The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay Part 30

"I had no idea it was so tall."

"Taller than the Was.h.i.+ngton Monument."

"What is it made out of, granite or limestone or something?"

"Plaster of paris, I believe."

"We've been doing very well, haven't we? Not talking about my leaving for L.A."

"Are you thinking about it?"

"Not me. So the ball is the Perisphere?"

"That's right."

"Was there anything inside them?"

"Not in the Trylon. But yeah, inside the Perisphere they had this whole show. Democracity. It was like a scale model of the city of the future, and you sat in these little cars going all around the outside and looked down on it. It was all superhighways and garden suburbs. You just felt like you were soaring over it all in a zeppelin. They would make it like nighttime in there, and all the little buildings and streetlights would sort of light up and glow. It was great. I loved it."

"You don't say. I'd like to see that. I wonder if it's still in there, Sammy, what do you think?"

"I don't know," said Sammy, with a kind of wary thrill. By now he knew Bacon well enough to recognize the impulse, and its accompanying tone, that had sent his friend up to a military installation at the top of the Empire State Building at midnight with a gourmet meal in two shopping bags. "Probably not, Bake. I think-hey, wait for me."

Bacon was already on his way around the low circular wall that surrounded the immense pool, now drained and covered in a sodden-looking layer of burlap, in which the Perisphere once had swum. Sammy looked to see if there were any workmen still around, or guards, but they appeared to have the place to themselves. It made his heart ache to look around the vast expanse of the fairground that, not very long ago, had swarmed with flags and women's hats and people being whizzed around in jitneys, and see only a vista of mud and tarpaulins and blowing newspaper, broken up here and there by the spindly stump of a capped stanchion, a fire hydrant, or the bare trees that flanked the empty avenues and promenades. The candy-colored pavilions and exhibit halls, fitted out with Saturn rings, lightning bolts, shark's fins, golden grilles, and honeycombs, the Italian pavilion with its entire facade dissolving in a perpetual cascade of water, the gigantic cash register, the austere and sinuous temples of the Detroit G.o.ds, the fountains, the pylons and sundials, the statues of George Was.h.i.+ngton and Freedom of Speech and Truth Showing the Way to Freedom had been peeled, stripped, prized apart, knocked down, bulldozed into piles, loaded onto truck beds, dumped into barges, towed out past the mouth of the harbor, and sent to the bottom of the sea. It made him sad, not because he saw some instructive allegory or harsh sermon on the vanity of all human hopes and Utopian imaginings in this translation of a bright summer dream into an immense mud puddle freezing over at the end of a September afternoon-he was too young to have such inklings-but because he had so loved the Fair, and seeing it this way, he felt in his heart what he had known all along, that, like childhood, the Fair was over, and he would never be able to visit again.

"Hey," Bacon called. "Clayboy. Over here."

Sammy looked around. There was no sign of Bacon. Sammy hurried, as quickly as he could, all the way around the low whitewashed wall with its rain stains and patchy skin of wet leaves, to the doors of the Trylon, which had led, via an imperial pair of escalators, into the heart of the magical egg. When the Fair was on, there was always a huge line of people coiling up to these big blue doors. Now there were only the scaffolding and a stack of planks. Some workman had forgotten the tin coffee-cup cap of his thermos. Sammy went over to the metal doors. They were heavily barred and padlocked with a thick chain. Sammy gave them a pull, and they did not budge in the least.

"I tried that," Bacon said. "Under here!"

The Perisphere was supported by a kind of tee, a ring of evenly s.p.a.ced pillars joined to it at its antarctic circle, so to speak, all the way around. The idea had been for the great bone-white orb, its skin rippled with fine veins like a cigar wrapper, to look as if it were floating there, in the middle of the pool of water. Now that there was no water, you could see the pillars, and you could see Tracy Bacon, too, standing in the middle of them, directly under the Perisphere's south pole.

"Hey," Sammy said, rus.h.i.+ng to the wall and leaning across its top. "What are you doing? That whole thing could come right down on top of you!"

Bacon looked at him, eyes wide, incredulous, and Sammy blushed; it was exactly what his mother would have said.

"There's a door," Bacon said, pointing straight up. Then he reached up over his head, and his hands went into the bottom of the Perisphere's hull. Bacon's head vanished next, his feet rose off the ground, and then he was gone.

