* * *
WHEN THE SECOND semester ended in early June, Ferguson shook hands with Tim McCarthy, said good-bye to Carman Hall, and moved to more spacious digs off-campus. Only freshmen were required to live in dormitories, and now that his freshman year was behind him, he was free to go wherever he wished. All along, his wish had been to move in with Amy, but as a point of pride (and perhaps a test of love), Ferguson had held back from asking her if he could rent one of the two bedrooms that would likely be opening up in her apartment (both occupied by seniors), waiting for her to ask the question herself, which she did at the end of April, just hours after she learned that her two graduating apartment mates would be leaving New York on the same day they were given their diplomas, and how much sweeter it was to be living there at her invitation than to have invited himself, to know that she wanted him just as much as he wanted her.
They promptly took over the two vacated rooms, both of which were larger and brighter than Amy’s cramped little hole at the back of the apartment, two rooms standing side by side along the main hallway, both equipped with double beds, desks, bureaus, and bookcases, which they bought from the departing tenants for a grand total of forty-five dollars each, and Ferguson’s shuttle existence of the past year came to an end, no more daily treks up and down Broadway between his dorm room and Amy’s apartment, they lived together now, they slept together in the same bed seven nights out of every seven now, and all through that summer of 1966, the nineteen-year-old Ferguson walked around with the uncanny sensation that he had entered a world in which it was no longer necessary to ask the world for anything more than it had already given him.
An unprecedented moment of equipoise and inner fulfillment. Having his cake and eating it too. No one, but no one, was ever supposed to be that happy. Ferguson sometimes wondered if he hadn’t pulled a fast one on the author of The Book of Terrestrial Life, who was turning the pages too quickly that year and had somehow left the page for those months blank.
Summer in hot, unbreathable New York, one ninety-degree day after another as the broiling asphalt melted in the sun and the concrete pavement slabs burned into the soles of their shoes, the air so dense with humidity that even the bricks on the façades of buildings seemed to be oozing sweat, and everywhere the stink of garbage rotting on the sidewalks. American bombs were falling on Hanoi and Haiphong, the heavyweight champion was talking to the press about Vietnam (No Vietcong ever called me nigger, he said, thus conflating the two American wars into a single war), the poet Frank O’Hara was run over by a dune buggy on a Fire Island beach and killed at the age of forty, and Ferguson and Amy were both trapped in boring summer jobs, bookstore clerk for him, typing and filing for her, low-paid work that forced them to ration their Gauloises, but Bobby George was playing baseball in Germany, the West End Bar had air-conditioning, and once they returned to their hot, airless apartment, Ferguson could run cool washcloths over Amy’s naked body and dream they were back in France. It was the summer of politics and movies, of dinners at the Schneidermans’ apartment on West Seventy-fifth Street and the Adlers’ apartment on West Fifty-eighth Street, of celebrating Gil Schneiderman’s move to the New York Times after the Herald Tribune shut down its presses and vanished from the scene, of going to concerts at Carnegie Hall with Gil and Amy’s brother, Jim, of riding the 104 bus down Broadway to the Thalia and the New Yorker to escape the heat by watching movies, which they jointly decided should always be comedies, since the grimness of the moment demanded that they laugh whenever it was possible, and who better to get them going than the Marx Brothers and W. C. Fields, or the screwball inanities starring Grant and Powell, Hepburn, Dunne, and Lombard, they couldn’t get enough of them, they jumped onto the bus the minute they found out another comedy double feature was playing, and what a relief it was to forget the war and the stinking garbage for a few hours as they sat in the air-conditioned dark, but when no comedies were to be seen in the neighborhood or anywhere else they returned to their summer project of grinding through what they called the literature of dissent, reading Marx and Lenin because one had to read them, and Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg, Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, Sartre and Camus, Malcolm X and Frantz Fanon, Sorel and Bakunin, Marcuse and Adorno, looking for answers to help explain what had happened to their country, which seemed to be collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions, but while Amy found herself moving closer to a Marxist reading of events (the inevitable overthrow of capitalism), Ferguson had his doubts, not just because the Hegelian dialectic turned on its head struck him as a mechanical and simplistic view of the world but because there was no class consciousness among American workers, no sympathy for socialist thought anywhere in the culture, and therefore no chance for the great upheaval Amy was predicting. In other words, they disagreed, even if they were essentially on the same side, but none of those differences seemed to matter, since neither one of them felt wholly certain about anything at that point, and each understood that the other could have been right, or that both of them could have been wrong, and better to air their doubts freely and openly than to march together in blind lockstep until they fell off the edge of a cliff.
