* * *
IT WAS SERIOUS. Not a one-time fling to be forgotten in the morning—but the beginning of something, the first step of many steps to follow. Ferguson didn’t care that she was older than he was, he didn’t care if anyone knew about them, he didn’t care if people talked. However inappropriate it might have been for a thirty-one-year-old woman to be carrying on with an eighteen-year-old boy, there was nothing the law could do about it, since Ferguson was past the age of consent and they were aboveboard and absolutely untouchable. If society looked upon what they were doing as wrong, then society could go on looking at them and lump it.
It wasn’t just the sex, although the sex was a large part of it, as much for the still young Evie as for the sex-deprived Ferguson, who walked around with the permanent hard-on of all young men and couldn’t get enough, the two of them trapped by the need to enfold themselves in each other and tangle up their arms and legs in frantic surges of carnal oblivion, florid, demonstrative sex that emptied them out and left them gasping for air, or else the long, slow arousals of touching skin as softly and delicately as possible and waiting until they couldn’t wait anymore, the generosity of it all, the alternating sweetness and violence of it all, and because Ferguson’s erotic history had been limited to only one other bed partner so far, the slender, light-boned Dana with her small breasts and narrow hips, the larger, more substantial Evie presented him with a new form of womanhood that was both thrilling and strange at first, then thrilling and not strange, then strange all over again because everything about sex was strange. That first of all, but by no means all of it. The bond of bodies. Bucking bodies and languid bodies, warm bodies and hot bodies, buttocks bodies, moist bodies, cock and pussy bodies, neck bodies and shoulder bodies, finger bodies and fingering bodies, hand and lip bodies, licking bodies, and always and ever face bodies, their two faces looking at each other both in and out of bed, and no, Evie’s face was not beautiful, it could not be judged as even vaguely pretty by whatever standards were in force that year, too much nose, an angular Italian phiz with too many angles in it, but what eyes to look at him with, burning brown eyes that bored clear into him and never flinched or faked a feeling that wasn’t there, and the charm of her slightly crooked two front teeth, which gave her the smallest hint of an overbite and turned her mouth into the sexiest mouth anywhere in America, and best of all he got to spend the night with her, which had not been possible with Dana more than two or three times, but now it was every time, and the prospect of waking up in the morning next to Evie helped him to fall into the profoundest, most blissful slumbers he had ever known.
They saw each other on the weekends, every weekend in New York until his grandfather returned from Florida in early April, and Ferguson’s already split life was now spent jumping across an ever-growing void between campus and city, five nights a week in one place, two nights a week in the other, schoolwork and classes from Monday morning to Friday morning with no time for Mulligan because he was a Walt Whitman scholar and wasn’t allowed to fuck up, and therefore it was imperative that he finish all Princeton obligations before he left for the city at noon on Friday (reading assignments, papers, studying for tests, discussing Zeno and Heraclitus with Howard), and then he would return to the other half of his double life in New York, which meant Evie from the moment she rang the doorbell on Friday between six and seven, Mulligan during the Friday hours before she showed up, Mulligan for four hours on Saturday and Sunday mornings as Evie corrected papers, read books, and prepared her classes for the week, then lunch and out into the city together, followed by Saturday nights with his friends or her friends or just the two of them at films, plays, concerts, or in the apartment rolling around on the bed, and the second half of their truncated Sundays as they returned to the quiet of the bedroom after brunch, talking or not talking until four, five, or six, when they would finally force themselves to put on their clothes and Evie would drive him down to Penn Station. That was always the worst part of it—saying good-bye, and then the train ride back to Princeton on Sunday evening. No matter how many times he made that trip, he never got used to it.
She was the only person who had read every story he had written in the past three years. She was the only person he had ever opened up to about the self-lacerating restrictions he had imposed on himself after Artie Federman’s death. She was the only person who understood the depth of the bitterness he felt toward his father. She was the only person who fully grasped the nature of the havoc roiling inside him, the contradictory muddle of hard, unforgiving judgments and raging contempt for big-dollar American greed combined with an overall gentleness of spirit, his unstinting love for the people he cared about, his good-boy rectitude and out-of-step clumsiness with his own heart. Evie knew him better than anyone else. She knew how exceptionally odd he was and yet how breathtakingly normal he appeared to be, as if he were an extraterrestrial who had just landed in his flying saucer, she said to him one night back in July (before the incident with the doorbell, before they even suspected they would wind up going to bed together), a man from outer space dressed in the same clothes as any other twentieth-century Earthling, the most dangerous spy in the universe, and the exceptionally odd person with the normal exterior had been oddly comforted by her words, for that was precisely how he wanted to think of himself, and it was gratifying to think she was the only one who knew it.
