But Ferguson hadn’t wanted to wait until then. The matter was too disturbing to be put off until the end of April, for now that Gil had lifted those sentences out of the book and isolated them from the surrounding material, Ferguson understood that he had been too harsh and deserved the scolding his stepfather had given him. It wasn’t that the passage was untrue, at least from the perspective of his eight-year-old self as remembered by his older self while he had been writing the book. His mother had been smoking too much that summer, she had been drinking straight shots of vodka and not taking care of the house, and he had been alarmed by the listlessness and passivity that had taken hold of her, at times even frightened by her numbed withdrawal from him as he sat beside her building sand castles on the beach and she looked out at the waves. The sentences Gil had transcribed in his letter depicted Ferguson’s mother at her lowest ebb, at the very bottom of her descent into grief and confusion, but the whole point had been to contrast that lost summer with what had happened to her after they returned to New York, which had marked her return to photography and the beginning of a new life, the invention of Rose Adler. It seemed that Ferguson had made too much of the contrast, however, infusing his little-boy fears and misapprehensions of adult behavior into a situation that had been less dire than he had imagined (there had been some vodka, according to what his mother had told Gil, but only two bottles over the forty-six days they had spent in Belmar), and therefore Ferguson had sat down after finishing the letter and had written contrite one-page responses to both his mother and his stepfather, apologizing for any upset he might have caused them and promising to delete the offending passage from the book.
So there he was now on the morning of April twenty-ninth standing in the lobby of the Hôtel Pont Royal with his arms around his jet-lagged mother asking her to forgive him. Outside, rain was pounding down on the streets, and as Ferguson settled his chin onto his mother’s shoulder, he looked through the front window of the hotel and saw an umbrella go flying out of a woman’s hand.
No, Archie, his mother said, I don’t need to forgive you for anything. You need to forgive me.
Gil was already standing in line at the front desk, waiting his turn to hand over their passports, sign the register, and check them into the hotel, and while he went about that tedious business, Ferguson led his mother to a bench in a corner of the lobby. She looked worn out from the trip, and if she wanted to go on talking to him as he supposed she did, it would be easier for her to do it sitting down. Worn out, Ferguson added to himself, but no more than anyone else would have been after traveling for twelve or thirteen straight hours, and looking just fine, he thought, with scarcely an iota of difference between now and the last time he had seen her six and a half months ago. His beautiful mother. His beautiful, somewhat exhausted mother, and how good it felt to be looking at her face again.
I’ve really missed you, Archie, she said. I know you’re a big person now, and you have every right to live wherever you want, but this is the longest we’ve ever been apart, and it’s taken some getting used to.
I know, Ferguson said. It’s been the same for me.
But you’re happy here, aren’t you?
Yes, most of the time. At least I think I am. Life isn’t perfect, you know. Not even in Paris.
That’s a good one. Not even in Paris. Not even in New York either, for that matter.
Tell me, Ma. Why did you say what you said a couple of moments ago—before we came over here and sat down?
Because it’s true, that’s why. Because it was wrong of me to make such a fuss.
I don’t agree. What I wrote was cruel and unfair.
Not necessarily. Not from where you were sitting as an eight-year-old boy. I’d managed to hold it together while you were going to school, but then it was vacation time, and I didn’t know what to do with myself anymore. A mess, Archie, that’s what I was, an unholy mess, and it must have been a bit scary for you to be around me then.
That’s not the point
No, you’re wrong. It is the point. You remember Jewish Wedding, don’t you?
Of course I do. Mean old cousin Charlotte and her bald, myopic husband, Mr. What’s-His-Name.
Nathan Birnbaum, the dentist.
It’s been about ten years, hasn’t it?
Almost eleven years. And I still haven’t talked to them again in all that time. You understand why, don’t you? (Ferguson shook his head.) Because they did to me what I almost did to you.
I don’t follow.
I took pictures of them that they didn’t like. Pretty good pictures, I thought. Not the most flattering pictures in the world, but good pictures, interesting pictures, and when they refused to let me publish them, I let Charlotte and Nathan disappear from my life because I thought they were a pair of fools.
What does that have to do with Laurel and Hardy?
Don’t you get it? You took a picture of me in your book. Lots of pictures, actually, dozens and dozens of them, and most of them were very flattering, some of them so flattering that I was almost embarrassed to read those things about myself, but along with all the flattering pictures there were one or two that showed me in a different light, an unflattering light, and when I read those parts of the book I felt hurt and angry, so hurt and angry that I talked to Gil about it, which I shouldn’t have done, and then he wrote that letter to you, which made you feel so bad, bad because I know the last thing you would ever want to do is hurt me, and when you wrote those little letters back to us, I felt I’d done you a wrong turn. Your book is an honest book, Archie. You told the truth in every sentence of it, and I don’t want you to revise anything or delete anything for my sake. Are you listening to me, Archie? Don’t change a word.
