His mother continued: From the look in your eyes, Archie, I gather you’ve forgotten about Amy, but back when you were three and four, you had quite a crush on her. Once, when we all went to the Schneidermans’ apartment for a late-afternoon Sunday dinner, you and Amy went into her room, closed the door, and took off all your clothes. You can’t even remember that, can you? The adults were still sitting around the table, but then we heard you giggling in there, shrieking with laughter, making those wild, out-of-control sounds only little children can make, and so we all got up to see what the commotion was about. Dan opened the door, and there you were, the two of you, just three and a half or four years old, jumping up and down on the bed, stark naked, shrieking your heads off like a pair of crazy people. Liz was mortified, but I found it hilarious. That ecstatic look on your face, Archie, the sight of your two little bodies bouncing up and down, a savage joy filling the room, nutty human children acting like chimpanzees—it was impossible not to burst out laughing. Your father and Daniel both laughed, too, I remember, but Liz charged into the room and ordered you and Amy to get dressed. At once. You know that angry mother’s voice. At once! But before you could get your clothes on, Amy said one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard. Mommy, she asked, all serious now and very thoughtful, pointing her finger directly at your privates and then at her own, Mommy, why is Archie so fancy and I’m so plain?
Ferguson’s mother laughed, laughed hard and long at the memory of those words, but Ferguson only smiled, a weak excuse of a smile that quickly vanished from his face, for few things gave him less pleasure than hearing about the idiotic shenanigans of his early childhood. He said to his still laughing mother: You like to tease me, don’t you?
Only sometimes, she said. Not so often, Archie, but sometimes I just can’t resist.
An hour later, Ferguson went out into the yard with his book of the moment, Journey to the End of the Night, and sat down in one of the Adirondack chairs he and his father had repainted earlier in the summer, dark green, dark, dark green, but rather than open the book and learn more about Ferdinand’s adventures at the Ford Motor plant in Detroit, he just sat there and thought as he waited for the first guests to arrive, marveling at the fact that he had once romped on a bed with a naked girl, had once been naked himself as he romped with the naked girl, and how perfectly comical it was that he should have no memory of having done that, whereas now he would give almost anything to be with a naked girl, to be naked in bed with a naked girl was the single most important aspiration of his lonely, loveless life, not one kiss or embrace in more than five months, he said to himself, a full spring and almost an entire summer of mourning for the absent, half-naked Anne-Marie Dumartin, and now he was about to meet the unremembered naked girl from his distant past, Amy Schneiderman, who no doubt had developed into a normal, healthy girl, boring and predictable as most girls were, as most boys were, as most men and women were, but that couldn’t be helped, and given that he hadn’t even met her yet, he would just have to see what he would see.
What he saw that afternoon was the person who became the next one, the successor to the crown of his desires, a girl who was neither normal nor not normal but burning, unafraid, aware of the exceptional self she had been born with, and some weeks after their first encounter, as summer dissolved into autumn and the world around them suddenly turned dark, she became the first one as well, meaning that naked Amy Schneiderman and naked Archie Ferguson were no longer jumping on the bed but lying in the bed, rolling around under the covers, and for years after that she would continue to bring him the greatest joys and the greatest torments of his young life, to be the indispensable other who dwelled inside his skin.
