He had always made love with his eyes open, always with his eyes wide open because he loved looking at the person he was with, and barring Andy Cohen and some of the streetwalkers in Les Halles, he had never been with anyone he had not felt powerfully attracted to, for the pleasure of touching and being touched by a person he cared about was enhanced by looking at that person as well, the eyes had as much to do with the enjoyment as any other part of the body, even the skin, but now for the first time since he could remember being with anyone Ferguson was going at it blind, which cut him off from the room and the present moment, and even as Fleming was asking Ferguson to take hold of his cock and spit on it, Ferguson wasn’t fully there anymore, his mind was producing images that had nothing to do with what was happening on the bed in his top-floor room on the rue de l’Université, Odysseus and Telemachus were weeping in each other’s arms, Ferguson was running his hand over the round, muscular half-moons of Brian Mischevski’s lovely ass, which he would never see or touch again, and poor Julie, whose last name he had never even known, was lying dead on a bare mattress in her room at the Hôtel des Morts.
Now Fleming was asking Ferguson to go inside him, please, he said, yes, if you will, thank you, deep inside him, all the way in, and as the still blind Ferguson eased his hard-on into the invisible man’s capacious hole, the professor grunted, then began to moan, then went on moaning as Ferguson’s cock moved around inside him, a wave of agonizing sounds that couldn’t be blocked out because Ferguson had not been prepared for them, unlike the visual things, which he had been prepared for and had managed to erase, but even if he covered his ears the sounds would still be heard, nothing could ever stop them, and then it was suddenly over, Ferguson’s erection was softening and shrinking, it was no longer possible to keep it up, neither the erection nor what he was doing, it was all over now, he was slipping out, he was done without being done, but done for all that, done for good.
I’m sorry, he said. I can’t go on with this.
Ferguson sat up in bed with his back turned toward Fleming, and all at once an enormous inrush of air filled his lungs, filled him to the point of choking, and then the air was rushing out of him in a single prolonged sob, a retched-up sound that was as loud as a loud cough, as loud as a dog’s bark, a chopped-off howl that shot through his windpipe, burst into the space around him, and left him gasping for breath.
No feeling ever worse than this one. No shame ever more terrible.
As Ferguson wept quietly into his hands, Fleming touched his shoulder and said he was sorry, he never should have come up to the room and asked him to do this, it was wrong, he didn’t know how it could have happened, but please, he said, you mustn’t let it get you down, it’s of no importance, they’d had too much to drink and weren’t in their right minds, it was all a mistake, and here is another thousand francs, he said, here is another fifteen hundred francs, and please, Archie, go out and spend it on something nice for yourself, something that will make you happy.
Ferguson climbed off the bed and picked up the money from the desk. I don’t want your stinking money, he said, as he crumpled up the notes in his fist. Not one bloody franc of it.
And then, still naked, he walked to the northern edge of the room, opened each half of the long double window, stepped onto the balcony, and tossed the wad of bills out into the cold January night.
5.4
He was eighteen, and she was sixteen. He was about to start college, and she was at the beginning of her junior year of high school, but before he lost any more time thinking about her, before he gave another second to imagining the possible future they might or might not have been destined to share one day, he decided the moment had come to give her the test. Linda Flagg had flunked that test three years ago, but Amy Schneiderman and Dana Rosenbloom had both passed it. Those two were the only girls he had ever loved, and while he still loved both of them in their different ways, Amy was his stepsister now and had never loved him in the way he loved her, and although Dana had loved him more than he had ever deserved to be loved by anyone, Dana was gone now and living in another country, gone from his life for good.
He knew there was something mad about the whole business, a wobbly four-in-the-morning logic to the idea that he could undo the curse of Artie’s death by falling in love with his dead friend’s sister, but there was more to it than that, he told himself, a genuine attraction to the ever more lovely Celia, who took after her lean father and bore no genetic resemblance to her stout, overweight mother, but beautiful as Celia was becoming, and sharp as her mind undoubtedly was, he had never been alone with her, not once since the day of the funeral had he ever talked to her without also talking to her parents at the same time, and it was still uncertain what she was made of, whether she was the demure and compliant middle-class girl who sat quietly at the dinner table during Ferguson’s visits to New Rochelle or whether she was a person with spirit, someone with the stuff to make him want to pursue her when the time was right.
