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The train stops in Chicago and Sammy gets off. They have a four-hour stop-over, which the cabbie assures him is just enough time to get to Burham Park and back. The World's Fair made it to Chicago in 1933, and was the first time an international fair paid completely for itself. It was so successful, in fact, that it was reopened the following year for an additional engagement. Sammy pays the driver in cash and promises to double it if he'll stay idling while Sammy walks what's left of the grounds.
There isn't much to see - it's not like in New York, where the fair buildings left were incongruous, clearly part of something larger and disconnected from real life. Here, there's just a stretch of beach and a single Roman column, standing, faded and worn, the temple that once surrounded it long lost. Somewhere on the beach, there are still a few of the houses they built for the fair - Houses of Tomorrow, they were called, 1930s architects' views of what kind of houses they'd be living in by now. Sammy's read that some of them are still standing; he's been in a duplicate model, in fact, in the outer reach of Queens. People walked through the houses and took brochures home, copied their designs, rebuilt the houses of the future on the ground in 1934, 1935. They brought the future down to earth. Sammy wants to see this, but the cabbie honks his horn and glances at his watch. He shuffles to a nearby variety store, where there's still a Century of Progress poster on the wall behind the cash register, the colors faded but still, somehow, bold, watercolor remnants of the rainbow village they created here. He buys two picture postcards, one of the city, one of the now-demolished Sky Ride that they built for the fair and tore down the next year. It doesn't occur to him until he's on the train, the lights of the city fading behind them, that he didn't bring any photos of New York with him.
They get Sammy's first card when he's been gone only a week. Doing fine, it says. Just thought I'd drop a line, on my way west. Did you know they have beaches in the middle of the country, too? Lots of things to learn. Love, Sammy. Rosa pins the card - a made-up-looking picture of Chicago, so that it seems big and bright like New York - to the front of the refrigerator, and she watches Joe glance at it every night when he's opening the door to start dinner.
"You think he is happy?" Joe asks her, one night after dinner when she's leaning against the counter, watching him wash plates. Tommy's in his bedroom, finishing up math homework that neither of them can be of much help with.
She thinks about Sammy the night before he left, how upbeat he sounded when they'd said their good-nights, how easily he'd allowed Joe to share her bed. She thinks about the way he walked so quietly through their house, that last night, trying not to wake anyone, trying, as always, not to disturb, just to make things OK. "I think he's going to try to be," she says. She hopes, wherever he lands, he's through with tip-toeing. "Maybe for the first time."
California is exactly what he'd thought it would be, only better and bigger and more. He gets off the train and takes a cab to a hotel recommended by a fellow traveler - the Beverly Hills Hotel. "Just take a lunch there," the guy said. "It's the place to see and be seen."
Sammy changes his clothes in the men's room at the station, so he's wearing his tropical-weight brown suit and the sharp matching hat that Rosa bought him for Christmas last year. An impractical buy at the time, of course, but she was never a woman affected by overpracticality. He wore it only once, and then, mostly, for the fun of saying, "Well, my wife got it for me," after which he cast off a nicely practiced look of what are you gonna do to the other boys in the office. Now, he sizes himself up in the mirror, decides he doesn't cut such a bad figure. Maybe should've listened to the wife more on these matters. He smoothes his eyebrow and catches the glint of his wedding ring. As he slides it into his pocket, he wonders, for the first time, whether Rosa will, eventually, want a divorce.
The Beverly Hills Hotel is every bit as shocking as his train companion led him to believe: it's a towering, sprawling pink structure, and Sammy wonders at first if this is a joke, if this is a cruel trick. But, no, the driver assures him, this is the Beverly Hills Hotel. "Take a walk, you'll love it," he says, and so Sammy stashes his bags at the desk and does exactly that. It's a jungle and a garden all in one; he takes off his suit jacket and strolls through the paths, expecting someone to stop him, to tell him he's in the wrong place, the wrong time. It feels, he has to admit, a bit like the future.
