Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

"Whatever you decide is fine by me, Mr. Singe," Sammy said. "To tell you the truth, I don't even know if I want to move to Los Angeles."

"Oh, don't start in on that again," Bacon said, with a big fake radio laugh. They shook hands with Singe, and he got into a cab.

"See you boys around," Singe said. There was an odd note in his voice, hovering somewhere between mockery and doubt. The cab pulled away from the curb, and he waved a little, leaving Sammy standing there under the arm of his boyfriend.

Bacon turned on him. "What'd you go and say that for, Clayboy?"

"Maybe it's true. Maybe I like it here."

Boyfriend. The word flew into Sammy's mind and careened blindly around it like a moth while Sammy chased after it with a broom in one hand and a handbook of lepidoptery in the other. It sounded like a wisecrack, acidulous, hard-bitten, italicized: Who's your boyfriend, Percy? Though Sammy now spent all his free time with Bacon, and had agreed in principle on their sharing a house in the event that they did go west, Sammy still refused to admit to himself-at that irrelevant, senatorial level of consciousness where the questions that desire has already answered are proposed and debated and tabled till later-that he was in love, or falling in love, with Tracy Bacon. It was not that he denied what he was feeling, or that the implications of the feeling had frightened him; well, he did, and they had, but Sammy had been in love with men nearly all his life, from his father to Nikola Tesla to John Garfield, whose snarl of derision echoed so clearly in his imagination, taunting Sammy: Hey, pretty boy, who's your boyfriend?

However clandestine and impossible an enterprise it might hitherto always have been or seemed, loving men came naturally to Sammy, like a gift of languages or an eye for four-leaf clovers; notions of denial andfear were, in a very real sense, superfluous. Yes, all right, so maybe he was in love with Tracy Bacon; so what? What did that prove? So maybe there had been further kissing, and some careful exploitation of shadows and stairwells and empty hallways; even John Garfield would have had to agree that their behavior since that night in the lightning storm, on the eighty-sixth floor, had been playful and masculine and essentially chaste. Sometimes in the back of a taxicab, their hands might steal toward each other across the leather banquette, and Sammy would feel his small, damp palm and bitten fingers absorbed into the deep, sober Presbyterian fastness of Tracy Bacon's grip.

The previous week, when they were at Brooks being fitted for new suits, standing side by side in their BVDs like a before-and-after advertisement for vitamin tonic, they had watched the salesman leave the fitting room, and the tailor turn his back, and then Bacon had reached out and grabbed a handful of the wool of Sammy's chest. He had fitted the hinge of his fingers into the notch of Sammy's breastbone, and run his palm down the flat slope of Sammy's belly, and then, hardening his blue eyes with an innocent Tom Mayflower twinkle, darted his hand into and out of the waistband of Sammy's briefs, like a cook testing a pot of hot water with a pinky. Sammy's cock retained, to this moment, a furtive memory of the imprint of that cool hand. As for kisses, there had been three more: one just outside the doorway of Bacon's hotel room as Sammy was dropping him home; one amid the dark latticework under the Third Avenue El at Fifty-first; and then the third and boldest, in a back row of the Broadway, at a showing of Dumbo, during the pink elephant bacchanal. For here was the novelty, the difference between the love that Sammy bad felt for Tesla and Garfield and even for Joe Kavalier, and that which he felt for Tracy Bacon: it really did seem to be reciprocated. And these blossomings of desire, these entanglings of their fingers, these four nourishing kisses stolen from the overflowing stand-pipe of New York 's indifference, were the inevitable product of that reciprocity. But did they mean that he, or Bacon, was a homosexual? Did they make Tracy Bacon Sammy's boyfriend?

"I don't care," Sammy said, aloud, to Mr. Frank Singe, New York, the world; and then, turning back to Bacon, "I don't care! I don't care if I get the job or not. I don't want to think about it, or Los Angeles, or you leaving, or any of it. I just want to live my life and be a good boy and have a nice time. That all right with you?"

"That's fine by me, sir," Bacon said, knotting his scarf against the chill. "How about we go do something?"

"What do you want to do?"

"I don't know. What's your favorite place ever? In the whole city, I mean."

"My favorite place ever in the whole city?"

"Right."

"Including the boroughs?"

"Don't tell me it's in Brooklyn. That's awfully disappointing."

"Not Brooklyn," Sammy said. " Queens."

"Worse still."

"Only it isn't there anymore, my favorite place. They closed it. Packed it up and rolled it right out of town."

"The Fair," Bacon said. He shook his head. "You and that Fair."

"You never went, did you?"

"That's your favorite place ever, huh?"

"Yeah, but-"

"All right, then." Bacon hailed a taxicab and opened the door for Sammy. Sammy stood there a moment, knowing that Bacon was about to get him into something he was not going to be able to get out of very easily. He just didn't know what.

"We're going to Queens," Bacon said to the driver. "To the World's Fair."

It was not until they had reached the Triborough Bridge that the driver, in a dry monotone, said, "I don't know how to tell you fellas this."

"Isn't there anything left?" Bacon said.

"Well, I seen in the papers they been arguing about what to do with the land, between the city and Mr. Moses and the Fair people. I guess some of it still might be there."

"We'll keep very low expectations," Bacon said. "How about that?"

"I'm comfortable with that," Sammy said.

Sammy had loved the Fair, visiting it three times in its first season of 1939, and until the end of his life, he kept one of the little buttons he had been given when he exited the General Motors pavilion, which said I have seen the future. He had grown up in an era of great hopelessness, and to him and millions of his fellow city boys, the Fair and the world it foretold had possessed the force of a covenant, a promise of a better world to come, that he would later attempt to redeem in the potato fields of Long Island.

The cab left them off outside the LIRR station, and they wandered along the Fair's perimeter for a while, looking for a way in. But there was a high fence, and Sammy didn't think he could get over it.

"Here," Bacon said, crouching behind some shrubs and arching his back. "Climb on."

"I can't-I'll hurt you-"

"Come on, I'll be fine."

Sammy scrambled up onto Bacon's back, leaving a muddy footprint on his coat.

"I have mystically augmented strength, you know," Bacon said. "Oof."

Sammy tumbled and dangled and fell into the fairgrounds, landing on his ass. Bacon launched, hoisted, and dropped himself up, over, and down the fairground side of the fence. They were in.

The first thing Sammy's eye sought out were the monumental Mutt-and-Jeff structures, the soaring Trylon and its rotund chum the Peri-sphere, symbols of the Fair that for two years had been ubiquitous throughout the country, working their way onto restaurant menus, clock faces, matchbooks, neckties, handkerchiefs, playing cards, girls' sweaters, cocktail shakers, scarves, lighters, radio cabinets, et cetera, before disappearing as suddenly as they had flourished, like the totems of some discredited Millerite cult that briefly thrills and then bitterly disappoints its adherents with grand and terrible prophecies. He saw right away that the lowermost hundred feet or so of the Trylon was covered in scaffolding.