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BY THANKSGIVING, THERE was no question in his mind that it was love. He had lived through numerous infatuations in the past, starting with the kindergarten crushes on Cathy Gold and Margie Fitzpatrick when he was six, succeeded by a furious whirl of dalliances with Carol, Jane, Nancy, Susan, Mimi, Linda, and Connie at twelve and thirteen, the weekend dancing parties, the kissing sessions in moonlit backyards and basement alcoves, the first tentative advances toward sexual knowledge, the mysteries of skin and saliva-coated tongues, the taste of lipstick, the smell of perfume, the sound of nylon stockings rubbing together, and then the breakthrough at fourteen, the sudden jump from boyhood into adolescence, and with it a new life in an alien, ever mutating body, unbidden erections, wet dreams, masturbation, erotic longings, nightly lust dramas performed by shadows in the sex theater now lodged in his skull, the somatic cataclysms of youth, but all those physical changes and upheavals aside, the fundamental quest both before and after his new life began had always been a spiritual one, the dream of an enduring connection, a reciprocal love between compatible souls, souls endowed with bodies, of course, mercifully endowed with bodies, but the soul came first, would always come first, and in spite of his flirtations with Carol, Jane, Nancy, Susan, Mimi, Linda, and Connie, he soon learned that none of those girls possessed the soul he was looking for, and one by one he had lost interest in them and allowed them to disappear from his heart.
With Anne-Marie Dumartin, the story was playing itself out in reverse. The others had all begun as intense physical attractions, but the better he had come to know them, the more disenchanted he had felt, whereas he had barely noticed Anne-Marie in the beginning, had not exchanged more than a few words with her throughout the month of September, but then their European History teacher arbitrarily paired them to work on a project together, and once Ferguson began to know her a little, he discovered that he wanted to know her more, and the more he came to know her, the higher she rose in his estimation, and after three weeks of daily meetings about the decline and fall of Napoleon (the subject of their joint paper), the once plain-looking Belgian girl with the slight French accent had been transformed into an exotic beauty, and Ferguson’s heart was entirely filled up with her, bursting with her, and he meant to keep her there for as long as he could. A sudden, unforeseen conquest. A fifteen-year-old boy caught with his guard down, and then Cupid lost his way and accidentally wound up in Montclair, New Jersey, and before Psyche’s husband could buy a new ticket and head back to New York or Athens or wherever he was going, he shot off an arrow for the sport of it, and thus began the agonizing adventure of Ferguson’s first great love.
Small but not uncommonly small, a shade under five-five with no shoes on, dark, medium-length hair, round face with symmetrical features and a sturdy, unbashful nose, full lips, slender neck, dark brows crowning gray-blue eyes, vivid eyes, illuminated eyes, slender arms and fingers, breasts fuller than might have been expected, narrow hips, thin legs and delicate ankles, a beauty that did not declare itself at first glance, or even at second glance, but one that emerged with growing familiarity, gradually boring itself into the eye and thereafter indelible, a face difficult to turn away from, a face to dream on. A smart and serious girl, an often somber girl, not prone to outbursts of laughter, parsimonious with her smiles, but when she did smile, her whole body turned into a knife of radiance, a gleaming sword. A newcomer, and therefore friendless, with little desire to ingratiate herself or fit in, a stubborn self-possession that appealed to Ferguson and made her different from any other girl he had known, the laughing teenage girls of northern New Jersey in all their splendid frivolity, for Anne-Marie was determined to remain an outsider, a girl uprooted from her house in Brussels and forced to live in vulgar, money-obsessed America, sticking fast to her European style of dressing, the ever-present black beret, the belted trench coat, the plaid jumpers, the white shirts with men’s ties, and even though she would sometimes admit that Belgium was a dismal country, a gray and dreary patch of land wedged between the Frogs and the Huns, she would also defend it whenever she was challenged, claiming that small, almost invisible Belgium had the best beer, the best chocolate, and the best frites anywhere in the world. Early on, during one of their first meetings, before Psyche’s husband had strayed into Montclair and loosed his arrow on his unsuspecting victim, Ferguson brought up the subject of the Congo and Belgium’s responsibility for the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of oppressed black people, and Anne-Marie fixed her eyes on his and nodded. You’re a clever boy, Archie, she said. You know ten times more than any ten of these idiot Americans put together. When I started this school last month, I decided I would stick to myself and not make any friends. Now I think I was wrong. Everyone needs a friend, and you can be that friend if you want to be.
