Jonathan Lethem - Men and Cartoons

“He's still here?” I was amazed Super Goat Man, of all people, had threaded his way through so many personnel shake-ups.

“Yes, though he's reduced to a kind of honorary presence. He doesn't actually teach now. I don't know if he'd be capable of it. But he's beloved. The students joke that he can be spotted strolling across Commons lawn twice a semester. And that if you want to get any time with him, you can join him on the stroll.”

“He recognized my name?”

“He seemed to, yes. You should prepare yourself. He's quite infirm.”

“How — how old is he?”

“Measured in years, I don't know. But there's been an accelerated aging process. You'll see.”

Perhaps superheroism was a sort of toxin, like a steroid, one with a punitive cost to the body. I mused on this as I departed the president's office, crossed the Commons, and headed through the parking lot and downhill, to find the bench beside Corcoran Creek, a favorite spot, where Angela had said she'd wait. I saw my wife before she saw me, her feet tucked up on the slats, abandoned shoes beneath, her body curled around a big hardback biography of Rousseau. In the distance, dying October light drew long saddle-shaped curves on the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Suddenly I could picture us here for a long time, and picture it happily.

“How did it go?” she asked when she noticed me.

“Par: two friends, two enemies, one sleeper.”

“And the president?”

“Nice, but she wasn't giving anything away.” I put my hands on her shoulders. She closed the book.

“You seem distant,” Angela said. “Memories?”

“Yes.” In fact, I was thinking about Super Goat Man. I'd never before considered the sacrifice he'd made, enunciating his political views so long ago. Fruitlessly, it seemed to me. In exchanging his iconic, trapped-in-amber status, what had he gained? Had Super Goat Man really accomplished much outside the parameters of his comics? However unglamorous the chores, didn't kittens need rescuing from trees? Didn't Vest Man require periodic defeating? Why jettison Ralph Gersten if in the end all you attained was life as a campus mascot?

I wanted to convey some of this to Angela, but didn't know where to begin. “When you were here—” I began, then stopped.

“Yes?”

“Did you know Super Goat Man?”

I felt her stiffen. “Of course, everybody knew him,” she said.

“He's still here.” I watched her as I spoke. Her gaze dipped to the ground.

“You saw him?”

“No, but we will at dinner tonight.”

“How. . unexpected.” Now Angela was the one in fugue.

“Did you study with him?”

“He rarely taught. I attended a few talks.”

“I thought you didn't like that stuff.”

She shrugged. “I was curious.”

I waited to understand. Crickets had begun a chorus in the grass. The sun ebbed. Soon we'd need to visit our bed-and-breakfast outside campus, to change into fresh clothes for the dinner party. Ordinarily such gatherings were clumsy at best, with grudges incompletely smothered under the surface of the talk, among tenured faculty who knew one another far too well. Something in me now curdled at the prospect of this one. In fact, I'd begun to dread it.

“Everett.” There was something Angela wanted to tell me.

I made a preemptive guess. “Did you have some sort of something with Super Goat Man?” This was how she and I blundered through one another's past liaisons — we'd never been systematic.

I moved around the bench, to try and look her in the eye.

“Just an — affair. Nothing.”

“What's nothing?”

She shrugged, and flipped her fingers as though dispelling a small fog. “We fooled around a few times. It was stupid.”

I felt the poison of bitterness leach into my bloodstream. “I don't know why but I find that totally disgusting.”

“Oh, Everett.” Angela raised her arms, moved to assuage me, knowing as she did my visceral possessiveness, the bolt of jealousy that shot through me when contemplating her real past, anytime it arose. Of course, she couldn't understand my special history with Super Goat Man. How could she if I didn't? I'd never even mentioned him.

“I was a silly girl.” She spoke gently. “And I didn't know you yet.”

Unsatisfied, I wished her to declare that the encounter had been abusive, an ethical violation. Not that I had any ground to stand on. Anyway, she was Italian in this, as in all things. It was just an affair.

“Do you want to skip the dinner?”

She scowled. “That's silly. He wouldn't even remember. And I don't care. It's really nothing, my darling. My love.”

At the president's house Super Goat Man was the last to arrive, so I was allowed to fantasize briefly that I'd been spared. The sight, when he did come in, was startling. He'd not only aged, but shrunk — I doubted if he was even five feet tall. He was, as ever, barefooted, and wore white muslin pajamas, with purple piping. The knees of the pajama bottoms were smudged with mud. As he entered the room, creeping in among us as we stood with our cocktail glasses, I quickly saw the reason for the smudges: as Super Goat Man's rickety steps faltered he dropped briefly to all fours. There, on the ground, he'd shake himself, almost like a wet dog. Then he'd rise again, on palsied limbs.

No one took notice of this. The guests, the other faculty, were inured, polite. In this halting manner Super Goat Man made his way past us, to the dining room. Apparently he wasn't capable of mingling, or even necessarily of speech. He took a seat at the long table, his bunched face, his squinting eyes and wrinkled horns, nearly at the level of his place setting. So Super Goat Man's arrival curtailed cocktail hour, as we began drifting in behind him, almost guiltily. The president's husband showed us to our places, which had been carefully designated, though an accommodation was evidently being made for Super Goat Man, who'd plopped down where he liked and wasn't to be budged. I was at the right hand of the president, and the left of the chair of the hiring committee. Again, a good sign. Angela sat across from me, Super Goat Man many places away, at the other end of the table.

I actually managed to forget him for the duration of the meal. He was, so far as I could tell, silent at his feed, and the women on either side of him turned to their other partners, or conversed across the width of the table. Toward the end we were served a course of cognac and dessert, and the president's husband passed around cigars, which he bragged were Cuban. Some of the women fled their chairs to avoid the smoke; other guests rose and mingled again in the corners of the room. It was in this interval of disarrangement that Super Goat Man pushed himself off his chair and made his way to the seat at my left, which the president had vacated. He had to collapse to his knees only once on the way, and he offered no evidence of sacrificed dignity as he rose from the floor.

Angela remained in her seat. Unlike any of the American women, she'd accepted a cigar, and now leaned it into the flame of a lighter proffered by an older professor she'd been entertaining throughout the meal. Her eyes found mine as Super Goat Man approached. Her expression was curious, and not unsympathetic.

Super Goat Man prodded my arm with a finger. I turned and considered him. Black pupils gleamed behind a hedge of eyebrows. His resplendent tufts had thinned and spread — the hair of his face had been redistributed, to form a merciful gauze across his withered features.

“I. . knew. . your. . father.” His voice was mossy, sepulchral.

“Yes,” I said simply, keeping my voice low. No one was paying us any attention, yet. Not apart from Angela.

“You. . remember. .?”