The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay Part 18

"Jeune homme, vous avez sauve une vie de tres grand valeur," he said. he said.

"Je le sais bien, maitre," said Joe. said Joe.

He felt a heavy hand on his shoulder. It was Longman Harkoo.

He was beaming, fairly rocking up and down in his sandals at the turn things had taken. The near death of a world-famous painter in a diving accident, in a Greenwich Village drawing room, contributed an unimpeachable Surrealist l.u.s.ter to the party.

"Hot stuff," he said.

Then the party seemed to close its fingers around Joe, treasuring him in its palm. He was a hero[6][6] People gathered around, tossing handfuls of hyperbolic adjectives and coa.r.s.e expostulations at his head, holding their pale tin-pan faces up to his as if to catch a splash of his rattling-jackpot moment of glory. Sammy managed to swim or shoulder his way through the people slapping and grabbing at Joe, and gave him a hug. George Deasey brought him a drink that was bright and cold as metal in his mouth. Joe nodded slowly, without speaking, accepting their tributes and acclaim with the sullen, abstracted air of a victorious athlete, breathing deep. It was nothing to him: noise, smoke, jostling, a confusion of perfumes and hair oils, a throb of pain in his right hand. He looked around the room, rising on tiptoe to see over the waxy tops of men's heads, peering through the dense foliage of the plumes on women's hats, searching Rosa out. All his self-denial, his Escapist purity of intentions, were forgotten in the flush of triumph and a sense of calm very like that which pervaded him after he had taken a beating. It seemed to him that his fortunes, his life, the entire apparatus of his sense of self were concentrated only on the question of what Rosa Saks would think of him now. People gathered around, tossing handfuls of hyperbolic adjectives and coa.r.s.e expostulations at his head, holding their pale tin-pan faces up to his as if to catch a splash of his rattling-jackpot moment of glory. Sammy managed to swim or shoulder his way through the people slapping and grabbing at Joe, and gave him a hug. George Deasey brought him a drink that was bright and cold as metal in his mouth. Joe nodded slowly, without speaking, accepting their tributes and acclaim with the sullen, abstracted air of a victorious athlete, breathing deep. It was nothing to him: noise, smoke, jostling, a confusion of perfumes and hair oils, a throb of pain in his right hand. He looked around the room, rising on tiptoe to see over the waxy tops of men's heads, peering through the dense foliage of the plumes on women's hats, searching Rosa out. All his self-denial, his Escapist purity of intentions, were forgotten in the flush of triumph and a sense of calm very like that which pervaded him after he had taken a beating. It seemed to him that his fortunes, his life, the entire apparatus of his sense of self were concentrated only on the question of what Rosa Saks would think of him now.

"She fairly bounded across the room to him," as E. J. Kahn would afterward describe it-referring in his item to Rosa (whom he knew slightly) only as "a fetching Village art maiden"-and then, after managing to reach him, she seemed to grow suddenly shy.

"What did he say to you?" she wanted to know. "Dali."

" 'Thank you,' " said Joe.

"That's all?"

"He called me 'jeune homme.'" 'jeune homme.'"

"I thought I heard you speaking French," she said, hugging herself to still a tremor of unmistakable, almost maternal pride. Joe, seeing his exploit so richly rewarded by the flush in her cheeks and her unwavering regard, stood there scratching at the side of his nose with the thumb of his right hand, embarra.s.sed by the ease of his success, like a fighter who mats his opponent nineteen seconds into the first round.

"I know who you are," she said, coloring again. "I mean, I... remember you now."

"I remember you, too," he said, hoping it did not sound salacious.

"How would you ... I'd like you to see my paintings," she said. "If you want to, I mean. I have a-a studio upstairs."

Joe hesitated. From the time of his arrival in New York City, he had never permitted himself to speak to a woman for pleasure. It was not an easy thing to do in English, and anyway, he had not come here to flirt with girls. He didn't have time for it, and furthermore, he did not feel that he was ent.i.tled to such pleasures, or to the commitments that they would inevitably entail. He felt-it was not an articulated feeling, but it was powerful and, in its way, a comfort to him-that he could justify his own liberty only to the degree that he employed it to earn the freedom of the family he had left behind. His life in America was a conditional thing, provisional, unenc.u.mbered with personal connections beyond his friends.h.i.+p and partners.h.i.+p with Sammy Clay.

