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  Ferguson wanted to explain it to her, but he knew how difficult it would be to delve into the thousand nuanced particulars of the long twilight struggle that had lasted the better part of his life, so he boiled it down to one simple and comprehensible statement:

  I was waiting for him to contact me, he was waiting for me to contact him, and before either one of us was willing to budge, time ran out.

  Two stubborn fools, Ethel said.

  That’s it. Two fools locked in their stubbornness.

  We can’t change what happened, Archie. It’s over and done with now, and all I can say is I hope you won’t go on tormenting yourself about it any more than you already have. Your father was an odd man, but not a cruel or vindictive man, and even though he made things hard on you, I believe he was on your side.

  How can you know that?

  Because he didn’t cut you out of his will. As far as I’m concerned, it should have been a much larger amount, but according to what your father told me, you have no interest in being the co-owner of a chain of seven appliance stores. Is that right?

  None whatsoever.

  I’m still convinced he should have left you a lot more, but one hundred thousand dollars isn’t too bad, is it?

  Ferguson didn’t know what to say, so he went on sitting in his chair and said nothing, answering Ethel’s question by shaking his head, meaning no, one hundred thousand dollars wasn’t too bad, even though he wasn’t sure at that point if he wanted to accept it or not, and now that there was nothing more to be said, Ethel and Ferguson went back upstairs, where he called his stepfather and told him he was ready to be picked up. When Dan’s car appeared in front of the house fifteen minutes later, Ferguson shook hands with Allen and Stephanie and said good-bye to them, and as Ethel walked him to the door, she told her dead husband’s son that he should expect a call from Kaminsky the lawyer about his inheritance sometime within the next week or two, and then Ferguson and Ethel hugged each other good-bye, a hard, fervent embrace of solidarity and affection as they promised to stay in touch with each other from now on, even though they both knew they never would.

  In the car, Ferguson lit his fourteenth Camel of the day, cracked open the window, and turned to Dan. How was his mother doing? That was the first question he asked as they made their way to Woodhall Crescent, the peculiar but necessary question about his mother’s state of mind after learning that her ex-husband and spouse for eighteen years and the father of her son had abruptly and unexpectedly left this world, for in spite of their angry divorce and the uninterrupted silence that had existed between them since the divorce, it must have come as a jolt to her just the same.

  The word jolt says it all, Dan replied. Which accounts for the tears, I think, and the astonishment, and the sorrow. But that was two days ago, and by now she’s more or less come to terms with it. You know how it is, Archie. Once a person dies, you start to feel different things about that person, no matter what trouble there might have been in the past.

  So you’re saying she’s all right.

  Don’t worry. Before I left, she asked me to ask you if you knew anything about your father’s will. Her brain is working again, which suggests the tears are finished. (Momentarily turning his eyes from the road to look at Ferguson.) She’s a lot more concerned about you than she is about herself. As am I, for that matter.

  Rather than talk about the deadness and confusion in his own brain, Ferguson told Dan about the one hundred thousand dollars. He assumed the six-figure number would impress him, but the normally unriled and devil-may-care Dan Schneiderman was distinctly unimpressed. For a man of Stanley Ferguson’s wealth, he said, one hundred thousand was the bare minimum, and anything lower than that would have been obnoxious.

  Still and all, Ferguson countered, it was a hell of a lot of money.

  Yes, Dan agreed, it was a veritable mountain.

  Ferguson then explained that he still hadn’t decided what he wanted to do about it, whether to accept the money for himself or give it away, and while he was thinking it over he wanted Dan and his mother to hold on to it for him, and if they should ever want to use some of it for themselves while he was still making up his mind, then they should feel free to do that, with his blessings.

  Don’t be an ass, Dan said. The money’s yours, Archie. Put it in your own account and spend it on yourself—any way you want. Your war with your father is over now, and you don’t have to go on fighting it after he’s dead.

  You could be right. But I have to make that decision myself, and I still haven’t made it. In the meantime, the money goes to you and my mother for safekeeping.

  All right, give us the money. And when we get it, the first thing I’m going to do is write you a check for five thousand dollars.

