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He wound up playing in a league sponsored by the West Side Y instead. It was still basketball, and he still enjoyed it, but even though he was recognized as the strongest player on his team, it wasn’t the same, it couldn’t be the same, and it would never be the same again. No more red-and-yellow uniforms. No more bus rides. No more Rebel fanatics cheering from the stands. And no more Chuckie Showalter pounding on his bass drum.
* * *
BY THE BEGINNING of 1964, the almost-seventeen-year-old Ferguson had published a dozen more film articles under the stewardship of Mr. Dunbar, often with help from Gil on matters of prose style, diction, and the always daunting problem of figuring out exactly what he meant to say and then saying it as clearly as possible. His pieces tended to alternate between American and foreign subjects, an examination of the language in W. C. Fields comedies, for instance, followed by something on The Seven Samurai or Pather Panchali, A Walk in the Sun followed by L’Atalante, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang followed by La Dolce Vita—an elemental sort of criticism that was less interested in making judgments about the films than in trying to capture the experience of watching them. Bit by bit, his work was improving, bit by bit his friendship with his stepfather had deepened, and the more he went to the movies, the more he wanted to go to the movies, for moviegoing wasn’t a hunger so much as an addiction, and the more movies he consumed, the more his appetite for them increased. Among the theaters he went to most often were the New Yorker on Broadway (just two blocks from his apartment), the Symphony, the Olympia, and the Beacon on the Upper West Side, the Elgin in Chelsea, the Bleecker Street and Cinema Village downtown, the Paris next door to the Plaza Hotel, the Carnegie next door to Carnegie Hall, the Baronet, the Coronet, and Cinemas I and II in the East Sixties, and, following a pause of several months, the Thalia again, where he had yet to run into Andy Cohen after twelve visits. In addition to the commercial theaters, there was the Museum of Modern Art, an indispensable resource for classic films, and now that Ferguson was a member (a present from Gil and his mother when he turned sixteen), he could go to any and all of those films merely by flashing his card at the door. How many films had he seen in that span between October 1962 and January 1964? An average of two every Saturday and Sunday and one other on Friday, which came to a total of more than three hundred—a good six hundred hours of sitting in the dark, or the number of clock ticks repeated in the course of twenty-five consecutive days and nights, and when you subtracted the minutes lost to sleep and various drunken swoons, over a month of his waking life during the fifteen months that had ticked by.
He had also smoked a thousand more cigarettes (both with and without Amy) and had pursued his love affair with strong spirits by drinking three hundred glasses of Scotland’s finest product at weekend parties thrown by Terry Mills and his equally dissolute successors the following year, no longer upchucking on rugs when he overindulged but passing out quietly and contentedly in a corner of the room, single-mindedly pursuing these alcoholic oblivions in order to purge the dead and the damned from his thoughts, having come to the conclusion that unmediated life was too horrible to bear and that swallowing liquids designed to dull the senses could bring comfort to the troubled heart, but it was important to exercise caution and not go too far, which was why binges were reserved for the weekends, not every weekend but roughly every other one, and he found it curious that he never craved the stuff unless it happened to be right in front of him, and even then he found it altogether resistible, but once he took the first drink, he couldn’t stop until he had drunk too much.
Pot was becoming more and more available at those weekend bashes, but Ferguson had decided it wasn’t for him. After three or four puffs, the unfunniest things would start to seem funny to him, and he would dissolve in a fit of giggles. Then he would begin to feel weightless, all silly and stupid inside, which had the unpleasant effect of thrusting him back into some childish incarnation of himself, for even though Ferguson was struggling to grow up just then, falling down as often as he managed to stay on his feet, he didn’t want to think of himself as a child anymore, so he shunned grass and stuck to booze, preferring to be plastered rather than stoned, and in that way he could feel he was acting as an adult.
Last but not least, that is, first and foremost, he had gone back to Mrs. M.’s place six times in those fifteen months. He would have gone more often, but the twenty-five dollars presented a problem, since his allowance was only fifteen dollars a week and he had no job and no chance of getting one (his parents wanted him to concentrate on his schoolwork), and once he had spent the first twenty-five in October (1962) his bank account was all but empty until his sixteenth birthday in March (1963), when his mother wrote him a check for one hundred dollars to supplement the gift of his museum membership card, which covered four sessions with Julie at the apartment on West Eighty-second Street, but the other two visits were paid for by appropriating things that didn’t belong to him and converting them into cash, criminal acts that tormented Ferguson and ate away at his crumbling conscience, but the sex was so important to him, so fundamental to his well-being, so indisputably the only thing that could keep him from cracking apart, that he couldn’t stop himself from bartering his soul for a few moments in Julie’s arms. God had been dead for years, but the devil had returned to Manhattan and was making a strong comeback in the northern sector of the borough.
