Pot was becoming more and more available at those weekend bashes, but Ferguson had decided it wasn’t for him. After three or four puffs, the unfunniest things would start to seem funny to him, and he would dissolve in a fit of giggles. Then he would begin to feel weightless, all silly and stupid inside, which had the unpleasant effect of thrusting him back into some childish incarnation of himself, for even though Ferguson was struggling to grow up just then, falling down as often as he managed to stay on his feet, he didn’t want to think of himself as a child anymore, so he shunned grass and stuck to booze, preferring to be plastered rather than stoned, and in that way he could feel he was acting as an adult.
Last but not least, that is, first and foremost, he had gone back to Mrs. M.’s place six times in those fifteen months. He would have gone more often, but the twenty-five dollars presented a problem, since his allowance was only fifteen dollars a week and he had no job and no chance of getting one (his parents wanted him to concentrate on his schoolwork), and once he had spent the first twenty-five in October (1962) his bank account was all but empty until his sixteenth birthday in March (1963), when his mother wrote him a check for one hundred dollars to supplement the gift of his museum membership card, which covered four sessions with Julie at the apartment on West Eighty-second Street, but the other two visits were paid for by appropriating things that didn’t belong to him and converting them into cash, criminal acts that tormented Ferguson and ate away at his crumbling conscience, but the sex was so important to him, so fundamental to his well-being, so indisputably the only thing that could keep him from cracking apart, that he couldn’t stop himself from bartering his soul for a few moments in Julie’s arms. God had been dead for years, but the devil had returned to Manhattan and was making a strong comeback in the northern sector of the borough.
It was always Julie because she was much the prettiest and most desirable girl who worked at Mrs. M.’s, and now that she understood how young Ferguson was (she had thought he was seventeen the first time he showed up, not fifteen), her attitude toward him had softened into a kind of droll camaraderie as she watched his limbs continue to grow from one encounter to the next, not that she treated him with anything that could be called tenderness or affection, but she was friendly enough to bend the rules now and let him kiss her on the lips when he wanted to, sometimes even to drive his tongue into her mouth, and the good thing about being with Julie was that she never talked about herself and never asked him any questions (beyond how old he was), and other than the fact that she worked at Mrs. M.’s every Tuesday and Friday, Ferguson knew nothing about Julie’s life, whether she was employed as a prostitute in other houses around the city, for example, or whether the two days with Mrs. M. were helping to fund her college education, perhaps even at City College for all he knew, where she sat next to Andy Cohen in their Russian literature seminar, or whether she had a boyfriend or a husband or a little child or twenty-three brothers and sisters, or whether she was planning to rob a bank or move to California or eat chicken pot pie for dinner. It was better not to know, he felt, better that it should be about nothing but the sex, which he found to be such deeply rewarding sex that twice during those fifteen months Ferguson was willing to break the law by entering bookstores on the Upper West Side with a woolen coat over his multipocketed winter jacket and fill the pockets of both coat and jacket with paperback books, which he then marked up with numerous dog-ears and underlinings and sold to a used bookstore across the street from Columbia at one-fourth the cover price, stealing and selling dozens of classic novels in order to earn the extra money he needed to have more sex with Julie.
He wished it could have been sixty times instead of six times, but just knowing that Julie would be there whenever the urge overpowered him was enough to kill his interest in chasing after the girls at his school, the fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds who would have swatted away his curious hands as he struggled to remove their sweaters and bras and panties, not one of them would have marched around naked in front of him as Julie did, not one of them would have allowed him to penetrate the inner sanctum of her holy womanhood, and even assuming that such a miracle could have come to pass, what work would have been required to achieve what he had already achieved with Julie, and with Julie there could never be any of the heartbreak that would inevitably come from falling for one of those nice girls, none of whom he loved in any case, only his adored Amy, who didn’t go to the Riverside Academy but attended Hunter High School in another part of town, his lost and rediscovered best beloved kissing cousin of the unfiltered cigarettes and the mighty laugh, she was the only one worth the effort and the risk, the only girl with whom sex would also mean love, for everything had changed in the past fifteen months, the world of his desires had been turned upside down, and one by one Isabel Kraft and Sydney Millbanks and Vivian Schreiber had all vanished from his thoughts at night, the only two who came to him anymore were the Schneiderman boy and the Schneiderman girl, the ferociously desired Jim and Amy, every night it was either one or the other who crawled into bed with him, on some nights first one and then the other, and that made sense, he supposed, sense to a person who was cut down the middle and couldn’t make sense of who he was, the soon-to-be seventeen-year-old Archibald Isaac Ferguson, variously known as a whoremongering sex maniac and petty criminal, an ex — high school basketball player and sometime film critic, a twice-rejected lover of his male and female stepcousins, and a devoted son and stepson of Rose and Gil — who both would have dropped dead if they had found out what he was up to.
