Ferguson emitted a brief snort of a laugh — not unlike one of Amy’s snorts — but in this case it was an admission of defeat rather than a genuine laugh. He had started an argument he was bound to lose.
We’ll never be younger than we are right now, Tim said, and after you’re young, it all goes downhill pretty fast. Boring adulthood. The blahs of the big blah-blah-blah. A job, a wife, a couple of kids, and then you’re shuffling around in your slippers, waiting for them to cart you off to the glue factory — sans teeth, sans everything. So why not live it up and have some fun while we can?
It depends on what you call fun.
Letting go, for one thing.
Agreed. But what’s your idea of letting go?
Juicing up and jumping out of my skin.
That might work for you, but it’s not for everyone.
Wouldn’t you rather fly than crawl on the ground? There’s nothing to it, Archie. You just open your arms and take off.
Some of us don’t want that. And even if we thought we did, we wouldn’t be able to do it.
Why not?
Because we can’t, that’s all. We just can’t.
IT WASN’T THAT Ferguson was unable to fly or let go or jump out of his skin, but he needed Amy in order to do those things, and now that they had lived through their first breakup, their first reconciliation, and their first experience of sleeping-together-every-night in France, he could no longer separate the idea of being who he was from the necessity of being with her. New York was the next step forward, everyday life with the chance to see each other every day, to be together almost constantly if they wished, but Ferguson understood that he couldn’t take any of those possibilities for granted, for the breakup had taught him that Amy was a person who needed more room than most people did, that her suffocating mother had made her allergic to any and all forms of emotional pressure, and if he demanded more from her than she was willing to give, she would eventually withdraw from him again. He sometimes wondered if he didn’t love her too much, or if he hadn’t yet learned how to love her in the correct way, because the truth was that Ferguson happily would have married her tomorrow, even as an eighteen-year-old student in his first months of college he felt prepared to march through the rest of his life with her and never look at another woman again. He knew how excessive those thoughts were, but he couldn’t stop himself from thinking them. Amy was all tangled up inside him. He was who he was because she was in there with him now, and why pretend he could ever be anything even remotely human anymore without her?
He never said a word about any of this. The idea wasn’t to scare her off but to love her, and Ferguson did his best to stay alert to Amy’s moods and respond to the subtle, unvoiced indications that told him whether tonight would be a good night for sleeping in her bed, for example, or whether she would prefer to wait until tomorrow night, to make a point of asking whether she wanted to get together for dinner that evening or meet up later at the West End or stay in because they both had papers to write or else chuck everything and go to a movie at the Thalia. He let her make all those decisions because he knew she felt freer and happier when she was the one to decide, and above all the Amy he wanted was the fierce, tender, wisecracking girl who had saved his life after the accident, the intrepid co-conspirator who had traveled through France with him and not the sullen monarch who had expelled him from her court last fall for four months of lonely rustication in his New Jersey backwater.
Mostly, he wound up spending the night with her, on average four or five nights a week, often as many as six, with one or two or sometimes three nights alone in his single bed on the tenth floor of Carman Hall. It was a workable arrangement, he felt, even though he wished the numbers could have been a consistent seven and zero, but the important thing was that after two years their bodies still caught fire when they crawled under the sheets together, and it was the rare night that Ferguson slept in Amy’s bed when they didn’t make love before falling asleep. To reverse the Gottesman proposition, not only was the steady sex good for them, but the good sex steadied them and made them stronger: two twined into one rather than one and one standing apart. The physical intimacy that had developed between them was so intense now that Ferguson sometimes felt he knew Amy’s body better than his own. But not always, and therefore it was essential that he listen to her and follow her lead in physical matters, that he pay close attention to what she was telling him with her eyes, for every now and then he would misconstrue the signals and do the wrong thing, such as grabbing hold of her and kissing her when she didn’t want him to, and even though she never pushed him away (which only added to his confusion), he could tell that her heart wasn’t fully in it, that sex wasn’t on her mind just then as it was on his, as it always was on his, but she would go ahead and let him make love to her anyway because she didn’t want to disappoint him, submitting to his desires with a passive sort of involvement, mechanical sex, which was worse than no sex at all, and the first time it happened Ferguson felt so ashamed of himself he vowed never to let it happen again, but it did happen again, twice more over the next few months, which made him understand, finally, that men and women were not the same, and if he meant to do right by his woman, he would have to pay even closer attention and learn how to think and feel as she did, for there was no doubt in his mind that Amy knew exactly what he was thinking and feeling, which explained why she tolerated his lustful blunders and love-blind acts of stupidity.
Another error he sometimes committed was overestimating Amy’s confidence in herself. The great roar of being that emanated from the Schneiderman soul seemed to preclude any lapses into doubt or uncertainty, but she had her bad moments just as everyone else did, her moments of sadness and weakness and grim introspection, and because they occurred so rarely, they always seemed to catch Ferguson by surprise. Intellectual doubts above all, whether her political ideas were sound or not, whether anything she ever did or said or thought would be of value to anyone, whether it was worth fighting the system when the system would never change, whether the fight to make things better would only make them worse because of all the people who would rise up against the people fighting to make them better, but also doubts about herself, the small girl things that would suddenly torment her for no apparent reason, her lips were too thin, her eyes were too small, her teeth were too big, there were too many moles on her legs, the same light-brown dots that Ferguson loved so much, but no, she would say, they’re ugly, and she would never wear shorts again, and now she was getting too fat, and now she had lost too much weight, and why were her breasts so small, and goddamn that big Jewish nose of hers, and what the fuck to do with her crazy, kinky hair, it was impossible, impossible to do anything with it, and how could she still want to go on wearing lipstick when the cosmetic companies were brainwashing women into conforming to some skewed, artificial vision of womanhood in order to feed the great capitalist profit machine that ran on making people want what they didn’t need? All this from a vibrant, attractive girl in the flower of her young adulthood, and if such a person as Amy Schneiderman could succumb to questioning the body that belonged to her in that way, what about the fat girls and the homely girls and the deformed girls who didn’t even have a chance? Not only were men and women not the same, Ferguson concluded, but it was more difficult to be a woman than a man, and if he should ever forget that, he told himself, then the gods should come down from their mountain and pluck out the eyes from his head.