Writing about himself over the six months it had taken him to finish his short, 157-page book had thrust Ferguson into a new relationship with himself. He felt more intimately connected to his own feelings and at the same time more remote from them, almost detached, indifferent, as if during the writing of the book he had paradoxically become both a warmer and a colder person, warmer by the fact that he had opened up his insides and exposed them to the world, colder by the fact that he could look at those insides as if they belonged to someone else, a stranger, an anonymous anyone, and whether this new interaction with his writing self was good for him or bad for him, better for him or worse for him, he could not say. All he knew was that writing the book had exhausted him, and he wasn’t sure if he would ever have the courage to write about himself again. About movies, yes, perhaps about other things as well someday, but autobiography was too wrenching, the demand to be both warm and cold was too difficult, and now that he had rediscovered his mother as she had been back then, he suddenly found himself missing her as she was now, missing both her and Gil, and with the Herald Tribune on the verge of collapse, he hoped they would come to visit him in Paris before long, for even though Ferguson was almost a man, there was much about him that was still a child, and having dwelled inside his childhood for the past six months, it wasn’t easy to get out of it.
That afternoon, he went downstairs for his Thursday study session with Vivian carrying the unbound pages of How Laurel and Hardy Saved My Life instead of his copy of Hamlet. Hamlet would have to wait, Ferguson decided. Hamlet, who did nothing but wait, would have to go on waiting a little longer, because now that the book was finished, Ferguson was desperate for someone to read it, since he himself was incapable of judging what he had written and had no idea whether it came across as a real book or a failed book, a garden filled with violets and roses or a truckload of manure. With Gil on the other side of the ocean, Vivian was the best choice, the inevitable choice, and Ferguson knew he could trust her to give his work a fair and impartial reading, for she had already proved herself to be an excellent preceptor, always assiduously prepared for their twice-a-week tutorials and incredibly sharp, with countless things to say about the works they pored over together (close readings, the explication de texte method for certain crucial passages, as demonstrated by the chapter about Odysseus’s scar in Auerbach’s Mimesis) but also around the works and behind the works, social and political conditions in ancient Rome, for example, Ovid’s exile, Dante’s banishment, or the revelation that Augustine was from North Africa and consequently a black man or a brown man, a constant in-flow of reference books, history books, and critical studies checked out from the nearby American Library and the farther-off British Council Library, and Ferguson was both impressed and amused that the supremely mondaine and often frivolous Madame Schreiber (how she could laugh at parties, how she roared at dirty jokes) was at the same time a dedicated scholar and intellectual, a summa cum laude graduate from Swarthmore, a Ph.D. in art history from what she mockingly referred to as the Sore Bone in Paris (dissertation on Chardin — her first stab at the material that would eventually become her book), and a clear and fluid writer (Ferguson had read parts of that book), and in addition to instructing him on how to read and think about the literary works on Gil’s list, she was taking the trouble to instruct Ferguson on how to look at and think about works of art with Saturday visits to the Louvre, the Musée de l’Art Moderne, the Jeu de Paume, or the Galerie Maeght, and even though Ferguson still found it incomprehensible that she should want to devote so much of her time to his education, he understood that his mind was steadily growing because of her, but why, he would ask, why are you doing all this for me, and the enigmatic Viv would always smile and say: Because I’m having fun, Archie. Because I’m learning so much.
By the time Ferguson went downstairs with his manuscript that afternoon in mid-February, he had been living in Paris for four months, and he and Vivian Schreiber had become friends, good friends, and perhaps (Ferguson sometimes thought) even a little bit in love with each other, or at least he was in love with her, and she had never failed to show him anything but the warmest, most complicitous affection, and when he knocked on the door of her study for their two-thirty appointment, he didn’t wait for her to ask him in because that wasn’t how they went about it, all he had to do was knock on the door to let her know he had arrived and then walk in, and so he walked in and found her sitting in her usual spot in the black leather armchair with her reading glasses on and a burning Marlboro wedged between the second and third fingers of her left hand (she still smoked American cigarettes after twenty-one years in France) and a paperback copy of Hamlet in her right hand, the text open somewhere in the middle of the book, and, as always, the picture of himself on the wall just behind her head, Archie, the photograph his mother had taken more than ten years ago, which he suddenly realized should be on the cover of the book if anyone ever wanted to publish it (good luck!), and as Vivian glanced up from the book and smiled at Ferguson, Ferguson walked across the room without saying a word and deposited the manuscript at her feet.
All done? she asked.
All done, he said.
Good for you, Archie. Bravo. And many merdes to mark the day.
I’m wondering if we could skip Hamlet this afternoon so you could take a look at it instead. It’s short. I doubt you’ll need more than two or three hours to finish it.
No, Archie, I’ll need more time than that. I assume you want a real response, yes?
Of course. And whenever something jumps out at you, feel free to mark it up. The book isn’t final yet, just finished for now. So read it with a pencil. Suggest changes, improvements, cuts, anything that occurs to you. I’m so sick of it, I can’t look at it anymore.
This is what we’ll do, Vivian said. I’ll stay here, and you’ll go out for a walk, for dinner, for a movie, for any old thing you want, and when you come back to the house, you’ll go straight upstairs to your room.
Pushing me out, huh?
I don’t want you around while I’m reading your book. Too much mental interference. Tu comprends? (You understand?)
Oui, bien sûr. (Yes, of course.)
We’ll meet in the kitchen tomorrow morning at eight-thirty. That will give me the rest of the afternoon, all evening, and into the night if necessary.
What about your dinner with Jacques and Christine? Aren’t you supposed to see them at eight?
I’ll cancel. Your book is more important.
Only if it’s good. If it’s bad, you’ll curse me for missing the dinner.