4 3 2 1

  Needless to say, there were moments when they quarreled and got on each other’s nerves, for they were together nearly every second for thirty-one days and nights, and Amy was a person prone to the occasional storm and foul-mouthed snit, and Ferguson had a tendency to lapse into fugues of morose introspection and/or inexplicable silences, but none of their disagreements lasted more than an hour or two, and most if not all of them occurred while they were on the road, under the duress of travel and sleepless nights on trains. Needless to say as well, America was constantly on their minds throughout the trip, even if they were glad to be away from it for the time being, and they talked at length about the two encouraging things that happened while they were gone—Johnson signing the Medicare Bill on July thirtieth and then the Voting Rights Act on August sixth—and also about the calamitous thing that happened on August eleventh, just five days before they flew home: the race riots in Los Angeles, the rage riots of the black population in a neighborhood called Watts. After which Amy said: Forget about studying French. My first impulse was the right one all along. History and political science. To which Ferguson raised an imaginary glass and said: Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask Amy Schneiderman to run your country.

  The day before they were scheduled to return to New York, they made two embarrassing discoveries: 1) they had bought too many books to carry on the plane; 2) their money was precariously low—no doubt because buying books had not been factored into their budget. They had both lost weight during their month abroad (Ferguson seven pounds, Amy five pounds), but that was to be expected of people determined to subsist on only one full meal a day, and yet in spite of those economies they had overspent on their frequent visits to bookstores, mostly to the Librairie Gallimard across from l’Église Saint-Germain and to the shop run by left-wing publisher François Maspero across from l’Église Saint-Séverin, and in addition to the twenty-one volumes of poetry Ferguson had bought and the eleven thick novels Amy had bought, they had been unable to resist purchasing a number of political books by Frantz Fanon (Les Damnés de la terre), Paul Nizan (Aden Arabie), and Jean-Paul Sartre (Situations I, II, III), which increased the total to thirty-seven books. Several hours of their last day in Paris were therefore squandered on packing up those books in cartons, lugging them to the post office, and shipping them to Amy’s apartment on West 111th Street (all of them to Amy’s apartment, even the ones that belonged to Ferguson, because his parents had accepted a down payment on their house in early June and it was unclear whether they were still living in Montclair or had moved somewhere else by now), and the cost of the stamps required to send those cartons across the ocean by slow boat—with delivery expected sometime around Christmas—so depleted their remaining cash that they were left with just fourteen dollars, eight of which would be needed for the bus ride to the airport in the morning. Their plans for a large farewell meal at the Restaurant des Beaux Arts that evening were consequently destroyed, and they were reduced to dining on flat, dessicated hamburgers at the Wimpy’s on Boulevard Saint-Michel. Fortunately, they both found it funny, for bad planning on that scale proved that they were indeed the Most Ridiculous People on Earth.

  So the skinny, bedraggled eighteen-year-olds returned from their Gallic adventures, hobbling into the New York air terminal with their overloaded backpacks and bushy heads of hair, and once they had gone through passport control and customs, their parents opened their arms and welcomed them back, greeting them with an enthusiasm and intensity normally reserved for returning war heroes and discoverers of new continents. Amy and Ferguson, who had already arranged to meet up again in a couple of days, kissed each other good-bye, and then they marched off with their respective families to be driven home for baths, haircuts, and brief visits with their parents, grandparents, and aunts and uncles.

  As Ferguson quickly learned while walking to the car, home was no longer the house in Montclair but an apartment in the Weequahic section of Newark. Neither one of his parents seemed upset by this backward move out of the suburbs, this apparent fall in social status, or economic status, or worldly status, or any other measure of what constituted success or failure in American life, which relieved him of the obligation to feel upset on their behalf, for the truth was that he didn’t care one way or the other.

