It wasn’t her fault, Ferguson told himself. She was a bright, fetching girl who had been raised in a hermetically sealed dome of upper-middle-class comforts and civilities, a colorless, rational world of tidy front lawns and air-conditioned rooms, and to find herself rubbing up against the squalor and tumult of big-city life filled her with an instinctive revulsion, a physical response she was powerless to control, as if she were breathing in a bad smell and suddenly felt sick to her stomach. She couldn’t help it, Ferguson repeated to himself, and therefore she couldn’t be blamed, but what a disappointment to discover how unadventurous she was, how squeamish, how thrown by what was unfamiliar to her. Difficult. That was the word he often used to describe her to himself, and surely the hot-and-cold Linda Flagg had made life difficult for him over the past six months, but she was by no means a stupid or empty person — just afraid, that was all, afraid of the irrationality of vast, repellent cities, and no doubt afraid of boys as well, even though that pretty face of hers was a lure few boys could resist. But not vapid, not without wit and thoughtfulness, for she had a good mind and always spoke intelligently about the books they read in English class, and now that Ferguson had wrapped his hand around her elbow and was guiding her eastward along Fifty-seventh Street, he wondered if her spirits wouldn’t begin to improve once they entered the theater and settled in to watch the film. The theater was on the other side of Park Avenue, in one of the richest, least dirty neighborhoods of Manhattan, and the movie was supposed to be good, and since Linda had a taste for good books and a nose for good art, perhaps a good movie would put her in a good mood and something good could be salvaged from the rotten day they were having so far.
The movie was certainly good, so good and so absorbing that Ferguson soon forgot about rubbing Linda’s leg or trying to kiss her on the mouth, but The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner was a young man’s story and not a young woman’s story, which meant that it appealed to Ferguson more than it did to Linda, and even though she granted that it was an excellent film, she wasn’t carried away by it as Ferguson was, who felt it was one of the best films ever made, a masterpiece. After the lights came on, they walked to a Bickford’s on Lexington Avenue and ordered coffee and doughnuts at the counter (coffee was a new pleasure in Ferguson’s life, and he drank it as often as he could, not only because he liked the taste but because drinking it made him feel more grown-up — as if each sip he took of that hot brown liquid were carrying him farther and farther from the prison house of childhood), and as they sat there among the less fat, less poor, less crazy people than the ones who frequented Horn & Hardart’s, they continued to discuss the film, in particular the final sequence, the long-distance championship race at the reform school where the hero (played by a new British actor named Tom Courtenay) is supposed to win the trophy for his pompous headmaster (played by Michael Redgrave) but changes his mind at the last minute and stops, allowing the pretty-boy rich kid from the fancy school (played by James Fox) to win instead. For Ferguson, the decision to lose on purpose was a magnificent act of defiance, a thrilling gesture of revolt against authority, and it had warmed his cold and angry heart to see that brazen Fuck you depicted on screen, for by insulting the headmaster in that way, the hero had said no to the corrupt and used-up world the headmaster represented, the crumbling British system of empty rewards and arbitrary punishments and unjust class barriers, and in so doing the hero had found his honor, his strength, his manhood. Linda rolled her eyes. Nonsense, she said. In her opinion, throwing the race was a dumb move, the worst thing the hero could have done, since long-distance running was his ticket out of that hellhole of a reform school, and now he would be pushed all the way to the bottom again and have to start over from scratch, and what was the point, she asked, he had won his moral victory, but at the same time he had ruined his life, and how could anyone call that magnificent?
It wasn’t that Linda was wrong, Ferguson said to himself, but she was arguing for expediency over valor, and he hated arguments of that sort, the practical approach to life, using the system to beat the system, playing by a set of broken rules because no other rules were in place, whereas those rules needed to be smashed and reinvented, and because Linda believed in the rules of their world, their little suburban world of getting ahead and moving up and settling into a good job and marrying someone who thought the way you did and mowing the lawn and driving a new car and paying your taxes and having 2.4 children and believing in nothing but the power of money, he understood how useless it would have been to prolong the discussion. She was right, of course. But he was right, too, and suddenly he didn’t want her anymore.
Linda was henceforth expunged from the list of possibles, and with no other possibles in sight, Ferguson dug in for what promised to be a sad and lonely end to a sad and lonely year. Many years after that year, when he was well into his adulthood, he would look back on that period of his adolescence and think: Exile in the rooms of home.
HIS MOTHER WAS worried about him. Not just because of Ferguson’s increasing hostility toward his father (to whom he rarely spoke anymore, refusing to initiate conversations with him and replying to Stanley’s questions with sullen, one- and two-word answers), not just because her son persisted in trekking out to New Rochelle for bimonthly dinners with the Federmans (about which he said nothing after he returned home, claiming it was simply too grim to talk about those destroyed, grieving people), not just because he had abruptly and inexplicably given up baseball (arguing that basketball was enough for him now and that baseball had become boring, which couldn’t have been true, Rose felt, not after the season started in April and she saw how carefully Ferguson read the box scores in the morning paper, studying the numbers with the same avidity he had always shown in the past), and not just because her once popular boy seemed to have no girlfriend at the moment and was attending fewer and fewer weekend parties, but because of all those things, and especially because there was something new in Ferguson’s eyes, a look of inwardness and detachment that had never been there in all the years she had known him, and on top of those concerns about the state of her son’s emotional health, there was a piece of news she had to share with him, a piece of bad news, and therefore it became necessary for the two of them to sit down together and have a talk.