It wasn’t the beer or the bourbon that interested him, it was the talk, the chance to talk to his friends from the Spectator and the Columbia Review, to talk to Amy’s political friends and various West End regulars, drinks were merely liquid props to be nursed along in order to go on sitting in the booth, for this was the first time in Ferguson’s life that he had been surrounded by people he wanted to talk to, not just Amy anymore, who for the past two years had been his sole interlocutor, the one person in his life worth talking to, now there were several, now there were many, and the conversations he took part in at the West End were just as valuable to him as anything that was said in his classes at Hamilton Hall.
The Spectator boys were a serious, hard-working lot, more grinds than pukes when it came to how they dressed and cut their hair, but grinds with the hearts of pukes, and Ferguson’s fellow beginners from the class of ’69 were already dedicated newspapermen, just out of high school but dug in and committed to their jobs as if they had been working at them for years. The older members of the Spectator staff tended to frequent another bar a couple of blocks down Broadway, the Gold Rail, which was the saloon of preference for the frat boys and jocks, but Ferguson’s cronies preferred the dingier, less raucous atmosphere of the West End, and of the three who sometimes joined him for drinks and talk in one of the side booths, there was the calm and thoughtful Robert Friedman, a kid from Long Island who covered Academic Affairs and at the absurd age of eighteen could write as skillfully and professionally as any reporter from the Times or the Herald Tribune, the fast-talking Greg Mullhouse from Chicago (Sports), and the dogged, probing, wryly sarcastic Allen Branch from San Francisco (Community Affairs), and they all agreed that the managing board of the paper was too conservative, too timid in its treatment of the university’s bad policies concerning the war (allowing military recruiters on campus, failing to cut ties with the ROTC—pronounced Rotsy—the Naval Reserve Officers’ Training Corps program) as well as its slumlord tactics in evicting poor tenants from university-owned apartment buildings to further Columbia’s expansion through the surrounding neighborhood, and when their turn came to take control of the Spectator in the spring of their junior year, they would elect Friedman editor in chief and quickly get to work at changing everything. The plans for this eventual coup only confirmed what Ferguson had already figured out about the freshman class that year. They were different from the classes above them—more aggressive, more impatient, more willing to stand up and fight against stupidity, complacency, and unfairness. The postwar children born in 1947 had little in common with the wartime children born just two and three years earlier, a generational rift had opened up in that short span of time, and whereas most of the upperclassmen still bought into the lessons they had learned in the 1950s, Ferguson and his friends understood that they were living in an irrational world, a country that murdered its presidents and legislated against its citizens and sent its young men off to die in senseless wars, which meant that they were more fully attuned to the realities of the present than their elders were. A small example, a trivial example, but nevertheless a pertinent example: the beanie battles of Freshman Orientation Week. Ferguson had instinctively refused to wear his, but so had the Columbia Review and Spectator boys, so had scores of others, and in a class of six hundred and ninety-three students, more than a third of them stared down and bumped shoulders with the football monitors in the days before the start of classes. Nothing had been organized. Each anti-beanie boy had acted on his own, appalled by the idea of having to march around campus as a conscript in the Tweedledee and Tweedledum brigade, and the contagion of resistance had spread until it was turned into a de facto mass movement, a general boycott, a struggle between tradition and common sense. The result? The administration announced that beanies would henceforth be dispensed with for all incoming freshmen in the future. A microscopic victory, yes, but perhaps a sign of things to come. Beanies today—who knew what tomorrow?
