The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Michael Chabon
the demonic invasion force, absorbed in his deployment and tipped dangerously back on the tall stool, was caught by surprise. He jumped, and the stool tipped, but he caught hold of the table’s edge and neatly righted himself, then reached out just in time to catch the bottle of ink before it, too, could tip over. He was quick.
“I am sorry,” Josef said. “I was very careful to don’t harm your drawings. See.” He lifted an overlaid sheet from the ambitious, Prince Valiant–style full-page panel Sammy had been working on, and the five noisome bat-demons disappeared. “I used separate papers for everything.” He peeled away the baboon-faced demon raiders and lifted the paper spider by the end of her thread. With a few quick motions of his long-fingered hands, the hellish siege of Sky City was lifted.
“Holy cow!” said Sammy. He clapped his cousin on his freckled shoulder. “Christ, look at this! Let me see those things.” He took the kidney-shaped sheet that Josef Kavalier had filled with slavering coal-eyed horned demons and cut to overlay Sammy’s own drawing. The proportions of the muscular demons were perfect, their poses animated and plausible, the inkwork mannered but strong-lined. The style was far more sophisticated than Sammy’s, which, while confident and plain and occasionally bold, was never anything more than cartooning. “You really can draw.”
“I was two years studying at the Academy of Fine Arts. In Prague.”
“The Academy of Fine Arts.” Sammy’s boss, Sheldon Anapol, was impressed by men with fancy educations. The ravishing, impossible scheme that had been tormenting Sammy’s imagination for months seemed all at once to have a shot at getting off the ground. “Okay, you can draw monsters. What about cars? Buildings?” he asked, faking an employerly monotone, trying to conceal his excitement.
“Of course.”
“Your anatomy seems not bad at all.”
“It’s a fascination for me.”
“Can you draw the sound of a fart?”
“Sorry?”
“At Empire they put out a whole bunch of items that make farting sounds. A fart, you know what that means?” Sammy clapped the cupped palm of one hand to the opposite armpit and pumped his arm, squirting out a battery of curt, wet blasts. His cousin, eyes wide, got the idea. “Naturally, we can’t say it outright in the ads. We have to say something like ‘The Whoopee Hat Liner emits a sound more easily imagined than described.’ So you really have to get it across in the drawing.”
“I see,” said Josef. He seemed to take up the challenge. “I would draw a breathing of wind.” He scratched five quick horizontal lines on a scrap of paper. “Then I would put such small things, so.” He sprinkled his staff with stars and curlicues and broken musical notation.
“Nice,” said Sammy. “Josef, I tell you what. I’m going to try to do better than just get you a job drawing the Gravmonica Friction-Powered Mouth Organ, all right? I’m going to get us into the big money.”
“The big money,” Josef said, looking suddenly hungry and gaunt. “That would be good of you, Sammy. I need some of the very big money. Yes, all right.”
Sammy was startled by the avidity in his cousin’s face. Then he realized what the money was wanted for, which made him feel a little afraid. It was hard enough being a disappointment to himself and Ethel without having to worry about four starving Jews in Czechoslovakia. But he managed to discount the tremor of doubt and reached out his hand. “All right,” he said. “Shake, Josef.”
Josef put forth his hand, then pulled back. He put on what he must have thought was an American accent, a weird kind of British cowboy twang, and screwed his features into a would-be James Cagney wise-guy squint. “Call me Joe,” he said.
“Joe Kavalier.”
“Sam Klayman.”
They started to shake again, then Sammy withdrew his own hand.
“Actually,” he said, feeling himself blush, “my professional name is Clay.”
“Clay?”
“Yeah. I, uh, I just think it sounds more professional.”
Joe nodded. “Sam Clay,” he said.
“Joe Kavalier.”
They shook hands.
“Boys!” called Mrs. Klayman from the kitchen. “Breakfast.”
“Just don’t say anything about any of this to my mother,” Sammy said. “And don’t tell her I’m changing my name.”
They went out to the laminate table in the kitchen and sat down in two of the padded chrome chairs. Bubbie, who had never met any of her Czech progeny, was sitting beside Joe, ignoring him completely. She had encountered, for better or worse, so many human beings since 1846 that she seemed to have lost the inclination, perhaps even the ability, to acknowledge faces or events that dated from any time after the Great War, when she had performed the incomparable feat of leaving Lemberg, the city of her birth, at the age of seventy, to come to America with the youngest of her eleven children. Sammy had never felt himself to be anything more, in Bubbie’s eyes, than a kind of vaguely beloved shadow from which the familiar features of dozens of earlier children and grandchildren, some of them dead sixty years, peered out. She was a large, boneless woman who draped herself like an old blanket over the chairs of the apartment, staring for hours with her gray eyes at ghosts, figments, recollections, and dust caught in oblique sunbeams, her arms streaked and pocked like relief maps of vast planets, her massive calves stuffed like forcemeat into lung-colored support hose. She was quixotically vain about her appearance and spent an hour each morning making up her face.
“Eat,” Ethel snapped, depositing in front of Joe a stack of black rectangles and a pool of yellow mucilage that she felt obliged to identify for him as toast and eggs. He popped a forkful into his mouth and chewed it with a circumspect expression behind which Sammy thought he detected a hint of genuine disgust.
Sammy performed the rapid series of operations—which combined elements of the folding of wet laundry, the shoveling of damp ashes, and the swallowing of a secret map on the point of capture by enemy troops—that passed, in his mother’s kitchen, for eating. Then he stood up, wiped his lips with the back of his hand, and pulled on his good wool blazer. “Come on, Joe, we gotta go.” He leaned down to embed a kiss in Bubbie’s suede cheek.
Joe dropped his spoon and, in the course of retrieving it, bumped his head on the table, hard. Bubbie cried out, and a minor commotion of silverware and chair-scraping ensued. Then Joe stood up, too, and delicately wiped his lips with his paper napkin. He smoothed it out when he finished and laid it on his empty plate.
“Delicious,” he said. “Thank you.”
“Here,” Ethel said, taking a neat tweed suit, on a hanger, from the back of a kitchen chair. “I pressed your suit and took the spots off your shirt.”
“Thank you, Aunt.”
Ethel put her arm around Joe’s hips and gave him a proud squeeze. “This one knows how to draw a lizard, that I can tell you.”
Sammy flushed. This was a reference to the peculiar difficulties Sammy had run into, the month before, with the Live Chameleon item (“Wear it on your lapel to amaze and impress!”) that Empire had recently added to their line. An apparently congenital lack of skill with reptiles was compounded by the fact that he had no idea what kind of reptile twenty-five cents sent to Empire Novelty would buy, since there were, in fact, no Live Chameleons in stock, and would not be until Shelly Anapol saw how many orders, if any, came in. Sammy had spent two nights poring over encyclopedias and library books, drawing hundreds of lizards, thin and fat, Old World and New, horned and hooded, and had ended up with something that looked a little like a flattened, bald squirrel. It was his sole failure since taking on the draftsmanship chores at Empire, but his mother, naturally, seemed to regard it as a signal one.
“He won’t have to draw any lizards, or cheap cameras, or any of that other dreck they sell,”