He saw her nearly every day, but the details of her private life were a mystery to him. Did she have a lover, Ferguson asked himself, or several lovers, or a series of lovers, or no lover at all? Were her sudden ten o’clock exits from their one-on-one dinners proof that she was on her way to an appointment in some man’s bed elsewhere in the city, or was she merely going out for a late-night drink with friends? And what about her occasional weekend departures, on average once or twice a month, most of them to Amsterdam, she said, where it seemed plausible to think a man might have been waiting for her, but then again, now that her book on Chardin had been published, perhaps she was looking for a new subject to write about and had chosen Rembrandt or Vermeer or some other Dutch painter whose work could be found only in Holland. Unanswerable questions, and because Vivian talked freely about the past but not about the present, at least not about her personal affairs in the present, the one soul Ferguson felt any connection to in all of Paris, the one human being he loved, was also a stranger to him.
One or two one-on-one dinners per week in the apartment, two or three dinners per week in restaurants, almost always with other people, Vivian’s friends, her horde of longtime Paris friends from the divergent but often overlapping worlds of art and literature, painters and sculptors, professors of art history, poets who wrote about art, gallery men and their wives, all of them well advanced in their careers, which meant that Ferguson was always the youngest person sitting at the table, suspected by many to be Vivian’s sex toy, he realized, even if their suspicions were wrong, and while Vivian always introduced him as the stepson of one of her dearest American friends, a fair number of the people at those four- and six- and eight-person restaurant dinners simply ignored him (no one could be colder or ruder than the French, Ferguson discovered), whereas others leaned in close and wanted to know everything about him (no one could be warmer or more democratic than the French, he also discovered), but even on the nights when he was ignored, there was the pleasure of being in the restaurants, of taking part in the good life those places seemed to represent, not just the grand spectacle of La Coupole, which he had witnessed three years earlier and still stood for him as the embodiment of all that was different between Paris and New York, but other brasseries such as Bofinger, Fouquet’s, and Balzar, nineteenth-century palaces and mini-palaces of wood-paneled walls and mirrored columns humming with the clink of flatware and the murmured roar of fifty or two hundred and fifty human voices, but also the grungier spots in the fifth arrondissement where he ate couscous and merguez for the first time in underground Tunisian and Moroccan restaurants and was initiated into the coriander savors of Vietnamese cuisine, the food of America’s mortal enemy, and two or three times that fall, when the dinners turned out to be especially animated and the hour was pushing past midnight, the whole group of four or five or six or seven would tramp off to Les Halles for onion soup at the Pied de Cochon, a restaurant crowded with customers at one and two and three o’clock in the morning, the arty sophisticates and late-night revelers sitting at the tables while the neighborhood whores stood at the bar drinking ballons de rouge alongside the hefty butchers in their blood-spattered smocks and aprons, an intermix of such radical disjunction and unlikely harmony that Ferguson asked himself if such a scene could exist anywhere else in the world.
Many dinners but no sex, no sex that he didn’t pay for and ultimately regret, and beyond those regrets no physical contact with anyone except for his morning cheek kisses with Vivian. De Gaulle was reelected president of the republic on December nineteenth, Giacometti was dying in Switzerland of a heart disease called pericarditis (it killed him on January eleventh), and every time Ferguson walked home at night after one of his post-dinner prowls, he was stopped by the police and asked to show his papers. On January twelfth, he launched into the ill-conceived third section of his book, which caused him much difficulty and many wasted hours of work until he finally scrapped it and figured out a new, more appropriate ending. On January twentieth, while still in the midst of those turmoils with his book, he received a letter from Brian Mischevski, who was in his first year at Cornell, and by the time Ferguson had finished studying the four short paragraphs of his friend’s letter, he felt as if a building had fallen on top of him. Not only had Brian’s parents reneged on their promise to pay for their son to visit Paris in the spring, a trip that Ferguson had been looking forward to with frantic anticipation, but Brian himself thought it was probably all for the best anyway, since he had a girlfriend now, and fun as it had been to pal around with Ferguson last year, what they had been up to was nothing more than kids’ stuff, really, and Brian had outgrown that after landing in college, had put all that behind him for good, and even though Ferguson was still his number one friend of all time, their friendship would just be a normal friendship from now on.
Normal. What did normal mean, Ferguson asked himself, and why wasn’t it normal for him to feel the way he did about wanting to kiss and make love to other boys, the sex of one-sex sex was just as normal and natural as the sex of two-sex sex, maybe even more normal and more natural because a cock was something boys understood better than girls, and therefore it was easier to know what the other person wanted without having to guess, without having to play the courtship and seduction games that could make the sex of two-sex sex so confounding, and why did a person have to choose between one or the other, why block out one-half of humanity in the name of normal or natural when the truth was that everyone was Both, and people and society and the laws and religions of people in different societies were just too afraid to admit it. As the California cowgirl had said to him three and a half years ago: I believe in my life, Archie, and I don’t want to be scared of it. Brian was scared. Most people were scared, but scared was a stupid way to live, Ferguson felt, a dishonest and demoralizing way to live, a dead-end life, a dead life.
For the next several days, he walked around feeling ravaged by Brian’s kiss-off letter — from Ithaca, New York, of all places (Ithaka!) — and the nights were almost unbearable in their loneliness. His intake of red wine doubled, and on two consecutive nights he vomited into the sink. Vivian, who had a good pair of eyes in her head to go along with a keen, observant brain, looked at him carefully during their first one-on-one dinner since the arrival of Brian’s letter, hesitated for a couple of moments, and then asked him what was wrong. Ferguson, who felt confident she would never betray him as Sydney Millbanks had on his disastrous trip to Palo Alto, decided to tell her the truth, since he needed to talk to someone, and there was no one else but Vivian.