The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (with bonus content) (90 page)

I
N ALL HIS LIFE
up to this afternoon, Sammy had gotten himself loaded only once, in that big house on a windswept stretch of Jersey shoreline, on the night before Pearl Harbor was attacked, when he fell first among beautiful and then evil men. Then, as now, it was something that he did mostly because it seemed to be expected of him. After the clerk released him from his oath, he turned, feeling as if the contents of his head had been blown like the liquor of an Easter egg through a secret pinhole, to face that puzzled roomful of gawking Americans. But before he had a chance to see whether they—strangers and friends alike—would avert their eyes or stare him down, would drop their jaws in horror or surprise, or would nod, with Presbyterian primness or urbane complacency, because they had suspected him all along of harboring this dark youth-corrupting wish to pad around his stately manor home with a youthful sidekick, in matching smoking jackets; before, in other words, he got a chance to begin to develop a sense of who and what he was going to be from now on—Joe and Rosa bundled him up, in a kidnapperly combination of their overcoats and bunched newspapers, and hustled him out of Courtroom 11. They dragged him past the television cameramen and newspaper photographers, down the stairs, across Foley Square, into a nearby chophouse, up to the bar, where they arranged him with the care of florists in front of a glass of bourbon and ice, all as if according to some long-established set of protocols, known to any civilized person, to be followed in the event of a family member’s being publicly identified as a lifelong homosexual, on television, by members of the United States Senate.

“I’ll have one of the same,” Joe told the bartender.

“Make that three,” Rosa said.

The bartender was looking at Sammy, an eyebrow arched. He was an Irishman, about Sammy’s age, stout and balding. He looked over his shoulder at the television on its shelf above the bar; although it was showing only an ad for Ballantine beer, the set appeared to be tuned to 11, WPIX, the station that had been carrying the hearings. The bartender looked back at Sammy, a mean Irish twinkle in his eye.

Rosa cupped her hands on either side of her mouth. “Hello!” she said. “Three bourbons on the rocks.”

“I heard you,” the bartender said, taking three glasses from below the bar.

“And turn that TV off, why don’t you?”

“Why not?” the bartender said, with another smile for Sammy. “Show’s over.”

Rosa snatched a package of cigarettes out of her purse and tore one from the pack. “The bastards,” she said, “the bastards. The fucking bastards.”

She said it a few more times. Neither Joe nor Sammy seemed to be able to think of anything to add. The bartender brought their drinks, and they drained them quickly and ordered another round.

“Sammy,” Joe said. “I’m so sorry.”

“Yeah,” Sammy said. “Well. That’s okay. I’m all right.”

“How are you?” Rosa said.

“I don’t know, I feel like I’m really all right.”

Though he was inclined to attribute the perception to alcohol, Sammy noticed that there appeared to lie no emotion at all, none at least that he could name or identify, behind his shock at his sudden exposure and his disbelief at the way it had happened. Shock and disbelief: a pair of painted flats on a movie set, behind which lay a vast, unknown expanse of sandstone and lizards and sky.

Joe put an arm across Sammy’s shoulders. On the other side of Sammy, Rosa leaned against him, and laid her head on Joe’s hand, and sighed. They sat that way for a while, propping one another up.

“I can’t help noticing that I’m not hearing a lot of astonishment from you two,” Sammy said at last.

Rosa and Joe sat up, looked at Sammy, and then at each other behind his back. They blushed.

“Batman and Robin?” Rosa said, astonished.

“That’s a dirty lie,” Sammy said.

They drank one more round, and then someone, Sammy wasn’t sure who, said that they had better be getting back out to Bloomtown, since Joe’s boxes were coming today and Tommy was due home from school in less than two hours. There followed a general donning of coats and scarves, some slapstick with dollar bills and the spilled ice from a drink, and then at some point Rosa and Joe seemed to remark that they were headed out the door of the chophouse and that Sammy was not with them.

“You’re both too drunk to drive anyway,” Sammy told them when they returned for him. “Take the train from Penn Station. I’ll bring the car home later.”

