If he wasn’t going to be a journalist anymore, then it made no sense to go on reporting for the Spectator. For the first time in years, he would be able to crawl out of his glass monastery and rub shoulders with the world again, not as a chronicler of other people’s actions but as the hero of his own life, however troubled and confused that life might have been. No more reporting, but nothing so drastic as a total break, since he loved the people he worked with there (if he respected any journalists in America now, it was Friedman and the other Spectator boys), so rather than cut all ties to the paper, he relinquished his spot as an associate member of the board and turned himself into an occasional reviewer of books and films, which meant that he handed in about one longish piece every month, speculations on such divergent topics as the posthumous poems of Christopher Smart and Godard’s newest film, Weekend, which Ferguson argued was the first instance on record of what he called public Surrealism, as opposed to the private Surrealism of Breton and his followers, for the two and a half days from Friday afternoon to Sunday night, commonly referred to as the weekend, made up approximately one-third of the week in industrial and post-industrial societies such as France and America, just as the seven or eight hours an individual spent in bed every night constituted about one-third of that person’s life, the dreamtime of private men and women in parallel to the dreamtime of the society they lived in, and Godard’s anarchic, blood-spattered film of smashed-up cars and cannibalistic sex was nothing if not the exploration of a mass nightmare, which was just the sort of thing that spoke most deeply to Ferguson now.
Hilton Obenzinger and Dan Quinn were appointed the new editors in chief of the Columbia Review, David Zimmer and Jim Freeman were the new associate editors, and Ferguson became one of nine on the literary board. Two issues per year as in the past, but now money had been raised to set up something called the Columbia Review Press, which would allow them to publish four small books in addition to the two issues. When the thirteen gathered for their inaugural meeting at Ferris Booth Hall in mid-September, there was little argument about the first three titles on the list. Poems by Zimmer, poems by Quinn, and a collection of stories by Billy Best, an ex–Columbia student who had dropped out five years earlier but was still in touch with various members of the Review. The fourth book posed a problem. Jim and Hilton both begged off, saying they didn’t have enough strong work to fill sixty-four pages, perhaps not even forty-eight pages, and then, during a pause in the discussion, Hilton unwrapped a one-pound package of ground beef, bunched it up in his hands, rose from his chair, and flung it with great force against a wall, shouting the word Meat! as it smacked against the surface and stuck there for a few seconds before it slid down to the floor. Such was Hilton’s brave Dada spirit, and such was the spirit of that year, when the best minds on campus understood that the most important questions could be answered only by off-the-wall non sequiturs, in contrast to the up-against-the-wall tactics of the previous spring, and once everyone had applauded Hilton for his lesson on the finer points of logic, Jim Freeman looked at Ferguson and said, What about your translations, Archie? Do you have enough of them to make a book?
Not quite, Ferguson said, but I did a lot of work over the summer. Can we wait until the spring?
By unanimous vote it was decided that a small anthology of Ferguson’s twentieth-century French poets would be the fourth and final book published that year. When Ferguson reminded them that it was illegal to publish translations without buying the rights to the originals, no one seemed to care. Quinn pointed out that the edition would be limited to five hundred copies, most of which would be given away for free, and if a French publisher happened to come to New York and stumble across Ferguson’s book on a shelf in the Gotham Book Mart, what could he do about it? They would all be gone by then, scattered far and wide across the country and no doubt across other countries as well, and why would anyone bother to go after them for a couple of hundred dollars?
I’m with Dan, Zimmer said. Fuck money.
For the first time in what must have been weeks, if not months, Ferguson laughed.
Then they voted again, just to make it official, and one by one all thirteen members of the Columbia Review board repeated Zimmer’s words: Fuck money.
Jim and Hilton set a cutoff date of April first for handing in the finished manuscript, which would give them enough time to print the book before they all graduated in June, and as the months pushed on, Ferguson often wondered what would have happened to him if Jim Freeman hadn’t asked his question, for with each month that passed, it was becoming more and more clear to him that the deadline was saving his life.
Those poems were his refuge, the one small island of sanity where he didn’t feel estranged from himself or at odds with Everything That Was, and even though he had finished many more translations than he had let on at the meeting, no fewer than a hundred pages so far, perhaps a hundred and twenty, he forged on with his versions of Apollinaire, Desnos, Cendrars, Éluard, Reverdy, Tzara, and the others, wanting to accumulate an abundance of material to work with when the time came to pare down the selection to the fifty or sixty pages the press could afford to publish, a dissonant book that would dart around from the brokenhearted cries of The Pretty Redhead to the mad, musical tumbling act of Tzara’s Approximate Man, from the discursive rhythms of Cendrars’s Easter in New York to the lyric grace of Paul Éluard:
Do we reach the sea with clocks
In our pockets, with the noise of the sea
In the sea, or are we the carriers
Of a purer and more silent water?
The water rubbing against our hands sharpens knives.
The warriors have found their weapons in the waves
And the sound of their blows is like
The rocks that smash the boats at night.
