Not bad. But the point was: Did I want to go on thinking about jockstraps or turn my full attention to panties and bras?
They both smiled.
Not a difficult choice, then.
No, utterly painless.
Howard walked over to the window and gestured toward the campus. Look at this place, he said. It reminds me of the Duke of Earl’s country retreat, or one of those mental hospitals for the insanely rich. P.U. the magnificent, thank you for letting me in here, and thank you for these sumptuous grounds. But please explain one thing to me. Why are there so many black squirrels prancing around out there? In my experience, squirrels have always been gray, but here at Princeton they’re all black.
Because they’re part of the decorating scheme, Ferguson said. You remember the Princeton colors, don’t you?
Orange … and black.
That’s right, orange and black. Once we start seeing some orange squirrels, we’ll know why the black ones are there.
Howard laughed at Ferguson’s mildly funny, mildly stupid joke, and because he laughed, the nerve-knot in Ferguson’s stomach began to unclench a little bit, for even if P.U. turned out to be a hostile or disappointing place, he was going to have a friend there, or so it seemed to him when he heard his roommate laugh, and how fortunate he was to have met that friend in the first minutes of the first hour on the first day.
As they went about the business of unpacking their bundles, boxes, and bags, Ferguson was informed that Howard had started life on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and had been turned into a bridge-and-tunnel boy at age eleven when his father was appointed dean of students at Montclair State, and how curious it was to learn that they had spent the past seven years living within a few miles of each other and yet had intersected only glancingly those two times on the hardwood floors of their high school gyms. Testing each other out in the way strangers tend to do when they have been arbitrarily thrown together in the same cell, they quickly learned that they shared many likes and dislikes but not all or even most, both preferring the Mets to the Yankees, for one thing, but as of two years ago Howard had become a staunch vegetarian (he was morally opposed to the slaughter of animals) while Ferguson was an unthinking, bred-in-the-bone carnivore, and although Howard indulged in cigarette smoking from time to time, Ferguson regularly consumed between ten and twenty Camels a day. Books and writers were all over the map (Howard had read little contemporary American poetry or European fiction; Ferguson was more and more immersed in both of them), but their taste in films was eerily congruent, and when they both judged their favorite comedy of the 1950s to be Some Like It Hot and their favorite thriller to be The Third Man, Howard blurted out in a sudden rush of enthusiasm, Jack Lemmon and Harry Lime!, and an instant later he was sitting down at his desk, grabbing hold of a pen, and drawing a cartoon of a tennis match between a lemon and a lime. Ferguson watched in wonder as his prodigious roommate dashed off the sketch — the longer, bumpier lemon with arms and legs and a tennis racket in its right hand playing against the smaller, rounder, smoother lime with similar arms, legs, and racket, each one with a face that resembled the Lemmon and Lime originals (Jack L. and Orson W.), and then Howard added a net, a ball flying through the air, and the cartoon was done. Ferguson looked down at his watch. Three minutes from the first stroke to the last. No more than three minutes, perhaps even two.
Good God, Ferguson said. You really can draw, can’t you?
Lemmon versus Lime, Howard said, ignoring the compliment. It’s pretty funny, don’t you think?
Not just pretty funny. Very funny.
We might be onto something here.
Without a doubt, Ferguson said, as he tapped his finger against Howard’s pen and said, William Penn, and then tapped his finger against the drawing and said, versus Patti Page.
Ah, but of course! There’s no end to it, is there?
They kept it up for the next several hours, all through the unpacking and settling in, all through lunch in the dining hall, all through the afternoon as they wandered around the campus together and straight into dinner, by which time they had come up with forty or fifty more pairings. From beginning to end, they never stopped laughing, and so hard did they laugh at times and now and then for long intervals of time that Ferguson asked himself if he had ever laughed so hard at anything since the day he was born. Laughter to the point of tears. Laughter to the point of suffocation. And what a good sport it was for overcoming the fears and trembles of a young traveler who had just left home and found himself standing at the border crossing between the written past and the unwritten future.
Think of body parts, Howard said, and a moment or two later Ferguson answered: Legs Diamond versus Learned Hand. A few moments after that, Howard volleyed back with: Edith Head versus Michael Foot.
Think of sloshy bodies, Ferguson said, H-two-O in any one of its various states, and Howard answered: John Ford versus Larry Rivers, Claude Rains versus Muddy Waters. After several moments of concentrated thought, Ferguson matched those two with two of his own: Bennett Cerf versus Toots Shor, Veronica Lake versus Dick Diver.
Do fictional characters count? Howard asked.
Why not? As long as we know who they are, they’re just as real as real people. Anyway, since when did Harry Lime stop being a fictional character?
Whoops, I forgot about old Harry. In that case, let me offer you C. P. Snow versus Uriah Heep.
Or two other English gentlemen: Christopher Wren versus Christopher Robin.
Smashing. Now think of kings and queens, Howard said, and after a long pause Ferguson answered: William of Orange versus Robert Peel. Almost at once, Howard came back with: Vlad the Impaler versus Charles the Fat.
Think of Americans, Ferguson said, and over the next hour and a half they produced:
Cotton Mather versus Boss Tweed.
Nathan Hale versus Oliver Hardy.
Stan Laurel versus Judy Garland.
W. C. Fields versus Audrey Meadows.
Loretta Young versus Victor Mature.
Wallace Beery versus Rex Stout.
Hal Roach versus Bugs Moran.
Charles Beard versus Sonny Tufts.
Myles Standish versus Sitting Bull.
On it went, and on they went with it, but when they finally returned to their room after dinner and sat down to make a list of the pairings, more than half of what they had come up with had already flown out of their heads.
We’ll have to keep better records, Howard said. If nothing else, we’ve learned that brainstorms grow from highly flammable materials, and unless we walk around with a pen or a pencil at all times, we’re bound to forget most of what we’ve done.
For every one we forget, Ferguson said, we’ll always be able to invent another. Think crustacean, for example, cast out your net for a little while, and suddenly you have Buster Crabbe versus Jean Shrimpton.
Nice.
Or sounds. A sweet peep in the forest, a loud roar in the jungle, and there you are with Lionel Trilling versus Saul Bellow.
Or crime fighters with secretaries and girlfriends whose names go with addresses.
You’ve lost me.
Think Perry Mason and Superman, and what you get is Della Street versus Lois Lane.
Good. Awfully good. But then take a stroll on the beach, and before you know it you’re looking at George Sand … versus Lorna Doone.
That’s going to be a fun one to draw. An hourglass playing tennis with a cookie.
Yes, but what about Veronica Lake versus Dick Diver? Think of the possibilities.
Delicious. It’s so sexy, it’s almost obscene.
NAGLE WAS HIS faculty adviser. Nagle was the professor who taught him Classical Literature in Translation, the course that was doing more for the growth of Ferguson’s mind than any other course he was taking. And almost surely Nagle was the person who had argued most strenuously on his behalf for the scholarship, and even though Nagle never would have talked about what he had done, Ferguson sensed that Nagle had hopes for him and was taking a special interest in his progress, and that was crucial to Ferguson’s inner equilibrium in that time of transition and potential disarray, for Nagle’s hopes were the difference between feeling estranged and feeling he might have belonged there, and when he handed in his first paper of the term, five pages on the reunion scene between Odysseus and Telemachus in the sixteenth book of The Odyssey, Nagle returned it to him with a cryptic note scrawled at the bottom of the last page, Not bad, Ferguson — keep it up, which Ferguson understood to be the laconic professor’s way of telling him he had done a good job, a less than superlative job, perhaps, but a good job for all that.