It wasn’t just the sex, although the sex was a large part of it, as much for the still young Evie as for the sex-deprived Ferguson, who walked around with the permanent hard-on of all young men and couldn’t get enough, the two of them trapped by the need to enfold themselves in each other and tangle up their arms and legs in frantic surges of carnal oblivion, florid, demonstrative sex that emptied them out and left them gasping for air, or else the long, slow arousals of touching skin as softly and delicately as possible and waiting until they couldn’t wait anymore, the generosity of it all, the alternating sweetness and violence of it all, and because Ferguson’s erotic history had been limited to only one other bed partner so far, the slender, light-boned Dana with her small breasts and narrow hips, the larger, more substantial Evie presented him with a new form of womanhood that was both thrilling and strange at first, then thrilling and not strange, then strange all over again because everything about sex was strange. That first of all, but by no means all of it. The bond of bodies. Bucking bodies and languid bodies, warm bodies and hot bodies, buttocks bodies, moist bodies, cock and pussy bodies, neck bodies and shoulder bodies, finger bodies and fingering bodies, hand and lip bodies, licking bodies, and always and ever face bodies, their two faces looking at each other both in and out of bed, and no, Evie’s face was not beautiful, it could not be judged as even vaguely pretty by whatever standards were in force that year, too much nose, an angular Italian phiz with too many angles in it, but what eyes to look at him with, burning brown eyes that bored clear into him and never flinched or faked a feeling that wasn’t there, and the charm of her slightly crooked two front teeth, which gave her the smallest hint of an overbite and turned her mouth into the sexiest mouth anywhere in America, and best of all he got to spend the night with her, which had not been possible with Dana more than two or three times, but now it was every time, and the prospect of waking up in the morning next to Evie helped him to fall into the profoundest, most blissful slumbers he had ever known.
They saw each other on the weekends, every weekend in New York until his grandfather returned from Florida in early April, and Ferguson’s already split life was now spent jumping across an ever-growing void between campus and city, five nights a week in one place, two nights a week in the other, schoolwork and classes from Monday morning to Friday morning with no time for Mulligan because he was a Walt Whitman scholar and wasn’t allowed to fuck up, and therefore it was imperative that he finish all Princeton obligations before he left for the city at noon on Friday (reading assignments, papers, studying for tests, discussing Zeno and Heraclitus with Howard), and then he would return to the other half of his double life in New York, which meant Evie from the moment she rang the doorbell on Friday between six and seven, Mulligan during the Friday hours before she showed up, Mulligan for four hours on Saturday and Sunday mornings as Evie corrected papers, read books, and prepared her classes for the week, then lunch and out into the city together, followed by Saturday nights with his friends or her friends or just the two of them at films, plays, concerts, or in the apartment rolling around on the bed, and the second half of their truncated Sundays as they returned to the quiet of the bedroom after brunch, talking or not talking until four, five, or six, when they would finally force themselves to put on their clothes and Evie would drive him down to Penn Station. That was always the worst part of it — saying good-bye, and then the train ride back to Princeton on Sunday evening. No matter how many times he made that trip, he never got used to it.
She was the only person who had read every story he had written in the past three years. She was the only person he had ever opened up to about the self-lacerating restrictions he had imposed on himself after Artie Federman’s death. She was the only person who understood the depth of the bitterness he felt toward his father. She was the only person who fully grasped the nature of the havoc roiling inside him, the contradictory muddle of hard, unforgiving judgments and raging contempt for big-dollar American greed combined with an overall gentleness of spirit, his unstinting love for the people he cared about, his good-boy rectitude and out-of-step clumsiness with his own heart. Evie knew him better than anyone else. She knew how exceptionally odd he was and yet how breathtakingly normal he appeared to be, as if he were an extraterrestrial who had just landed in his flying saucer, she said to him one night back in July (before the incident with the doorbell, before they even suspected they would wind up going to bed together), a man from outer space dressed in the same clothes as any other twentieth-century Earthling, the most dangerous spy in the universe, and the exceptionally odd person with the normal exterior had been oddly comforted by her words, for that was precisely how he wanted to think of himself, and it was gratifying to think she was the only one who knew it.
They weren’t as brave as he had been expecting them to be, however. The all-public, who-gives-a-damn approach to what they were doing could not work without certain exceptions, for it quickly became apparent that some people would have to be kept in the dark for their own good — and for Ferguson and Evie’s good as well. In Ferguson’s case, that meant his mother, and because of his mother, it also meant Dan, Amy, and Jim. In Evie’s case, that meant her mother in the Bronx, her brother and his wife in Queens, and her sister and her husband in Manhattan. All of her relatives would be scandalized, Evie said, and while Ferguson didn’t think his mother’s response would be as strong as that, she was bound to be upset, or worried, or confused, and it wouldn’t be worth the trouble to explain himself to her, since all his justifications would probably leave her only more upset, more worried, or more confused. With Evie’s friends in Manhattan, on the other hand, there were no impediments to full exposure. They were actors, jazz musicians, and journalists, and they were all sophisticated enough not to care. The same held true for Ferguson’s smaller collection of New York acquaintances (why would Ron Pearson care?), but Noah was a potential stumbling block, in that he was more than just a friend but Ferguson’s cousin by marriage, and although it seemed unlikely that Noah would ever have a reason to talk to his father about his cousin’s love life, there was always a chance that it could slip out at some unguarded moment while Mildred happened to be eavesdropping in the next room, but that was a chance he would have to take, Ferguson decided, since Noah’s friendship was too important to him, and he trusted Noah enough to be able to count on his silence if he asked him to be silent, which Noah did, did without hesitation the moment he was asked, and as young Marx raised his right arm and solemnly promised to keep his trap shut, he congratulated Ferguson on having won the affections of an older woman. When Ferguson introduced them for the first time, Noah shook Evie’s hand and said, The famous Mrs. Monroe at last. Archie’s been talking about you for years, and now I see why. Some men have the hots for Marilyn, even though she’s no longer with us, but for Archie it’s always been Evelyn, and who can blame him for having the hots for you?
And who can blame me for having the hots for Archie? Evie said. It all works out rather beautifully, doesn’t it?