Sammy got one leg over the wall, then the other, and lowered himself down into the pool bed. The damp burlap made squis.h.i.+ng sounds under his shoes as he ran across the gently curved bottom of the basin toward the Perisphere. When he got underneath it, he looked up and saw a rectangular hatchway that looked as if Tracy Bacon might just have fit through it.

"Come on."

"It looks pretty dark in there, Bake."

A big hand emerged from the hatch, wavering, fingers flexing. Sammy reached for it, their palms crossed, and then Bacon pulled him bodily up into the darkness. Before he could begin to feel, or smell, or listen to the darkness, to Bacon and to the pounding of his own heart, the lights came on.

"Gee," Bacon said. "Look at that."

The systems that controlled the motion, sound, and lighting of Democracity and its companion exhibit, General Motors' Futurama, were quite literally the dernier cri dernier cri of the art and ancient principles of clockwork machinery in the final ticking moments of the computerless world. Coordinating the elaborate sound track of voice and music, the motion of the cars, and the varying light-moods inside the Perisphere had required an array of gears, pulleys, levers, cams, springs, wheels, switches, relays, and belts that was sophisticated, complex, and sensitive to disruption. A mouse dropping, a sudden snap of cold, or the acc.u.mulated rumblings of ten thousand arriving and departing underground trains could throw the system out of whack and bring the ride to an abrupt halt, occasionally trapping fifty people inside. It was because of the need for frequent minor adjustments and repairs that there was a hatch in the Perisphere's underbelly. It led into an odd, bowl-shaped room. Where Bacon and Sammy came in, at the bottom of the bowl, there was a kind of corrugated steel platform. On one side of the platform, a series of cleats had been welded onto the inner frame of the sphere that reached, gradually, up along the inside of the bowl, toward the elaborate clockwork underside of Democracity. of the art and ancient principles of clockwork machinery in the final ticking moments of the computerless world. Coordinating the elaborate sound track of voice and music, the motion of the cars, and the varying light-moods inside the Perisphere had required an array of gears, pulleys, levers, cams, springs, wheels, switches, relays, and belts that was sophisticated, complex, and sensitive to disruption. A mouse dropping, a sudden snap of cold, or the acc.u.mulated rumblings of ten thousand arriving and departing underground trains could throw the system out of whack and bring the ride to an abrupt halt, occasionally trapping fifty people inside. It was because of the need for frequent minor adjustments and repairs that there was a hatch in the Perisphere's underbelly. It led into an odd, bowl-shaped room. Where Bacon and Sammy came in, at the bottom of the bowl, there was a kind of corrugated steel platform. On one side of the platform, a series of cleats had been welded onto the inner frame of the sphere that reached, gradually, up along the inside of the bowl, toward the elaborate clockwork underside of Democracity.

Bacon took hold of one of the lower cleats of the ladder. "Think you can manage it?" he said.

"I'm not sure," Sammy said. "I really think-"

"You go first," Bacon said. "I'll give you a hand if you need it."

So Sammy and his bad legs climbed a hundred feet into the air. At the top, there was another hatch. Sammy poked his head through.

"It's dark," Sammy said. "Too bad. Okay, we better go."

"Just a minute," Bacon said. Sammy felt a sudden push from behind as Bacon took hold of his legs and more or less jackknifed him up into the cool, huge blackness. Something rough abraded Sammy's cheek, and then there was a creak and a series of rasping sounds as Bacon pulled himself up after. "Huh. You're right."

"Indeed." Sammy reached out along the ground, feeling for the hatch. "Good. You're crazy, Bake, you know that? You just won't take no for an answer. I-"

Sammy heard the metallic chirp of the hinge of a cigarette lighter, the sc.r.a.pe of its flint, and then a spark swelled magically and became the flickering face of Tracy Bacon.

"Now yours," he said.

Sammy lit his lighter. Together they managed to generate just enough light to see that they were camped far to one side of the display, in the middle of a wide, forested area half an inch high. Tracy stood up and started toward the center. Sammy followed him, protecting the flame. The surface of the floor beneath their feet was covered in a kind of rough, dry artificial moss that was meant to suggest vast rolling hills of trees. It made a crunching sound that echoed in the high empty dome. Every so often, though they tried to be careful, one of them stepped on a model farmhouse, or crushed the amus.e.m.e.nt district or central orphanage of a town of the future. Finally they reached the major city, at the very center of the diorama, which had been known as Centerville or Centerton or something equally imaginative. A single skysc.r.a.per rose from a cl.u.s.ter of smaller buildings. All the buildings looked streamlined and moderne, like a city on Mongo, or the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz. The Wizard of Oz. Bacon got down on one knee and brought his eyes level with the top of the lone tower. Bacon got down on one knee and brought his eyes level with the top of the lone tower.

