone prop and associate. Now he had friends, down at that magic shop of his, and in the New York art world. He had changed; she had changed him. In the pages of
Radio Comics
—Rosa was now a loyal reader—he and the Escapist continued to fight the forces of the Iron Chain, in battles that were increasingly grotesque and ornate. But the sad futility of the struggle, which Joe had sensed so early in his run on the magazine and which had been immediately apparent to Rosa, seemed to have begun to overtake the ingenuity of his pen. Month after month, the Escapist ground the armies of evil into paste, and yet here they were in the spring of 1941 and Adolf Hitler’s empire was more extensive than Bonaparte’s. In the pages of
Triumph
, the Four Freedoms
^*
attained the orgasmically impossible goal of killing Hitler, only to learn in the next issue that their victim had been merely a mechanical double. Though Joe kept fighting, Rosa could see that his
heart had gone out of the mayhem. It was in the pages of
All Doll
, in realms far from Zothenia or Prague, that Joe’s art now blossomed.

Luna Moth was a creature of the night, of the Other World, of mystic regions where evil worked by means of spells and curses instead of bullets, torpedoes, or shells. Luna fought in the wonderworld against specters and demons, and defended all us unsuspecting dreamers against attack from the dark realms of sleep. Twice now she had flapped into battle against slavering Elder Creatures readying vast interdimensional armadas of demons, and while it was easy enough to see such plots as allegories of paranoia, invasion, and world war, and Joe’s work here as a continuation of the internecine conflict of
Radio
and
Triumph
, the art Joe turned in for
Luna Moth
was very different from his work on the other books. Rosa’s father, with his eye for native
American sources of the Surrealist idea, had introduced Joe to the work of Winsor McKay. The urban dreamscapes, the dizzying perspectives, the playful tone, and the bizarre metamorphoses and juxtapositions of
Little Nemo in Slumberland
all quickly found their way into Joe’s pages for
Luna Moth
. Suddenly the standard three tiers of quadrangular panels became a prison from which he had to escape. They hampered his efforts to convey the dislocated and non-Euclidean dream spaces in which Luna Moth fought. He sliced up his panels, stretched and distorted them, cut them into wedges and strips. He experimented with benday dots, cross-hatching, woodcut effects, and even crude collage.
^*
Through this bravura landscape of twilight flew a wisecracking, powerful young woman with immense breasts, fairy wings, and furry antennae. The strip lay poised on the needle-sharp fulcrum between the marvelous and the vulgar that was, to Rosa, the balancing point of Surrealism itself. She could see Joe, in each new issue, contending with the conventions and clichés of Sammy’s more than usually literate stories, working his way toward some kind of breakthrough in his art. And she was determined to be there when he did. She had a feeling that she was going to be the only one to notice or appreciate it when it happened; to her, Joe had that authentic air of the solitary bricoleur, the potterer of genius, like the Facteur Cheval or that strange and diffident other Joe, Mr. Cornell, striking out toward the sublime in a vessel constructed of the commonplace, the neglected, the despised. Being there, supporting him in whatever way she could, at that moment of embarkation and on all the brilliant journey that would follow, had become a key element, along with helping him bring over his brother, and binding her to him and to America with unbreakable bonds, in her mission of love. As for the practice of her own art, that had always been less a matter of mission than of long, moody habit, a way of snatching at her emotions and ideas as they flitted past and pinning them, as it were, to canvas before they could elude her gaze. In the end, it would take far less time for the
world, or at least that small portion of the world that read and thought about comic books, to acclaim Joe’s genius than it took for anyone—least of all Rosa—to acknowledge her own.

“I’d better start getting ready,” he said, though he did not move, and she redoubled her grip on his penis.

“What are you planning to do with this?” she asked him. “Maybe you could work it into your act. I could paint a little face on it.”

“I don’t work with puppets.”

There was a knock on the door. She let go of him, and he clambered over her to get underneath the coverlet, too. “Yes?” she called.

“Open up! I have a little gift for the Amazing.” It was her father. Rosa got up and pulled on a bathrobe. Then she picked up the cigarette that Joe had left burning on her dresser and went over to the door.

Her father stood in the hall, dressed for the reception in an enormous three-piece cocoa-brown seersucker suit, and carrying a canvas garment bag over one arm. He peered in curiously at Joe, who had sat up in bed, the blanket pulled up just high enough to cover himself. The question of this not being a convenient time to interrupt the young lovers, or of whether perhaps he ought to come back later, did not occur to her father. He just barreled right into her room.

“Josef,” he said, raising the garment bag. “We have noticed that every time you perform, you’re obliged to rent your tuxedo.” Her father was inclined to the imperial “we” when he felt he was being particularly magnanimous. “It seemed to us you really ought to have one of your own.” He unzipped the bag. “I had it made,” he said.

The jacket was the color of the sky over Prague Castle on a clear winter night. The trousers were also a glossy, coal-dark blue, piped with a bright gold stripe. And affixed to one of the satiny black lapels was a small golden pin in the shape of a skeleton key.

“I sort of thought,” her father said. “In honor of you-know-who.” He reached into the pocket of the jacket and pulled out a domino mask of the same black satin as the jacket lapels, with long ties of black ribbon. “It couldn’t hurt to add a little bit of mystery to the act.”

Rosa was as surprised as Joe. She was smiling so hard that her ears started to hurt a little. “Joe,” she said, “look what he did.”

“Thank you,” Joe said, “I—” He made a show of wanting to stand up, trapped in the bed by his nakedness.

“For God’s sake, toss him a towel,” her father drawled. “So he can thank us properly.”

Joe climbed down from the bed, pulling the coverlet up around him. He knotted it around his waist and then took the blue tuxedo from Rosa’s father. A rather clumsy embrace followed, then her father brought out a flask and, after a bit of hopeless rummaging through the chaos of Rosa’s room, managed to find a glass that was only slightly smudged with lipstick prints.

“To the Amazing Cavalieri,” he said, raising the pink-tinged glass of whiskey. “Whom—dare I say it?”

“Dare it,” Rosa said, feeling herself blushing mightily.

“I’ll just say that, in a family as small as this, there is most certainly room for one more.” He drank.

Rosa was watching Joe’s face, feeling almost drunk on the happiness of the moment, and so she saw the look of pain that flickered across it at these words.

“I already have a family,” he said quietly.

“Oh, yes … Joe, for heaven’s sake, I know that. I just—”

“I’m sorry,” Joe said immediately. “That was very rude of me. Thank you so much, for everything. For this.” He held up the tuxedo. “For your kindness. For Rosa.”

He had nearly saved the moment, and they allowed him to think that he had. But her father fled the bedroom within the minute, and Rosa and her Joe were left alone, on the bed, naked, staring at the empty blue suit.

T
HE LAST LETTER
that Joe was ever to receive from his mother, mailed from the Ostrovni Street post office, as the laws required, between the hours of one and three in the afternoon, read as follows (the black marks trace the brusque transit of the censor’s pen across the text):