  His mother was laughing. Not only are we back in Newark, she said, but we’re in the same building we used to live in when we were first married—25 Van Velsor Place. Not the same apartment, but one on the same floor, the third floor, right across the hall from where you spent the first three years of your life. Pretty extraordinary, don’t you think? I wonder if you’ll remember anything about it. An identical apartment, Archie. Not the same one, but one just like it.

  An hour later, when Ferguson stepped into the two-bedroom flat on the third floor of 25 Van Velsor Place, he was impressed by how cozy and lived-in it felt after such a short time. In just three weeks his parents had already managed to settle in, and compared to the narrow confines of chambre dix-huit, its proportions struck him as immense. Nothing like the house in Montclair, of course, but big enough.

  Well, Archie? his mother said, as he wandered in and out of the rooms, does anything come back to you?

  Ferguson wished he could have thought of some clever remark to echo the hopefulness in his mother’s voice, but all he could do was shake his head and smile.

  He remembered nothing.

  4.2

  4.3

  The summer of 1962 began with a trip to a far-off place and ended with a second trip to an even farther far-off place, four back-and-forth journeys by air that took Ferguson to California (by himself) and to Paris (with his mother and Gil), where he spent a total of two and a half weeks not having to worry about running into Andy Cohen. In between his travels, he stayed at home on Riverside Drive, avoiding the Thalia but going to as many old and new movies as he could, participating in two outdoor basketball leagues, and, at Gil’s suggestion, reading twentieth-century American literature for the first time (Babbitt, Manhattan Transfer, Light in August, In Our Time, The Great Gatsby), but for the fifteen-year-old Ferguson, who never once laid eyes on Andy Cohen during the months between his freshman and sophomore years, the most memorable part of the summer was traveling in airplanes for the first time and seeing what he saw and doing what he did in California and Paris. Memorable, of course, did not mean that all his memories were good ones, but even the worst one, the memory that continued to cause him the most pain, had come from an experience that proved to be instructive to him, and now that he had learned his lesson, he hoped he would never make the same mistake again.

  The California trip was a present from his Aunt Mildred, the once elusive and mysterious relative who had boycotted her sister’s wedding in 1959 and had appeared to want nothing more to do with the family, but she had returned to New York twice since that nasty, inexplicable snub, once for her father’s funeral in 1960 and again for her mother’s funeral in 1961, and now she was back in the fold, on reasonably good terms with her sister again and on excellent terms with her new brother-in-law, and so changed was her attitude that on the second visit she willingly showed up for a dinner at the apartment on Riverside Drive, where one of the guests was her ex-husband, Paul Sandler, Ferguson’s former uncle, who had remained a fast friend of the Adler-Schneiderman household, Paul Sandler in the company of his second wife no less, a forthright, outspoken painter by the name of Judith Bogat, and Ferguson was impressed by how relaxed and comfortable his aunt seemed at that dinner, trading pleasantries with her ex as if there were no history between them, discussing the progress of the not-yet-completed Lincoln Center with Gil, actually deigning to compliment her sister on some of her recent photographs, and asking Ferguson all sorts of friendly, challenging questions about films and basketball and the agonies of adolescence, which led to a sudden, spontaneous invitation to visit her in Palo Alto—on her dime—and thus it was arranged that her nephew would fly out to spend a week with her after the end of the sc
hool year. Two hours later, as the last of the dinner guests dispersed into the night, Ferguson asked his mother why Aunt Mildred seemed so different now, so happy.

  I think she’s in love, his mother said. I don’t know any of the details, but she mentioned a person named Sidney a couple of times, and I have a feeling they might be living together now. You can never tell with Mildred, but there’s no question she’s in a good mood these days.

  He was expecting his aunt to meet him at the airport, but someone else was waiting for him in the terminal the day he landed in San Francisco, a younger woman of perhaps twenty-five or twenty-six who stood by the exit door holding up a copy of Mildred’s book on George Eliot, a diminutive, lively-looking, almost pretty girl with short brown hair dressed in blue jeans rolled up at the bottoms, a red-and-black checkered shirt, two-toned alligator boots with pointy tips, and a yellow bandanna cinched around her neck—Ferguson’s first Westerner, a genuine cowgirl!