By the end of Thanksgiving week, Ferguson had built up a pile of half a dozen translations that seemed more or less finished to him, and when they passed the all-important Amy Test, he finally gathered them together, put them in a manila envelope, and submitted them to the Review. Contrary to what he had been expecting to be told, the editors were not averse to the principle of including translations in the magazine—as long as they weren’t too long, as one of them said—and so it was that Ferguson’s English rendering of the Desnos poem about the deserter and the sentinels, At the Edge of the World, was accepted for publication in the spring issue. Even if he was no longer a full-fledged poet, he could still participate in the act of writing poetry by translating poems that were far superior to anything he could have written himself, and the young poets connected to the Review, whose ambitions for themselves were much greater than his were for himself, who risked everything when they sat down to write while he risked almost nothing when he sat down to translate, recognized his value to the group as someone who could judge the merits of some works over other works, who brought a wider, more inclusive perspective to their conversations about poetry, but they never embraced him as a member of the inner circle, which was entirely fair and just, Ferguson thought, since in the end he wasn’t truly one of them, and yet as far as hanging out at the West End was concerned, they were all good friends, and Ferguson loved talking to them, especially David Zimmer, who impressed him as the most brilliant and precocious of the bunch, along with Zimmer’s non-writer pal from Chicago, Marco Fogg, an eccentric, wild-haired boy who walked around in an Irish tweed suit and was so deeply informed about literature that he could crack jokes in Latin and make you laugh, even if you didn’t understand Latin.
The journalists and the poets were the ones Ferguson gravitated to because he found them to be the ones who were most alive, the ones who had already begun to figure out who and what they were in relation to the world, but there were others in the class of ’69 who had no clue about themselves or anything else, the floundering teenage boys who had amassed good grades in school and could score knockout numbers on standardized tests but who still had the minds of children, the horde of inexperienced ephebes and virgin wankers who had grown up in small provincial cities and suburban tract houses and who clung to the campus and their dorm rooms because New York was too big, too rough, too fast, and the place threatened and confused them. One such innocent was Ferguson’s roommate, a genial fellow from Dayton, Ohio, named Tim McCarthy, who had entered college thoroughly unprepared to take on the freedom of living away from home for the first time, but unlike many of the others in that position, he didn’t withdraw into himself and hide from the city, he rushed straight into it, bent on losing himself in the twin pleasures of monumental beer consumption and a steady intake of marijuana, with a couple of acid trips thrown in for good measure. Ferguson didn’t know what to do. He spent most nights with Amy at the apartment on 111th Street, and his room in Carman Hall served as little more than an office for him, the place where he kept his books, typewriter, and clothes, and whenever he was in that room he tended to be sitting at his desk with the typewriter in front of him, working on his news articles for the Spectator, composing the various short and long papers he was required to hand in for his courses, or else fiddling with yet another draft of one of his translations. He didn’t see Tim often enough to have formed a connection with him, their relations were friendly but deeply superficial, as he had once heard a woman say to another woman on the 104 bus, and while Ferguson sensed that the boy was headed for what could have been serious trouble, he was reluctant to pry into Tim’s personal business. He had already seen enough to know that he himself had no interest in experimenting with the silliness that was pot or the craziness that was LSD, but what right did he have to tell Tim McCarthy to refrain from ingesting those things? One afternoon in mid-December, however, when Tim stumbled into the room squealing and giggling after his latest pot session with the gang down the hall, Ferguson finally spoke up and said: It might seem funny to yo
u, Tim, but it’s not funny to anyone else.
The Dayton boy flopped down on his bed and smiled: Don’t be such a grump, Archie. You’re beginning to sound like my father.
I don’t care how many drugs you take, but it wouldn’t be so nice for you if you flunked out of here, would it?
You’re talking through your nose, Mr. New Jersey. I’m all A’s and B’s this semester, with more A’s than B’s, and if I do what I should on the finals next month, I’ll probably make the dean’s list. Won’t Daddy be proud.
Good for you. But if you go on getting stoned every day, how much longer can you keep it up?
Keep it up? It’s always up, man, always up and raring to go, and the higher I am, the more up it is. You should try it sometime, Archie. The hardest hard-ons this side of the Rock of Gibraltar.
Ferguson emitted a brief snort of a laugh—not unlike one of Amy’s snorts—but in this case it was an admission of defeat rather than a genuine laugh. He had started an argument he was bound to lose.