They weren’t as brave as he had been expecting them to be, however. The all-public, who-gives-a-damn approach to what they were doing could not work without certain exceptions, for it quickly became apparent that some people would have to be kept in the dark for their own good—and for Ferguson and Evie’s good as well. In Ferguson’s case, that meant his mother, and because of his mother, it also meant Dan, Amy, and Jim. In Evie’s case, that meant her mother in the Bronx, her brother and his wife in Queens, and her sister and her husband in Manhattan. All of her relatives would be scandalized, Evie said, and while Ferguson didn’t think his mother’s response would be as strong as that, she was bound to be upset, or worried, or confused, and it wouldn’t be worth the trouble to explain himself to her, since all his justifications would probably leave her only more upset, more worried, or more confused. With Evie’s friends in Manhattan, on the other hand, there were no impediments to full exposure. They were actors, jazz musicians, and journalists, and they were all sophisticated enough not to care. The same held true for Ferguson’s smaller collection of New York acquaintances (why would Ron Pearson care?), but Noah was a potential stumbling block, in that he was more than just a friend but Ferguson’s cousin by marriage, and although it seemed unlikely that Noah would ever have a reason to talk to his father about his cousin’s love life, there was always a chance that it could slip out at some unguarded moment while Mildred happened to be eavesdropping in the next room, but that was a chance he would have to take, Ferguson decided, since Noah’s friendship was too important to him, and he trusted Noah enough to be able to count on his silence if he asked him to be silent, which Noah did, did without hesitation the moment he was asked, and as young Marx raised his right arm and solemnly promised to keep his trap shut, he congratulated Ferguson on having won the affections of an older woman. When Ferguson introduced them for the first time, Noah shook Evie’s hand and said, The famous Mrs. Monroe at last. Archie’s been talking about you for years, and now I see why. Some men have the hots for Marilyn, even though she’s no longer with us, but for Archie it’s always been Evelyn, and who can blame him for having the hots for you?
And who can blame me for having the hots for Archie? Evie said. It all works out rather beautifully, doesn’t it?
* * *
TWO WEEKS AFTER that night, Evie opened the door of her soul and let Ferguson in.
It was another Saturday, another one of the good Saturdays in the middle of another one of their good weekends in New York, and they had just returned to the apartment on West Fifty-eighth Street from a small dinner with some of Evie’s musician friends. Rather
than go straight to the bedroom as they normally did after their Saturday night outings, Evie took Ferguson’s hand and led him into the living room, saying there was something she wanted to talk to him about first, and so they sat down on the couch together, Ferguson lit up a Camel, passed the cigarette to Evie, who took one drag and gave it back to Ferguson, and then she said:
Something has happened to me, Archie. Something big. I was supposed to have my period on Monday, but it didn’t come. Most of the time, I’m right on schedule, but every now and then I might be off by a day or half a day, so I didn’t think much about it, assuming it would come on Tuesday, but nothing happened on Tuesday either. Exceptional. Almost unprecedented. Deeply curious. In the past, that would be the moment when I’d start to panic, wondering if I was pregnant or not, playing out the grim possibilities in my head, since I’ve never wanted to be pregnant, or at least I don’t think I have, and I suppose the two abortions prove that—one in my sophomore year at Vassar, one about a year after Bobby and I were married. But now, and by now I mean Tuesday, four days ago, with my period two days late, for the first time in my life I wasn’t worried. What if I’m pregnant? I asked myself. Would it matter? No, I answered myself, it wouldn’t matter. It would be pretty damned terrific. Never in my life, Archie—never once have I had that thought and said those words to myself. Wednesday. Still no blood. Not only was I not worried anymore, I felt on top of the world.
And? Ferguson asked.
And Thursday it was over. The whole world poured out of me, and I’m still bleeding as if I’d been stabbed in the gut. I mean, you know that. You slept with me last night.
Yes, there was a lot of blood. More than usual. Not that I cared, of course.
Not that I cared either. But the important thing is this, Archie: Something has happened to me. I’m different now.
Are you sure?
Yes, absolutely sure. I want to have a baby.
It took a while before Ferguson understood what she was talking about, the mountain of unexplained particulars and daunting questions such as who would be the father of that child, and how did she propose to become a mother without being married, and, if she wasn’t married or living with someone, how could she go on teaching and be a mother at the same time if she didn’t have the money to pay for a nurse or babysitter?
Evie deflected those questions by taking him on a short tour of her inner life, with a heavy emphasis on the love and sex part of that life, the boys and men she had fallen for over the years between girlhood and now, the good and bad decisions she had made, the ephemeral dalliances and longer commitments that had all come to nothing in the end, the worst mistake being her impossible early marriage to Bobby Monroe, which had lasted all of two and a half years, and the surprising thing about those passions and hopes and disappointments, Evie said, was that no one had ever made her happier than he did, her boy-man Archie, her irreplaceable Archie, and for the first time in her life she was with someone she felt she could trust, someone she could love without simultaneously dreading the moment when she would be slapped down for loving too hard or too much. No, Archie, she said, you’re not like any of the others. You’re the first man who isn’t afraid of me. It’s a remarkable thing, really, and I’m trying to live it as fully as I can, because deep down you know and I know that it isn’t going to last.
