Michael Chabon: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

And then, bent and twisted and adrift at the bottom of the box, a strip of four photographs, from a coin booth, of his mother and Joe-grinning, startled by the flash; all tongues and bug-eyes; with their cheeks and temples pressed together; and then kissing, a heroic and heavy-lidded kiss like two people on a movie poster. In the pictures, they looked absurdly skinny and young and so stereotypically in love that it was obvious even to Tommy, an eleven-year-old boy who had never before in his life looked at any two people and had the conscious thought: Those two people are in love. As if by magic, he heard their voices, their laughter, and then the knob turning, and the creaking hinges of the door. Quickly, he began replacing the things he had taken from the box.

He could hear their lips meeting and parting with a sticky sound; the clicking of their teeth or the buttons on their clothes.

"I have to work," his mother said at last. " 'Love Made a Monkey Out of Me.'"

"Ah," he said. "Autobiography."

"Shut up."

"How about if I make dinner," he said. "So you can keep on working?"

"Hey, that would be swell. Unheard of. Maybe you want to be careful, I could get used to that."

"Get used to it."

Those two people are in love.

"Have you talked to Tommy yet?" she said.

"Sort of."

"Sort of?"

"I haven't found the right moment."

"Joe. You have to tell him."

The folder filled with memorabilia of the Mighty Molecule's career slipped from Tommy's hand. Photographs and clippings fluttered everywhere, and as he tried to gather them up, he knocked against the crate, and its lid fell shut with a splintery crack.

"What was that?"

"Tommy? Oh, my God. Tommy, are you in here?"

He sat in the dim hollow of his sanctum, clutching the strip of photographs to his chest.

"No," he said, after a moment, knowing that it was, without question, the most pathetic thing he had ever said in his life.

"Let me," he heard Joe say. There was a scrape of crates and some grunting and then Joe's head poked into the Innermost Cell. He had wriggled his way through the passage on his belly. He propped himself on his elbows with his arms tucked under his chest. Up close, his face was blotchy, and his hair was all crabgrass and dandelions.

"Hey," he said. "Hi."

"Hi."

"What are you doing?"

"Nothing."

"So," Joe said, "I guess maybe you heard a few things out there."

"Yeah."

"Can I come in?" It was his mother.

"I don't think there's room, Rosa."

"Sure there is."

Joe looked at Tommy. "What do you think?"

Tommy shrugged and nodded. So Joe pulled himself all the way in and crammed himself, hunched over, up against the side of the Cell, his hips pressed against Tommy's. Tommy's mother's head appeared, her hair hastily and imperfectly tied up in a scarf, her lips showing right through her lipstick. Tommy and Joe each reached out a hand and pulled her in with them, and she sat up and sighed and said, happily,

"Well," as if they had all settled down together on a blanket in the shade beside a sun-dappled stream.

"I was just about to tell Tom a story," Joe said.

"Uh-huh," Rosa said. "Go on."

"That isn't something I-I'm more used to doing it-with pictures, you know?" He swallowed, and cracked his knuckles, and took a deep breath. He smiled a weak little smile, and unclipped a pen from his shirt pocket. "Maybe I should draw it, ha ha."

"I already saw the pictures," Tommy said.

His mother leaned forward to look with Joe at the two people they once had been.

"Oh, my God," she said. "I remember that. It was that night we took your aunt to the movies. In the lobby of the Loew's Pitkin."

They all moved a little closer together, and then Tommy lay down with his head in his mother's lap. She stroked his hair, and he listened while Joe went on unconvincingly for a while about the things that you did when you were young, and the mistakes that you made, and the dead brother for whom Tommy had been named, that unlucky, unimaginable boy, and how everything had been different then, because there was a war on, at which Tommy pointed out that there had also, until recently, been a war in Korea, and Joe replied that this was true, and it was then that he and Rosa both realized that the boy was no longer listening to anything they were telling him. He was just lying there, in the Bug's Nest, holding his father's hand, while his mother brushed the bangs from his forehead.

"I think we are okay," Joe said finally.

"Okay," said Rosa. "Tommy? Are you okay? Do you understand all this?"

"I guess so," the boy said. "Only."

"Only what?"

"Only what about Dad?"

His mother sighed, and told him they were going to have to see about that.

Sammy let himself into the house. It was past midnight, he was sober as a headstone, and in his pockets there were tickets for the Broadway Limited and the City of Los Angeles. There was a light on in the living room, and he saw that Joe had fallen asleep in the armchair with one of his dusty old books on Kabbalah or whatever it was-Volume IV of Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews -pitched like a tent on his lap. A half-empty bottle of Piels sat on a raffia coaster on the deal table beside him. When Sammy came in, Joe roused a little and shifted in the chair, lifting a hand to shield his eyes from the glare of the bulb. He gave off a stale, drowsy smell of beer and ash.

"Hey."

"Hey," Sammy said. He went to Joe and put a hand on his shoulder. He kneaded the muscles there; they felt knotted and hard. "Everyone all right? Tommy all right?"

"Mmm." Joe nodded, then closed his eyes again. Sammy switched off the light. He went over to the sofa, picked up a peach-and-mustard afghan-one of the few things his mother had ever knit and the only visible remnant of her in his life-carried it to the armchair, and draped it over Joe, careful to cover the orange-tipped toes of Joe's stocking feet.

Next Sammy walked down the hall and entered Tommy's bedroom. In the bend of light from the hall, he could see that Tommy had wandered, in his sleep, to the far edge of the bed, and lay with his face mashed against the wall. He had kicked away all the bedclothes; he had on powder-blue pajamas with white piping at the lapels and cuffs (Sammy, naturally, owned an identical pair). Tommy was a very energetic sleeper, and even after Sammy pulled his head away from the wall, the boy went on snuffling, twitching, his breathing so rapid that it sounded almost like the panting of a dog. Sammy started to pull the covers up over him. Then he stopped and just stood there looking at Tommy, loving him, and feeling the usual spasm of shame that it should be while he was watching the boy sleep that he felt most like a father, or rather, the happiest to be one.

He had been an indifferent father, better than his own, perhaps, but that was saying very little. When Tommy was still an unknown fishboy inside Rosa, Sammy had resolved never to let him feel abandoned, never to walk out on him, and until now, until tonight, he had managed to keep the promise, though there were times-the night he had decided to take that job at Gold Star Comics, for example-when it had been difficult. But the truth was that, for all his noble intentions, if you didn't count the hours when the boy was sleeping, then Sammy had missed out on most of his childhood. Like many boys, Sammy supposed, Tommy had done most of his growing up when the man he called his father was not around, in the spaces between their infrequent hours together. Sammy wondered if the indifference that he had attributed to his own father was, after all, not the peculiar trait of one man but a universal characteristic of fathers. Maybe the "youthful wards" that he routinely assigned to his heroes-a propensity that would, from that day forward, enter into comics lore and haunt him for the rest of his life-represented the expression not of a flaw in his nature but of a deeper and more universal wish.