Mercifully, he was not aware of the cruel plan the gods had devised for him. Mercifully, he did not know he was destined to have such a brief entry in The Book of Terrestrial Life, and therefore he went on living as if there were thousands of tomorrows in front of him rather than just three hundred and four.
Two days after his mother and Gil left for Amsterdam, Ferguson backed out of going to a party with Vivian and Lisa when he found out that Fleming had been invited. It had been more than three months since the night of the money and the tears, and he had long since absolved Fleming of any blame for his part in the misunderstanding. It was the memory of what he had allowed himself to do with Fleming that continued to haunt him, the conviction that it had been his own fault, all his fault, and because Fleming hadn’t forced him to do anything he hadn’t said he was willing to do, how could he hold Fleming responsible for what had happened? It wasn’t Fleming, it was himself, his own shame, the memory of his own greed and degradation that had prompted him to rip up Fleming’s letters and not return his calls, but even if he bore no grudge against Fleming now, why would he ever want to see him again?
At breakfast in the kitchen the following morning, Vivian told him about someone she had met at the party, which had been thrown in the courtyard garden of Reid Hall, Columbia University’s outpost in Paris, a young man of twenty-five or twenty-six who had made a strong impression on her, she said, someone she thought Ferguson would like just as much as she had. A Canadian from Montreal with a white Québécquoise mother and a black American father originally from New Orleans, a person by the name of Albert Dufresne (Al-bear Du-frenn) who had graduated from Howard University in Washington, where he had played on the basketball team (something Vivian supposed would interest Ferguson, which it did), and who had moved to Paris after his father’s death, where he was working on his first novel (another thing Vivian supposed would interest Ferguson, which it did), and now that she had captured his attention, he asked her to tell him more.
Such as?
Such as, what is he like?
Intense. Intelligent. Engaged—as in engagé. Not a big sense of humor, I’m sorry to report. But very alive. Captivating. One of those burning young men who wants to turn the world upside down and reinvent it.
Unlike me, for example.
You don’t want to reinvent the world, Archie, you want to understand the world so you can find a way to live in it.
And what makes you think I’d get along with this person?
A fellow scribbler, a fellow basketball player, a fellow North American, a fellow only child, and even though his father died only a couple of years ago, a fellow fatherless boy, since his old man absconded when Albert was six and went back to live in New Orleans.
What did the father do?
Jazz trumpet, and according to his son, a hard-drinking, dyed-in-the-wool, lifelong son of a bitch.
And the mother?
A fifth-grade schoolteacher. Just like my mother.
You must have had a lot to talk about.
I should also say that Mr. Dufresne cuts a fine figure, a most unusual figure.
How so?
Tall. About six-one or six-two. Lean and muscular, I would guess, although he was standing there with his clothes on, of course, so I can’t be more precise. But he seems to be an ex-athlete who’s managed to keep himself in shape. Says he still plays hoops whenever he can.
That’s good. But I fail to see what’s unusual about it.
It’s his face, I think, the striking qualities of his face. Not only was his father black, but there’s Choctaw blood in there, too, he told me, and when you mix that up with his white mother’s genes, he comes across as a light-skinned black person with somewhat Asiatic features, Eurasian features. A remarkable skin color, I found, with a glowing, coppery cast to it, skin that’s neither dark nor pale, Goldilocks’s just right, if you know what I mean, such lovely skin that I kept wanting to touch his face while I was talking to him.
Handsome?
No, I wouldn’t go that far. But nice-looking. A face you want to look at.
And what about his … his innermost inclinations?
I can’t say for sure. Usually, I can tell right off, but this Albert is something of a puzzle. A man for other men, I’d presume, but a manly sort of man who doesn’t want to broadcast his attraction to other men.
A macho queer.
Perhaps. He mentioned James Baldwin a few times, if that means anything. He loves Baldwin above all American writers. That’s why he came to Paris, he said, because he wanted to follow in Jimmy’s footsteps.
I love Baldwin, too, and I agree that he’s the best American writer, but just because he happens to swing toward men doesn’t prove anything about the men who like his books.
Exactly. In any case, I talked about you quite a bit, and Albert seemed mightily impressed when I told him about your book, maybe even a little envious. Nineteen, he kept saying. Nineteen, and already about to be published, and there he was in his mid-twenties still grinding away at the first half of his first novel.
I hope you told him it was a short book.
