Ferguson sat down. A moment later, Vivian sat down as well. She leaned forward, looked Ferguson in the eyes, and said: No worries, bub. Tu piges? (You get it?) Tu me suis bien? (You follow?) It’s a beautiful, heartbreaking book, and I’m awed that someone your age could have written anything this good. If you don’t change a word, it’s strong enough to be published as is. On the other hand, it’s still not perfect, and because you told me to go ahead and mark it up if I wanted to, I’ve marked it up. About six or seven pages of suggested cuts, I’d say, along with fifty or sixty sentences that could use more work. In my opinion. You don’t have to follow my opinion, of course, but here’s the manuscript (shoving it across the table in Ferguson’s direction), and until you decide what you want to do, I won’t say another word. They’re only suggestions, remember, but in my opinion, I think the changes will make the book a better book.
How can I thank you?
Don’t thank me, Archie. Thank your extraordinary mother.
Later that morning, Ferguson climbed back into the pages of his manuscript and began working his way through Vivian’s comments, most of which were spot on target, he felt, a good eighty to ninety percent of them, at any rate, which was a large percentage, so many small but acute excisions, a phrase here, an adjective there, subtle but ruthless parings-down to increase the energy of the prose, and then the awkward sentences, there were far too many of them, he was ashamed to admit, blind spots he had failed to catch after dozens of readings, and over the next ten days Ferguson attacked each one of those stylistic flubs and aggravating repetitions, at times changing bits that Vivian had left unmarked, at times reversing those changes and going back to the original, but the essential thing was that Vivian had left the structure of the book intact, her pencil hadn’t switched around paragraphs or sections, there were no serious overhauls or blotted out passages, and once Ferguson had incorporated the revisions into his now scratched-over, barely readable typescript, he typed up the book again, this time in triplicate (two carbons), which proved to be a hellish job because of his propensity for hitting the wrong keys, but when his nineteenth birthday rolled around on March third, he was nearly done, and six days later he was completely done.
Meanwhile, Vivian had been calling around, making inquiries among her British friends about potential publishers for Ferguson’s book, choosing London over New York because she had better contacts there, and Ferguson, who was wholly ignorant about all matters concerning publishing, whether in England or the United States, left everything to Vivian and forged on with his typing, already starting to think about his partially written essay, “Junkyards and Geniuses,” which might or might not have been the germ of a second book, and about reading over some of his longer high school pieces with the notion of reworking them (if he found they were worth the trouble) and trying to place them in magazines, but even after Vivian had narrowed down the British possibilities to two small literary houses, minute but aggressive concerns dedicated to publishing what she called new talent, Ferguson had no hope that either one of them would accept his book.
You decide where you want to send it first, Vivian said to him, as they sat in the kitchen on the morning of his nineteenth birthday, and when she told him that the names of the two presses were Io Books and Thunder Road, Ltd., Ferguson instinctively said Io, not because he had a clear sense of who Io was but because the word thunder seemed inimical to a book with the names Laurel and Hardy in the title.
They’ve been in business for about four years now, Vivian said, a kind of hobbyhorse for a well-to-do, thirtyish young man named Aubrey Hull, mostly a publisher of poets, they tell me, with some fiction and nonfiction, nicely designed and printed, good paper, but they put out only twelve to fifteen books a year, whereas Thunder Road publishes about twenty-five. Still want to go for Io?
Why not? They’re going to reject it anyway. And when we send it to the Thunder people, they’re going to reject it, too.
All right, Mr. Negative, one last question. The title page. The book will be going out sometime next week, and what name do you want to use for yourself?
What name? My name, of course.
I’m talking about Archibald or Archie, or A., or A. plus your middle initial.
My birth certificate and passport both say I’m Archibald, but no one has ever called me that. Archibald Isaac. I’ve never been Archibald, and I’ve never been Isaac. I’m Archie. I’ve always been Archie, and I’ll always be Archie to the end. That’s my name, Archie Ferguson, and that’s the name I’ll use to sign my work. Not that it matters now, of course, since no publisher in his right mind would ever want to publish such a weird little book, but it’s good to think about it for the future.
