Ferguson was euphoric. Not just Paris, but Paris under the same roof as Vivian Schreiber, Paris under the benevolent care of womankind’s most glorious incarnation, Paris on the rue de l’Université in the seventh arrondissement, Left Bank Paris with all the comforts of a rich and tranquil neighborhood, just a short walk to the cafés of Saint-Germain, just a short walk across the river to the Cinémathèque at the Palais de Chaillot, and, most important of all, for the first time ever in his life, life on his own.
It was painful having to say good-bye to his mother and Gil, especially his mother, who cried a bit at the end of their last home-cooked dinner together on a wet night in mid-October, which almost made him want to tear up as well, but he averted that potential embarrassment by telling them about the book he had started writing in the days just after his army physical, at a moment when he still wasn’t sure what would happen to him and was feeling entirely lost, a little book which already had a title that was forever fixed in stone, How Laurel and Hardy Saved My Life, which was essentially a book about his mother, he said, and the rough years they had gone through together between the night of the Newark fire and the day she married Gil, a book that would be broken down into three parts, “Glorious Oblivions” being the first one, an account of all the movies they had watched together during the Curious Interregnum and the months beyond, the importance of those movies to them, the life-saving power of those ridiculous studio films, watched together in the balconies of West Side theaters as his mother puffed away on her Chesterfields and Ferguson dreamed he was inside the movies playing on the two-dimensional screens in front of him, and then the second part would be called “Stan and Ollie,” a history of his infatuation with those two morons and how he loved them still, and then a final section, not yet fully worked out, something with a title such as “Art and Trash” or “This Versus That,” which would explore the differences between Hollywood garbage films and masterpieces from other countries and argue strongly for the value of garbage even as it defended those masterpieces, and maybe it was good for him to be going so far away, he said, away from his mother as she was now in order to write about her as she had been then, to be able to live for a while in the large, densely crowded spaces of memory with no interference from the present, nothing to distract him from living in the past for as long as he needed to be there.
His mother smiled at him through her tears. Stubbing out a half-smoked cigarette with her left hand, she reached out to Ferguson with her right, drew her son toward her, and kissed him on the forehead. Gil stood up from the table, walked over to where Ferguson was sitting, and kissed him as well. Ferguson kissed both of them, and then Gil kissed his mother, and they all said good night. By the evening of the next day, good night had turned into good-bye, and a minute later Ferguson was boarding the plane and was gone.
* * *
SHE HAD AGED somewhat since he had last seen her, or looked somewhat older than the person he had been carrying around in his head for the past three years, but she was forty-one now, almost forty-two, which was only two years younger than his mother, his still beautiful mother who had aged somewhat in the past three years as well, and undoubtedly Vivian Schreiber was still beautiful herself, just a little older, that was all, and even if she was objectively less beautiful than his mother, she still had that glow about her, that seductive glamour-glow of power and certainty that his mother didn’t have, his hard-working artist mother who only bothered about looking her best when she went out into the world, whereas Vivian Schreiber wrote books about artists and was always out in the world, a well-heeled widow with no offspring and a multitude of friends, according to Gil, someone who hobbed and nobbed with artists, writers, journalists, publishers, gallery owners, and museum directors, while Ferguson’s more subdued mother was hunkered down inside her work with no intimate others beyond her husband and her son.
Sitting in the backseat of the taxi on their way into town from the airport, Vivian (not Mrs. or Madame Schreiber, as she had instructed him in the terminal, but Vivian or Viv) asked Ferguson a hundred questions about himself and his plans and what he was hoping to accomplish by living in Paris, which he answered by talking about the book he had started writing back in the summer, about his determination to improve his French to such a degree that he would be able to speak it as well as he spoke English, about his eagerness to plunge into Gil’s reading list and soak up every word of those one hundred books, about seeing as many films as he could and recording his observations in his three-ring loose-leaf binder, about his ambition to write articles on films and publish them in British or American or French-based English-language magazines if any editor would accept them, about wanting to play basketball somewhere and joining a league if there were such things as amateur basketball leagues in Paris, about the possibility of tutoring French kids in English to pad the allowance his parents would be sending him every month, an under-the-table cash arrangement since by law he wouldn’t be allowed to work in France, and on and on the jet-lagged Ferguson talked in response to Vivian Schreiber’s questions, no longer intimidated by her as his fifteen-year-old self had been, able to think boldly enough now to look upon her not as an auxiliary parent but as an adult acquaintance and possible friend, for there was no reason to suppose she had offered him a room in her building out of some dormant maternal impulse (childless woman seeks to take care of the child she might have had in her early twenties), no, proxy mothering was not at issue here, there was another reason, an as yet unknowable reason that continued to perplex him, and therefore, once he had answered her many questions, he had only one question to ask her, which was the same question he had been asking himself ever since Gil had received her letter: Why was she doing this? Not that he wasn’t grateful, Ferguson said, not that he wasn’t thrilled to be back in Paris, but they hardly knew each other, and why would she put herself out like this for someone she hardly knew?