The week passed quickly. Vivian suspended their study sessions for the length of the visit, and although Ferguson carried on with several hours of reading in the morning, he met up with his mother and Gil every afternoon for lunch and then remained with them until it was time to come home and go to bed. Many things had changed in the months since he had left New York, and yet everything was essentially the same. Gil had finished his book on Beethoven after seven years of work, and he seemed to have no regrets about giving up the pressures of reviewing and journalism for the quieter life of teaching music history at Mannes. Ferguson’s mother continued to make portraits of well-known people for magazines and was slowly assembling a new book about the anti-war movement at home (she was vehemently pro-anti). She took the small Leica and several rolls of film with her everywhere they went during those days, snapping picture after picture of the protest signs that had gone up all over Paris (U.S. OUT OF VIETNAM, YANKEE GO HOME, À BAS LES AMERLOQUES, LE VIETNAM POUR LES VIETNAMIENS) along with numerous shots of Paris street scenes and a couple of rolls of just Ferguson and Gil, both singly and together. The three of them looked at paintings in the Louvre and the Jeu de Paume, they went to the Salle Pleyel for a performance of Haydn’s Mass in Time of War (Ferguson and his mother both thought it was extraordinary, but Gil answered their enthusiasm with a pained smile, which meant it hadn’t been up to snuff for him), and one night after dinner Ferguson coaxed them into traveling to the Action Lafayette for a ten o’clock screening of Mervyn LeRoy’s Random Harvest, a film they all agreed had enough horseshit in it to fill up four stables, but, as Ferguson’s mother pointed out, how enjoyable it was to watch Greer Garson and Ronald Colman pretending to be in love.
Needless to say, Ferguson told them about the letter from Io Books. Needless to say, his mother said she would be glad to donate a negative of Archie for the cover. Needless to say, Ferguson took them upstairs and showed them his room on the sixth floor. Needless to say, his mother and Gil reacted differently to what they saw. His mother gasped and said: Oh, Archie, is it really possible? Gil, on the other hand, clapped him on the shoulder and said: Anyone who can make a go of it in here has my full and enduring respect.
Other matters were not so simple or pleasant for Ferguson, however, and several time
s throughout the week he found himself in the uncomfortable position of having to hold things back from them or having to tell them lies. When his mother asked if he had met any nice girls, for example, he made up a story about a brief flirtation with an attractive Italian student named Giovanna who had been in his language class at the Alliance Française. It was true that Giovanna had been in the class, but other than two thirty-minute conversations in the café around the corner from the school, nothing had developed between them. Nor had anything developed between him and Béatrice, the highly intelligent French girl who worked as an assistant at the Galerie Maeght and was supposedly someone he had dated for a month or two. Yes, Béatrice worked for the gallery, and they had sat next to each other at a Maeght vernissage dinner back in December, flirting in a mild, unfocused sort of way, but when Ferguson called to ask her out, she turned him down with the excuse that she was engaged to be married, something she hadn’t bothered to mention at the dinner. No, he couldn’t talk to his mother about girls because there hadn’t been any girls except for the five overweight and underweight hookers he had found in the streets of Les Halles, and he wasn’t about to talk to her about them, nor was he was going to break her heart by talking about Aubrey and how excited he had been when the ruler of the elves had pushed his stiffened cock deep into his ass. She could never know any of those things about him. There were zones of his life that had to be walled off from her and guarded with utmost vigilance, and because of that they could never be as close to each other as they had once been, as he still wanted them to be. That wasn’t to say he hadn’t lied to her in the past, but he was older now and the circumstances were different, and yet even as he walked around Paris with her and rejoiced in how happy she looked, rejoiced in how fully she continued to stand behind him, those days were tinged with sadness as well, a feeling that some essential part of him was on the verge of melting away and disappearing from his life forever.
There were three dinners with Vivian that week, two in restaurants and one at the apartment on the rue de l’Université, a small dinner with just the four of them and no other guests, not even Lisa, who normally came to all of Vivian’s parties. Ferguson was a bit surprised when he was told that Lisa wouldn’t be joining them, but then he thought about it for a couple of minutes and understood that Vivian was protecting herself, which was exactly what he would have done if he had been in her place. Like him, she had a dirty secret to hide from the world, and even though Gil was an old friend, he apparently knew nothing about the complicated marriage she had built with Jean-Pierre and nothing about what she had been up to since Jean-Pierre’s death and therefore could not be exposed to the spectacle of dining with Vivian’s new female bed partner. Shades of Aunt Mildred and the cowgirl in Palo Alto four years ago, Ferguson said to himself, but with this crucial difference: even at fifteen, he hadn’t cared and hadn’t been shocked, but while the fifty-two-year-old Gil might have thought he wouldn’t care, he almost certainly would have been shocked.
