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Sometimes Sam Clay felt every one of his thirty-some years, felt them like they were hands dragging at his ankles, felt their bony fingers at his arms, pinching his sleeve and tapping his shoulder, felt their breath misting his neck, rising around his ears as he knotted his tie.
Sometimes he half-expected to see them – fanned out like a chorus line behind him, large to small – when he looked into washroom mirrors, each of his selves looking at him with slightly different expressions. Everyone had an opinion, after all.
In the late morning of April 22nd 1954, the day of his testimony to the Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, he felt them stepping behind him. At first it was a mere suggestion, a sort of entourage, a sense of entering the courtroom escorted by a confidence in himself, in the values of the Escapist, in the knowledge that Sammy Klayman at seventeen, Sam Clay at twenty, twenty-two, Mr Samuel Clay, husband, father, self – they were all on the same side. The right side.
As he stepped outside the courtroom, after, leaving the scene (and if he’d had Joe draw it, scene would call for wrecked chairs and trampled houseplants, torn drapes, perhaps a hole in a window the size of a man’s head instead of the unruffled stenographers and the tumblers of cool water sitting on blond wood desks they were leaving inside the chamber) in a fast-moving bundle made of coats and Rosa and Joe Kavalier – their odd domestic arrangement in tangible motion – he felt thirty-one of them, or at least a good selection, on the steps behind them, muttering so that he could almost hear, a rustle of censure and disappointment and no surprise at all.
They left him in the bar, eventually, satisfied that he’d drunk the sting, that first knee-to-pavement scorch of humiliation away. When he said he’d get home without falling in the river, they believed it well enough and Sam smiled as widely as he should. It’s not something he really knew what to do with, this realization that you’ve been telling, living a story. The telling of more seemed as good a plan as any.
He considered his situation. His fourth and fifth bourbons were getting between him and his thoughts, like he’d vaselined the lens he had trained on his life, and he guessed – he swirled the last mouthful in his glass before downing it – he guessed he had.
His imperfect marriage, there was a house of cards and as sure as the right kind of question could knock Batman’s domestic façade loose, so an expertly placed blow could topple it in on them all.
And what then? He pictured Rosa sat at her typewriter, her silk bathrobe spilling over her bare thighs, lighting a cigarette, laughing as the tiles rattled from the roof. Joe, shrugging off his jacket and keeping his scarf knotted at his chin, ink stippling his fingers again, looking at the ceiling, at Rosa, looking as haunted and happy as Sam had ever seen him.
Sammy thought, and it’s with a clarity he’d put down to the drink before anything else, he thought that maybe the corruption, the real vice, lay in the concealment. How difficult it must be, to humiliate a man who never felt the shame it took to build himself a fortress such as this.
Which was not to diminish the day. No. The hearing had been appalling. The man who almost sat on the stool beside him, who gathered his drink hurriedly and rushed to a corner booth after the barman narrowed his eyes in Sam’s direction, he was somehow symbolic of the disaster, Sam thought.
He looked at the door his old colleague George Deasey had, five minutes ago, shrugged his trench-coated shoulders through, fedora clamped to his scalp and any acquaintance he ever had with Sam Clay denied by his studiously averted gaze. He ordered another drink.
There was a man beside him – or, more accurately, beside the empty stool – who, and Sam accepted this already, in the spirit the Escapist might, as an extra set of irons to be worn across his back, was looking at him. Smiling at him, to be precise, offering him a small, tentative smile and Sammy felt, suddenly, like punching him, this balding man who arranged his soft-edged face, pink-cheeked above an afternoon’s bruise of stubble, and his full lips as if he knew him.
He pushed his fist down on his thigh and stared at the bar, the greasy polish on the wood, the sweat on his glass. Today had not made him transparent. It had not altered him. He just – he slugged back half the glass of liquor the barman, now grim-faced, set before him – he felt irreparably changed.
“I know,” the man said and, after a long pause in which Sam debated fleeing and decided, eventually, against it – after all, to duck his head and dash for the door would be the beginning, or the next instalment, of a life on the run – “I understand.”
A child’s bellow of rage rose in him like bile but he clenched it down. He glanced at the man sidelong, looking away before he spoke. “Oh, you do?” He tilted his drink until the liquid touched the lip of the glass but didn’t overflow.
He thought then, of Tracy and of Joe and of the time he wasted in flight from them.