  Why five thousand?

  Because that’s what you’ll need to live on for the summer and your last year of college. It used to be four thousand, but now it’s five. You’ve heard of inflation, haven’t you? Not only is the war killing people, it’s also starting to kill the economy.

  But if I decide I don’t want to keep the money, it won’t be a hundred thousand anymore, it will be ninety-five thousand.

  Not after a year it won’t. Interest is at six percent these days. By the time you graduate from college, the ninety-five thousand will be a hundred thousand again. It’s what we call invisible money.

  I never knew you were such a schemer.

  I’m not. You’re the schemer, Archie, but unless I do a little scheming myself, I won’t be able to keep up with you.

  * * *

  THE NEXT BIG blow that spring was losing Celia.

  First Cause: By the time Aunt Mildred pulled Ferguson out of the burning house and found him new shelter at Brooklyn College, it had been one year since he and Celia had put their arms around each other and ventured their first kiss. Love had followed from that kiss, a big love that now dwarfed all other loves from the past, but in that year he had also learned how complicated loving Celia could be. When it was just the two of them alone together, Ferguson felt they were mostly in harmony, mostly able to overcome the differences that sometimes flared up between them by shedding their clothes and crawling into bed, and the bond of copious, lustful copulations kept them united even when they were at odds about how to live or what they imagined they were living for. Ferguson and Celia both had strong opinions on the matters that concerned them most, but those matters were often different matters in that Ferguson was preparing himself for a future in art and Celia was preparing herself for a future in science, and even though they both professed to admire what the other did (Ferguson had no doubt that Celia was enthusiastic about his work, Celia had no doubt that Ferguson was in awe of her immense academic brain), they couldn’t be all things to each other all the time.

  Rebuttal: A gap between them, but not so broad a gap as to thwart their efforts to bridge it. Celia read books, listened to music, and merrily trotted off to movies and plays with Ferguson, and Ferguson himself was studying biology that year, needing one more science course to fulfill his requirement, but making that course biology because of her, in order to master the rudiments of the language she spoke, and, as he explained to Celia, to immerse himself more deeply in his book, which they both understood could be written only by penetrating the Noyesian realm of physical bodies, the tissues and bones of the ill and healthy bodies his man had been treating for more than twenty years as a medical doctor. Beyond helping him with the work for his biology class, Celia also took it upon herself to arrange interviews for him with pre-med students from Barnard and Columbia, with young interns at St. Luke’s, Lenox Hill, and Columbia Presbyterian, and an invaluable four-hour meeting with her own family doctor since childhood, Gordon Edelman from New Rochelle, a compact, round-chested man who calmly walked Ferguson through the history and day-to-day routines of his practice, the dramas he had confronted over the years, and even talked for a while about Celia’s brother’s early death, explaining that Artie did not present symptoms
of an aneurysm and consequently was not subjected to the dangerous procedure of an angiograph, which was the only method for examining a living brain in 1961, as opposed to the more reliable procedure of picking apart a dead brain during an autopsy. Did not present. In other words, there was nothing anyone could have done, and then the day arrived when the vessel broke and the doctor’s words were scrambled into three different words that carried an altogether different meaning: No longer present.

  Because of his novel, Ferguson was also making the bleak but necessary journey through the literature of suicide, and in order to keep pace with him, Celia read some of those books as well, beginning with philosophical, sociological, and psychological essays and studies by Hume, Schopenhauer, Durkheim, and Menninger, then numerous accounts from the distant past and near present, Empedocles and his mythic leap into the flames of Mount Etna, Socrates (hemlock), Mark Antony (sword), the mass suicide of Jewish rebels at Masada, Plutarch’s description of Cato’s self-murder in Parallel Lives (plucking out his own bowels in front of his son, his doctor, and his servants), the disgraced boy genius Thomas Chatterton (arsenic), the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva (hanging), Hart Crane (jumping off a ship into the Gulf of Mexico), George Eastman (a gunshot to the heart), Hermann Göring (cyanide), and, most pertinent of all, the opening sentences from The Myth of Sisyphus: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.”

