The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (with bonus content) (52 page)

“Well, it was just sitting there.”

“And brought it up here.”

“Well, you were just sitting here.”

The lull that this observation introduced into their talk was filled all of a sudden by a dark purple stirring in the sky all around them, a long, low summery sound, at once menacing and familiar. There was an answering murmur of bells from the stacked glasses on the bar.

“Jeez,” Bacon said, getting up from the table. “Thunder.”

He went over to the windows and looked out. Sammy rose and followed him.

“This way,” he said, taking Bacon by the arm. “It’s blowing in from the southeast.”

They stood side by side, shoulders pressed together, watching the slow black zeppelin as it steamed in over New York, trailing long white guy wires of lightning. Thunder harried the building like a hound, brushing its crackling coat against the spandrels and mullions, snuffling at the windowpanes.

“It seems to like us.” A feather of laughter fluttered in Bacon’s voice. Sammy saw that he was afraid.

“Yeah,” Sammy said. “We’re its favorite.” He lit a cigarette, and at the spark of his lighter, Bacon jumped. “Relax. They’ve been coming all month. They come all through the summer.”

“Huh,” Bacon said. He took a swallow from the bottle of Burgundy, then licked his lips. “And I am relaxed.”

“Sorry.”

“That stuff doesn’t ever, you know, hit the building.”

“Five times so far this year, I think it is.”

“Oh my God.”

“Relax.”

“Shut up.”

“They’ve recorded strokes that were more than twenty-two thousand amperes.”

“Hitting this building.”

“Ten million volts, or something like that.”

“Jesus.”

“Don’t worry,” Sammy said, “the whole building acts like one gigantic—Oh.” Bacon’s breath was sour with wine, but one sweet drop of the stuff lingered on his lips as he pressed his mouth against Sammy’s. The stubble on their chins scraped with a soft electric rasp. Sammy was so taken by surprise that by the time his brain with its considerable store of Judeo-Christian prohibitions and attitudes could begin sending its harsh and condemnatory messages to the various relevant parts of his body, it was too late. He was already kissing Tracy Bacon back. They angled their bodies half toward each other. The bottle of wine clinked against the window glass. Sammy felt a tiny halo, a gemstone of heat burning his fingers. He let the cigarette drop to the floor. Then the sky just beyond the windows was veined with fire, and they heard a sizzle that sounded almost wet, like a droplet on a hot griddle, and then a thunderclap trapped them in the deep black caverns of its palms.

“Lightning rod,” said Sammy, pulling away. As if in spite of all he had been told one evening last week by the bland and reassuring Dr. Karl B. MacEachron of General Electric, who had been studying the electrical atmospheric phenomena associated with the Empire State Building, from Saint Elmo’s fire to reverse lightning that struck the sky, he was suddenly afraid. He took a step back from Tracy Bacon, stooped to retrieve his smoldering cigarette, and sought refuge by unconsciously adopting the dry manner of Dr. MacEachron himself. “The steel structure of the building attracts but then totally dissipates the discharge.…”

“I’m sorry,” Bacon said.

“That’s all right.”

“I didn’t mean to—wow, look at that.”

Bacon pointed to the deserted promenade outside the windows.
Along its railings, a bright blue liquid, viscous and turbulent, seemed to flow. Sammy opened the door and reached out into the ozone-sharp darkness, and then Bacon came beside him again and put out his hand, too, and they stood there, for a moment, watching as sparks two inches long forked from the tips of their outstretched fingers.

A
MONG THE MAGICIANS
who haunted Louis Tannen’s Magic Shop was a group of amateurs known as the Warlocks, men with more or less literary careers who met twice a month at the bar of the Edison Hotel to baffle one another with drink, tall stories, and novel deceptions. The definition of “literary” had been stretched, in Joe’s case, to include work in the comic book line, and it was through his membership in the Warlocks, another of whom was the great Walter B. Gibson, biographer of Houdini and inventor of the Shadow, that Joe had come to know Orson Welles, a semiregular attendee of the Edison confabulations. Welles was also, as it turned out, a friend of Tracy Bacon, whose first work in New York had been with the Mercury Theatre, playing the role of Algernon in Welles’s radio production of
The Importance of Being Earnest
. Between Joe and Bacon, they had managed to get four tickets to the premiere of Welles’s first film.

“So what’s he like?” Sammy wanted to know.

“He’s quite a guy,” Rosa said. She had briefly met the tall, baby-faced actor one afternoon when she dropped by the Edison bar to meet Joe, and thought she had sensed in him a kindred spirit, a romantic, someone whose efforts to shock other people were, more than anything else, the expression of a kind of hopefulness about himself, of a desire to escape the confines of a decent respectable home. In high school, she and a friend had gone uptown to see the booming, voodooistic
Macbeth
, and she had loved it. “I really think he’s a genius.”

“You think everyone’s a genius. You think this guy’s a genius,” Sammy said, jabbing Joe in the knee with a stubby forefinger.

“I don’t think
you
are,” she said sweetly.

“True genius is never recognized in its own time.”

“Except by the one who has it,” Bacon said. “Orson has no doubts on that score.”

They were all headed uptown together, crammed into the back of a taxicab. Sammy and Rosa had taken the jump seats, and Rosa had a good grip on Sammy’s arm. She had come from the offices of the T.R.A. and was dressed, with a dowdiness that pained her considerably, in a square-shouldered, belted brown tweed suit, of a vaguely military cut. She had been dressed like a schoolteacher the last time Orson Welles had seen her, too—the man was going to think that Joe Kavalier’s girlfriend was about as fascinating as a sack of onions. Sammy had on one of his big, pinstriped leftovers from a George Raft film, Bacon the usual penguin suit—he took the part of man-about-town a bit too seriously for Rosa’s taste, though, to his credit, that seemed to be just about the only thing he
did
take seriously. And Joe, of course, looked as if he had just fallen out of a hedge. There was white paint in his hair. It looked as though he had used the end of his necktie to blot an ink spill.

