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  So it went for the first five days of his visit, that is, the three days that weren’t spent traveling around in Mildred’s car, the quiet, uneventful days when Ferguson and Sydney would lie around in the backyard and talk about anything that came into their heads, not just about the question of who fucked whom and why but also about Sydney’s girlhood in Ohio and Ferguson’s double boyhood in New Jersey and New York, about the different ways in which stories were told in books and movies and the pleasures and frustrations of teaching young children, about how Mildred felt both excited and nervous to have her nephew staying in the house, excited for all the obvious reasons but nervous because she was hesitant to expose her sister’s son to the way she was living now, which explained why she had asked Sydney to sleep in the garage apartment while Ferguson was with them, to spare the boy any embarrassment, as she had put it, meaning her own embarrassment, and when Ferguson asked Sydney why she had gone ahead and told him the real story just minutes after picking him up at the airport, the pretty cowgirl said: I hate dissembling, that’s why. It means you don’t believe in your own life, or that you’re scared of your own life, and I believe in my life, Archie, and I don’t want to be scared of it.

  Around four o’clock, they would pull themselves together and shuffle into the kitchen to start making dinner, continuing to talk as they chopped onions and peeled potatoes, the two of them twelve years apart in age, which paradoxically was much larger than the fifteen years that stood between Sydney and Mildred, but for all that he and Sydney were closer in spirit than Sydney was to Mildred, Ferguson felt, two mutts as opposed to the thoroughbred from Stanford University, a question of temperament more than of age, he supposed, but when Mildred finally returned to the house at six or six-thirty, Ferguson would pay close attention to how the two women acted around him, aware that Mildred was pretending not to be involved with Sydney in the way he knew she was while Sydney stubbornly ignored the injunction to pretend, showering endearments on his aunt that seemed to make Mildred more and more uncomfortable as the days went on, the darlings and angels and sugar-pies that no doubt would have pleased her if he hadn’t been sitting at the table with them, and after five days Ferguson sensed they were locked in a silent quarrel that had been provoked by his presence, and on the evening of the sixth day, which was the next to last day of his visit, the increasingly anxious and out-of-sorts Mildred drank too much wine at dinner and eventually lost her composure—lost it because she wanted to lose it and needed the wine to push her over the edge—and the surprising thing about her outburst was that she didn’t lash out at Sydney but at her nephew, as if he were the cause of her troubles, and the moment the assault began, Ferguson understood that Sydney had been talking behind his back, that the cowgirl had betrayed him.

  Since when have you been a Bulgarian, Archie? Mildred said.

  A Bulgarian? Ferguson replied. What are you talking about?

  You’ve read Candide, haven’t you? Don’t you remember the Bulgarians?

  I’m not following you.

  The buggering Bulgarians. That’s where the word comes from, you know. Bul-gar, bug-gar. Bugger.

  And what’s that supposed to mean?

  Men fucking other men up the ass.

  I still don’t know what you’re talking about.

  A little birdie told me you’ve been buggering other boys. Or maybe other boys have been buggering you.

  A little birdie?

  At that point Sydney jumped into the conversation and said: Leave him alone, Mildred. You’re drunk.

  No, I’m not, Mildred said. I’m mildly intoxicated, and that gives me the right to tell the truth, and the truth of the matter is, my beloved Archie, the truth is that you’re too young to be going down that road now, and if you don’t get a grip on yourself, you’ll turn into a queer before you know it, and then there’ll be no turning back. There are enough queers in this family already, I’m afraid, and the last thing we need is another one.

  Without uttering a word, Ferguson stood up from the table and started walking out of the room.

  Where are you going? Mildred asked.

  Away from you, Ferguson said. You have no idea what you’re talking about, and I don’t have to sit here listening to your crap.

  Oh, Archie, Mildred said, come on back. We need to talk.

  No we don’t. I’m done talking with you.

  Ferguson stomped off, struggling to push back the tears that were gathering in his eyes, and when he came to the corridor at the front of the house, he turned left and walked down the tiled hallway until he reached the guest bedroom at the far end. In the distance, he could hear Mildred and Sydney arguing behind him, but he didn’t listen to what they were saying, and by the time he entered the room and shut the door, their voices were too muffled for him to make out the words.