  The Sidney Ferguson’s mother had told him about was in fact Sydney, a Sydney with the last name of Millbanks, and as the young woman accompanied the weary traveler out of the terminal and led him toward her car in the parking lot, she explained that Mildred was teaching summer classes that quarter and had been held up at a department meeting on campus, but she would be joining them for dinner at the house in a couple of hours.

  Ferguson inhaled his first whiff of California air and said: Are you the cook?

  Cook, housekeeper, back rubber, and bedmate, Sydney replied. I hope you aren’t shocked.

  The truth was that Ferguson did feel a little shocked, or at least surprised, or perhaps confused, since this was the first time he had heard of two people of the same sex living together, and no one had ever told him or dropped the smallest hint that his aunt secretly preferred the bodies of women to the bodies of men. The divorce from Uncle Paul had an explanation now, or seemed to have an explanation, but even more interesting was that Sydney the cowgirl saw no point in hiding the truth from him, and there was something admirable about her candor, he thought, it was good not to feel ashamed of being different, and so rather than admit to being a little shocked or confused by this unexpected revelation, Ferguson smiled and said: No, not at all. I’m just happy that Aunt Mildred isn’t alone anymore.

  It took about forty minutes to drive from the San Francisco airport to the house in Palo Alto, and as Sydney tooled down the freeway in her pale green Saab, she told Ferguson about how she had met Mildred some years back when she was looking for a new place to live and had rented the garage apartment attached to her house. In other words, it had been an accidental meeting, something that never would have happened if she hadn’t stumbled across four lines of minuscule type in a newspaper, but not long after she settled in they had become friends, and a couple of months after that they had fallen in love. Neither one of them had been with a woman before, but there they were, Sydney said, a university professor and a third-grade schoolteacher, a woman in her early forties and a woman in her mid-twenties, a Jew from New York and a Methodist from Sandusky, Ohio, swept up in the greatest romance of their lives. The most confounding thing about it, Sydney continued, was that she had never thought about women in the past, she had always been a girl who was crazy for boys, and even now, after being shacked up with a woman for close to three years, she still didn’t think of herself as a lesbian, she was simply a person in love with another person, and because that other person was beautiful and entrancing and unlike anyone else in the world, what difference did it make if she was in love with a man or a woman?

  She probably shouldn’t have been talking to him in that way. No doubt there was something inappropriate and perhaps indecent for a grown woman to be sharing such confidences with a fifteen-year-old boy, but the fifteen-year-old Ferguson was thrilled by her openness, at no point in his adolescence had any adult ever been so honest with him about the chaos and ambiguities of erotic life, and even though he had only just met Sydney Millbanks, Ferguson decided that he liked her, that he liked her enormously, and because he himself had been wrestling with these same matters for the past several months, struggling to figure out where he stood on the boy-girl spectrum of desire and whether he belonged in the zone of boys and girls or boys and boys or girls and boys interchangeably, he felt that this California cowgirl, this lover of both men and women, this person who had just entered his life and was taking him to his aunt’s house in Palo Alto, might be someone he could talk to without fear of being laughed at or insulted or misunderstood.

  I agree, Ferguson said. It doesn’t matter if it’s a man or a woman.

  Not many people think that way, Archie. You know that, don’t you?

  Yes, I know, but I’m not many people, I’m just me, and the weird thing about me so far is that the only sex I’ve ever had was with another boy.

  That’s very common for people your age. So common that you shouldn’t worry about it—just in case you have been worrying. What’s a boy to do, right?

  Ferguson laughed.

  I hope you enjoyed it, at least, Sydney said.

  I enjoyed it, but after a while I didn’t enjoy him, so I put a stop to it.

