Afterward, as Gil and his mother were about to put Vivian in a taxi, the young widow took hold of Ferguson’s face, kissed him once on each cheek, and said: Come back and see me when you’re a little older, Archie. I think we’re going to be great friends.
* * *
BETWEEN THE TRIPS to California and Paris there was the hot summer in New York, the outdoor basketball games in Riverside Park, the four or five nights a week spent in air-conditioned movie theaters, the big and small American novels Gil continued to leave on his bedside table, and the poor planning that had kept him stuck in the city when every one of his school friends had gone somewhere else for July and August, not to mention the nineteen-year-old Jim, who was working as a counselor at a sleepaway camp in Massachusetts, and the confounding, ever-elusive Amy, who had managed to get herself shipped off to Vermont to take part in a two-month-long immersion program in French, which was precisely what he should have done and no doubt would have done if he hadn’t lacked the wit to propose it to his mother and Gil, who almost certainly would have been able to afford the tuition, which Uncle Dan and Aunt Liz could not, but fast-talking Amy had pried loose the necessary cash from her grandmother in Chicago and the old goat in the Bronx, and there she was sending him jocular, teasing postcards from the New England woods (Cher Cousin, The word “con” in French doesn’t mean what I thought it meant. The English equivalent would be “jerk” or “asshole”—not you-know-what. Whereas “queue,” which means “tail,” also means you-know-what in French. Which reminds me: How is my favorite con man doing in N.Y. these days? Hot enough for you, Archie, or is that pretend sweat I see dripping from your forehead? Baisers à mon bien-aimé, Amy), while Ferguson languished in the torrid drool of dog-day Manhattan, trapped in yet another loveless stretch of masturbation reveries and grimly persistent wet dreams.
The biggest topic in the household that summer was Lincoln Center and Gil’s long-term dispute with his colleagues over the new Philharmonic Hall, which would finally be opening on September twenty-third. The pus-ridden eyesore (as Ferguson’s grandfather used to call it) had been part of the West Sixties landscape for as long as Ferguson and his mother had been living in New York—a gigantic, thirty-acre slum-clearance project financed by Rockefeller money that had razed hundreds of buildings and kicked out thousands of people from their apartments to make way for what was being called a new cultural hub. All those mountains of dirt and bricks, all those steam shovels and pile drivers and holes in the ground, all that noise blasting through the neighborhood for all those years, and now that the first building of the sixteen-acre Lincoln Center complex was nearly done, the controversy was about to erupt into one of the angriest public shouting matches in the city’s history. Size versus acoustical balance, arrogance and presumption versus mathematics and reason, and Gil was in the thick of it because the feud had been provoked by the Herald Tribune, in particular by two of the people he worked with most closely at the paper, arts editor Victor Lowry and fellow music critic Barton Crosetti, who had led an aggressive campaign to expand the number of seats in the original blueprints for the new hall because, they insisted, a great metropolis like New York deserved something bigger and better. Bigger, yes, Gil had argued, but not better, since the acoustical design had been calibrated for an auditorium of twenty-four hundred seats, not twenty-six hundred, and even though the architects and engineers responsible for the plan had said the quality of the sound would be different, which was another way of saying worse or unacceptable, the city gave in to the Herald Tribune’s demands and increased the size of the hall. Gil saw that capitulation as a defeat for the future of orchestral music in New York, but now that the larger version of the building was almost finished, what could he do but hope the results would be somewhat less disastrous than he feared? And if they weren’t less, that is, if the results were fully as bad as he expected them to be, then he would launch a public campaign of his own, he said, and throw himself into an effort to help save Carnegie Hall, which the city was already intending to demolish.
The joke in the family that summer was: How do you spell the word hub? Answer: f-l-u-b.
Gil could joke about it because the only other option was to feel angry, and walking around with anger inside you was a bad way to live, he told Ferguson, it was pointless and self-destructive and cruel to the people who depended on you not to be angry, especially when the cause of your anger was something you couldn’t control.
Do you understand what I’m trying to say, Archie? Gil asked.
I’m not sure, Ferguson said. I think so.
(I’m not sure: a subtle reference to Gil’s volcanic outburst against Margaret at the old apartment on Central Park West. I think so: an acknowledgment that he had not seen his stepfather lose his temper again on such a grand scale since that night. There could be only two reasons to account for the change in Gil: (1) His character had improved over time or (2) His marriage to Ferguson’s mother had turned him into a better, calmer, happier man. Ferguson chose to believe the second possibility—not just because he wanted to believe it but because he knew it was the correct answer.)
It’s not that the issue isn’t important to me, Gil went on. My whole life is music. My whole life is writing about the music performed in this town, and if those performances are going to be less good now because of stupid decisions made by wrongheaded but well-meaning people—some of them my friends, I’m sad to say—then of course I’m going to feel angry, so angry that I’ve even thought about quitting the paper, just to let them know how seriously I take this business. But what good would that do me—or you, or your mother, or anyone else? I suppose we could get along without my salary if we had to, but the fact is I love my job, and I don’t want to quit.