"Huh," he said. He frowned, then lowered himself and leaned forward on one arm, slowly, taking care not to extinguish his flame, until he was lying flat on his belly along the ground. "Huh," he said again, grunting it this time. He lowered his chin to the ground. "Yeah. This is the way. I don't think I would have liked just floating over it near as much."

Sammy went over and stood beside Bacon for a moment. Then he eased himself down on the ground beside him. He folded an arm under his chest and, inclining his head slightly, squinted his eyes, trying to lose himself in the illusion of the model the way he used to lose himself in Futuria, back at his drawing board in Flatbush a million years before. He was a twentieth of an inch tall, zipping along an oceanic highway in his little antigravity Skyflivver, streaking past the silent faces of the aspiring silvery buildings. It was a perfect day in a perfect city. A double sunset flickered in the windows and threw shadows across the leafy squares of the city. His fingertips were on fire.

"Ow!" Sammy said, dropping his lighter. "Ouch!"

Bacon let his own flame go out. "You have to kind of pad it with your necktie, dopey," he said. He grabbed Sammy's hand. "This the one?"

"Yeah," Sammy said. "The first two fingers. Oh. Okay."

They lay there for a few seconds, in the dark, in the future, with Sammy's sore fingertips in Tracy Bacon's mouth, listening to the fabulous clockwork of their hearts and lungs, and loving each other.

12

ON the last day of November, Joe had a letter from Thomas. In an execrable left-slanting hand, he announced, employing a sardonic tone that had not been present in his first letters from Lisbon, that the old tub-after a series of delays, reversals, mechanical failures, and governmental tergiversations, had finally been cleared- yet again-for departure, on the second of December. More than eight months had now pa.s.sed since Thomas's journey from the Moldau to the Tagus. The boy had turned thirteen on a cot in the crowded refectory of the convent of Nossa Senhora de Monte Carmel, and in his letter he warned Joe that he suffered from a mysterious tendency to start rattling off paternosters and Hail Marys at the drop of a hat, and had become partial to wimples. He claimed to be afraid that Joe would not recognize him for the spots on his face and the "apparently permanent p.u.b.ertal smudge on my upper lip that some have the temerity to call a mustache." When Joe had finished reading the letter, he kissed it and pressed it to his chest. He remembered the immigrant's fear of going unrecognized in a land of strangers, of being lost in the translation from there to here.

The following day Rosa came straight to the Empire offices from the T.R.A. and burst into tears in Joe's arms. She told Joe that Mr. Hoffman had, almost as an afterthought, placed a call that afternoon to the Was.h.i.+ngton offices of the President's Advisory Committee on Political Refugees, just to make certain that everything was in order. To his astonishment, he had been told by the chairman of the committee that it looked as though all of the children's visas were going to be revoked for reasons of "state security." The head of the State Department's visa section, Breckinridge Long, a man with, as the chairman carefully put it, "certain antipathies," had long since established a clear policy of refusing visas to Jewish refugees. Hoffman knew that perfectly well. But in this instance, he argued, the visas had already been issued, the s.h.i.+p was about to depart, and the "security risks" were three hundred and nineteen children! The chairman sympathized. He apologized. He expressed profound regret and embarra.s.sment at this unfortunate turn of events. Then he hung up.

"I see" was Joe's only response when Rosa, perched on his high stool, had finished her tale. With one hand he stroked mechanically at the back of her head. With the other he spun the striker of his cigarette lighter, sparking it over and over again. Rosa was ashamed and confused. She felt that she ought to be comforting Joe, but here she was, in the middle of the Empire workroom, with a bunch of guys staring at her over their drawing boards, bawling into his s.h.i.+rtfront, while he stood patting her hair and saying, "There, there." His shoulders were tensed, his breathing shallow. She could feel the anger building inside him. Each time the lighter sparked, she flinched.

"Oh, honey," she said. "I wish there was something we could do. Someone we could turn to."