At this very moment, Joe's attention was diverted by the sound of someone, somewhere in the drawing room, talking in German. He turned and searched among the faces and the blare of conversation until he found the lips that were moving in time to the elegant Teutonic syllables he was hearing. They were fleshy, sensual lips, in a severe way, downturned at the corners in a somehow intelligent frown, a frown of keen judgment and bitter good sense. The frowner was a trim, fit man in a black turtleneck sweater and corduroy trousers, rather chinless but with a high forehead and a large, dignified German nose. His hair was fine and fair, and his bright black eyes held a puckish gleam that belied the grave frown. There was great enthusiasm in the eyes, pleasure in the subject of his discourse. He was talking, as far as Joe could tell, about the Negro dance team the Nicholas Brothers.

Joe felt the familiar exultation, the epinephrine flame that burned away doubt and confusion and left only a pure, clear, colorless vapor of rage. He took a deep breath and turned his back on the man.[7][7]

"I would love to see your work," he said.

10

The pitch of the staircase was steep and the treads narrow. There were three stories above the ground floor, and she took him all the way to the top. It got darker and spookier as they climbed. The walls on either side of the stairs were hung with hundreds of framed portraits of her father, carefully fit together like tiles to cover every inch of available s.p.a.ce. In each of them, as far as Joe could tell from a hasty inspection, the subject wore the same goofy suppressing-a-fart expression, and if there was any significant difference among them, apart from the fact that some people were evidently more adept at telepathically focusing a lens than others, it was lost on Joe. As they made their way up through the increasing gloom, Joe seemed to steer only according to the light shed by the action of her palm against his wrist, by the low steady flow of voltage through the conducting medium of their sweat. He stumbled like a drunken man and laughed as she hurried him along. He was vaguely aware of the ache in his hand, but he ignored it. As they turned the landing to the top floor, a strand of her hair caught in the corner of his mouth, and for an instant he crunched it between his teeth.

She took him into a small room in the middle of the house, which curved queerly where it backed up against the central tower. In addition to her tiny, girlish white iron bed, a small dresser, and a nightstand, she had crowded in an easel, a photo enlarger, two bookcases, a drawing table, and a thousand and one other items piled atop one another, strewn about, and jammed together with remarkable industry and abandon.

"This is your studio?" studio?" Joe said. Joe said.

A smaller blush this time, at the tips of her ears.

"Also my bedroom," she said. "But I wasn't going to ask you to come up to that." that."

There was something unmistakably exultant about the mess that Rosa had made. Her bedroom-studio was at once the canvas, journal, museum, and midden of her life. She did not "decorate" it; she infused it. Sometime around four o'clock that morning, for example, half-disentangled from the tulle of a dream, she had reached for the chewed stub of a Ticonderoga she kept by her bed for this purpose. When, just after dawn, she awoke, she found a sc.r.a.p of loose-leaf paper in her left hand, scrawled with the cryptic legend "lampedusa." She had run to the unabridged on its lonely lectern in the library, where she learned this was the name of a small island in the Mediterranean Sea, between Malta and Tunisia. Then she had returned to her room, taken a big thumbtack with an enameled red head from an El Producto box she kept on her supremely "cluttered-up" desk, and tacked the sc.r.a.p of paper to the eastern wall of her room, where it overlapped a photograph, torn from the pages of Life, Life, of Amba.s.sador Joseph Kennedy's handsome eldest son, tousled and wearing a Choate cardigan. The sc.r.a.p joined a reproduction of a portrait of Arthur Rimbaud at seventeen, dreaming with chin in palm; the entire text of her only play, a Jarry-influenced one-act called of Amba.s.sador Joseph Kennedy's handsome eldest son, tousled and wearing a Choate cardigan. The sc.r.a.p joined a reproduction of a portrait of Arthur Rimbaud at seventeen, dreaming with chin in palm; the entire text of her only play, a Jarry-influenced one-act called Homunculus Uncle; Homunculus Uncle; plates, sliced from art books, of a detail from Bosch that depicted a woman being pursued by an animate celery, of Edvard Munch's plates, sliced from art books, of a detail from Bosch that depicted a woman being pursued by an animate celery, of Edvard Munch's Madonna, Madonna, of several Pica.s.so "blue" paintings, and of Klee's of several Pica.s.so "blue" paintings, and of Klee's Cosmic Flora; Cosmic Flora; Ignatius Donnelly's map of Atlantis, traced; a grotesquely vibrant full-color photo, also courtesy Ignatius Donnelly's map of Atlantis, traced; a grotesquely vibrant full-color photo, also courtesy of Life, of Life, of four cheerful strips of bacon; a spavined dead locust, forelegs arrested in an att.i.tude of pleading; as well as some three hundred other sc.r.a.ps of paper bearing the numinous vocabulary of her dreams, a puzzling lexicon that included "grampus," "ullage," "parbuckle," and some entirely fict.i.tious words, such as "luben" and "salactor." Socks, blouses, skirts, tights, and twisted underpants lay strewn across teetering piles of books and phonograph alb.u.ms, the floor was thick with paint-soaked rags and chromo-chaotic cardboard palettes, canvases stacked four deep stood against the walls. She had discovered the surrealistic potential of food, about which she had rather pioneeringly complicated emotions, and everywhere lay portraits of broccoli stalks, cabbage heads, tangerines, turnip greens, mushrooms, beets-big, colorful, drunken tableaux that reminded Joe of Robert Delaunay. of four cheerful strips of bacon; a spavined dead locust, forelegs arrested in an att.i.tude of pleading; as well as some three hundred other sc.r.a.ps of paper bearing the numinous vocabulary of her dreams, a puzzling lexicon that included "grampus," "ullage," "parbuckle," and some entirely fict.i.tious words, such as "luben" and "salactor." Socks, blouses, skirts, tights, and twisted underpants lay strewn across teetering piles of books and phonograph alb.u.ms, the floor was thick with paint-soaked rags and chromo-chaotic cardboard palettes, canvases stacked four deep stood against the walls. She had discovered the surrealistic potential of food, about which she had rather pioneeringly complicated emotions, and everywhere lay portraits of broccoli stalks, cabbage heads, tangerines, turnip greens, mushrooms, beets-big, colorful, drunken tableaux that reminded Joe of Robert Delaunay.

