While he was in the air heading south, Andy Warhol was shot and almost killed by a woman named Valerie Solanas, who had written a manifesto entitled SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) and a play called Up Your Ass.
Two days after that, Robert Kennedy was shot in Los Angeles by a man named Sirhan Sirhan and killed at the age of forty-two.
Ferguson walked on the beach every evening at dusk, played tennis with his father on most mornings, ate lox and eggs at Wolfie’s in honor of his grandmother, and spent the bulk of his time in the air-conditioned apartment working on his translations of French poems. On June sixteenth, not knowing where Amy was anymore, he sealed up one of those poems in an envelope and sent it off to her in care of her parents in New York. He couldn’t write her a letter and wouldn’t write her a letter, but the poem somehow managed to say most of the things he himself could no longer say to her.
THE PRETTY REDHEAD
BY GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE
6.2
6.3
Thirty-nine days after he threw Fleming’s money out the window, Ferguson typed the last pages of the final version of his book. He had assumed he would start to feel all sorts of good things about himself at that moment, but after a brief surge of elation as he rolled the last five sheets of paper and carbon out of his typewriter, those feelings soon went away, even the supposedly eternal good feeling of having proved to himself that he was capable of writing a book, that he was a person who finished what he started and not one of those weak-willed pretenders who dreamed big dreams but never managed to deliver the goods, which was a human quality that pertained to far more than just the writing of books, but after an hour or so Ferguson wasn’t feeling much of anything but a kind of weary sadness, and by the time he went downstairs for a pre-dinner drink with Vivian and Lisa at six-thirty, his insides had gone numb.
Empty. That was the word for it, he said to himself, as he sat down on the sofa and took his first sip of wine, the same empty space Vivian had talked about when describing how she had felt after finishing her own book. Not empty in the sense of standing alone in a room without furniture — but empty in the sense of feeling hollowed out. Yes, that was it, hollowed out in the way a woman was hollowed out after giving birth. But in this case to a stillborn child, an infant who would never change or grow or learn how to walk, for books lived inside you only as long as you were writing them, but once they came out of you, they were all used up and dead.
How long does the feeling go on? he asked Vivian, wondering if it was just a temporary crisis or the beginning of a plunge into full-blown melancholia, but before Vivian could answer him, live-wire Lisa jumped in and said, Not long, Archie. Only about a hundred years. Right, Viv?
There’s one quick solution, Vivian said, smiling at the thought of those one hundred years. Start writing another book.
Another book? Ferguson said. I’m feeling so burned out right now, I’m not sure if I’ll ever be able to read another book.
Nevertheless, Vivian and Lisa toasted Ferguson on having given birth to his baby, which might not have been alive for him, they said, but it was very much alive for them, and so much so, added Lisa (who hadn’t read a single page of the book), that she would be willing to quit her law job if Ferguson promised to hire her as the nanny. Such was Lisa’s sense of humor — her nonsensical sense of humor — but it tended to be funny because she herself was funny, and Ferguson laughed. Then he imagined Lisa strolling around Paris with a dead baby in a pram, and he laughed again.
The next morning, Ferguson and Vivian walked to the post office on the Boulevard Raspail, their local branch of the state-run PTT (Postes, Télégraphes et Téléphones), which in French was known as the Pay-Tay-Tay, the triple initials that tripped off the tongue so euphoniously that Ferguson never tired of repeating them, and once they had entered that sturdy edifice of communication services provided to the citizens of the French Republic and all others either traveling through or living in France, they airmailed a copy of Ferguson’s manuscript to London. The envelope was not addressed to Aubrey Hull of Io Books but rather to a woman named Norma Stiles, who worked as a senior editor at Vivian’s British publishing house (Thames & Hudson) and happened to be a friend of her younger T&H colleague Geoffrey Burnham, who in turn happened to be a close friend of Hull’s. This was the way Vivian had chosen to submit the manuscript — through the intervention of her friend, who had assured her she would get to the manuscript at once and then pass it on to Burnham, who would then pass it on to Hull. Wasn’t that unnecessarily complicated? Ferguson had asked Vivian when she proposed the idea to him. Wouldn’t it be faster and simpler just to ship it off straight to Hull himself?