By the night of their first kiss on October twenty-second, Ferguson had learned just a few scant facts about Anne-Marie’s family. He knew that her father worked as an economist for the Belgian delegation to the U.N., that her mother had died when Anne-Marie was eleven, that her father had remarried when she was twelve, and that her two older brothers, Georges and Patrice, were university students in Brussels, but that was the extent of it, along with the micro-detail of her having lived in London between the ages of seven and nine, which accounted for the fluency of her English. Before that night, however, not a single word about the stepmother, not a word about the cause of the mother’s death, not a word about the father except for the job that had brought the Dumartins to America, and because Ferguson understood that Anne-Marie was reluctant to talk about those matters, he didn’t press her to open up to him, but little by little, over the weeks and months that followed, more information came out, the grisly story of her mother’s cancer to begin with, cervical cancer metastasizing to levels of such pain and hopelessness that her mother ultimately killed herself with an overdose of pills, which was the official story, in any case, but Anne-Marie suspected her father had started his affair with her future stepmother months before her mother’s death, and who knew if the widowed Fabienne Corday, a so-called family friend of long standing, for three years now the second wife of Anne-Marie’s blind and adoring father, the wretched woman who was now her stepmother, hadn’t forced those death pills down her mother’s throat in order to accelerate the transition from clandestine affair to marriage sanctified by the Catholic church? An outrageous slander, no doubt entirely untrue, but Anne-Marie couldn’t help herself, the possibility continued to eat away at her thoughts, and yet even if Fabienne was innocent, that wouldn’t have made her any less despicable, any less worthy of the hatred and contempt Anne-Marie felt for her. Ferguson listened to these revelations with mounting sympathy for his beloved. Fate had wounded her, and now she was stuck inside a troubled household, at war with an odious stepmother, disappointed by a selfish, inattentive father, still mourning her dead mother, bereft at having been exiled to a harsh, unwelcoming America, angry, angry at everything, but rather than scare Ferguson off, the operatic scale of Anne-Marie’s difficulties only drew him closer to her, for now she had been turned into a tragic figure in his eyes, a noble, suffering character hounded by the blows of fortune, and with all the fervor of an inexperienced fifteen-year-old boy, his new mission in life was to rescue her from the clutches of her unhappiness.
It never occurred to him that she might have been exaggerating, that the grief she felt over losing her mother had distorted her vision, that she had pushed away her stepmother without giving her a chance, turning her into an enemy for no other reason than the fact that she was not her mother and never would be, that her overworked father was doing the best he could for his enraged and obstinate daughter, that there was, as there always is, another side to the story. Adolescence feeds on drama, it is most happy when living in extremis, and Ferguson was no less vulnerable to the lure of high emotion and extravagant unreason than any other boy his age, which meant that the appeal of a girl like Anne-Marie was fueled precisely by her unhappiness,
and the greater the storms she engulfed him in, the more intensely he wanted her.
Arranging to be alone with her was difficult, since they were both too young to drive and had to depend on their feet for transportation, which necessarily limited the range of their movements, but one dependable recourse was the empty Ferguson house after the end of the school day, the two hours before his parents came home from work when he and Anne-Marie could go upstairs to his room and shut the door. Ferguson gladly would have taken the plunge with her, but he knew Anne-Marie wasn’t ready for it, and so the subject of losing their virginity was never openly discussed, which was the way such matters were handled in 1962, at least for properly raised fifteen-year-olds from the middle and upper middle classes of Montclair and Brussels, but if neither one of them had the courage to defy the conventions of the era, that didn’t mean they neglected to make use of the bed, which fortunately was a double bed, with ample room on its surface for the two of them to stretch out side by side and take part in sex that wasn’t fully sex but which nevertheless had the taste and feel of love.
Until then, it had all been about kissing, prolonged excursions of tongues wandering through the insides of mouths, wet lips, napes and the backs of ears, hands clutching faces, hands traveling through heads of hair, arms enfolding torsos, shoulders, waists, arms wrapped around other arms, and then with Connie the previous spring the first hesitant move to put hands on breasts, well-guarded breasts to be sure, safely covered by both blouse and bra, but he wasn’t shoved or swatted away, which represented a further advance in his education, and now, with Anne-Marie, the blouse had come off, and a month after that the bra had come off, which coincided with the removal of his shirt, and even that partial nakedness was an undreamt-of pleasure that surpassed all other pleasures, and as the weeks went on it was only by pure force of will that Ferguson restrained himself from taking hold of her hand and thrusting it onto the bulge inside his pants. Sharply remembered afternoons, not just because of what they did on that bed together but because it all happened in broad daylight and was visible, as opposed to the blind fumbles in the dark with Connie, Linda, and the others, the sun was in the room with them and he could see her body, their two bodies, which meant that each act of touching was also an image of that touching, and on top of that there was a constant undercurrent of fear in the room, a dread that they would lose track of the time and one of his parents would knock on the door while they were still embracing or, even worse, barge into the room without remembering to knock, and while neither of those things ever happened, there was always a chance they would, which filled those afternoon hours with a sense of urgency, danger, and outlaw daring.