He called it the Horn & Hardart Initiation Exam.
If she was as entranced by her first visit to the automat as he had been, as each of his high school loves had been at approximately her age, then the door would remain open and he would continue to think about Celia and wait for her to grow up.
If not, the door would shut, and he would abandon his foolish fantasy about trying to rectify the wrongs of the world and never think about opening the door again.
He called the house in New Rochelle on the Thursday after Labor Day. He wouldn’t be going down to Princeton for another two weeks, but the public schools were already in session, and he was hoping she might be free for an afternoon rendezvous this Saturday, or, if not this Saturday, the next one.
When Celia picked up the phone and heard his voice, she assumed he wanted to talk to her mother about arranging another dinner at the house. She nearly put the receiver down before he had a chance to tell her that, no, she was the one he wanted to talk to, and after asking her how it felt to be back in school (so-so) and whether she was taking biology, physics, or chemistry this year (physics), he asked whether she would be willing to meet up with him in Manhattan this Saturday or next Saturday for lunch and a movie or a visit to a museum or anything else she cared to do.
You’re joking, of course, she said.
Why would I joke?
It’s just that … well, never mind, it’s not important.
Well?
Yes, I’m free. Both this Saturday afternoon and next Saturday afternoon.
Let’s say this Saturday.
All right, Archie, this Saturday.
He met her at Grand Central Station, and after not having seen her in the past two and a half months, he was encouraged by how pretty she looked, her smooth maple-syrup skin a shade darker from a summer’s worth of sun in New Rochelle, where she had worked as a junior counselor and swimming instructor at a day camp for small children, which made her teeth and the whites of her eyes shine with an enhanced clarity, and the simple white blouse and flowing azure skirt she had put on for the afternoon suited her well, he thought, as did the pinkish-red lipstick she was wearing, which added one more dab of color to the overall picture of whites and blues and browns, and because it was a warm day, she had put up her dark, shoulder-length hair in a dancer’s knot, which exposed the back of her long, graceful neck, and so impressed was Ferguson by that overall picture as she walked toward him and shook his hand, he had to remind himself that she was still too young for him, that this was nothing more than a friendly get-together, and that beyond their initial handshake and the one they would give each other at the end of the day, he must not, under any circumstances, even think of putting a hand on her.
Here I am, she said. Now tell me why I’m here.
As they walked uptown from East Forty-second Street toward the block between Sixth and Seventh Avenues on West Fifty-seventh, Ferguson tried to explain what had prompted him to call her out of the blue, but Celia was skeptical, unconvinced by the
stories he told about why he had wanted to see her, shaking her head when he came out with nonsense such as, I’m going off to college soon, and there won’t be many chances to see each other this fall, to which she replied, Since when has seeing me ever been important to you?, such as, We’re friends, aren’t we, isn’t that enough?, to which she replied, Are we friends? You and my parents are friends, maybe, or sort of friends, but you’ve spoken a grand total of about one hundred words to me in the past four years, and why would you want to hang out with a person you barely even know is alive?
