Rather than compliment her on being the world’s most clever and ambitious student, which undoubtedly would have led to some talk about Artie’s good grades and how those good grades seemed to run in the family, he asked her what she wanted to do after lunch. There were several films playing that afternoon, he said, among them the new thing with the Beatles (Help!) and the latest thing from Godard, Alphaville, which Jim had already seen and couldn’t stop talking about, but Celia felt it would be more enjoyable to visit a museum or a gallery, where they could go on talking to each other rather than having to sit in the dark for two hours listening to other people talk. Ferguson nodded and said, Good point. They could walk over to Fifth Avenue, head uptown to the Frick, and spend the afternoon there looking at the Vermeers, Rembrandts, and Chardins. Okay? Yes, that was more than okay. But first, he added, one more cup of coffee before they left, and an instant later he bolted out of his chair and disappeared with their two cups.
He was gone for only a minute, but in that time Celia had noticed a man sitting at the table next to theirs, a small old man who had been blocked from her view by Ferguson’s shoulder, and when Ferguson came back with their recharged coffees and two containers of cream, he saw that Celia was looking at the man, looking at him with such distress in her eyes that Ferguson asked her if anything was wrong.
I feel so sorry for him, she said. I’ll bet he hasn’t eaten anything all day. He just sits there staring into his coffee as if he’s afraid to drink it, because once the coffee is gone, he won’t have enough money to buy another cup, and he’ll have to leave.
Ferguson, who had spotted the old man while walking back to the table, didn’t feel it would be polite to turn around and look at him again, but yes, the man had struck him as a lonely down-and-outer, a grizzled, unkempt wino with dirty fingernails and a sad leprechaun’s face, and Celia was probably right that he had just spent his last nickel.
I think we should give him something, she said.
We should, Ferguson replied, but we have to remember that he hasn’t asked us for it, and if we just walk over there and hand him some money because we feel sorry for him, he might feel offended, and then all our good intentions would only make him feel worse than he already feels.
You could be right, Celia said, as she lifted her cup and brought it toward her mouth, but then again, you could be wrong.
They both finished and stood up from their chairs. Celia opened her purse, and as they walked toward the old man sitting at the next table, she reached into the purse, pulled out a dollar, and put it down in front of him.
Please, sir, she said, go and buy yourself something to eat, and the old man, taking hold of the dollar and putting it in his pocket, looked up at her and said, Thank you, miss. God bless you.
LATER WOULD BE later, no doubt a most fulfilling and instructive later, a later of more afternoons and possibly even nights with the admirable, still-too-young Celia, but now was now, and for now the world had moved to the cranberry bogs and marshy lowlands of central New Jersey, for now the world was all about being one of eight hundred incoming freshmen and trying to adjust to his new circumstances. He understood himself well enough to know that he probably wasn’t going to fit in, that there would be things about the place he wasn’t going to like, but at the same time he was determined to make the most of the things he was going to like, and to that end he had already laid down five personal commandments in advance of his departure for Princeton, five laws he meant to adhere to for the whole duration:
1) Weekends in New York whenever and as often as possible. After his grandmother’s sudden and calamitous death in July (congestive heart failure), his now widowed grandfather had given him a key to the apartment on West Fifty-eighth Street along with unrestricted use of the spare bedroom, which meant there would always be a place to crash for the night. The promise of that room represented a singular instance of desire and opportunity joined, for on most Friday afternoons Ferguson would be able to leave campus and board the one-car shuttle train from Princeton to Princeton Junction (known as the Dinky, as in dinky suburban town) and then transfer to the longer, faster train that shot north to midtown Manhattan, the new and ugly Penn Station as opposed to the old and beautiful one, which had been demolished in 1963, but architectural blunders aside, it was still New York, and the reasons for going to New York were multiple. The negative reason was that it would allow him to escape the stuffiness of Princeton for an occasional breath of fresh air (even if the air in New York wasn’t fresh), which would make the stuffiness more tolerable to him and perhaps even pleasant (in its own stuffy way) during the time he spent on campus. The positive reason was the old reason of the past: density, immensity, complexity. Another positive reason was the chance he would be given to spend time with his grandfather and to keep up his friendship with Noah, which was vital to him. Ferguson hoped he would make friends at college, he wanted to make friends, he was expecting to make friends, but would any of those friends ever be as important to him as Noah?
2) No creative writing classes. A difficult decision, but Ferguson aimed to stick with it to the end. Difficult because the Princeton undergraduate program was one of the oldest in the country, which meant he could have earned academic credit for doing what he was already doing, that is, have been rewarded for the privilege of forging on with his book, which in turn meant his course load would have been effectively lightened by one course each semester, which would have given him more time not only to write but to read, to watch films, to listen to music, to drink, to pursue girls, and to go to New York, but Ferguson was opposed to the teaching of creative writing on principle, for he was convinced that fiction writing was not a subject that could be taught, that every future writer had to learn how to do it on his or her own, and furthermore, based on the information he had been given about how those so-called workshops were run (the word inevitably made him think of a roomful of young apprentices sawing through wooden planks and hammering nails into boards), the students were encouraged to comment on one another’s work, which struck him as absurd (the blind leading the blind!), and why would he ever submit to having his work picked apart by a numskull undergraduate, his exceptionally bizarre and unclassifiable work, which would surely be frowned upon and dismissed as experimental rubbish. It wasn’t that he was against showing his stories to older, more experienced people for one-on-one criticism and discussion, but the idea of a group horrified him, and whether that horror was caused by arrogance or fear (of the dreaded punch) was less important than the fact that he finally didn’t give a rat’s ass about anyone’s work but his own, and why bother to pretend to care when he didn’t? He was still in touch with Mrs. Monroe (who had read the first twelve parts of Mulligan’s Travels, which had led to twelve kisses and no punches along with some pertinent, mind-opening comments), and if and when she wasn’t available, other trusted readers included Uncle Don, Aunt Mildred, Noah, and Amy, and if he ever found himself in a fix and couldn’t track down any of those trusted ones, he would head for the office of Professor Robert Nagle, the best literary mind in all of Princeton, and humbly ask for his help.