A good question, she said. I wish I could answer it.
You don’t know?
Not really.
Does it have something to do with Gil? To thank him for what he did for you during the war, maybe?
Maybe. But it’s not just that. More about being at loose ends, I think. It took me fifteen years to write the Chardin book, and now that it’s done, the thing in my life that used to be the book has turned into an empty space.
Fifteen years. I can’t believe fifteen years.
Vivian smiled, a frowning sort of smile, Ferguson remarked, but nevertheless a smile. She said: I’m slow, honey.
I still don’t get it. What does the empty space have to do with me?
It could be the photograph.
What photograph?
The picture your mother took of you when you were a little boy. I bought it, remember? And for the past three years it’s been hanging on a wall in the room where I finished writing Chardin. I’ve looked at that photo thousands of times. The little boy with his back to the camera, his bony spine protruding as the striped T-shirt presses against the vertebrae, his thin right arm extended, his hand splayed out on the carpet, and Laurel and Hardy on the screen in the distance, which is the same distance from the front of you as the camera is from the back of you. The proportions are just perfect—sublime. And there you are, all alone on the floor, stranded in the middle of those two distances. Boyhood incarnate. The loneliness of boyhood. The loneliness of your boyhood. And needless to say, whenever I look at the photograph, I think about you, the boy I met in Paris three years ago, the same boy who had once been the little boy in the picture, and after thinking about you so often, it’s hard for me not to think of us as friends. So when Gil wrote to me and said you wanted to come here, I said to myself, Good, now we can become real friends. I know it sounds a bit daft, but there it is. I think we’re going to have an interesting time together, Archie.
* * *
THE SECOND-FLOOR APARTMENT was vast, the sixth-floor chambre de bonne was not. Seven large rooms below, one little room above, and each of th
ose seven rooms was filled with furniture, standing lamps, Persian rugs, paintings, drawings, photographs, and books, books everywhere in the master bedroom and the study and along one wall of the living room, a spacious, high-ceilinged apartment with a simple, uncluttered feel to it because the rooms were ample enough to absorb the objects they contained without impinging on one’s movements, a pleasant feeling of just enough and never too little or too much, and how taken Ferguson was by the huge, all-white, old-fashioned kitchen with the black and white tiles underfoot, and the mirrored double doors that stood between the living room and the dining room, with their slim French door handles as opposed to the stumpy doorknobs used in America, and the massive double windows in the living room, sheathed in thin, almost translucent muslin drapes, which allowed the light to filter through at all hours of the morning and afternoon and often to the point of dusk. Bourgeois heaven in the apartment below, but upstairs in the sixth-floor maid’s room, which was technically on the seventh floor of the building, since the French counted the ground floor not as the first floor but the rez-de-chaussée, there was nothing but four bare walls, a sloped ceiling, and just enough space for a bed, a narrow five-shelf bookcase, a tiny desk with a creaking wood-and-wicker chair, a built-in storage drawer under the bed, and a cold-water sink. Communal toilet down the hall; no shower or bath. A floor that was reached by taking the elevator to the fifth floor and walking up the stairs to the floor above, where a long wooden corridor stretched along the northern face of the building, with six identical brown doors standing side by side in a row, each one the property of the owners of the apartments on floors zero through five, Ferguson’s door being the second of those doors, while the rooms behind the other doors were occupied by the Spanish and Portuguese maids who worked for the apartment owners below. It was a grim little monk’s cell, Ferguson realized, when he set foot in it with Vivian on the morning of his first day in Paris, not at all what he had been expecting, the smallest space he would ever have to live in since the beginning of his life, a chambre that would no doubt take some getting used to before he could learn to inhabit it without feeling he was about to suffocate, but it did have windows, or one window in two parts, a tall double window in the northern wall, with a Lilliputian balcony surrounded by a metal railing on three sides and just enough room to accommodate his size eleven-and-a-half feet, and from that balcony or through that double window he could look north and take in a prospect of the Quai d’Orsay, the Seine, the Grand Palais on the other side of the river, and up through the right bank all the way to the far-off ivory dome of the Sacré-Coeur in Montmartre, and if he turned his head to the left and leaned over the balcony railing, there was the Champs de Mars and the Eiffel Tower. Not bad. Not bad at all, finally, because there had never been any question that he would have to spend all his time in that room, it was to serve as his place for writing, studying, and sleeping, but the place for eating, bathing, and talking was downstairs in Vivian’s apartment, where the cook Celestine gave him food whenever he asked for it, the delicious bowls of coffee and tartines beurrées for breakfast in the morning, the hot lunches when he wasn’t eating sandwiches in little cafés on or around the Boulevard Saint-Germain, and the dinners with or without Vivian at home or the dinners with Vivian in restaurants or with Vivian and other people in restaurants or at dinner parties in Vivian’s apartment or the apartments of other people, and as Vivian slowly introduced him to the complex Parisian world she belonged to, Ferguson slowly began to settle in.