Most of all, it was the summer of looking at Amy, of watching her put on lipstick and brush her impossible hair, of studying her hands as she rubbed body lotion into her palms and then ran those palms over her legs and arms and breasts, of washing her hair for her as she closed her eyes and sank into the lukewarm water in the tub, the ancient tub with the claw feet and the rust stains running through the cracked porcelain, of lying in bed in the morning and seeing her dress herself in a corner of the room as light came through the window and surrounded her, smiling at him as she slipped into her panties and bra and cotton skirt, the small domestic details of living within her feminine orbit, tampons, birth-control pills, the pills for when her stomach cramped up during hard periods, the household chores they did together, shopping for food, washing dishes, and the way she would sometimes bite her lower lip as they stood in the kitchen slicing and chopping onions and tomatoes for the pot of chili that would feed them for a weekend’s worth of dinners, the concentration in her eyes whenever she painted her fingernails or toenails to make a good impression at work, watching her shave her legs and underarms as she sat quietly in the bath, then climbing into the tub with her and soaping down her slithery white skin, the unearthly smoothness of her skin against his hands, and sex and sex and sex, sweaty summer sex with no cover or sheet on top of them as they rolled around on the bed in her room and the creaking old fan stirred the air a bit and cooled off nothing, the shudders and sighs, the yowls and groans, in her, on top of her, under her, beside her, the deep laughs trapped in her throat, the surprise tickling attacks, the sudden snatches of old pop songs from their childhood, lullabies, dirty limericks, Mother Goose poems, and grumpy Amy narrowing her eyes in another one of her snits, happy Amy gulping down ice water and cold beers, eating fast, shoveling it in like a ravenous stevedore, the snorts of laughter watching Fields and the M. Brothers—There ain’t no sanity clause, Archie!—and the magnificent Ah she exhaled one evening when he handed her his translation of an early poem by René Char, a poem so short that it consisted of only six words, a brief blink entitled Lacenaire’s Hand, which was a reference to the nineteenth-century criminal-poet who later surfaced as a character in Children of Paradise:
Worlds of eloquence have been lost.
It could never end. The sun was stuck in the sky, a page had gone missing from the book, and it would always be summer as long as they didn’t breathe too hard or ask for too much, always the summer when they were nineteen and were finally, finally almost, finally perhaps almost on the brink of saying good-bye to the moment when everything was still in front of them.
5.2
5.3
On November 7, 1965, Ferguson came to the sixteenth book of Homer’s Odyssey. He was sitting at a desk in a small maid’s room on the sixth floor of an apartment building in the seventh arrondissement of Par
is, which had been his home for the past three weeks, and now that Odysseus has finally made it back to Ithaka after his endless journey from Troy, gray-eyed Athena has disguised him in the garb and body of a wizened old vagabond, and as the man of many wiles sits with the swineherd Eumaeus in a mountain hut on the outskirts of town, in walks Telemachus, Odysseus’s son, who was no more than an infant when his father set off for Troy twenty years ago and still knows nothing about his father’s return, having himself just returned from a long and dangerous voyage, and as Eumaeus leaves the hut and heads for the palace in order to tell Penelope, the young man’s mother, that Telemachus has returned to Ithaka unharmed, father and son are alone together for the first time, and while the father is fully aware that he is looking at his son, the son still knows nothing.
Athena then shows up masquerading as a tall and handsome Ithakan woman, seen only by Odysseus and therefore invisible to the son, and when she beckons the father to step outside for a moment, she tells him that the time for dissembling is over and that he must reveal himself to Telemachus now. “Saying no more” (as rendered in the newly published Fitzgerald translation that was sitting on Ferguson’s desk) “she tipped her golden wand upon the man, / making his cloak pure white, and the knit tunic / fresh around him. Lithe and young she made him, / ruddy with sun, his jawline clean, the beard / no longer grey upon his chin.”
There was no God, Ferguson kept telling himself. There never had been and never would be a single God, but there were gods, many gods from many and all parts of the world, among them the Greek gods who lived on Mount Olympus, Athena, Zeus, Apollo, and the various others who had gamboled their way through the first two hundred and ninety-five pages of The Odyssey, and what the gods enjoyed more than anything else was meddling in the affairs of men. They simply couldn’t help themselves, it was what they had been born to do. In the same way that beavers couldn’t help themselves from building dams, Ferguson supposed—or cats couldn’t help themselves from torturing mice. Immortal beings, yes, but beings with too much time on their hands, which meant that nothing could stop them from cooking up their juicy, often ghastly entertainments.
When Odysseus reenters the hut, Telemachus is thunderstruck by the transformation of the old man into what he now concludes must be a god. But Odysseus, on the verge of crumbling into tears, barely able to get the words out of his mouth, quietly says: “No god. Why take me for a god? No, no. / I am that father whom your boyhood lacked / and suffered pain for lack of. I am he.”
That was the first stab, the tip of the blade puncturing Ferguson’s skin somewhere in the boneless, unprotected area between his rib cage and groin, for reading the words of Odysseus’s short reply produced the same effect in him that would have been produced if the lines had read: It’s going to be a cold day, Archie. Remember to wear your scarf to school.
Then the blade went all the way in: “throwing / his arms around this marvel of a father / Telémakhos began to weep. Salt tears / rose from the wells of longing in both men, / and cries burst from both as keen and fluttering / as those of the great taloned hawk, / whose nestlings farmers take before they fly. / So helplessly they cried, pouring out tears, / and might have gone on weeping so until sundown.”