When they walked into the room, Rosa went over to the phonograph and switched it on. When the needle hit the groove, the scratches on the disk popped and crackled like a burning log. Then the air was filled with a festive wheeze of violins.

"Schubert," said Joe, rocking on his heels. "The Trout." "The Trout."

"The Trout's my favorite," Rosa said. my favorite," Rosa said.

"Me too."

"Look out."

Something hit him in the face, something soft and alive. Joe brushed at his mouth and came away with a small black moth. It had electric-blue transverse bands on its belly. He shuddered.

Rosa said, "Moths."

"Moths more than one?"

She nodded and pointed to the bed.

Joe noticed now that there were a fair number of moths in the room, most of them small and brown and unremarkable, scattered on the blankets of the narrow bed, flecking the walls, sleeping in the folds of the curtains.

"It's an annoyance," she said. "They're all over the upstairs of the house. n.o.body's really sure why. Sit down."

He found a moth-free spot on the bed and sat down.

"Apparently there were moths all through the last house, too," she said. She knelt down before him. "And in the one before that. That was the one where the murder happened. What's the matter with your finger?"

"It's sore. From when I was turning the screw."

"It looks dislocated."

His right index finger was curled a little to one side, in a queer parenthetical crook.

"Give me your hand. Come on, it's all right. I was almost a nurse once."

He gave her his hand, sensing the thin strong rod of obdurate competence that was the armature of her artsy Village style. She turned his hand over and over, probed delicately with the tips of her own fingers at the joints and skin.

"Doesn't it hurt?"

"Actually," he said. The pain, now that he attended to it, was fairly sharp.

"I can fix it."

"You really are a nurse? I thought you worked at Life Life the magazine." the magazine."

She shook her head.

"No, I'm really not a nurse," she said briskly, as if skipping over some incident or emotion she preferred to keep to herself. "It was just something I-pursued." She gave an explanatory sigh as if tired of her own tale. "I wanted to be a nurse in Spain. You know. In the war. I volunteered. I had a post in a hospital run by the A.C.P. in Madrid, but I... hey." She let his hand fall. "How did you know ..."

"I saw your business card."

"My- Oh." He was rewarded with a full new flush. "Yes, it's such a bad habit," she went on, resuming her big stage voice though there was no crowd to overhear the performance, "leaving things in men's bedrooms."

Joe wasn't, in Sammy's phrase, buying any of that. He would have been willing to bet not only that having left her purse behind in Jerry Glovsky's room had mortified Rosa Luxemburg Saks but that her habits did not even encompa.s.s the regular visiting of men's bedrooms.

"This is going to hurt," she promised him.

"Badly?"

"Horribly, but only for a second."

"All right."

She looked at him, steadily, and licked her lips, and he had just noticed that the pale brown irises of her eyes were flecked with green and gold when abruptly she twisted his hand one way and his finger the other, and, crazing his arm to the elbow with instantaneous veins of lightning and fire, set the joint back into place.

"Wow."

"Hurt?"

He shook his head, but there were tears rolling down his cheeks.

"Anyway," she said. "I had a ticket from New York to Cartagena on the Bernardo. Bernardo. On March twenty-fifth, 1939. On the twenty-third, my stepmother died very suddenly. My father was devastated. I postponed sailing for a week. On the thirty-first, the Falangists took Madrid." On March twenty-fifth, 1939. On the twenty-third, my stepmother died very suddenly. My father was devastated. I postponed sailing for a week. On the thirty-first, the Falangists took Madrid."