It is the storm and the thunder. Why not the silence
Of the flood, for we have dreamt within us
Space for the greatest silence and we breathe
Like the wind over terrible seas, like the wind
That creeps slowly over every horizon.
So Ferguson had his extracurricular jobs of translating and reviewing, each of them alternately and often simultaneously both a struggle and a pleasure for him, the pleasure of the struggle to get it right, the frustrations of not getting it right more often than he should have, the poems that defeated him and could not be rendered into acceptable English after two dozen stabs at them, the failure of his piece on the effect of listening to different kinds of music as sung by different kinds of female voices (Janet Baker, Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin) because in the end it was impossible to write about music, he decided, at least impossible for him, but still he managed to produce some articles that were less than awful enough to hand in and publish, and still the pile of translations continued to grow, and in the midst of all that there were the classes he was taking as well, mostly seminars in English and French literature at that point because he had fulfilled all his academic requirements except one, science, the abominable two-year science requirement that was an utter waste of time and effort in his opinion, but he discovered there was a course designed for lunkheads like himself, Introduction to Astronomy, which apparently no one failed because the professor was against flunking non-science students in science, and even if you never showed up for any of the classes, all you had to do was take a multiple-choice exam at the end of the year, a test you could not fail even if you failed to beat the guesswork odds and scored only ten percent, so Ferguson registered for that lunkhead course in celestial mathematics, but because he was living in a stranger’s body and didn’t know who he was anymore, and because he felt nothing but contempt for the rulers of Columbia and the pointless subjects they were forcing him to study against his will, he went into the college bookstore at the beginning of the first semester and stole the astronomy textbook, he who had never stolen anything in his life, who had worked at Book World during the summer after his freshman year and had caught six o
r seven students in the act of stealing books and had thrown them out of the store, now he was a book thief himself, slipping a ten-pound hardcover under his jacket and calmly walking toward the exit and out into the sunshine of Indian summer, now he was doing things he never would have done in the past, behaving as if he were no longer himself, but then again, perhaps this was the person he had become now, for the truth was that he didn’t feel guilty about pinching the book—he didn’t feel anything about it at all.
Too many nights at the West End, too many nights getting plastered with Zimmer and Fogg, but Ferguson craved the company and the talk, and on the nights when he went into the bar alone there was always the off chance of running into a girl who was just as lonely as he was. Off chance rather than chance because he was so dreadfully inexperienced when it came to such matters, having spent close to five years of his youth and early adulthood with one girl, the eternally departed Amy Schneiderman, who had loved him and then not loved him and had tossed him aside, and now he was starting from the bottom again, a beginner in the art of amorous conquest, knowing next to nothing about how to approach someone and start a conversation, but a tipsy Ferguson was more charming than a sober Ferguson, and three times during his first three months back at Columbia, when he had tippled enough to overcome his shyness but was not too far gone to have lost control of his thoughts, he wound up in bed with a woman, once for an hour, once for several hours, once for the whole night. All of the women were older than he was, and on two of those three occasions he was the one who was approached rather than the other way around.
The first occasion was a disaster. He had enrolled in a graduate seminar on the French novel, the only undergraduate in a class with two graduate-student men and six graduate-student women, and when one of those women turned up at the West End in the third week of September, he walked over to her and said hello. Alice Dotson was twenty-four or twenty-five, not unattractive or unwilling but plump and awkward, perhaps not accustomed to the protocols of casual sex, perhaps even more shy than he was, and when he found himself in her arms later that night, her body looked and felt so different from Amy’s that he was thrown by the unfamiliarity of it all, and then, to compound his confusion, she was far more passive in bed than the ardent and spirited Amy had been, and as Ferguson went about the job of trying to copulate with her, his mind kept wandering from the task at hand, and even though Alice seemed to be enjoying herself in a mild, dreamy sort of way, he couldn’t finish what he had started, which was something that had never happened in all his years with Amy, and the pleasant tumble he had been looking forward to was turned into a wretched hour of impotence and shame. Nor was he ever allowed to forget that blow to his masculine pride, since the class met for two hours every Monday and Thursday, and twice a week for the rest of the year there was Alice Dotson sitting around the table with the other students, doing her best to ignore him.
The second occasion left no scars but taught him a valuable lesson. A thirty-one-year-old secretary of pleasing but unremarkable aspect came into the West End one night with the express purpose of picking up a student. She called herself Zoe (last name never given), and when she fixed her eyes on the solitary Ferguson, she sat down next to him at the bar, ordered a Manhattan, and began talking about the World Series currently in progress between the Cardinals and the Tigers (she was pulling for St. Louis because she had been raised in Joplin, Missouri). After three or four sips of her drink, she tested the waters by placing her hand on Ferguson’s thigh, and because he was susceptible to provocations of that sort, he responded by kissing her on the back of the neck. Zoe downed the rest of her Manhattan, Ferguson polished off his beer, and then they climbed into a taxi and headed for her place on West Eighty-fourth Street, exchanging no more than six or seven words as they pawed and kissed each other in the back. It was all rather impersonal, he supposed, but her lithe body moved in ways that excited Ferguson, and after they reached her apartment, the sorry organ that had let him down so cruelly with Alice Dotson had no trouble finishing what it had started with Zoe No-Name. It was his first one-night stand. Or almost a night, in that there was a first round followed by a second round, but after the second round ended at two o’clock, Zoe asked Ferguson to leave, assuring him they would both feel better about it in the morning if they didn’t spend the rest of the night together. He didn’t know what to think. Fun while it had lasted, he said to himself, but sex without feeling had its decided limitations, and as he walked back to his apartment in the windy autumn night, he realized that it hadn’t been worth it.
