So there he was now on the morning of April twenty-ninth standing in the lobby of the Hôtel Pont Royal with his arms around his jet-lagged mother asking her to forgive him. Outside, rain was pounding down on the streets, and as Ferguson settled his chin onto his mother’s shoulder, he looked through the front window of the hotel and saw an umbrella go flying out of a woman’s hand.
No, Archie, his mother said, I don’t need to forgive you for anything. You need to forgive me.
Gil was already standing in line at the front desk, waiting his turn to hand over their passports, sign the register, and check them into the hotel, and while he went about that tedious business, Ferguson led his mother to a bench in a corner of the lobby. She looked worn out from the trip, and if she wanted to go on talking to him as he supposed she did, it would be easier for her to do it sitting down. Worn out, Ferguson added to himself, but no more than anyone else would have been after traveling for twelve or thirteen straight hours, and looking just fine, he thought, with scarcely an iota of difference between now and the last time he had seen her six and a half months ago. His beautiful mother. His beautiful, somewhat exhausted mother, and how good it felt to be looking at her face again.
I’ve really missed you, Archie, she said. I know you’re a big person now, and you have every right to live wherever you want, but this is the longest we’ve ever been apart, and it’s taken some getting used to.
I know, Ferguson said. It’s been the same for me.
But you’re happy here, aren’t you?
Yes, most of the time. At least I think I am. Life isn’t perfect, you know. Not even in Paris.
That’s a good one. Not even in Paris. Not even in New York either, for that matter.
Tell me, Ma. Why did you say what you said a couple of moments ago — before we came over here and sat down?
Because it’s true, that’s why. Because it was wrong of me to make such a fuss.
I don’t agree. What I wrote was cruel and unfair.
Not necessarily. Not from where you were sitting as an eight-year-old boy. I’d managed to hold it together while you were going to school, but then it was vacation time, and I didn’t know what to do with myself anymore. A mess, Archie, that’s what I was, an unholy mess, and it must have been a bit scary for you to be around me then.
That’s not the point
No, you’re wrong. It is the point. You remember Jewish Wedding, don’t you?
Of course I do. Mean old cousin Charlotte and her bald, myopic husband, Mr. What’s-His-Name.
Nathan Birnbaum, the dentist.
It’s been about ten years, hasn’t it?
Almost eleven years. And I still haven’t talked to them again in all that time. You understand why, don’t you? (Ferguson shook his head.) Because they did to me what I almost did to you.
I don’t follow.
I took pictures of them that they didn’t like. Pretty good pictures, I thought. Not the most flattering pictures in the world, but good pictures, interesting pictures, and when they refused to let me publish them, I let Charlotte and Nathan disappear from my life because I thought they were a pair of fools.
What does that have to do with Laurel and Hardy?
Don’t you get it? You took a picture of me in your book. Lots of pictures, actually, dozens and dozens of them, and most of them were very flattering, some of them so flattering that I was almost embarrassed to read those things about myself, but along with all the flattering pictures there were one or two that showed me in a different light, an unflattering light, and when I read those parts of the book I felt hurt and angry, so hurt and angry that I talked to Gil about it, which I shouldn’t have done, and then he wrote that letter to you, which made you feel so bad, bad because I know the last thing you would ever want to do is hurt me, and when you wrote those little letters back to us, I felt I’d done you a wrong turn. Your book is an honest book, Archie. You told the truth in every sentence of it, and I don’t want you to revise anything or delete anything for my sake. Are you listening to me, Archie? Don’t change a word.
The week passed quickly. Vivian suspended their study sessions for the length of the visit, and although Ferguson carried on with several hours of reading in the morning, he met up with his mother and Gil every afternoon for lunch and then remained with them until it was time to come home and go to bed. Many things had changed in the months since he had left New York, and yet everything was essentially the same. Gil had finished his book on Beethoven after seven years of work, and he seemed to have no regrets about giving up the pressures of reviewing and journalism for the quieter life of teaching music history at Mannes. Ferguson’s mother continued to make portraits of well-known people for magazines and was slowly assembling a new book about the anti-war movement at home (she was vehemently pro-anti). She took the small Leica and several rolls of film with her everywhere they went during those days, snapping picture after picture of the protest signs that had gone up all over Paris (U.S. OUT OF VIETNAM, YANKEE GO HOME, À BAS LES AMERLOQUES, LE VIETNAM POUR LES VIETNAMIENS) along with numerous shots of Paris street scenes and a couple of rolls of just Ferguson and Gil, both singly and together. The three of them looked at paintings in the Louvre and the Jeu de Paume, they went to the Salle Pleyel for a performance of Haydn’s Mass in Time of War (Ferguson and his mother both thought it was extraordinary, but Gil answered their enthusiasm with a pained smile, which meant it hadn’t been up to snuff for him), and one night after dinner Ferguson coaxed them into traveling to the Action Lafayette for a ten o’clock screening of Mervyn LeRoy’s Random Harvest, a film they all agreed had enough horseshit in it to fill up four stables, but, as Ferguson’s mother pointed out, how enjoyable it was to watch Greer Garson and Ronald Colman pretending to be in love.
Needless to say, Ferguson told them about the letter from Io Books. Needless to say, his mother said she would be glad to donate a negative of Archie for the cover. Needless to say, Ferguson took them upstairs and showed them his room on the sixth floor. Needless to say, his mother and Gil reacted differently to what they saw. His mother gasped and said: Oh, Archie, is it really possible? Gil, on the other hand, clapped him on the shoulder and said: Anyone who can make a go of it in here has my full and enduring respect.
Other matters were not so simple or pleasant for Ferguson, however, and several times throughout the week he found himself in the uncomfortable position of having to hold things back from them or having to tell them lies. When his mother asked if he had met any nice girls, for example, he made up a story about a brief flirtation with an attractive Italian student named Giovanna who had been in his language class at the Alliance Française. It was true that Giovanna had been in the class, but other than two thirty-minute conversations in the café around the corner from the school, nothing had developed between them. Nor had anything developed between him and Béatrice, the highly intelligent French girl who worked as an assistant at the Galerie Maeght and was supposedly someone he had dated for a month or two. Yes, Béatrice worked for the gallery, and they had sat next to each other at a Maeght vernissage dinner back in December, flirting in a mild, unfocused sort of way, but when Ferguson called to ask her out, she turned him down with the excuse that she was engaged to be married, something she hadn’t bothered to mention at the dinner. No, he couldn’t talk to his mother about girls because there hadn’t been any girls except for the five overweight and underweight hookers he had found in the streets of Les Halles, and he wasn’t about to talk to her about them, nor was he was going to break her heart by talking about Aubrey and how excited he had been when the ruler of the elves had pushed his stiffened cock deep into his ass. She could never know any of those things about him. There were zones of his life that had to be walled off from her and guarded with utmost vigilance, and because of that they could never be as close to each other as they had once been, as he still wanted them to be. That wasn’t to say he hadn’t lied to her in the past, but he was older now and the circumstances were different, and yet even as he walked around Paris with her and rejoiced in how happy she looked, rejoiced in how fully she continued to stand behind him, those days were tinged with sadness as well, a feeling that some essential part of him was on the verge of melting away and disappearing from his life forever.