The Harkoo house lay entirely hidden from the avenue, "like an emblem (heavy-handed at that) of suppressed nasty urges," as Auden put it in his letter to Isherwood, at the heart of a city block the whole of which subsequently passed into the hands of New York University, was razed, and now forms the site of the massive Levine School of Applied Meteorology. The solid rampart of row houses and apartment blocks that enclosed the Harkoo house and its grounds on all four sides could be breached only by way of a narrow ruelle that slipped unnoticed between two buildings and penetrated, through a tunnel of ailanthus trees, to the dark, leafy yard within.
The house, when they reached it, was a vest-pocket Oriental fantasy, a miniature Topkapi, hardly bigger than a firehouse, squeezed onto its tiny site. It curled like a sleeping cat around a central tower topped witha dome that resembled, among other items, a knob of garlic. Through skillful use of forced perspective and manipulation of scale, the house managed to look much bigger than it really was. Its luxurious coat of Virginia creeper, the gloom of its courtyard, and the artless jumble of its gables and spires gave the place an antique air, but it had in fact been completed in September 1930, around the time that Al Smith was laying the cornerstone for the Empire State Building. Like that structure, it was a kind of dream habitation, having, like the Long Man of Harkoo himself, originally appeared to Longman Harkoo in his sleep, giving him the excuse he had long sought to pull down the dull old Greek Revival house that had been the country home of his mother's family since the founding of Greenwich Village.Thathouse had itself replaced a much earlier structure, dating to the first years of British dominion, in which-or so Harkoo claimed-a Dutch-Jewish forebear of his had entertained the devil during his 1682 tour of the colonies.
Joe noticed that Sammy was hanging back a little, looking up at the miniature tower, absently massaging the top of his left thigh, his face solemn and nervous in the light of the torches that flanked the door. In his gleaming pinstriped suit, he reminded Joe of their character the Monitor, armored for battle against perfidious foes. Suddenly Joe felt apprehensive, too. It had not quite sunk in until now, with all the talk of bombs and woolens and radio programs, that they had come downtown with Deasey to attend aparty.
Neither of the cousins was much for parties. Though Sammy was mad for swing, he could not, of course, dance on his pipe-cleaner legs; his nerves killed his appetite, and at any rate, he was too self-conscious about his manners to eat anything; and he disliked the flavor of liquors and beer. Introduced into a cursed circle of jabber and jazz, he would drift helplessly behind a large plant. His brash and heedless gift of conversation, by means of which he had whipped upAmazing Midget Radio Comicsand with it the whole idea of Empire, deserted him. Put him in front of a roomful of people at work and he would be impossible to shut up; work was not work for him. Parties were work. Women were work. At Palooka Studios, whenever there occurred the chance conjunction of girls and a bottle, Sammy simply vanished, like Mike Campbell's fortune, at first a little at a time, and then all at once.
Joe, on the other hand, had always been the boy for a party in Prague. He could do card tricks and hold his alcohol; he was an excellent dancer. In New York, however, all this seemed to have changed. He had too much work to do, and parties seemed a great waste of his time. The conversation came fast and slangy, and he had trouble following the gags and patter of the men and the sly double-talk of the ladies. He was vain enough to dislike it when something he said in all seriousness for some reason broke up a room. But the greatest obstacle he faced was that he did not feel that he ought-ever-to be enjoying himself socially. Even when he went to the movies, he did so in a purely professional capacity, studying them for ideas about light and imagery and pacing that he could borrow or adapt in his comic book work. Now he drew back alongside his cousin, looking up at the scowling torchlit face of the house, ready to run at the first signal from Sam.
"Mr. Deasey," Sammy said, "listen. I feel I've got to confess… I haven't even startedStrange Frigateyet. Don't you think I better-"
"Yes," Joe said. "And I have the cover forThe Monitor -"
"All you need is a drink, boys." Deasey looked greatly amused by their sudden qualms of conscience and courage. "That will make it go much easier when they pitch you both into the volcano. I presume youarevirgins?" They scraped up the rough, clinker-brick front steps. Deasey turned, and all at once his face looked grave and admonitory. "Just don't let himhugyou," he said.