The girl had spirit, Ferguson said to himself, that much was clear, and that much was settled. She had evolved into a proud, smart girl who wasn’t afraid to speak her mind, but with that newfound assertiveness she had also acquired a talent for asking questions that had no answers, at least none he could give her without sounding like a crazy person. No matter what, he would have to keep Artie out of the discussion, but now that she had challenged his motives, he understood that he would have to give her better answers than the lame ones he had given so far, truthful answers, the whole truth about all things and every thing except her brother, and so he started again by saying that he had called her the other night because he had honestly wanted to see her, which was in fact the case, and the reason why he had wanted to see her alone was because he felt it was time they established their own one-on-one friendship, independent of her parents and the house in New Rochelle. Still reluctant to accept any of his statements as even remotely or possibly true, Celia asked him why he would bother, why he would want to spend a moment of his time with her, a mere high school girl, when he was already on his way to Princeton, and again Ferguson gave her a simple, truthful answer: Because she was a big person now, he said, and everything was different and would go on being different from now on. She had fallen into the erroneous habit of looking up to him as a much older person, but the calendar said they were only two years apart, and before long those two years would cease to count for anything and they would be the same age. To give her an example, Ferguson started talking about his stepbrother Jim, who was a full four years older than he was and yet one of his closest friends, someone who regarded him as an absolute equal, and now that Jim had flunked his army physical because of a falsely diagnosed heart murmur and had chosen to do his graduate work at Princeton, which would put them on the same campus at the same time—what luck that was—they were planning to see each other as often as they could and were even mapping out a trip together for sometime in the spring or early summer—going from Princeton to Cape Cod on foot, all the way to the northernmost tip of the cape without once stepping into a car or a train or a bus or, perish the thought, mounting a bicycle.
Celia was beginning to relent, but still she said: Jim’s your brother. That makes it different.
My stepbrother, Ferguson said. And only for the past two years.
All right, Archie, I believe you. But if you want to be my friend now, you’ll have to stop acting like my big brother, my pretend big brother. Do you understand?
Of course I do.
No more fake-brother stuff, and no more Artie stuff, because I don’t like it and never have. It’s sick and stupid and doesn’t do either one of us any good.
Agreed, Ferguson said. No more of that. Ever.
They had just turned west off Madison Avenue and were beginning to walk down Fifty-seventh Street. After fifteen blocks of doubt, perplexity, and contentious wrangling, a cease-fire had been declared, and Celia was smiling now, Celia was listening to Ferguson’s questions and telling him that of course she knew what an automat was, and of course she had heard of Horn & Hardart, but no, she admitted, as far as she could remember she had never set foot in the place, not even as a little girl. Then she asked: What is it like, and why are we going there?
You’ll see, Ferguson said.
He was willing to give her every benefit of the doubt now because he wanted her to pass the test, even to the point of bending the rules and allowing indifference to count as much as all-out, passionate enthusiasm. Only antipathy or scorn would disqualify her, he said to himself, something equivalent to the disgust he had seen in Linda Flagg’s eyes when she looked over and saw the three-hundred-pound black woman muttering to herself about the dead baby Jesus, but then, before he could take that thought any further, they had already come to the automat and were walking into that nutty glitter-box of chrome and glass, and the first words that came out of Celia’s mouth put an end to his worries before they even had a chance to turn their dollars into nickels. Holy moly, she said. What a weird and nifty place.
They sat down with their sandwiches and talked, for the most part about the summer, which in Ferguson’s case had been spent moving furniture with Richard Brinkerstaff, traveling to cemeteries to bury his grandmother and Jim and Amy’s grandfather, and writing his little saga, Mulligan’s Travels, which was going to have twenty-four parts in all, he said, each one about five or six pages long, each one an account of a voyage to another imaginary country, Mulligan’s anthropological reports for the American Society of Displaced Souls, and with twelve of those pieces now written, he was hoping the work at college wouldn’t be too crushing for him to go on with it after he moved to Princeton. As for Celia, not only had she been splashing around in pools with children during the day, she had been taking night classes at the College of New Rochelle in trigonometry and French, and now that she had earned those additional credits, she would be able to finish high school after her junior year by taking one extra course a semester, which would mean she could start college next fall, and when Ferguson asked her Why the big rush?, she told him she was fed up living in that dinky suburban town and wanted to get out and move to New York, either Barnard or NYU, she didn’t care which one, and as Ferguson listened to her enumerate the motives behind her early jailbreak, he had the sudden, vertiginous feeling that he was listening to himself, for what she was saying and thinking about her life sounded almost identical to what he had been saying and thinking for years.
