I’ve had a disappointment, he said.
I can see that, Vivian replied.
Yes, a ton of hurt landed on me the other day, and I’m still trying to get over it.
What kind of hurt?
Love hurt. In the form of a letter from a person I care about very much.
That’s hard.
Extremely hard. Not only have I been dumped, but I’ve been told that I’m not normal.
What does normal mean?
In my case, an overall interest in all kinds of people.
I see.
Do you really see?
I assume you’re talking about girl people and boy people, no?
Yes, I am.
I’ve always known that about you, Archie. From the first time we met at your mother’s opening.
How could you tell?
From the way you were looking at the young man who was serving the drinks. And also from the way you were looking at me, from the way you still look at me.
Is it so obvious?
Not really. But I have a good sense of these things — from long experience.
You’re saying you have a nose for two-way people?
I was married to one.
Oh. I had no idea.
You’re so much like Jean-Pierre, Archie. Maybe that’s why I wanted you to come here and stay with me. Because you remind me of him so much … so much.
You miss him.
Horribly.
It must have made for a complicated marriage, though. I mean, if I go on being the way I am, I don’t think I’ll ever marry anyone.
Unless it’s to another two-way person.
Ah. I never though of that.
Yes, it can be a bit complicated at times, but it’s worth the effort.
Are you telling me that you and I are the same?
That’s right. But different, too, of course, in that I, through no doing of my own, am a woman, and you, dear boy, are a man.
Ferguson laughed.
Then Vivian laughed back at him, which induced Ferguson to laugh again, and once Ferguson laughed again, Vivian laughed back at him again, and before long the two of them were laughing together.
THE FOLLOWING SATURDAY, January twenty-ninth, two guests came to the apartment for dinner, both of them Americans, both of them old friends of Vivian’s, a man of about fifty named Andrew Fleming, who had been Vivian’s American history professor in college and now taught at Columbia, and a young woman of about thirty named Lisa Bergman, a transplant from La Jolla, California, who had recently moved to Paris to work for an American law firm and whose older cousin was married to Vivian’s brother. After Ferguson’s talk with Vivian earlier in the week, which had led to the startling double confession of their equal but opposite two-way proclivities, Ferguson wondered if Lisa Bergman might not be Vivian’s current flame, and, if so, whether her presence at the table that evening was a sign that Vivian had cracked open the door a bit and was allowing him to have a glimpse of her private life. As for Fleming, who was in Paris on a one-semester sabbatical to complete the final draft of his book about what he called the American old boys in France (Franklin, Adams, Jefferson), he was so obviously not a man cut out for women, so obviously a man interested only in men, that after twenty or thirty minutes it flashed through Ferguson’s head that he was taking part in his first all-queer dinner since that horrible night in Palo Alto. This time, however, he was having fun.
It felt good to be with Americans again, so comfortable and unforced, so pleasant to sit down with people who shared the same references and laughed at the same jokes, all four of them so different from one another and yet chatting away as if they had been friends for years, and the more Ferguson studied how Vivian was looking at Lisa, and the more he looked at how Lisa was looking at Viv, the more certain he became that his intuition had been correct, that the two of them were indeed involved, and that made Ferguson happy for Vivian, since he wanted her to have anything and everything her good heart desired, and this Lisa Bergman, as in Ingrid and Ingmar, a Swedish Bergman as opposed to a German or Jewish Bergman, was nothing if not a fascinating character, a vivacious and vivid match for the all-deserving Viv.
Big. That was the first thing you noticed about her, the bigness of her body, five foot ten and large-boned, a burly girl without a touch of fat on her, solid and broad-shouldered, thick, powerful arms, large breasts, and extremely blond hair, a southern California blonde, with a round, pretty face and pale, almost invisible eyelashes, the kind of woman Ferguson could have imagined winning medals as a shot-putter or discus thrower at the summer Olympics, a Swedish-American Amazon who looked as if she had stepped from the pages of a nudist magazine, clean-cut, health-conscious nudism, the champion female weight lifter of all nudist colonies throughout the civilized world, and funny, devilishly funny and unconstrained, laughing between every other sentence she spoke, delicious American sentences spiced with words that made Ferguson understand how much he had missed hearing them since he’d left New York, two-syllable standbys such as dinky, dorky, grotty, snazzy, goofy, snooty, crummy, cruddy, crappy, gunky, and wicked, as in wonderful or marvelous, and whatever kind of law Lisa was practicing in Paris, she said not a word about it.
By contrast, the middle-aged Fleming was small and chubby, five-six at the most, with a waddling sort of walk and a sizable paunch protruding against the V-neck sweater under his jacket, small, fleshy hands, a chinless, sagging face, and an unusual pair of horn-rimmed owl glasses perched on his nose. A young professor who suddenly and irrevocably was no longer young. A veteran academic with a slight stammer and a head of fewer and fewer thinning gray hairs, but also alive and alert to the three others sitting at the table, a man who had read much and knew much but didn’t talk about himself or his work either, that was the game they were playing that night, Lisa the lawyer not talking about the law, Vivian the art writer not talking about art, Ferguson the memoirist not talking about his memories, Fleming the historian not talking about the old American boys in Paris, and in spite of occasional lapses into stuttering, Fleming expressed himself in clean, smoothly articulated sentences, actively participating in the general conversation about all things and no things, politics for one, bien sûr, the war in Vietnam and the anti-war movement at home (Ferguson was receiving twice-monthly reports about it from his cousin Amy in Madison), de Gaulle and the French elections, the recent suicide of a man named Georges Figon just before he was about to be arrested for the kidnapping of Mehdi Ben Barka, the Moroccan politician whose whereabouts were still unknown, but also trivial digressions into such matters as trying to remember the name of the actress in the movie with the title no one could remember or — Lisa excelled at this — reciting the lyrics of obscure pop songs from the 1950s.
The dinner lumbered on slowly and enjoyably, a languorous three hours of food and talk and large quantities of wine, and then they were on to the cognac, and as Ferguson and Fleming raised their glasses to toast each other, Vivian said something to Lisa about wanting to show her something somewhere else in the apartment (Ferguson had stopped listening by then, but he hoped they were going off to neck in the study or in Vivian’s bedroom), and just like that the two women were gone, which left Ferguson alone at the table with Fleming, and after an awkward moment in which neither one of them said anything because neither one of them knew what to say, Fleming suggested they go upstairs to visit Ferguson’s room, which earlier in the evening Ferguson had described as the smallest room in the world, and although Ferguson laughed and inanely commented that there wasn’t much to see up there beyond a messy desk and an unmade bed, Fleming said it didn’t matter, he was simply curious to see what the smallest room in the world looked like.