* * *
HIS FIRST YEAR at Princeton was coming to an end. Howard would be taking off for the summer to work on his aunt and uncle’s dairy farm in southern Vermont, and although Ferguson had been invited to join him in that bucolic venture, the half-destroyed ex-lover of Evie Monroe, who had simultaneously become the half-resurrected author of the soon-to-be-published Mulligan’s Travels, had already backed out of his junk-removal job and was planning to spend the summer working on his next writing project, The Scarlet Notebook. Amy would be down in the city for those months as well (working as an editorial assistant for a trade magazine called Nurses Digest), and so would her new boyfriend, Luther Bond, who had found a spot filling in for someone in the Coming Events department at the Village Voice. Celia Federman, on the other hand, would be far away, profiting from the reward her parents had given her for graduating early from high school: a two-month trek through Europe with her twenty-year-old cousin Emily. As predicted, Bruce-the-boyfriend, a.k.a. the Human Buffer Zone, was a thing of the past. Celia promised to write Ferguson exactly twenty-four letters, which she instructed him to keep in a special box labeled Federman’s Travels.
Noah would be gone, too, unexpectedly and at the last minute gone, up to northern Massachusetts to take part in the Williamstown Theatre Festival, which he had tried out for on a whim because the girl he was pursuing had wanted to try out, but while she was turned down without a single callback, Noah wasn’t, and now he would be acting in two different plays over the summer (All My Sons and Waiting for Godot) and the plan to do a film version of Sole Mates was put on the shelf again. Ferguson was relieved. More than that, he was happy for Noah, who had always been the best actor onstage whenever he had seen him perform, which must have been seven or eight times over the years, and however much Noah wanted to become a filmmaker, Ferguson was convinced he had the stuff to become a top-of-the-line actor, not just in comedies, which he already excelled at, but in dramas, too, although perhaps not in tragedies, at least not the fifty-ton classics in which men plucked out their eyes and mothers boiled their children and Fortinbras entered as the curtain eased down slowly on a mass of bloody corpses. Ferguson also felt that Noah could have made people piss in their pants if he ever decided to do stand-up, but each time he had suggested it to him, Noah had frowned and said, Not for me. But he was wrong, Ferguson thought, dead wrong to resist, and one evening he had even gone to the trouble of sitting down and trying to write some jokes for Noah, just to get him started, but jokes were hard, so hard they were almost impossible, and except for some of the tennis matches he had done with Howard earlier in the year, he seemed to have no talent for them. Writing droll sentences in a story was one thing, but coming up with unforgettable, punch-out zingers required a different sort of brain from the one that had been planted in Ferguson’s skull.
Amy had been linked to Luther Bond since the beginning of May. Now it was June, and according to Ferguson’s most recent telephone conversation with her, his aggressive, battling stepsister still hadn’t found the nerve to tell her father or stepmother about the new man in her life. That disappointed Ferguson, who had always admired Amy for her guts, even though he had sometimes wanted to strangle her as well, and the only reason he could come up with to account for her hesitation was not that her boyfriend happened to be black but that he was militantly black, a Black Power person who stood even farther to the left than Amy, a large, menacing figure in a black leather jacket with a black beret sitting atop his Afro—just the sort of man to frighten Amy’s gentle, live-and-let-live father into a month-long panic attack.
Then the couple came down from Boston and moved into their summer sublet on Morningside Heights. That same evening, they met Ferguson for a drink at the West End Bar, and when Ferguson shook Luther Bond’s hand for the first time, the cartoon he had drawn in his head exploded into a thousand worthless fragments. Yes, Luther Bond was black, and yes, he had the firm handshake of a physically strong person, and yes, there was a stubborn sort of determination in his eyes, but when those eyes looked into Ferguson’s eyes, Ferguson understood that they were looking not at an enemy but at a potential friend, someone he was earnestly hoping he would like, and if Luther wasn’t the belligerent, hate-filled terrorist of the cartoon, then what was wrong with Amy, and why in the world had she not told her father about him?
