Men and Cartoons Read Free Page B

me, he saw I was transfixed by this sculpture, and he uttered this line I'll never forget, it shot through me like a bolt: ‘Spielend, doch, mit toedlichem Griff.'
He thinks it's a game, but he's choking the goose
. But in the guard's High German it was more allusive and grand—‘playing, but with a deadly grip.'”
    “Like something from Rilke,” said Roberta Jar.
    Oh yes, I thought viciously,
Rilke
and
High German
after four or five beers. You're both such fine people. However slow my uptake, a picture formed: I now supposed Doe's dissertation had been in art history, for example. And that Adam Cressner and Roberta Jar had together known, from intimate experience, how easily Doe might be induced to turn herself inside out for us.
    I wanted revenge on Doe's behalf. “I've never,” I said loudly.
    All stared. I began again. “I've never pretended I was a character from a comic book. Never, say, dressed up in a superhero costume, not even on Halloween.” I glared at Adam Cressner: Let him eat cape.
    It was Roberta Jar who drew our attention, though, by lifting her bottle high, as if to toast again before she sipped. We looked to her as we had to Doe.
    “I met a man once,” Roberta said. “I liked this man, well, very, very much. This was eight years ago now.” She lolled her big head, a little shy to tell it, though her voice was still strong and resonant in her chest. “When we began to see one another, this man and I, there was something between us that was difficult, a secret—a secret priority in his life. It had to do with this, exactly: dressing up as a character from a comic book. And this priority was difficult for both of us.”
    She'd turned my hostile joke into another confession, to give Doe company. We listened wide-eyed—I caught Flour glancing at me, likely wondering how I'd known to ask the question, as I'd wondered before at Adam Cressner. As for Adam, he sat quietly adoring his paramour while she spilled on.
    “I realized I had to learn as much about this as I could, or it would beat us, and I was determined not to be beaten. I discovered that the comic-book character in question had gotten married, to another character, called the Scarlet Witch. I thought this was very unusual, two married superheroes, and I took it as a good sign. So, I went shopping for fabric, and hand-sewed a Scarlet Witch costume. Tights, and pink boots, a sort of pink headpiece to hold back my hair. I did a good job, really impressed myself. It was the most sustained arts-and-crafts project of my life, actually.”
    Roberta paused, and in the silence we were allowed to sense the result of her efforts, a climax as inevitable and in its way as horrible as the kitten's execution. I wondered if Adam still wore the red food coloring for face paint, or whether he'd found some better method, easier to remove when he'd wanted to pass for a mere Columbia professor. I thought of the Scarlet Witch as I knew her from Marvel Comics, an exotic beauty whose powers, loosely defined as “sorcery,” mostly consisted of throwing up pink force fields, but whose real achievement was a stoical, unwavering devotion to her Spock-like emotional mute of a husband.
    I looked again to Adam Cressner. I still faintly wished for the satisfaction of an unmasking, but his eyes gave me nothing. Adam Cressner was as little interested in my impressions of his Visionhood as he'd been at second base, all those years ago. He hadn't even sipped his beer to confess the truth.
    “I have to go,” said Doe suddenly. She flinched her head from me, from all of us, hastily gathered a load of beer bottles into the kitchen and rinsed them in the sink. I wondered if she'd also been enticed into a costume—Ant-Girl, or Thumbelina.
    “Well, anyway, that's my story,” said Roberta, the sardonic twang restored to her voice. One of the men gave an artificial laugh, barely adequate to break the tension. It was only now that Adam Cressner followed the game's protocol