  He sat down on the bed, put his hands over his face, and started to sob.

  No more sharing of secrets, he said to himself, no more unguarded confessions, no more trusting in people who didn’t deserve to be trusted. If he couldn’t say what he wanted to say in front of everyone in the world, he would keep his mouth shut and say it to no one.

  He understood now why his mother had always looked up to her older sister—and why she had always been disappointed by her. So much intelligence there, he said to himself, so much humor when she had a mind to be humorous, so much generosity when she had a mind to be generous, but Mildred could be mean, meaner than any other person on earth, and now that Ferguson had been scalded by that meanness, he wanted nothing more to do with her and would henceforth cross her off his list. No more Aunt Mildred, and no more Sydney Millbanks, who had shown such promise as a friend—but how could you be friends with someone who seemed to be your friend but wasn’t?

  A moment later, Sydney was knocking on the door. He knew it was Sydney because she was calling out his name, asking if he was all right, asking if she could come in and talk to him, but Ferguson said no, he didn’t want to see her or talk to her, he wanted her to leave him alone, but unfortunately the door had no lock, and Sydney came in anyway, cracking open the door until he could see her face and the tears that were rushing down her cheeks, and then she was all the way in, apologizing for what she had done, saying I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

  Fuck off, little birdie, Ferguson said. I don’t care if you’re sorry or not. Just leave me alone.

  I’m a stupid blabbermouth, Sydney said. Once I start talking, I don’t know when to stop. I didn’t mean it, Archie, I swear I didn’t.

  Of course you meant it. Breaking a secret is bad enough, but lying is even worse. So don’t start lying too, okay?

  What can I do to help, Archie?

  Nothing. Just go.

  Please, Archie, let me do something for you.

  Besides getting you out of this room, there’s only one thing I want.

  Tell me what it is, and it’s yours.

  A bottle of scotch.

  You’re not serious.

  A bottle of scotch, preferably unopened, and if it is open, as close to full as possible.

  It’ll make you sick.

  Listen, Sydney, either you bring it in to me or I go out and get it myself. But I’d rather not go out there right now because my aunt is in the other room, and I don’t want to see her.

  All right, Archie. Give me a few minutes.

  So Ferguson got his scotch, a half-empty bottle of Johnnie Walker Red hand-delivered to him by Sydney Millbanks, a half-empty bottle that Ferguson chose to think of as half full, and once Sydney left the room again, he began drinking the scotch and went on drinking it in small, slow swallows until the first slivers of dawn cut through the slats of the venetian blinds and the bottle was empty, and for the second time that year Ferguson puked up his binge on the floor of another person’s house and passed out.

  * * *

  PARIS WAS DIFFERENT. Paris was all about the sensation of being in Paris and roaming around the streets with his mother and Gil, about attending
the opening of his mother’s first solo exhibition at the Galerie Vinteuil on the rue Bonaparte, about the two evenings spent with an old friend of Gil’s named Vivian Schreiber, about discovering that in spite of his B’s and B+’s at the Riverside Academy he had learned enough French to be able to hold his own in the language, about deciding that Paris was the city where he eventually wanted to live. After a summer of watching old and new French films, it was impossible to walk through the streets of Montmartre without thinking he might run into the young Antoine Doinel from The 400 Blows, to walk down the Champs-Élysées without hoping to brush past the gorgeous Jean Seberg as she strolled back and forth in her white T-shirt hawking copies of the Herald Tribune—the same paper his stepfather worked for!—or to glide along the banks of the Seine and glance over at the bouquinistes’ stalls without remembering the roly-poly bookstore owner who dives into the water to rescue the vagabond Michel Simon in Boudu Saved from Drowning. Paris was the movie of Paris, an agglomeration of all the Paris movies Ferguson had seen, and how inspiriting it was to find himself in the real place now, real in all of its sumptuous and stimulating reality, and yet to walk around feeling that it was an imaginary place as well, a place both in his head and out in the air that encircled his body, a simultaneous here and there, a black-and-white past and a full-color present, and Ferguson took pleasure in shuttling between the two of them, his thoughts moving so fast at times that the two blurred into one.

