Twenty-fifth Entry. On every page of the scarlet notebook, there is my desk and everything else in the room where I am sitting now. Although I have often been tempted to take the scarlet notebook with me on my walks through the city, I have not yet found the courage to remove it from my desk. On the other hand, when I go off into the scarlet notebook itself, I always seem to have the scarlet notebook with me.
So began Ferguson’s second swim across the lake, his Walden Pond of solitary word-work and seven to ten hours of desk time per day. It would turn into a long and messy splash, with frequent submersions and ever more exhausted arms and legs, but Ferguson had an inborn talent for jumping into deep and perilous waters when no lifeguards were around, and given that such a book had never been written or even dreamed of by anyone before him, Ferguson had to teach himself how to do what he was doing in the process of doing it. As seemed to be the case with everything he wrote now, he discarded more material than he kept, whittling down the 365 entries he composed between early June and mid-September 1966 to 174, which filled one hundred and eleven double-spaced typewritten pages in the ultimate draft, making his second novella-length book slightly shorter than the first, and when it was boiled down further on Gizmo’s single-spaced stencils, the text came to fifty-four pages, an even number that absolved Ferguson of the onerous responsibility of having to write another autobiographical note about himself.
* * *
HE ENJOYED LIVING in his small hush-money apartment, and all through his first summer there in 1966, as Joanna worked on the typing of Mulligan’s Travels and Ferguson sweated out the pages of The Scarlet Notebook, he continued to think about the ten thousand dollars and how slyly and underhandedly his grandfather had explained the “gift” to his daughter Rose, calling her at home the very next day, which was the same day Ferguson had met Billy and Joanna Best for the first time, to tell her he had started his own informal equivalent of the Rockefeller Foundation, i.e., the Adler Foundation for the Promotion of the Arts, and had just bestowed a ten-thousand-dollar award on his grandson to encourage his progress as a writer. What a colossal mound of bullshit, Ferguson thought, and yet how interesting that a man who had been shamed into tears and had written out a check to cover up his guilt could turn around the next day and start bragging about what he had done. Crazy, stupid old man, but when Ferguson talked to his mother from Princeton the following Monday, he had to suppress his laughter as she reported what her father had said to her, the incredible phoniness of it all, the show-off self-aggrandizement of his unparalleled generosity, and when his mother said, Just think, Archie—first the Walt Whitman Scholarship and now this amazing gift from your grandfather—Ferguson replied, I know, I know, I’m the luckiest man on the face of the earth, consciously repeating the words Lou Gehrig had spoken at Yankee Stadium after he found out he was dying from the disease that would eventually be named after him. Sitting pretty, Ferguson’s mother said. Yes, that was it, sitting pretty, and what a grand and beautiful world it was if you didn’t stop to look at it too closely.
* * *
A MATTRESS ON the floor, a desk and a chair found on a nearby sidewalk and hauled up to the room with Billy’s help, some pots and pans bought for nickels and dimes at a local Goodwill Mission store, sheets, towels, and bedding donated by his mother and Dan as housewarming gifts, and a second typewriter bought secondhand at Osner’s typewriter shop on Amsterdam Avenue to avoid having to lug a machine from Princeton to New York and then back to Princeton every Friday and Sunday, an Olympia manufactured in West Germany circa 1960 with an even finer and faster touch than his dependable, deeply loved Smith-Corona. Frequent dinners with the Bests, frequent dinners with Amy and Luther, occasional get-togethers with Ron Pearson and his wife, Peg, and solo expeditions for early dinners at the Ideal Lunch Counter on East Eighty-sixth Street, the eating hole with a sign over the door that read: SERVING GERMAN FOOD SINCE 1932 (a significant date that established no connection with what happened in Germany the following year), and how Ferguson liked to chow down on those heavy, lump-in-the-stomach dishes, Königsberger Klopse and Wiener schnitzel, and to hear the large, muscular waitress behind the counter shout into the kitchen with her thick accent, Vun schnitzel!, which never failed to evoke memories of Dan and Gil’s dead father, that other crazy grandfather in the tribe, Jim and Amy’s cantankerous, crackpot Opa. The luckiest man on the face of the earth also had the good fortune to meet Mary Donohue that summer, Joanna’s twenty-one-year-old younger sister, who was spending those months with the Bests and working in an office before heading back to Ann Arbor for her senior year, and because the plump, jovial, sex-mad Mary took a shine to Ferguson, she often came to his apartment at night and crawled into bed with him, which helped diminish the constant longing he still felt for Evie and turn his thoughts from the vile thing he had done to her by cutting it off without a proper good-bye. Mary’s soft and abundant flesh—a good place to drown in and forget who he was, to throw off the burden of being himself—and the sex was good because it was simple and transitory, sex without strings, without delusions, without hope for anything more lasting than it was.