"Huh," Joe said, and then "Look here." He took hold of her shoulders and spun her around on the stool. On a low table next to his drawing board lay a stack of lettered but uninked comic book pages on big sheets of Bristol board. Joe shuffled through the stack of pages, pa.s.sing them to her one by one. They presented a story that was narrated by the custodian at the Statue of Liberation, a tall, stooped man with a mop and a billed cap, drawn to look a lot like George Deasey. Apparently, the unfortunate fellow had a bone to pick with "that long-underwear bunch." He then went on to describe how, just that morning, he had watched in horror as Professor Percival "Smarty" Pantz, hapless know-it-all rival of Dr. E. Pluribus Hewnham, the Scientific American, performed an "electro-brain implantation procedure" on the Lady. The idea was to enlist the statue in the effort to keep the skies of Empire City clear of enemy planes and airs.h.i.+ps. "She'll be able to swat Messerschmitts like mosquitoes!" Pantz crowed. Instead, thanks to the usual miscalculation on the part of Dr. Pantz, she had, upon awakening, gone off striding across the bay toward Empire City, her spike-crowned electro-head filled with homicidal urges. Of course the Scientific American, employing a handy giant robot of his own manufacture that he quickly fitted out with an enormous Clark Gable mask, was able to lure her back to her pillar, and then neutralize her using "superdynamic electromagnets." But it all made, to the exasperation of the janitor-narrator, an awful mess. Not only the island but the entire seaport lay in shambles. His brother janitors and sanitation workers were already overburdened cleaning up after the donnybrooks in which the super-beings regularly indulged. How would they ever manage to clean up this latest?

At that moment, an airplane landed on Liberation Island, and a familiar figure in a broad-brimmed hat and belted topcoat climbed out, looking as if she meant business.

"That looks like Eleanor Roosevelt," said Rosa, pointing to the panel in which Joe had drawn a quite flattering version of the First Lady, waving from the top step of the plane's gangplank.

"She picks up a broom," Joe said. "And starts sweeping. Soon all the women in the town come out with their brooms. To help."

"Eleanor Roosevelt," Rosa said.

"I'm going to call her," Joe said, going to a telephone on a nearby desk.

"Okay."

"I wonder if she'll speak to me?" He picked up the receiver. "I should think she will. I get that picture from the things I read of her."

"No, Joe, I really don't think she will," Rosa said. "I'm sorry. I don't know how it was in Czechoslovakia, but here you can't just call up the president's wife and ask her for a favor."

"Oh," Joe said. He set the receiver back down and stared at his hand, his head bowed.

"But, oh, my G.o.d." She climbed down from the stool. "Joe!"

"What?"

"My father. He knows her slightly. They met doing something for the W.P.A."

"Is he allowed to call up the president's wife?"

"Yes, I believe he is. Get your hat, we're going home."

Longman Harkoo called the White House that afternoon and was told that the First Lady was in New York City. With some help from Joe Lash, whom he knew through his Red connections, Rosa's father managed to track down Mrs. Roosevelt, and received a brief appointment to visit her at her apartment on East Eleventh Street, not far from the Harkoo house. For fifteen minutes, over tea, Harkoo explained the predicament of the Ark of Miriam Ark of Miriam and its pa.s.sengers. Mrs. Roosevelt, Rosa's father later reported, had seemed to become extremely angry, though all she said was that she would see what she could do. and its pa.s.sengers. Mrs. Roosevelt, Rosa's father later reported, had seemed to become extremely angry, though all she said was that she would see what she could do.

The Ark of Miriam, Ark of Miriam, her course smoothed by the invisible hand of Eleanor Roosevelt, set sail from Lisbon on the third of December. her course smoothed by the invisible hand of Eleanor Roosevelt, set sail from Lisbon on the third of December.

The following day, Joe called Rosa and asked her if she could meet him on her lunch break at an address in the West Seventies. He wouldn't tell her why, only that he had something he wanted to give her.

"I have something for you, too," she said. It was a small painting that she had finished the night before. She wrapped it in paper, tied it with string, and carried it onto the train. Shortly afterward, she found herself standing in front of the Josephine, a fifteen-story pile of cool blue-tinged Vermont marble. It had pointed parapets and took up more than half of an entire block between West End Avenue and Broadway. The doorman was uniformed like a doomed hussar in the retreat from Smolensk, down to his trim waxed mustache. Joe was waiting for her when she walked up, his coat slung over his arm. It was a pretty day, cold and bright, the sky as blue as a Nash and cloudless but for one lost lamb overhead. It had been a long time since Rosa had been in this neighborhood. The walls of high apartment houses stretching far away to the north, which had struck her in the past as self-important and stuffily bourgeois, now had a st.u.r.dy, sober look to them. In the austere light of autumn, they looked like buildings filled with serious and thoughtful people working hard to accomplish valuable things. She wondered if perhaps she had had enough of Greenwich Village.

