If only Andy Cohen hadn’t said those words last spring, Ferguson sometimes thought, if only their simple arrangement hadn’t become so messy and impossible. Not that he even liked Andy Cohen anymore, but the way things were shaping up for his sophomore year, those Saturday afternoon romps on West 107th Street were beginning to make sense again, at least when you considered how much better it was to be with someone than with no one. On the other hand, Onan’s muse had never come to him in the form of a male body. It was always a female person who crawled under the blankets with him, for when it wasn’t Isabel Kraft slipping out of her red bikini and pressing her skin against his skin, it was Amy, or else — and this he found bizarre — it was Sydney Millbanks, the two-faced cowgirl who had stabbed him in the back, or Vivian Schreiber, who had spoken approximately forty-seven words to him and was old enough to be his mother, but there they were, the two women from his travels across continents and oceans in July and August, and there was nothing he could do to stop either one of them from entering his thoughts at night.
The contrast seemed clear enough, a rigid divide between what he wanted and what his circumstances allowed him to have, the soft flesh of women that would necessarily have to be deferred for another year or two and the stiff cocks of boys that could be savored now if the opportunity ever arose again, the impossible as opposed to the possible, nighttime fantasies as opposed to daytime realities, love on the one hand and adolescent lust on the other, all so neat and unambiguous, but then he discovered that the line was less sharply drawn than he had supposed, that love could exist on either side of that mental boundary and could do to him what the cowgirl said it had done to her, and to understand that about himself after pushing away the unwanted love of Andy Cohen came as a shock to Ferguson — and it frightened him, frightened him so much that he scarcely seemed to know who he was anymore.
In late September, he left New York again for yet another far-off place, traveling to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to spend the weekend with his cousin Jim. Not by air this time but five and a half hours by land on two buses to Boston with a change in Springfield, his first long-distance bus ride anywhere, and then two nights sleeping in Jim’s dormitory room at MIT, camped out on the bed normally occupied by Jim’s roommate, who had left campus on Friday morning and wouldn’t be back until Sunday night. The plan was nebulous. Take in the sights, play some one-on-one basketball in the gym on Saturday morning, visit a few labs at MIT, have a look at the Harvard campus, wander around Back Bay and Copley Square in Boston, have lunch and/or dinner at Harvard Square, go to a movie at the Brattle Theatre — an unstructured, spur-of-the-moment kind of weekend, Jim said, since the purpose of the visit was to hang out and spend some time together and what they wound up doing was of little importance. Ferguson was thrilled. No, more than thrilled — out of his skin with anticipation, and the mere thought of spending the weekend with Jim instantly parted the clouds that had been gathering overhead and turned the sky a bright, bright blue. No one was better than Jim, no one was kinder or more generous than Jim, no one was more admirable than Jim, and all during the bus ride to Boston Ferguson reflected on how lucky he was to have been thrown into the same family as his remarkable stepcousin. He loved him, he said to himself, he loved him to pieces, and he knew that Jim loved him back because of all those Saturday mornings in Riverside Park, teaching the runty twelve-year-old how to play roundball when there were a hundred other things he could have been doing, he loved him because he had called to invite him to go up to Cambridge for no other reason than to hang out and spend some time together, and now that Ferguson had tasted the pleasures of boy-boy intimacy, there was nothing he wouldn’t have done to find himself naked in Jim’s arms, to be kissed by Jim, to be fondled by Jim, yes, to be buggered by Jim, which was something that had never happened with the boy from City College last spring, for whatever Jim wanted him to do he would do, since this was love, a big, burning love that would go on burning for the rest of his life, and if Jim turned out to be the kind of ambidextrous boy he himself seemed to be turning into, which was altogether unlikely, of course, then a kiss from Jim would carry him to the gates of heaven, and yes, those were the words Ferguson said to himself when he thought that thought in the middle of his journey to Boston: the gates of heaven.
It was the happiest weekend of his life — and also the saddest. Happy because being with Jim made him feel so protected, so secure in the comforting nimbus of the older boy’s calm, and at every moment he could count on being listened to as carefully as he listened to Jim, who never made him feel lesser or lower or left out. The big breakfasts at the little diner across the Charles, the talk about the space program and mathematical puzzles and the enormous computers that one day would be small enough to fit in your palm, the Bogart double bill of Casablanca and To Have and Have Not at the Brattle Theatre on Saturday night, so many things to be thankful for during the long hours they spent with each other between Friday night and Sunday afternoon, but through it all the constant pain of knowing that the kiss he wanted would never be given to him, that having Jim was also not having Jim, that to have and have not meant never exposing his true feelings without running the risk of perishing in a fire of eternal humiliation. Worst of alclass="underline" looking at his cousin’s naked body in the locker room after one-on-one basketball, standing naked together with no possibility of extending his arm and putting his fingers on the lean, muscular body of his forbidden love, and then, on Sunday morning, Ferguson’s brazen ploy to test the waters by walking around the dorm room with no clothes on for more than an hour, tempted to ask Jim if he wanted a rubdown but not daring to, tempted to sit down on his bed and start jerking off in front of Jim but not daring to, hoping his nakedness would elicit some response from his thoroughly heterosexual cousin, which needless to say it didn’t, for Jim was already in love with someone else, a girl from Mount Holyoke named Nancy Hammerstein, who drove in on Sunday to have lunch with them, a perfectly decent and intelligent girl who saw in Jim precisely what Ferguson saw, and so even in his happiness Ferguson suffered through much sorrow that weekend, aching for the kiss that would never be given to him and knowing how deluded he was even to want it, and as he sat on the bus that carried him back to New York on Sunday, he cried a little bit, then cried a lot as the sun went down and darkness engulfed the bus. He was crying more and more often these days, he realized … and who was he? he kept asking himself … and what was he?… and why on earth did he persist in making life so hard for himself?
HE WOULD HAVE to get over it or die, and because Ferguson didn’t feel ready to die at age fifteen and a half, he did what he could to get over it, throwing himself with scattershot fervor into a maelstrom of contradictory pursuits. By the time the Cuban missile crisis started and ended two weeks later, with no bombs dropped and no wars declared, leaving no war in sight other than the ever-present Cold War of long duration, Ferguson had published his first film review, had smoked his first cigarette, and had lost his virginity to a twenty-year-old prostitute in a small brothel on West Eighty-second Street. The following month, he made the Riverside Academy’s varsity basketball team, but as one of only three sophomores on the ten-man squad, he sat on the bench and rarely saw more than one or two minutes of action per game.