But back to that Monday afternoon in September 1963, the Labor Day barbecue in the Fergusons’ backyard, and the first glimpse he had of her as she stepped out of her parents’ blue Chevrolet, the head of dirty blond hair emerging from the backseat, and then the surprising fact of how tall she was, at least five-eight, perhaps five-nine, a big girl with an impressively handsome face, not pretty or beautiful but handsome, solid nose, forthright chin, large eyes of still undetermined color, neither heavy nor slight of build, smallish breasts under a blue short-sleeved blouse, long legs, round ass encased in a pair of tight-fitting tan slacks, and an odd sort of galumphing walk, torso pitched forward ever so slightly, as if impatient to be barreling forward, a tomboy’s walk, he supposed, but fetching and unusual, signaling that she was someone to be reckoned with, a girl different from most sixteen-year-old girls because she carried herself without the slightest trace of self-consciousness. His mother presided over the introductions, a handshake with the mother (slightly tense, a brief smile), a handshake with the father (relaxed, amiable), and even before he shook hands with Amy, he could sense that Liz Schneiderman didn’t like his mother because she suspected her husband was half in love with her, which might have been true, considering the protracted hug of greeting Schneiderman gave the still beautiful forty-one-year-old Rose, and then Ferguson was shaking Amy’s hand, her long and remarkably slender hand, determining that her eyes were dark green with some flecks of brown in them, observing when she smiled that her teeth were a bit too big for her mouth, a fraction too big and therefore arresting, and then he heard her voice for the first time, Hello, Archie, and at that moment he knew, knew beyond any doubt that they were destined to be friends, which was a ridiculous assumption to make, of course, since how could he have known anything at that point, but there it was, a feeling, an intuition, a certainty that something important was happening and that he and Amy Schneiderman were about to set off on a long journey together.
Bobby George was there that day along with his brother, Carl, who was about to begin his sophomore year at Dartmouth, but Ferguson had no desire to talk to either one of them, not to the swift-thinking Carl nor to the bird-brained, ever-joking Bobby. What he wanted was to be with Amy, the only other young person at the party, and so within forty-five seconds of shaking her hand, as a strategy to avoid having to share her with the others, he invited her up to his room. It was a somewhat impetuous thing to do, perhaps, but she accepted with a willing nod of the head, saying Good idea, let’s go, and up they went to Ferguson’s second-floor refuge, which was no longer a shrine to Kennedy but a place crammed with books and records, so many books and records that the overcrowded shelves could no longer contain the collection, which was continuing to grow in piles stacked up against the wall nearest to the bed, and it pleased him to watch Amy nod again as she entered the room, as if telling him that she approved of what she saw, the scores of sanctified names and hallowed works, which she then proceeded to examine more closely, pointing to this one and saying, A hell of a good book, pointing to that one and saying, I still haven’t read it, pointing to a third and saying, Never heard of him, but before long she sat down on the floor at the foot of the bed, which prompted Ferguson to sit down on the floor as well, face to face with her from a distance of three feet, leaning his back against the drawers of his desk, and for the next hour and a half they talked, stopping only when someone knocked on the door and announced that food was being served in the backyard, which propelled them downstairs to join the others for a while as they ate hamburgers and drank forbidden beer in front of their parents, all four of whom failed to blink at this flouting of the law, and then Amy reached into her bag, pulled out a pack of Luckys, and lit up in front of her parents—who again failed to blink—explaining that she didn’t smoke much but loved the taste of tobacco after a meal, and once the meal and the cigarette had been taken care of, Ferguson and Amy excused themselves and took a slow walk around the neighborhood as the sun began to go down, eventually landing on a bench in the same small park where he had kissed Anne-Marie for the last time before she disappeared, and not long after Ferguson and Amy arranged to see each other again in New York on a Saturday later that month, they too began to kiss, an unplanned, spontaneous leap as one mouth latched onto the other, a delicious slobber of flailing tongues and
clanking teeth, instant arousal in the rambunctious nether zones of their postpubescent bodies, kissing with such abandon that they might have eaten each other up if Amy hadn’t suddenly pulled away from him and started to laugh, a spurt of breathless, astonished laughter that soon had Ferguson laughing as well. Good grief, Archie, she said. If we don’t stop now, we’ll be ripping off our clothes in a couple of minutes. She stood up and extended her right arm to him. Come on, crazy man, let’s go back to the house.