I did. A very short book. And I also mentioned that you’ve been dying to play basketball. Believe it or not, he lives on the rue Descartes in the fifth, and right across the street from his building there’s an outdoor court. The fence is always locked, he says, but it’s easy to climb over it, and no one has ever given him any trouble about going in and playing there.
I’ve walked past that court a dozen times, but the French are so strict about locks and keys and regulations, I assumed I’d be deported if I tried to go in.
He said he’d like to meet you. Are you interested?
Of course I am. Let’s have dinner with him tonight. There’s that little Moroccan restaurant you like so much, the one just off the Place de la Contrescarpe, La Casbah, and the rue Descartes is right up the hill from there. If he doesn’t have other plans, maybe he could join us for a platter of couscous royale.
* * *
DINNER AT LA Casbah that night with Vivian, Lisa, and the stranger, who showed up fifteen minutes late, looking just as Vivian had described him with that remarkable skin of his and his intense, confident bearing. No, not a person given to small talk or cracking jokes, but he was capable of smiling and even laughing when he felt there was something to laugh about, and whatever hard thing had been locked up inside him was softened by the gentleness of his voice and the curiosity in his eyes. Ferguson was sitting directly across from him. He could see the whole of his face front-on, and while Vivian had probably been right to call it a less than handsome face, Ferguson found it beautiful. No thank you, Albert said, when the waiter tried to pour some wine into his glass, and then he looked at Ferguson and explained that he was off the stuff for now, which seemed to suggest he had been on it earlier, no doubt more than he should have been, an admission of a weakness, perhaps, and coming from such a restrained, self-possessed figure as Albert Dufresne, Ferguson welcomed it as a sign that the man was human, after all. Again the gentle, evenly modulated voice, which reminded Ferguson of how much he had enjoyed listening to his father’s voice when he was a boy, and with the bilingual Albert, who spoke with a small trace of a Canadian accent when he spoke French and a small trace of a French accent when he spoke his idiomatic North American English, Ferguson found himself experiencing a similar if not wholly identical sort of pleasure.
A meandering conversation that went on for two hours, with Lisa more subdued than Ferguson had ever seen her, contributing only a couple of funny interjections instead of a hundred, as if she were under the spell of the stranger and understood that her antics would have struck the wrong note with him, but how relaxed Albert seemed to be with Vivian, who had that effect on most people, of course, although in this case the effect might have been enhanced because there was something about her that echoed some quality of his mother, a person he was very close to, he said, the white mother of this black man with his despised lout of a dea
d black father, how complicated it must have been, Ferguson realized, and how much heavy baggage Albert must have been carrying with him, and then they were on to New York and the year and a half he had spent in Harlem after graduating from college, followed by the decision to come to France because America was a mass grave for every black person who lived there, especially for a black person like him (meaning a man-man person like him, Ferguson wondered, or was he referring to something else?), and then they were all talking about the long history of black American writers and artists who had come to live in Paris, the nude and numinous Josephine Baker, as Albert put it, and Richard Wright, Chester Himes, Countee Cullen, and Miles Davis in the arms of Juliette Gréco, Nancy Cunard in the arms of Henry Crowder, and Albert’s heroic Jimmy, who had been so rudely insulted by not being asked to speak at the March on Washington three years ago, he said, but with Bayard Rustin already on the list of speakers maybe they figured one black fag was enough (the evidence was mounting), and then Ferguson jumped in and started talking about Giovanni’s Room, which in his humble, heartfelt opinion was one of the bravest, most elegantly written books he had ever read (a comment that received an approving nod from Albert), and a moment later, as so often happened with dinner conversations, they were on to another subject and the two of them were talking about basketball, the Boston Celtics, and Bill Russell, which led Ferguson to ask Albert the same question he had asked Jim many years before, Why is Russell the best when he’s not even good?, to which Albert replied: But he is good, Archie. Russell could score twenty-five points a game if he wanted to. It’s just that Auerbach doesn’t need him to do that. He wants him to be the conductor of the team, and as we all know, a conductor doesn’t play an instrument. He stands up there with his baton and leads the orchestra, and even though it looks simple, if there were no conductor to do that job, the musicians would go off-key and hit all the wrong notes.
The evening ended with an invitation. If Ferguson wasn’t busy tomorrow afternoon, he could come over to Albert’s place at around four-thirty for a friendly game of one-on-one on his “private court” across the street from his building on the rue Descartes. Ferguson told Albert that he hadn’t played in months and was bound to be rusty, but yes, he said, he would love to.
