They walked out of there wordless and agape, carrying their gifts from Henri Matisse’s son as they propelled themselves along Fifty-seventh Street, walking quickly because they were the future, because their bodies were demanding that they walk quickly after such an encounter, after being blessed by an act of such unexpected kindness, and so they walked down the crowded, sunlit street as fast as two walkers could walk without breaking into a run, and after a couple of hundred yards Amy finally interrupted the silence and declared that she was hungry, famished was the word she used, as she often did, since Amy could never be merely hungry as other people were, she was starved or ravenous, she could eat an elephant or a flock of penguins, and now that she was talking about filling up her belly with some tasty chow, Ferguson realized that he could go for some food himself, and given that they were walking down Fifty-seventh Street, he proposed that they head for the Horn & Hardart automat between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, not just because it was close but because on an earlier trip to the city he and Amy had both decided that the Horn & Hardart automat was the most splendid eating spot in all of New York.
Not that the bland, inexpensive food served there could be categorized as splendid, the bowls of Yankee bean soup, the Salisbury steaks with mashed potatoes doused in gravy, the thick slabs of blueberry pie, no, it was the place itself that lured them in, the amusement park atmosphere of that vast emporium of chrome and glass, the novelty of eating automated food, twentieth-century American efficiency in its craziest, most delightful incarnation, wholesome, hygienic cuisine for the hungry masses, and how enjoyable it was to go to the cashier and load up with a pile of nickels and then walk around looking at the dozens of offerings in their glassed-in receptacles, windows barricading tiny rooms of food, each one an individual portion made especially for you, and once you had chosen your ham-and-cheese sandwich or slice of pound cake, you would insert the appropriate number of nickels into the slot and the window would open, and just like that the sandwich was yours, a solid, dependable, freshly made sandwich, but before you left to start searching for a table there was the further enjoyment of seeing how quickly the empty receptacle filled up with another sandwich, a sandwich identical to the one you had just bought for yourself, for there were people back there, men and women in white uniforms who took care of the nickels and replenished the empty containers with more food, what a job that must have been, Ferguson thought, and then the quest for an unoccupied table, carrying your meal or snack around and among the motley crowd of New Yorkers eating and drinking their automated food and beverages, many of them old men who sat there for hours every day consuming cup after cup of slowly drunk coffee, the old men from the vanished left still arguing after forty years about where the revolution had gone wrong, the stillborn revolution that had once seemed imminent and now was no more than a memory of what had never been.
So Ferguson and Amy went into the Horn & Hardart automat toward the close of that resplendent afternoon to have a bite to eat, to browse through the thin, densely illustrated catalogues of past exhibitions at the Pierre Matisse Gallery, and to discuss what they both felt had been a good day, all in all a very good day. He needed more days like this one, Ferguson said to himself, more good days to counteract the effect of so many rough days in the past few months, which had been the days of no baseball for one thing, a decision that had so confused his friends that he had stopped trying to explain himself to them, for the experiment in self-denial was turning out to be much harder to stick to than he had thought, giving up something he had loved so thoroughly for so many years, a thing so thoroughly a part of him that his body sometimes ached to hold a bat in his hands again, to put on his glove and have a catch with someone, to feel his spikes digging into the dirt as he ran to first base, but he couldn’t back down now, he would have to keep the promise he had made or else admit to himself that Artie’s death had meant nothing, had taught him nothing, which would have turned him into someone so weak and unheroic that he might as well have asked to be turned into a dog, an abject, groveling mutt who begged for scraps and licked up his own vomit from the floor, and if not for his weekly escapes into the city, which kept him far from the ball fields where his friends played every Saturday, who knows if he wouldn’t have given in and allowed himself to become that dog?
Worse still, the spring of no baseball was also the spring of no love. Ferguson had thought he was smitten with Linda Flagg, but after pursuing her throughout the fall and winter, determined to win the affections of Maplewood’s most enticing and enigmatic heartthrob, who by turns had encouraged him and rebuffed him, had let him kiss her and not let him kiss her, had given him hope and wrenched that hope away from him, Ferguson had come to the conclusion that not only did Linda Flagg not love him but that he didn’t love her. The moment of revelation occurred on a Saturday in early April. After weeks of effort, Ferguson had finally persuaded her to accompany him on one of his trips to Manhattan. The plan was simple: lunch at the automat, a crosstown walk to Third Avenue, and then a couple of hours in the dark watching The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, a film that Jim Schneiderman had been urging him to see, and if, during the course of the film, Ferguson was able to hold Linda’s hand, or kiss Linda on the mouth, or run his hand up and down Linda’s leg, so much the better. It turned out to be a gloomy day, dank with drizzles and intermittent downpours, colder than they would have wished, darker than seemed normal for that time of year, but nothing about early spring was ever normal, Ferguson said, as they walked to the station under opened umbrellas and dodged the puddles forming on the sidewalk, and he was sorry about the rain, he continued, but it wasn’t really his fault, since he had written a letter to Zeus last week asking for sunny weather, and how could he have known they were in the middle of a month-long postal strike on Mount Olympus? Linda laughed at the inane remark, or else laughed because she was feeling no less jittery and hopeful than he was, which seemed to suggest they were off to a promising start, but then they boarded the Erie Lackawanna for Hoboken, and Ferguson understood that nothing was going to go right that day. The train was dirty and uncomfortable, Linda said, the view was depressing, it was too wet to take the ferry (even though the sky was beginning to clear), the Hudson tube was even dirtier and more uncomfortable than the train, the automat was interesting but scary, what with all the derelicts shuffling in and out, the three-hundred-pound black woman sitting alone at that table over there talking to herself about baby Jesus and the end of the world, the half-blind, whiskery old man reading a rumpled, three-day-old newspaper with a magnifying glass, the ancient couple just next to them dipping old, used-up tea bags into cups of hot water, everyone who came in here was either poor or crazy, and what kind of city was this that allowed crazy people to wander around the streets, she said, and you, Archie, what makes you think New York is so much better than everywhere else when in fact it’s so disgusting?