In the spring of 1966, an SDS chapter was formed at Columbia. Students for a Democratic Society was a national organization by then, and one by one most of the left-wing student groups on campus voted to join up with SDS or disband their ranks and dissolve into it. Among them were the Committee for Social Mockery, which had marched around College Walk last year holding up blank signs in a general protest against everything (a spectacle Ferguson dearly wished he had seen), the May 2 Movement, which was backed by the Progressive Labor Party, members of the Progressive Labor Party itself (the hard-line, Maoist PL), and the group that Amy had belonged to since her freshman year, the ICV (Independent Committee on Vietnam), which had fought with the police last May when twenty-five of its members disrupted the NROTC awards ceremony on Low Library plaza. The SDS slogan was Let the People Decide!, and Ferguson supported the group’s positions just as enthusiastically as Amy did (against the war, against racism, against imperialism, against poverty — and for a democratic world in which all citizens could live with one another as equals), but Amy joined the organization and Ferguson didn’t. The reasons were obvious to both of them, and they didn’t spend much time discussing the matter, nor any time at all in trying to talk the other into making a different decision, since he in fact encouraged her to join up, and she understood why he would never join anything, for Amy was someone who could imagine herself throwing bricks, who no doubt had been born to throw bricks, whereas Ferguson was someone who couldn’t and wasn’t, and even if he had burned his press badge and resigned from the Spectator, he still wouldn’t have joined under any circumstances. He walked down Fifth Avenue with her again on March twenty-sixth in another anti-war demonstration, but that was as far as he would go in doing his bit for the cause. There were just so many hours in a day, after all, and once he had finished his schoolwork and newspaper work, the prospect of spending some time with his French poets was far more attractive to him than attending loud, contentious political meetings to plan out the next action the group would be taking against the next issue on the agenda.
WHEN THE SECOND semester ended in early June, Ferguson shook hands with Tim McCarthy, said good-bye to Carman Hall, and moved to more spacious digs off-campus. Only freshmen were required to live in dormitories, and now that his freshman year was behind him, he was free to go wherever he wished. All along, his wish had been to move in with Amy, but as a point of pride (and perhaps a test of love), Ferguson had held back from asking her if he could rent one of the two bedrooms that would likely be opening up in her apartment (both occupied by seniors), waiting for her to ask the question herself, which she did at the end of April, just hours after she learned that her two graduating apartment mates would be leaving New York on the same day they were given their diplomas, and how much sweeter it was to be living there at her invitation than to have invited himself, to know that she wanted him just as much as he wanted her.
They promptly took over the two vacated rooms, both of which were larger and brighter than Amy’s cramped little hole at the back of the apartment, two rooms standing side by side along the main hallway, both equipped with double beds, desks, bureaus, and bookcases, which they bought from the departing tenants for a grand total of forty-five dollars each, and Ferguson’s shuttle existence of the past year came to an end, no more daily treks up and down Broadway between his dorm room and Amy’s apartment, they lived together now, they slept together in the same bed seven nights out of every seven now, and all through that summer of 1966, the nineteen-year-old Ferguson walked around with the uncanny sensation that he had entered a world in which it was no longer necessary to ask the world for anything more than it had already given him.
An unprecedented moment of equipoise and inner fulfillment. Having his cake and eating it too. No one, but no one, was ever supposed to be that happy. Ferguson sometimes wondered if he hadn’t pulled a fast one on the author of The Book of Terrestrial Life, who was turning the pages too quickly that year and had somehow left the page for those months blank.