* * *
SO IT WENT during the daytime hours of Ferguson’s early months in Paris, the satisfactions of intense study and hard work on his book, the steady improvement of his French after the summer-long program in Vermont, the classes at the Alliance Française, the dinners conducted entirely in French with Vivian’s Paris friends, the daily conversations with Celestine, not to mention numerous encounters with strangers while standing at the bar and eating ham sandwiches in his lunch-hour cafés, which had turned him into an almost fifty-fifty bilingual American in France, and so immersed had he become in his second language that if not for his studies in English, his writing in English, and his all-English interactions with Vivian, his own English might have started to atrophy. He often dreamed in French now (once, comically, with English subtitles running below the action), and his head was continually churning with bizarre, often obscene bilingual puns, such as transforming the common French expression au contraire (on the contrary) into an English homonym of stupefying vulgarity: O cunt rare.
Cunts were on his mind, however, as were cocks, along with the imagined and remembered bodies of naked women and men from both the present and the past, for once the sun went down in the evening and the city turned dark, the invigorating solitude of his daytime regimen often collapsed into a breathless sort of loneliness at night. The first months were the hardest on him, the beginning period when he was introduced to many people but no one he particularly liked, no one even a millionth as much as he liked Vivian, and he would gut out those empty, late-night hours in his small suffocation room by doing one of several things to distract himself from the loneliness: reading (almost impossible), listening to classical music on his pocket-sized transistor radio (a bit more possible, but never for more than twenty or thirty minutes at a stretch), doing a second stint of work on his book (difficult but sometimes productive, sometimes useless), stepping out for ten o’clock showings of films in theaters behind and around the Boulevard Saint-Michel (mostly enjoyable, even when the film was less than good, but then he would return to his room at twelve-thirty and the loneliness would still be waiting for him), prowling the streets of Les Halles in search of a prostitute when the cunt-cock problem raged out of control (the buzz in the groin from walking past all those sidewalk hookers, temporary release, but the sex was brusque and dismal, impersonal fucks of no account, which inevitably filled him with aching memories of Julie on his long walks home in the dark, and with an allowance of just eighty dollars a week from his mother and Gil, those ten- and twenty-dollar tumbles had to be kept to a minimum). The last solution was alcohol, which could be part of the other solutions as well, drinking and reading, drinking and listening to music, drinking after coming back from a film or another sad-eyed whore—the one solution that solved everything whenever the loneliness became too big for him. Having sworn off scotch after one too many blackout stupors in New York, Ferguson had shifted over to red wine as his medicine of choice, and with a liter of vin ordinaire selling for a paltry one franc at some of the neighborhood épiceries close to his lunchtime haunts (twenty cents for a bare, unlabeled bottle at grocery stores scattered through the sixth arrondissement), Ferguson always had one or two of those bottles stashed in his room, and whether he went out or stayed in on a given night, the one-franc red
wine was an effective balm for inducing drowsiness and an eventual plunge into sleep, although those foul, nameless vintages could be hard on his system, and he often found himself battling the runs or a woozy, cracking head when he woke in the morning.
On average, he dined alone with Vivian in the apartment once or twice a week, traditional cold-weather food such as pot au feu, cassoulet, and boeuf bourguignon prepared and served by Celestine, who had no husband or family in Paris and was always on call for extra duty when asked, such good-tasting meals that the ever-hungry Ferguson could seldom resist a second or even third helping of the main course, and it was during those quiet, one-on-one dinners that he and Vivian became friends, or solidified the friendship that had been there from the start, both of them sharing stories about their lives, with much of what he learned about her entirely unexpected: born and raised in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, for example, the same part of town where the original Archie had lived, Jewish in spite of coming from a family named Grant (which prompted Ferguson to tell the story of how, in one day, his grandfather had gone from being Reznikoff to Rockefeller to Ferguson), daughter of a doctor and a fifth-grade schoolteacher, four years younger than her brilliant scientist brother, Douglas, Gil’s good friend during the war, and then, even before she graduated from high school, a trip to France in 1939 at age fifteen to visit distant relatives in Lyon, where she met Jean-Pierre Schreiber, an even more distant relative, perhaps a fourth or fifth cousin, and even though he had just celebrated his thirty-fifth birthday, which made him a vast twenty years older than she was, something happened, Vivian said, a spark was lit between them and she gave herself to Jean-Pierre, he a widower in charge of a significant French export company and she just a second-year student at Erasmus High School in Brooklyn, a liaison that no doubt would have struck most outsiders as a little perverse, but it had never seemed that way to Vivian, who looked upon herself as a grown-up in spite of her young age, and then, when the Germans crossed into Poland in September, there was no chance for them to see each other again until the war was over, but Jean-Pierre was safe in Lausanne, and over the five years it took for Vivian to complete high school and graduate from college, she and Jean-Pierre exchanged two hundred and forty-four letters and were already committed to marrying each other by the time Gil managed to pull the strings that allowed her to slip into France just after Paris was liberated in August 1944.