  F: What do you think, Celia? Is Camus right or wrong?

  C: Probably right. But then again …

  F: I agree with you. Probably right, but not necessarily.

  Not all things all the time, but more than enough things to make a decent go of it, perhaps a splendid and lasting go, but they were still just eighteen and twenty when the school year began, and one of the good things they shared was the double conviction that work came before pleasure and that neither of them had any aptitude for domestic life. Even if Ferguson’s apartment on East Eighty-ninth Street had been big enough for two rather than one, they never would have considered living together, not because they were too young for the rigors of steady cohabitation but because they were both essentially loners and needed long stretches of time alone in order to do their work. For Celia, that meant her studies at Barnard, where she was excelling not only in science and math but in all her subjects, which put her firmly in the grind camp, an obsessive, round-the-clock grind who had joined up with four other Barnard grind-girls for her sophomore year and was living in a large, gloomy dump on West 111th Street, an apartment she teasingly referred to as the Cloister of Perpetual Stillness. For Ferguson, the exigencies of work were no less demanding, the taxing double job of trying to do his best at Brooklyn College while trying to write his novel, which was advancing slowly because of that, but one more good thing about the obsessive Celia was how deeply attuned she was to his obsessions, and several times that year, on the Fridays and Saturdays and Sundays when they had made plans to see each other and Ferguson found himself on a sudden roll with his book, she didn’t take offense when he called her at the last minute to cancel the date, telling him to forge on and write his heart out and not to worry. That was the crux of it, he realized, the comrade spirit that set her apart from everyone else he had known, for there was never any doubt that she was disappointed by those last-minute calls but had the guts (the strength of character) to pretend she wasn’t.

  Second Cause: A mostly harmonious meeting of minds and bodies when it was just the two of them alone together, but whenever they stepped out into the world and mixed with other people, life became problematic. Beyond the four girls she shared her apartment with, Celia had few close friends, perhaps no close friends, and therefore the bulk of their infrequent socializing consisted of floating in and out of Ferguson’s world, which was mostly an alien world to Celia, a world she tried to understand but couldn’t. She had no difficulties with the older generation and felt warmly treated by Ferguson’s mother and stepfather, she enjoyed herself at the two dinners they had with Aunt Mildred and Uncle Don, but Noah and Howard both rubbed her the wrong way, Noah because she found his sarcastic, nonstop jesting unbearable and Howard because she felt wounded by his polite indifference to her. She got along well enough with Amy and Jim’s wife, Nancy, but the ever-expanding circle of Ferguson’s poet and painter friends bored her and repelled her in equal measure, and it saddened Ferguson to see how unhappy she looked whenever they spent an evening with Billy and Joanna, who were as close to him as blood relations now, a sadness that turned into both guilt and irritation when he watched her sit through another one of his long, meandering talks about poets and writers with Ron, Lewis, or Anne, and even less did she comprehend why her noble, deep-thinking Archie found it so much fun to go to trashy Joan Crawford movies with Bo Jainard and his friend Jack Ellerby, those slender fey boys who sometimes kissed each other in the darkness of the balcony and never stopped laughing, they all laughed too much, she said, not one person in the crowd ever took anything seriously, they were sloppy, floppy, loosey-goosey starvelings with no aim in life except to prowl the margins of life and make art that no one wanted to see or buy, and yes, Ferguson admitted, perhaps that was true, but they were his boys and girls, his gallant, unembittered fellow outcasts, and because none of them was quite fit for this world, a burst of laughter now and then showed they were doing the best they could under the circumstances.

  Rebuttal: By the beginning of the new year (1968), Ferguson understood that he could no longer subject Celia to his disreputable companions, some of whom were blatant homosexuals, some of whom were addicts and drunks, some of whom were emotionally disturbed cripples under psychiatric care, and even if some of them were contentedly married parents of young children, no matter how hard he tried to bring her into that small society of cracked-in-the-head monomaniacs, she would always resist it, and rather than go on punishing her for the sin of wanting to accompany him when he sought out the company of others, he would absolve her of the obligation to be with any others who were not to her liking. He knew it was a step in the wrong direction, that cutting her off from that part of his life would open a permanent space between them, but he didn’t want to run the risk of losing Celia, and how else could he hold on to her except by liberating her from those unhappy evenings with his friends?