For the first five months, the rhythm of his daytime routine was as follows: work on his book every morning from nine to twelve, lunch from noon to one, reading the books on Gil’s list from one to four, except on Tuesdays and Thursdays, when he read from one to two-thirty and spent the next hour and a half in Vivian’s study talking with her about the books, an hour-long walk through various Left Bank neighborhoods (mostly Saint-Germain, the Latin Quarter, and Montparnasse), and then on to the Boulevard Raspail for his Monday-through-Friday classes at the Alliance Française. Until he finished his book (which happened a few days after his nineteenth birthday in March), and until he felt his French was solid enough to forgo the classes (also in March), he rigidly adhered to those three fundamental activities of writing, reading, and studying to the exclusion of all others, which meant that for the time being there was no time for watching movies except on Saturdays and Sundays and the occasional weekday night, no time for basketball, and no time to begin tutoring French children in English. Never before had Ferguson shown such dedication and singleness of purpose, such a fervent commitment to the tasks he had set for himself, but never before had he felt so calm and steady when the light came through his window in the morning, so glad to be where he was, even on those mornings when he was hungover or not feeling at his best.
The book was everything to him. The book was the difference between being alive and not being alive, and although Ferguson was still young, no doubt extremely young to have embarked on such a project, the advantage of starting the book at eighteen was that he was still close to the time of his boyhood and remembered it well, and because of Mr. Dunbar and the Riverside Rebel he had been writing for some years now and was no longer strictly a novice. He had published twenty-seven articles of varying lengths in Mr. Dunbar’s paper (one as short as two and a half typed pages, another one as long as eleven typed pages), and after he started recording his impressions of films in the loose-leaf binder, he had acquired the habit of writing nearly every day, since there were more than a hundred and sixty sheets in the binder now, and the jump from nearly every day to every day come hell or high water was not so much a jump as the natural next step. On top of his own efforts during the past three years, there had been the long conversations with Gil, the lessons learned from Gil about how to achieve concision, grace, and clarity in each sentence he wrote, how to join one sentence to another sentence in order to build a paragraph that had some muscles in it, and how to begin the next paragraph with a sentence that would either prolong or contradict the statements in the preceding paragraph (depending on your argument or your purpose), and Ferguson had listened to his stepfather and absorbed those lessons well, which meant that even though he was barely out of high school when he started working on his book, he had already sworn his allegiance to the flag of the Written Word.
The idea had come to him after the humiliations of his army physical on August second. Not only had he been forced to reveal the black mark on his name denoted by the words criminal record, but the doctor had pressed him to talk about the particulars as well, not just being caught for pinching books on the day George Tyler’s hand had crashed down on his shoulder but how many other times he had stolen books without being caught, and because Ferguson had felt tense and frightened to be sitting in that government building on Whitehall Street talking to a U.S. Army doctor, he had told the man the truth, had said several times in answer to the question, but beyond the humiliation of being forced to delve into the larcenous activities of his senior year, there had been the greater humiliation of having to confess to his unnatural sexual desires, his attraction to boys as well as to girls, and then the man, whose name was Dr. Mark L. Worthington, had asked Ferguson to provide the particulars concerning that matter as well, and while Ferguson had understood that telling the truth would guarantee that he would never have to serve in the army or spend two to five years in a federal prison for refusing to serve in the army, it had been hard to tell the truth because of the disgust he had seen in Dr. Worthington’s eyes, the revulsion expressed by the tightening of his lips and the clenching of his jaw, but the man had wanted to know the details and Ferguson had had no choice but to give them, so one by one he had marched through the erotic acts he had performed during his love affair with the beautiful Brian Mischevski from early spring to the day Brian left New York in early summer, and Yes, sir, Ferguson had said, they had been on the bed together many times with no clothes on, that is, both of them entirely naked, and Yes, sir, Ferguson had s
aid, they had kissed each other with their mouths open and had pushed their tongues into those open mouths, and Yes, sir, they had put their hardened penises into each other’s mouths, and Yes, sir, they had ejaculated into each other’s mouths, and Yes, sir, they had put their hardened penises into each other’s bottoms and had ejaculated into those bottoms or onto the buttocks flanking those bottoms or onto each other’s faces or stomachs, and the more Ferguson had talked, the more disgusted the expression on the doctor’s face had become, and by the time the interview was over, the never-to-be-inducted Ferguson was trembling throughout the length of his four limbs and sickened by the words that had tumbled from his mouth, not because he felt ashamed of what he had done but because the doctor’s eyes had condemned him, had looked on him as a moral degenerate and a menace to the stability of American life, which had felt to Ferguson as if his own life were being spat on by the government of the United States, which was his country, after all, whether he liked it or not, and by way of revenge, he had said to himself as he walked out of that building into the hot summer air of New York, he would write a little book about the dark years after the Newark fire, a book so powerful and so brilliant and so drenched in the truths of what it meant to be alive that no American would ever want to spit on him again.