Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

“May I—?” he said to Anapol, gesturing toward the door.

“Might as well get him in here.”

Sammy signaled for Joe to come in, a ringmaster welcoming a famous aerialist into the spotlight. Joe stood up, gathering the portfolio and his stray pencils, then sidled into Anapol’s office, sketchpad clutched to his chest, in his baggy tweed suit, with his hungry face and borrowed tie, his expression at once guarded and touchingly eager to please. He was looking at the owner of Empire Novelty as if all the big money Sammy had promised had been packed into the swollen carapace of Sheldon Anapol and would, at the slightest prick or tap, come pouring out in an uncontrollable green torrent.

“Hello, young man,” said Anapol. “I’m told you can draw.”

“Yes, sir!” Joe said, in a voice that sounded oddly strangled, startling them all.

“Give it here.” Sammy reached for the pad and found, to his surprise, that he couldn’t pry it loose. For an instant, he was afraid that his cousin had done something so abominable that he was afraid to show it. Then he caught a glimpse of the upper left corner of Joe’s drawing, where a fat moon peered from behind a crooked tower, a crooked bat flapping across its face, and he saw that, on the contrary, his cousin simply couldn’t let go.

“Joe,” he said softly.

“I need a little more time with it,” Joe said, handing the pad to Sammy.

Anapol came around from behind his desk, lodged the burning cigarette in a corner of his mouth, and took the pad from Sammy. “Look at that!” he said.

In the drawing it was midnight, in a cobblestone alley crosshatched with menacing shadows. There were evocative suggestions of tiled roofs, leaded windows, icy puddles on the ground. Out of the shadows and into the light of the bat-scarred moon strode a tall, brawny man. His frame was as sturdy and thick as his hobnailed boots. For costume he wore a tunic with deep creases, a heavy belt, and a big, shapeless stocking hat like something out of Rembrandt. The man’s features, though regular and handsome, looked frozen, and his intrepid gaze was empty. There were four Hebrew characters etched into his forehead.

“Is that the Golem?” said Anapol. “My new Superman is the Golem?”

“I didn’t—the conceit is new for me,” Joe said, his English stiffening up on him. “I just drawed the first thing I could think of that resembled … To me, this Superman is … maybe … only an American Golem.” He looked for support to Sammy. “Is that right?”

“Huh?” said Sammy, struggling to conceal his dismay. “Yeah, sure, but, Joe … the Golem is … well … Jewish.”

Anapol rubbed his heavy chin, looking at the drawing. He pointed to the portfolio. “Let me see what else you got in there.”

“He had to leave all his work back in Prague,” Sammy put in quickly, as Joe untied the ribbon of the portfolio. “He just started throwing together some new stuff this morning.”

“Well, he isn’t fast,” Anapol said when he saw that Joe’s portfolio was empty. “He has talent, anyone can see that, but …” The look of doubtfulness returned to his face.

“Joe,” cried Sammy. “Tell him where you studied!”

“The Academy of Fine Art, in Prague,” said Joe.

Anapol stopped rubbing his chin. “The Academy of Fine Art?”

“What is that? Who are these guys? What’s going on in here?” Jack Ashkenazy burst into the office without warning or a knock. He had all his hair, and was a much snappier dresser than his brother-in-law, favoring checked vests and two-tone shoes. Because he had prospered, in a Kramler Building kind of way, more easily than Anapol, he had not been forced to develop the older man’s rumpled salesman’s charm, but he shared Anapol’s avidity for unburdening America’s youth of the oppressive national mantle of tedium, ten cents at a time. He plucked the cigar from his mouth and yanked the sketchpad out of Anapol’s hands.

“Beauteeful,” he said. “The head is too big.”

“The head is too big?” said Anapol. “That’s all you can say?”

“The body’s too heavy. Looks like he’s made out of stone.”

“He is made out of stone, you idiot, he’s a golem.”

“Clay, actually,” said Joe. He coughed. “I can do something more lighter.”

“He can do anything you want,” said Sammy.

“Anything,” Joe agreed. His eyes widened as an inspiration seemed to strike, and he turned to Sammy. “Maybe I ought to show them my fart.”

“He’s only ever read one comic book,” Sammy said, ignoring this suggestion. “But I’ve read them all, boss. I’ve read every issue of Action. I’ve studied this stuff. I know how it’s done. Look.” He picked up his own portfolio and untied the strings. It was a cheap pasteboard number from Woolworth’s, like Joe’s, but battered, scraped, and carefully dented. You couldn’t sit around in some art director’s waiting room with a brand-new-looking portfolio. Everyone would know you were a tyro. Sammy had spent an entire afternoon last fall hitting his with a hammer, walking across it in a pair of his mother’s heels, spilling coffee on it. Unfortunately, since purchasing it he had managed to land only two cartoons, one in a completely humor-free magazine called Laff and the other in Belle-Views, house organ of the psychiatric ward where his mother worked.

“I can do it all,” he boasted, pulling out a fistful of sample pages and passing them around. What he meant, more precisely, was that he could steal it all.

“It isn’t half bad,” Anapol said.

“It ain’t beauteeful, either,” said Ashkenazy.

Sammy glared at Ashkenazy, not because Ashkenazy had insulted his work—no one was ever more aware of his own artistic limitations than Sam Clay—but because Sammy felt that he was standing on the border of something wonderful, a land where wild cataracts of money and the racing river of his own imagination would, at last, lift his makeshift little raft and carry it out to the boundless freedom of the open sea. Jack Ashkenazy, whose watery eyes could easily, Sammy imagined, be stabbed out with the letter opener on Anapol’s desk, was threatening to get in his way. Anapol caught the look of visionary murder in Sammy’s eyes and took a chance on it.

“What say we let these boys go home over the weekend and try to come up with a Superman for us.” He fixed Sammy with a hard look. “Our own kind of a Superman, naturally.”

“Of course.”

“How long is a Superman story?”

“Probably twelve pages.”

“I want a character and a twelve-page story by Monday.”

“We’re going to need a lot more than that,” said Ashkenazy. “They got typically five or six characters in there. You know, a spy. A private eye. A shadowy avenger of the helpless. An evil Chinaman. These two can’t come up with all that themselves and draw it. I got artists, Shelly. I got George Deasey.”

“No!” said Sammy. George Deasey was the editor in chief of Racy Publications. He was a tyrannical, ill-tempered old newspaperman who filled the Kramler Building’s elevators with the exacerbated smell of rye. “It’s mine. Ours, me and Joe. Boss, I can handle it.”

“Absolutely, boss,” said Joe.

Anapol grinned. “Get a load of this guy,” he said. “You just get me a Superman,” he went on, putting a placating hand on Sammy’s shoulder. “Then we’ll see about what you can handle or not. All right, Jack?”

Ashkenazy twisted his usually genial features into a grimace. “I have to tell you, Shelly. I got serious doubts. I’m going to have to say—”

“The radios,” Joe said. “The little radios outside.”

“Aw, forget the damn radios, Joe, will you?” Sammy said.

“What, the midgets?” Anapol said.