THE SUMMER MOVIE project was off. Noah’s maternal grandmother had died back in November, and now that his mother had come into a bit of extra money, she decided to spend a portion of it on furthering her son’s education. Without consulting Noah, she enrolled him in a summer-long program for foreign high school students in Montpellier, France — eight weeks of total immersion in the French language, at the end of which, if the booklet about the program was to be believed, he would return to New York speaking with the fluency of a home-grown, snail-eating Frog. Three days after Ferguson finished reading Crime and Punishment, Noah called to announce the change in plans, cursing his mother for having pulled a fast one on him, but what could he do about it, he said, he was too young to be the master of his own life, and for now the mad queen still called the shots. Ferguson covered his disappointment by telling Noah how lucky he was, that if he were in his shoes he’d jump at the chance to go, and as for their own pair of shoes, well, too bad, but the fact was they still had no camera and hadn’t even begun to outline the script, so no harm done, and just think of what was waiting for him in France — Dutch girls, Danish girls, Italian girls, a harem of high school beauties all to himself, since not many boys went to those programs, and with little competition standing in his way, he was sure to have the time of his life.
Ferguson would miss Noah, of course, miss him badly, for summer had always been the season when they could be together every day, all day every day for eight full weeks, and a summer without his grouchy harpist cousin-friend would scarcely feel like summer anymore — just a long stretch of time marked by hot weather and a new kind of loneliness.
Fortunately, the one-hundred-dollar check was not the only present his parents had given him for his fifteenth birthday. He had also gained the right to travel to New York on his own, a new liberty he intended to exercise as often as possible, for the beautiful but dreary town of Maplewood had been built for the sole purpose of making people want to get out of it, and with another, larger world suddenly available to him, Ferguson was out of it nearly every Saturday that spring. There were two ways to travel to Manhattan from where he lived: by the 107 bus, which set off every hour from the depot in Irvington and took you to the Port Authority building at Eighth Avenue and Fortieth Street, or by the four-car train run by the Erie Lackawanna Railroad, which left from the station in Maplewood and stopped at the terminus in Hoboken, where there were two further options for finishing off the trip to the city: underground on the Hudson tube or above ground over the water on the Hudson ferry. Ferguson preferred the train-ferry solution, not only because he could walk to the station in about ten minutes (whereas going to the depot in Irvington required someone to give him a lift) but because he loved the train, which was one of the oldest trains still in use anywhere in America, with cars that had been built in 1908, dark green metal hulks that evoked the early days of the industrial revolution, and inside the car the antiquated wicker seats and the seat backs that could be flipped in either direction, the low-speed anti-express that rattled and lurched and sang forth a ruckus of screams as the wheels churned over the rusty tracks, such happiness to be sitting in one of those cars alone, looking out the window at the gruesome, deteriorating landscape of northern New Jersey, the swamps and rivers and iron drawbridges against a background of crumbling brick buildings, remnants of the old capitalism, some of it still functioning, some of it in ruins, so ugly that Ferguson found it inspiring in the same way nineteenth-century poets had found inspiration from the ruins on Greek and Roman hills, and when he wasn’t looking out the window at the collapsed world around him he was reading his book of the moment instead, the Russian novels that were not written by Dostoyevsky, Kafka for the first time, Joyce for the first time, Fitzgerald for the first time, and then standing on the deck of the ferry if the weather was anywhere close to decent, the wind in his face, the engine vibrating in the soles of his feet, the seagulls circling above him, such an ordinary trip when all was said and done, a trip made by thousands of commuters every morning from Monday to Friday, but this was Saturday, and to the fifteen-year-old Ferguson it was pure romance to be traveling toward lower Manhattan in this way, the best of all good things he could possibly be doing — not just leaving home behind, but going to this, to all this.
Seeing Noah. Talking to Noah. Arguing with Noah. Laughing with Noah. Going to movies with Noah. On Perry Street Saturdays, lunch in the apartment with Aunt Mildred and Uncle Don, then out with Noah and off to wherever they had decided to go, which was often nowhere, the two of them ambling through the streets of the West Village as they gawked at pretty girls and discussed the fate of the universe. Everything had been decided now. Ferguson was going to write books, Noah was going to direct films, and therefore they mostly talked about books and films and the numerous projects they would work on together over the years. Noah was a different Noah from the one Ferguson had met as a small boy, but he still had that aggravating side to him, what Ferguson thought of as his wise-ass, Marx Brothers side, his rambunctious displays of exuberant anarchism, which would burst forth in nonsensical exchanges with greengrocers (Hey, buddy, what’s with this eggplant stuff — I don’t see no egg there) or waitresses in coffee shops (Sweetheart, before you give us our check, kindly rip it up so we won’t have to pay) or movie-house cashiers standing in their glass boxes (Tell me one good thing about the film that’s playing or I’ll cut you out of my will), provocative gibberish that only proved what a pest he could be, but that was the price you paid for being Noah’s friend, feeling amused and embarrassed by him at the same time, as if you were walking around with an obstreperous toddler, and then, without warning, he would do an abrupt about-face and start talking about Albert Camus’s Reflections on the Guillotine, and after you told him you still hadn’t read a word of Camus, he would rush into a bookstore and steal one of his novels for you, which of course you couldn’t accept, and consequently you would be put in the awkward position of having to tell him to reenter the store and put the book back on the shelf, which of course made you feel like a sanctimonious prig, but still he was your friend, the best friend you had ever had, and you loved him.
Not every Saturday was a Perry Street Saturday, however. On the weekends Noah spent with his mother on the Upper West Side, it wasn’t always possible for Ferguson to see him, so he made other arrangements for those blackout Saturdays, twice traveling into New York with a Maplewood friend named Bob Smith (yes, there was such a person as Bob Smith), once by himself to visit his grandparents, and several times with Amy, as in Amy Ruth Schneiderman, who was especially keen on looking at art, and because Ferguson had recently discovered how much he enjoyed looking at art himself, they spent those Saturdays walking through museums and galleries, not just the big ones everyone went to, the Met, the Modern, the Guggenheim, but smaller ones such as the Frick (Ferguson’s favorite) and the midtown photography center, all of which kept them talking for hours afterward, Giotto, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Chardin, Manet, Kandinsky, Duchamp, so much to take in and think about, seeing nearly everything for the first time, again and again the destabilizing jolt of the first time, but the most memorable experience they shared together didn’t happen in a museum but in the more confined space of a gallery, the Pierre Matisse Gallery in the Fuller Building on East Fifty-seventh Street, where they saw an exhibition of recent sculptures, paintings, and drawings by Alberto Giacometti, and so pulled in were they by those mysterious, tactile, lonely works that they stayed for two hours, and when the rooms began to empty out, Pierre Matisse himself (Henri Matisse’s son!) noticed the two young people in his gallery and walked over to them, all smiles and good humor, happy to see that two new converts had been made that afternoon, and much to Ferguson’s surprise, he stood there and talked to them for the next fifteen minutes, telling them stories about Giacometti and his studio in Paris, about his own transplantation to America in 1924 and the founding of his gallery in 1931, about the tough years of the war when so many European artists were destitute, great artists like Miró and so many others, and how they wouldn’t have survived without help from their friends in America, and then, on an impulse, Pierre Matisse led them to a back room of the gallery, an office with desks and typewriters and bookcases, and one by one he took down from the shelves of those bookcases a dozen or so catalogues from past exhibitions by Giacometti, Miró, Chagall, Balthus, and Dubuffet and handed them to the two astonished teenagers, saying, You two children are the future, and maybe these will help with your education.