You shouldn’t quit. There might be some problems over there, but you shouldn’t quit.
It’s not going to last much longer anyway. The Herald Tribune is sinking financially, and I doubt it will hold on for more than another two or three years. So I might as well go down with the ship. A loyal crew member to the last, standing by the mad captain who steered us into such dangerous waters.
You’re joking, right?
Since when have you known me to joke, Archie?
The end of the Herald Tribune. I remember the first time you took me there—and how much I liked it, how much I still like it every time we go to the building together. It’s hard to believe it won’t exist anymore. I even thought … well, never mind …
Thought what?
I don’t know … that one day … it sounds so idiotic now … that one day I might end up working there, too.
What a beautiful idea. I’m touched, Archie—deeply touched—but why would a boy with your talents want to be a newspaperman?
Not a newspaperman, a movie critic. In the same way you write about concerts, maybe I could write about films.
I’ve always imagined you’d end up making your own films.
I don’t think so.
But you love movies so much …
I love watching them, but I’m not sure I’d enjoy making them. It takes too much time to make a movie, and during that time you don’t have any time left over to watch other movies. Do you see what I’m talking about? If the thing I enjoy most is watching movies, then the best job for me would be to watch as many movies as I can.
* * *
SCHOOL HAD BEEN in session for close to a month when the new hall opened with a gala concert performed by the New York Philharmonic under the direction of Leonard Bernstein, an event considered so important that it was televised by CBS—a live national broadcast beamed into every home in America. In the days that followed, more concerts were performed by some of the most admired symphony orchestras in the country (Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland), and by the end of the week both the press and the public had pronounced their verdict on the acoustical qualities of Lincoln Center’s flagship venue. PHILHARMONIC FLOP read one headline. PHILHARMONIC FOLLY read another. PHILHARMONIC FIASCO read a third. The d
ouble-f-sound was apparently irresistible to newspaper editors, given how neatly it flew off the tongues of indignant music lovers, professional naysayers, and barroom wags alike. Some people differed, however, claiming the results weren’t as bad as all that, and so began the screaming contest between fors and againsts, the uncivil debate that would go on filling the New York air for months and years to come.
Ferguson followed these events out of loyalty to Gil, pleased that his stepfather had been on the winning side of the argument, no matter what harm the defective hall would do to the eardrums of the city’s classical music patrons, and one Sunday afternoon he even stood in front of Carnegie Hall with Gil and his mother holding a sign that read PLEASE SAVE ME, but mostly Ferguson didn’t care, and mostly his thoughts were zeroed in on the demands of school and the never-ending quest for love, even when all the newspapers in New York shut down during the printers’ strike that lasted from early December to the final day of March—which he generously chose to interpret as a long-deserved rest for Gil.
Amy had broken up with last year’s boyfriend, the one Ferguson had never met and whose name he had never known, but she had found a new ami intime during her Francophone summer in Vermont, someone who lived in New York and therefore was disponible pour les rencontres chaque weekend, which pushed Ferguson out of the running once again, disqualifying him from even considering a new assault on the fortress of Amy’s heart. The same held true of the attractive girls at the Riverside Academy—all locked up and out of bounds, just as they had been the year before, which meant that Isabel Kraft was still no more than a phantom sylph running through the forests of his imagination, a figment other writhing in the light of the nocturnal bone—more real than Miss September, perhaps, but not by much.
If only Andy Cohen hadn’t said those words last spring, Ferguson sometimes thought, if only their simple arrangement hadn’t become so messy and impossible. Not that he even liked Andy Cohen anymore, but the way things were shaping up for his sophomore year, those Saturday afternoon romps on West 107th Street were beginning to make sense again, at least when you considered how much better it was to be with someone than with no one. On the other hand, Onan’s muse had never come to him in the form of a male body. It was always a female person who crawled under the blankets with him, for when it wasn’t Isabel Kraft slipping out of her red bikini and pressing her skin against his skin, it was Amy, or else—and this he found bizarre—it was Sydney Millbanks, the two-faced cowgirl who had stabbed him in the back, or Vivian Schreiber, who had spoken approximately forty-seven words to him and was old enough to be his mother, but there they were, the two women from his travels across continents and oceans in July and August, and there was nothing he could do to stop either one of them from entering his thoughts at night.
The contrast seemed clear enough, a rigid divide between what he wanted and what his circumstances allowed him to have, the soft flesh of women that would necessarily have to be deferred for another year or two and the stiff cocks of boys that could be savored now if the opportunity ever arose again, the impossible as opposed to the possible, nighttime fantasies as opposed to daytime realities, love on the one hand and adolescent lust on the other, all so neat and unambiguous, but then he discovered that the line was less sharply drawn than he had supposed, that love could exist on either side of that mental boundary and could do to him what the cowgirl said it had done to her, and to understand that about himself after pushing away the unwanted love of Andy Cohen came as a shock to Ferguson—and it frightened him, frightened him so much that he scarcely seemed to know who he was anymore.