We’ll never be younger than we are right now, Tim said, and after you’re young, it all goes downhill pretty fast. Boring adulthood. The blahs of the big blah-blah-blah. A job, a wife, a couple of kids, and then you’re shuffling around in your slippers, waiting for them to cart you off to the glue factory—sans teeth, sans everything. So why not live it up and have some fun while we can?
It depends on what you call fun.
Letting go, for one thing.
Agreed. But what’s your idea of letting go?
Juicing up and jumping out of my skin.
That might work for you, but it’s not for everyone.
Wouldn’t you rather fly than crawl on the ground? There’s nothing to it, Archie. You just open your arms and take off.
Some of us don’t want that. And even if we thought we did, we wouldn’t be able to do it.
Why not?
Because we can’t, that’s all. We just can’t.
* * *
IT WASN’T THAT Ferguson was unable to fly or let go or jump out of his skin, but he needed Amy in order to do those things, and now that they had lived through their first breakup, their first reconciliation, and their first experience of sleeping-together-every-night in France, he could no longer separate the idea of being who he was from the necessity of being with her. New York was the next step forward, everyday life with the chance to see each other every day, to be together almost constantly if they wished, but Ferguson understood that he couldn’t take any of those possibilities for granted, for the breakup had taught him that Amy was a person who needed more room than most people did, that her suffocating mother had made her allergic to any and all forms of emotional pressure, and if he demanded more from her than she was willing to give, she would eventually withdraw from him again. He sometimes wondered if he didn’t love her too much, or if he hadn’t yet learned how to love her in the correct way, because the truth was that Ferguson happily would have married her tomorrow, even as an eighteen-year-old student in his first months of college he felt prepared to march through the rest of his life with her and never look at another woman again. He knew how excessive those thoughts were, but he couldn’t stop himself from thinking them. Amy was all tangled up inside him. He was who he was because she was in there with him now, and why pretend he could ever be anything even remotely human anymore without her?
He never said a word about any of this. The idea wasn’t to scare her off but to love her, and Ferguson did his best to stay alert to Amy’s moods and respond to the subtle, unvoiced indications that told him whether tonight would be a good night for sleeping in her bed, for example, or whether she would prefer to wait until tomorrow night, to make a point of asking whether she wanted to get together for dinner that evening or meet up later at the West End or stay in because they both had papers to write or else chuck everything and go to a movie at the Thalia. He let her make all those decisions because he knew she felt freer and happier when she was the one to decide, and above all the Amy he wanted was the fierce, tender, wisecracking girl who had saved his life after the accident, the intrepid co-conspirator who had traveled through France with him and not the sullen monarch who had expelled him from her court last fall for four months of lonely rustication in his New Jersey backwater.
Mostly, he wound up spending the night with her, on average four or five nights a week, often as many as six, with one or two or sometimes three nights alone in his single bed on the tenth floor of Carman Hall. It was a workable arrangement, he felt, even though he wished the numbers could have been a consistent seven and zero, but the important thing was that after two years their bodies still caught fire when they crawled under the sheets together, and it was the rare night that Ferguson slept in Amy’s bed when they didn’t make love before falling asleep. To reverse the Gottesman proposition, not only was the steady sex good for them, but the good sex steadied them and made them stronger: two twined into one rather than one and one standing apart. The physical intimacy that had developed between them was so intense now that Ferguson sometimes felt he knew Amy’s body better than his own. But not always, and therefore it was essential that he listen to her and follow her lead in physical matters, that he pay close attention to what she was telling him with her eyes, for every now and then he would misconstrue the signals and do the wrong thing, such as grabbing hold of her and kissing her when she didn’t want him to, and even though she never pushed him away (which only added to his confusion), he could tell that her heart wasn’t fully in it, that sex wasn’t on her mind just then as it was on his, as it always was on his, but she would go ahead and let him make love to her anyway because she didn’t want to disappoint him, submitting to his desires with a passive sort of involvement, mechanical sex, which was worse than no sex at all, and the first time it happened Ferguson felt so ashamed of himself he vowed never to let it happen again, but it did happen again, twice more over the next few months, which made him understand, finally, that men and women were not the same, and if he meant to do right by his woman, he would have to pay even closer attention and learn how to think and feel as she did, for there was no doubt in his mind that Amy knew exactly what he was thinking and feeling, which explained why she tolerated his lustful blunders and love-blind acts of stupidity.
