Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

"So how old is she?" said Sammy.

"Seventy-two, actually."

"Bacon."

"The old gal's remarkably well preserved."

"Bacon!"

"What's her secret? Liver, folks, and lots of it."

" Tracy!"

Bacon looked up from his food, pretending an innocent surprise.

"Yes, Clay?"

"What are you doing here?"

"What do you mean?"

Sammy gave him a hard look.

"Well, I didn't want to waste all this great food. Helen's cook went to a lot of trouble."

"Helen's cook?"

"Yes. I think you really ought to write her a little note."

"You mean, it was a dinner party?"

"Originally."

"Did you and Helen have a fight?"

Bacon nodded.

"A big one?"

He nodded again, looking genuinely miserable. "But it wasn't my fault," he said.

Sammy was dying to ask what they had fought about, but felt that they didn't know each other well enough for that. It did not occur to him that under similar circumstances, with anybody else, he would not have hesitated, in his best Brooklyn manner, to inquire. But Bacon enlightened him of his own accord.

"For some reason," Bacon continued, "she was under the misapprehension that I intended to propose marriage to her this evening. God knows who told her that."

"It was in Ed Sullivan," said Sammy. He had chanced upon the item in the News with an odd sense of regret; his friendship with Bacon had had so little room in which to flourish-the tiny area that marked the intersection of their separate worlds; and he sensed that it could not survive once Bacon had married his leading lady and gone off to Hollywood to be a star. "Yesterday morning."

"Oh, yeah." He gave his big handsome head a rueful shake.

"You saw it?"

"No, but I remember running into Ed Sullivan at Lindy's a couple of nights ago."

"Did you tell him you were going to ask Helen to marry you?"

"Could have."

"But you aren't."

"Didn't."

"And she got upset."

"Ran into her bedroom and slammed the door. Hit me first, actually."

"Good for her."

"Sucker punched me."

"Ouch." There was something exciting about this narrative to Sammy, or rather about the scene as he reconstructed it in his imagination. He felt that old stirring of desire he had often experienced, growing up to have… not Tracy Bacon, but rather his life, his build, his beautiful and temperamental girlfriend and the power to break her heart. When in fact what he had was a pair of binoculars, a clipboard, and the most solitary perch in the city three nights a week. "So then you took her food."

"Well, it was just sitting there."

"And brought it up here."

"Well, you were just sitting here."

The lull that this observation introduced into their talk was filled all of a sudden by a dark purple stirring in the sky all around them, a long, low summery sound, at once menacing and familiar. There was an answering murmur of bells from the stacked glasses on the bar.

"Jeez," Bacon said, getting up from the table. "Thunder."

He went over to the windows and looked out. Sammy rose and followed him.

"This way," he said, taking Bacon by the arm. "It's blowing in from the southeast."

They stood side by side, shoulders pressed together, watching the slow black zeppelin as it steamed in over New York, trailing long white guy wires of lightning. Thunder harried the building like a hound, brushing its crackling coat against the spandrels and mullions, snuffling at the windowpanes.

"It seems to like us." A feather of laughter fluttered in Bacon's voice. Sammy saw that he was afraid.

"Yeah," Sammy said. "We're its favorite." He lit a cigarette, and at the spark of his lighter, Bacon jumped. "Relax. They've been coming all month. They come all through the summer."

"Huh," Bacon said. He took a swallow from the bottle of Burgundy, then licked his lips. "And I am relaxed."

"Sorry."

"That stuff doesn't ever, you know, hit the building."

"Five times so far this year, I think it is."

"Oh my God."

"Relax."

"Shut up."

"They've recorded strokes that were more than twenty-two thousand amperes."

"Hitting this building."

"Ten million volts, or something like that."

"Jesus."

"Don't worry," Sammy said, "the whole building acts like one gigantic- Oh." Bacon's breath was sour with wine, but one sweet drop of the stuff lingered on his lips as he pressed his mouth against Sammy's. The stubble on their chins scraped with a soft electric rasp. Sammy was so taken by surprise that by the time his brain with its considerable store of Judeo-Christian prohibitions and attitudes could begin sending its harsh and condemnatory messages to the various relevant parts of his body, it was too late. He was already kissing Tracy Bacon back. They angled their bodies half toward each other. The bottle of wine clinked against the window glass. Sammy felt a tiny halo, a gemstone of heat burning his fingers. He let the cigarette drop to the floor. Then the sky just beyond the windows was veined with fire, and they heard a sizzle that sounded almost wet, like a droplet on a hot griddle, and then a thunderclap trapped them in the deep black caverns of its palms.

"Lightning rod," said Sammy, pulling away. As if in spite of all he had been told one evening last week by the bland and reassuring Dr. Karl B. MacEachron of General Electric, who had been studying the electrical atmospheric phenomena associated with the Empire State Building, from Saint Elmo's fire to reverse lightning that struck the sky, he was suddenly afraid. He took a step back from Tracy Bacon, stooped to retrieve his smoldering cigarette, and sought refuge by unconsciously adopting the dry manner of Dr. MacEachron himself. "The steel structure of the building attracts but then totally dissipates the discharge…"

"I'm sorry," Bacon said.

"That's all right."

"I didn't mean to-wow, look at that."

Bacon pointed to the deserted promenade outside the windows.

Along its railings, a bright blue liquid, viscous and turbulent, seemed to flow. Sammy opened the door and reached out into the ozone-sharp darkness, and then Bacon came beside him again and put out his hand, too, and they stood there, for a moment, watching as sparks two inches long forked from the tips of their outstretched fingers.

Among the magicians who haunted Louis Tannen's Magic Shop was a group of amateurs known as the Warlocks, men with more or less literary careers who met twice a month at the bar of the Edison Hotel to baffle one another with drink, tall stories, and novel deceptions. The definition of "literary" had been stretched, in Joe's case, to include work in the comic book line, and it was through his membership in the Warlocks, another of whom was the great Walter B. Gibson, biographer of Houdini and inventor of the Shadow, that Joe had come to know Orson Welles, a semiregular attendee of the Edison confabulations. Welles was also, as it turned out, a friend of Tracy Bacon, whose first work in New York had been with the Mercury Theatre, playing the role of Algernon in Welles's radio production of The Importance of Being Earnest. Between Joe and Bacon, they had managed to get four tickets to the premiere of Welles's first film.

"So what's he like?" Sammy wanted to know.

"He's quite a guy," Rosa said. She had briefly met the tall, baby-faced actor one afternoon when she dropped by the Edison bar to meet Joe, and thought she had sensed in him a kindred spirit, a romantic, someone whose efforts to shock other people were, more than anything else, the expression of a kind of hopefulness about himself, of a desire to escape the confines of a decent respectable home. In high school, she and a friend had gone uptown to see the booming, voodooistic Macbeth, and she had loved it. "I really think he's a genius."