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With a sharpened Ticonderoga tucked behind his ear and a fresh yellow lawyer's pad pressed to his chest, Sammy got into bed with her. He wore a pair of stiff cotton pajamas-these were white with a thin lime stripe and a diagonal pattern of gold stags' heads-to which clung a sweet steam whiff of her iron. Normally he folded into the envelope of their bed an olfactory transcript of his day in the city, a rich record of Vitalis, Pall Mall, German mustard, the sour imprint of his leather-backed office chair, the scorched quarter-inch membrane of coffee at the bottom of the company urn, but tonight he had showered, and his cheeks and throat had a stinging mint smell of Lifebuoy. He transferred his relatively slight bulk from the floor of the bedroom to the surface of the mattress with the usual recitative of grunts and sighs. At one time Rosa would have inquired as to whether there was some general or specific cause for these amazing performances, but there never was-his groaning was either some involuntary musical response to the effects of gravitation, like the "singing" of certain moisture-laden rocks that she had read about in Ripley's, produced by the first shafts of morning sun; or else it was just the inevitable nightly release, after fifteen hours spent ignoring and repressing them, of all the day's frustrations. She waited out the elaborate process by which he effected a comprehensive rearranging of the mucus in his lungs and throat. She felt him settle his legs and smooth the covers over them. At last she rolled over and sat up on one arm.
"Well?" she said.
Given everything that had happened that day, there were a lot of different possible answers to her question. Sammy might have said, "Apparently our son is not, after all, a little school-skipping, comic-book-corrupted delinquent right out of the most lurid chapters of Seduction of the I
But he just snuffled one last time and said, "I like it."
Rosa sat up a little bit more.
"Really?"
He nodded, folding his hands behind his head. "It's very disturbing," he continued, and she realized that she had known all along that this was the answer she was going to get, or rather that this would be the line he would probably choose to take in reply to her open-ended invitation to fill her with longing and dread. She was, as always, anxious for his opinion of her work, and grateful, too, that he wanted to reckon things between them, for just a little longer, by the old calendar, as rife with lacunae and miscalculations as it may have been. "It's like the Bomb really is the Other Woman."
"The Bomb is sexy."
"That's what's disturbing," Sammy said. "Actually, what's disturbing is that you could think such a thing."
"Look who's talking."
"You gave the Bomb a figure. A womanly shape."
"That comes right out of Tommy's World Book. I didn't make that up."
Sammy lit a cigarette and then stared at the match head until it burned down almost to the skin of his fingers. He shook it out.
"Is he out of his mind?" he said.
"Tommy or Joe?"
"He's been leading a secret life for the last ten years. I mean, but really. Disguises. Assumed names. He told me only a dozen people knew who he was. Nobody knew where he lived."
"Who knew?"
"A bunch of those magicians. That's where Tommy first saw him. In the back room at Ta
"Louis Ta
"Misdirection."
"A lie to cover a lie."
"I asked Joe about Orson Welles," Sammy said. "He knew."
She pointed to the pack of cigarettes, and Sammy handed her one. She was sitting up now, legs crossed, facing him. Her stomach hurt; that was nerves. Nerves, and the impact of years and years of accumulated fantasies collapsing all at once, toppling like a row of painted flats. She had imagined Joe not merely run down by passing trucks on a lonely road but drowned in remote Alaskan inlets, shot by Klansmen, tagged in a drawer in a midwestern morgue, killed in a jail riot, and in any number of various suicidal predicaments from hanging to defenestration. She could not help it. She had a catastrophic imagination; an air of imminent doom darkens much of even her su
"No," she said. "I don't think he's out of his mind. You know? I just don't know if there's a sane reaction to what he… what happened to his family. Is your reaction, and mine… you get up, you go to work, you have a catch in the yard with the kid on Sunday afternoon. How sane is that? Just to go on planting bulbs and drawing comic books and doing all the same old crap as if none of it had happened?"
"Good point," Sammy said, sounding profoundly uninterested in the question. He worked his legs up toward his chest and laid the legal pad against them. The pencil began to scratch. He was through with this conversation. As a rule, they tended to avoid questions like "How sane are we?" and "Do our lives have meaning?" The need for avoidance was acute and apparent to both of them.
"What is that?" she said.
"Weird Planet." He did not lift his pencil from the pad. "Guy lands on a planet. Exploring the galaxy. Mapping the far fringes." While he spoke, he did not look at her, or interrupt the steady progress across the ruled lines of the tiny bold block letters he produced, regular and neat, as if he had a typewriter hand. He liked to talk through his plots for her, combing out into regular plaits what grew in wild tufts in his mind. "He finds a vast golden city. Like nothing he's ever seen. And he's seen it all. The beehive cities of Deneba. The lily-pad cities of Lyra. The people here are ten feet tall, beautiful golden humanoids. Let's say they have big wings. They welcome Spaceman Jones. They show him around. But something is on their minds. They're worried. They're afraid. There's one building, one immense palace he isn't allowed to see. One night our guy wakes up in his nice big bed, the entire city is shaking. He hears this terrible bellowing, raging like some immense monstrous beast. Screams. Strange electric flashes. It's all coming from the palace." He peeled the page he had filled, folded it over, plastered it down. Went on. "The next day everybody acts like nothing happened. They tell him hemust have been dreaming. Naturally our guy has to find out. He's an explorer. It's his job. So he sneaks into this one huge, deserted palace and looks around. In the highest tower, a mile above the planet, he comes upon a giant. Twenty feet tall, huge wings, golden like the others but with ragged hair, big long beard. In chains. Giant atomic chains."