Michael Chabon: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Joe put an arm across Sammy's shoulders. On the other side of Sammy, Rosa leaned against him, and laid her head on Joe's hand, and sighed. They sat that way for a while, propping one another up.

"I can't help noticing that I'm not hearing a lot of astonishment from you two," Sammy said at last.

Rosa and Joe sat up, looked at Sammy, and then at each other behind his back. They blushed.

"Batman and Robin?" Rosa said, astonished.

"That's a dirty lie," Sammy said.

They drank one more round, and then someone, Sammy wasn't sure who, said that they had better be getting back out to Bloomtown, since Joe's boxes were coming today and Tommy was due home from school in less than two hours. There followed a general donning of coats and scarves, some slapstick with dollar bills and the spilled ice from a drink, and then at some point Rosa and Joe seemed to remark that they were headed out the door of the chophouse and that Sammy was not with them.

"You're both too drunk to drive anyway," Sammy told them when they returned for him. "Take the train from Penn Station. I'll bring the car home later."

Now came the first time that they looked at Sammy with something approaching the doubt, the mistrust, the pity that he had been dreading seeing in their faces.

"Give me a break," he said. "I'm not going to fucking drive into the East River. Or anything like that."

They didn't move.

"I swear to you, all right?"

Rosa looked at Joe again, and Sammy wondered if it wasn't just that they worried he might do something to hurt himself; perhaps they were worried that, as soon as they left him, he would head up to Times Square and try to cruise a sailor. And then Sammy realized that, after all, he could.

Rosa came back toward him and unfurled a big lurching hug that nearly sent Sammy tumbling off his bar stool. She spoke into his ear, her breath warm and with a burned-cork smell of bourbon.

"We'll be all right," she said. "All of us."

"I know," Sammy said. "Go on, you guys. I'm just going to sit here. I'm just going to sober up."

Sammy nursed his drink for the next hour, chin in his palms, elbows on the bar. The dark brown, sardonic taste of the bourbon, which at first he had found unpalatable, now seemed no different to him from that of the tongue in his mouth, the thoughts in his head, the heart beating imperturbably in his chest.

He wasn't sure what finally started him thinking about Bacon. Perhaps it was the revived memory of that alcoholic night at Pawtaw in 1941. Or maybe it was just the single pink wrinkle that creased the broad back of the barman's neck. Over the years, Sammy had regretted nearly everything about his affair with Bacon except, until now, its secrecy. The need for stealth and concealment was something that he had always taken for granted as a necessary condition both of that love and of the shadow loves, each paler and more furtive than the last, that it had cast. Back in the summer of 1941, they had stood to lose so much, it seemed, through the shame and ruination of exposure. Sammy could not have known that one day he would come to regard all the things that their loving each other had seemed to put at so much risk-his career in comic books, his relations with his family, his place in the world-as the walls of a prison, an airless, lightless keep from which there was no hope of escape. Sammy had long since ceased to value the security that he had once been so reluctant to imperil. Now he had been unmasked, along with Bruce and Dick, and Steve and Bucky, and Oliver Queen (how obvious!) and Speedy, and that security was gone for good. And now there was nothing left to regret but his own cowardice. He recalled his and Tracy's parting at Penn Station on the morning of Pearl Harbor, in the first-class compartment of the Broadway Limited, their show of ordinary mute male farewell, the handshake, the pat on the shoulder, carefully tailoring and modulating their behavior though there was no one at all watching, so finely attuned to the danger of what they might lose that they could not permit themselves to notice what they had.

"Hey, Weepin' Wanda," said the bartender, in a tone of not quite mock menace. "We don't allow crying in this bar."

"Sorry," Sammy said. He wiped his eyes on the end of his necktie and sniffled.

"Saw you on the TV this afternoon," the bartender said. "Didn't I now?"

"Did you?"

The barman grinned. "You know, I always wondered about Batman and Robin."

"Did you?"

"Yeah. Thanks for clearing that up."

"You," said a voice behind Sammy. He felt a hand on his shoulder and turned to find himself looking into the face of George Debevoise Deasey. The ginger mustache had faded and dulled to the color of a turned slice of apple, and the eyes behind the thick lenses were rheumy and branched with pink veins. But Sammy could see that they were animated by the same old glint of mischief and indignation.

Sammy pushed back from his stool and half-fell, half-lowered himself to the floor. He was not quite as sober as he might have been.

"George! What are you-were you there? Did you see it?"

Deasey seemed not to hear Sammy. His gaze was leveled at the bartender.

"Do you know why they have to fuck each other?" Deasey asked the man. He had developed a slight tremor of his head, it seemed to Sammy, which gave him a more querulous air than ever.

"What's that?" the bartender said.

"I said, Do you know why Batman and Robin have to fuck each other?" He took out his wallet and pulled out a ten-dollar bill, nonchalant, building up to the punch.

The bartender shook his head, half-smiling, waiting for something good. "Now, why is that?" he said.

"Because they can't go fuck themselves." Deasey tossed the bill onto the bar. "The way you can. Now why don't you make yourself useful and bring me a rye and water, and another of what he's having?"

"Say," the bartender said, "I don't have to take that kind of talk."

"Then don't," said Deasey, abruptly losing interest in the discussion. He climbed up onto the stool beside Sammy's and patted the seat that Sammy had vacated. The bartender languished for a few seconds in the cold of the sudden conversational void that Deasey had left him to, then moved over and took two clean glasses from the back bar.

"Sit down, Mr. Clay," Deasey said.

Sammy sat, a little in awe of George Deasey, as ever.

"Yes, I was there, to answer your question," Deasey said. "I happened to be in town for a few weeks. I saw you were on the bill."

George Deasey had left the comics business during the war, never to return. An old school chum had recruited him into some kind of intelligence work, and Deasey had moved to Washington, remaining there after the war was over, doing things with men like Bill Donovan and the Dulles brothers, which, the few times that Sammy had run into him, he neither refused nor agreed to discuss. He was still dressed quaintly, in one of his trademark Woodrow Wilson suits, gray flannel with a parson collar and a clocked bow tie. For a few minutes, as they waited for the barman to bring them their drinks-he took his sweet time-and then sipped at them, Deasey said nothing. Finally, "It's a sinking ship," he said. "You ought to be grateful that they just threw you overboard."

"Only I can't swim," Sammy said.

"Ah, well," Deasey said lightly. He finished his drink and signaled to the bartender for another. "Tell me, has my old friend Mr. Kavalier truly returned? Can the fantastic tale I heard possibly be accurate?"

"Well, he wasn't really going to jump," Sammy said. "If that's what you heard. And he didn't write the letter. It was all-my son-it's a long story. But he's living in my house now," Sammy said. "Actually, I think that he and my wife-"

Deasey held up a hand. "Please," he said, "I've heard enough unsavory details about your private life today, Mr. Clay."