I’m not expecting it to be bad, Archie. But even if it is, your book is still more important than the dinner.
How can you say that?
Because it’s your book, your first book, and no matter how many books you write in the future, you’ll never write your first book again.
In other words, I’ve lost my virginity.
That’s it. You’ve lost your virginity. And whether you’ve done it with a good fuck or a bad fuck, you’ll never be a virgin again.
The next morning, Ferguson walked into the kitchen a few minutes before eight o’clock, hoping to fortify himself with a bowl or two of Celestine’s café au lait before Vivian showed up to pronounce her verdict on his miserable excuse of a book and cast it into the dustbin of history, one more discarded human thing to rot among the millions of others. In spite of his calculations, however, Vivian had beaten him to the punch, and there she was when Ferguson entered the room, sitting at the white enamel table in the white kitchen dressed in her white morning bathrobe with the white-and-black pages of his manuscript standing in a pile next to her own white bowl of Celestine’s café au lait.
Bonjour, Monsieur Archie, Celestine said. Vous vous levez tôt ce matin (You’re up early this morning), addressing Ferguson with the formal vous of servants rather than the tu of familiar equals, a quirk of the language that still grated on his American ears.
Celestine was a brisk little woman of around fifty, reserved, unobtrusive, but exceedingly kind, Ferguson had always felt, and even though she insisted on calling him vous, he liked the way she pronounced his name in French, softening the hard ch sound into a less abrasive sh, which turned him into Ar-shee, which in turn invariably made him think of the French word for archive, ar-sheeve. Young as he still was, he had already become an archive, which meant he was someone to be kept for the ages — even if his book belonged in the dustbin of history.
Parce que j’ai bien dormi, Ferguson said to her (Because I had a good sleep), which was manifestly untrue, since one glance at his tousled hair and hollowed-out eyes would have told anyone he had drunk a full bottle of red wine last night and had hardly slept at all.
Vivian stood up and kissed him once on each cheek, their standard morning salutation, but then, diverging from the daily ritual, she put her arms around him and kissed him on each cheek again, two smacking busses this time, loud smooches that resonated throughout the tiled kitchen, after which she abruptly pushed him back, held him at arm’s length, and asked: What’s wrong with you? You look terrible.
I’m nervous.
Don’t be nervous, Archie.
I’m about to shit in my pants.
Don’t do that either.
What if I can’t help myself?
Sit down, stupid, and listen to me.
Ferguson sat down. A moment later, Vivian sat down as well. She leaned forward, looked Ferguson in the eyes, and said: No worries, bub. Tu piges? (You get it?) Tu me suis bien? (You follow?) It’s a beautiful, heartbreaking book, and I’m awed that someone your age could have written anything this good. If you don’t change a word, it’s strong enough to be published as is. On the other hand, it’s still not perfect, and because you told me to go ahead and mark it up if I wanted to, I’ve marked it up. About six or seven pages of suggested cuts, I’d say, along with fifty or sixty sentences that could use more work. In my opinion. You don’t have to follow my opinion, of course, but here’s the manuscript (shoving it across the table in Ferguson’s direction), and until you decide what you want to do, I won’t say another word. They’re only suggestions, remember, but in my opinion, I think the changes will make the book a better book.
How can I thank you?
Don’t thank me, Archie. Thank your extraordinary mother.
Later that morning, Ferguson climbed back into the pages of his manuscript and began working his way through Vivian’s comments, most of which were spot on target, he felt, a good eighty to ninety percent of them, at any rate, which was a large percentage, so many small but acute excisions, a phrase here, an adjective there, subtle but ruthless parings-down to increase the energy of the prose, and then the awkward sentences, there were far too many of them, he was ashamed to admit, blind spots he had failed to catch after dozens of readings, and over the next ten days Ferguson attacked each one of those stylistic flubs and aggravating repetitions, at times changing bits that Vivian had left unmarked, at times reversing those changes and going back to the original, but the essential thing was that Vivian had left the structure of the book intact, her pencil hadn’t switched around paragraphs or sections, there were no serious overhauls or blotted out passages, and once Ferguson had incorporated the revisions into his now scratched-over, barely readable typescript, he typed up the book again, this time in triplicate (two carbons), which proved to be a hellish job because of his propensity for hitting the wrong keys, but when his nineteenth birthday rolled around on March third, he was nearly done, and six days later he was completely done.
Meanwhile, Vivian had been calling around, making inquiries among her British friends about potential publishers for Ferguson’s book, choosing London over New York because she had better contacts there, and Ferguson, who was wholly ignorant about all matters concerning publishing, whether in England or the United States, left everything to Vivian and forged on with his typing, already starting to think about his partially written essay, “Junkyards and Geniuses,” which might or might not have been the germ of a second book, and about reading over some of his longer high school pieces with the notion of reworking them (if he found they were worth the trouble) and trying to place them in magazines, but even after Vivian had narrowed down the British possibilities to two small literary houses, minute but aggressive concerns dedicated to publishing what she called new talent, Ferguson had no hope that either one of them would accept his book.
You decide where you want to send it first, Vivian said to him, as they sat in the kitchen on the morning of his nineteenth birthday, and when she told him that the names of the two presses were Io Books and Thunder Road, Ltd., Ferguson instinctively said Io, not because he had a clear sense of who Io was but because the word thunder seemed inimical to a book with the names Laurel and Hardy in the title.
They’ve been in business for about four years now, Vivian said, a kind of hobbyhorse for a well-to-do, thirtyish young man named Aubrey Hull, mostly a publisher of poets, they tell me, with some fiction and nonfiction, nicely designed and printed, good paper, but they put out only twelve to fifteen books a year, whereas Thunder Road publishes about twenty-five. Still want to go for Io?
Why not? They’re going to reject it anyway. And when we send it to the Thunder people, they’re going to reject it, too.
All right, Mr. Negative, one last question. The title page. The book will be going out sometime next week, and what name do you want to use for yourself?
What name? My name, of course.
I’m talking about Archibald or Archie, or A., or A. plus your middle initial.
My birth certificate and passport both say I’m Archibald, but no one has ever called me that. Archibald Isaac. I’ve never been Archibald, and I’ve never been Isaac. I’m Archie. I’ve always been Archie, and I’ll always be Archie to the end. That’s my name, Archie Ferguson, and that’s the name I’ll use to sign my work. Not that it matters now, of course, since no publisher in his right mind would ever want to publish such a weird little book, but it’s good to think about it for the future.