7
The party had originally been planned for the pint-sized mansion's ballroom, but when that room was rendered uninhabitable by the noise from Salvador Dali's breathing apparatus, everyone crowded into the library instead. Like all the rooms in the house, the library was diminutive, built to a three-quarter scale that gave visitors a disquieting sense of giantism. Sammy and Joe squeezed in behind Deasey to find the room packed to the point of immobility with Transcendental Symbolists, Purists, and Vitalists, copywriters in suits the color of new Studebakers, socialist banjo players, writers forMademoiselle,experts on Yuggogheny cannibal cults and bird-worshipers of the Indochinese Highlands, composers of twelve-tone requiems and of slogans for Eas-O-Cran, the Original New England Laxative. The gramophone-and (of course) the bar-had been carried up to the library as well, and over the heads of the crammed-together guests there veered the notes of an Armstrong trumpet solo. Beneath this bright glaze of jazz and a frothy layer of conversation there was a low, heavy rumbling from the distant air compressor. Along with the smells of perfume and cigarettes, the air in the room had a faint motor-oil smell of the wharves.
"Hello, George." Harkoo fought his way toward them, a round, broad, not at all long man, with thinning coppery hair cropped close. "I was hoping you would show."
"Hello, Siggy." Deasey stiffened and offered his hand in a way that struck Joe as defensive or even protective, and then, in the next instant, the man he called Siggy had put a wrestling hold on him, in which seemed to be mingled affection and a desire to snap bones.
"Mr. Clay, Mr. Kavalier," Deasey said, fighting free of the embrace like Houdini jerking and thrashing his way out of a wet straitjacket.
"May I-present-Longman Harkoo, known to those who prefer not to indulge him as Mr. Siegfried Saks."
Joe had an uneasy feeling, as if the name meant something to him, but he could not quite get hold of the connection. He searched his memory for "Siegfried Saks," shuffling through the cards, trying to pop the ace that he knew was in there somewhere.
"Welcome!" The former Mr. Saks let go of his old friend and turned smiling to the cousins; they each took a step back, but he just offered them his hand, with a mischievous twinkle in his mild blue eyes that seemed to suggest he subjected to his demonic hugs only those who least liked to be touched. At a time when an honorable place in the taxonomy of male elegance was still reserved for the genus Fat Man, Harkoo was a classic instance of the Mystic Potentate species, managing to look at once commanding, stylish, and ultramundane in a vast purple-and-brown caftan, heavily embroidered, that hung down almost to the tops of his Mexican sandals. The little toe of his horny right foot, Joe saw, was adorned with a garnet ring. A venerable Kodak Brownie hung from an Indian-beaded strap around his neck.
"Sorry about all thatracketdownstairs," he said with a hint of weariness.
"Is it really him?" Sammy said. "Inside that thing?"
"It really is. I've tried to coax him out of it. I told him it was amarvelousidea in the, you know, the abstract, but inpractice…But he's a terribly stubborn man. I've never known a genius who was not."
The doorman had pointed Dali out to them when they came in, standing in the ballroom, just off the front hall. He was wearing a deep-sea diving costume, complete with rubberized canvas coverall and globular brass helmet. A striking woman whom Deasey identified as Gala Dali stood loyally by her husband's side in the middle of the empty room, along with two or three other people too stubborn, too sycophantic, or perhaps simply too deaf to mind the intolerable coughing hum of the large gasoline-powered air pump, to which the Master was connected by a length of rubber hose. They were all yelling at the top of their lungs. "No one at the party," as Kahn wrote inThe New Yorker,was ill-mannered enough to ask Dali what he intended by this get-up. Most took it to be either an allusion to the tenebrous benthos of the human unconscious or else to "The Dream of Venus," which as everyone knows featured a school of live girls dressed up as mermaids swimming around half-naked in a tank. In any case Dali would not, in all likelihood, have been able to hear the question through the diving helmet.
