The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

As Sammy began to harangue the reporter from the Journal-American, Joe put down his fork.

"Very good," he said. "I haven't eaten anything like this in so long I can't remember."

"Did you get enough?"

"No."

She served him another chunk from the dish.

"He missed you the most," she said. She nodded in the direction of the dining room, where Sammy was telling the reporter from the Journal-American how he and Joe had first come up with the idea for the Escapist, on a cold October night a million years ago. The day a boy had come tumbling in through the window of Jerry Glovsky's bedroom and landed, wondering, at her feet. "He hired private detectives to try to find you."

"One of them did find me," Joe said. "I paid him off." He took a bite, then another, then a third. "I missed him, too," he said finally. "But I used to always imagine that he was happy. When I would be sitting there at night sometimes thinking about him. I would read his comic books-I could alwavs tell which ones were his-and then I would think, well, Sam is doing all right there. He must be happy." He washed down the last bite of his third helping with a swallow of seltzer water. "It's a very disappointment to me to find out that he is not."

"Isn't he?" Rosa said, not so much out of bad faith as from the enduring power of what a later generation would have termed her denial. "No. No, you're right, he really isn't."

"What about the book, the Disillusioned American? I have often thought of it, too, from time to time."

His English, she saw, had deteriorated during his years in the bush, or wherever he'd been.

"Well," Rosa said, "he finished it a couple of years ago. For the fifth time, actually, I think it was. And we sent it out. There were some nice responses, but."

"I see."

"Joe," she said. "What was the idea?"

"What was the idea of what? My jump?"

"Okay, let's start with that."

"I don't know. When I saw the letter in the newspaper, you know, I knew that Tommy wrote it. Who else could it be? And I just felt, well, since I am the one to mention to him about it… I wanted… I just wanted to have it be… true for him."

"But what were you trying to accomplish? Was the idea to shame Sheldon Anapol into giving you two more money, or…?"

"No," Joe said. "I don't guess that was ever the idea."

She waited. He pushed his plate back and picked up her cigarettes. He lit two at once, then passed one to her, just the way he used to do, long, long ago.

"He doesn't know," he said after a moment, as if offering a rationale for his leap from the top of the Empire State Building, and although she didn't grasp it at once, for some reason the statement started her heart pounding in her chest. Was she keeping so many secrets, so many different kinds of guilty knowledge from the men in her life?

"Who doesn't know what?" she said. She reached, as if casually, to take an ashtray from the kitchen counter just behind Joe's head.

"Tommy. He doesn't know… what I know. About me. And him. That I-"

The ashtray-red and gold, stamped with the words el morocco in stylish gold script-fell to the kitchen floor and shattered into a dozen pieces.

"Shit!"

"It's all right, Rosa."

"No, it isn't! I dropped my El Morocco ashtray, god damn it." They met on their knees, in the middle of the kitchen floor, with the pieces of the broken dish between them.

"So all right," she said, as Joe started sweeping the shards together with the flat of his hand. "You know."

"I do now. I always thought so, but I-"

"You always thought so? Since when?"

"Since I heard about it. You wrote me, remember, in the navy, back in 1942, I think. There were pictures. I could tell."

"You have known since 1942 that you"-she lowered her voice to an angry whisper-"that you had a son, and you never-"

The rage that welled up suddenly felt dangerously satisfying, and she would have let it out, heedless of the consequences to her son, her husband, or their reputation in the neighborhood, but she was held back, at the very last possible moment, by the fiery blush in Joe's cheeks. He sat there, head bowed, stacking the pieces of the ashtray into a neat little cairn. Rosa got up and went to the broom closet for a dustpan and broom. She swept up the ashtray and sent the pieces jingling into the kitchen trash.

"You didn't tell him," she said at last.

He shook his bent head. He was still kneeling in the middle of the kitchen floor. "We always never spoke very much," he said.

"Why does that not surprise me?"

"And you never told him."

"Of course not," Rosa said. "As far as he knows, that"-she lowered her voice and nodded again toward the dining room-"is his father."

"This is not the case."

"What?"

"He told me that Sammy adopted him. He overheard this or some such thing. He has a number of interesting theories about his real father."

"He… did he ever… do you think he…"

"At times I felt he might be leading up to asking me," Joe said. "But he never has."

She gave him her hand then, and he took it in his own. For an instant, his felt much drier and more callused than she remembered, and then it felt exactly the same. They sat back down at the kitchen table, in front of their plates of food.

"You still haven't said," she reminded him. "Why you did it. What was the point of it all?"

Sammy came back into the kitchen and hung up the phone, shaking his head at the profound journalistic darkness that he had just wasted ten minutes attempting to illuminate.

"That's what the guy was just asking me," he said. "What was the point of it?"

Rosa and Sammy turned to Joe, who regarded the inch of ash at the tip of his cigarette for a moment before tapping it into the palm of his hand.

"I guess this was the point," he said. "For me to come back. To end up sitting here with you, on Long Island, in this house, eating some noodles that Rosa made."

Sammy raised his eyebrows and let out a short sigh. Rosa shook her head. It seemed to be her destiny to live among men whose solutions were invariably more complicated or extreme than the problems they were intended to solve.

"Couldn't you have just called?" Rosa said. "I'm sure I would have invited you."

Joe shook his head, and the color returned to his cheeks. "I couldn't. So many times I wanted to. I would call you and hang up the phone. I would write letters but didn't send them. And the longer I waited, the harder it became to imagine. I just didn't know how to do it, you see? I didn't know what you would think of me. How you would feel about me."

"Christ, Joe, you fucking idiot," Sammy said. "We love you."

Joe put his hand on Sammy's shoulder and shrugged, nodding as if to say, yes, he had acted like an idiot. And that would be it for them, Rosa thought. Twelve years of nothing, a curt declaration, a shrug ofapology, and those two would be as good as new. Rosa snorted a jet of smoke through her nostrils and shook her head. Joe and Sammy turned to her. They seemed to be expecting her to come up with a plan of action for them, a nice tight Rose Saxon script they could all follow, in which they would all get just the lines they wanted.

"Well?" she said. "What do we do now?"

The silence that ensued was long enough for three or four of Ethel Klayman's proverbial idiots to enter this woebegone world. Rosa could see a thousand possible replies working themselves through her husband's mind, and she wondered which one of them he was finally going to offer, but it was Joe who finally spoke up.

"Is there any dessert?" he said.