They were the same age, or very nearly the same age, two hundred months old as opposed to a hundred and ninety-eight months old, but because Amy had been born at the end of 1946 (December 29) and Ferguson at the beginning of 1947 (March 3), she was a full year ahead of him in school, which meant that she was about to start her senior year at Hunter while he was still stuck in the trenches as a lowly junior. College was no more than a nebulous anywhere to him at that point, a far-flung destination that had yet to be given a name, whereas she had been studying maps for the better part of a year and was almost ready to begin packing her bags. She would be applying to several schools, she said. Everyone had told her she would need backups, second and third options, but Barnard was her first choice, her only choice, really, because it was the best college in New York, the all-girl twin of all-boy Columbia, and objective number one was to stay in New York.
But you’ve been in New York all your life, Ferguson said. Wouldn’t you like to try some other place?
I’ve been to other places, she said, lots of other places, and every one of them is called Yawn City. Have you ever been to Boston or Chicago?
No.
Yawn City One and Yawn City Two. L.A.?
No.
Yawn City Three.
Fine. But what about a school in the country? Cornell, Smith, one of those places. Green lawns and echoing quads, the pursuit of knowledge in a rustic setting.
Joseph Cornell is a genius, the Smith Brothers make excellent cough drops, but freezing my ass off for four years at Wilderness U. isn’t my idea of a fun time. No, Archie, New York is it. There’s no other place.
He had known her for approximately ten minutes when they exchanged these words, and as Ferguson listened to Amy defend New York, declare her love of New York, it occurred to him that she herself was somehow an embodiment of her city, not only in her confidence and quickness of mind but also and especially in her voice, which was the voice of brainy Jewish girls from Brooklyn, Queens, and the Upper West Side, the third-generation New York Jewish voice, meaning the second generation of Jews born in America, which had a slightly different music from the New York Irish voice, for example, or the New York Italian voice, at once earthy, sophisticated, and brash, with a similar aversion to hard r’s but more precise and emphatic in its articulations, and the more he accustomed himself to those articulations, the more he wanted to go on hearing them, for the Schneiderman voice represented everything that was not the suburbs, not his life as it existed now, and therefore the promise of an escape into a possible future, or at least a present inhabited by that possible future, and as he sat in the room with Amy and later walked through the streets with her, they talked about any number of things, mostly about the roller-coaster summer that had started with the killing of Medgar Evers and ended with Martin Luther King’s speech, the endless tangle of horror and hope that seemed to define the American landscape, and also about the books and records on the shelves and floor of Ferguson’s room, not to mention schoolwork, SATs, and even baseball, but the one question he did not ask her, was determined at all costs to refrain from asking, was whether she had a boyfriend, for he had already decided he was going to do everything in his power to make her the next one, and he had no interest in learning how many rivals were standing in his way.
On September fifteenth, less than two weeks after the Labor Day barbecue, which was exactly six days before they were supposed to get together again in New York, she called him, and because he was the one she called and no one else, he understood that there was no boyfriend in the picture, no rival to be afraid of, and that she was with him now in the same way he was with her. He knew that because he was the person she chose to call when she heard the news about the bombing of a black church in Birmingham, Alabama, and the murder of four little girls inside, another American horror, another battle in the race war spreading across the South, as if the March on Washington two and a half weeks earlier had to be avenged with bombs and murder, and Amy was crying into the phone, struggling not to cry as she told him the news, and bit by bit, as she slowly pulled herself together, she began to talk about what could be done, about what she felt had to be done, not just laws passed by politicians but an army of people to go down there and fight the bigots, and she would be the first one to join up, the day after she graduated from high school she would hitchhike to Alabama and work for the cause, bleed for the cause, make the cause the central purpose of her life. It’s our country, she said, and we can’t let the bastards steal it from us.