Another error he sometimes committed was overestimating Amy’s confidence in herself. The great roar of being that emanated from the Schneiderman soul seemed to preclude any lapses into doubt or uncertainty, but she had her bad moments just as everyone else did, her moments of sadness and weakness and grim introspection, and because they occurred so rarely, they always seemed to catch Ferguson by surprise. Intellectual doubts above all, whether her political ideas were sound or not, whether anything she ever did or said or thought would be of value to anyone, whether it was worth fighting the system when the system would never change, whether the fight to make things better would only make them worse because of all the people who would rise up against the people fighting to make them better, but also doubts about herself, the small girl things that would suddenly torment her for no apparent reason, her lips were too thin, her eyes were too small, her teeth were too big, there were too many moles on her legs, the same light-brown dots that Ferguson loved so much, but no, she would say, they’re ugly, and she would never wear shorts again, and now she was getting too fat, and now she had lost too much weight, and why were her breasts so small, and goddamn that big Jewish nose of hers, and what the fuck to do with her crazy, kinky hair, it was impossible, impossible to do anything with it, and how could she still want to go on wearing lipstick when the cosmetic companies were brainwashing women into conforming to some skewed, artificial vision of womanhood in order to feed the great capitalist profit machine that ran on making people want what they didn’t need? All this from a vibrant, attractive girl in the flower of her young adulthood, and if such a person as Amy Schneiderman could succumb to questioning the body that belonged to her in that way, what about the fat girls and the homely g
irls and the deformed girls who didn’t even have a chance? Not only were men and women not the same, Ferguson concluded, but it was more difficult to be a woman than a man, and if he should ever forget that, he told himself, then the gods should come down from their mountain and pluck out the eyes from his head.
In the spring of 1966, an SDS chapter was formed at Columbia. Students for a Democratic Society was a national organization by then, and one by one most of the left-wing student groups on campus voted to join up with SDS or disband their ranks and dissolve into it. Among them were the Committee for Social Mockery, which had marched around College Walk last year holding up blank signs in a general protest against everything (a spectacle Ferguson dearly wished he had seen), the May 2 Movement, which was backed by the Progressive Labor Party, members of the Progressive Labor Party itself (the hard-line, Maoist PL), and the group that Amy had belonged to since her freshman year, the ICV (Independent Committee on Vietnam), which had fought with the police last May when twenty-five of its members disrupted the NROTC awards ceremony on Low Library plaza. The SDS slogan was Let the People Decide!, and Ferguson supported the group’s positions just as enthusiastically as Amy did (against the war, against racism, against imperialism, against poverty—and for a democratic world in which all citizens could live with one another as equals), but Amy joined the organization and Ferguson didn’t. The reasons were obvious to both of them, and they didn’t spend much time discussing the matter, nor any time at all in trying to talk the other into making a different decision, since he in fact encouraged her to join up, and she understood why he would never join anything, for Amy was someone who could imagine herself throwing bricks, who no doubt had been born to throw bricks, whereas Ferguson was someone who couldn’t and wasn’t, and even if he had burned his press badge and resigned from the Spectator, he still wouldn’t have joined under any circumstances. He walked down Fifth Avenue with her again on March twenty-sixth in another anti-war demonstration, but that was as far as he would go in doing his bit for the cause. There were just so many hours in a day, after all, and once he had finished his schoolwork and newspaper work, the prospect of spending some time with his French poets was far more attractive to him than attending loud, contentious political meetings to plan out the next action the group would be taking against the next issue on the agenda.