One of the best things about that beautiful spring was anticipating the summer, making plans with Amy for the trip they were going to take to France, a month-long journey from the middle of July to the middle of August, one month because that was all they could afford after stitching together money saved from past summer jobs, the fees from Ferguson’s Montclair Times articles that had not been spent on gas for his car and hamburgers for his stomach, a sizable graduation present from Ferguson’s grandparents (five hundred dollars), a smaller contribution from Amy’s paternal grandfather, and additional sums chipped in by both sets of parents, which would cover four and a half weeks of bare-bones living once the fares for the charter flight had been dispensed with, so rather than try to cram a grand European tour into that limited amount of time, they chose to stick to one country and immerse themselves in it as fully as they could. France was the inevitable choice because they were both studying French and wanted to become more fluent in the language, but also because France was the center of all things that were not American, with the best poets, the best novelists, the best filmmakers, the best philosophers, the best museums, and the best food, and with no luggage but the knapsacks on their backs they left American soil from Kennedy Airport at eight o’clock in the evening on July fifteenth, one day after the annual celebration of Bastille Day in France. It was their first trip abroad. For Ferguson, it was also the first time he had flown in an airplane, which meant it was the first time he had ever lost contact with the earth.
Paris for the most part, Paris for twenty-two of the thirty-one days they spent in France, with one excursion by train to the north (Normandy and Brittany, with visits to Omaha Beach, Mont Saint-Michel, and Chateaubriand’s family castle in Saint-Malo) and one excursion to the south (Marseille, Arles, Avignon, and Nîmes). A vow to converse in French with each other as often as possible, to shun American tourists, to strike up conversations with local residents in order to practice their French, to read only French books and newspapers, to see only French films, to send home postcards written in French. The Paris hotel they lived in was so obscure that it didn’t even have a name. The sign above the front door simply read HOTEL, and the simple room they shared on the rue Clément in the sixth arrondissement, directly facing the Marché Saint-Germain, the small but large enough chambre dix-huit, which had no telephone or television or radio in it, which was equipped with a cold-water sink but no toilet, cost ten francs a night, the equivalent of two dollars, which came to one dollar apiece, and what difference did it make that the toilet down the hall wasn’t always free when you wanted to use it, or that the shower was a cramped metal box jammed into the wall at the top of the stairs and wasn’t always free when you wanted to use it, the essential thing was that the room was clean and light and that the bed was big enough for two people to sleep in it comfortably, and even more essential was the fact that the owner of the hotel, a stout man with a mustache named Antoine, could not have cared less that Ferguson and Amy were sharing that bed, even though they were clearly not married and were young enough to have been Antoine’s children.
That was the first thing that endeared them to France (the blessed indifference to the private lives of others), but more things soon followed, such as the hard-to-understand fact that everything seemed to smell better in Paris than in New York, not just the bakeries and restaurants and cafés but even the nethermost bowels of the metro, where the disinfectant used to wash down the floors was scented with something akin to perfume, whereas the New York subways were rank and often unbreathable, and the constant motion of the sky, with clouds continually massing overhead and then breaking apart, which created a shimmering, mutating sort of light that was both soft and full of surprises, and the northern latitude that kept the midsummer sky aglow for many more hours than at home, still not dark until ten-thirty or a quarter to eleven at night, and the pleasure of simply wandering through the streets, of being lost and yet never fully lost, as in the streets of the Village in New York, but now an entire city was like the Village, with no grid and few right angles in the neighborhoods they went to as one sinuous, cobbled path wound around and flowed into another, and of course there was the food, la cuisine française, rapturously ingested at the one restaurant meal they had every night after a breakfast of buttered bread and coffee (tartine beurré and café crème) and a lunch of homemade ham sandwiches (jambon de Paris) or homemade cheese sandwiches (gruyère, camembert, emmental), nightly dinners at the good but inexpensive restaurants noted in Europe on Five Dollars a Day, and at places such as Le Restaurant des Beaux Arts and Wadja in Montparnasse and La Crémerie Polidor (supposedly one of James Joyce’s eating spots), they dug into foods and dishes they had never encountered in New York or anywhere else, poireaux vinaigrette, rillettes, escargots, céleri rémoulade, coq au vin, pot au feu, quenelles, bavette, cassoulet, fraises au crème chantilly, and the beguiling sugar bomb known as baba au rhum. Within a week of setting foot in Paris, they had both turned into rabid Francophiles, with Amy suddenly announcing her decision to major in French as she worked her way through novels by Flaubert and Stendhal and Ferguson made his first halting attempts to translate French poetry as he sat in chambre dix-huit or the back room at La Palette and read Apollinaire, Éluard, Desnos, and other pre-war French poets for the first time.
Needless to say, there were moments when they quarreled and got on each other’s nerves, for they were together nearly every second for thirty-one days and nights, and Amy was a person prone to the occasional storm and foul-mouthed snit, and Ferguson had a tendency to lapse into fugues of morose introspection and/or inexplicable silences, but none of their disagreements lasted more than an hour or two, and most if not all of them occurred while they were on the road, under the duress of travel and sleepless nights on trains. Needless to say as well, America was constantly on their minds throughout the trip, even if they were glad to be away from it for the time being, and they talked at length about the two encouraging things that happened while they were gone — Johnson signing the Medicare Bill on July thirtieth and then the Voting Rights Act on August sixth — and also about the calamitous thing that happened on August eleventh, just five days before they flew home: the race riots in Los Angeles, the rage riots of the black population in a neighborhood called Watts. After which Amy said: Forget about studying French. My first impulse was the right one all along. History and political science. To which Ferguson raised an imaginary glass and said: Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask Amy Schneiderman to run your country.
The day before they were scheduled to return to New York, they made two embarrassing discoveries: 1) they had bought too many books to carry on the plane; 2) their money was precariously low — no doubt because buying books had not been factored into their budget. They had both lost weight during their month abroad (Ferguson seven pounds, Amy five pounds), but that was to be expected of people determined to subsist on only one full meal a day, and yet in spite of those economies they had overspent on their frequent visits to bookstores, mostly to the Librairie Gallimard across from l’Église Saint-Germain and to the shop run by left-wing publisher François Maspero across from l’Église Saint-Séverin, and in addition to the twenty-one volumes of poetry Ferguson had bought and the eleven thick novels Amy had bought, they had been unable to resist purchasing a number of political books by Frantz Fanon (Les Damnés de la terre), Paul Nizan (Aden Arabie), and Jean-Paul Sartre (Situations I, II, III), which increased the total to thirty-seven books. Several hours of their last day in Paris were therefore squandered on packing up those books in cartons, lugging them to the post office, and shipping them to Amy’s apartment on West 111th Street (all of them to Amy’s apartment, even the ones that belonged to Ferguson, because his parents had accepted a down payment on their house in early June and it was unclear whether they were still living in Montclair or had moved somewhere else by now), and the cost of the stamps required to send those cartons across the ocean by slow boat — with delivery expected sometime around Christmas — so depleted their remaining cash that they were left with just fourteen dollars, eight of which would be needed for the bus ride to the airport in the morning. Their plans for a large farewell meal at the Restaurant des Beaux Arts that evening were consequently destroyed, and they were reduced to dining on flat, dessicated hamburgers at the Wimpy’s on Boulevard Saint-Michel. Fortunately, they both found it funny, for bad planning on that scale proved that they were indeed the Most Ridiculous People on Earth.