They saw each other the following Saturday and every other Saturday throughout the fall, Ferguson riding the bus from New Jersey to the Port Authority terminal and then taking the IRT express train to West Seventy-second Street, where he would get off and walk three blocks north and two blocks west to the Schneidermans’ apartment on Riverside Drive and Seventy-fifth Street, Apartment 4B, which was now the most important address in New York City. Outings of various sorts, nearly always just the two of them together, occasionally with some of Amy’s friends, foreign films at the Thalia on Broadway and Ninety-fifth Street, Godard, Kurosawa, Fellini, visits to the Met, the Frick, the Museum of Modern Art, the Knicks at the Garden, Bach at Carnegie Hall, Beckett, Pinter, and Ionesco at small theaters in the Village, everything so close and available, and Amy always knew where to go and what to do, the warrior-princess of Manhattan was teaching him how to find his way around her city, which had rapidly become his city as well. Nevertheless, for all the things they did and all the things they saw, the best part of those Saturdays was sitting in coffee shops and talking, the first rounds of the ongoing dialogue that would continue for years, conversations that sometimes turned into fierce spats when their opinions differed, the good or bad film they had just seen, the good or bad political idea one of them had just expressed, but Ferguson didn’t mind arguing with her, he had no interest in pushovers, the pouting, nincompoop girls who wanted only what they imagined to be the formalities of love, this was real love, complex and deep and pliable enough to allow for passionate discord, and how could he not love this girl, with her relentless, probing gaze and immense, booming laugh, the high-strung and fearless Amy Schneiderman, who one day was going to be a war correspondent or a revolutionary or a doctor who worked among the poor. She was sixteen years old, pushing toward seventeen. The blank slate was no longer entirely blank, but she was still young enough to know she could rub out the words she had already written, rub them out and start again whenever the spirit moved her.
Kisses, of course. Embraces, of course. Along with the irksome fact that Amy’s parents tended to stay at home on Saturday afternoons and evenings, which limited the opportunities for being alone in the apartment and led to much chilly-weather necking on benches in Riverside Park, some furtive, back-bedroom makeout splurges at parties given by Amy’s friends, and twice, just twice, on the two occasions when her homebody parents stepped out for the evening, a chance to indulge in earnest, half-naked tumbles on the bed in Amy’s room, marked by the old fear that the door would be flung open at the worst possible moment. The frustrations of not being fully in control of their lives, hormonal frenzies thwarted again and again by circumstances, the two of them growing ever more desperate as the weeks passed. Then, on a Tuesday night in mid-November, Amy called with good news. Her parents would be going out of town the weekend after next, three full days in distant Chicago to visit her mother’s ailing mother, and with her big brother Jim not scheduled to fly in from Boston until the day before Thanksgiving, she would have the a
partment to herself while her parents were gone. A whole weekend, she said. Just think of it, Archie. A whole weekend with no one in the apartment but us.
He told his parents that he and a couple of his friends had been invited to another friend’s house on the Jersey shore, a lie so ornate and nonsensical that neither one of them saw through it, and when he left for school on the Friday in question, it seemed altogether appropriate that he should be carrying a small overnight bag with him. The plan was to leave for New York the instant school let out, and if he was lucky enough to catch the first bus, he would be at Amy’s apartment by four-thirty or a quarter to five, and if he missed the first bus and had to take the second, by five-thirty or a quarter to six. Another dull day in the corridors and classrooms of Montclair High School, concentrating on the clock as if he could will time forward by the sheer power of his thoughts, counting the minutes, counting the hours, and then, in the early afternoon, the announcement over the public address system that the president had been shot in Dallas, followed by another announcement sometime later that President Kennedy was dead.
Within minutes, all activities at the school came to a halt. Handkerchiefs and tissues appeared in a thousand pairs of hands, mascara was running down the cheeks of sobbing girls, boys walked around shaking their heads or punching the air with their fists, girls were hugging, boys and girls were hugging, teachers were sobbing and hugging while others looked blankly at walls and doorknobs, and before long students were massing in the gym and cafeteria, no one had any idea what to do, no one was in charge, all feuds and animosities had stopped, there were no enemies anymore, and then the principal’s voice came over the public address system again and announced that school was dismissed, that everyone could go home.