For a moment Joe wavered there, soaking wet, looking slowly across the two hundred faces ranged in an anxious and wondering ring around him. His face was twisted in an expression that most of the guests would later characterize as shame but that others, Stanley Konigsberg among them, saw as a terrible, inexplicable anger. (pg 399-400)

How could he begin to say how happy he had been, this last month or so, in the radiant focus of Bacon’s regard, how mistaken Bacon was in wasting that regard on him. No one as beautiful, as charming and poised and physically grand, as Bacon could possibly taken an interest in him. (pg 407)

These sections of Kavalier and Clay (pages 360-440 and 440-500) are a fulcrum, a pivot point, a crossroads around which the possible paths of their futures lay spread out like spokes on a bike wheel, sign posts arrowing off in different directions. Down one way Thomas lands in New York and becomes the third member of a rapidly growing family in a swanky new apartment. Down another he drowns, killed by emotionless Nazis, another nameless body in another grim news story, leaving Josef alone, an escapist with no way out. Or he could run, an art he has by this point mastered, abandon his superhero mask and Clark Kent glasses and disappear into tundraed wasteland of loneliness, the only place on earth the machinations of war hasn’t crushed.

Sammy has his own crossroads. One leads him off to California to live in debauchery and ecstasy through the Golden Age of Hollywood. Or he could turn down the dark and rugged path that leaves him half-dead in an alley, broken, abused, and without recourse, an unwitting harbinger of Stonewall and Harvey Milk. A third path leaves him trapped in a marriage forged not out of love but from of duty and respect, a life as a failing Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent, his secret identity locked away in a closet, drowning in mothballs and failed attempts to forget.

By the start of Part VI, The League of the Golden Key, both men have made their choices, selected a path and run helter-skelter down its rocky, fragmented terrain. Soon enough they found the narrow road constricting, suffocating, empty, but, rather than turn back and start again they kept walking, accepting the journey without a thought about the destination. Sometimes the trees would thin and they would get glimpses of each other, their paths momentarily angling toward each other before veering sharply in the other direction. When Sammy begins to suspect that Joe is the masked marauder threatening to turn himself into a Jackson Pollack painting on 5th Avenue the trees part, the ferns thin out, the gravel smoothes, and the two journeymen begin to realize just how parallel their paths really were. The man in the dinner jacket falling through the air, his parachute just out of arms’ reach isn’t oblivious to his impending death. He knows the consequences of his decision to fall from the plane, but it is the path he chose and he will follow it through until the end.

-AxB

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