Ferguson’s initial plan was to barge in and settle the Amy-Luther problem himself, to go behind their backs in the same way Noah had done with his manuscript and call his mother to tell her what was going on and ask how she thought Dan would react to the news. Then he reexamined that approach and concluded he didn’t have the right to deceive his stepsister or act without her consent, so one evening in the middle of June, as Ferguson, Bond, and Schneiderman sat in the West End inhaling and imbibing another round of cigarettes and beers, the son of Rose asked the stepdaughter of Rose if she would allow him to speak to his mother on her behalf in order to get this nonsense over with. Before Amy could respond, Luther leaned forward and said, Thanks, Archie, and a moment later Amy said more or less the same thing, Thank you, Arch.
Ferguson called his mother the next morning, and when he told her why he was calling, his mother laughed.
We already know about this, she said.
You know? How can you possibly know?
From the Waxmans. And also from Jim.
Jim?
Yes, Jim.
And how does Jim feel about it?
He doesn’t care. Or rather he does care, because he likes Luther so much.
And what about Dan?
A bit shocked at first, I would say. But I think he’s over it now. I mean, Amy and Luther aren’t planning to get married, are they?
I have no idea.
Marriage would be tough. Tough for both of them, a tough, tough road if they ever decided to do that, but also tough for Luther’s parents, who are none too pleased about this little romance to begin with.
You’ve talked to the Bonds?
No, but Edna Waxman says the Bonds are worried about their son. They think he’s been around white people too much, that he’s lost the sense of his own blackness. The Newark Academy, now Brandeis, and always everyone’s darling, the white people’s darling. Too gentle and accommodating, they say, no chip on his shoulder, and yet, at the same time, they’re so proud of him and so grateful to the Waxmans for helping them out. It’s a complicated world, isn’t it, Archie?
And how do you feel about all this?
My mind is still open. I won’t know what I think until I’ve had a chance to meet Luther. Tell Amy to call me, okay?
I will. And don’t worry. Luther’s a good guy, and tell Edna Waxman to tell the Bonds not to worry either. Their son does have a chip on his shoulder. It’s just not a big one, that’s all. The right length of chip, I’d say, a chip that suits him well.
One month and one week later, Ferguson, Mary Donohue, Amy, and Luther were on their way north in the old Pontiac, heading for the farm in southern Vermont where Howard Small was spending the summer, and on that same Friday in another car, Ferguson’s mother and Amy’s father along with Ferguson’s aunt and stepuncle were heading toward Williamstown, Massachusetts, where the five
undergraduates would be joining up with them the following evening to watch Noah perform as Lucky in Waiting for Godot. Pigs and cows and chickens, the stench of manure in the barn, wind rushing down the green hills and swirling through the valley below, and broad-shouldered Howard tramping beside the New York foursome as they toured the grounds of his aunt and uncle’s sixty-acre spread on the outskirts of Newfane. How happy Ferguson was to see his college pal again, and how good it was that the aunt and uncle had no prissy qualms about the coed sleeping arrangements (Howard had put his foot down and forced them to accept—or else), and now that the business between Amy and her father concerning Luther had been resolved, how relaxed everyone was that weekend, far from the hot cement and steaming fumes of New York as Amy galloped around a meadow on a chestnut stallion, a memorable image that Ferguson would go on savoring for years afterward, but nothing was more memorable than the performance on Saturday evening in Williamstown, just fifty miles from the farm, the play that Ferguson had read in high school but had never seen mounted onstage, which he had reread earlier that week to prepare himself for the production, but nothing as it turned out could have prepared him for what he saw that night, Noah with his wig of long white hair hanging under his bowler hat and the rope around his neck, the abused slave and bearer of burdens, the dunce, the mute clown who falls and totters and stumbles, such finely choreographed steps, the shuffling, torporous, snap-to surges forward and back, dozing off on his feet, the unexpected kick delivered to Estragon’s leg, the unexpected tears that fall down his face, the contorted, pathetic dance he does when ordered to dance, the whip and the bags up and the bags down again and again, Pozzo’s stool folded and unfolded again and again, it didn’t seem credible that Noah could do such things, and then, in the first act, the famous speech, the Puncher and Wattman speech, the quaquaquaqua speech, the long harangue of unpunctuated scholarly gibberish, and Noah flew into it as if in a trance, such an impossible display of breath control and complex verbal rhythm, and Jesus Christ, Ferguson said to himself, Jesus fucking Christ as the words flew out of his cousin’s mouth, and then the other three onstage jumped him and pounded him and smashed his hat, and Pozzo brandished the whip again, and once again it was Up! Pig!, and off they went, exiting the stage as Lucky crashed in the wings.
After the bows and the applause, Ferguson took Noah in his arms and embraced him so tightly that he almost broke his ribs. Once Noah was able to breathe again, he said: I’m glad you liked it, Archie, but I think I’ve done a better job in most of the other performances. Knowing you were in the audience, and my father, and Mildred, and Amy, and your mother—well, you get the idea. Pressure, man. Real pressure.