It was pleasant to listen to Vivian’s stories because she seemed to take such pleasure in telling them, even if it probably was a little perverse for a thirty-five-year-old man to have fallen for a fifteen-year-old girl, but Ferguson couldn’t help noting that he too had been fifteen when he made his first trip to France, where he had met Vivian Schreiber through similar kinds of family connections, a woman who was not just twenty years older than he was but twenty-three years, yet why bother to count when it had already been established that one person was less than half the age of the other, and all through those lonely first months in Paris Ferguson actively lusted after Vivian and hoped they would wind up in bed together, for inasmuch as her love life and marriage had not been constricted by questions of age, it was possible to wonder if she might not be willing to experiment in the opposite direction with him, to be the older one this time while he took over her previous spot as the younger for what was bound to be an intoxicating adventure in erotic perversity. He found her beautiful, after all, old in comparison to him but not old in the big scheme of things, a woman who still shimmered with sensuality and allure, and there was no doubt in his mind that she found him attractive, since she had often remarked on how handsome he was, how smashing he looked when they left the apartment to go out for dinner, and what if that was the true and secret reason why she had invited him to live with her—because she had dreamed of his body and wanted to nuzzle against his young flesh? That would account for her inexplicable generosity toward him, the free rent and the free food, the free study sessions, the clothes she had bought for him on their first shopping blitz at Le Bon Marché in November, all the expensive shirts and shoes and sweaters she had sprung for that day, the three pairs of pleated corduroy trousers, the sports jacket with the double vents in back, the winter coat and the red woolen scarf, top-of-the-line French clothes, the fashionable clothes he took such pleasure in wearing, and why would she be doing all those things if she wasn’t lusting after him just as feverishly as he was lusting after her? Sex toy. That was the term for it, and yes, he gladly would have become her sex toy if that was what she had in mind, but even though she often looked at him as if that was precisely what she had in mind (the thoughtful stares directed at his face, her eyes closely scrutinizing his smallest gestures), he was in no position to act, as the younger one he had no right to make the first move, it was up to Vivian to reach out to him, but much as he longed for her to take him in her arms and kiss him on the mouth, or even to extend her hand and touch his face with the tips of her fingers, she never did.
He saw her nearly every day, but the details of her private life were a mystery to him. Did she have a lover, Ferguson asked himself, or several lovers, or a series of lovers, or no lover at all? Were her sudden ten o’clock exits from their one-on-one dinners proof that she was on her way to an appointment in some man’s bed elsewhere in the city, or was she merely going out for a late-night drink with friends? And what about her occasional weekend departures, on average once or twice a month, most of them to Amsterdam, she said, where it seemed plausible to think a man might have been waiting for her, but then again, now that her book on Chardin had been published, perhaps she was looking for a new subject to write about and had chosen Rembrandt or Vermeer or some other Dutch painter whose work could be found only in Holland. Unanswerable questions, and because Vivian talked freely about the past but not about the present, at least not about her personal affairs in the present, the one soul Ferguson felt any connection to in all of Paris, the one human being he loved, was also a stranger to him.
