An Untold Tale of Kavalier & Clay: Breakfast in the Wreck
Michael Chabon
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Author's Note: Very alert readers of Kavalier & Clay might be able to trace the ghost of a series of allusions to some kind of extra-scholastic relationship going on between Sam Clay and his son's fifth-grade teacher, Mr. Landauer, one—the last—of a long string of Sammy's inconclusive and half-hearted not-quite-affairs with men during the course of his marriage. This relationship with Felix Landauer was at one time a (slightly) more pronounced subplot in the novel, one which found its termination in this deleted chapter. "Breakfast in the Wreck" follows immediately—it's the next day—on Sammy's strange public humiliation-cum-liberation at the Kefauver hearings into juvenile delinquency and comics. Now that he has been outed, he is trying to decide what to do with all the suddenly outmoded fixtures of his life, including Felix himself.The Culloden Diner, in Pequot, New York, two stops beyond Bloomtown on the LIRR, had been formed by the forcible coupling of an abandoned house, its siding and boarded-up windows painted a pale shade of pancake batter, to the shell of a decommissioned New York City trolley car. Because, due to some miscalculation or subsidence of the foundation slab, the trolley car sat at a lurching angle to the little old house, with its blank surprised mien and air of buckling studs and sagging rafters, the diner was known among its devotees as the Collision, or, paraphrastically, as the Wreck. Its Greek owner, or his daughter, would unlock the door of the lobby—a glassed-in square of ash-gray linoleum with just enough room for a woolly rubber mat, an umbrella stand, and a Kiwanis gum-ball dispenser—every weekday morning at six o'clock. Within five minutes, the dozen booths, low-backed, padded in translucent, syrup-brown Naugahyde, and the flecked laminate counter, worn down in patches to the wooden underply by the transit of plates and running the length of the streetcar, would be crowded with the Wreck's steady clientele of men who could not afford the time or bear the torment it would cost them to eat their breakfasts at home.