"What is this all about?" she said, taking Joe's arm.

"I just signed the lease," he said. "Come on up and see."

"A lease? You're moving out? You're moving here! here! Did you and Sammy have a fight?" Did you and Sammy have a fight?"

"No, of course not. I never fight with Sammy. I love Sammy."

"I know you do," she said. "You guys are a good team."

"It's first, well, he's moving to Los Angeles. Okay, he says for three months only to write the movie, but I bet you good money after the bad he will stay there when he goes. What's in the package?"

"A present," she said. "I guess you can hang it in your new apartmerit." new apartmerit." She was a little put out that he had said nothing to her about a move, but that was the way he was about everything. When they had a date, he would never tell her where they were going or what they were going to do. It was not so much that he She was a little put out that he had said nothing to her about a move, but that was the way he was about everything. When they had a date, he would never tell her where they were going or what they were going to do. It was not so much that he refused refused as that he managed to communicate he would prefer it if she didn't ask. "This as that he managed to communicate he would prefer it if she didn't ask. "This is is nice." nice."

There was a marble fountain in the lobby, festooned with glinting j.a.panese carp, and an echoing interior courtyard of vaguely Moorish flavor. When the elevator door opened, with a deep and musical chime, a woman got out, followed by two small, adorable boys in matching blue woolen suits. Joe tipped his hat.

"This is for Thomas you're doing this," Rosa said, getting on the elevator. "Isn't it?"

"Ten," Joe said to the elevator man. "I just thought this might be a, well, a better neighborhood. You know, for me ... for me to ..."

"For you to raise him in."

He shook his head, smiling. "That sounds very strange."

"You are going to be like a father to him, you know," she said. And I could be like a mother. Just ask me, Joe, and I'll do it. It was on the tip of her tongue to say this, but she held back. What would she be saying if she did? That she wanted to marry him? For ten years, at least, since she was twelve or thirteen, Rosa had been declaring roundly to anyone who asked that she had no intention of getting married, ever, and that if she ever did, it would be when she was old and tired of life. When this declaration in its various forms had ceased to shock people sufficiently, she had taken to adding that the man she finally married would be no older than twenty-five. But lately she had been starting to experience strong, inarticulate feelings of longing, of a desire to be with Joe all the time, to inhabit his life and allow him to inhabit hers, to engage with him in some kind of joint enterprise, in a collaboration that would be be their lives. She didn't suppose they needed to get married to do that, and she knew that she certainly ought not to their lives. She didn't suppose they needed to get married to do that, and she knew that she certainly ought not to want want to to. But did she? When her father had gone to see Mrs. Roosevelt, he had told the First Lady, explaining his connection to the matter, that one of the children on the s.h.i.+p was the brother of the young man his daughter was going to marry. Rosa had carefully neglected to pa.s.s that part of the story on to Joe. "I think it's very sweet of you. Sensible and sweet." But did she? When her father had gone to see Mrs. Roosevelt, he had told the First Lady, explaining his connection to the matter, that one of the children on the s.h.i.+p was the brother of the young man his daughter was going to marry. Rosa had carefully neglected to pa.s.s that part of the story on to Joe. "I think it's very sweet of you. Sensible and sweet."

"There are good schools nearby. I have an interview for him at the Trinity School which I am told is excellent and takes Jews. Deasey said he would help me get him into Collegiate where he attended."

"Goodness, you've been making a lot of plans." She really ought to know better than to take offense at his secretiveness. Keeping things to himself was just his nature; she supposed it was what had drawn him to the practice of magic in the first place, with its tricks and secrets that must never be divulged.

"Well, I have a lot of time. It is eight months I have been waiting for this to happen. I've been doing a lot of thinking."

The elevator operator braked the car and hauled the door aside for them. He waited for them to step out. Joe was gazing at her with a strange, fixed look, and she thought, or perhaps she only wished, that she saw a glint of mischief there.

"Ten," said the operator.

"A lot of thinking," Joe repeated.

"Ten, sir," the elevator man said.