It was always Julie because she was much the prettiest and most desirable girl who worked at Mrs. M.’s, and now that she understood how young Ferguson was (she had thought he was seventeen the first time he showed up, not fifteen), her attitude toward him had softened into a kind of droll camaraderie as she watched his limbs continue to grow from one encounter to the next, not that she treated him with anything that could be called tenderness or affection, but she was friendly enough to bend the rules now and let him kiss her on the lips when he wanted to, sometimes even to drive his tongue into her mouth, and the good thing about being with Julie was that she never talked about herself and never asked him any questions (beyond how old he was), and other than the fact that she worked at Mrs. M.’s every Tuesday and Friday, Ferguson knew nothing about Julie’s life, whether she was employed as a prostitute in other houses around the city, for example, or whether the two days with Mrs. M. were helping to fund her college education, perhaps even at City College for all he knew, where she sat next to Andy Cohen in their Russian literature seminar, or whether she had a boyfriend or a husband or a little child or twenty-three brothers and sisters, or whether she was planning to rob a bank or move to California or eat chicken pot pie for dinner. It was better not to know, he felt, better that it should be about nothing but the sex, which he found to be such deeply rewarding sex that twice during those fifteen months Ferguson was willing to break the law by entering bookstores on the Upper West Side with a woolen coat over his multipocketed winter jacket and fill the pockets of both coat and jacket with paperback books, which he then marked up with numerous dog-ears and underlinings and sold to a used bookstore across the street from Columbia at one-fourth the cover price, stealing and selling dozens of classic novels in order to earn the extra money he needed to have more sex with Julie.
He wished it could have been sixty times instead of six times, but just knowing that Julie would be there whenever the urge overpowered him was enough to kill his interest in chasing after the girls at his school, the fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds who would have swatted away his curious hands as he struggled to remove their sweaters and bras and panties, not one of them would have marched around naked in front of him as Julie did, not one of them would have allowed him to penetrate the inner sanctum of her holy womanhood, and even assuming that such a miracle could have come to pass, what work would have been required to achieve what he had already achieved with Julie, and with Julie there could never be any of the heartbreak that would inevitably come from falling for one of those nice girls, none of whom he loved in any case, only his adored Amy, who didn’t go to the Riv
erside Academy but attended Hunter High School in another part of town, his lost and rediscovered best beloved kissing cousin of the unfiltered cigarettes and the mighty laugh, she was the only one worth the effort and the risk, the only girl with whom sex would also mean love, for everything had changed in the past fifteen months, the world of his desires had been turned upside down, and one by one Isabel Kraft and Sydney Millbanks and Vivian Schreiber had all vanished from his thoughts at night, the only two who came to him anymore were the Schneiderman boy and the Schneiderman girl, the ferociously desired Jim and Amy, every night it was either one or the other who crawled into bed with him, on some nights first one and then the other, and that made sense, he supposed, sense to a person who was cut down the middle and couldn’t make sense of who he was, the soon-to-be seventeen-year-old Archibald Isaac Ferguson, variously known as a whoremongering sex maniac and petty criminal, an ex–high school basketball player and sometime film critic, a twice-rejected lover of his male and female stepcousins, and a devoted son and stepson of Rose and Gil—who both would have dropped dead if they had found out what he was up to.
* * *
WHEN OLD MAN Schneiderman gave up the ghost at the end of February, there was an after-funeral gathering at the apartment on Riverside Drive, a small gathering because Gil’s widowed father had made no new friends in the past twenty years and most of the old ones had already found permanent accommodations elsewhere, a collection of perhaps two dozen people that included Gil’s daughters, Margaret and Ella, making their first family appearance since the fall of 1959, accompanied by their newly acquired fat, balding husbands, one of whom had made Margaret pregnant, and in spite of his prejudice against them, Ferguson had to admit that his stepsisters showed no signs of hostility toward his mother, which was a lucky thing for them, since nothing would have made Ferguson happier than to stir up a scene and boot them out of the house, a violent impulse that was entirely uncalled for under the circumstances, but after standing out in the cold February weather for close to an hour as the family laid the old goat to rest, Ferguson was feeling agitated, revvy-revvy, as Happy Finnegan would have put it, perhaps because he had been thinking about his not-grandpa’s hot temper and outspoken contentiousness, or perhaps because every death made him think of his father’s death, so by the time the assembled mourners returned to the apartment, Ferguson was feeling wretched enough to down two quick whiskeys on an empty stomach, which might have contributed to the events that followed, for once the post-funeral gathering began, he wound up misbehaving in a manner so bold and outlandishly inappropriate that it wasn’t clear to him if he had lost his mind or accidentally solved the mystery of the universe.