He would have to talk to her about that in private and do what he could to pound some sense into her, but for now he had to focus on Mr. Bond himself in order to figure out what kind of person he was. Not a big person, that much was clear, but an average person of five-nine or so, roughly the same height as Amy, and if hair was any indication of a person’s political beliefs, then Luther’s modest Afro suggested he was on the left but not the far left, as opposed to the large Afros worn by the Black Is Beautiful people, and as for his face, well, it was awfully handsome, Ferguson thought, so good-looking as to verge on cute, if such an adjective could be applied to men, and as Ferguson studied that face, he understood why Amy had been attracted to Luther and was still attracted to him after six weeks of talk and steady sex, but putting aside those superficial things for a moment, the extraneous details of how tall or how short and hair lengths and cuteness quotients, the more important thing Ferguson was discovering about Luther was that he had a sharp sense of humor, something Ferguson valued in people because he was so bereft of verbal wit himself, which was why he gravitated toward people like Noah Marx and Howard Small and Richard Brinkerstaff, all of whom could talk circles around him, and when Luther told Ferguson that his roommate at Brandeis had been a fellow freshman named Timothy Sawyer, in other words Tim Sawyer, Ferguson laughed, and then he asked Luther if Tim bore any resemblance to Tom, but Luther said no, he reminded him more of that other character in the Murk Twang book, Hick Funn.
That was funny. Murk Twang and Hick Funn were genuinely funny, the same kinds of two-in-one things Howard would blurt out in his inspired moments, and the fact that Amy laughed made it even funnier, no doubt much funnier, because the volume of her laughter meant she had been caught off balance, which proved she had never heard Luther say those things before, which in turn proved that Luther hadn’t come up with his distorted versions of Mark Twain and Huck Finn last month or last year and had not been going around repeating them to his friends, no, he had invented them on the spot, right there at the West End Bar, and Ferguson appreciated a mind that was quick enough and clever enough to deliver a pair of such delicious puns, or, as he wanted to say out loud but didn’t, such pungent puns. Instead, he laughed along with his snorting stepsister and then asked Mr. Bond if he could buy him another beer.
Ferguson had already been given some information about Luther’s background and the odd path he had traveled from the Central Ward of Newark to Brandeis University in New England, things Amy had mentioned to him on the phone such as the seven years Luther had spent at the Newark Academy, one of the top private schools in the area, not paid for by Luther’s cab-driver father or his housemaid mother but by his mother’s employers, Sid and Edna Waxman, a wealthy couple from South Orange whose only son had been killed in the Battle of the Bulge, an uncommon duo of grieving souls who had fallen in love with Luther when he was a little boy, and now that Luther had won his scholarship to Brandeis, the Waxmans were doing the same thing for his younger brother, Septimus (Seppy), and how about them apples, Amy had said to Ferguson on the phone, a rich Jewish family and a struggling black family united forever in the Disunited States of America—Ha!
Ferguson was therefore up on the fact that Amy’s boyfriend had attended the Newark Academy when the three of them sat down for drinks at the West End, and before long the conversation came around to Newark itself, then Newark and basketball, a sport that Luther and Ferguson had both played in high school, and because the words Newark and basketball had unexpectedly occurred in the same sentence, Ferguson brought up the Newark gym where he had played in the triple-overtime game when he was fourteen, and the moment he said the words
triple overtime, Luther leaned forward, made a wordless, indecipherable noise somewhere in the back of his throat, and said: I was there.
So you remember what happened, Ferguson said.
I’ll never forget it.
Were you playing in the game?
No, sitting in the stands waiting for your game to be over so mine could begin.
You saw the half-court shot.
The longest swish on record. At the buzzer.
And afterward?
Yes, that too. As if it was yesterday.
Kids were pouring out of the stands and I got punched, punched hard as I was running out of the gym, punched so hard that it went on hurting for hours.
It was probably me.
You?
I punched someone, but I don’t know who it was. All white people look the same, right?
I was the only person on my team who got punched. It had to be me. And if it was me, it had to be you.
Amy said: The once stable earth is wobbling out of orbit. Tidal waves are rushing across the Seven Seas, volcanoes are wiping out cities. Or am I just imagining things?