Not last? Ferguson said. How can you say that?
Because it can’t. Because it won’t. Because you’re still too young, and sooner or later we won’t be right for each other anymore.
That was the nub of it, Ferguson realized, the anticipation of a time when they would no longer be together, a future time when all that was happening now would disappear and they would be turned into memory-ghosts living on in each other’s minds, insubstantial beings without skin or bones or hearts, and that was why she was thinking about babies now and wanted one of her own—because of him, because she wanted him to be the father, a ghost-father who would bequeath his body to her child and go on living with her forever.
It made sense. And then again, it made no sense at all.
It wasn’t anything urgent, she said, and it wasn’t anything she wanted him to think about very often, simply that the possibility would be there now, a thing to tuck away in the back of their heads and then go on as before, and no, she wasn’t asking him to take any responsibility, he wouldn’t even have to sign the birth certificate if he didn’t want to, it would be her job and not his, and thank God women didn’t have to be married in order to have children, she said, and then she started to laugh, to let loose with the big laugh of someone who had made up her mind and was no longer afraid of anything.
* * *
THEY WENT ON as before. The only difference was that Evie left her diaphragm at home and Ferguson stopped buying condoms.
He wasn’t disturbed by the thought of becoming a father, just as he hadn’t been disturbed by the thought of becoming a husband when he proposed to Dana. What did disturb him was the thought of losing Evie. Now that she had made her pessimistic declaration about their eventual demise as a couple, he was determined to prove her wrong. However, if time should prove her right, then he would follow her example and try to make the most of the time they still had together by living it as fully as he could.
It was possible that he was no longer thinking clearly, but it didn’t feel that way to Ferguson. His eyes were open, and the world was teeming around him.
Months passed.
He wrote the twenty-fourth chapter of Mulligan’s Travels, an account of Mulligan’s strenuous journey home from a country in the midst of a three-pronged civil war. Ferguson’s book was finished, all one hundred and thirty-one double-spaced pages of it, but rather than burn the manuscript as he had been planning to do, he dug into his savings and shelled out the irrational sum of one hundred and fifty dollars to hire a professional typist to make three copies for him (an original plus two carbons), which he then gave as presents to Evie, Howard, and Noah. They all professed to like it. That reassured Ferguson, but he was sick of Mulligan by then and was already dreaming about his next project, a risky venture called The Scarlet Notebook.
Celia Federman was accepted by Barnard and NYU and would be starting Barnard in the fall, with the intention of majoring in biology. Ferguson sent her a bouquet of white roses. They still talked on the phone from time to time, but after Bruce and Evie came into their lives, there had been no more Saturdays in New York.
Howard and Ferguson decided to go on rooming together until the end of college. Next year, they would be taking their meals at the Woodrow Wilson Club, which was not an eating club but rather an anti-eating club for students who didn’t want to join a club. Some of the smartest undergraduates ate there. The cozy dining room had about twenty small tables for four people each, which made it a kind of anti-cafeteria cafeteria, and one of the good things about it was that professors often came to give informal talks after dessert. Howard and Ferguson were planning to invite Nagle to discuss one of their best-loved fragments from Heraclitus: If you do not hope, you will never stumble upon the unhoped for, which is sealed off and impenetrable.
Noah informed him that he was planning to spend the summer working on his long-deferred idea of adapting Sole Mates into a short black-and-white film. When Ferguson told him not to waste his time on that juvenile rot, Noah said, Too late, Archibald, I’ve already written the script, and the sixteen-millimeter camera is on loan for a total of zero cents.
Jim was questioning his future in the Princeton Physics Department, and after months of doubt and inner struggle he had more or less decided to stop after his masters and become a high school science teacher. I’m not the hotshot I thought I was, he said, and I don’t want to spend my life as a second-rate assistant working in someone else’s lab. Besides, he and his girlfriend Nancy wanted to get married, and that meant he would have to find a real job with a real salary and become a full-fledged member of the real world. Ferguson and Jim postponed their plans to walk to C
ape Cod, but when Easter vacation rolled around in April, they made the trek from Princeton to Woodhall Crescent on foot, about thirty-five miles in a straight line on the map but over forty on Jim’s pedometer. Just to see if they could do it. Of course it rained that day, and of course they were soaked by the time they walked up the front steps of the house and rang the bell.
Amy joined SDS and found herself a new boyfriend, a fellow freshman from Brandeis who happened to come from Newark and also happened to be black. Luther Bond. What a good name, Ferguson thought, as Amy told it to him over the phone, but what about your father, he asked, does he know anything about it yet? No, of course not, Amy said, are you kidding? Don’t worry, Ferguson said, Dan isn’t like that, he won’t care. Amy grunted. Don’t bet on it, she said. And when do I get to meet him? Ferguson asked. Anytime you like, Amy said, anywhere you like, just as long as the place isn’t Woodhall Crescent.