  It was unusual for an exhibition to open at the end of August, when half the population of Paris was gone from the city, but that was the only available slot in the gallery’s schedule—August twentieth to September twentieth—and Ferguson’s mother had gladly accepted it, knowing that the director had done everything he could to fit her in. Forty-eight pictures in all, about half from previously published work and half from a new book that would be coming out next year, Silent City. Ferguson had already been told that he was the subject of one of the photographs, but still, he found it somewhat destabilizing to see himself hanging on the far wall when he entered the gallery, the familiar old picture his mother had taken of him seven years ago in the pre-Gil days when they were living together in the apartment on Central Park West, a long shot of him from behind as he sat on the living room floor watching Laurel and Hardy on television, his eight-year-old torso enveloped in a striped, short-sleeved T-shirt, and the moving thing about the photo, which bore the one-word title Archie, was the curve of his skinny back, each vertebra of his spine protruding into the shirt to create the bumpy-bony effect of childhood vulnerability, the portrait of an exposed being, a little boy locked in total concentration before the bowler-hatted buffoons on screen and therefore oblivious to everything else around him, and how proud Ferguson was of his mother for having produced such a good picture, which could have been nothing more than a banal snapshot but wasn’t, as was the case with the forty-seven other pictures on view that evening, and as Ferguson looked at his young faceless self sitting on the floor of an apartment they no longer occupied, he couldn’t help going back to the months of the curious interregnum and the Hilliard School disaster and remembering how his mother had ultimately replaced God in his mind as the supreme being, the human incarnation of the divine spirit, a flawed and mortal deity prone to the sulks and restless confusions that afflict all human beings, but he had worshipped his mother because she was the one person who never let him down, and no matter how many times he had disappointed her or proved himself to be less than he should have been, she had never not loved him and would never not love him to the end of her life.

  Pretty and jittery, Ferguson said to himself, as he watched his mother smile and nod and shake hands with the guests at the vernissage, which had attracted about a hundred people in spite of the August holiday, a large noisy crowd crammed into the smallish exhibition space of the gallery, noisy because the eight or nine dozen people who had come there were apparently more interested in talking to one another than in looking at the pictures on the walls, but this was the first opening of any kind that Ferguson had attended, and he was unfamiliar with the protocols of such gatherings, the sophisticated hypocrisies of supposed art lovers coming to an art show in order to ignore the artworks on display, and if the young barman serving drinks at a table in a corner of the room hadn’t been kind enough to pour Ferguson a glass of vin blanc, followed by a second glass twenty minutes later, Ferguson might have walked out in protest, since this was his mother’s big moment, and he wanted everyone there to be fixed on Rose Adler’s work, to be transfixed by it to such a degree that all of them would be hammered into a state of speechless awe, and when that failed to happen Ferguson stood in the corner feeling ticked off and let down, too inexperienced to understand that the small red dots posted next to the frames on the walls meant those pictures had already been sold and that his mother was in excellent spirits that evening, not the least put off by the chatter and noise of those rude, ignorant people.

  Midway through his second vin blanc, Ferguson saw Gil slicing through the crowd with his arm around a woman’s shoulder. The two of them were moving in his direction, steadily advancing toward the drinks table in spite of the intervening bodies, and when they drew close enough for Ferguson to see that they were both smiling, it occurred to him that the woman must have been Gil’s old friend Vivian Schreiber. Gil had already told him something about her, but Ferguson hadn’t been paying much attention and had retained little of the story, which was a rather complicated one, he remembered, having to do with the war and Vivian’s older brother, Douglas Gant or Grant, who had served in Gil’s intelligence unit and was his closest friend, and somehow or other Gil had pulled the strings that allowed Vivian, the much younger sister of his much younger army comrade, to enter France in September 1944, just one month after the liberation of Paris and three months after she graduated from college in the United States. Why Vivian had needed to go to France was unclear to Ferguson, but not long after she got there she married Jean-Pierre Schreiber, a French citizen born of German-Jewish parents in 1903 (which made him twenty years older than Vivian) who had managed to avoid arrest by the Germans and/or the Vichy police by traveling to neutral Switzerland just days before the fall of France, and according to what Gil had told Ferguson, Schreiber was rich, or had been rich, or soon became rich again because of his family’s resurrected wine-export business, or wine-growing business, or wine-bottle-manufacturing business, or some other commercial enterprise that had nothing to do with the harvesting or selling of grapes. No children, Gil had said, but a successful marriage that lasted until the end of 1958, when the trim and youthful Schreiber unexpectedly dropped dead while running to catch a plane at Orly Airport, which had turned Vivian into a young widow, and now that she had sold off her husband’s share of the business to his two nephews, she was a wealthy young widow, and, he added, the most charming and intelligent woman in all of Paris, a great friend.

