All these facts or partial facts or possible anti-facts were rolling around in Ferguson’s head as Gil and Vivian Schreiber came nearer to where he was standing. His first impression of the great friend was that she ranked among the three or four most beautiful women he had ever seen. Then, as she came closer and he could make out her features with more precision, he realized that she wasn’t beautiful so much as impressive, a thirty-eight-year-old woman who projected a radiant aura of assurance and ease, whose clothes and makeup and hair were so elegantly and unpretentiously arranged that they seemed to have required no effort on her part to achieve the effect they achieved, who didn’t simply occupy space in the room where everyone was standing but seemed to dominate the room, to own the room, as she no doubt owned every room she happened to enter anywhere in the world. A moment later, Ferguson was shaking her hand and looking into her large brown eyes and smelling the good smells of the perfume that hovered around her body as he listened to her unusually deep voice say how honored she was to meet him (honored!), and all of a sudden everything began to glow more brightly in Ferguson, for surely Vivian Schreiber was an exceptional person, a full-fledged movie-star sort of person, and knowing her was bound to make a difference in his sadly unexceptional fifteen-year-old’s life.
Vivian was present at the dinner that followed the opening, but there were twelve people sitting at the table in the restaurant, and Ferguson was too far away from her for them to have a chance to talk, so he contented himself with watching her throughout the meal, noting how carefully the others around her listened to what she said whenever she contributed something to the conversation, and once or twice she looked over at him and saw that he was looking at her and smiled, but other than that, and other than the word spreading at his end of the table that Vivian had bought six of his mother’s photographs (including Archie), there was no contact between them that night. Three nights later, when Ferguson, his mother, and Gil met Vivian for dinner at La Coupole, there were no impediments to the give-and-take of talking and listening, but for some reason Ferguson felt shy and overwhelmed in Vivian’s presence and said little, preferring to listen to the conversation of the three adults, who had much to say on any number of subjects, including his mother’s photographs, which Vivian praised as sublimely human and uncannily direct, and Vivian’s older brother, Douglas Gant or Grant, who worked as a marine biologist in La Jolla, California, and the progress Gil had made on his book about Beethoven’s string quartets, and Vivian’s own work on a book she had been writing about an eighteenth-century painter named Chardin (who was still unknown to Ferguson at that point, but by the time he left Paris four days later he had made it his business to see every Chardin at the Louvre and had absorbed the mysterious fact that looking at a glass of water or an earthen jug on a painted canvas could be more involving and significant to the soul than looking at the crucified son of God on a similar painted rectangle), but even though Ferguson was mostly silent at the dinner, he was alert and happy, fully engaged in what the others were saying, and how much he enjoyed sitting in La Coupole, that huge, cavernous restaurant with the white tablecloths and the brisk waiters in their black-and-white uniforms, and all the people around him talking at once, so many people talking and looking at one another at the same time, the heavily rouged women with their little dogs and the somber men chain-smoking their Gitanes and the outlandishly decked-out couples who seemed to be auditioning for a play in which they were the central characters, the Montparnasse scene, as Vivian called it, the never-ending jeu du regard, and there was Giacometti, she said, and there was the actor who performed in all of Beckett’s plays, and there was another artist whose name meant nothing to Ferguson but who must have been a famous figure known to everyone in Paris, and because they were in Paris his mother and Gil let him drink wine at dinner, such a luxury to be in a place where no one cared about how old you were, and several times during the two hours they spent at their corner table in the restaurant Ferguson sat back and looked at his mother and Gil and the luminous Vivian Schreiber and found himself wishing the four of them could go on sitting there forever.
Afterward, as Gil and his mother were about to put Vivian in a taxi, the young widow took hold of Ferguson’s face, kissed him once on each cheek, and said: Come back and see me when you’re a little older, Archie. I think we’re going to be great friends.
BETWEEN THE TRIPS to California and Paris there was the hot summer in New York, the outdoor basketball games in Riverside Park, the four or five nights a week spent in air-conditioned movie theaters, the big and small American novels Gil continued to leave on his bedside table, and the poor planning that had kept him stuck in the city when every one of his school friends had gone somewhere else for July and August, not to mention the nineteen-year-old Jim, who was working as a counselor at a sleepaway camp in Massachusetts, and the confounding, ever-elusive Amy, who had managed to get herself shipped off to Vermont to take part in a two-month-long immersion program in French, which was precisely what he should have done and no doubt would have done if he hadn’t lacked the wit to propose it to his mother and Gil, who almost certainly would have been able to afford the tuition, which Uncle Dan and Aunt Liz could not, but fast-talking Amy had pried loose the necessary cash from her grandmother in Chicago and the old goat in the Bronx, and there she was sending him jocular, teasing postcards from the New England woods (Cher Cousin, The word “con” in French doesn’t mean what I thought it meant. The English equivalent would be “jerk” or “asshole”—not you-know-what. Whereas “queue,” which means “tail,” also means you-know-what in French. Which reminds me: How is my favorite con man doing in N.Y. these days? Hot enough for you, Archie, or is that pretend sweat I see dripping from your forehead? Baisers à mon bien-aimé, Amy), while Ferguson languished in the torrid drool of dog-day Manhattan, trapped in yet another loveless stretch of masturbation reveries and grimly persistent wet dreams.