The third occasion was memorable, the one good thing that happened to him during those long, empty months. Although the West End was essentially a student hangout, there were a number of regulars who had stopped being students or had never been students, the oddball dreamers and drunks who sat alone in booths plotting the overthrow of imaginary governments or were having one last round before they took another crack at A.A. or reminisced about the old days when Dylan Thomas used to sit at the bar reciting his poems. Among those regulars was a young woman Ferguson had met all the way back at the beginning of his freshman year, a slender, long-legged beauty from Lubbock, Texas, named Nora Kovacs, someone he had always felt attracted to but had never even flirted with because of Amy, a most unusual girl who had come up north to attend Barnard in 1961, had dropped out in the middle of her first semester, and had remained in the neighborhood ever since, foul-mouthed, raunchy, go-fuck-yourself Nora, who had drifted into the profession of removing her clothes in front of strangers, a striptease artist who toured far-flung outposts of American industry to enhance the lives of the womanless men who worked in oil fields, shipyards, and mills, a well-paid performer who would vanish from New York for a couple of months to bounce around Alaska or the Gulf Coast of Texas, but she would always come back to claim her seat at the bar of the West End, where she went nearly every night to chat with anyone who happened to be sitting next to her, talking about her adventures on the road and sounding off about the dimwitted Nobodaddies who were destroying the universe. Ferguson didn’t know her well, but over the years they had had five or six long conversations together, and because Ferguson had once helped her out on a matter of considerable importance, there was a special bond between them, even if they weren’t close friends. It went back to a night during his freshman year when he had gone into the West End without Amy and had spent four hours talking one-on-one with Nora in a side booth. She was about to go off on her first stripping tour, she had told him, and she needed to come up with a stage name for herself, since she sure as hell wasn’t going to hawk her wares as Nora LuAnn Kovacs. In a sudden flash of inspiration, Ferguson had said: Starr Bolt. Hot damn, Nora had said back to him, hot diggity damn, Archie, you’re a genius, and perhaps for that one moment he had been a genius, for Starr Bolt was a name that radiated glamour, freedom, and sexual power, the essential qualities every stripper needed to rise to the top, and whenever he had run into Nora over the ensuing years, she had always thanked him for turning her into what she playfully called the Queen of the Hinterlands.
Ferguson liked Nora because he was attracted to her, or he was attracted to her because he liked her, but he also understood that Nora was a mess, that she drank too much and took too many drugs, that she had evolved into what the guardians of virtue would have called a trollop or a slut, a young woman traveling down a fast road to rack and ruin, too outspoken for her own good, too comfortable in the gorgeous body God had given her for no other purpose than to test the morale of weak men and wavering sinners, a woman who fucked whomever she pleased and openly talked about her cunt, her clit, and the pleasures of having a hard cock rammed up her ass, but at the same time Ferguson found her to be one of the more intelligent members of the West End crowd, a girl with a warm heart and kind impulses, and even though he suspected she wouldn’t live past thirty or thirty-five, he felt nothing but affection for her.
He hadn’t seen her in months, perhaps not for half a year, but there she w
as one night in early November, just a couple of days after Nixon had defeated Humphrey, which had further darkened the already dark mood that had enveloped Ferguson that fall, and when he sat down next to her at the bar, Nora laughed one of her big laughs and planted a kiss on his left cheek.
They talked for about an hour, covering a number of vital subjects such as the arrest of Nora’s ex-boyfriend for selling drugs, Amy’s definitive exit from Ferguson’s life, the disappointing announcement (for Ferguson) that Nora would be leaving for Arizona the next morning, and the curious fact that while Nora had been jiggling her boobs in Nome (a phrase he vowed never to forget), she had managed to keep abreast (Nora’s joke) of what had been going on at Columbia last spring by reading issues of the Spectator, which had been sent to her every day from New York by her friends Molly and Jack. As a consequence, she had read all of Ferguson’s articles about the occupation of the buildings, the police bust, the strike, and everything else.
The news might have been slow in getting to Alaska, but his articles were damned good, she said to him, fucking terrific, Archie, and after he thanked her for the compliment, he told her that he had retired from reporting. Perhaps permanently, he said, perhaps temporarily, he wasn’t sure yet, but one thing he was sure of was that he didn’t know what to think anymore, that his brain had been bled dry and that shit (thank you, Sal Martino) was everywhere.
Nora said she had never seen him looking so low.
I’m lower than low, Ferguson answered. I’ve just reached the ninety-third sub-basement, and the elevator is still going down.