Part 44 (2/2)
”I asked you if Dr Wertham mentioned you You said ” She tried to remember what exactly he had said ”You said that you looked, and you weren't in the index”
”Well, not by name,” Sammy said ”That's what I meant”
”I see,” Rosa said ”But it turns out there is a whole, actual chapter chapter about you” about you”
”It's not about me personally personally It doesn't even identify me by name It just talks about stories I wrote The Lumberjack The Rectifier But not just mine There's a lot about Batman And Robin There's stuff about Wonder Woman About how she's a littlea little on the butch side” It doesn't even identify me by name It just talks about stories I wrote The Lumberjack The Rectifier But not just mine There's a lot about Batman And Robin There's stuff about Wonder Woman About how she's a littlea little on the butch side”
”Uh-huh I see” Everyone knew That hat made their particular secret, their lie, so ironic; it went unspoken, unchallenged, and yet it did not hborhood; Rosa had never heard it, but she could feel it so room that she and Sam had just entered ”Does the US Senate know that you wrote these stories?”
”I seriously doubt it,” Sammy said ”It was all nom de plume”
”Well, then”
”I'll be fine” He reached for his pad again, then rolled over and rifled the nightstand drawer for another pencil But when he was back under the covers, he just sat there, dru with the eraser end on the pad
”Think he'll stay for a while?” he said
”No Uh-uh Maybe I don't know Do ant him to stay?” she said him to stay?” she said
”Do you still love hiuard, lawyer-style But she was not going to venture so far, not yet, nor poke so deeply into the embers of her love for Joe
”Do you?” she said, and then, before he could begin to take the question seriously, she went on, ”Do you still love me?”
”You know I do,” he said at once Actually, she knew that he did ”You don't have to ask”
”And you don't have to tell me,” she said She kissed him It was a curt and sisterly kiss Then she switched off her light and turned her face to the wall The scratching of his pencil resumed She closed her eyes, but she could not relax It took her very little ti she had wanted to talk to Sammy about: Tommy
”He knows that you adopted hi to Joe” The pencil stopped Rosa kept her face to the wall ”He knows that somebody else is really his dad He just doesn't knoho”
”Joe never told hiuess he wouldn't”
”We have to tell him the truth, Sam,” Rosa said ”The ti now,” Sa to talk about this any experience to believe this The conversation had officially co that she wanted to say to him! She put a hand on his warain, there was a tiny shock of remembered coolness at the touch of his skin
”What about you?” she said, just before she finally drifted off to sleep ”Are you going to stay for a while?”
But if there was a reply, she missed it
13
AT thirty-five, with incipient wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and a voice grown husky with cigarettes, Rosa Clay was, if anything, irl Joe reheaded battle against the aeneral expansion of her rosy flesh had softened the drath 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 gli fro but fictitious threat of spilling over, that was afforded hiht encounter outside the bathrooht of Rosa countless ti or elected to dab in the freckles hich she was so prodigiously stippled, and noas startled by their profusion They eainst 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 shi+ at the breakfast table, lying on the couch, he would watch as she went about her household business, carrying a dustto contain the determined sway of her hips and buttocks, and feel as if inside hihtened 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 froes of coh the streets of Metropolis and Gothaave 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 ain-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,and pork chop, his collection of false beards and e-baths by the sink in the closet, these regular, unquestioned features of his recent existence, now seemed the behaviors of a shadow, the ie 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 Sae (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 hie, to be even more than ordinarily cos between them, Sammy and Rosa were married, and had been so for quite a few years They were un a household slang-”pea-bee and jay,” ”idiot box”- talking on top of each other, finishi+ng each other's sentences, a each other off So parallel, complementary versions of the same story, and Joe would become lost in the somewhat tedious marital intricacy of their conversation Saht it to her in her studio She ironed his shi+rt with griht before she retired And they had evolved a reh they rarely collaborated outright on a story as Clay Clay) Saht forth items from the inexhaustible stock of cheap, reliable, and efficient ideas that God had supplied hih a plot, supplying him with a constant stream of refine froes of her own stories with her, panel by panel, criticizing her drahen it got too elaborate, coaxing her intoline, stylized, impatient with detail, that was her forte Rosa and Saether reat mystery and interest to Joe-but when they were, they seemed to be very involved involved with each other with each other
So it was unthinkable that he should interpose hied upon hi else, and thus he went around the house in a constant state of inflamed erateful ardor for one of the nurses, a pretty ex-socialite from Houston known as Alexis froto keep hi an erection every tie him down It was like that with Rosa now He spent all of his tis There was an ache in the hinge of his jaw
Further beforehand the unwelco himself to make, which caused him to feel like even more of a heel After their initial conversation in the kitchen, he and Rosa seeet a second one started For a while, he was so preoccupied by his clumsy attempts at small talk that he failed to remark her own reticence whenever they were alone When he finally did notice it, he attributed her silence to aniined anger, which he felt he entirely deserved Not only for having left her pregnant and in the lurch, so that he e; but for having never returned, never telephoned or dropped a line, never once thought of her-so he iined-in all those years away The expanding gas of silence between them only excited his shame and lust the more In the absence of verbal intercourse, he becans of her-the jumble of her makeups and creaerie dangling froainst her teacup froano, bacon, onions cooked in fat
At last, when he could stand it no longer, he decided he had to say so he could think of to say was but the only thing he could think of to say was Please forgiveand abject as need be, and throw himself on her mercy He mulled and planned and rehearsed his words, and when he happened to be passing her in the narrow hallway, Joe just blurted it out He wouldand abject as need be, and throw himself on her mercy He mulled and planned and rehearsed his words, and when he happened to be passing her in the narrow hallway, Joe just blurted it out
”Look,” he said, ”I'm sorry”
”What did you do?”
”I', I ht”
”I know you ry”
She crossed her arms over her chest and stared at him, broide 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 arht to be”
”I hurt your feelings I abandoned you I left Saainst 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”
”Thank you,” Joe said ”Maybe you can explain it to me sometimes”
”It hen you didn't come home, Joe It hen you jumped overboard, or whatever it was you did”
”I' that was very hard for me to understand”
He reached for her hand, taken aback by his own daring She let him hold it for nine seconds, then reclaimed it Her eyes crossed a little with reproach
”I didn't kno to co for years, believe me”
He was surprised suddenly to find her mouth on his He put his hand on her heavy breast They fell sideways against the paneled wall, dislodging a photograph of Ethel Klay around inside the zipper fly of her jeans Theto pull down her jeans and he was going to cliht there in the hallway before To; it was not anger that she had interposed between the like his own Then the next thing he knew, they were standing up again in the middle of the hall, and the various sirens and air-raid beacons that had been going wild all around them seemed to have fallen silent abruptly She replaced the various things he had left in disarray, zipped her trousers, smoothed her hair The color on her lips had smeared all over her cheeks
”Hum,” she said And then, ”Maybe not yet”
”I understand,” he said ”Please let me know” He meant it to sound patient and cooperative, but soh She put her arms around him, and he rubbed the sone
”How did did you do it, anyway?” she said The tips of her teeth were stained with tea ”Get off the boat in the middle of the ocean, I mean” you do it, anyway?” she said The tips of her teeth were stained with tea ”Get off the boat in the middle of the ocean, I mean”