Everything improved after that. Egregious, unacceptable social offenses were apparently not always egregious and unacceptable, for not only had Ferguson managed to open his heart and declare his love to the two Schneidermans but his friendship with Jim had grown stronger because of it, and he and Amy had become a couple again. The week after the funeral, his mother and Gil gave him two hundred dollars for his birthday, but he didn’t need the money for Julie anymore, he could spend it on Amy and buy her beautiful lace underwear for the nights when Gil and his mother went out and they had the apartment to themselves, or the nights when Amy’s parents went out, or the nights when someone else’s parents went out and one of their friends gave them a room to hole up in for a few hours, and how much better things were between them now that he was writing his film articles and Amy could see that he wasn’t the dolt she used to think he was, suddenly she respected him, suddenly it didn’t matter if he was wrapped up in politics or not, he was a film boy, an art boy, a sensitive boy, and that was good enough for her, and what a pleasant jolt it was to discover that neither one of them was a virgin, that neither one of them was afraid, that they had both learned enough by then to know how to satisfy each other, surely that made all the difference, to be happy in bed with a person you loved and who loved you back, and for a short time Ferguson walked around feeling that yes, it was true — by throwing his arms around Jim and Amy he had unlocked the secret of the universe.
It couldn’t last, of course, the big love would have to be put aside and perhaps even forgotten because Amy was a year ahead of him in school and would be going to the University of Wisconsin in the fall, not to nearby Barnard as originally planned but to the far-off American tundra because Amy had decided, after long weeks of tormented soul-searching, that she had to get as far away from her mother as possible. Ferguson begged her not to go there, actually got down on his knees and begged, but the sobbing Amy said she had no choice because she would be strangled and suffocated in New York by her relentlessly interfering mother, and much as she loved her darling Archie, she felt she was fighting for her life and had to go, simply had to go and couldn’t let herself be talked out of it. That conversation was the beginning of the end, the first step in the slow dismantling of the perfect world they had created for themselves, and because the next day was the start of the weekend when Amy was supposed to make her long-planned trip to Cambridge to visit her brother, Ferguson found himself alone in New York on that Friday night in April, and he who had not drunk a drop of alcohol since the afternoon of the old man’s funeral and had not attended a single one of his friends’ disreputable parties went to one of those disreputable parties and drank himself into such a stupor that he overslept the next morning and missed going to school to take the SATs, which had been scheduled to begin at nine sharp.
There would be another chance to take the test in the fall, but his mother and Gil were annoyed with him for being so irresponsible, and though he couldn’t fault them for being miffed by his failure to show up for the exam, their anger nevertheless stung, stung far more than it should have, and for the first time in his life Ferguson was beginning to understand how fragile he was, how difficult it was for him to steer his way through even the smallest conflicts, especially conflicts brought on by his own flaws and stupidities, for the point was that he needed to be loved, loved more than most people needed to be loved, entirely loved without respite through every waking minute of his life, loved even when he did things that made him unlovable, especially when reason demanded that he not be loved, and unlike Amy, who was pushing her mother away from her, Ferguson could never let go of his mother, his unsmothering mother whose love was the source of all life for him, and merely to see her frown at him with that sad look in her eyes was a devastation, a bullet in the heart.
The end came at the beginning of summer. Not the fall, when Amy would be going to Wisconsin, but early July, when she left on a two-month backpacking trip through Europe with one of her friends, another whiz-kid Hunter girl named Molly Devine. Later that same week, Ferguson left for Vermont. His mother and stepfather had granted him his wish to follow Amy’s example and take part in the French immersion program at Hampton College. It was a fine program, and Ferguson’s French improved enormously in the weeks he was there, but it was a sexless summer filled with dread about what was waiting for him when he returned to New York: a last kiss with Amy — and then good-bye, no doubt a definitive good-bye.
So there was Ferguson after Amy flew off to Madison, Wisconsin, a senior in high school with his whole life in front of him, as he was informed by his teachers, his relatives, and every adult he crossed paths with, but he had just lost the love of his life, and the word future had been erased from every dictionary in the world. Almost inevitably, his thoughts turned to Julie again. It wasn’t love, of course, but at least it was sex, and sex without love was better than no sex at all, particularly when no books would have to be stolen in order to pay for it. Most of his birthday money was gone by then. He had spent it on lingerie and perfume and linguine dinners with Amy in the spring, but he still had thirty-eight dollars left over, which was more than enough for another tumble in the apartment on West Eighty-second Street. Such were the contradictions of manhood, Ferguson discovered. Your heart could be broken, but your gonads kept telling you to forget about your heart.
He called Mrs. M., hoping to schedule a Friday afternoon appointment with Julie, and though Mrs. M. had some trouble remembering who he was (it had been months since his last visit), he reminded her that he was the kid who had been sitting around in the living room talking to the girls when that cop walked in to collect his weekly envelope and shooed him out of the place. Yeah, yeah, Mrs. M. said. I remember you now. Charlie Schoolboy. That’s what we used to call you.