Later on, Ferguson understood how badly he had misread the situation from the start. He had assumed that Andy was just another sexed-up boy like himself, unlucky with girls and therefore willing to have a go at it with a boy, two boys rolling around with each other for the fun of it, fuck-fun for adolescent virgins, but it had never once crossed his mind that anything serious could come of it. Then, on the last Saturday they spent together, just minutes before Ferguson had to leave the apartment, as the two of them lay side by side on the bed, still naked, still sweaty and out of breath, each one drained by the exertions of the past quarter hour, Andy took Ferguson into his arms and said that he loved him, that Ferguson was the love of his life and he would never stop loving him, not even after he was dead.
Ferguson said nothing. Any word would have been the wrong word at that moment, so he held his tongue and said nothing. Sad, he thought, so sad and demoralizing to have created such a mess, but he didn’t want to hurt Andy’s feelings by telling him about his own feelings, which were that he didn’t love him back and would never love him back for as long as he lived, and this was good-bye, and too bad it had to end this way because the fun had been so much fun, but damn it all, he shouldn’t have said that, and how could he be so stupid?
He kissed Andy on the cheek and smiled. Gotta go, he said.
Ferguson sprang off the mattress and began collecting his clothes from the floor.
Andy said: Same time next week?
What’s playing? Ferguson asked, as he climbed into his jeans and buckled his belt.
Two Bergmans. Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal.
Whoops.
Whoops? What’s whoops?
I just remembered. I have to go up to Rhinebeck with my parents next Saturday.
But you still haven’t seen any Bergmans. That’s more important than a day with Moms and Pops, no?
Probably. But I have to go with them.
The week after next, then?
Ferguson, who was slipping into his shoes at that point, mumbled a barely audible Uh-huh.
You’re not going to come, are you?
Andy sat up in bed and repeated the words at the top of his voice: You’re not going to come, are you?
What are you talking about?
You bitch! Andy yelled. I pour my heart out to you, and you don’t say a fucking word!
What do you want me to say?
Ferguson zipped up his spring jacket and headed for the door.
Fuck off, Archie. I hope you fall down the stairs and die.
Ferguson left the apartment and walked down the stairs.
He didn’t die.
Instead, he walked home, went into his room, and lay down on the bed, where he spent the next two hours looking up at the ceiling.
3.4
On the first Saturday of 1962, three days after Ferguson handed in his nine-hundred-word essay about Jackie Robinson, he and the six other players on his YMHA basketball team traveled from their home base in West Orange to a gym in Newark for a morning game against a YMCA team from the Central Ward. Two more games were scheduled to be played on that court immediately afterward, and the bleachers were filled with members of those four other teams along with friends and relatives of the players from those teams, not to mention the team that Ferguson and his friends were about to square off against in the first part of the triple-header, which made for a crowd of about eighty or ninety people. Except for the seven white boys from the Jewish Y and their coach, a high school math teacher named Lenny Millstein, everyone in the gym that morning was black. There was nothing unusual about that, since the West Orange boys often played against all-black teams in their Essex County Y League, but what was unusual about that morning in Newark was the size of the crowd, close to a hundred instead of the customary ten or twelve. At first, no one seemed to be paying much attention to what was happening on the court, but when the game ended in a tie and had to go into overtime, the people who had come for the two other games began to grow restless. As far as Ferguson could tell, the crowd didn’t care which team won or lost — they just wanted the game to be done with so the other games could start — but then the five-minute overtime ended in another tie score, and the mood of the crowd swelled from restlessness to agitation. Get the jokers off the court, yes, but if one of those two teams eventually had to win, then the onlookers were going to pull for the Newark boys over the suburban boys, the Christian boys over the Jewish boys, the black boys over the white boys. Fair enough, Ferguson said to himself as the second overtime began, it was only natural for people to root for the home team, only natural for people to shout from the stands during a close game, only natural for people to insult the visiting players, but then the second overtime ended in yet another tie score, and everything suddenly seemed to catch fire: the small, dilapidated gym in central Newark was ablaze with sound, and a no-account basketball game between fourteen-year-old boys had been turned into a symbolic blood match between us and them.
Both teams were playing poorly, both teams were missing nine-tenths of their shots and throwing away a third of their passes, both teams were tired and distracted by the noise from the crowd, both teams were doing their best to win and yet performing as if they wanted to lose. The crowd was unanimous in its support of one team over the other team, stomping and roaring its approval every time a Newark player wrestled away a rebound or intercepted a pass, hooting with derision whenever a West Orange player clanked a jump shot or bounced the ball off his foot, yowling in raucous ecstasy every time Newark scored a basket, booing in prolonged bursts of outrage and disgust whenever West Orange answered with a score of its own. With ten seconds left on the clock, Newark led by one point. Lenny Millstein called a time-out, and as the West Orange players gathered around their coach, the clamor from the stands was so loud that he had to shout to make himself heard, the sage Lenny Millstein, who not only was an excellent basketball man but an excellent person as well, who knew how to handle fourteen-year-old boys because he understood that fourteen was the worst possible age on the calendar of human life, and therefore all fourteen-year-olds were confused and fractured beings, not one of them a child anymore and not one of them an adult, none quite right in the head or at home in his unfinished body, and in the furnace of that claustrophobic arena of belligerent, bellowing partisans, the astute man with the curly blond hair and the jocular, no-discipline approach to running a team was shouting at his charges and reminding them how to break a full-court press, and before the boys put their right hands on top of Lenny’s right hand for a last Let’s go!, the thirty-four-year-old husband and father of two pointed to an exit door in the side wall of the gym and told the boys that no matter what happened in the next ten seconds, whether they won the game or lost the game, at the instant the final buzzer sounded they should all run for that door and jump into his station wagon parked at the curb because, as he put it, things are getting a little nuts in here, and he didn’t want anyone to be injured or killed in the mayhem that was sure to follow. Then the five hands and the one hand came together, Lenny barked the last Let’s go!, and Ferguson and the other starters trotted back onto the court.