Now came the first time that they looked at Sammy with something approaching the doubt, the mistrust, the pity that he had been dreading seeing in their faces.

“Give me a break,” he said. “I’m not going to fucking drive into the East River. Or anything like that.”

They didn’t move.

“I swear to you, all right?”

Rosa looked at Joe again, and Sammy wondered if it wasn’t just that they worried he might do something to hurt himself; perhaps they were worried that, as soon as they left him, he would head up to Times Square and try to cruise a sailor. And then Sammy realized that, after all, he could.

Rosa came back toward him and unfurled a big lurching hug that nearly sent Sammy tumbling off his bar stool. She spoke into his ear, her breath warm and with a burned-cork smell of bourbon.

“We’ll be all right,” she said. “All of us.”

“I know,” Sammy said. “Go on, you guys. I’m just going to sit here. I’m just going to sober up.”

Sammy nursed his drink for the next hour, chin in his palms, elbows on the bar. The dark brown, sardonic taste of the bourbon, which at first
he had found unpalatable, now seemed no different to him from that of the tongue in his mouth, the thoughts in his head, the heart beating imperturbably in his chest.

He wasn’t sure what finally started him thinking about Bacon. Perhaps it was the revived memory of that alcoholic night at Pawtaw in 1941. Or maybe it was just the single pink wrinkle that creased the broad back of the barman’s neck. Over the years, Sammy had regretted nearly everything about his affair with Bacon except, until now, its secrecy. The need for stealth and concealment was something that he had always taken for granted as a necessary condition both of that love and of the shadow loves, each paler and more furtive than the last, that it had cast. Back in the summer of 1941, they had stood to lose so much, it seemed, through the shame and ruination of exposure. Sammy could not have known that one day he would come to regard all the things that their loving each other had seemed to put at so much risk—his career in comic books, his relations with his family, his place in the world—as the walls of a prison, an airless, lightless keep from which there was no hope of escape. Sammy had long since ceased to value the security that he had once been so reluctant to imperil. Now he had been unmasked, along with Bruce and Dick, and Steve and Bucky, and Oliver Queen (how obvious!) and Speedy, and that security was gone for good. And now there was nothing left to regret but his own cowardice. He recalled his and Tracy’s parting at Penn Station on the morning of Pearl Harbor, in the first-class compartment of the Broadway Limited, their show of ordinary mute male farewell, the handshake, the pat on the shoulder, carefully tailoring and modulating their behavior though there was no one at all watching, so finely attuned to the danger of what they might lose that they could not permit themselves to notice what they had.

“Hey, Weepin’ Wanda,” said the bartender, in a tone of not quite mock menace. “We don’t allow crying in this bar.”

“Sorry,” Sammy said. He wiped his eyes on the end of his necktie and sniffled.

“Saw you on the TV this afternoon,” the bartender said. “Didn’t I now?”

“Did you?”

The barman grinned. “You know, I always wondered about Batman and Robin.”

“Did you?”

“Yeah. Thanks for clearing that up.”

“You,” said a voice behind Sammy. He felt a hand on his shoulder and turned to find himself looking into the face of George Debevoise Deasey. The ginger mustache had faded and dulled to the color of a turned slice of apple, and the eyes behind the thick lenses were rheumy and branched with pink veins. But Sammy could see that they were animated by the same old glint of mischief and indignation.

Sammy pushed back from his stool and half-fell, half-lowered himself to the floor. He was not quite as sober as he might have been.

“George! What are you—were you there? Did you see it?”

Deasey seemed not to hear Sammy. His gaze was leveled at the bartender.

“Do you know why they have to fuck each other?” Deasey asked the man. He had developed a slight tremor of his head, it seemed to Sammy, which gave him a more querulous air than ever.

“What’s that?” the bartender said.

“I said, Do you know why Batman and Robin have to fuck each other?” He took out his wallet and pulled out a ten-dollar bill, nonchalant, building up to the punch.

