Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

"I'd better start getting ready," he said, though he did not move, and she redoubled her grip on his penis.

"What are you planning to do with this?" she asked him. "Maybe you could work it into your act. I could paint a little face on it."

"I don't work with puppets."

There was a knock on the door. She let go of him, and he clambered over her to get underneath the coverlet, too.

"Yes?" she called.

"Open up! I have a little gift for the Amazing." It was her father. Rosa got up and pulled on a bathrobe. Then she picked up the cigarette that Joe had left burning on her dresser and went over to the door.

Her father stood in the hall, dressed for the reception in an enormous three-piece cocoa-brown seersucker suit, and carrying a canvas garment bag over one arm. He peered in curiously at Joe, who had sat up in bed, the blanket pulled up just high enough to cover himself. The question of this not being a convenient time to interrupt the young lovers, or of whether perhaps he ought to come back later, did not occur to her father. He just barreled right into her room.

"Josef," he said, raising the garment bag. "We have noticed that every time you perform, you're obliged to rent your tuxedo." Her father was inclined to the imperial "we" when he felt he was being particularly magnanimous. "It seemed to us you really ought to have one of your own." He unzipped the bag. "I had it made," he said.

The jacket was the color of the sky over Prague Castle on a clear winter night. The trousers were also a glossy, coal-dark blue, piped with a bright gold stripe. And affixed to one of the satiny black lapels was a small golden pin in the shape of a skeleton key.

"I sort of thought," her father said. "In honor of you-know-who." He reached into the pocket of the jacket and pulled out a domino mask of the same black satin as the jacket lapels, with long ties of black ribbon. "It couldn't hurt to add a little bit of mystery to the act."

Rosa was as surprised as Joe. She was smiling so hard that her ears started to hurt a little. "Joe," she said, "look what he did."

"Thank you," Joe said, "I-" He made a show of wanting to stand up, trapped in the bed by his nakedness.

"For God's sake, toss him a towel," her father drawled. "So he can thank us properly."

Joe climbed down from the bed, pulling the coverlet up around him. He knotted it around his waist and then took the blue tuxedo from Rosa 's father. A rather clumsy embrace followed, then her father brought out a flask and, after a bit of hopeless rummaging through the chaos of Rosa 's room, managed to find a glass that was only slightly smudged with lipstick prints.

"To the Amazing Cavalieri," he said, raising the pink-tinged glass of whiskey. "Whom-dare I say it?"

"Dare it," Rosa said, feeling herself blushing mightily.

"I'll just say that, in a family as small as this, there is most certainly room for one more." He drank.

Rosa was watching Joe's face, feeling almost drunk on the happiness of the moment, and so she saw the look of pain that flickered across it at these words.

"I already have a family," he said quietly.

"Oh, yes… Joe, for heaven's sake, I know that. I just-"

"I'm sorry," Joe said immediately. "That was very rude of me. Thank you so much, for everything. For this." He held up the tuxedo. "For your kindness. For Rosa."

He had nearly saved the moment, and they allowed him to think that he had. But her father fled the bedroom within the minute, and Rosa and her Joe were left alone, on the bed, naked, staring at the empty blue suit.

The last letter that Joe was ever to receive from his mother, mailed from the Ostrovni Street post office, as the laws required, between the hours of one and three in the afternoon, read as follows (the black marks trace the brusque transit of the censor's pen across the text):

My dear son,

It is a puzzle worthy of the best psychiatrist that a human life can be so utterly void and at the same time filled to bursting with hope. With Thomas gone we have nothing to live for, it seems, but the knowledge that he is on his way to be with you in that fortunate nation which has already so kindly received you in its bosom.

We are all as well as can be expected given Tante Lou's fits of pique ["Tante Lou" was family code for the Nazi government of Prague]. Your grandfather has lost most of the hearing in his left ear due to an infection, and some of the use of his right ear as well. So now he dwells in a realm of shouted conversations and serene imperviousness to argument. The latter is a valuable skill to possess around our Dear Friends [i.e., the Katz family, with whom the Kavaliers shared their two-room flat], and indeed I am at times inclined to believe that Papa is simply pretending to be deaf, or at least that he arranged to become so on purpose. My wrist has not quite healed it never may in the absence of ____________________ diet and is quite useless in poor weather but we have lately had a stretch of fine days, and I have continued to work on my Reinterpretation of Dreams [11] though paper [? smudged] is ____________________ bother, and I am obliged to soak my old typewriter ribbons in __ .