This was what happened. First: Everyone present was either standing or sitting in the living room, food was being eaten, drinks were being drunk, conversations were going back and forth between and among pairs and groups of people. Ferguson saw Jim standing in a corner by the front window talking to his father, maneuvered his way into that corner himself, and asked Jim if he could have a word with him in private. Jim said yes, and the two of them walked down the hall and went into Ferguson’s bedroom, where, with no word or preamble of any kind, Ferguson threw his arms around Jim and told him he loved him, loved him more than anyone in the world, loved him so much he would be willing to die for him, and before Jim could respond, the now six-foot Ferguson covered the face of the six-foot-one-inch Jim with numerous kisses. The good Jim was neither angry nor shocked. He assumed that Ferguson was either drunk or gravely upset about something, so he wrapped his arms around his younger cousin, held him in a long, fervent hug, and said: I love you, too, Archie. We’re friends for life. Second: Half an hour later, everyone present was still either standing or sitting in the living room, food was still being eaten, drinks were still being drunk, conversations were still going back and forth between and among pairs and groups of people. Ferguson saw Amy standing in a corner by the front window talking to her cousin Ella, maneuvered his way into that corner himself, and asked Amy if he could have a word with her in private. Amy said yes, and the two of them walked down the hall and went into Ferguson’s bedroom, where, with no word or preamble of any kind, Ferguson threw his arms around Amy and told her he loved her, loved her more than anyone in the world, loved her so much he would be willing to die for her, and before Amy could respond, Ferguson kissed her on the mouth, and Amy, who was familiar with Ferguson’s mouth because of the many kisses he had given her in the bygone days of their pubescent fling, opened her own mouth and let Ferguson dive in with his tongue, and before long she had wrapped her arms around her cousin and the two of them had fallen onto the bed, where Ferguson reached under Amy’s skirt and began running his hand up her stockinged leg and Amy reached into Ferguson’s pants and took hold of his stiffened penis, and after each one had finished off the other, Amy smiled at Ferguson and said: This is good, Archie. We’ve been needing to do this for a long time.
Everything improved after that. Egregious, unacceptable social offenses were apparently not always egregious and unacceptable, for not only had Ferguson managed to open his heart and declare his love to the two Schneidermans but his friendship with Jim had grown stronger because of it, and he and Amy had become a couple again. The week after the funeral, his mother and Gil gave him two hundred dollars for his birthday, but he didn’t need the money for Julie anymore, he could spend it on Amy and buy her beautiful lace underwear for the nights when Gil and his mother went out and they had the apartment to themselves, or the nights when Amy’s parents went out, or the nights when someone else’s parents went out and one of their friends gave them a room to hole up in for a few hours, and how much better things were between them now that he was writing his film articles and Amy could see that he wasn’t the dolt she used to think he was, suddenly she respected him, suddenly it didn’t matter if he was wrapped up in politics or not, he was a film boy, an art boy, a sensitive boy, and that was good enough for her, and what a pleasant jolt it was to discover that neither one of them was a virgin, that neither one of them was afraid, that they had both learned enough by then to know how to satisfy each other, surely that made all the difference, to be happy in bed with a person you loved and who loved you back, and for a short time Ferguson walked around feeling that yes, it was true—by throwing his arms around Jim and Amy he had unlocked the secret of the universe.
It couldn’t last, of course, the big love would have to be put aside and perhaps even forgotten because Amy was a year ahead of him in school and would be going to the University of Wisconsin in the fall, not to nearby Barnard as originally planned but to the far-off American tundra because Amy had decided, after long weeks of tormented soul-searching, that she had to get as far away from her mother as possible. Ferguson begged her not to go there, actually got down on his knees and begged, but the sobbing Amy said she had no choice because she would be strangled and suffocated in New York by her relentlessly interfering mother, and much as she loved her darling Archie, she felt she was fighting for her life and had to go, simply had to go and couldn’t let herself be talked out of it. That conversation was the beginning of the end, the first step in the slow dismantling of the perfect world they had created for themselves, and because the next day was the start of the weekend when Amy was supposed to make her long-planned trip to Cambridge to visit her brother, Ferguson found himself alone in New York on that Friday night in April, and he who had not drunk a drop of alcohol since the afternoon of the old man’s funeral and had not attended a single one of his friends’ disreputable parties went to one of those disreputable parties and drank himself into such a stupor that he overslept the next morning and missed going to school to take the SATs, which had been scheduled to begin at nine sharp.
There would be another chance to take the test in the fall, but his mother and Gil were annoyed with him for being so irresponsible, and though he couldn’t fault them for being miffed by his failure to show up for the exam, their anger nevertheless stung, stung far more t
han it should have, and for the first time in his life Ferguson was beginning to understand how fragile he was, how difficult it was for him to steer his way through even the smallest conflicts, especially conflicts brought on by his own flaws and stupidities, for the point was that he needed to be loved, loved more than most people needed to be loved, entirely loved without respite through every waking minute of his life, loved even when he did things that made him unlovable, especially when reason demanded that he not be loved, and unlike Amy, who was pushing her mother away from her, Ferguson could never let go of his mother, his unsmothering mother whose love was the source of all life for him, and merely to see her frown at him with that sad look in her eyes was a devastation, a bullet in the heart.
The end came at the beginning of summer. Not the fall, when Amy would be going to Wisconsin, but early July, when she left on a two-month backpacking trip through Europe with one of her friends, another whiz-kid Hunter girl named Molly Devine. Later that same week, Ferguson left for Vermont. His mother and stepfather had granted him his wish to follow Amy’s example and take part in the French immersion program at Hampton College. It was a fine program, and Ferguson’s French improved enormously in the weeks he was there, but it was a sexless summer filled with dread about what was waiting for him when he returned to New York: a last kiss with Amy—and then good-bye, no doubt a definitive good-bye.