Summer in hot, unbreathable New York, one ninety-degree day after another as the broiling asphalt melted in the sun and the concrete pavement slabs burned into the soles of their shoes, the air so dense with humidity that even the bricks on the façades of buildings seemed to be oozing sweat, and everywhere the stink of garbage rotting on the sidewalks. American bombs were falling on Hanoi and Haiphong, the heavyweight champion was talking to the press about Vietnam (No Vietcong ever called me nigger, he said, thus conflating the two American wars into a single war), the poet Frank O’Hara was run over by a dune buggy on a Fire Island beach and killed at the age of forty, and Ferguson and Amy were both trapped in boring summer jobs, bookstore clerk for him, typing and filing for her, low-paid work that forced them to ration their Gauloises, but Bobby George was playing baseball in Germany, the West End Bar had air-conditioning, and once they returned to their hot, airless apartment, Ferguson could run cool washcloths over Amy’s naked body and dream they were back in France. It was the summer of politics and movies, of dinners at the Schneidermans’ apartment on West Seventy-fifth Street and the Adlers’ apartment on West Fifty-eighth Street, of celebrating Gil Schneiderman’s move to the New York Times after the Herald Tribune shut down its presses and vanished from the scene, of going to concerts at Carnegie Hall with Gil and Amy’s brother, Jim, of riding the 104 bus down Broadway to the Thalia and the New Yorker to escape the heat by watching movies, which they jointly decided should always be comedies, since the grimness of the moment demanded that they laugh whenever it was possible, and who better to get them going than the Marx Brothers and W. C. Fields, or the screwball inanities starring Grant and Powell, Hepburn, Dunne, and Lombard, they couldn’t get enough of them, they jumped onto the bus the minute they found out another comedy double feature was playing, and what a relief it was to forget the war and the stinking garbage for a few hours as they sat in the air-conditioned dark, but when no comedies were to be seen in the neighborhood or anywhere else they returned to their summer project of grinding through what they called the literature of dissent, reading Marx and Lenin because one had to read them, and Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg, Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, Sartre and Camus, Malcolm X and Frantz Fanon, Sorel and Bakunin, Marcuse and Adorno, looking for answers to help explain what had happened to their country, which seemed to be collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions, but while Amy found herself moving closer to a Marxist reading of events (the inevitable overthrow of capitalism), Ferguson had his doubts, not just because the Hegelian dialectic turned on its head struck him as a mechanical and simplistic view of the world but because there was no class consciousness among American workers, no sympathy for socialist thought anywhere in the culture, and therefore no chance for the great upheaval Amy was predicting. In other words, they disagreed, even if they were essentially on the same side, but none of those differences seemed to matter, since neither one of them felt wholly certain about anything at that point, and each understood that the other could have been right, or that both of them could have been wrong, and better to air their doubts freely and openly than to march together in blind lockstep until they fell off the edge of a cliff.
Most of all, it was the summer of looking at Amy, of watching her put on lipstick and brush her impossible hair, of studying her hands as she rubbed body lotion into her palms and then ran those palms over her legs and arms and breasts, of washing her hair for her as she closed her eyes and sank into the lukewarm water in the tub, the ancient tub with the claw feet and the rust stains running through the cracked porcelain, of lying in bed in the morning and seeing her dress herself in a corner of the room as light came through the window and surrounded her, smiling at him as she slipped into her panties and bra and cotton skirt, the small domestic details of living within her feminine orbit, tampons, birth-control pills, the pills for when her stomach cramped up during hard periods, the household chores they did together, shopping for food, washing dishes, and the way she would sometimes bite her lower lip as they stood in the kitchen slicing and chopping onions and tomatoes for the pot of chili that would feed them for a weekend’s worth of dinners, the concentration in her eyes whenever she painted her fingernails or toenails to make a good impression at work, watching her shave her legs and underarms as she sat quietly in the bath, then climbing into the tub with her and soaping down her slithery white skin, the unearthly smoothness of her skin against his hands, and sex and sex and sex, sweaty summer sex with no cover or sheet on top of them as they rolled around on the bed in her room and the creaking old fan stirred the air a bit and cooled off nothing, the shudders and sighs, the yowls and groans, in her, on top of her, under her, beside her, the deep laughs trapped in her throat, the surprise tickling attacks, the sudden snatches of old pop songs from their childhood, lullabies, dirty limericks, Mother Goose poems, and grumpy Amy narrowing her eyes in another one of her snits, happy Amy gulping down ice water and cold beers, eating fast, shoveling it in like a ravenous stevedore, the snorts of laughter watching Fields and the M. Brothers—There ain’t no sanity clause, Archie! — and the magnificent Ah she exhaled one evening when he handed her his translation of an early poem by René Char, a poem so short that it consisted of only six words, a brief blink entitled Lacenaire’s Hand, which was a reference to the nineteenth-century criminal-poet who later surfaced as a character in Children of Paradise: