Similar tastes in most things, similar responses to books and films and people (Albert adored Vivian), but as far as their writing went, they had fallen into a standoff because neither one of them could find the courage to show his work to the other. Ferguson wanted Albert to read his book, but he was reluctant to force it on him, and since Albert never asked to see it, Ferguson held back and said nothing, nor did he share any news with him about the copyedited manuscript Aubrey had sent from London, the decision to use his mother’s photograph on the cover, or the selection of ten Laurel and Hardy stills and ten other stills from movies released in late 1954 and 1955 (among them Marilyn Monroe in There’s No Business Like Show Business, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis in Artists and Models, Kim Novak and William Holden in Picnic, Marlon Brando and Jean Simmons in Guys and Dolls, and Gene Tierney and Humphrey Bogart in The Left Hand of God). Nor did he say a word about the first-pass galleys, the second-pass galleys, or the bound galleys after they showed up in early July, late July, and early September, and not once did he mention the letter he received from Aubrey telling him that Paul Sandler at Random House in New York (Ferguson’s ex-uncle Paul) would be copublishing an American edition of the book one month after it was released in England.
When Ferguson asked Albert if he could have a look at the first half of his novel in progress (a bit more than two hundred pages, apparently), Albert said it was still too rough and that he couldn’t show it to anyone until it was finished. Ferguson said he understood, which in fact was true, since he hadn’t shown his book to anyone until it was finished either, but at least maybe he could tell him what the title was. Albert shook his head, claiming the book didn’t have one yet, or rather that he was toying with three different possibilities and still hadn’t decided which one he preferred, an answer that could have been true or could have been a polite evasion. The first time Ferguson had stepped into Albert’s study, the manuscript had been sitting on the desk near the Remington typewriter, but after that day the manuscript had disappeared, no doubt into one of the drawers of the large wooden desk. On several occasions during the months they spent together, Ferguson found himself alone in the apartment while Albert was out on an errand somewhere in the neighborhood, which meant he could have gone into the study and pulled out the manuscript from the drawer it was hiding in, but Ferguson never did that because he didn’t want to be the kind of person who did those sorts of things, who betrayed the trust of others and broke promises and acted underhandedly when no one was watching, for taking a look at Albert’s manuscript would have been just as bad as stealing it or burning it, an act of such repugnant disloyalty that it would have been unforgivable.
Albert kept his book a secret, but in other ways he was surprisingly unwithheld, at times even eager to talk about himself, and in their first weeks together Ferguson came to know many things about his past. Abandoned by his father at six, just as he had told Vivian on the night they met at Reid Hall, but then, after seventeen years of no contact, remembered in his father’s will, remembered to the tune of sixty thousand dollars, enough money to live on in Paris for five years or more with nothing to worry about except his novel. His closeness to his mother, who had been booted out of her strict Roman Catholic family after marrying a black man, and even after the black man left and the family was willing to forgive and forget, his strong, spirited mother had stayed booted out on purpose because she wasn’t willing to forgive or forget. Montreal, a city not devoid of black people and mixed-race people, a city where Albert had thrived as a pup, a top boy in sports, a top boy in school, but by mid-adolescence the growing knowledge that he was different from most boys whether black or white or mixed and the fear that his mother would find out, which Albert felt would have devastated her, and so he had left Montreal at seventeen for college in America at all-black Howard in mostly black Washington, a fine school but a rotten place to live, and bit by bit during his first year down there he had come undone. First booze, then cocaine, then heroin, the big crash into apathetic confusion and enraged certainty, a lethal mixture that sent him limping back to Montreal and into the arms of his mother, but better to be a drug-addict son than a faggot-son, he reasoned, and then she dragged him off to the Laurentian Mountains for the summer and locked him up in a barn for what she called the Miles Davis Cure, four straight days of vomiting and shitting and screaming, the shaking and wailing grotesqueries of cold-turkey detox, the brutal confrontation with his own pathetic nothingness and the puny god who refused to watch over him, and then his mother led him out of the barn and sat with him quietly for the next two months as he learned how to eat again and think again and stop feeling sorry for himself. Back to Howard in the fall, and from that day on not a drop of wine, beer, or booze, not a whiff of grass or a snort of coke, clean for the past eight years but still frightened to his bones that he would lapse and die an O.D. death, and when Albert told Ferguson that story on the third day they were together, Ferguson resolved to stop drinking in Albert’s presence, he who took such pleasure in alcohol and enjoyed drinking wine almost as much as he enjoyed having sex would no longer drink with dear Mr. Bear, and no, it wasn’t fun, it wasn’t fun at all, but it was necessary.