Tracy, who he could still see, standing on the beach surrounded by dusk the colour of seashells, with his hand out. He remembered himself huddled further in-shore, hands crossed in front of his chest like a pair of spears on a shield as he thought no, not here, not now. The time is wrong.
Tracy hadn’t pushed him, hadn’t wanted to hurry him along, he just watched him, hands extended, his palms flat and steady and when at last he swung them back to his sides, sheathed them in the pockets of his slacks and turned, glancing once over his shoulder towards Sammy in the dunes before he watched the water, the gesture was less vexed than fond.
“It isn’t right,” said the man. “It’s not how people think, not honestly. It’s not real.”
“Felt real enough today.” Sam twisted his mouth up.
“That I don’t doubt.” He had a barely touched Martini in front of him. One of his fingers, long and – Sam, even now, thought in automatic tropes – sensitive-looking, tipped the cocktail stick to and fro.
Sam was still watching the progress of the cocktail stick when the man spoke again. “But in the world at large, the public mind? Gone the day after tomorrow.” The stick made an elegant circumnavigation of the glass rim, propelled by a manicured fingernail.
Sam wrenched his eyes up to the man’s face. Not a trace of a smirk. No hovering aggression. The man smiled in mock apology and said, “I work in television.”
Oh god, thought Sam, stomach tipping to one side like a doomed raft as he smiled brightly enough. The man at last raised his glass and sipped, then continued, “They see what they want to. We all see what we want to, I guess.”
Sam must have been looking, he supposed, with the ill-disguised curiosity of somebody who isn’t sure whether they’re in the presence of celebrity. The man’s eyes shone with amusement as he set his glass down.
“I’m merely an accompanist. Piano.” He put out his hand. “Michael Dershowitz.”
Sam took his hand warily, as though it might be wired with explosives, but the pianist merely grinned broadly.
“Sam Clay.” He ducked his head and gave the start of a hollow laugh.
“Sam Clay,” said Michael Dershowitz with a small nod at the same time as Sam said, “But you knew that,” and laughed again.
In the pause that followed, Sam looked sheepish and Michael was still watching him. “Perhaps,” Michael said eventually, dropping Sam’s hand and raising his cocktail to his lips, “Perhaps I did.”
Michael slid a hand inside his coat and brought out a business card, which he held out into the space above the empty stool.
“I go dancing most weeks at Claude’s in Harlem.” He gave Sam a lop-sided smile. “Music like nothing else, and company.”
Sam felt a sharp wring of panic as he put his hand out. Yes, he knew of such places, once or twice had been to them, but he had, since Tracy, become accustomed to the dank corners, the odor of leaf mold and ammonia of the stalking grounds of the pervert. Some things seemed to have a proper place, he must have decided, and that held even when he could no longer recall the place or the logic of the decision.
“I believe a dance is good,” Sam watched his mouth move, not daring to meet his eyes, “For the soul.”
Like the creatures of the pulpier comics, the vampires and wraiths, for that sort of creature the first showing of the light was the worst, Sam thought, and his instinct was to shrink violently. But this. This, was not full sun, not really. That, flashguns and lenses and microphones, that was full sun.
This man, soft voiced and smooth gripped and with eyes that looked like they’d watched and hurt enough for Sam to trust him with a little of himself; this man wanted to take him somewhere dim and candle-lit and of their mutual choosing. Sam took his card and their fingers brushed and held. Sam closed his eyes, a slow blink and when he opened them he, they, were still in a bar and there were no splashed spotlights or bickering crowd.
There was only the pianist who, as Sam slowly drew his hand away and turned the card to face him, left his own hand outstretched on the bar. Michael’s thick lashes drew attention to his eyes as he looked from the card to Sam’s face, as Sam swallowed like his mouth was stuck together, as if he was at the World’s Fair standing under a marquee with his face and fingers tacky with sugar and his eyes raised to the sign above, See the Future.
He swallowed and said, his voice creaking like a disused door, “Why, I think I may, Michael Dershowitz.” He smiled and it came with a shimmery feeling that he remembered from somewhere, like jumping for a fly ball he knew he’d never catch, sure to land badly on his treacherous legs yet leaping nonetheless. Like lifting the pen from the contract that had his name on it, now both typed and inked. Like holding his hand out to Tracy, like almost holding his hand out to Joe. A dizzying sensation, like stepping off a skyscraper almost knowing you can fly, like the worst has happened and you are here, still here in a bar with a stranger who looks you in the eye without complication.
Sammy Clay slid the card into his breast-pocket and grinned. “I think I may.”