"But never mind," Harkoo continued cheerily, "we're all quite cozy in here. Welcome, welcome. Comic books, is it?Marvelousstuff. Love it. Regular reader. Positively a devotee."
Sammy beamed. Harkoo slipped the camera from around his neck and handed it to Joe. "I'd be very honored if you would take my picture," he said.
"Please? I'm sorry?"
"Take a picture of me. With the camera." He looked at Deasey. "Does he speak English?"
"He has his own brand. Mr. Kavalier is from Prague."
"Very good! Yes, you must! I have a marked deficit of Czech impressions."
Deasey nodded to Joe, who raised the camera's viewfinder to his left eye and framed Longman Harkoo's big, cracked-baby face. Harkoo settled his jowls and eyebrows into a sober, nearly blank expression, but his eyes gleamed with pleasure. Joe had never in his life made anyone so happy so easily.
"How do I focus it?" Joe asked him, lowering the camera.
"Oh, don't bother about that. Just look at me and push the little lever. Your mind will do the rest."
"My mind." Joe snapped a photo of his host, then handed the camera back to him. "The camera is…" He searched for the word in English. "Telepathic."
"All cameras are," his host said mildly. "I have been photographed now by seven thousand one hundred and… eighteen… people, all with this camera, and I assure you that no two portraits are alike." He handed the camera to Sammy, and his features, as if stamped from a machine, once more settled into the same corpulent happy mask. Sammy snapped the lever. "What possible other explanation can there be for this endless variation but interference by waves emanating from the photographer's own mind?"
Joe did not know how to reply to this, but he saw that a reply was expected, and as the intensity of his host's expectation increased, he realized somewhat belatedly what that reply must be.
"None," he said finally.
Longman Harkoo looked extremely pleased. He put one arm across Sammy's shoulders and the other across Joe's and, with a good deal of shoving and apologizing, managed to take them on a tour of their immediate neighbors, introducing them to painters and writers and various holders of cocktails, furnishing each, without even appearing to stop to organize his thoughts, with a miniature curriculum vitae that touched on the high points of their oeuvres, sex lives, or family connections.
"… her sister is married to a Roosevelt, don't ask me which one… you must have seen hisArt and Agon…she's standing right under one of her ex-husband's paintings… he was publicly slapped by Siquieros…"
Most of the names were unfamiliar to Joe, but he did recognize Raymond Scott, a composer who had recently hit it big with a series of whimsical, cacophonous, breakneck pseudo-jazz pop tunes. Just the other day, when Joe stopped in at Hippodrome Radio, they had been playing his new record,Yesterthoughts and Stranger,over the store PA. Scott was feeding a steady diet of Louis Armstrong platters to the portable RCA while explaining what he had meant when he referred to Satchmo as the Einstein of the blues. As the notes fluttered out of the fabric-covered loudspeaker, he would point at them, as if to illustrate what he was saying, and even tried to snatch at one with his hands. He kept turning the volume up, the better to compete with the less important conversations taking place ail around him. Over there, under the saguaro cactus, was the girl painter Loren MacIver, whose luminous canvases Joe had admired at the Paul Matisse gallery. Tall, overly thin by Joe's lights, but with a New York kind of beauty-sharp, tense, stylish-she was chatting with a tall, striking Aryan beauty who was holding a tiny baby to her breast. "Miss Uta Hagen," Harkoo explained. "She's married to Jose Ferrer, he's around here someplace. They're doingCharley's Aunt."
The women offered their hands. MacIver's eyes were kohled, her lips painted a surprising shade of cocoa.
"These gentlemen make comic books," Harkoo told them. "The adventures of a fellow named the Escaper.