In late September, he left New York again for yet another far-off place, traveling to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to spend the weekend with his cousin Jim. Not by air this time but five and a half hours by land on two buses to Boston with a change in Springfield, his first long-distance bus ride anywhere, and then two nights sleeping in Jim’s dormitory room at MIT, camped out on the bed normally occupied by Jim’s roommate, who had left campus on Friday morning and wouldn’t be back until Sunday night. The plan was nebulous. Take in the sights, play some one-on-one basketball in the gym on Saturday morning, visit a few labs at MIT, have a look at the Harvard campus, wander around Back Bay and Copley Square in Boston, have lunch and/or dinner at Harvard Square, go to a movie at the Brattle Theatre—an unstructured, spur-of-the-moment kind of weekend, Jim said, since the purpose of the visit was to hang out and spend some time together and what they wound up doing was of little importance. Ferguson was thrilled. No, more than thrilled—out of his skin with anticipation, and the mere thought of spending the weekend with Jim instantly parted the clouds that had been gathering overhead and turned the sky a bright, bright blue. No one was better than Jim, no one was kinder or more generous than Jim, no one was more admirable than Jim, and all during the bus ride to Boston Ferguson reflected on how lucky he was to have been thrown into the same family as his remarkable stepcousin. He loved him, he said to himself, he loved him to pieces, and he knew that Jim loved him back because of all those Saturday mornings in Riverside Park, teaching the runty twelve-year-old how to play roundball when there were a hundred other things he could have been doing, he loved him because he had called to invite him to go up to Cambridge for no other reason than to hang out and spend some time together, and now that Ferguson had tasted the pleasures of boy-boy intimacy, there was nothing he wouldn’t have done to find himself naked in Jim’s arms, to be kissed by Jim, to be fondled by Jim, yes, to be buggered by Jim, which was something that had never happened with the boy from City College last spring, for whatever Jim wanted him to do he would do, since this was love, a big, burning love that would go on burning for the rest of his life, and if Jim turned out to be the kind of ambidextrous boy he himself seemed to be turning into, which was altogether unlikely, of course, then a kiss from Jim would carry him to the gates of heaven, and yes, those were the words Ferguson said to himself when he thought that thought in the middle of his journey to Boston: the gates of heaven.
It was the happiest weekend of his life—and also the saddest. Happy because being with Jim made him feel so protected, so secure in the comforting nimbus of the older boy’s calm, and at every moment he could count on being listened to as carefully as he listened to Jim, who never made him feel lesser or lower or left out. The big breakfasts at the little diner across the Charles, the talk about the space program and mathematical puzzles and the enormous computers that one day would be small enough to fit in your palm, the Bogart double bill of Casablanca and To Have and Have Not at the Brattle Theatre on Saturday night, so many things to be thankful for during the long hours they spent with each other between Friday night and Sunday afternoon, but through it all the constant pain of knowing that the kiss he wanted would never be given to him, that having Jim was also not having Jim, that to have and have not meant never exposing his true feelings without running the risk of perishing in a fire of eternal humiliation. Worst of all: looking at his cousin’s naked body in the locker room after one-on-one basketball, standing naked together with no possibility of extending his arm and putting his fingers on the lean, muscular body of his forbidden love, and then, on Sunday morning, Ferguson’s brazen ploy to test the waters by walking around the dorm room with no clothes on for more than an hour, tempted to ask Jim if he wanted a rubdown but not daring to, tempted to sit down on his bed and start jerking off in front of Jim but not daring to, hoping his nakedness would elicit some response from his thoroughly heterosexual cousin, which needless to say it didn’t, for Jim was already in love with someone else, a girl from Mount Holyoke named Nancy Hammerstein, who drove in on Sunday to have lunch with them, a perfectly decent and intelligent girl who saw in Jim precisely what Ferguson saw, and so even in his happiness Ferguson suffered through much sorrow that weekend, aching for the kiss that would never be given to him and knowing how deluded he was even to want it, and as he sat on the bus that carried him back to New York on Sunday, he cried a little bit, then cr
ied a lot as the sun went down and darkness engulfed the bus. He was crying more and more often these days, he realized … and who was he? he kept asking himself … and what was he?… and why on earth did he persist in making life so hard for himself?
* * *
HE WOULD HAVE to get over it or die, and because Ferguson didn’t feel ready to die at age fifteen and a half, he did what he could to get over it, throwing himself with scattershot fervor into a maelstrom of contradictory pursuits. By the time the Cuban missile crisis started and ended two weeks later, with no bombs dropped and no wars declared, leaving no war in sight other than the ever-present Cold War of long duration, Ferguson had published his first film review, had smoked his first cigarette, and had lost his virginity to a twenty-year-old prostitute in a small brothel on West Eighty-second Street. The following month, he made the Riverside Academy’s varsity basketball team, but as one of only three sophomores on the ten-man squad, he sat on the bench and rarely saw more than one or two minutes of action per game.