Thus Albert Dufresne entered Ferguson’s life. Thus the man who would come to be known alternately as Al Bear and Mr. Bear joined the regiment as Ferguson’s comrade-in-arms for the next battle in the never-ending Bore War against the Pains of Human Existence, for unlike the two-way Aubrey Hull, who was contentedly married to his one-way Fiona and an adoring father to his two young offspring, the single, one-way Al Bear, whose innermost inclinations tilted toward the Aubreys of this world rather than the Fionas, was available for full-time combat duty, and because he lived in the same city as Ferguson, full-time meant nearly every day, at least for the time the battle lasted.
The unexpected developments of their first afternoon together, beginning with the rough, contentious games of one-on-one as the out-of-practice ex–Commando-in-Chief crashed the boards against the nimble, ex–point guard Mr. Bear, their bodies banging against each other as they tussled for loose balls and tried to block shots, three close games with twenty or thirty fouls in each one of them and the laughable twist that white-boy Ferguson could outjump black-boy Dufresne, and although Ferguson wound up losing all three games because his outside shot was horrendously off, it was clear that they were more or less evenly matched, and once Ferguson rounded into form again, Albert would have to play his hardest to keep up with him.
Climbing over the chain-link fence afterward, both of them exhausted, breathing hard, drenched in salty, sticky sweat, and then walking across the street and going up to Albert’s third-floor apartment. The order and cleanliness of the two rooms, the wall of four hundred books in the larger one with the bed and the armoire in it, the desk and the Remington typewriter in the smaller room with the pages of Albert’s novel in progress piled up in a neat stack, the light coming through the windows in the tidy, sit-down kitchen with its wooden table and four wooden chairs, and more light coming through the windows in the white tiled bathroom. Not the kinds of showers one took in America, but the handheld showers of France, standing or sitting in the tub and spraying oneself with what Ferguson called telephone nozzles, and because Ferguson was the guest, Albert kindly offered him first crack at washing up, so into the bathroom Ferguson went, where he kicked off his sneakers, removed his damp and smelly socks, shorts, and T-shirt, turned on the water, and stepped into the deep, squarish tub. An all-over dousing with the telephone nozzle held up in his right hand and water splashing down on his head, and with the noise of the water in his ears and his eyes closed to protect them from the hot liquid darts, he did not hear Albert knock on the door and did not see him enter the bathroom a moment later.
A hand was touching him on the back of his neck. Ferguson dropped his arm, let go of the showerhead, and opened his eyes.
Albert still had his shorts on, but everything else had come off.
I assume you’re okay with this, he said to Ferguson, as the hand traveled down Ferguson’s back and settled on his ass.
More than okay, Ferguson said. If it hadn’t happened, I would have walked out of here one sad and disappointed customer.
Albert put his other hand around Ferguson’s waist and pulled his body toward him. You’re such a marvelous boy, Archie, he said, and I certainly wouldn’t want you to walk out of here disappointed. In fact, it would be much better for both of us if you stayed, don’t you think?
The afternoon turned into the evening, the evening turned into the night, the night turned into the morning, and the morning turned into another afternoon. As far as Ferguson was concerned, this was it, the once-in-a-lifetime big-bang love, and for the next two hundred and fifty-six days he lived in another country, a place that was neither France nor America nor anywhere else, a new country that had no name, no borders, and no cities or towns, a country with a population of two.
That wasn’t to say that Mr. Bear was an easy person to get along with or that Ferguson didn’t go through some rough patches during those eight-plus months of sex, camaraderie, and conflict, for the baggage his new friend carried was indeed a heavy burden on him, and no matter how young or brilliant or sure of himself Albert appeared to be when he stepped out into the world, his soul was old and weary, and old and weary souls could be bitter at times, and angry at times, most especially against the souls of the ones who did not feel that same bitterness and anger. Loving as Albert was on most days, frequently with a tenderness and a warmth that overwhelmed Ferguson and made him think there was no better person in the world than the warm and tender man lying beside him in bed, Albert was also proud and competitive and given to making harsh moral judgments about others, and it didn’t help that the young one’s book was going to be published while the older one was still working on his, and it didn’t help that Ferguson’s boyish sense of humor was often at odds with Albert’s sour righteousness, the giddy splurges of madcap ideas that would come rushing out of him in moments of postcoital happiness, such as the suggestion that they shave off all the hair on their bodies, buy wigs and women’s clothes, and then go out to a restaurant or a party and see if they could pull off the gag by passing as real women. Ar-shee, Ferguson said, imitating Celestine’s pronunciation of his name, and wouldn’t it be interesting if I could actually be a she for one night? Albert’s irritable response: Don’t be stupid, he said. You’re a man. Be proud of being a man and forget about this drag-queen nonsense. If you want to change who you are, try being a black person for a day or two and see what happens to you then. Or else, after a particularly rewarding session in bed, Ferguson’s proposal that they get into the business of posing naked together for gay porno magazines, full-color feature spreads of the two of them kissing and giving each other blow jobs and fucking each other in the ass with close-ups of the cum spurting out of their cocks, wouldn’t that be a blast, Ferguson said, and just t
hink of the money they could make.