“He is a clever fellow,” Joe said. “But not so good a magician.”

“Is he really dating Dolores Del Rio?” Bacon said. “That’s what I want to know.”

“I wonder,” Joe said, though he seemed completely uninterested in the question. He was feeling blue tonight, Rosa knew. Hoffman’s ship, having finally reached Lisbon a few weeks previously, was to have reembarked for New York by now. But two days ago, a telegram had come from Mrs. Kurtzweil, the agent of the T.R.A. in Portugal. Three of the children had come down with measles; one of them was dead. Today they had received word that the entire convent of Nossa Senhora de Monte Carmelo had been put on an “absolute but indefinite quarantine” by the Portuguese authorities.

“I thought
you
were dating Dolores Del Rio, Bake,” Sammy said. “That’s what it said in Ed Sullivan.”

“It was Lupe Velez.”

“I mix those two up.”

“Anyway, you know better than to believe what you read in the papers.”

“Like, for instance, that Parnassus Pictures plans to bring funny-book strong man the Escapist to the silver screen in the person of noted radio star Mr. Tracy Bacon?”

“
Are
they?” Rosa said.

“It’s only going to be one of those
serials
,” Bacon said. “Parnassus. They’re from hunger.”

“Joe,” Rosa said, “you didn’t tell me.”

“It doesn’t make no difference to me,” Joe said, still looking out at the neon-and-steam spectacle of Broadway scrolling past the windows of the cab. A woman walked by with what looked like the tails of at least nine little dead weasels dangling from her shoulders. “For Sammy and me we don’t get a penny.”

Sammy looked at Rosa and lifted a shoulder—
What’s eating him?
Rosa gave Sammy’s arm a squeeze. She hadn’t had a chance to tell Sammy about the latest telegram from Lisbon.

“Maybe not on this end, Joe,” Sammy continued, “but listen. Tracy here said that if he does get the role, he’s going to put in a word for us with the studio. Tell them they ought to hire us to write the thing.”

“It’s only natural,” Bacon said. “ ’Course that probably damns the idea right there.”

“We could move to
Hollywood
, Joe. That could
lead
to something. It could be the start of something really
legit
.”

“Something legit.” Joe nodded his head in a ponderous way, as if, upon reflection, Sammy had settled the question that had been troubling Joe all day. Then he went back to his window. “I know that’s important to you.”

“There it is,” Bacon said. “The Palace.”

“The Palace,” Sammy said, an odd crease in his voice.

They pulled up in front of what was now known as the RKO Palace, once the summit and capital of American vaudeville, at the end of a line of cabs and hired cars. A colossal cutout of Orson Welles, looking wild-eyed and tousle-haired, loomed from the marquee. The whole front of the theater was riotous with flashbulbs and shouting, and there was a general impression of imminent catastrophe and red lipstick. Sammy had gone white as a sheet.

“Sam?” Rosa said. “You look like you saw a ghost.”

“He’s just worried we’re going to make him pay the fare,” said Bacon, reaching for his wallet.

Joe climbed out of the cab, settled his hat on his head, and held the door for Rosa. As she got out of the cab, she threw her arms around his neck. He lifted her from the ground, squeezing her tight, and took a long deep breath of her. She could feel the people around them staring, wondering who these two were, or thought they were. Joe’s gray hat started to tumble off the back of his head, but he caught it with one hand, then set Rosa back down on the ground.

“He’s going to be fine,” she told him. “He already had measles. It’s just a little delay, that’s all.”

She knew from bitter experience that Joe hated to be consoled, but to her surprise, when he set her down again, he was smiling. He looked around at the photographers, the crowd, the dazzling kliegs, the long black limousines at the curb, and she could see that it excited him. It
was
exciting, she thought.

“I know,” he said. “He’s going to be fine.”

“We could end up in Hollywood ourselves one of these days,” she said, urged to recklessness by his unexpected change of mood. “You, me, and Thomas. In a little bungalow in the Hollywood Hills.”

“Thomas would love that,” Joe said.

“The Palace.” Sammy had joined them, and was gazing up at the six giant letters atop the brilliant marquee. He took a five-dollar bill out of his wallet. “Here you go, buddy boy,” he said, handing it to Bacon. “The cab’s on me.”

G
REAT STUFF, THE
E
SCAPIST,
”
Orson Welles told Sammy. He seemed vastly tall and surprisingly young, and he smelled like Dolores Del Rio. In 1941 it was fashionable among certain smart people to confess to a more than passing knowledge of Batman, or Captain Marvel, or the Blue Beetle. “I don’t like to miss a word.”

“Thank you,” said Sam.

This, though he never forgot and in later years embellished it, was the extent of his interaction with Orson Welles, on that night or any other. At the party afterward, at the Pennsylvania Roof, Joe danced with Dolores Del Rio, and Rosa danced with handsome Joseph Cotten and with Edward Everett Horton, the latter by far the better dancer of the two. Tommy Dorsey’s band was playing. Sammy sat and watched and listened, eyes half-closed, aware, as were all devotees of big-band swing in 1941, that it was his privilege to be alive at the very moment when the practitioners of his favorite music were at the absolute peak of their artistry and craft, a moment unsurpassed in this century for verve, romanticism, polish, and a droll, tidy variety of soul. Joe and Dolores Del Rio danced a fox-trot and then, naturally, a rumba. That was the extent of Joe’s interaction with Dolores Del Rio, though he and Orson Welles continued to see each other from time to time at the bar of the Edison Hotel.