The New York quartet drove back to the city on Sunday night, and the next morning, July twenty-fifth, the poet Frank O’Hara was struck by a dune buggy on a Fire Island beach and killed at the age of forty. As word of the accident spread among the writers, painters, and musicians of New York, a great lamentation rose up throughout the city, and one by one the young downtown poets who had worshipped O’Hara broke down and wept. Ron Pearson wept. Ann Wexler wept. Lewis Tarkowski wept. And uptown, on East Eighty-ninth Street, Billy Best punched a wall so hard that his fist went straight through the Sheetrock. Ferguson had never met O’Hara, but he knew his work and admired it for its effervescence and freedom, and though he didn’t break down or put his fist through a wall, he spent the next day rereading the two books of O’Hara’s that he owned, Lunch Poems and Meditations in an Emergency.
I am the least difficult of men, O’Hara had written in 1954. All I want is boundless love.
* * *
TRUE TO HER word, Celia sent Ferguson precisely twenty-four letters during her two months of travel abroad. Good letters, he felt, well-written letters, with many observant remarks about her experiences in Dublin, Cork, London, Paris, Nice, Florence, and Rome, for not unlike her brother, Artie, Celia knew how to look at things carefully, with more patience and curiosity than most people did, as displayed in this sentence about the Irish countryside in one of her early letters, which set the tone for everything that followed: A green treeless land dotted with gray stones and black rooks flying overhead, a stillness in the heart of all things, even when the heart is beating and the wind has begun to blow. Not bad for a future biologist, Ferguson thought, but friendly as the letters were, there was nothing intimate or revealing about them, and when Celia returned to New York on August twenty-third, one day after Mary Donohue kissed him good-bye and returned to Ann Arbor, Ferguson had no idea where he stood with her. He meant to find out as quickly as possible, however, for now that Celia was seventeen and a half, the ban against physical contact had been lifted. Love was a contact sport, after all, and Ferguson was looking for love now, he was ready for love, to use the words from the old number in Singin’ in the Rain, and for all the old reasons and all the new ones as well, he was hoping to find that love in the arms of Celia Federman. If she would have him.
She was dumbfounded by the bareness of his apartment when she came to visit on the twenty-seventh. The desk was fine, the mattress was fine, but how could he keep his clothes in a cardboard box in the closet and not have a bag or a basket for dirty laundry and just throw his socks and undies on the bathroom floor? And why not get a bookcase instead of piling up books against the wall? And why no pictures? And why eat at his desk when there was room for a small kitchen table in the corner? Because he wanted as few things as possible, Ferguson said, and because he didn’t care. Yes, yes, Celia said, she was acting like a middle-aged woman from the suburbs and he was roughing it as a bohemian renegade in the jungles of Manhattan, she got all that, and it wasn’t her concern, but didn’t he want to make it just a little bit nicer?
They were standing in the middle of the room with sunlight pouring in on them, sunlight pouring in through the windows and onto Celia’s face, the illuminated face of a seventeen-and-a-half-year-old girl of such beauty that Ferguson was stunned by the sight of her, stunned into silence and awe and trembling uncertainty, and as he went on looking at her, looking and looking at her because he was unable to look at anything else, Celia smiled and said, What’s wrong, Archie? Why are you staring at me like that?
I’m sorry, he said. I can’t help it. It’s just that you’re so beautiful, Celia, so astonishingly beautiful, I’m beginning to wonder if you’re real.
Celia laughed. Don’t be absurd, she said. I’m not even pretty. Just your average workaday girl.
Who’s been feeding you that crap? You’re a goddess, the queen of all earth and every city in heaven.
Well, it’s nice that you think so, but maybe you should have your eyes checked, Archie, and get a pair of glasses.
The sun shifted in the sky, or a cloud passed in front of it, or Ferguson was beginning to feel embarrassed by his gushing pronouncement, but four seconds after Celia said those words the subject of her looks was no longer on the table, the subject was once again the table Ferguson didn’t have, the bookcase he didn’t have, the bureau he didn’t have, and if it meant so much to her, he said, maybe they could borrow Billy’s hand truck and go out looking for furniture on the streets, it was the tried and true method of decorating apartments in Manhattan, and with the rich people on the Upper East Side throwing out good stuff every day, all they had to do was walk a few blocks south and a few blocks west, where they were bound to find something on the sidewalk that would meet with her approval.
I’m game if you are, Celia said.
Ferguson was game, but before they left there were a couple of things he wanted to show her, and then he led Celia over to his desk, where he pointed to a small wooden box with the words Federman’s Travels written on it, and once she had absorbed the significance of that box and the loyalty to their friendship it demonstrated, Ferguson opened the bottom right-hand drawer of the desk, pulled out a copy of the Gizmo Press edition of Mulligan’s Travels, and handed it to her.
Your book! Celia said. It’s been published!
She looked
down at Howard’s cover, ran her hand softly over the drawing of Mulligan, thumbed briefly through the mimeographed pages inside, and then, inexplicably, let the book drop to the floor.
Why did you do that? Ferguson asked.
Because I want to kiss you, she said.
A moment later, she put her arms around him and pressed her mouth against his, and all at once his arms were around her, and their tongues were inside each other’s mouths.
It was their first kiss.
And it was a real kiss, which gladdened Ferguson’s heart greatly, for not only did the kiss offer the promise of more kisses in the days ahead, it proved that Celia was in fact real.
* * *