Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

"Three nights a week. Are you drunk?"

"What kind of question is that?" Bacon said, without elaborating whether he found the question offensive or merely superfluous, or both. "I came up here my first day in New York City," he continued, his breath fogging up the glass. "It was a lot different in the daylight. Kids running around. All that blue sky and steam out there. Pigeons. Boats. Flags."

"I've actually never been up here in the daytime. I mean, I've seen the sun come up. But I'm always gone long before they let the people in."

Bacon stepped back. A ghostly print of his skull lingered a moment on the window before evaporating. Then he slid down along the windows to the southeast corner, where, as at the three other corners of the observation floor, there was a coin-operated telescope. He stooped to peer through it. The shopping bags made a crinkling sound. Bacon seemed to have forgotten he was carrying them.

"This is really something," he said, squinting into the eyepiece. "You can see the Statue of Liberty." Unless you fed it a dime, of course, you could see nothing at all. "How about that, she sleeps in a hair net." He whirled around, the expression on his face at once innocent and reckless, for all the world like a toddler searching the nursery for something new to break.

"Mind if I look around?"

"Well…"

"This where you sit?"

Still carrying the bags, trailing a now-unmistakable odor of asparagus, Bacon walked over behind the broad podium that served during the day as a station for the guards who took tickets and gave informal tours of the celebrated panorama. This was where the Interceptor Command had installed the telephone that would, in the event of an aerial attack, connect Sammy immediately to Cortlandt Street. Sammy kept his lunch box here, his spare pencils, cigarettes, and extra log forms.

"I don't really sit… Bacon, maybe you'd better not… no!"

Bacon had set down one of the bags and lifted the receiver of the emergency phone. "Hello, Fay? It's Kong. Listen, sweetheart-hey. It's ringing."

Sammy ran around behind the guard station, snatched the phone from his hand, and slammed it back into place.

"Sorry."

"Can I ask you something, Bacon?" said Sammy. "Besides not to touch anything, I mean?" He leaned against Bacon as against a stuck door, getting his shoulder into it, and dislodged him from behind the guard station. "What's in the bags?"

Bacon looked down at his left hand, a little surprised, then at the bag he had set beside him. He picked it up and then hefted the bags in Sammy's direction. Sammy caught a whiff of something buttery and winy and green, shallots maybe.

"Dinner!" Bacon said.

They went into the dark cafe, bristling with the upturned legs of chairs. The polished stone floor whispered against their feet. The chrome bands that ringed the long bar glinted at one end in the light from the lobby. The refrigerators hummed softly to themselves. The muted atmosphere of the bar seemed to dampen, or at least to still, Bacon's spirits somewhat. He spun two chairs floorward, and then, without a word, began to unpack his shopping bags. One bag, it turned out, contained three lidded silver platters, of the type that hotel waiters in the movies were always wheeling in on linen-draped carts. The other bag held two more of the platters and a small tureen drizzled with pale green soup. After Bacon had arranged the platters and tureen on the table, he took out a somewhat random fistful of forks, knives, and spoons, an ornate, heavy pattern, and a pair of cloth napkins somewhat soiled by juices and liquids that had escaped the various platters. He also took out a bottle of wine, a corkscrew, and two glasses, one of which had broken along the way.

"We'll have to share," he said. "Or I can just drink from the bottle."

"What, no baked Alaska?" said Sammy.

Bacon looked hurt. With a curt gesture, he lifted the lid on one of the platters, revealing a sad little puddle of brown-streaked white sugary ooze. "What do you take me for?"

"Sorry," Sammy said. They sat down to eat. There were quails stuffed with oysters, steamed asparagus in sauce hollandaise, a Macedonian salad, and dauphin potatoes. The pale soup was cream of watercress. Sammy could not quite bring himself to dismember one of the little bird bodies, but he picked out the stuffing and found it quite delicious. "What did you do?" said Sammy. "Order room service to go?" Bacon lived well beyond his means, according to him, at the Mayflower Hotel.

"Not exactly."

"It's good. Could be hotter."

"Salt?" Bacon reached into the shopping bag once more, took out a silver salt cellar of a design even more ornate than the flatware, and set it on the table. It was empty. "Oops." He leaned down again, peered into the bag, then lifted it up and tipped it, dipping one corner to the mouth of the salt cellar. A thin stream of lumpy salt poured down from the bag. "There. Good as new. So," he continued, gesturing to Sammy's clipboard and spotter's badge. "You just wanted to do your part, is that it? Help the Escapist in his unending fight against the Iron Chain and their Axis stooges?"

"A lot of people ask me that," Sammy said, sprinkling his potatoes with salt. "That's usually what I say."

"But you'll tell me the truth, won't you?" Bacon said, his voice mocking, but with just the slightest hint of an earnest plea.

"Well," Sammy said, flattered. "I just felt like I… ought to. I-I did something that I-I wasn't proud of. And when I got back from doing it, there was a small group of these volunteer spotters in the lobby, they were being given a tour, and I just kind of blended in with them. Before I really stopped to think about what I was doing."

"A guilty conscience."

Sammy nodded, although it was true that his stint as a plane spotter had also roughly coincided with the period when Joe began to spend more and more of his time with Rosa Saks, leaving Sammy alone with hours to kill nearly every night. "And don't ask me what was the thing I did, because I can't tell you."

"Okay, I won't," Bacon said with a shrug. He shoved a forkful of asparagus into his mouth.

"All right," said Sammy, "I'll tell you."

Bacon waggled his eyebrows. "Is it something kind of racy?"

"No." Sammy laughed. "No, I-I committed perjury. In a legal deposition. I told the lawyers for Superman that Shelly Anapol never asked me to copy their character. When he really just out-and-out had."

"My God!" Bacon said, looking perfectly aghast.

"Pretty bad, huh?"

"Hanging is too good for you."

Sammy saw then that Bacon had been teasing him. But he found that the memory of his uncomfortable and tedious afternoon in a conference room at Phillips, Nizer could still bring a flush of humiliation to his cheeks.

"Well, it was wrong," he said. "I had a good reason, but still. I guess I felt like I wanted to make up for it somehow."

"If that's the worst thing you ever did," Bacon said, shaking his head.

"So far," Sammy said. "I think it is."

Some unknown memory swam briefly into Bacon's eyes and saddened them. "Lucky you," he said.

"So, uh, where were you?" Sammy said, changing the subject. "Dressed like that. A party?"

"A little party. Very little."

"Where at?"

"Helen's. Today's her birthday."

"Helen Portola?"

"You forgot to say 'the lovely.' "

"The lovely Helen Portola?"

Bacon nodded, studying or affecting to study the thigh joint of one of his quail, as if there were a spot of blood that troubled him.

"Who was there?"

"I was there. The lovely Helen Portola was there."

"Just the two of you?"

He nodded again. He was so uncharacteristically terse on the subject that Sammy wondered if Bacon and Helen had quarreled. Sammy had little direct experience of actresses but shared in the conventional notion that by and large they possessed the sexual mores of estrous chinchillas. Surely if Helen Portola had invited her leading man to celebrate her birthday a deux in the privacy of her home, it was not because she expected the evening to end with her boyfriend out wandering around midtown with a couple of shopping bags full of tepid gourmet food.