Ferguson smiled briefly at Amy and then turned back to Luther. Why did you do it? he asked.
I don’t know. I didn’t know then, and I still can’t explain it now.
It shook me up, Ferguson said. Not the punch, but the reason for the punch. The madness in the gym, the hatred.
It built up slowly, but by the third tie score it was starting to get ugly in there. Then came the swish, and everyone snapped.
Until that morning, I was your average American numskull boy. A person who believed in progress and the search for a better tomorrow. We’d cured polio, hadn’t we? Racism was going to be next. The civil rights movement was the magic pill that was going to turn America into a color-blind society. After that punch, after your punch, I suddenly got a lot smarter about a whole lot of things. I’m so smart now, I can’t think about the future without feeling sick. You changed my life, Luther.
For what it’s worth, Luther said, that punch changed me, too. The feelings of the crowd got inside me that morning, and the anger of the crowd became my anger. I wasn’t thinking for myself anymore, I was letting the crowd think for me, so I lost control when the crowd lost control, and I ran down onto the court and did that dumb thing. Never again, I said to myself. From now on, I’m the one who’s in charge of me. Christ. White people were sending me to school, weren’t they? What did I have against white people?
Just wait, Amy said. You’ve been lucky so far.
I know, Luther replied. Plan A: Work to become a lawyer like Thurgood Marshall, work to become the first black mayor of Newark, work to become the first black senator from New Jersey. But if that doesn’t turn out, there’s always Plan B: Buy myself a machine gun and follow the words of Malcolm. By any means necessary. It’s never too late, right?
Let’s hope not, Ferguson said, as he raised his glass and nodded in assent.
Luther laughed. I like this stepbrother of yours, he said to Amy. He tickles my funny bone—and knows how to take a punch. His arm might have hurt that day, but what about my hand? I thought my knuckles were broken.
* * *
THE SCARLET NOTEBOOK was going to be difficult, far and away the most challenging work he had ever attempted, and Ferguson had serious doubts about whether he could pull it off. A book about a book, a book that one could read and also write in, a book that one could enter as if it were a three-dimensional physical space, a book that was the world and yet of the mind, a conundrum, a fraught landscape filled with beauties and dangers, and little by little a story would begin to develop inside it that would thrust the fictitious author, F., into a confrontation with the darkest elements of himself. A dream book. A book about the immediate realities in front of F.’s nose. An impossible book that could not be written and would surely devolve into a chaos of random, unconnected shards, a pile of meaninglessness. Why attempt to do such a thing? Why not simply invent another story and tell it as any other writer would? Because Ferguson wanted to do something different. Because Ferguson was no longer interested in telling mere stories. Because Ferguson wanted to test himself against the unknown and see if he could survive the struggle.
First Entry. In the scarlet notebook there are all the words that have yet to be spoken and all the years of my life before I bought the scarlet notebook.
Second Entry. The scarlet notebook is not imaginary. It is a real notebook, no less real than the pen in my hand or the shirt on my back, and it is lying in front of me on my desk. I bought it three days ago in a stationery store on Lexington Avenue in New York City. There were many other notebooks for sale in the store—blue notebooks, green notebooks, yellow notebooks, brown notebooks—but when I caught sight of the red one, I heard it call out to me and speak my name. The red was so red that the color was in fact scarlet, for it burned as brightly as the A on Hester Prynne’s frock. The pages inside the scarlet notebook are of course white, and there are many of them, more pages than a person could possibly count in the hours between dawn and dusk on a long midsummer day.
Fourth Entry. When I open the scarlet notebook, I see the window I am looking through in my mind. I see the city on the other side of the window. I see an old woman walking her dog, and I hear the baseball game playing on the radio in the apartment next door. Two balls, two strikes, two men out. Here comes the pitch.
Seventh Entry. When I turn the pages of the scarlet notebook, I often see things I thought I had forgotten, and suddenly I find myself back in the past. I remember old telephone numbers of vanished friends. I remember the dress my mother was wearing on the day I graduated from elementary school. I remember the date of the signing of the Magna Carta. I even remember the first scarlet notebook I ever bought. That was in Maplewood, New Jersey, many years ago.