Joe remembered the Fall of Madrid. It had come two weeks after the fall, uncapitalized, disregarded, of Prague.

"You were disappointed?"

"Crushed." She c.o.c.ked her head to one side, as if listening to the echo of the word she had just uttered. She gave her head a decisive shake. A curl slipped free of its pin and tumbled down the side of her face. She brushed it irritably to one side. "You want to know something? Honestly, I was relieved. What a coward, huh?"

"I don't think so."

"Oh, yes. I am. A big coward. That's why I just keep daring myself to do things I'm afraid of doing."

He had a notion. "Such things like?"

"Like bringing you up here to my room."

This was unquestionably the moment to kiss her. Now he was the coward. He leaned over and started to flip with his good hand through a stack of paintings by the bed. "Very good," he said after a moment. Her brushwork seemed hasty and impatient, but her portraits-the term "still life" did not suffice-of produce, canned foods, and the occasional trotter or lamb chop were at once whimsical, wors.h.i.+pful, and horrifying, and managed to suggest their subjects perfectly without wasting too much time on the details. Her line was very strong; she could draw as well as he, perhaps better. But she took no pains with her work. The paint was streaked, blotchy, studded with dirt and bristles; the edges of paintings often were left ragged and blank; where she couldn't get something quite right, she just blotted it out with furious, petulant strokes. "I can almost to smell them. What murder?"

"Huh?"

"You said there was a murder."

"Oh, yes. Caddie Horslip. She was a socialite or a debutante or-they hung my great-granduncle for it. Moses Espinoza. It was a huge sensation at the time, back in the eighteen-sixties, I think." She noticed that she was still holding his hand. She let it go. "There. Good as new. Have you got a cigarette?"

He lit one for her. She continued to kneel in front of him, and there was something about it that aroused him. It made him feel like a wounded soldier, making time in a field hospital with his pretty American nurse.

"He was a lepidopterist, Moses," she said.

"A-?"

"He studied moths."

"Oh."

"He knocked her out with ether and killed her with a pin. Or at least that's what my father says. He's probably lying. I made a dreambook about it."

"A pin," he said. "Ouch." He waggled his finger. "It's good, I think. You fixed it."

"Hey, how about that."

"Thank you, Rosa."

"You're welcome, Joe. Joe. You don't make a very convincing Joe."

"Not yet," he said. He flexed his hand, turned it over, studied it. "Am I going to be able to draw?"

"I don't know, can you draw now?"

"I'm not bad. What's a dreambook?"

She set the burning cigarette down on a phonograph record that lay on the floor beside her and went to her desk. "Would you like to see one?"

Joe bent over and picked up the cigarette, holding it upright between the very tips of his fingers as though it were a stick of burning dynamite. It had melted a small divot into the second movement of Mendelssohn's Octet. Octet.

"Here, this is one. I can't seem to find the Caddie Horslip."

"Really?" he said dryly. "What a surprise."

"Don't be smart, it's unattractive in a man."

He handed the cigarette to her and took from her a large, clothbound book, black with a red spine. It was an accounts ledger, swollen to twice its normal thickness, like a book left out in the rain, from all the things pasted into it. When he turned to the first page, he found the words "Airplane Dream #13" written in an odd, careful hand like a scattering of spindly twigs.

"Numbered," he said. "It's like a comic book."

"Well, there are just so many. I'd lose track."

"Airplane Dream #13" told the story, more or less, of a dream Rosa had had about the end of the world. There were no human beings left but her, and she had found herself flying in a pink seaplane to an island inhabited by sentient lemurs. There seemed to be a lot more to it-there was a kind of graphic "sound track" constructed around images relating to Peter Tchaikovsky and his works, and of course abundant food imagery-but this was, as far as Joe could tell, the gist. The story was told entirely through collage, with pictures clipped from magazines and books. There were images from anatomy texts, an exploded musculature of the human leg, a pictorial explanation of peristalsis. She had found an old history of India, and many of the lemurs of her dream-apocalypse had the heads and calm, horizontal gazes of Hindu princes and G.o.ddesses. A seafood cookbook, rich with color photographs of boiled Crustacea and poached whole fish with jellied stares, had been thoroughly mined. Sometimes she inscribed text across the pictures, none of which made a good deal of sense to him; a few pages consisted almost entirely of her brambly writing, illuminated, as it were, with collage. There were some penciled-in drawings and diagrams, and an elaborate system of cartoonish marginalia like the creatures found loitering at the edges of pages in medieval books. Joe started to read sitting down in her desk chair, but before long, without noticing, he had risen to his feet and started pacing around the room. He stepped on a moth without noticing.

"These must take hours," he said.

"Hours."