SO IT WENT during the daytime hours of Ferguson’s early months in Paris, the satisfactions of intense study and hard work on his book, the steady improvement of his French after the summer-long program in Vermont, the classes at the Alliance Française, the dinners conducted entirely in French with Vivian’s Paris friends, the daily conversations with Celestine, not to mention numerous encounters with strangers while standing at the bar and eating ham sandwiches in his lunch-hour cafés, which had turned him into an almost fifty-fifty bilingual American in France, and so immersed had he become in his second language that if not for his studies in English, his writing in English, and his all-English interactions with Vivian, his own English might have started to atrophy. He often dreamed in French now (once, comically, with English subtitles running below the action), and his head was continually churning with bizarre, often obscene bilingual puns, such as transforming the common French expression au contraire (on the contrary) into an English homonym of stupefying vulgarity: O cunt rare.
Cunts were on his mind, however, as were cocks, along with the imagined and remembered bodies of naked women and men from both the present and the past, for once the sun went down in the evening and the city turned dark, the invigorating solitude of his daytime regimen often collapsed into a breathless sort of loneliness at night. The first months were the hardest on him, the beginning period when he was introduced to many people but no one he particularly liked, no one even a millionth as much as he liked Vivian, and he would gut out those empty, late-night hours in his small suffocation room by doing one of several things to distract himself from the loneliness: reading (almost impossible), listening to classical music on his pocket-sized transistor radio (a bit more possible, but never for more than twenty or thirty minutes at a stretch), doing a second stint of work on his book (difficult but sometimes productive, sometimes useless), stepping out for ten o’clock showings of films in theaters behind and around the Boulevard Saint-Michel (mostly enjoyable, even when the film was less than good, but then he would return to his room at twelve-thirty and the loneliness would still be waiting for him), prowling the streets of Les Halles in search of a prostitute when the cunt-cock problem raged out of control (the buzz in the groin from walking past all those sidewalk hookers, temporary release, but the sex was brusque and dismal, impersonal fucks of no account, which inevitably filled him with aching memories of Julie on his long walks home in the dark, and with an allowance of just eighty dollars a week from his mother and Gil, those ten- and twenty-dollar tumbles had to be kept to a minimum). The last solution was alcohol, which could be part of the other solutions as well, drinking and reading, drinking and listening to music, drinking after coming back from a film or another sad-eyed whore — the one solution that solved everything whenever the loneliness became too big for him. Having sworn off scotch after one too many blackout stupors in New York, Ferguson had shifted over to red wine as his medicine of choice, and with a liter of vin ordinaire selling for a paltry one franc at some of the neighborhood épiceries close to his lunchtime haunts (twenty cents for a bare, unlabeled bottle at grocery stores scattered through the sixth arrondissement), Ferguson always had one or two of those bottles stashed in his room, and whether he went out or stayed in on a given night, the one-franc red wine was an effective balm for inducing drowsiness and an eventual plunge into sleep, although those foul, nameless vintages could be hard on his system, and he often found himself battling the runs or a woozy, cracking head when he woke in the morning.
On average, he dined alone with Vivian in the apartment once or twice a week, traditional cold-weather food such as pot au feu, cassoulet, and boeuf bourguignon prepared and served by Celestine, who had no husband or family in Paris and was always on call for extra duty when asked, such good-tasting meals that the ever-hungry Ferguson could seldom resist a second or even third helping of the main course, and it was during those quiet, one-on-one dinners that he and Vivian became friends, or solidified the friendship that had been there from the start, both of them sharing stories about their lives, with much of what he learned about her entirely unexpected: born and raised in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, for example, the same part of town where the original Archie had lived, Jewish in spite of coming from a family named Grant (which prompted Ferguson to tell the story of how, in one day, his grandfather had gone from being Reznikoff to Rockefeller to Ferguson), daughter of a doctor and a fifth-grade schoolteacher, four years younger than her brilliant scientist brother, Douglas, Gil’s good friend during the war, and then, even before she graduated from high school, a trip to France in 1939 at age fifteen to visit distant relatives in Lyon, where she met Jean-Pierre Schreiber, an even more distant relative, perhaps a fourth or fifth cousin, and even though he had just celebrated his thirty-fifth birthday, which made him a vast twenty years older than she was, something happened, Vivian said, a spark was lit between them and she gave herself to Jean-Pierre, he a widower in charge of a significant French export company and she just a second-year student at Erasmus High School in Brooklyn, a liaison that no doubt would have struck most outsiders as a little perverse, but it had never seemed that way to Vivian, who looked upon herself as a grown-up in spite of her young age, and then, when the Germans crossed into Poland in September, there was no chance for them to see each other again until the war was over, but Jean-Pierre was safe in Lausanne, and over the five years it took for Vivian to complete high school and graduate from college, she and Jean-Pierre exchanged two hundred and forty-four letters and were already committed to marrying each other by the time Gil managed to pull the strings that allowed her to slip into France just after Paris was liberated in August 1944.
It was pleasant to listen to Vivian’s stories because she seemed to take such pleasure in telling them, even if it probably was a little perverse for a thirty-five-year-old man to have fallen for a fifteen-year-old girl, but Ferguson couldn’t help noting that he too had been fifteen when he made his first trip to France, where he had met Vivian Schreiber through similar kinds of family connections, a woman who was not just twenty years older than he was but twenty-three years, yet why bother to count when it had already been established that one person was less than half the age of the other, and all through those lonely first months in Paris Ferguson actively lusted after Vivian and hoped they would wind up in bed together, for inasmuch as her love life and marriage had not been constricted by questions of age, it was possible to wonder if she might not be willing to experiment in the opposite direction with him, to be the older one this time while he took over her previous spot as the younger for what was bound to be an intoxicating adventure in erotic perversity. He found her beautiful, after all, old in comparison to him but not old in the big scheme of things, a woman who still shimmered with sensuality and allure, and there was no doubt in his mind that she found him attractive, since she had often remarked on how handsome he was, how smashing he looked when they left the apartment to go out for dinner, and what if that was the true and secret reason why she had invited him to live with her — because she had dreamed of his body and wanted to nuzzle against his young flesh? That would account for her inexplicable generosity toward him, the free rent and the free food, the free study sessions, the clothes she had bought for him on their first shopping blitz at Le Bon Marché in November, all the expensive shirts and shoes and sweaters she had sprung for that day, the three pairs of pleated corduroy trousers, the sports jacket with the double vents in back, the winter coat and the red woolen scarf, top-of-the-line French clothes, the fashionable clothes he took such pleasure in wearing, and why would she be doing all those things if she wasn’t lusting after him just as feverishly as he was lusting after her? Sex toy. That was the term for it, and yes, he gladly would have become her sex toy if that was what she had in mind, but even though she often looked at him as if that was precisely what she had in mind (the thoughtful stares directed at his face, her eyes closely scrutinizing his smallest gestures), he was in no position to act, as the younger one he had no right to make the first move, it was up to Vivian to reach out to him, but much as he longed for her to take him in her arms and kiss him on the mouth, or even to extend her hand and touch his face with the tips of her fingers, she never did.