Because it would kill me, that’s why.
It isn’t forever, Archie. All I’m asking for is a time-out.
THEY WENT ON talking for more than an hour, and then Ferguson left the apartment and drove back to Montclair. Four and a half months would go by before he saw Amy again, four and a half dreary months of no kissing, no touching, and no talking to the one person he most wanted to kiss and touch and talk to, but Ferguson managed to weather that time without going to pieces because he was convinced that he and Amy had not come to the end, that the long and complicated journey they had embarked on together had merely run into its first detour, a rockslide that had fallen onto their path and had forced them to head off into the woods, where they had momentarily lost sight of each other, but sooner or later they would find the road again and continue on their way. He was convinced of this because he had taken Amy at her word, for Amy was the one person he had ever known who didn’t lie, who couldn’t lie, who always told the truth no matter what the circumstances, and when she’d said that she wasn’t dumping him or sending him into permanent exile, that all she was asking for was a break, a pause to open the windows and air out the room, Ferguson had believed her.
The strength of that belief kept him going through those empty, Amy-less months, and he hunkered down and tried to make the best of them, refusing to succumb to the temptations of self-pity, which had been so attractive to him at earlier stages of his adolescence (the loss of Anne-Marie Dumartin, the injury to his hand), striving for a tougher, more resolute approach to the conundrums of pain (the pain of disappointment, the pain of living in Mr. Martino’s world of shit), girding himself to absorb blows now rather than crumbling under their force, standing his ground rather than running away, digging in for what he now understood would be a long siege of trench warfare. Late November 1964 to mid-April 1965: a time of no sex and no love, a time of inwardness and disembodied solitude, a time of forcing himself, at long last, to grow up, to have done with everything that still connected him to his childhood.
It was his last year of high school, the last year he would spend in the town of Montclair, New Jersey, the last year he would live under the same roof with his parents, the last year of the first part of his life, and now that he was alone again, Ferguson looked out at his old, familiar world with renewed concentration and intensity, for even as he kept his gaze fixed on the people and places he had known for the past fourteen years, he felt they were already beginning to vanish before his eyes, slowly dissolving like a Polaroid image moving in reverse, undeveloping itself as the outlines of buildings blurred and the features of his friends’ faces grew less distinct and the bright colors faded into white rectangles of nothingness. He was among his classmates again as he hadn’t been in over a year, no longer slinking off to New York on the weekends, no longer a person with a secret life, a one-thumbed shadow reinserted into the midst of the seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds he had known since the age of three and four and five, and now that they were beginning to disappear, he found himself looking at them with something close to tenderness, the same boring suburban crowd he had turned his back on so abruptly after Amy went upstairs with him on the afternoon of the Labor Day cookout were his sole companions again, and he did what he could to treat them with tolerance and respect, even the most ridiculous and empty-headed among them, for he was no longer in the judgment business, he had given up his compulsion to hunt out the flaws and weaknesses in others because he had learned by now that he was just as weak and flawed as they were, and if he meant to grow up into the kind of person he was expecting himself to be, he would have to keep his mouth shut and his eyes open and never look down on anyone again.
No Amy for now, no Amy for what threatened to be a long and unbearable stretch of time, but Ferguson’s irrational conviction that the two of them were destined to be together again at some point in the future pushed him into making plans for that future when the moment came for him to send off his applications to college. That was one of the curious things about being in the last year of high school, the fact that you spent most of your time thinking about next year, knowing that a part of you was already gone even as you remained where you were, as if you were living in two places at once, the drab present and the uncertain future, boiling down your existence into a set of numbers that included your grade point average and SAT scores, approaching the teachers you liked best and asking them to write letters of recommendation for you, composing the absurd, impossible essay about yourself in which you hoped to impress a panel of anonymous strangers of your worthiness to attend their institution, then putting on a jacket and tie and traveling to that institution to be interviewed by someone whose report would weigh heavily on whether they accepted you or not, and suddenly Ferguson started worrying about his hand again, for the first time in months he felt anxious about his missing fingers when he sat down across from the man who would help to decide his future, asking himself whether the man saw him as a handicapped person or merely as someone who had been in an accident, and then, even as he was replying to the man’s questions, he remembered the last time he and Amy had talked about his hand, back in the summer when for some reason he had looked down at it and said how much it revolted him, which had annoyed her so greatly that she’d shouted at him, saying that if he ever mentioned his hand again she would take out a cleaver and chop off her own left thumb and give it to him as a present, and the ferocity of her anger was so magnificent that he promised never to bring up the subject again, and as he went on talking to the man who was interviewing him, he realized that not only must he not talk about it again but he must not think about it either, and bit by bit he forced himself to push it out of his mind and settled into his conversation with the man, who was a music professor at Columbia, which needless to say was his first choice, the only college he had any interest in attending, and when the genial, humorous, thoroughly sympathetic composer of twelve-tone comic operas found out that Ferguson was interested in poetry and hoped to become a writer one day, he walked over to the bookshelf in his office and pulled out four recent issues of the Columbia Review, the undergraduate literary magazine, and handed them to the nervous, self-conscious applicant from the other side of the Hudson. You might want to have a look at these, the professor said, and then they were shaking hands and saying good-bye to each other, and as Ferguson left the building and walked out onto the campus, which was already familiar to him because of his half dozen weekend trysts with Lady Schneiderman back in the fall, he wondered if he might not run into her that afternoon (he didn’t) or if he shouldn’t go down to her apartment on West 111th Street and ring the bell (he didn’t, he wouldn’t, he couldn’t), and so rather than torment himself with thoughts about his absent, inaccessible love, he opened one of the issues of the Columbia Review and stumbled across a poem with a most amusing and vulgar refrain, a line so shocking in its directness that Ferguson laughed out loud when he read it: A steady fuck is good for you. It might not have been much of a poem, but Ferguson couldn’t help agreeing with the sentiment, which contained a truth that no other poem had ever expressed so bluntly, or at least no other poem he had read, and on top of that he found it encouraging to know that Columbia was a place that allowed its students to publish such thoughts without fear of being censored, which meant that one could be free as a student there, for if any student had written that line for the Montclair High School literary magazine, he would have been expelled at once and likely thrown in jail.