Rather than compliment her on being the world’s most clever and ambitious student, which undoubtedly would have led to some talk about Artie’s good grades and how those good grades seemed to run in the family, he asked her what she wanted to do after lunch. There were several films playing that afternoon, he said, among them the new thing with the Beatles (Help!) and the latest thing from Godard, Alphaville, which Jim had already seen and couldn’t stop talking about, but Celia felt it would be more enjoyable to visit a museum or a gallery, where they could go on talking to each other rather than having to sit in the dark for two hours listening to other people talk. Ferguson nodded and said, Good point. They could walk over to Fifth Avenue, head uptown to the Frick, and spend the afternoon there looking at the Vermeers, Rembrandts, and Chardins. Okay? Yes, that was more than okay. But first, he added, one more cup of coffee before they left, and an instant later he bolted out of his chair and disappeared with their two cups.
He was gone for only a minute, but in that time Celia had noticed a man sitting at the table next to theirs, a small old man who had been blocked from her view by Ferguson’s shoulder, and when Ferguson came back with their recharged coffees and two containers of cream, he saw that Celia was looking at the man, looking at him with such distress in her eyes that Ferguson asked her if anything was wrong.
I feel so sorry for him, she said. I’ll bet he hasn’t eaten anything all day. He just sits there staring into his coffee as if he’s afraid to drink it, because once the coffee is gone, he won’t have enough money to buy another cup, and he’ll have to leave.
Ferguson, who had spotted the old man while walking back to the table, didn’t feel it would be polite to turn around and look at him again, but yes, the man had struck him as a lonely down-and-outer, a grizzled, unkempt wino with dirty fingernails and a sad leprechaun’s face, and Celia was probably right that he had just spent his last nickel.
I think we should give him something, she said.
 
; We should, Ferguson replied, but we have to remember that he hasn’t asked us for it, and if we just walk over there and hand him some money because we feel sorry for him, he might feel offended, and then all our good intentions would only make him feel worse than he already feels.
You could be right, Celia said, as she lifted her cup and brought it toward her mouth, but then again, you could be wrong.
They both finished and stood up from their chairs. Celia opened her purse, and as they walked toward the old man sitting at the next table, she reached into the purse, pulled out a dollar, and put it down in front of him.
Please, sir, she said, go and buy yourself something to eat, and the old man, taking hold of the dollar and putting it in his pocket, looked up at her and said, Thank you, miss. God bless you.
* * *
LATER WOULD BE later, no doubt a most fulfilling and instructive later, a later of more afternoons and possibly even nights with the admirable, still-too-young Celia, but now was now, and for now the world had moved to the cranberry bogs and marshy lowlands of central New Jersey, for now the world was all about being one of eight hundred incoming freshmen and trying to adjust to his new circumstances. He understood himself well enough to know that he probably wasn’t going to fit in, that there would be things about the place he wasn’t going to like, but at the same time he was determined to make the most of the things he was going to like, and to that end he had already laid down five personal commandments in advance of his departure for Princeton, five laws he meant to adhere to for the whole duration:
1) Weekends in New York whenever and as often as possible. After his grandmother’s sudden and calamitous death in July (congestive heart failure), his now widowed grandfather had given him a key to the apartment on West Fifty-eighth Street along with unrestricted use of the spare bedroom, which meant there would always be a place to crash for the night. The promise of that room represented a singular instance of desire and opportunity joined, for on most Friday afternoons Ferguson would be able to leave campus and board the one-car shuttle train from Princeton to Princeton Junction (known as the Dinky, as in dinky suburban town) and then transfer to the longer, faster train that shot north to midtown Manhattan, the new and ugly Penn Station as opposed to the old and beautiful one, which had been demolished in 1963, but architectural blunders aside, it was still New York, and the reasons for going to New York were multiple. The negative reason was that it would allow him to escape the stuffiness of Princeton for an occasional breath of fresh air (even if the air in New York wasn’t fresh), which would make the stuffiness more tolerable to him and perhaps even pleasant (in its own stuffy way) during the time he spent on campus. The positive reason was the old reason of the past: density, immensity, complexity. Another positive reason was the chance he would be given to spend time with his grandfather and to keep up his friendship with Noah, which was vital to him. Ferguson hoped he would make friends at college, he wanted to make friends, he was expecting to make friends, but would any of those friends ever be as important to him as Noah?