Fuck off, little birdie, Ferguson said. I don’t care if you’re sorry or not. Just leave me alone.
I’m a stupid blabbermouth, Sydney said. Once I start talking, I don’t know when to stop. I didn’t mean it, Archie, I swear I didn’t.
Of course you meant it. Breaking a secret is bad enough, but lying is even worse. So don’t start lying too, okay?
What can I do to help, Archie?
Nothing. Just go.
Please, Archie, let me do something for you.
Besides getting you out of this room, there’s only one thing I want.
Tell me what it is, and it’s yours.
A bottle of scotch.
You’re not serious.
A bottle of scotch, preferably unopened, and if it is open, as close to full as possible.
It’ll make you sick.
Listen, Sydney, either you bring it in to me or I go out and get it myself. But I’d rather not go out there right now because my aunt is in the other room, and I don’t want to see her.
All right, Archie. Give me a few minutes.
So Ferguson got his scotch, a half-empty bottle of Johnnie Walker Red hand-delivered to him by Sydney Millbanks, a half-empty bottle that Ferguson chose to think of as half full, and once Sydney left the room again, he began drinking the scotch and went on drinking it in small, slow swallows until the first slivers of dawn cut through the slats of the venetian blinds and the bottle was empty, and for the second time that year Ferguson puked up his binge on the floor of another person’s house and passed out.
PARIS WAS DIFFERENT. Paris was all about the sensation of being in Paris and roaming around the streets with his mother and Gil, about attending the opening of his mother’s first solo exhibition at the Galerie Vinteuil on the rue Bonaparte, about the two evenings spent with an old friend of Gil’s named Vivian Schreiber, about discovering that in spite of his B’s and B+’s at the Riverside Academy he had learned enough French to be able to hold his own in the language, about deciding that Paris was the city where he eventually wanted to live. After a summer of watching old and new French films, it was impossible to walk through the streets of Montmartre without thinking he might run into the young Antoine Doinel from The 400 Blows, to walk down the Champs-Élysées without hoping to brush past the gorgeous Jean Seberg as she strolled back and forth in her white T-shirt hawking copies of the Herald Tribune—the same paper his stepfather worked for! — or to glide along the banks of the Seine and glance over at the bouquinistes’ stalls without remembering the roly-poly bookstore owner who dives into the water to rescue the vagabond Michel Simon in Boudu Saved from Drowning. Paris was the movie of Paris, an agglomeration of all the Paris movies Ferguson had seen, and how inspiriting it was to find himself in the real place now, real in all of its sumptuous and stimulating reality, and yet to walk around feeling that it was an imaginary place as well, a place both in his head and out in the air that encircled his body, a simultaneous here and there, a black-and-white past and a full-color present, and Ferguson took pleasure in shuttling between the two of them, his thoughts moving so fast at times that the two blurred into one.
It was unusual for an exhibition to open at the end of August, when half the population of Paris was gone from the city, but that was the only available slot in the gallery’s schedule — August twentieth to September twentieth — and Ferguson’s mother had gladly accepted it, knowing that the director had done everything he could to fit her in. Forty-eight pictures in all, about half from previously published work and half from a new book that would be coming out next year, Silent City. Ferguson had already been told that he was the subject of one of the photographs, but still, he found it somewhat destabilizing to see himself hanging on the far wall when he entered the gallery, the familiar old picture his mother had taken of him seven years ago in the pre-Gil days when they were living together in the apartment on Central Park West, a long shot of him from behind as he sat on the living room floor watching Laurel and Hardy on television, his eight-year-old torso enveloped in a striped, short-sleeved T-shirt, and the moving thing about the photo, which bore the one-word title Archie, was the curve of his skinny back, each vertebra of his spine protruding into the shirt to create the bumpy-bony effect of childhood vulnerability, the portrait of an exposed being, a little boy locked in total concentration before the bowler-hatted buffoons on screen and therefore oblivious to everything else around him, and how proud Ferguson was of his mother for having produced such a good picture, which could have been nothing more than a banal snapshot but wasn’t, as was the case with the forty-seven other pictures on view that evening, and as Ferguson looked at his young faceless self sitting on the floor of an apartment they no longer occupied, he couldn’t help going back to the months of the curious interregnum and the Hilliard School disaster and remembering how his mother had ultimately replaced God in his mind as the supreme being, the human incarnation of the divine spirit, a flawed and mortal deity prone to the sulks and restless confusions that afflict all human beings, but he had worshipped his mother because she was the one person who never let him down, and no matter how many times he had disappointed her or proved himself to be less than he should have been, she had never not loved him and would never not love him to the end of her life.
Pretty and jittery, Ferguson said to himself, as he watched his mother smile and nod and shake hands with the guests at the vernissage, which had attracted about a hundred people in spite of the August holiday, a large noisy crowd crammed into the smallish exhibition space of the gallery, noisy because the eight or nine dozen people who had come there were apparently more interested in talking to one another than in looking at the pictures on the walls, but this was the first opening of any kind that Ferguson had attended, and he was unfamiliar with the protocols of such gatherings, the sophisticated hypocrisies of supposed art lovers coming to an art show in order to ignore the artworks on display, and if the young barman serving drinks at a table in a corner of the room hadn’t been kind enough to pour Ferguson a glass of vin blanc, followed by a second glass twenty minutes later, Ferguson might have walked out in protest, since this was his mother’s big moment, and he wanted everyone there to be fixed on Rose Adler’s work, to be transfixed by it to such a degree that all of them would be hammered into a state of speechless awe, and when that failed to happen Ferguson stood in the corner feeling ticked off and let down, too inexperienced to understand that the small red dots posted next to the frames on the walls meant those pictures had already been sold and that his mother was in excellent spirits that evening, not the least put off by the chatter and noise of those rude, ignorant people.
Midway through his second vin blanc, Ferguson saw Gil slicing through the crowd with his arm around a woman’s shoulder. The two of them were moving in his direction, steadily advancing toward the drinks table in spite of the intervening bodies, and when they drew close enough for Ferguson to see that they were both smiling, it occurred to him that the woman must have been Gil’s old friend Vivian Schreiber. Gil had already told him something about her, but Ferguson hadn’t been paying much attention and had retained little of the story, which was a rather complicated one, he remembered, having to do with the war and Vivian’s older brother, Douglas Gant or Grant, who had served in Gil’s intelligence unit and was his closest friend, and somehow or other Gil had pulled the strings that allowed Vivian, the much younger sister of his much younger army comrade, to enter France in September 1944, just one month after the liberation of Paris and three months after she graduated from college in the United States. Why Vivian had needed to go to France was unclear to Ferguson, but not long after she got there she married Jean-Pierre Schreiber, a French citizen born of German-Jewish parents in 1903 (which made him twenty years older than Vivian) who had managed to avoid arrest by the Germans and/or the Vichy police by traveling to neutral Switzerland just days before the fall of France, and according to what Gil had told Ferguson, Schreiber was rich, or had been rich, or soon became rich again because of his family’s resurrected wine-export business, or wine-growing business, or wine-bottle-manufacturing business, or some other commercial enterprise that had nothing to do with the harvesting or selling of grapes. No children, Gil had said, but a successful marriage that lasted until the end of 1958, when the trim and youthful Schreiber unexpectedly dropped dead while running to catch a plane at Orly Airport, which had turned Vivian into a young widow, and now that she had sold off her husband’s share of the business to his two nephews, she was a wealthy young widow, and, he added, the most charming and intelligent woman in all of Paris, a great friend.