WHEN OLD MAN Schneiderman gave up the ghost at the end of February, there was an after-funeral gathering at the apartment on Riverside Drive, a small gathering because Gil’s widowed father had made no new friends in the past twenty years and most of the old ones had already found permanent accommodations elsewhere, a collection of perhaps two dozen people that included Gil’s daughters, Margaret and Ella, making their first family appearance since the fall of 1959, accompanied by their newly acquired fat, balding husbands, one of whom had made Margaret pregnant, and in spite of his prejudice against them, Ferguson had to admit that his stepsisters showed no signs of hostility toward his mother, which was a lucky thing for them, since nothing would have made Ferguson happier than to stir up a scene and boot them out of the house, a violent impulse that was entirely uncalled for under the circumstances, but after standing out in the cold February weather for close to an hour as the family laid the old goat to rest, Ferguson was feeling agitated, revvy-revvy, as Happy Finnegan would have put it, perhaps because he had been thinking about his not-grandpa’s hot temper and outspoken contentiousness, or perhaps because every death made him think of his father’s death, so by the time the assembled mourners returned to the apartment, Ferguson was feeling wretched enough to down two quick whiskeys on an empty stomach, which might have contributed to the events that followed, for once the post-funeral gathering began, he wound up misbehaving in a manner so bold and outlandishly inappropriate that it wasn’t clear to him if he had lost his mind or accidentally solved the mystery of the universe.
This was what happened. First: Everyone present was either standing or sitting in the living room, food was being eaten, drinks were being drunk, conversations were going back and forth between and among pairs and groups of people. Ferguson saw Jim standing in a corner by the front window talking to his father, maneuvered his way into that corner himself, and asked Jim if he could have a word with him in private. Jim said yes, and the two of them walked down the hall and went into Ferguson’s bedroom, where, with no word or preamble of any kind, Ferguson threw his arms around Jim and told him he loved him, loved him more than anyone in the world, loved him so much he would be willing to die for him, and before Jim could respond, the now six-foot Ferguson covered the face of the six-foot-one-inch Jim with numerous kisses. The good Jim was neither angry nor shocked. He assumed that Ferguson was either drunk or gravely upset about something, so he wrapped his arms around his younger cousin, held him in a long, fervent hug, and said: I love you, too, Archie. We’re friends for life. Second: Half an hour later, everyone present was still either standing or sitting in the living room, food was still being eaten, drinks were still being drunk, conversations were still going back and forth between and among pairs and groups of people. Ferguson saw Amy standing in a corner by the front window talking to her cousin Ella, maneuvered his way into that corner himself, and asked Amy if he could have a word with her in private. Amy said yes, and the two of them walked down the hall and went into Ferguson’s bedroom, where, with no word or preamble of any kind, Ferguson threw his arms around Amy and told her he loved her, loved her more than anyone in the world, loved her so much he would be willing to die for her, and before Amy could respond, Ferguson kissed her on the mouth, and Amy, who was familiar with Ferguson’s mouth because of the many kisses he had given her in the bygone days of their pubescent fling, opened her own mouth and let Ferguson dive in with his tongue, and before long she had wrapped her arms around her cousin and the two of them had fallen onto the bed, where Ferguson reached under Amy’s skirt and began running his hand up her stockinged leg and Amy reached into Ferguson’s pants and took hold of his stiffened penis, and after each one had finished off the other, Amy smiled at Ferguson and said: This is good, Archie. We’ve been needing to do this for a long time.