  The next time she slept over at his place, he picked up on something she said and then moved in on the subject as delicately as he could. They were lying in bed together, sharing one of his Camels after a richly satisfying hour under and on top of the sheets and down comforter, talking about nothing of any importance, or perhaps not talking at all (he couldn’t remember), perhaps just looking at each other, as they tended to do at such moments, each one filled up with the other and yet prolonging the moment by running their hands up and down and over the other’s naked skin, no words other than Ferguson telling her how beautiful she was, if indeed he was saying that much, but he remembered that Celia’s eyes were closed and she was humming to herself, a soft little tuneless sound that resembled a purr, languorous, long-limbed, panther-woman Celia lounging on her side and whispering to him in a throaty voice: I love it when we’re like this, Archie. Just the two of us on our island together with the waves of the city splashing outside.

  Me, too, Ferguson said. That’s why I’m proposing a moratorium, a ban on any more contact with the outside.

  Are you saying we should lock ourselves in this room and never go out?

  No, we can go out. But just the two of us. No more running around with other people.

  That’s fine with me. What do I care about other people?

  There’s just one problem. (A pause to puff and think about how to say it without upsetting her.) We’ll have to start seeing each other a bit less often.

  Why would we want to do that?

  Because the people you don’t care about are not people I don’t care about.

  A
nd which people are we referring to?

  The ones I’ve forced down your throat. Billy Best, Howard Small, Noah Marx, Bo Jainard—the whole lot of unacceptables.

  I’m not against them, Archie.

  Maybe not, but you’re not for them either, and I don’t see why you should have to put up with them anymore.

  Are you saying this for me or for you?

  For both of us. It kills me to see you go into those funks of yours.

  I know you’re trying to be nice, but you think I’m a twit, don’t you? An uptight, bourgeois noodlehead.

  That’s right. A girl with straight A’s and an invitation to go back to Woods Hole for the summer must be a twit and a noodlehead.

  But they’re your friends. I don’t want to let you down.

  They’re my friends, but there’s nothing that says they have to be your friends.

  It’s kind of sad, don’t you think?

  Not really. It’s just a new arrangement, that’s all.

  I’m talking about less, about seeing each other less often.

  If the quality of that less is more than the more we have now, then less will compensate for all the miserable hours I’ve spent watching you suffer with those people, and less will end up trumping more, less in fact will be more.

  They settled into a new rhythm of weekends only, two late afternoons, evenings, and nights per weekend, either Friday and Saturday, Friday and Sunday, or Saturday and Sunday, except on those rare Fridays, Saturdays, or Sundays when Ferguson called to cancel at the last minute, which left him free to associate with one or more of the unacceptables on the weekend night that was not shared with Celia, not to mention the weekday nights when he was not overburdened with schoolwork, the roughly one night in four when he had dinner with Billy and Joanna at their place down the street, talking about writers, politics, movies, painters, and sports as they took turns holding and playing with one-year-old Molly, big-brother Billy Best, who had believed in Ferguson before anyone else and was his only prose-writer friend in the fish tank of poets where he was swimming now, the only one with an ear for prose who could follow his arguments about why Flannery O’Conner and Grace Paley were bolder, more inventive stylists than Bellow, Updike, or any other American man except perhaps Baldwin, and in that way Ferguson managed not to lose contact with the Bests or Noah or Howard or the Tumult trio or any of the other necessary ones who kept him anchored to the world. Yes, it was a little sad, as Celia had put it, but after a month and then another month of the new arrangement, he felt they were beginning to do better, breathing less fitfully because there were fewer distractions and exasperations to contend with, and yet Ferguson also knew there was much work still to be done, that the small problem he had solved was nothing compared to the big problem of hiding too much of himself from her, and unless he found the strength to open up to Celia and tell her everything she needed to be told about him, he would eventually destroy their future and end up with nothing.