As the four of them sat around the dining room table that evening, Ferguson was comforted to see how well Vivian and his mother got along, how rapidly they had turned into friends after just a few encounters, but the two women were bound together now because of Gil and their admiration for each other (how many times had Vivian talked about his mother’s exceptional photographs?) and also because of him, his mother’s displaced son now living under Vivian’s roof, and again and again since coming to Paris his mother had told him how grateful she was to Vivian for taking care of him and studying with him and giving him so much, and at the dinner that night she was saying those things directly to Vivian herself, thanking her for watching over her rascal of a boy, and yes, Vivian said, That imp of yours can be quite a handful at times, the two of them teasing him because they both knew he could take it and didn’t mind, for not only did he not mind but he actually enjoyed being teased by them, and in the middle of that lighthearted, anti-Archie mockathon, it occurred to him that Vivian had a better grasp of who he was now than his mother did. Not only had she worked on the manuscript of his book with him, not only were they plowing their way through the one hundred most important works in Western literature together, but she knew everything about his split-in-two inner self and was, undoubtedly, the most trusted confidant he had ever had. A second mother? No, not that. No need for more mothers at this late date. But what? More than a friend, less than a mother. His female twin, perhaps. The person he would have become if he had been born a girl.
On the last day, he stopped by the Hôtel Pont Royal to see them off. The city was at its best and most beautiful that morning, a bright blue sky overheard, the air warm and clear, good smells floating out of the neighborhood boulangeries, pretty girls in the streets, honking cars, farting mopeds, the whole glorious, Gershwinian dazzle of Springtime in Paris, the Paris of a hundred cornball songs and Technicolor movies, but the fact was that it truly was glorious and inspiring, it truly was the best place on earth, and yet as Ferguson walked from the apartment house on the rue de l’Université to the hotel on the rue Montalembert, even as he took note of the sky and the smells and the girls, he was struggling against the immense weight that had fallen upon him that morning, the dumb and childish dread of having to say good-bye to his mother. He didn’t want her to go. A week hadn’t been long enough, even if a part of him knew he would be better off with her gone, that bit by bit he always turned into a baby again when he was with her, but now the ordinary sadness of another farewell had mutated into a premonition that he would never see her again, that something was going to happen to her before they had another chance to be together and that this good-bye would be their last one. A ridiculous thought, he said to himself, the stuff of feebleminded romantic fantasies, a surge of adolescent angst in its most embarrassing form, but the thought was in him now and he didn’t know how to get rid of it.
When he arrived at the hotel, he found his mother in a whirling state of hustle and excitement, wrapped up in the moment with no time to talk about dark premonitions of fatal diseases and deadly accidents, for on this particular morning she was going to the Gare du Nord, she was going to Amsterdam, she was on her way out of Paris to another city, another country, another adventure was about to begin, and there were satchels and suitcases to be loaded into the trunk of the taxi, there were last-minute peeks into her handbag to make sure she had Gil’s stomach tablets with her, there were tips to be handed out and doormen and bellhops to thank and say good-bye to, and after giving her son a quick and ebullient farewell hug, she turned to head for the cab, but just as Gil opened the door for her and she was about to climb into the backseat, she turned around and blew Ferguson a big, smiling kiss. Be a good boy, Archie, she said, and suddenly the bad feeling he had been carrying around with him since early in the morning went away.
As he watched the taxi disappear around the corner, Ferguson decided he was going to ignore his mother’s wishes and cut the passage from the book.
* * *
THE BAD FEELING vanished, but as events would prove ten months later, Ferguson’s premonition had not been wrong. The farewell hug he exchanged with his mother on May sixth was the last time they ever touched each other, and once she climbed into the backseat of the taxi and Gil shut the door, Ferguson never saw her again. They spoke to each other on the telephone, one call on the night of his twentieth birthday in March 1967, but after Ferguson hung up the receiver, he never heard her voice again. His premonition had not been wrong, but neither had it been exactly on the mark. The deadly accident or disease that Ferguson had imagined would strike down his mother did not happen to her but to him, in his case a traffic accident that occurred during his visit to London to celebrate the publication of his book, which meant that after he said good-bye to his mother in Paris on May 6, 1966, he had three hundred and four days to live.