She was the first person he allowed into the inner chambers of his secret music palace, and when they weren’t rolling around on the bed or talking about their lives (mostly Anne-Marie’s life), they would listen to records on the small, two-speaker machine that sat on a table in the southern corner of the room, a present from Ferguson’s parents for his twelfth birthday. Now, three years later, 1962 had become the year of J. S. Bach, the year when Ferguson listened to Bach more than any other composer, in particular Glenn Gould’s Bach, with an emphasis on the Preludes and Fugues and the Goldberg Variations, and Pablo Casals’s Bach, which included endless playings of the six pieces for unaccompanied cello, and Hermann Scherchen conducting the Suites for Orchestra and the Saint Matthew Passion, which Ferguson had concluded was the finest piece Bach had ever written, hence the finest piece ever written by anyone, but he and Anne-Marie also listened to Mozart (the Mass in C Minor), Schubert (piano works performed by Sviatoslav Richter), Beethoven (symphonies, quartets, sonatas), and numerous others as well, nearly all of them gifts from Ferguson’s Aunt Mildred, not to speak of Muddy Waters, Fats Waller, Bessie Smith, and John Coltrane, which was not to speak of all sorts of other twentieth-century souls, both living and dead, and the best thing about listening to music with Anne-Marie was watching her face, studying her eyes and looking at her mouth as tears gathered or smiles formed, how deeply she felt the emotional resonances of any given piece, for unlike Ferguson she had been trained since earliest childhood and could play the piano well and had an excellent soprano voice, so excellent that she broke her vow not to participate in high school activities and joined the chorus midway through the first semester, and that was perhaps their greatest bond, the need for music that ran through their bodies, which at that point in their lives was no different from the need to find a way to exist in the world.
There was so much to admire about her, he felt, so much to love in her, but Ferguson never deluded himself into thinking he would be able to hold on to her, at least not past another few months or weeks or days. Right from the start, in the earliest moments of his budding infatuation, he could sense that her feelings were not as strong as his, and much as she seemed to like him, much as she seemed to enjoy his body and his record albums and his way of talking to her, he was destined to love more than he was loved in return, and within a month of their first kiss, he understood that he would have to play by her rules or else risk not being with her at all. What maddened him most was her inconsistency, how often she broke promises, how often she forgot things he said to her, how often she backed out of dates at the last minute, telling him that she wasn’t feeling well or that there was trouble at home or that she thought they were supposed to meet on Saturday, not Friday. He sometimes wondered if there was another boy, or several boys, or a boy back in Belgium, but it was impossible to know from observation, since the first rule she demanded he adhere to was an injunction against any public displays of affection, meaning that Montclair High was off-limits, that even when they crossed paths in the classrooms, corridors, and cafeteria they would have to pretend not to be involved with each other, that they could nod, say hello, and talk as if they were passing acquaintances, but at no time were they allowed to kiss or hold hands, which was normal conduct for every other steady couple in the school, and if that was the game she wanted to play with him, who knew if she wasn’t also playing it with someone else? Ferguson felt foolish for having agreed to such an absurd bargain, but he was living under a deranged sort of enchantment just then, and the thought of losing her was far worse than the humiliation of pretending to be someone he was not. Still, they went on seeing each other, and the times they spent together always seemed to go smoothly, he always felt happiest and most fully alive when he was with her, and whatever conflicts or disagreements they had invariably seemed to take place on the telephone, that strange instrument of disembodied voices, each invisible to the other as they talked through the wires that ran from his house to hers, and if and when he caught her at a bad moment, he often found himself listening to a cranky, pigheaded, impossible kind of person, someone altogether different from the Anne-Marie he thought he knew. The saddest, most demoralizing of these conversations came in the middle of March. After a month of tryouts for the high school baseball team, of living through the weekly postings of names on the locker room bulletin board, the anxious search for his own name on the slowly shrinking list of players who had survived the latest cut, he called to tell her that the final list had gone up and that he was one of only two sophomores who had made the varsity. A long silence on the other end of the line, which Ferguson broke by saying: I just wanted to share the good news with you. Another pause. And then her response, delivered in a flat, cold voice: Good news? Why should I think it’s good news? I hate sports. Especially baseball, which must be the dumbest game ever invented. It’s empty and childish and boring, and why would a smart person like you want to waste your time running around a field with a pack of morons? Grow up, Archie. You’re not a kid anymore.