Please, Josef, do not continue to trouble yourself or waste your time attempting to win for us what you have, with the help of your friends, been able to attain for your brother. It is enough; more than enough. Your late father, as you know, suffered from chronic optimism, but it is clear to me and to anyone not foolish or addled by deafness that we ____________________ and that the present state of affairs will be as permanent as any of us shall require. You must make a life for yourself there, with your brother, and turn your thoughts from us and from ____________________.

I have not had word from you for three months, and while I am certain that you continue to write faithfully I take this silence however unintentional as a suggestion. In all likelihood this letter will not find you but if you are reading this, then please. Listen to me. I want you to forget us, Josef, to leave us behind once and for all. It is not in your nature to do so, but you must. They say that ghosts find it painful to haunt the living, and I am tormented by the idea that our tedious existence should dim or impair your enjoyment of your own young life. That the reverse situation should obtain is fair and proper, and you cannot imagine how I delight in picturing you standing on some bright, busy street corner in that city of freedom and swing music. But for you to waste another moment in worrying about us in this city of ____________________! No.

I shall not write again unless I have news of which you cannot fairly be deprived. Until then you must know, dear one, that you are in my thoughts every instant of my waking life and in my (clinically quite uninteresting) dreams as well.

Fondly,

Mother

This letter was in the hip pocket of Joe's new tuxedo as he entered the cream-and-gold Grand Ballroom of the Pierre. He had been carrying it around with him-unopened and unread-for days now. Whenever he paused to consider this behavior he found it quite shocking; but he never paused for very long. The burst of guilt that lit up the radiant nerves of his solar plexus when he handled or suddenly remembered the unopened letter was every bit as intense, he was sure, as whatever he would feel upon tearing its fragile seal and letting out the usual gray compound of bad dreams and pigeon feathers and soot. Every evening he took out the letter, without looking at it, and set it on his dresser. In the morning he transferred it to the pocket of the next day's trousers. It would not be accurate to say that it weighed there like a stone, encumbering his progress through the city of freedom and swing, or that it caught like a bone in his throat. He was twenty years old, and he had fallen in love with Rosa Saks, in the wild scholastic manner of twenty-year-old men, seeing, in the tiniest minutiae, evidence of the systematic perfection of the whole and proof of a benign creation. He loved, for example, her hair in all the forms it took on her body: the down on her lip, the fuzz on her buttocks, the recurrent brown feelers her eyebrows sent toward each other in between tweezings, the coarse pubic ruff that she had allowed him to shave into the outline of a moth's wings, the thick smoke-fragrant curls of her head. When she worked on a canvas in her top-floor room, she had a habit, when pondering, of standing storklike on her left foot and lovingly massaging it with the big toe, its toenail painted aubergine, of the right. Somehow this shade of purple and the echo of contemplative childish masturbation in the way she rubbed at her ankle struck him every time as not merely adorable but profound. The two dozen commonplace childhood photographs-snowsuit, pony, tennis racket, looming fender of a Dodge-were an inexhaustible source of wonder for him, at her having existed before he met her, and of sadness for his possessing nothing of the ten million minutes of that black-and-white scallop-edged existence save these few proofs. Only the embattled standards of a fundamentally restrained and sensible character prevented him from nattering constantly, to friends and strangers alike, about the capers she put in chicken salad (it was how her late mother had made it), the pile of dream words that accumulated by her bedside night after night, the lily-of-the-valley smell of her hand soap, et cetera. His portrayals of Judy Dark, in her up-to-the-minute gowns and bathing costumes cribbed from Vogue, and of her winged alter ego in streamlined bra and panties, grew ever more libidinous and daring- as if Luna Moth had received from the secret councils of Sex Itself an augmentation of powers like that granted to the Escapist at the outbreak of war-until she verged, in certain panels that took on a sacred and totemic significance for the boys of America, on total nakedness.