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AT thirty-five, with incipient wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and a voice grown husky with cigarettes, Rosa Clay was, if anything, more beautiful than the girl Joe remembered. She had surrendered her futile and wrongheaded battle against the ample construction of her frame. The general expansion of her rosy flesh had softened the dramatic rake of her nose, the equine length of her jaw, the flare of her cheekbones. Her thighs had a grandeur, and her hips were capacious, and in those first few days, a great goad to his renascent love was the glimpse of her pale, freckled breasts, brimming from the cups of her brassiere with a tantalizing but fictitious threat of spilling over, that was afforded him by one of her housedresses, or by a chance late-night encounter outside the bathroom in the hall. He had thought of Rosa countless times over the years of his flight, but somehow, courting or embracing her in his memory, he had neglected to dab in the freckles with which she was so prodigiously stippled, and now he was startled by their profusion. They emerged and faded against her skin with the inscrutable cadence of stars on the night sky. They invited the touch of fingers as painfully as the nap of velvet or the shimmer of a piece of watered silk.
Sitting at the breakfast table, lying on the couch, he would watch as she went about her household business, carrying a dust mop or a canvas bag of clothespins, her skirt straining to contain the determined sway of her hips and buttocks, and feel as if inside him a violin string were being tightened on its key. Because, as it turned out, he was still in love with Rosa. His love for her had survived the ice age intact, like the beasts from vanished aeons that were always thawing out in the pages of comic books and going on rampages through the streets of Metropolis and Gotham and Empire City. This love, thawing, gave off a rich mastodon odor of the past. He was surprised to eneounter these feelings again-not by their having survived so much as by their undeniable vividness and force. A man in love at twenty feels more alive than he ever will again-finding himself once more in possession of this buried treasure, Joe saw more clearly than ever that for the past dozen years or so, he had been, more or less, a dead man. His daily fried egg and pork chop, his collection of false beards and mustaches, the hasty sponge-baths by the sink in the closet, these regular, unquestioned features of his recent existence, now seemed the behaviors of a shadow, the impressions left by a strange novel read under the influence of a high fever.
The return of his feelings for Rosa-of his very youth itself-after so long a disappearance ought to have been a cause for delight, but Joe felt terribly guilty about it. He did not want to be that twinkle-eyed, ascot-wearing, Fiat-driving mainstay of Rosa's stories, the home-wrecker. In the past few days, he had, it was true, lost all his illusions about Sammy and Rosa's marriage (which, as we tend to do with missed opportunities, he had, over the years, come to idealize). The solid suburban bond that he had, from a distance, half-ruefully and half-contentedly conjured to himself at night, proved, at close range, to be even more than ordinarily complicated and problematic. But whatever the state of things between them, Sammy and Rosa were married, and had been so for quite a few years. They were unmistakably a couple. They spoke alike, employing a household slang-"pea-bee and jay," "idiot box"- talking on top of each other, finishing each other's sentences, amiably cutting each other off. Sometimes they both went at Joe at the same time, telling parallel, complementary versions of the same story, and Joe would become lost in the somewhat tedious marital intricacy of their conversation. Sammy made tea for Rosa and brought it to her in her studio. She ironed his shirt with grim precision every night before she retired. And they had evolved a remarkable system of producing comic books as a couple (though they rarely collaborated outright on a story as Clay & Clay). Sammy brought forth items from the inexhaustible stock of cheap, reliable, and efficient ideas that God had supplied him with at birth, and then Rosa talked him through a plot, supplying him with a constant stream of refinements that neither of them seemed to realize were coming from her. And Sammy went over the pages of her own stories with her, panel by panel, criticizing her drawing when it got too elaborate, coaxing her into maintaining the simple strong line, stylized, impatient with detail, that was her forte. Rosa and Sam were not together much-except in bed, a place that remained a source of great mystery and interest to Joe-but when they were, they seemed to be very involved with each other.
So it was unthinkable that he should interpose himself and make the claim his reawakened love urged upon him; but he could think of nothing else, and thus he went around the house in a constant state of inflamed embarrassment. In the hospital in Cuba, he had conceived a grateful ardor for one of the nurses, a pretty ex-socialite from Houston known as Alexis from Texas, and had spent an excruciating month in the arid heat of Guantanamo Bay trying to keep himself from getting an erection every time she came around to sponge him down. It was like that with Rosa now. He spent all of his time squelching his thoughts, tamping down his feelings. There was an ache in the hinge of his jaw.
Furthermore, he sensed that she was avoiding him, shu
At last, when he could stand it no longer, he decided he had to say something, but the only thing he could think of to say was Please forgive me. He would make a formal apology, as long and abject as need be, and throw himself on her mercy. He mulled and pla
"Look," he said, "I'm sorry."
"What did you do?"
"I'm sorry for everything, I mean."
"Oh. That," she said. "All right."
"I know you must be angry."
She crossed her arms over her chest and stared at him, brow wide and smooth, lips compressed into a doubtful pout. He could not read the expression in her eyes-it kept changing. Finally, she looked down at her freckled arms, rosy and flushed.
"I have no right to be."
"I hurt your feelings. I abandoned you. I left Sammy to do my job."
"I don't hold that against you," she said. "Not at all. And neither does he, I don't think, not really. We both understand why you left. We understood then."