Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

"Isn't this great?" he said. He was whispering now, which meant that he was up to something. He looked at his watch. "Shit, five o'clock. I have to go, gate."

"You have to go, 'gate'?"

"Yes, 'gate.' It's like 'man.' 'What's happening, gate?' 'Don't be late, gate.' You never say 'gate'?"

"No, that's something I never say," Sammy said. "Only Negroes say that, Joe. Ethel's expecting us around six."

"Yes, okay. Six."

"That's in an hour."

"Okay."

"You're coming, aren't you?" said Sammy.

Mr. Cobb turned around in his chair and scowled at them again. They covered their mouths. Joe nodded his head toward the door. Sammy got up and followed him out into the hall. Joe closed the heavy studio door and leaned his shoulder against it.

"Joe, you said you'd come."

"I was very careful not to say that."

"Well, I don't have the transcript handy, but that was how it sounded."

"Sammy, please. Don't make me. I don't want to go. I want to go out with my girl. I want to have fun." He blushed. Having fun was still a difficult thing for Joe to admit he was able to do. "It isn't my fault that you don't have anyone-"

The studio door burst open, throwing Joe back against the wall.

"Sorry!" said Tracy Bacon. He gingerly pulled back the door to see what had become of Joe. "Holy Eye of the Moon Opal, are you all right?"

"Yes, thank you," said Joe, rubbing his forehead.

"I was in such a damn hurry to get out here I didn't bother to look where I was going! I was afraid you two might have left before I got a chance to talk to Mr. Clay."

"Yes, talk! You talk," Joe said, patting Bacon on the shoulder. "Unfortunately, I have to go. Mr. Bacon, it was nice meeting you, you are a perfect Escapist I think."

"Well, thank you."

Joe drew himself up. "So," he said, pronouncing it in the German fashion. With Bacon interposed very carefully between them, he gave Sammy an awkward little wave and ducked around Bacon to make a dash for the end of the hall. Before reaching the stairwell, he stopped and turned back. He looked at Sammy right in the eyes, his expression grave and remorseful, as though he were on the verge of making a full confession of everything bad that he had ever done. Then he flashed his visitor's badge, Melvin Purvis-style, and was gone. And that, Sammy knew, was about as close as Joe Kavalier could get to an apology.

"So," said Bacon, "what's he so hot to trot about?"

"His girl," said Sammy. "Miss Rosa Luxemburg Saks."

"I see." Bacon had a little bit of a southern accent. "She a foreigner, too?"

"Yeah, she is," Sammy said. "She's from Greenwich Village."

"I've heard of it."

"It's a pretty backward place."

"Is it."

"The people are little more than savages."

"I hear they eat dogs there."

" Rosa can do amazing things with dog."

When this burst of somewhat labored bantering flagged, they were embarrassed. Sammy rubbed at the back of his neck. For some reason, he was a little afraid of Tracy Bacon. He decided that Bacon was playing with him, condescending to him. Big, radiant, confident fellows with string-bass voices always made him feel acutely how puny, dark, and Jewish he was, a goofy little curlicue of ink stamped on a sheet of splintery paper.

"You had something to ask me?" Sammy said coldly.

"Yes, I wanted-look here." He punched Sammy on the shoulder. Not painfully, but not gently, either. Not always knowing his own strength was eventually to become, thanks to Tracy Bacon, one of the Escapist's characteristic traits. "Ordinarily I wouldn't do something like this, but when I got a look at you and saw you weren't any older than I am, maybe even younger-how old are you?"

"Safely in my twenties," Sammy said.

"I'm twenty-four," said Bacon. "Last week."

"Happy birthday."

"Mr. Clay-"

"Sammy."

" Tracy."

Bacon's grip was firm and dry, and he pumped Sammy's hand up and down half a dozen times.

"Sammy, I don't know if you could tell it or not," Bacon said, "but I'm having a little problem in there-"

The door opened again, and the other actors started to file out. Helen Portola sidled up to Bacon, took hold of his arm, and gazed up at him in the ardent manner Walter Winchell had alluded to. She could see that he had something on his mind and turned inquiringly to Sammy. She smiled, but Sammy thought he saw a waver of anxiety in her big green eyes.

"Trace? We're all going over to Sardi's."

"Save me a seat, all right, gorgeous?" said Bacon. He gave her shoulder a squeeze. "Turns out Mr. Clay and I have a mutual friend. We're just doing a little catching up."

Sammy was amazed by the ease and naturalness of Bacon's lie. Helen Portola looked Sammy over very carefully and coldly, as if trying to calculate what possible human could be the link between him and Tracy Bacon. Then she kissed Bacon on the cheek and, not without a show of reluctance, left. Sammy must have looked puzzled.

"Oh, I'm an awful liar," Bacon said airily. "Now, come on, let me buy you a drink, and I'll explain."

"Jeez," said Sammy, "I'd like to, but-"

Bacon actually took hold of Sammy by the elbow-gently enough- and put his arm around him, steering him down to the end of the hall by a fire door. He lowered his voice to a conspiratorial rasp.

"Sammy, I'm going to confess something to you." He paused, as if to give Sammy a moment to feel grateful for being taken into his confidence. Sammy was almost-almost-too taken aback to comply. "I'm in way over my head here. I'm no actor! I studied civil engineering in school. Two months ago I was swabbing out the mess on a cargo freighter. All right, I have an ideal voice for radio." He composed his features, his fair eyebrows and rather girlish mouth, into a stern, fatherly mien. "That isn't enough, and I know it. You can't get by in this business on natural ability alone." He looked so pleased by the harsh line he had taken with himself that all trace of it vanished at once. "This is my first big part. I want to be very, very good. If you could give me any, you know…"

"Insights?"

"Exactly!" He smacked Sammy on the chest with the palm of his right hand. "That's it! I was hoping we could sit down, see, and I could buy you a drink, and you could just talk to me a little bit about the Escapist. I'm not having any problems with Tom Mayflower."

"No, you seem to have him down pretty good."

"Well, I am Tom Mayflower, Mr. Clay, and that's the explanation for that. But the Escapist, jeez, I don't know. He just… he seems to take everything so damn seriously."

"Well, Mr. Bacon, he has serious problems to deal with…" Sammy began, grimacing at his own pretension. He felt he ought to be glad for this chance Bacon was offering him to gain some small influence over the direction of the radio program, but instead he found that he was more afraid of Tracy Bacon than before. Sammy came from a land of intense, uninterruptable, and energetic speakers, and he was used to being harangued, but he had never before felt himself so addressed, with such a direct appeal, made not merely to his ears but to his eyes. No one who looked like Tracy Bacon had ever, to his memory, spoken to him at all. The lithe, knicker-clad golden halfback atop the football trophy, stiff-arming every obstacle in his path, was not a type stamped out in any great profusion by Brownsville, Flatbush, or the Manual Arts High School. Sammy had encountered one or two of these pink-skinned, cardigan-wearing, cultivated lunks with schoolboy haircuts during his brief dips into the world of Rosa Saks, but he had certainly never been addressed by one-or even acknowledged. "The world today has a lot of serious problems." God, he sounded like a school principal! He ought just to shut up. "I really can't," he said. He looked at his watch. It was nearly ten past five. "I'll be late for a dinner date."