  All these facts or partial facts or possible anti-facts were rolling around in Ferguson’s head as Gil and Vivian Schreiber came nearer to where he was standing. His first impression of the great friend was that she ranked among the three or four most beautiful women he had ever seen. Then, as she came closer and he could make out her features with more precision, he realized that she wasn’t beautiful so much as impressive, a thirty-eight-year-old woman who projected a radiant aura of assurance and ease, whose clothes and makeup and hair were so elegantly and unpretentiously arranged that they seemed to have required no effort on her part to achieve the effect they achieved, who didn’t simply occupy space in the room where everyone was standing but seemed to dominate the room, to own the room, as she no doubt owned every room she happened to enter anywhere in the world. A moment later, Ferguson was shaking her hand and looking into her large brown eyes and smelling the good smells of the perfume that hovered around her body as he listened to her unusually deep voice say how honored she was to meet him (honored!), and all of a sudden everything began to glow more brightly in Ferguson, fo
r surely Vivian Schreiber was an exceptional person, a full-fledged movie-star sort of person, and knowing her was bound to make a difference in his sadly unexceptional fifteen-year-old’s life.

  Vivian was present at the dinner that followed the opening, but there were twelve people sitting at the table in the restaurant, and Ferguson was too far away from her for them to have a chance to talk, so he contented himself with watching her throughout the meal, noting how carefully the others around her listened to what she said whenever she contributed something to the conversation, and once or twice she looked over at him and saw that he was looking at her and smiled, but other than that, and other than the word spreading at his end of the table that Vivian had bought six of his mother’s photographs (including Archie), there was no contact between them that night. Three nights later, when Ferguson, his mother, and Gil met Vivian for dinner at La Coupole, there were no impediments to the give-and-take of talking and listening, but for some reason Ferguson felt shy and overwhelmed in Vivian’s presence and said little, preferring to listen to the conversation of the three adults, who had much to say on any number of subjects, including his mother’s photographs, which Vivian praised as sublimely human and uncannily direct, and Vivian’s older brother, Douglas Gant or Grant, who worked as a marine biologist in La Jolla, California, and the progress Gil had made on his book about Beethoven’s string quartets, and Vivian’s own work on a book she had been writing about an eighteenth-century painter named Chardin (who was still unknown to Ferguson at that point, but by the time he left Paris four days later he had made it his business to see every Chardin at the Louvre and had absorbed the mysterious fact that looking at a glass of water or an earthen jug on a painted canvas could be more involving and significant to the soul than looking at the crucified son of God on a similar painted rectangle), but even though Ferguson was mostly silent at the dinner, he was alert and happy, fully engaged in what the others were saying, and how much he enjoyed sitting in La Coupole, that huge, cavernous restaurant with the white tablecloths and the brisk waiters in their black-and-white uniforms, and all the people around him talking at once, so many people talking and looking at one another at the same time, the heavily rouged women with their little dogs and the somber men chain-smoking their Gitanes and the outlandishly decked-out couples who seemed to be auditioning for a play in which they were the central characters, the Montparnasse scene, as Vivian called it, the never-ending jeu du regard, and there was Giacometti, she said, and there was the actor who performed in all of Beckett’s plays, and there was another artist whose name meant nothing to Ferguson but who must have been a famous figure known to everyone in Paris, and because they were in Paris his mother and Gil let him drink wine at dinner, such a luxury to be in a place where no one cared about how old you were, and several times during the two hours they spent at their corner table in the restaurant Ferguson sat back and looked at his mother and Gil and the luminous Vivian Schreiber and found himself wishing the four of them could go on sitting there forever.