TWO WEEKS AFTER that night, Evie opened the door of her soul and let Ferguson in.
It was another Saturday, another one of the good Saturdays in the middle of another one of their good weekends in New York, and they had just returned to the apartment on West Fifty-eighth Street from a small dinner with some of Evie’s musician friends. Rather than go straight to the bedroom as they normally did after their Saturday night outings, Evie took Ferguson’s hand and led him into the living room, saying there was something she wanted to talk to him about first, and so they sat down on the couch together, Ferguson lit up a Camel, passed the cigarette to Evie, who took one drag and gave it back to Ferguson, and then she said:
Something has happened to me, Archie. Something big. I was supposed to have my period on Monday, but it didn’t come. Most of the time, I’m right on schedule, but every now and then I might be off by a day or half a day, so I didn’t think much about it, assuming it would come on Tuesday, but nothing happened on Tuesday either. Exceptional. Almost unprecedented. Deeply curious. In the past, that would be the moment when I’d start to panic, wondering if I was pregnant or not, playing out the grim possibilities in my head, since I’ve never wanted to be pregnant, or at least I don’t think I have, and I suppose the two abortions prove that — one in my sophomore year at Vassar, one about a year after Bobby and I were married. But now, and by now I mean Tuesday, four days ago, with my period two days late, for the first time in my life I wasn’t worried. What if I’m pregnant? I asked myself. Would it matter? No, I answered myself, it wouldn’t matter. It would be pretty damned terrific. Never in my life, Archie — never once have I had that thought and said those words to myself. Wednesday. Still no blood. Not only was I not worried anymore, I felt on top of the world.
And? Ferguson asked.
And Thursday it was over. The whole world poured out of me, and I’m still bleeding as if I’d been stabbed in the gut. I mean, you know that. You slept with me last night.
Yes, there was a lot of blood. More than usual. Not that I cared, of course.
Not that I cared either. But the important thing is this, Archie: Something has happened to me. I’m different now.
Are you sure?
Yes, absolutely sure. I want to have a baby.
It took a while before Ferguson understood what she was talking about, the mountain of unexplained particulars and daunting questions such as who would be the father of that child, and how did she propose to become a mother without being married, and, if she wasn’t married or living with someone, how could she go on teaching and be a mother at the same time if she didn’t have the money to pay for a nurse or babysitter?
Evie deflected those questions by taking him on a short tour of her inner life, with a heavy emphasis on the love and sex part of that life, the boys and men she had fallen for over the years between girlhood and now, the good and bad decisions she had made, the ephemeral dalliances and longer commitments that had all come to nothing in the end, the worst mistake being her impossible early marriage to Bobby Monroe, which had lasted all of two and a half years, and the surprising thing about those passions and hopes and disappointments, Evie said, was that no one had ever made her happier than he did, her boy-man Archie, her irreplaceable Archie, and for the first time in her life she was with someone she felt she could trust, someone she could love without simultaneously dreading the moment when she would be slapped down for loving too hard or too much. No, Archie, she said, you’re not like any of the others. You’re the first man who isn’t afraid of me. It’s a remarkable thing, really, and I’m trying to live it as fully as I can, because deep down you know and I know that it isn’t going to last.
Not last? Ferguson said. How can you say that?
Because it can’t. Because it won’t. Because you’re still too young, and sooner or later we won’t be right for each other anymore.
That was the nub of it, Ferguson realized, the anticipation of a time when they would no longer be together, a future time when all that was happening now would disappear and they would be turned into memory-ghosts living on in each other’s minds, insubstantial beings without skin or bones or hearts, and that was why she was thinking about babies now and wanted one of her own — because of him, because she wanted him to be the father, a ghost-father who would bequeath his body to her child and go on living with her forever.
It made sense. And then again, it made no sense at all.
It wasn’t anything urgent, she said, and it wasn’t anything she wanted him to think about very often, simply that the possibility would be there now, a thing to tuck away in the back of their heads and then go on as before, and no, she wasn’t asking him to take any responsibility, he wouldn’t even have to sign the birth certificate if he didn’t want to, it would be her job and not his, and thank God women didn’t have to be married in order to have children, she said, and then she started to laugh, to let loose with the big laugh of someone who had made up her mind and was no longer afraid of anything.
THEY WENT ON as before. The only difference was that Evie left her diaphragm at home and Ferguson stopped buying condoms.
He wasn’t disturbed by the thought of becoming a father, just as he hadn’t been disturbed by the thought of becoming a husband when he proposed to Dana. What did disturb him was the thought of losing Evie. Now that she had made her pessimistic declaration about their eventual demise as a couple, he was determined to prove her wrong. However, if time should prove her right, then he would follow her example and try to make the most of the time they still had together by living it as fully as he could.
It was possible that he was no longer thinking clearly, but it didn’t feel that way to Ferguson. His eyes were open, and the world was teeming around him.
Months passed.
He wrote the twenty-fourth chapter of Mulligan’s Travels, an account of Mulligan’s strenuous journey home from a country in the midst of a three-pronged civil war. Ferguson’s book was finished, all one hundred and thirty-one double-spaced pages of it, but rather than burn the manuscript as he had been planning to do, he dug into his savings and shelled out the irrational sum of one hundred and fifty dollars to hire a professional typist to make three copies for him (an original plus two carbons), which he then gave as presents to Evie, Howard, and Noah. They all professed to like it. That reassured Ferguson, but he was sick of Mulligan by then and was already dreaming about his next project, a risky venture called The Scarlet Notebook.
Celia Federman was accepted by Barnard and NYU and would be starting Barnard in the fall, with the intention of majoring in biology. Ferguson sent her a bouquet of white roses. They still talked on the phone from time to time, but after Bruce and Evie came into their lives, there had been no more Saturdays in New York.
Howard and Ferguson decided to go on rooming together until the end of college. Next year, they would be taking their meals at the Woodrow Wilson Club, which was not an eating club but rather an anti-eating club for students who didn’t want to join a club. Some of the smartest undergraduates ate there. The cozy dining room had about twenty small tables for four people each, which made it a kind of anti-cafeteria cafeteria, and one of the good things about it was that professors often came to give informal talks after dessert. Howard and Ferguson were planning to invite Nagle to discuss one of their best-loved fragments from Heraclitus: If you do not hope, you will never stumble upon the unhoped for, which is sealed off and impenetrable.
Noah informed him that he was planning to spend the summer working on his long-deferred idea of adapting Sole Mates into a short black-and-white film. When Ferguson told him not to waste his time on that juvenile rot, Noah said, Too late, Archibald, I’ve already written the script, and the sixteen-millimeter camera is on loan for a total of zero cents.