Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

At the far end of the library, a number of men had gathered into a tight, jostling ring around a very pretty, very young woman who was talking at what must have been the top of her lungs. Joe could not really understand what she was telling them, but it appeared to be a story that reflected poorly on her own judgment-she was blushing and grinning at the same time-and it unquestionably ended with the word "fuck." She tugged on the word, drawing it out to several times its usual length. She wound it all the way around her in two or three big loops and reveled in it as if it were a luxuriant shawl.

"Fuuuuuuuck."

The men around her burst out laughing, and she blushed even more deeply. She had on a loose, sleeveless kind of smock, and you could see the flush reaching all the way down past her shoulders to the tops of her arms. Then she looked up, and her eyes met Joe's.

"Saks," Joe said, producing the card at last. "Rosa Luxemburg Saks."

"Nah," Sammy said. "Is it?"

It was fascinating to see her face again after so long. Although Joe had never forgotten the girl whom he had surprised that morning in Jerry Glovsky's bedroom, he saw that, in his nocturnal reimaginings of the moment, he had badly misremembered her. He never would have recalled her forehead as so capacious and high, her chin as so delicately pointed. In fact, her face would have seemed overlong were it not counterbalanced by an extravagant flying buttress of a nose. Her rather small lips were set in a bright red hyphen that curved downward just enough at one corner to allow itself to be read as a smirk of amusement, from which she herself was not exempted, at the surrounding tableau of human vanity. And yet in her eyes there was something unreadable, something that did not want to be read, the determined blankness that in predator animals conceals hostile calculation, and in prey forms part of an overwhelming effort to seem to have disappeared.

The men around her had parted reluctantly as Harkoo, providing blocking for Joe and Sammy like a back for the latter's beloved Dodgers, shoehorned them into the circle.

"We've met," Rosa said. It was almost a question. She had a strong, deep, droll, masculine voice, turned up to a point that verged on speaker-rattling, as if she were daring everyone around her to listen and to judge. But then maybe, Joe thought, she was just very drunk. There was a glass of something amber in her hand. In any case, her voice went well, somehow, with her dramatic features and the wild mass of brown woolen loops, constrained here and there by a desperate bobby pin, that constituted her hairstyle. She gave his hand a squeeze that partook of the same bold intentions as her voice, a businessman's shake, dry and curt and forceful. And yet he noticed that she was, if anything, blushing more obviously than ever. The delicate skin over her clavicles was mottled.

"I don't believe so," said Joe. He coughed, partly to cover his discomfiture, partly to camouflage the suave rejoinder he had just been fed by the prompter crouching by the footlights of his desire, and partly because his throat had gone bone-dry. He felt a weird urge to lean down- she was a small woman, the top of whose head barely reached his collarbone-and kiss her on the mouth, in front of everyone, as he might have done in a dream, with that long optimistic descent across the distance between their lips enduring for minutes, hours, centuries. How surreal would that be? Instead, he reached into his pocket and took out his cigarettes. "Someone like you I would absolutely remember," he said.

"Oh, good God," said one of the men beside her in disgust.

The young woman to whom he was lying produced a smile which- Joe couldn't tell-might have been either flattered or appalled. Her smile was a surprisingly broad and toothy achievement for a mouth that in contemplation had been compacted into such a tiny pout.

"Huh," said Sammy. He, at least, sounded impressed by Joe's suavity.

Longman Harkoo said, "That's our cue." He put his arm once more around Sammy's shoulder. "Let's get you a drink, shall we?"

"Oh, I don't- I'm not-" Sammy reached out to Joe as Harkoo led him away, as though worried that their host was about to drag him off to the promised volcano. Joe watched him go with a cold heart. Then he held the pack of Pall Malls out to Rosa. She tugged a cigarette free and put it to her lips. She took a long drag. Joe felt constrained to point out that the cigarette was not lit.

"Oh," she said. She snorted. "I'm such an idiot."

" Rosa," chided one of the men standing beside her, "you don't smoke!"

"I just took it up," Rosa said.

There was a muffled groan, then the cloud of men around her seemed to dissolve. She took no notice. She inclined toward Joe and peered up, curving her hand around his and the flame of the match. Her eyes shone, an indeterminate color between champagne and the green of a dollar. Joe felt feverish and a little dizzy, and the cool talcum smell of Shalimar she gave off was like a guardrail he could lean against. They had drawn very close together, and now, as he tried and failed to prevent himself from thinking of her lying naked and facedown on Jerry Glovsky's bed, her broad downy backside with its dark furrow, the alluvial hollow of her spine, she took a step backward and studied him.

"You're sure we haven't met."

"Fairly."

"Where are you from?"

" Prague."

"You're Czech. "

He nodded.

"A Jew?"

He nodded again.

"How long have you been here?"

"One year," he said, and then, the realization filling him with wonder and chagrin, "one year today."

"Did you come with your family?"

"Alone," he said. "I left them there." Unbidden, there flashed in his mind's eye the image of his father, or the ghost of his father, striding down the gangplank of the Rotterdam , arms outstretched. Tears stung his eyes, and a ghostly hand seemed to clutch at his throat. Joe coughed once and batted at the smoke from his cigarette, as if it were irritating him. "My father has recently died."

She shook her head, looking sorrowful and outraged and, he thought, entirely lovely. As his glibness had departed him, so a more earnest nature seemed to feel greater liberty to confess itself in her.

"I'm really sorry for you," she said. "My heart goes out to them."

"It's not so bad," Joe said. "It will be all right."

"You know we're getting into this war," she declared. She wasn't blushing now. The brass-voiced party girl of a moment before, telling a story on herself that ended in an oath, seemed to have vanished. "We have to, and we will. Roosevelt will arrange it. He's working toward it now. We won't let them win."

"No," Joe said, though Rosa's views were hardly typical of her countrymen, most of whom felt that the events in Europe were an embroilment to be avoided at any price. "I believe…" He found himself, to his mild surprise, unable to finish the sentence. She reached out and took his arm.

"What I'm saying is just, I don't know. I guess 'don't despair,'" she said. "I really, really do mean that, Joe."

At her words, the touch of her hand, her pronouncing of his short blank American name devoid of all freight and family associations, Joe was overcome with a flood of gratitude so powerful that it frightened him, because it seemed to reflect in its grandeur and force just how little hope he really had left. He pulled away.

"Thank you," he said stiffly.

She let her hand fall, dismayed at having offended him. "I'm sorry," she said again. She lifted an eyebrow, quizzical, bold, and on the verge, he thought, of recognizing him. Joe averted his eyes, his heart in his throat, thinking that if she were able to recollect him and the circumstances of their first meeting, his chances with her would be ruined. Her eyes got very big, and her throat, her cheeks, her ears were flooded with the bright heart's blood of humiliation. Joe could see her making an effort not to look away.