There were some exceptions, however, some girls who would not be going on to college and would not be staying put either, some girls with altogether different pasts and futures from the home-grown New Jersey girls Ferguson had been studying all his life, and one such figure happened to turn up in his English class on the first day of his first year as a high school student, a dark-haired, dark-skinned girl who was neither pretty nor not pretty but singularly arresting to Ferguson’s eyes, all coiled into herself like an unafraid animal trapped in a zoo, calmly observing the observers through the bars, wondering which one would be brave enough to feed her, and when Mrs. Monroe began the session by pointing her finger at each of the twenty students and asking them to give their names and introduce themselves to the other members of the class, he heard the dark-haired girl speak with what he took to be a British accent, and without pausing to reflect on the matter Ferguson made up his mind to pursue her, not only because a girl from somewhere else was automatically more desirable than a local girl from the Jersey suburbs but because it had been exactly seven days since Amy had rebuffed him in the backyard and he was free, disgustingly free to pursue any girl who crossed his path. Fortunately, Amy was not in his English class that year, which meant her eyes would not be looking at him as he looked at the dark-haired girl and plotted how to approach her, woo her, and win her over, and with no Amy around to spy on his intentions, he could make those intentions as transparent as he wished.
Dana Rosenbloom. Not British but South African. The second of four daughters born to Maurice and Gladys Rosenbloom in Johannesburg, currently residing in the United States because Dana’s prosperous, factory-owning father was not only a capitalist entrepreneur but a socialist, a man so opposed to the apartheid government that had been ruling the country since 1948 that he had actively worked against it, and by engaging in those subversive activities he had offended the South African legal authorities to such an extent that they had wanted to put him in prison, a place that would not have been good for Maurice Rosenbloom’s health or the morale of his family, so off the six of them went, hightailing it out of South Africa to London, leaving behind their factory, their house in Johannesburg, their cars, their cats, their horse, their country house, their boat, and the better part of their money. From everything to nearly nothing, and with Dana’s sixty-two-year-old father too frail to work anymore, her much younger mother, whom Ferguson guessed to be somewhere in her mid-forties, had taken it upon herself to support the family in London, a task she had accomplished by rising to a position of great prominence at Harrods department store within three years, and having risen as far as she could go at Harrods, she had accepted a more important position for double the salary at Saks Fifth Avenue in New York. Thus the Rosenblooms landed on American soil in the spring of 1962, and thus they found their way to a large, creaking house on Mayhew Drive in South Orange, New Jersey, and thus Dana Rosenbloom wound up sitting two desks over from Ferguson in Mrs. Monroe’s tenth-grade English class at Columbia High School.
A white South African with the swart complexion of a North African, Eastern European origins layered upon older, deeper origins in Middle Eastern deserts, the exotic Jewess of Germanic and Nordic literature, the gypsy girl of nineteenth-century operas and Technicolor films, Esmeralda, Bathsheba, and Desdemona rolled into one, the black fire of crinkled, unruly hair burning like a crown on her head, slender limbs and narrow hips, a slight slouch to the shoulders and upper neck as she scratched out her notes in class, languid movements, never rushed or frazzled, calm, mild and calm, not the Levantine temptress she appeared to be but a solid girl with warm, affectionate impulses, in many ways the most ordinary girl Ferguson had ever been attracted to, not beautiful in the way Linda Flagg was beautiful, not brilliant in the way Amy was brilliant, but older and more poised than either one of them because of what she and her family had been through, older than Ferguson himself, an untormented sensualist with enough experience and daring to make her receptive to his early advances, and before long he understood that she was crazy about him and would never hack him to pieces as Amy sometimes did, the disputatious Schneiderman who burst out laughing when Ferguson pulled out a pipe and lit it after dinner one evening during the Year of Many Dinners before their parents were married, the pipe he had bought to smoke while writing because he thought all writers were meant to smoke pipes when they sat at their desks and wrote, and how thoroughly she had mocked him for that, calling him a pretentious oaf and the silliest boy who had ever lived, words that Dana Rosenbloom never would have spoken to him or anyone else, and so he courted the dark-eyed newcomer from Johannesburg and London and won her over, not because he knew what he was doing when it came to the art of seduction but because she had fallen for him and wanted to be seduced.
He wasn’t in love with her, he would never be in love with her, right from the start he understood that Dana would never be the grand passion he was looking for, but his body needed to be touched, he craved intimacy with someone, and Dana touched him and kissed him well, so well and so often that the physical pleasures obtained by her caresses all but obliterated the need for a grand passion at that point in his life. A little passion with a lot of touching and kissing was enough for now, and when they broke through to bare-skin, all-out sex in the winter of their junior year, it was more than enough to satisfy him.
Wordless animal sex with the gypsy girl who loved him, communication by looks and gestures and touch, few verbal exchanges about anything but the most trivial matters, not a meeting of minds as with Amy or the future girl of his dreams but a meeting of bodies, an understanding between bodies, a lack of inhibition that was so new to Ferguson that he sometimes trembled when he thought about what they did to each other in the empty rooms where they managed to be alone together, skin burning with happiness, sweat flowing from their pores as they slathered each other with kisses, and how kind she was to him, how accepting of his funks and self-indulgent despairs, how unconcerned that he loved her less than she loved him, but they both knew their connection was no more than a temporary business, that America was his place and not hers and for now she was just biding her time until graduation and her eighteenth birthday, when she would be heading off to Israel to live on a kibbutz between the Sea of Galilee and the Golan Heights, that was all she wanted, no college, no books, no big ideas, just planting her body in a place with other bodies and doing whatever she had to do in order to belong to a country that would never kick her out.
Inevitably, there were times when he felt bored with her, disengaged because she cared so little about the things that were most important to him, and all through the years they were in school together he wobbled and drifted, set his sights on other girls, took up with other girls during the summers when Dana visited her relatives in Tel Aviv, but he couldn’t ever break with her entirely, her sweetness kept luring him back, the sweetness of her good heart was irresistible, and the sex was necessary, the one thing that blotted out all other things for the minutes or hours it lasted and seemed to make him understand why he had been born and what it meant to belong to the world, the beginning of erotic life, the beginning of real life, and none of that would have been possible with any other girl in the school, the Linda Flaggs and Nora McGintys and Debbie Kleinmans were all militant virgins, professional maidens locked up in iron chastity belts, and therefore, even if his affections wavered from time to time, he knew how lucky he was to have found Dana Rosenbloom and would never let go of her until he had to, for beyond giving herself to him Dana had also given him her family, and Ferguson had come to love that family, love the very idea that such a family could exist, and every time he stepped into their house and was engulfed by the Rosenbloomian aura, he felt so happy to be there he didn’t want to leave.