Where’s your dignity? Albert shot back at him, once again failing to realize that Ferguson was joking. And why all this talk about money? You might not get much from your parents, but Vivian takes care of you pretty damned well, it seems to me, so why talk about humiliating yourself for a handful of extra francs?
That’s just it, Ferguson said, leaving behind his whimsical fantasy to address something real, something that had been preoccupying him for the past couple of months. Vivian takes such good care of me, I’m beginning to feel like a moocher, and I don’t like that feeling, at least not anymore I don’t. There’s something wrong about taking so much from her, but I’m not allowed to work in this country, as you well know, so what am I supposed to do?
You could always hustle your ass in queer bars, Albert said. Then you’d get a real taste of what it feels like to live in the mud.
I’ve already thought about that, Ferguson answered, remembering the night of the money and the tears. I’m not interested.
As the younger of the two by seven years, Ferguson was the junior partner in the affair, the little one following the lead of the big one, which was the role he felt better suited to play, for nothing felt better to him than the feeling of living under Albert’s protection, of not having to be the responsible one or the one who was supposed to have figured everything out, and by and large Albert did protect him, and by and large he did take care of him exceedingly well. Albert was the first person he had ever known who shared his double but unified passion for the mental and the physical, the physical being first of all sex, the primacy of sex over all other human activities, but basketball and working out and running as well, running in the Jardin des Plantes, push-ups, sit-ups, squats, and jumping jacks on the court or in the apartment, and the ferocious, bruising games of one-on-one, which were challenging and fulfilling in themselves but also served as an elaborate kind of erotic foreplay, because now that he knew Albert’s body so well, it was hard not to think about the naked body hidden under Albert’s shorts and T-shirt as he moved around on the court, the splendid and deeply loved particulars of Mr. Bear’s physical self, and the mental being not just the functions and cognitive efforts of the brain but the study of books, films, and works of art, the need to write, the essential business of trying to understand or reinvent the world, the obligation to think about oneself in relation to others and to reject the enticement of living just for one’s self, and when Ferguson discovered that Albert cared about films as well as books, that is, cared about them as much as he himself now cared about books, they fell into the habit of going to films together on most evenings, all kinds of films because of Ferguson’s eclectic tastes and Albert’s willingness to follow him into any theater he chose, but of the many films they saw none was more important to them than the new film by Bresson, Au Hasard Balthazar, which opened in Paris on May twenty-fifth and which they sat through together on four consecutive nights, a film that roared into their hearts and heads with the fury of a divine revelation, Dostoyevsky’s Idiot transformed into a tale about a donkey in rural France, the downtrodden and cruelly dealt with Balthazar, emblem of human suffering and saintly forbearance, and Ferguson and Albert couldn’t get enough of it because each one of them saw the story of his own life in Balthazar’s story, each one of them felt he was Balthazar while watching the film play on-screen, and so they went back three more times after the first time, and by the end of the last showing Ferguson had taught himself how to replicate the piercing, discordant sounds that burst from the donkey’s mouth at crucial moments in the film, the asthmatic keening of a victim-creature struggling for the next breath, a horrible sound, a heartbreaking sound, and from then on, whenever Ferguson wanted to tell Albert that he was down in the dumps or aching over some injustice he had seen in the world, he would dispense with words and do his imitation of Balthazar’s atonal, in-and-out double screech, the bray from beyond, as Albert called it, and because Albert himself was incapable of letting go to that extent and therefore could not join in, every time Ferguson became the suffering donkey, he felt he was doing it for both of them.