Published. The piece wasn’t a review but an overview, a discussion of the equal but contrasting merits of two films Ferguson had been pondering for the past several months. It appeared in the dismal, sloppily printed biweekly school paper called the Riverside Rebel, an eight-page broadsheet that published out-of-date news items about interscholastic athletic events, articles about meaningless school controversies (the declining quality of the cafeteria food, the headmaster’s decision to ban the playing of transistor radios in the halls between classes), and poems, short stories, and occasional drawings by the students who fancied themselves poets, short-story writers, and artists. Mr. Dunbar, Ferguson’s English teacher that year, was the Rebel’s faculty adviser, and he encouraged the fledgling cinephile to contribute as many articles as he cared to write, claiming that the paper was in desperate need of new blood, and regular columns on films, books, art, music, and theater would be a step in the right direction. Intrigued and flattered by Mr. Dunbar’s request, Ferguson set to work on a piece about The 400 Blows and Breathless, his two favorite French films of the past summer, and now that he had been to France himself, it seemed only natural that he should begin his career as a film critic by writing about the French New Wave. Other than the fact that both films were shot in black and white and set in contemporary Paris, Ferguson argued, they had nothing in common. The two works were radically different in tone, sensibility, and narrative technique, so different that it would be useless to compare them and even more useless to waste a single moment questioning which one was the better film. About Truffaut he wrote: heartbreaking realism, tender but tough-minded, deeply human, rigorously honest, lyrical. About Godard he wrote: jagged and disruptive, sexy, disturbingly violent, funny and cruel, constant in-joke references to American films, revolutionary. No, Ferguson wrote in the final paragraph, he would not come down on the side of one film or the other because he loved them both, in the same way he loved both Jimmy Stewart Westerns and Busby Berkeley musicals, loved both Marx Brothers comedies and James Cagney gangster films. Why choose? he asked. Sometimes we want to sink our teeth into a nice fat hamburger, and at other times nothing tastes better than a hard-boiled egg or a dry saltine. Art is a banquet, he concluded, and every dish on the table is calling out to us — asking to be eaten and enjoyed.
Smoked. On Sunday morning, one week after Ferguson’s trip to Cambridge, the two Schneiderman households jammed their six bodies into a rented station wagon and drove north to Dutchess County, where they stopped for lunch at the Beekman Arms in Rhinebeck and then scattered in several directions throughout the town. As usual, Ferguson’s mother disappeared with her camera and was not seen again until it was time to return to New York. Aunt Liz headed off for the main drag to browse in the antique shops, and Gil and Uncle Dan climbed back into the car, saying they wanted to have a look at the autumn foliage when in fact they were planning to discuss what to do with their declining father, who was in his mid-eighties now and suddenly in need of twenty-four-hour palliative care. Neither Ferguson nor Amy had any interest in poking around old furniture stores or looking at the mutating colors of dying leaves, so they turned right when they saw Amy’s mother turn left and kept on walking until they reached the edge of town, where they chanced upon a small hillock that was still covered with green grass, a pleasant little clump of soft ground that seemed to be begging them to sit on it, which they both promptly did, and a few seconds later Amy reached into her pocket, pulled out a pack of unfiltered Camels, and offered Ferguson a cigarette. He didn’t hesitate. It was high time he gave one of those cancer sticks a shot, he said to himself, Mr. He-Man-Athlete-Who-Would-Never-Smoke-Because-It-Was-Bad-For-His-Wind, and of course he coughed after each of the first three puffs, and of course he felt dizzy for a while, and of course Amy laughed because it was funny to see him doing the things all novice smokers inevitably did, but then he settled down and began to get the hang of it, and before long he and Amy were talking, talking in a way that hadn’t been possible for them in over a year, with no wisecracks or insults or accusations, with all the rancor and built-up resentments gone like the smoke that was gusting from their mouths and vanishing into the autumn air, and then they stopped talking and just sat on the grass smiling at each other, happy to be friends again and no longer at odds, never again at odds, at which point Ferguson wrapped his arm around her in a pretend headlock and croaked softly into her ear: Another cigarette, please.
Lost. There was a wicked and exciting boy in the senior class named Terry Mills, a brilliant good-for-nothing who knew more about what teenage boys were not supposed to know than anyone else at the school. He was the supplier of scotch for weekend parties, the purveyor of amphetamine pills for those who wanted to fly fast and stay up all night, the dispenser of marijuana for those who preferred a more subdued approach to intoxication, and the panderer who could help you lose your virginity by taking you to the whorehouse on West Eighty-second Street. One of the richest boys at the Riverside Academy, the plump and sarcastic Terry Mills lived with his divorced and frequently absent mother in a townhouse between Columbus Avenue and Central Park West, and although there was much about his behavior that Ferguson found repugnant, he also found it difficult not to like him. According to Terry, legions of Riverside Academy boys both past and present had left their boyhoods behind them in the rooms of the Eighty-second Street bordello, it was a long-established tradition, he said, one that he himself had embraced two years ago as a sophomore, and now that Ferguson had ascended to the rank of sophomore as well, might he be interested in paying a visit to that enchanted realm of sensual delights? Yes, Ferguson said, of course he would, most certainly he would, when could they go?
That conversation took place on a Monday afternoon over lunch, the Monday following the Sunday that Ferguson had spent in Rhinebeck smoking cigarettes with Amy, and the following morning Terry reported that everything had been arranged for Friday afternoon at around four, which wouldn’t pose a problem for Ferguson because his curfew had been extended that year to six o’clock, and fortunately he had the twenty-five dollars that would be needed to turn him into a man, although Terry was still hoping that Mrs. M., the director of the establishment, could be talked into giving Ferguson a student discount. Not knowing what to expect, since he had no experience of brothels outside of what he had seen in gaudy, Technicolor Hollywood Westerns, Ferguson walked into the apartment on West Eighty-second Street with no images in his head — nothing but a blank of uncertainty, zip plus zero minus null. He found himself in one of those large Upper West Side apartments with crumbled plaster and yellowing walls, a once elegant place that had no doubt housed a prominent New York burgher and his voluminous family, but who would stop to examine plaster and walls when the first room you entered was a broad living room with six young women in it, half a dozen professional love-makers sitting around on chairs and divans in various stages of undress, two of them in fact entirely undressed, which made them the first naked women Ferguson had seen in his life.