But there's a promenade that feels classy, maybe even classic, and he feels a bit more grounded by that. Sammy takes two long strolls of its length, surveying the couples passing him by and those sitting on the benches. Here, apparently, it's not only acceptable to stare, it's encouraged. A world of observation, he thinks, taking a seat on one of the elegant benches. The men who walk by are wearing, almost to a man, neatly tailored coats in pale colors, matched to creased slacks. Their shirts are glowing white, almost blue. No road dirt on their cuffs; everything about these men gleams, from their slicked hair to their shining black shoes. It's an ease of style he never saw in New York - but then again, all of the observation of men he did in the city was of the quickest, most furtive type; he often justified it to himself as research, so that he'd know how to dress a hero on his off-day.
All of the men here look like heroes in their day-wear. Sammy feels a peculiar tingle in his chest, interest and fear combined. He stands and follows a particularly dapper couple down the promenade and, eventually, into the lounge.
Here, at least, is an establishment he understands, fashions he's accustomed to, even if the whole place looks like something off the surface of the moon. A pink moon, at that. Everything inside is the color of a hazy rose sunset, except for the shadowy green booths. Sammy avoids the serious tables and their serious conversation and instead takes a seat at the end of a long, polished bar and orders a whiskey. It's not long before there's another man next to him, and - just like it's New York, just like it's any other day - they fall into easy conversation. There's a variety show on television, one man encouraging a younger man to pick up a trumpet and blow the world to smithereens.
"Wouldn't that be a talent," the other man says, signaling for a second drink. "Just pick up your horn and blow everything to bits."
"Kind of like a superhero thing," Sammy says, and the words feel strange on his tongue - almost mocking, almost derisive. He is this far outside of himself.
"Hey, that'd be a good one," the guy says. "The Magical Musician or something like that. Guy races to the scene and saves everyone with the toot of his horn." He smirks into his fresh drink. "Better than half the ideas I've seen today."
The guy's name is Mac McGuinness, and he works at an ad agency. They produce the commercials that appear alongside the television shows, he explains.
"So you know the people on the shows?"
He shrugs. "Sure, some of 'em. Mostly I deal with the big wigs, though, you know? The studio money guys." Mac gives him a sidelong glance. "Why, you in the business?"
"No," Sammy says. "At least, not yet. I just got here today."
"Yeah? Where from?"
For some reason - the whiskey, the long trip, the strange idea that out here, no drama is new - Sammy tells him everything: the hearing, Joe's return, his long train ride west. When he finishes telling the story, he looks over, not even sure what expression to expect.
Mac signals the bartender. "I thought I recognized you," he says, shaking his head. "Hey, Lou, you got any tables open? My friend and I need a bite to eat to wash down this whiskey, I think."
So they get a table, and over steaks Mac tells him they could use a little free-lance help at his office, if Sammy's looking for something right away. "You know," he says, as he pays the tab, "I used to read those comics non-stop. Broke my heart when the last Escapist came out. My kid's heart, too. You got kids, Mr. Clay?"
"Just one," Sammy says.
Mac nods. "Come by the office tomorrow, I'll show you around."
They get his second card after a month. This one is addressed to Tommy specifically, though the message is generic enough: Have a nice job going here, Sammy writes, in neat cartoon block. Writing some copy for television ads. It's not much creative, but it means you'll probably be seeing my words on TV pretty soon. Have been meeting a lot of people, might have a BIG SURPRISE soon. Love, Dad.
"You think he's going to write a comic book for TV?" Tommy asks, handing his mother the postcard across the dinner table. Rosa tucks it under the ashtray, but Joe picks it up and gazes at it. It's a very generic card, almost cartoonish but with very sloppy artwork: a palm tree, a crayon-blue ocean, a lighter blue sky. All the signs of over-optimism, he thinks, and sets the card down at the other end of the table.
"Maybe that's his big surprise," Rosa says, helping herself to peas. "Maybe he's found a way to put The Escapist back on the air."