  And now you’re wondering: What’s next?

  Until I get a chance to do it with a girl, I won’t really know what’s next.

  It’s not much fun being fifteen, is it?

  It has its good points, I suppose.

  Really? Name one.

  Ferguson closed his eyes, paused for a long moment, and then turned to her and said: The best thing about being fifteen is that you don’t have to be fifteen for more than a year.

  * * *

  THERE WERE NO flies or mosquitoes in California, and the Palo Alto air smelled like a box of cough drops, spicy-sweet throat lozenges with a eucalyptus flavor because eucalyptus trees turned out to be everywhere, giving off an all-pervasive scent that seemed to cleanse your nasal passages every time you inhaled. Vicks VapoRub dispensed free of charge into the northern California atmosphere for the health and happiness of the human population!

  The town, on the other hand, felt bizarre to Ferguson, less a real place than the idea of a place, a quasi-urban-quasi-suburban outpost designed by a master planner with no tolerance for dirt or imperfection, which made the town seem dull and artificial, a quaint little Spookville inhabited by people with trim haircuts and straight white teeth, all of them dressed in good-looking, up-to-the-minute casual clothes. Luckily, Ferguson didn’t spend much time there, going once to shop for groceries with Sydney in the largest, cleanest, most beautiful supermarket he had ever seen, once to a filling station to put gas in her primitive, lawn-mower-engine Saab (seven parts gasoline to one part oil, both poured directly into the tank), and twice to the local art house theater to watch films in that week’s Carole Lombard Festival (My Man Godfrey, To Be or Not to Be), primarily because Sydney believed Mildred bore a strong resemblance to Carole Lombard, which, upon reflection, Ferguson granted was more or less true, but what splendid comedies those films were, and now that he had seen them, not only did Ferguson have a new actress to admire but a new insight into Aunt Mildred, who had laughed harder at those films than anyone else, and since Ferguson’s mother had often told him how her big sister had mocked her in the old days for liking movies so much, he wondered if love hadn’t softened his aunt’s attitude toward what she had once called trashy, low-life entertainment or if she had always been a hypocrite, lording it over her sister by asserting her superior taste and intelligence in all things while privately reveling in the same trash everyone else did.

  Twice, the three of them left Palo Alto and went on all-day excursions in Mildred’s black Peugeot, first to Mount Tamalpais on Wednesday, with a return trip down the coast that included a two-hour pause at Bodega Bay, where they had dinner in a restaurant overlooking the water, and a Saturday outing to San Francisco that triggered dozens of tourist yelps from the startled Ferguson as they drove up and down the steep hills and then stopped for lunch at a Chinese restaurant wher
e he ate dim sum for the first time (food that tasted so good his eyes filled with tears as he gorged himself on three different varieties of dumplings—tears of thanks, tears of joy, tears of hot sauce surging through his nostrils), but for the most part Mildred was busy with her classes and student conferences that week, which meant that until she came home for dinner at six or six-thirty Ferguson was either alone or with Sydney, although far less alone than with Sydney, who was on a ten-week vacation from her school, just as he was from his, and because Sydney professed to being the laziest person in the world, a title Ferguson had always thought belonged exclusively to him, they spent the bulk of their time together sprawled out on blankets in the yard behind the house, which was a one-story stucco cottage with a terra-cotta roof, or inside the house, which was pleasantly cluttered with books and records and was the first house Ferguson had ever set foot in that had no television, and as the days passed and he got to know Sydney better, he was intrigued that the almost pretty cowgirl was turning into the pretty cowgirl, and then the very pretty cowgirl, for the longish nose he had first seen as a defect now struck him as alluring and distinctive, and the blue-gray eyes that had once seemed so ordinary now looked alive and full of feeling. He had known her for just a few days, but he already felt they were friends—in much the same way, he imagined, that he and cousin Francie had once been friends in the long-ago world before the Newark fire.