Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

"You think everyone's a genius. You think this guy's a genius," Sammy said, jabbing Joe in the knee with a stubby forefinger.

"I don't think you are," she said sweetly.

"True genius is never recognized in its own time."

"Except by the one who has it," Bacon said. "Orson has no doubts on that score."

They were all headed uptown together, crammed into the back of a taxicab. Sammy and Rosa had taken the jump seats, and Rosa had a good grip on Sammy's arm. She had come from the offices of the T.R.A. and was dressed, with a dowdiness that pained her considerably, in a square-shouldered, belted brown tweed suit, of a vaguely military cut. She had been dressed like a schoolteacher the last time Orson Welles had seen her, too-the man was going to think that Joe Kavalier's girlfriend was about as fascinating as a sack of onions. Sammy had on one of his big, pinstriped leftovers from a George Raft film, Bacon the usual penguin suit-he took the part of man-about-town a bit too seriously for Rosa's taste, though, to his credit, that seemed to be just about the only thing he did take seriously. And Joe, of course, looked as if he had just fallen out of a hedge. There was white paint in his hair. It looked as though he had used the end of his necktie to blot an ink spill.

"He is a clever fellow," Joe said. "But not so good a magician."

"Is he really dating Dolores Del Rio?" Bacon said. "That's what I want to know."

"I wonder," Joe said, though he seemed completely uninterested in the question. He was feeling blue tonight, Rosa knew. Hoffman's ship, having finally reached Lisbon a few weeks previously, was to have reembarked for New York by now. But two days ago, a telegram had come from Mrs. Kurtzweil, the agent of the T.R.A. in Portugal. Three of the children had come down with measles; one of them was dead. Today they had received word that the entire convent of Nossa Senhora de Monte Carmelo had been put on an "absolute but indefinite quarantine" by the Portuguese authorities.

"I thought you were dating Dolores Del Rio, Bake," Sammy said. "That's what it said in Ed Sullivan."

"It was Lupe Velez."

"I mix those two up."

"Anyway, you know better than to believe what you read in the papers."

"Like, for instance, that Parnassus Pictures plans to bring funny-book strong man the Escapist to the silver screen in the person of noted radio star Mr. Tracy Bacon?"

"Are they?" Rosa said.

"It's only going to be one of those serials," Bacon said. " Parnassus. They're from hunger."

"Joe," Rosa said, "you didn't tell me."

"It doesn't make no difference to me," Joe said, still looking out at the neon-and-steam spectacle of Broadway scrolling past the windows of the cab. A woman walked by with what looked like the tails of at least nine little dead weasels dangling from her shoulders. "For Sammy and me we don't get a penny."

Sammy looked at Rosa and lifted a shoulder- What's eating him? Rosa gave Sammy's arm a squeeze. She hadn't had a chance to tell Sammy about the latest telegram from Lisbon.

"Maybe not on this end, Joe," Sammy continued, "but listen. Tracy here said that if he does get the role, he's going to put in a word for us with the studio. Tell them they ought to hire us to write the thing."

"It's only natural," Bacon said. " 'Course that probably damns the idea right there."

"We could move to Hollywood , Joe. That could lead to something. It could be the start of something really legit."

"Something legit." Joe nodded his head in a ponderous way, as if, upon reflection, Sammy had settled the question that had been troubling Joe all day. Then he went back to his window. "I know that's important to you."

"There it is," Bacon said. "The Palace."

"The Palace," Sammy said, an odd crease in his voice.

They pulled up in front of what was now known as the RKO Palace, once the summit and capital of American vaudeville, at the end of a line of cabs and hired cars. A colossal cutout of Orson Welles, looking wild-eyed and tousle-haired, loomed from the marquee. The whole front of the theater was riotous with flashbulbs and shouting, and there was a general impression of imminent catastrophe and red lipstick. Sammy had gone white as a sheet.

"Sam?" Rosa said. "You look like you saw a ghost."

"He's just worried we're going to make him pay the fare," said Bacon, reaching for his wallet.

Joe climbed out of the cab, settled his hat on his head, and held the door for Rosa. As she got out of the cab, she threw her arms around his neck. He lifted her from the ground, squeezing her tight, and took a long deep breath of her. She could feel the people around them staring, wondering who these two were, or thought they were. Joe's gray hat started to tumble off the back of his head, but he caught it with one hand, then set Rosa back down on the ground.

"He's going to be fine," she told him. "He already had measles. It's just a little delay, that's all."