Joe shakes his head. "I think that is dead forever, for Sammy," he says, and is surprised at the sorrow in his own voice. "Who would play him? There's no one else, after Tracy."
Rosa raises an eyebrow toward him. Tommy brought out a box of mementos the other evening from the garage, in which there had been a picture of Tracy Bacon. Joe had called him a good friend of Tommy's dad, and left it at that - an explanation Rosa hadn't liked particularly. Why shouldn't we just tell him the truth? If we don't think there's any harm, why keep secrets? She'd asked, and while Joe agreed, he also thought there were some secrets that were Sammy's to keep or share with Tommy as he saw fit.
"No address," Joe complains, turning the card over. "How are we supposed to write him? What if we need him?"
"Give him another month," Rosa says. "Soon we'll be able to just address a card to The Great Sammy Clay, Hollywood, and be certain it will get through."
Tommy nods, apparently satisfied with this explanation, and Joe decides to buy it as well. It's Sammy, after all; he'll figure something out.
Working for Mac is a foot in the door, just like working for Anapol was back in the day - the only difference is, this time it's a much better door, and Sammy has much bigger feet. His appearance before the committee has made him a minor "real-life" celebrity in a town full of screen darlings, and within a few weeks of arriving he finds himself on the list of reliable, entertaining party guests for not just the guys at the ad agency but, increasingly, the people he meets at their parties. This leads, eventually, to a golf date with show producer, which leads to a lunch, which leads, after two months in town, to a sit-down meeting with Mr. Jack Ramsey himself, director of production for MGM.
"Comic book heroes, huh?" Ramsey says. "But Terry Goshen tells me you have some kind of novel, too."
"Yeah, something like," Sammy says, and here he lays out the plan that he's so carefully worked out with Mac and Carl and the other guys during the evenings. Carl, who works in the art department at Mac's agency, has been particularly helpful as Sammy has crafted his pitch, and has nudged Sammy closer and closer to a true-to-life story. "What I've learned," Sammy says, ending it all up, tapping his cigarette nervously over the ashtray on Ramsey's wide desk, "is that it doesn't matter who the characters are, so long as people see them trying. They can be superheroes, they can be every day, broken down joes, but everyone wants to believe there's a chance to rise above at the end. We used to do it in broad strokes, but now, now we got the chance to do things subtle. Do things with some style."
"Like Hitchcock," Ramsey says, his eyes narrowed, "only - not a mystery?"
Sammy sits back. "There's mystery in the everyday," he says. A man goes missing for a decade, for instance. A man stays with a son that's not his. A man misses his family. "There's mystery enough in just answering why a guy does anything he does."
Ramsey nods, looks thoughtful. He takes a puff of his cigar. "It's a fascinating pitch," he says, leaning back. "I have your number, right?"
"Yes, sir. I'm at the Beverly Hills Hotel."
He nods again. "Take my card, too. We'll get something out of this, Clay, I know it."
Sammy steps out of the office and nods to the girl behind the desk. She smiles back, gives him a little wink, even, says, "Be seeing you, huh?"
"You bet you will," he says.
He walks to the lobby slowly, staring down at the carpet. Red carpet, all of it, like every day here is another movie premiere. Another star being made. Sammy thinks of Joe's Golem book, knows he can't pitch that here, not yet, but knows just as well that this meeting is what it's riding on: the chance to work again with Joe glimmers under all of this. He wouldn't buy Empire Comics with a million dollars - he'd buy a house out here for Rosa, and Joe, and Tommy, and he'd start a studio just like this. He'd put up stories the world couldn't ignore, recreate the way stories were seen, make people pay some goddamned attention, for once. Make them all understand that everyone has a drama, that everyone's a lunatic in his own way. He has a dream, again, and he can feel, standing in the center of the lobby, in a ring of gold carpet and potted palms, that this time it could work out. He could get a fair shake, this time. For once.
Carl is waiting outside, smoking out the window of his new car. "How'd he like it?" he asks as Sammy takes the front seat.