Ninth Entry. In the scarlet notebook there are cardinals, red-winged blackbirds, and robins. There are the Boston Red Sox and the Cincinnati Red Stockings. There are roses, tulips, and poppies. There is a photograph of Sitting Bull. There is the beard of Erik the Red. There are left-wing political tracts, boiled beets, and hunks of raw steak. There is fire. There is blood. Included also are The Red and the Black, the Red Scare, and The Masque of the Red Death. This is only a partial list.
Twelfth Entry. There are days when a person who owns a scarlet notebook must do nothing but read it. On other days, it is necessary for him to write in it. This can be troublesome, and on some mornings when I sit down to work I am not certain which activity is the correct one to pursue. It seems to depend on which page you have come to at that moment, but as the pages are unnumbered, it is difficult to know in advance. That explains why I have spent so many fruitless hours staring at blank pages. I feel I am supposed to find an image there, but when nothing materializes after my efforts, I am often gripped by panic. One episode was so demoralizing to me that I was afraid I would lose my mind. I called my friend W., who also owns a scarlet notebook, and told him how desperate I was. “Those are the risks of having a scarlet notebook,” he said. “Either you give in to your despair and wait for it to pass or you burn your scarlet notebook and forget you ever had it.” W. might have a point, but I could never do that. No matter how much pain it causes me, no matter how lost I sometimes feel, I could never live without my scarlet notebook.
Fourteenth Entry. On the right-hand pages of the scarlet notebook a soothing, crepuscular light appears at various moments during the day, a light similar to the one that falls on wheat and barley fields at dusk in late summer, but more glowing somehow, more ethereal, more restful to the eye, whereas the left-hand pages give off a light that makes one think of a cold afternoon in winter.
Seventeenth Entry. The startling discovery last week that it is possible to enter the scarlet notebook, or rather that the notebook is an instrument for entering imagined spaces so vivid and tangible that they take on the appearance of reality. It is not just a collection of pages for reading and writing words, then, it
is a locus solus, a microscopic slit in the universe that can expand to allow a person through if he presses the scarlet notebook against his face and breathes in the smells of the paper with his eyes closed. My friend W. has warned me how dangerous it can be to go off on these impromptu excursions, but now that I have made my discovery, how can I resist the urge to slide into those other spaces every now and then? I pack a light lunch, throw some things into a small overnight bag (a sweater, a collapsible umbrella, a compass), and then telephone W. to let him know I’m about to take off. He worries about me constantly, I’m afraid, but W. is much older than I am (he turned seventy on his last birthday), and perhaps he has lost his feel for adventure. Good luck, he says to me, you moron, and then I laugh into the phone and hang up. Until now, I have not been gone for more than two or three hours at a stretch.
Twentieth Entry. In the scarlet notebook, I am happy to report, there is a violent curse against each and every person who has ever wronged me.
Twenty-third Entry. Not everything in the scarlet notebook is what it seems to be. The New York that dwells inside it, for example, does not always correspond to the New York of my waking life. It has happened to me that while walking down East Eighty-ninth Street and turning the corner onto what I was expecting to be Second Avenue, I have found myself on Central Park South near Columbus Circle. Perhaps this is because I know those streets more intimately than any others in the city, having just settled into an apartment on East Eighty-ninth Street at the beginning of the summer and having gone to Central Park South hundreds of times since the beginning of my life to visit my grandparents, whose apartment building on West Fifty-eighth Street also has an entrance on Central Park South. This geographical synapse would suggest that the scarlet notebook is a highly personal instrument for each person who owns one and that no two scarlet notebooks are alike, even if their covers all look the same. Memories are not continuous. They jump around from place to place and vault over large swaths of time with many gaps in between, and because of what my stepbrother calls this quantum effect, the multiple and often contradictory stories to be found in the scarlet notebook do not form a continuous narrative. Rather, they tend to unfold as dreams do—which is to say, with a logic that is not always readily apparent.