The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon Page B

his head on the table, hard. Bubbie cried out, and a minor commotion of silverware and chair-scraping ensued. Then Joe stood up, too, and delicately wiped his lips with his paper napkin. He smoothed it out when he finished and laid it on his empty plate.
    "Delicious," he said. "Thank you."
    "Here," Ethel said, taking a neat tweed suit, on a hanger, from the back of a kitchen chair. "I pressed your suit and took the spots off your shirt."
    "Thank you, Aunt."
    Ethel put her arm around Joe's hips and gave him a proud squeeze. "This one knows how to draw a lizard, that I can tell you."
    Sammy flushed. This was a reference to the peculiar difficulties Sammy had run into, the month before, with the Live Chameleon item ("Wear it on your lapel to amaze and impress!") that Empire had recently added to their line. An apparently congenital lack of skill with reptiles was compounded by the fact that he had no idea what kind of reptile twenty-five cents sent to Empire Novelty would buy, since there were, in fact, no Live Chameleons in stock, and would not be until Shelly Anapol saw how many orders, if any, came in. Sammy had spent two nights poring over encyclopedias and library books, drawing hundreds of lizards, thin and fat, Old World and New, horned and hooded, and had ended up with something that looked a little like a flattened, bald squirrel. It was his sole failure since taking on the draftsmanship chores at Empire, but his mother, naturally, seemed to regard it as a signal one.
    "He won't have to draw any lizards, or cheap cameras, or any of that other dreck they sell," said Sammy, and then added, forgetting the warning he had given Joe, "not if Anapol goes in for my plan."
    "What plan?" His mother narrowed her eyes.
    "Comic books," yelled Sammy, right to her face.
    "Comic books!" She rolled her eyes.
    " 'Comic books'?" said Joe. "What are these?"
    "Trash," said Ethel.
    "What do you know about it?" Sammy said, taking hold of Joe's arm. It was almost seven o'clock. Anapol docked your pay if you came in after eight. "There's good money in comic books. I know a kid, Jerry Glovsky—" He pulled Joe toward the hallway that led to the foyer and the front door, knowing exactly what his mother was going to say next.
    "Jerry Glovsky," she said. "A fine example. He's retarded. His parents are first cousins."
    "Don't listen to her, Joe. I know what I'm talking about"
    "He doesn't want to waste his time on any idiotic comic books."
    "'It's not your business,'" Sammy hissed, "what he does. Is it?"
    This, as Sammy had known it would, shut her right up. The question of something being one's business or not held a central position in the ethics of Ethel Klayman, whose major tenet was the supreme importance of minding one's own. Gossips, busybodies, and kibitzers were the fiends of her personal demonology. She was universally at odds with the neighbors, and suspicious, to the point of paranoia, of all visiting doctors, salesmen, municipal employees, synagogue committeemen, and tradespeople.
    She turned now and looked at her nephew. "You want to draw comic books?" she asked him.
    Joe stood there, head down, a shoulder against the door frame. While Sammy and Ethel argued, he had been affecting to study in polite embarrassment the low-pile, mustard-brown carpeting, but now he looked up, and it was Sammy's turn to feel embarrassed. His cousin looked him up and down, with an expression that was both appraising and admonitory.
    "Yes, Aunt," he said. "I do. Only I have one question. What is a comic book?"
    Sammy reached into his portfolio, pulled out a creased, well-thumbed copy of the latest issue of Action Comics, and handed it to his cousin.
    In 1939 the American comic book, like the beavers and cockroaches of prehistory, was larger and, in its cumbersome way, more splendid than its modern descendant. It aspired to the dimensions of a slick magazine and to the thickness of a pulp, offering sixty-four pages of gaudy bulk (including the cover) for its