One or two one-on-one dinners per week in the apartment, two or three dinners per week in restaurants, almost always with other people, Vivian’s friends, her horde of longtime Paris friends from the divergent but often overlapping worlds of art and literature, painters and sculptors, professors of art history, poets who wrote about art, gallery men and their wives, all of them well advanced in their careers, which meant that Ferguson was always the youngest person sitting at the table, suspected by many to be Vivian’s sex toy, he realized, even if their suspicions were wrong, and while Vivian always introduced him as the stepson of one of her dearest American friends, a fair number of the people at those four- and six- and eight-person restaurant dinners simply ignored him (no one could be colder or ruder than the French, Ferguson discovered), whereas others leaned in close and wanted to know everything about him (no one could be warmer or more democratic than the French, he also discovered), but even on the nights when he was ignored, there was the pleasure of being in the restaurants, of taking part in the good life those places seemed to represent, not just the grand spectacle of La Coupole, which he had witnessed three years earlier and still stood for him as the embodiment of all that was different between Paris and New York, but other brasseries such as Bofinger, Fouquet’s, and Balzar, nineteenth-century palaces and mini-palaces of wood-paneled walls and mirrored columns humming with the clink of flatware and the murmured roar of fifty or two hundred and fifty human voices, but also the grungier spots in the fifth arrondissement where he ate couscous and merguez for the first time in underground Tunisian and Moroccan restaurants and was initiated into the coriander savors of Vietnamese cuisine, the food of America’s mortal enemy, and two or three times that fall, when the dinners turned out to be especially animated and the hour was pushing past midnight, the whole group of four or five or six or seven would tramp off to Les Halles for onion soup at the Pied de Cochon, a restaurant crowded with customers at one and two and three o’clock in the morning, the arty sophisticates and late-night revelers sitting at th
e tables while the neighborhood whores stood at the bar drinking ballons de rouge alongside the hefty butchers in their blood-spattered smocks and aprons, an intermix of such radical disjunction and unlikely harmony that Ferguson asked himself if such a scene could exist anywhere else in the world.
Many dinners but no sex, no sex that he didn’t pay for and ultimately regret, and beyond those regrets no physical contact with anyone except for his morning cheek kisses with Vivian. De Gaulle was reelected president of the republic on December nineteenth, Giacometti was dying in Switzerland of a heart disease called pericarditis (it killed him on January eleventh), and every time Ferguson walked home at night after one of his post-dinner prowls, he was stopped by the police and asked to show his papers. On January twelfth, he launched into the ill-conceived third section of his book, which caused him much difficulty and many wasted hours of work until he finally scrapped it and figured out a new, more appropriate ending. On January twentieth, while still in the midst of those turmoils with his book, he received a letter from Brian Mischevski, who was in his first year at Cornell, and by the time Ferguson had finished studying the four short paragraphs of his friend’s letter, he felt as if a building had fallen on top of him. Not only had Brian’s parents reneged on their promise to pay for their son to visit Paris in the spring, a trip that Ferguson had been looking forward to with frantic anticipation, but Brian himself thought it was probably all for the best anyway, since he had a girlfriend now, and fun as it had been to pal around with Ferguson last year, what they had been up to was nothing more than kids’ stuff, really, and Brian had outgrown that after landing in college, had put all that behind him for good, and even though Ferguson was still his number one friend of all time, their friendship would just be a normal friendship from now on.
Normal. What did normal mean, Ferguson asked himself, and why wasn’t it normal for him to feel the way he did about wanting to kiss and make love to other boys, the sex of one-sex sex was just as normal and natural as the sex of two-sex sex, maybe even more normal and more natural because a cock was something boys understood better than girls, and therefore it was easier to know what the other person wanted without having to guess, without having to play the courtship and seduction games that could make the sex of two-sex sex so confounding, and why did a person have to choose between one or the other, why block out one-half of humanity in the name of normal or natural when the truth was that everyone was Both, and people and society and the laws and religions of people in different societies were just too afraid to admit it. As the California cowgirl had said to him three and a half years ago: I believe in my life, Archie, and I don’t want to be scared of it. Brian was scared. Most people were scared, but scared was a stupid way to live, Ferguson felt, a dishonest and demoralizing way to live, a dead-end life, a dead life.