It was the first time Ferguson had wept over a book. He had shed numerous tears in the darkness of both empty and crowded movie theaters, sometimes at the most soft-headed, sentimental rubbish, had choked up more than once while listening to the Saint Matthew Passion with Gil, especially at that spot on the first side of the third disk when the tenor’s voice suddenly catches with emotion, but books had never done that to him, not even the saddest, most moving books, and yet now in the dim November light of Paris tears were falling on page 296 of his one-dollar-and-forty-five-cent paperback edition of The Odyssey, and when he turned away from the poem and tried to look through the window of his little room, everything in the room was blurred.
* * *
THE ODYSSEY WAS the second book on Gil’s reading list. The Iliad had come first, and after plowing his way through the two epic poems by the anonymous bard or bards who had been given the name Hómēros, Ferguson had promised to read ninety-eight more books over the next two years, including Greek tragedies and comedies, Virgil and Ovid, portions of the Old Testament (King James version), Augustine’s Confessions, Dante’s Inferno, roughly half the contents of Montaigne’s Essays, no fewer than four tragedies and three comedies by Shakespeare, Milton’s Paradise Lost, selections from Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, and Kant, The Oxford Book of English Verse, The Norton Anthology of American Poetry, as well as British, American, French, and Russian novels by such writers as Fielding-Sterne-Austen, Hawthorne-Melville-Twain, Balzac-Stendhal-Flaubert, and Gogol-Tolstoy-Dostoyevsky. Gil and Ferguson’s mother both hoped their 4-F, ex-book-thief son would change his mind about going to college in a year or two, but if Ferguson persisted in shunning the benefits of a formal education, at least those one hundred titles would give him some knowledge of some of the books every educated person was supposed to have read.
Ferguson meant to stick to his promise because he wanted to read those books and had every intention of reading every one of them. He didn’t want to go through life as an untrained, undisciplined know-nothing, he merely didn’t want to go to college, and even though he was willing to sit through five two-hour classes a week at the Alliance Française because one of his ambitions in life was to become wholly proficient in French, he had no desire to sit through classes anywhere else, least of all in a college, which would have been no better than any of the other maximum-security institutions he had been confined to since the age of five—and undoubtedly even worse. The only reason to surrender your ideals and go in for one of those four-year stretches was to be given a student deferment from the army, which would put off the dilemma of marching off to Vietnam or saying no to Vietnam, which in turn would put off the second dilemma of federal prison or permanent removal from the United States, all postponed for the length of your four-year sentence, but Ferguson had already solved the problem by other means, and now that the army had rejected him, he could reject college without ever having to face any of those dilemmas again.
He knew how lucky he was. Not only had he been spared from the war and each one of the odious choices that followed from the war, the terrible ayes and nays that every post–high school and post-college American male would have to confront for as long as the evil war went on, but his parents had not turned against him, that was crucial, nothing was more important to the prospects of his long-range survival than the fact that Gil and his mother had forgiven him for the transgressions of his senior year, and even though they continued to worry about him and question his mental and emotional stability, they had not forced him to start seeing a doctor for the psychotherapy Gil had suggested might do him an enormous amount of good, for Ferguson had argued that it wasn’t necessary, that he had made his fair share of dumb adolescent mistakes but was essentially fine and that throwing away their money on such a nebulous proposition would only make him feel guilty. They gave in. They always gave in when he talked to them in a mature and sensible tone of voice, because whenever Ferguson was on top of himself and not under himself, which was about half the time, there were few people in the world as sweet as he was, as loving as he was, such sweetness and transparent love emanating from his eyes that few could resist him, least of all his mother and stepfather, who were perfectly aware that Ferguson could be other things besides sweet as well, but still they found themselves powerless to resist.
Two lucky things, and then a third lucky thing that came through for him at the last minute, the chance to live in Paris for a time, perhaps for a long time, which had not seemed possible at first, not with his mother fretting about the enormous distance that would stand between them and Gil stewing about the logistics of the venture and the dozens of practical difficulties it would present, but then, a couple of weeks after Ferguson’s 4-F classification landed in the family mailbox, Gil wrote
to Vivian Schreiber in Paris to ask for her advice, and the surprising answer she gave him in her return letter put an end to Gil’s stewing and greatly diminished Ferguson’s mother’s alarm. “Send Archie to me,” Vivian wrote. “The sixth-floor chambre de bonne that belongs to my apartment is empty now, since my brother’s son Edward has gone back to America for his senior year at Berkeley and I haven’t bothered to look for a new occupant, which means that Archie can have it if he doesn’t mind living in minimal quarters. Rent-free, of course. And now that my Chardin book has been published in London and New York, I’ve been spending my time translating it into French for my Paris publisher, a tedious job that thankfully is nearly done, and with no new projects burning on the immediate horizon, I would be happy to take on the task of tutoring Archie as he works his way through the extraordinary books on your list, which will of course make it necessary for me to read them as well, and I must admit that the thought of plunging into all that good stuff again is exceedingly pleasant to me. The high school film articles you included in your letter show that Archie is a capable and intelligent young man. If he doesn’t approve of my teaching methods, we can look for someone else. But I’m willing to give it a try.”