* * *
TEN DAYS AFTER that third day, Ferguson started writing again. His original plan had been to tiptoe back into it by looking over some of his old high school articles to see if anything could be salvaged from them, but after a close examination of the piece on John Ford’s non-Westerns, which he had once felt was the best essay he had written, he found it crude and wanting, not worth thinking about anymore. He had come so far since then, and why go back when everything in him was crying out to go forward? He had accumulated enough good examples to begin writing the article about the representation of childhood in films, and the ever-evolving “Junkyards and Geniuses” had been given the simpler, more direct title of “Films and Movies,” a distinction that would allow him to explore the often fuzzy line between art and entertainment, but in the middle of his deliberations about which piece to write first, something new had come up, something big enough to encompass both of those ideas, and Ferguson was ready to dig in.
Gil had sent a letter from Amsterdam along with a package of books, pamphlets, and postcards from the Anne Frank House at Prinsengracht 263, which he and Ferguson’s mother had visited on their last day in the city. It was a museum now, Gil wrote, and the public could climb the stairs up to the Secret Annex and stand in the room where young Anne Frank had written her diary, and because he remembered how taken Ferguson had been with that book when he’d read it with his eighth-grade English class at the Riverside Academy, swept up in it to such a degree that you confessed to having a “gigantic crush” on Anne Frank and once went so far as to say you were “madly in love with her,” I thought the enclosed material would interest you. I know there’s something unseemly about the fetishization of this poor girl, Gil continued. After the bestselling book, and then the play and the movie, Anne Frank has been turned into the kitsch representative of the Holocaust for the non-Jewish population in America and elsewhere, but one can’t blame Anne Frank for that, Anne Frank is dead, and the book she wrote is a fine piece of work, the work of a budding writer with genuine talent, and I must say that your mother and I were both deeply moved by our visit to that house. After you told us about the essay you’re planning to write about children in films, I couldn’t help thinking of you when I looked at the pictures Anne had taped onto a wall in the Secret Annex, cutouts from newspapers and magazines of Hollywood stars—Ginger Rogers, Greta Garbo, Ray Milland, the Lane sisters—which led me to buy you the book of her writings not connected to the diary, Tales from the House Behind. Take a look at the story “Dreams of Movie Stardom,” a wish-fulfillment fantasy about a seventeen-year-old European girl named Anne Franklin (Anne Frank did not live to be seventeen) who writes to Priscilla Lane in Hollywood and is eventually invited to spend her summer vacation with the Lane family. A long trip by air across the ocean, then across the Am
erican continent, and once she lands in California, Priscilla takes her to the Warner Bros. studio, where the girl is photographed and tested—and winds up with a job modeling tennis outfits. What a delirium! And remember, too, Archie, the photograph that Anne F. pasted into her diary with the caption “This is a photograph of me as I wish I looked all the time. Then I might have a chance of getting into Hollywood.” The slaughter of millions, the end of civilization, and a little Dutch girl destined to die in a camp is dreaming of Hollywood. You might want to think about this.
That became Ferguson’s next project, an essay of as yet undetermined length entitled “Anne Frank in Hollywood.” Not only would he write about children in films, he would write about the effect of films on children, especially Hollywood films, and not just American children but children from around the world, for he remembered having read somewhere about the young Satyajit Ray in India writing a fan letter to juvenile star Deanna Durbin in California, and by using Ray and Anne Frank as his principal examples, he would also be able to explore the art-entertainment divide he had been thinking about ever since he’d started thinking about films. The lure of entering a parallel world of glamour and freedom, the desire to align oneself with the larger-than-real and better-than-real stories of others, the self levitating out of itself and leaving the earth behind. Not an insignificant subject, and in Anne Frank’s case, a matter of life and death. Movies and films. His once beloved Anne, his still beloved Anne, trapped in the Secret Annex and longing to go to Hollywood, dead at fifteen, murdered in Bergen-Belsen at age fifteen, and then Hollywood made a movie about the last years of her life and turned her into a star.
You have no idea how precious these things are to me, Ferguson wrote to his stepfather, thanking him for the letter and the books. They’ve crystalized my thoughts and given me a new way into what I want to write about next. Serious. Because of you, the thrust of the thing has been lifted up to a new level of seriousness, and I can only hope I have it in me to do it justice. Tennis outfits. Barbed-wire villages watched over by machine guns. Greta Garbo laughing for the first time. Romping on the beaches of California as a typhoid epidemic breaks out in the capital of Mud. Time for cocktails, everyone. Time for the lime pits, my starved little dying children. How can we love one another anymore? How can we go on thinking our selfish thoughts anymore? You were there, Gil, you saw it firsthand and breathed in the smells, and yet you’ve given your life to music. Impossible to tell you how much I admire you and love you.