She knew from bitter experience that Joe hated to be consoled, but to her surprise, when he set her down again, he was smiling. He looked around at the photographers, the crowd, the dazzling kliegs, the long black limousines at the curb, and she could see that it excited him. It was exciting, she thought.

"I know," he said. "He's going to be fine."

"We could end up in Hollywood ourselves one of these days," she said, urged to recklessness by his unexpected change of mood. "You, me, and Thomas. In a little bungalow in the Hollywood Hills."

"Thomas would love that," Joe said.

"The Palace." Sammy had joined them, and was gazing up at the six giant letters atop the brilliant marquee. He took a five-dollar bill out of his wallet. "Here you go, buddy boy," he said, handing it to Bacon. "The cab's on me."

Great stuff, the Escapist," Orson Welles told Sammy. He seemed vastly tall and surprisingly young, and he smelled like Dolores Del Rio. In 1941 it was fashionable among certain smart people to confess to a more than passing knowledge of Batman, or Captain Marvel, or the Blue Beetle. "I don't like to miss a word."

"Thank you," said Sam.

This, though he never forgot and in later years embellished it, was the extent of his interaction with Orson Welles, on that night or any other. At the party afterward, at the Pennsylvania Roof, Joe danced with Dolores Del Rio, and Rosa danced with handsome Joseph Cotten and with Edward Everett Horton, the latter by far the better dancer of the two. Tommy Dorsey's band was playing. Sammy sat and watched and listened, eyes half-closed, aware, as were all devotees of big-band swing in 1941, that it was his privilege to be alive at the very moment when the practitioners of his favorite music were at the absolute peak of their artistry and craft, a moment unsurpassed in this century for verve, romanticism, polish, and a droll, tidy variety of soul. Joe and Dolores Del Rio danced a fox-trot and then, naturally, a rumba. That was the extent of Joe's interaction with Dolores Del Rio, though he and Orson Welles continued to see each other from time to time at the bar of the Edison Hotel.

More significant by far than anything else that happened to the cousins on that first day of May 1941 was the movie they had come to see.

In later years, in other hands, the Escapist was played for laughs. Tastes changed, and writers grew bored, and all the straight plots hadbeen pretty well exhausted. Later writers and artists, with the connivance of George Deasey, turned the strip into a peculiar kind of inverted parody of the whole genre of the costumed hero. The Escapist's chin grew larger and more emphatically dimpled, and his muscles hypertrophied until he bulged, as his postwar arch-foe Dr. Magma memorably expressed it, "like a sack full of cats." Miss Plum Blossom's ever-ready needle was pressed into providing the Escapist with a Liberacean array of specialized crime-fighting togs, and Omar and Big Al began to grumble openly about the bills their boss piled up by his extravagant expenditures on supervehicles, superplanes, and even a "hand-carved ivory crutch" for Tom Mayflower to use on big date nights. The Escapist was quite vain; readers sometimes caught him stopping, on his way to fight evil, to check his reflection and comb his hair in a window or the mirror of a drugstore scale. In between acts of saving the earth from the evil Omnivores, in one of the late issues, #130 (March 1953), the Escapist works himself into quite a little lather as he attempts, with the help of a lisping decorator, to renovate the Keyhole, the secret sanctum under the boards of the Empire Palace. While he continued to defend the weak and champion the helpless as reliably as ever, the Escapist never seemed to take his adventures very seriously. He took vacations in Cuba, Hawaii, and Las Vegas, where he shared a stage at the Sands Hotel with none other than Wladziu Liberace himself. Sometimes, if he was in no particular hurry to get anywhere, he let Big Al take over the controls of the Keyjet and picked up a movie magazine that had his picture on its cover. The so-called Rube Goldberg plots-in which the Escapist, as bored as anyone by the dull routine of crime-busting, deliberately introduced obstacles and handicaps into his own efforts to thwart the large but finite variety of megalomaniacs, fiends, and rank hoodlums he fought in the years after the war, in order to make things more interesting for himself-became a trademark of the character: he would agree with himself beforehand, say, to dispatch some particular gang of criminals "barehanded," and to use his by now vastly augmented physical strength only if one of them uttered some random phrase like "ice water," and then, just after he was almost licked and the weather too cold for anyone ever to ask for a glass of ice water, the Escapist would hit on a way to arrange things so that inexorably the gang ended up in the back of a truck full of onions. He was a superpowerful, muscle-bound clown.