In the apartment there were views of New Jersey out the windows all along one side, gilded fixtures in the larger of the two bathrooms, and the parquetry of the floors was dizzying and mathematical. There were three bedrooms, and a library with shelves on three walls reaching from floor to ceiling; every room had at least one bookshelf built in. She visited all the rooms twice, unable to prevent herself, as she did so, from imagining a life in these elegant rooms, high over this cultivated swath of Manhattan with its Freudian psychoa.n.a.lysts, first cellists, and appellate-court judges. They could all live here, she and Joe and Thomas, and maybe in time there would be another child, imperturbable and fat as a putto.

"Okay now, what do you have for me?" She couldn't refrain from asking anymore. She didn't see any obvious bulges in his pockets, but whatever it was might be concealed under the drape of his coat. Or it could be something very, very small. Was he about to propose to her? What was she going to say if he did?

"No," he said. "You first."

"It's a portrait," she said. "A portrait of you."

"Another one? I didn't sit for it."

"How odd," she said teasingly. She untied the wrapping and carried the painting over to the mantel.

She had done two previous portraits of Joe. He sat for the first in s.h.i.+rtsleeves and vest, sprawled in a leather chair in the dark-paneled parlor where they had first become acquainted. In the piece, his doffed jacket, with a curled newspaper in its hip pocket, hangs from the back of the chair, and he leans against the arm, his head with its long wolfhound face c.o.c.ked a little to one side, the fingers of his right hand lightly pressed to his right temple. His legs are crossed at the knee, and he ignores a cigarette in the fingers of his left hand. Rosa's brush caught the rime of ash on his lapel, the missed b.u.t.ton of his waistcoat, the tender, impatient, defiant expression in his eyes by means of which he is clearly trying to convey to the artist, telepathically, that he intends, in an hour or so, to f.u.c.k her. In the second portrait, Joe is shown working at the drawing table in his and Sammy's apartment. A piece of Bristol board lies before him, partly filled in with panels; careful examination reveals the discernible form, in one panel, of Luna Moth in flight. Joe is reaching with a long slender brush toward a bottle of ink on the taboret beside him. The table, which Joe had bought sixth- or seventh-hand shortly after his arrival in New York, is crusted and constellated with years of splattered paint. Joe's sleeves are rolled to the elbow and a few dark coils of hair dangle over his high forehead. The end of his necktie can be seen to lie precariously close to a fresh stroke of ink on the paper, and on his cheek he wears an adhesive bandage over some faint pink scratches. In this picture, his expression is serene and almost perfectly blank, his attention focused entirely on the bristles of the brush that he is about to dip into the bright black ink.

The third portrait of Joe Kavalier was the last painting Rosa ever made, and it differed from the first two in that it was not painted from life. It was executed with the same easy but accurate draftsmans.h.i.+p of all her work, but it was a fantasy. The style was simpler than in the other two portraits, approaching the cartoonish, slightly self-conscious naivete of her food pictures. In this one, Joe is posed against an indeterminate background of pale rose, on an ornate carpet. He is naked. More surprisingly, he is entirely entangled, from head to toe, in heavy metal chains from which, like charms on a bracelet, dangle padlocks, cuffs, iron clasps, and manacles. His feet are shackled together with leg irons. The weight of all this metal bows him at the waist, but his head is held high, staring out at the viewer with a challenging expression. His long, muscular legs are straight, his feet spread as if he is ready to spring into action. The pose was borrowed from a photograph in a book about Harry Houdini, with the following crucial differences: unlike Houdini, who in the photo guarded his modesty with his manacled hands, Joe's genitals, with their forlorn expression, though heavily shadowed with fur, are plainly visible; the big lock in the middle of his chest is shaped like a human heart; and on his shoulder, in black overcoat and men's galoshes, sits the figure of the artist herself, holding a golden key.

"That's funny," he said. He reached into his trousers pocket. "This is what I have for you." He held out a fist to her, knuckles up. She turned the hand over and pried the fingers apart. On the palm of his hand lay a bra.s.s key. "I'm going to need help to do this," he said. "I hope with all my heart, Rosa, that you will want to help me."

"And what is this the key to?" she said, her voice sharper than she wanted it to be, knowing perfectly well that it was the key to this apartment, and that Joe was now asking her for the very thing she had been on the verge of asking for herself-that she be allowed to act as a mother, or at least a big sister, to Thomas Kavalier. She was disappointed in the same measure that she had been expecting a ring, and thrilled to the degree that she was horrified by her desire for one.

"Like in the painting," he said, in a kidding way, as if he could see she was upset, and was trying to figure out what tone to adopt with her. "The key to my heart."