Ferguson sat down on the bed in the fifth-floor room of the Hôtel George V and watched Aubrey take off his suit jacket and tie. It had been so long since he had been with anyone he cared about, so long since anyone had touched him or had wanted to touch him without first talking about money that when the ruler of the elves walked over to the bed, climbed into his lap, and put his arms around Ferguson’s fully clothed torso, Ferguson shivered. Then he was kissing the pretty little mouth and shuddering up and down the entire length of his body, and as their tongues met and the embrace tightened, Ferguson remembered the words he had said to himself years earlier while riding on the bus to Boston to see his beloved Jim: the gates of heaven. Yes, that was how it felt to him now, and after the rooms he had visited in his mind during lunch, the rooms he had walked into as Aubrey had stood there opening one door after another for him, now another door was opening and he and Aubrey were walking into the room together. Earthbound men. A bed in a Paris hotel named after an English king. An Englishman and an American on that bed in their bare, earthbound flesh. Au-delà. The French word for the hereafter. The next world breathing inside them in the here and now of this one.
The dick was as small as he had imagined it would be, but as with all the rest of Aubrey, it was fit to the proportions of his miniaturized frame and was no less pretty than his pretty little mouth or any other part of him. The important thing was that Aubrey knew what to do with what he had. At thirty, he was far more experienced in bed and body matters than the boys Ferguson had slept with in the past, and because he was a companionable lover with no odd or unsavory inclinations and no guilt about his passion for fucking and being fucked by boys, he was at once more subtle and more aggressive than Andy Cohen and Brian Mischevski had been, at once more confident in himself and more generous, a darling person who enjoyed doing it as much as he enjoyed having it done to him, and the hours he spent with Ferguson that afternoon and evening were surely the best and most satisfying hours of Ferguson’s life in Paris so far. One week earlier, Ferguson had feared he was heading for a crack-up. Now his brain was bulging with a thousand new thoughts, and his body was at rest.
TEN DAYS AFTER traveling to the next world in the arms of his English publisher, Ferguson put his arms around his mother and asked her to forgive him. She and Gil had just landed in Paris. The New York Herald Tribune had shut down and died on April twenty-fourth, and with Gil temporarily unemployed until the fall, when he would begin his new career as a professor at the Mannes College of Music, Ferguson’s mother and stepfather had decided to go on the honeymoon they still hadn’t taken after six and a half years of marriage. One week in Paris to start with. Then Amsterdam, Florence, Rome, and West Berlin, which Gil had last seen six months after the end of the war in late 1945. They were planning to spend their time looking at Dutch and Italian art, and then Gil would show Ferguson’s mother the places where he had lived as a boy.
Ferguson had finished typing the three copies of his book on March ninth. One copy was now sitting on the top shelf of the bookcase in his room in Paris, another copy was sitting on Aubrey’s desk in London, and the third had been sent to his parents’ apartment on Riverside Drive in New York. Two weeks after the manuscript had made its way across the ocean, Ferguson had received a letter from Gil. That was normal, since his mother wasn’t much of a letter writer and nine-tenths of the correspondence he sent to the two of them jointly was answered solely by Gil, sometimes with a short P.S. from his mother at the end (I miss you so much, Archie! or A thousand kisses from your Ma!) and sometimes not. The early paragraphs of Gil’s letter had been full of positive comments about the book and the outstanding job he had done in balancing the emotional content of the story with the physical and phenomenological data and how impressed he was by Ferguson’s rapid growth and improvement as a writer. By the fourth paragraph, however, the tone of the letter had begun to change. But dear Archie, Gil had written, you must realize how profoundly the book has upset your mother and how difficult it was for her to read it. Of course, reliving such hard days from the past would be difficult for anyone, and I don’t fault you for having made her cry (I shed some tears myself), but there were a few spots where you might have been a bit too honest, I’m afraid, and she was stunned by the intimacy of the details you revealed about her. In looking over the manuscript again, I would say that the most offensive passage falls on pp. 46–47, in the middle of the section about the grim summer the two of you spent at the Jersey shore, locked in that little house together watching television from early in the morning to late at night and hardly ever setting foot on the beach. Just to refresh your memory: “My mother had always smoked, but now she smoked without interruption, consuming four and five packs of Chesterfields per day, rarely bothering to use matches or lighters anymore because it was simpler and more efficient to light the next cigarette with the burning tip of the last one. As far as I knew, she had seldom drunk alcohol in the past, but now she drank six and seven shot glasses of straight vodka every evening, and by the time she put me to bed at night her voice would be slurred and her eyelids would be half-closed over eyes that could no longer bear to look at the world. My father had been dead for eight months by then, and every night that summer I would climb under the warm and rumpled top sheet of my bed and pray that my mother would still be alive in the morning.” This is rough stuff, Archie. Perhaps you should consider cutting it out of the final version or at least modifying it to some degree — to spare your mother the pain of having that wretched interval of her life exposed to public view. Stop and think about it for a moment, and you’ll understand why I’m asking you to do this … Then came the final paragraph: The good news is that the Trib is about to croak, and I’ll soon be out of a job. Once that happens, your mother and I will be off to Europe — most likely by the end of April. We can talk about it then.
But Ferguson hadn’t wanted to wait until then. The matter was too disturbing to be put off until the end of April, for now that Gil had lifted those sentences out of the book and isolated them from the surrounding material, Ferguson understood that he had been too harsh and deserved the scolding his stepfather had given him. It wasn’t that the passage was untrue, at least from the perspective of his eight-year-old self as remembered by his older self while he had been writing the book. His mother had been smoking too much that summer, she had been drinking straight shots of vodka and not taking care of the house, and he had been alarmed by the listlessness and passivity that had taken hold of her, at times even frightened by her numbed withdrawal from him as he sat beside her building sand castles on the beach and she looked out at the waves. The sentences Gil had transcribed in his letter depicted Ferguson’s mother at her lowest ebb, at the very bottom of her descent into grief and confusion, but the whole point had been to contrast that lost summer with what had happened to her after they returned to New York, which had marked her return to photography and the beginning of a new life, the invention of Rose Adler. It seemed that Ferguson had made too much of the contrast, however, infusing his little-boy fears and misapprehensions of adult behavior into a situation that had been less dire than he had imagined (there had been some vodka, according to what his mother had told Gil, but only two bottles over the forty-six days they had spent in Belmar), and therefore Ferguson had sat down after finishing the letter and had written contrite one-page responses to both his mother and his stepfather, apologizing for any upset he might have caused them and promising to delete the offending passage from the book.