* * *
BEING WITH ALBERT meant not being with Albert for the bulk of the daylight hours. Albert on the rue Descartes adding words to his novel, Ferguson in his chambre de bonne reading the books on Gil’s list and working on his essay, and then at around five o’clock Ferguson would put down his pen and walk over to Albert’s place, where they sometimes played basketball and sometimes didn’t, and depending on whether they did or didn’t, afterward they would walk down to the noisy market on the rue Mouffetard and shop for dinner, or else not shop for dinner and go to a restaurant later, and because Ferguson couldn’t afford to eat in restaurants, Albert would pay for his share of the check (he was consistently generous with money and again and again would tell Ferguson to eat up and forget about it), and then, after going or not going to a movie (usually going), they would return to the third-floor apartment across from the basketball court and crawl into bed together, except on the evenings when Albert came to dinner at Vivian’s apartment and would spend the night in Ferguson’s little room on the sixth floor.
Ferguson imagined it would go on forever, and if not forever a long time, many more months and years of time, but after two hundred and fifty-six days of living in that enthralling routine, the thing he had been dreading about his mother on the morning he’d said good-bye to her in May weirdly and unexpectedly happened to Albert’s mother. A telegram at seven A.M. on January twenty-first while the two of them were still asleep in Albert’s bed on the rue Descartes, the concierge knocking loudly on the door and saying, Monsieur Dufresne, un télégramme urgent pour vous, and all of a sudden they were both climbing out of bed and jumping into their clothes, and then Albert was reading the telegram, the blue telegram with the black news that his mother had tripped and fallen down a flight of stairs in her Montreal apartment house and was dead at the age of sixty. Albert said nothing. He handed the telegram to Ferguson and continued to say nothing, and by the time Ferguson had finished reading the telegram, which ended with the words COME HOME AT ONCE, Albert had begun to howl.
He left for Canada at one in the afternoon that same day, and because there were many complicated family matters and financial matters to attend to while he was there, and because he decided to go down to New Orleans after he buried his mother to find out more about his father’s life, as he put it in a letter to Ferguson, he wound up staying on the other side of the world for two months, and because Ferguson had only forty-three days left to live on the day of Albert’s departure from Paris, they never saw each other again.
* * *
FERGUSON WAS CALM. He knew that Albert would be coming back at some point, and meanwhile he would forge on with his work and take advantage of Albert’s absence to resume his old habit of drinking wine at dinner, glass after glass of drunk-making wine if necessary, for even though he was calm, he was also worried about Albert, who had been hammered by the telegram and had seemed half-deranged when they’d hugged good-bye at the airport, and what if he couldn’t hold it together and stumbled into using again? Stay calm, he said to himself, and have another glass of wine, stay calm and keep pushing forward. The Anne Frank essay was more than a hundred pages long by now and had grown into a book, another book that would take at least another year to finish, but then it wasn’t January anymore, it was February, and with the publication of Laurel and Hardy just one month away, he was beginning to find it hard to concentrate.
Aubrey had not returned to Paris since his brief visit in April, but he and Ferguson had written to each other a couple of dozen times over the past ten months. So many large and small details to go over concerning the book, but also jocular and affectionate allusions to the hours they had spent together in the fifth-floor room of the Hôtel George V, and even though Ferguson had written that he was more or less shacked up with someone in Paris, the ruler of the elves remained undaunted and was fully prepared for a repeat performance or several performances during his author’s upcoming visit to London. That seemed to be how things worked in the no-woman world Ferguson was traveling in now. As Albert had once explained to him, the fidelity rules in force for men and women did not apply to men and men, and if there was any advantage to being an outlaw queer over a law-abiding married citizen, it was the liberty to bonk at will with whomever you wished whenever you wished—as long as you didn’t hurt the feelings of your number one. But what did that mean, exactly? Not telling your number one that you had been with someone else, Ferguson supposed, and if Albert was bonking someone or several someones on his peregrinations through North America, Ferguson wouldn’t want to know about it, nor would he say anything to Albert if he wound up bonking Aubrey in London. No, not if, he said to himself, but when, when and where and how many times during the days and nights he would be in England, for even though he loved Albert, he found Aubrey irresistible.