Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

"You want to draw it?"

She reached out and laid a hand on his cheek. It was warm and still dewy from the shower, his stubble pleasantly scratchy under her fingertips. She wondered how long it had been since she had last touched his face.

"Sam, come on. Stop for a minute," she said.

"I need to get this down."

She reached out for the pencil and arrested its mechanical progress. For a moment he fought her; there was a tiny creaking of splinters, and the pencil began to bend. Finally, it snapped in two, splitting lengthwise. She handed him her half, the skinny gray tube of graphite glinting like mercury rising in a thermometer.

"Sammy, how did you get him off?"

"I told you."

"My father called the mayor's mother," Rosa said. "Who was able to manipulate the criminal-justice system of New York City. Which she did out of her deep love of Rene Magritte."

"Apparently."

"Bullshit."

He shrugged, but she knew he was lying. He had been lying to her steadily, and with her approval, for years. It was a single, continuous lie, the deepest kind of lie possible in a marriage: the one that need never be told, because it will never be questioned. Every once in a while, however, small bergs like this one would break off and drift across their course, mementos of the trackless continent of lies, the blank spot on their maps.

"How did you get him off?" Rosa said. She had never before so persisted in trying to get the truth out of him. Sometimes she felt like Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, married to a man with contacts in the underground. The lies were for her protection as well as his.

"I talked to the arresting officer," Sammy said, looking steadily at her. "Detective Lieber."

"You spoke to him."

"He seemed like an all right kind of guy."

"That's lucky."

"We're going to have lunch."

Sammy had been having lunch, on and off, with a dozen men over the past dozen years or so. They rarely displayed any last names in his conversation; they were just Bob or Jim or Pete or Dick. One would appear on the fringes of Rosa's consciousness, hang around for six months or a year, a vague mishmash of stock tips, opinions, and vogue jokes in a gray suit, then vanish as quickly as he had come. Rosa always assumed that these friendships of Sammy's-the only relations, since Joe's enlistment, that merited the name-went no further than a lunch table at Le Marmiton or Laurent. It was one of her fundamental assumptions.

"Well then, maybe Daddy can help you out with this Senate committee, too," Rosa said. "I'll bet Estes Kefauver is a terrific Max Ernst fan."

"Maybe we should just get hold of Max Ernst," Sammy said. "I need all the help I can get."

"Are they calling in everyone?" Rosa said.

Sammy shook his head. He was trying not to look worried, but she could tell that he was. "I made some calls," he said. "Gaines and I seem to be the only comics men that anyone knows they're calling."

Bill Gaines was the publisher and chief pontiff of Entertainment Comics. He was a slovenly, brilliant guy, excitable and voluble the way that Sammy was-when the subject was work-and, like Sammy, he harbored ambitions. His comic books had literary pretensions and strove to find readers who would appreciate their irony, their humor, their bizarre and pious brand of liberal morality. They were also shockingly gruesome. Corpses and dismemberments and vivid stabbings abounded. Awful people did terrible things to their horrible loved ones and friends. Rosa had never liked Gaines or his books very much, though she adored Bernard Krigstein, one of the E.C. regulars, refined and elegant in both print and person and a daring manipulator of panels.

"Some of your stuff is pretty violent, Sam," she said. "Pretty close to the limit."

"It might not be the stabbings and vivisections," Sammy said. And then, licking his lips, "At least not only that."

She waited.

"There's, well, there's, sort of a whole chapter on me in Seduction of the Innocent."

"There is?"

"Part of a chapter. Several pages."

"And you never told me this?"

"You said you weren't going to read the damn thing. I figured you didn't want to know."

"I asked you if Dr. Wertham mentioned you. You said…" She tried to remember what exactly he had said. "You said that you looked, and you weren't in the index."

"Well, not by name," Sammy said. "That's what I meant."

"I see," Rosa said. "But it turns out there is a whole, actual chapter about you."

"It's not about me personally. It doesn't even identify me by name. It just talks about stories I wrote. The Lumberjack. The Rectifier. But not just mine. There's a lot about Batman. And Robin. There's stuff about Wonder Woman. About how she's a little… a little on the butch side."

"Uh-huh. I see." Everyone knew. That was what made their particular secret, their lie, so ironic; it went unspoken, unchallenged, and yet it did not manage to deceive. There was gossip in the neighborhood; Rosa had never heard it, but she could feel it sometimes, smell it lingering in the air of a living room that she and Sam had just entered. "Does the U.S. Senate know that you wrote these stories?"

"I seriously doubt it," Sammy said. "It was all nom de plume."

"Well, then."

"I'll be fine." He reached for his pad again, then rolled over and rifled the nightstand drawer for another pencil. But when he was back under the covers, he just sat there, drumming with the eraser end on the pad.

"Think he'll stay for a while?" he said.

"No. Uh-uh. Maybe. I don't know. Do we want him to stay?" she said.

"Do you still love him?" He was trying to catch her off guard, lawyer-style. But she was not going to venture so far, not yet, nor poke so deeply into the embers of her love for Joe.

"Do you?" she said, and then, before he could begin to take the question seriously, she went on, "Do you still love me?"

"You know I do," he said at once. Actually, she knew that he did. "You don't have to ask."

"And you don't have to tell me," she said. She kissed him. It was a curt and sisterly kiss. Then she switched off her light and turned her face to the wall. The scratching of his pencil resumed. She closed her eyes, but she could not relax. It took her very little time to realize that somehow she had forgotten the one thing she had wanted to talk to Sammy about: Tommy.

"He knows that you adopted him," she said. "According to Joe." The pencil stopped. Rosa kept her face to the wall. "He knows that somebody else is really his dad. He just doesn't know who."

"Joe never told him, then."

"Would he?"

"No," said Sammy. "I guess he wouldn't."

"We have to tell him the truth, Sam," Rosa said. "The time has come. It's time."

"I'm working now," Sammy said. "I'm not going to talk about this anymore."

She knew from long experience to believe this. The conversation had officially come to an end. And she had not said anything that shewanted to say to him! She put a hand on his warm shoulder and left it there a little while. Again, there was a tiny shock of remembered coolness at the touch of his skin.

"What about you?" she said, just before she finally drifted off to sleep. "Are you going to stay for a while?"

But if there was a reply, she missed it.

AT thirty-five, with incipient wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and a voice grown husky with cigarettes, Rosa Clay was, if anything, more beautiful than the girl Joe remembered. She had surrendered her futile and wrongheaded battle against the ample construction of her frame. The general expansion of her rosy flesh had softened the dramatic rake of her nose, the equine length of her jaw, the flare of her cheekbones. Her thighs had a grandeur, and her hips were capacious, and in those first few days, a great goad to his renascent love was the glimpse of her pale, freckled breasts, brimming from the cups of her brassiere with a tantalizing but fictitious threat of spilling over, that was afforded him by one of her housedresses, or by a chance late-night encounter outside the bathroom in the hall. He had thought of Rosa countless times over the years of his flight, but somehow, courting or embracing her in his memory, he had neglected to dab in the freckles with which she was so prodigiously stippled, and now he was startled by their profusion. They emerged and faded against her skin with the inscrutable cadence of stars on the night sky. They invited the touch of fingers as painfully as the nap of velvet or the shimmer of a piece of watered silk.