"Just fine," Sammy says. He lights a cigarette for himself. "So, on the heels of my newfound success, can I take you to dinner, Carl?"
He smiles and shifts the car into gear. "I thought you'd never ask, Clay," he says.
Their fourth card is, actually, a letter and a card. The postcard is for Tommy, a bright picture of "Studio City" on the front, an announcement of his upcoming television special on the back; the letter is addressed in block-print, very simply, to "The two of you."
Found an apartment, he writes in about the fifth line, after the set-up (weather, how are yous, sorry for not calling) is out of the way. Also found a roommate. Well. You know. A sidekick of my very own, I guess. Carl's a guy at the ad agency. He's been a big help in planning the TV special and the film script. I hope you'll get to meet him someday; bring the kid out, maybe, over the summer. Bring yourselves out. You wouldn't believe the sunshine.
I've been working on some things, he starts the next page, and then it goes on. Five pages, front and back, some of the best writing he's ever done, and some of the least comprehensible, probably, to anyone but Joe. It reads like Sammy talking - Sammy talking fifteen years ago, Sammy alight with his own ideas, Sammy eager to go get the world.
Joe reads the letter in bed, then trades it to Rosa for the remainder of her cigarette. She reads it and sets it on the nightstand, under a book on French art that she's been leafing through every night. She rests her head on his stomach. "I suppose it shouldn't surprise me," she says.
"What, that he's found someone?" Joe asks, rubbing his fingers through her hair.
"That it's taken him less time to figure things out, out there, than it has us." She looks up and him, and he blinks.
"I thought we were doing things all right," he says, and she nods.
"All right," she agrees. "But - doesn't this seem a little - " She breaks off and puts her head down again, and Joe stubs out the cigarette in the ashtray and puts his hands, gently, on her back. She feels warm under his fingertips, tender, more breakable than he would ever say.
He wants only to protect her, to make things OK, to make them better. He has a little money coming in, now. People know he's back. He owns Empire Comics now, and he makes an appearance in the office several days a week. He's been out to see Crandall, he's been over to see Bob Gaines. Things have changed, yes, and he doesn't mind trusting Gaines to run things, because he likes these character, likes the dark turns they're taking, the chances. Rosa came with him, once, though she's declined his offer of a desk of her own. "I'm comfortable at home," she said, and he took her at her word, because things are still strangely fragile between them. He dresses every day in a suit, in the shirt she presses for him, in shoes that she took him out to buy, and he catches the right trains and hopes that in these patterns she will see how sincerely he means to stay.
It's not a life, exactly, but it's close. He's putting himself back together, here; he can feel the pieces knitting. What he wishes, now, is to have Sammy close by.
He hasn't mentioned the Golem to anyone, except to Rosa, who read it in a single evening with a break only to make Tommy's lunch and tuck him in. He is not yet ready, because Sammy was right - the story isn't ready, yet, the tale is too specific, too personal, too wrapped up in a culture most people would not understand. And he isn't yet ready because he can't imagine fixing this book before he, himself, is fixed, and he has begun to sense that this may be impossible without Sammy's input, Sammy's guidance, Sammy's feedback.
"It's not what you thought it would be like," he says. "For this, for everything, Rosa, I am so sorry."
"No," she says, and looks up again. Her eyes are still as beautiful as he drew them in his mind, but her face is fuller, more lined, more mysterious. He doesn't know how they will bridge that gap, all of these years, but he knows somehow that they will, that the ease they have with each other is something that will make it possible - that it will make anything possible. "It's just the way the world works," she says, and slowly brings one leg over his, crawls up a bit, so she's hovering just over him. "Things never turn out the way you think."
"But they are all right," Joe persists, his hands still on her back.
"I think, at least we're back to even," she says. "I really get this feeling like finally, everything's turning out OK, for us. We can start over, you know? We can do anything."
There's no mystery in how she kisses him, at least; it's still as wonderful and terrifying as ever. This, he thinks, is certainly the best show in the world.
End