Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

"Mr. Deasey?" said Joe.

Deasey left off looking out at the expanse of sandstone sky and rusty palisade and went over to his desk. He picked up the phone.

"Fuck it," he said. "We'll leave it up to Anapol. I have a feeling they may be looking for a new kind of character, anyway."

"Why's that?" Sammy said.

Deasey looked at Sammy and then at Joe. There was something he wanted to tell them. "Why is what?"

"Why might Shelly and Jack be looking for a new kind of character?"

"I never said that. Let's call him. Get me Mr. Anapol," he said into the phone.

"What about Ashkenazy?" said Joe. "What will he say?"

Deasey said, "Do you seriously have any doubts?"

Be a u t e e f u l." Ashkenazy sighed. "Look at those… those…" "They're called knockers," said Anapol. "Look at them! Which one of you thought this up?" said Ashkenazy. He looked at Joe with one eye while he kept the other on Luna Moth. Affluence had brought with it an entire panoply of new suits, striped and checked and boldly herringboned, madly checkered three-piece numbers, each of them the color of a different variety of squash, from butternut to Italian green. The fabrics were rich woolens and cashmeres, the cuts jazzy and loose, so that he no longer looked like a racetrack tout, with his chewed cigar end and his thumbs in his waistcoat. Now he looked like a big-time gangster with a fix in on the third at Belmont. "I bet it was you, Kavalier."

Joe looked at Sammy. "We did it together," he said. "Sammy and I. Mostly Sammy. I just said something about a moth."

"Aw, now don't be modest, Joe," Sammy said, stepping over to pat Joe on the shoulder. "He pretty much slapped the whole thing together himself?'

The practice of magic, which Joe had resumed in front of the mirror in Jerry Glovsky's bedroom immediately after meeting with Hermann Hoffman, also seemed to have played a role in her parturition. It was true, however, that Sammy, for some time, had been digging around for a female superbeing. The addition of sex to the costumed-hero concept was a natural and, apart from a few minor efforts at other companies- the Sorceress of Zoom, the Woman in Red-yet to be attempted. Sammy had been toying with ideas for a cat-woman, a bird-woman, a mythological Amazon (all of them soon to be tried elsewhere), and a lady boxer named Kid Vixen when Joe had proposed his secret tribute to the girl from Greenwich Village. The idea of a moth-woman was also, in its way, a natural. National had another huge hit on its hands with Batman in Detective Comics, and the appeal of a nocturnal character, one who derived her power from the light of the moon, was evident.

"I don't know," said Shelly Anapol. "It makes me a little nervous." He took from his partner, and held with the tips of his fingers, the painting of Luna Moth, which Joe had invested with all the hopefulness and desire that Rosa, admittedly in person a somewhat less buxom creature, had stirred in him-he had worked most of the time with an erection. Anapol pushed aside a letter that lay open on his desk blotter and dropped the painting there, as if it were extremely hot or had been dipped in carbolic. "Those are very large breasts, boys."

"We know it, Mr. Anapol," said Sammy.

"But a moth, I don't know, it's not a popular insect. Why can't she be a butterfly? There must be some good names there. Red, uh, what? Red Dot… Bluewing… Pearly… I don't know."

"She can't be a butterfly!'' said Sammy. "She's the Mistress of the Night."

"That's another thing: we can't say 'mistress.' Already I'm getting fifty letters a week from priests and ministers. A rabbi from Schenectady. Luna Moth. Luna Moth." The look of incipient nausea had come into his eyes and slack jaw. They were going to make themselves a pile with this.

"George, you think this is a good idea?"

"Oh, it's drivel, Mr. Anapol," Deasey said brightly. "Extremely pure."

Anapol nodded. "You haven't been wrong yet," he said. He picked up the letter that he had pushed aside, scanned it quickly, then put it back down. "Jack?"

"They got nothing like it," Ashkenazy said.

Anapol turned to Sammy. "It's settled, then. Call Pantaleone, the Glovskys, whoever you need to fill in the rest of the book. What the hell, make 'em all dollies. Maybe we could call it All Doll. Huh? Huh? All Doll. That's new. Is that new?"

"I never heard of anything like it."

"Let them infringe on us for a change. Yeah, good, get the kids in here, George, and get them started on this. I want something by Monday."

"Here we go again," said Sammy. "There's just one thing, Mr. Anapol."

Ashkenazy and Anapol looked at him. You could see they knew what was coming. Sammy glanced at Deasey, remembering the speech the editor had made on Friday night, hoping to find some encouragement. Deasey was watching intently, his face expressionless but pale, his forehead beaded with perspiration.

"Uh-oh," Anapol said. "Here it comes."

"We want in on the Escapist radio program, that's first."

"That's first?"

"Second is, you agree that this character, Luna Moth, is half ours. Fifty percent to Empire Comics, fifty percent to Kavalier & Clay. We get half of the merchandising, half the radio program if there is one. Half of everything. Otherwise we take her, and our services, elsewhere."

Anapol half turned his head toward his partner. "You were right," he said.

"And we want raises, too," Sammy said, with another glance at Deasey, deciding, now that the subject seemed to be open for discussion, to press it as far as he could.

"Another two hundred dollars a week," Joe said. The Ark of Miriam was scheduled to sail in the early spring of next year. At that rate, if he put away an additional two hundred a week, he would be able to underwrite four, five, perhaps half a dozen passages more than he had promised.

"Two hundred dollars a week!" Anapol shouted.

Deasey chuckled and shook his head. He seemed genuinely tickled.

"And, uh, yeah, the same for Mr. Deasey, here, too," said Sammy. "He's going to have a lot more to do."

"You can't negotiate for me, Mr. Clay," Deasey said dryly. "I'm management."

"Oh."

"But I do thank you."

All at once Anapol looked very tired. What with phony bombs and millionaires and threatening letters from famous attorneys hand-delivered by messengers, he had not slept well since Friday. Last night he had tossed and turned for hours, while beside him Mrs. Anapol growled at him to lie still.

"Shark!" she had called him. "Shark, be still." She called him "shark" because she had read in Frank Buck's column that this animal literally could not stop moving or it would die. "What's the matter with you, my God, it's like trying to sleep with a cement mixer in the bed."

I almost got blown up! he wanted to tell her for the one hundredth time. He had decided to say nothing about the cheap-novelty bomb in the Empire offices, as he had said nothing about the threatening letters that had been trickling in steadily ever since Kavalier & Clay had declared unilateral war on the Axis.

"I'm going to lose my shirt," he had said instead.

"So you'll lose your shirt," his wife said.

"It's a goddamn very nice shirt I'm going to lose. Do you know how much money there is in radio? With the pins, the pencils, the cereal boxes. We're not just looking at novelties, you know. This is Escapist pajamas. Bath towels. Board games. Soft drinks."

"They won't take it away."

"They're going to try."

"So let them try. In the meantime, you get on the radio, and I have a chance to meet an important and cultivated man like James Love. I saw him in the newsreel once. He looks just like John Barrymore."

"He does look like John Barrymore."