The bartender shook his head, half-smiling, waiting for something good. “Now, why is that?” he said.

“Because they can’t go fuck themselves.” Deasey tossed the bill onto the bar. “The way you can. Now why don’t you make yourself useful and bring me a rye and water, and another of what he’s having?”

“Say,” the bartender said, “I don’t have to take that kind of talk.”

“Then don’t,” said Deasey, abruptly losing interest in the discussion. He climbed up onto the stool beside Sammy’s and patted the seat that Sammy had vacated. The bartender languished for a few seconds in the cold of the sudden conversational void that Deasey had left him to, then moved over and took two clean glasses from the back bar.

“Sit down, Mr. Clay,” Deasey said.

Sammy sat, a little in awe of George Deasey, as ever.

“Yes, I was there, to answer your question,” Deasey said. “I happened to be in town for a few weeks. I saw you were on the bill.”

George Deasey had left the comics business during the war, never to return. An old school chum had recruited him into some kind of intelligence work, and Deasey had moved to Washington, remaining there after the war was over, doing things with men like Bill Donovan and the Dulles brothers, which, the few times that Sammy had run into him, he neither refused nor agreed to discuss. He was still dressed quaintly, in one of his trademark Woodrow Wilson suits, gray flannel with a parson collar and a clocked bow tie. For a few minutes, as they waited for the barman to bring them their drinks—he took his sweet time—and then sipped at them, Deasey said nothing. Finally, “It’s a sinking ship,” he said. “You ought to be grateful that they just threw you overboard.”

“Only I can’t swim,” Sammy said.

“Ah, well,” Deasey said lightly. He finished his drink and signaled to the bartender for another. “Tell me, has my old friend Mr. Kavalier truly returned? Can the fantastic tale I heard possibly be accurate?”

“Well, he wasn’t really going to jump,” Sammy said. “If that’s what you heard. And he didn’t write the letter. It was all—my son—it’s a long story. But he’s living in my house now,” Sammy said. “Actually, I think that he and my wife—”

Deasey held up a hand. “Please,” he said, “I’ve heard enough unsavory details about your private life today, Mr. Clay.”

Sammy nodded; he wasn’t going to argue with that.

“It really was something, wasn’t it?” he said.

“Oh, you were all right, I suppose. But I found the pornographer
extremely
touching.” Deasey turned to Sammy and licked his lips, as if wondering whether he ought to drop the bantering tone. “How are you holding up?”

Sammy tried again to decide how he was feeling.

“When I’m sober,” he said, “I’m probably going to want to kill myself.”

“Status quo for me,” Deasey said. The bartender smacked down another glass of rye in front of him.

“I don’t know,” Sammy said. “I know I ought to feel really bad.
Ashamed, or what have you. I know I ought to be feeling what that asshole there”—he jerked a thumb toward the bartender—“was trying to make me feel. Which I guess is what I’ve more or less been feeling for the last ten years of my life.”

“But you don’t.”

“No, I don’t. I feel—I don’t know what the word for it would be.
Relieved
, I guess.”

“I have been in the secrets business for a long time now, Clay,” Deasey said. “Take it from me, a secret is a heavy kind of chain. I don’t cotton very well to these proclivities of yours. In fact, I find them fairly revolting, particularly when I picture you personally indulging in them.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“But I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out in the end that Senator C. Estes Kefauver and his pals just handed you your own golden key.”

“My God,” Sammy said, “I think you might be right.”

“Of course I’m right.”

Sammy could not even begin to imagine what it would feel like to live through a day that was not fueled or deformed by a lie.

“Mr. Deasey, have you ever been to Los Angeles?”

“Once. I sensed that I could be extremely happy there.”

“Why don’t you go back?”

“I’m much too old to be happy, Mr. Clay. Unlike you.”

“Yeah,” Sammy said. “L.A.”

“And what would you do out there, I wonder?”

“I don’t know. Try to get work in television, maybe.”

“Television, yes,” Deasey said with a show of distaste. “Yes, you’d be very good at that.”