There were three dinners with Vivian that week, two in restaurants and one at the apartment on the rue de l’Université, a small dinner with just the four of them and no other guests, not even Lisa, who normally came to all of Vivian’s parties. Ferguson was a bit surprised when he was told that Lisa wouldn’t be joining them, but then he thought about it for a couple of minutes and understood that Vivian was protecting herself, which was exactly what he would have done if he had been in her place. Like him, she had a dirty secret to hide from the world, and even though Gil was an old friend, he apparently knew nothing about the complicated marriage she had built with Jean-Pierre and nothing about what she had been up to since Jean-Pierre’s death and therefore could not be exposed to the spectacle of dining with Vivian’s new female bed partner. Shades of Aunt Mildred and the cowgirl in Palo Alto four years ago, Ferguson said to himself, but with this crucial difference: even at fifteen, he hadn’t cared and hadn’t been shocked, but while the fifty-two-year-old Gil might have thought he wouldn’t care, he almost certainly would have been shocked.
As the four of them sat around the dining room table that evening, Ferguson was comforted to see how well Vivian and his mother got along, how rapidly they had turned into friends after just a few encounters, but the two women were bound together now because of Gil and their admiration for each other (how many times had Vivian talked about his mother’s exceptional photographs?) and also because of him, his mother’s displaced son now living under Vivian’s roof, and again and again since coming to Paris his mother had told him how grateful she was to Vivian for taking care of him and studying with him and giving him so much, and at the dinner that night she was saying those things directly to Vivian herself, thanking her for watching over her rascal of a boy, and yes, Vivian said, That imp of yours can be quite a handful at times, the two of them teasing him because they both knew he could take it and didn’t mind, for not only did he not mind but he actually enjoyed being teased by them, and in the middle of that lighthearted, anti-Archie mockathon, it occurred to him that Vivian had a better grasp of who he was now than his mother did. Not only had she worked on the manuscript of his book with him, not only were they plowing their way through the one hundred most important works in Western literature together, but she knew everything about his split-in-two inner self and was, undoubtedly, the most trusted confidant he had ever had. A second mother? No, not that. No need for more mothers at this late date. But what? More than a friend, less than a mother. His female twin, perhaps. The person he would have become if he had been born a girl.
On the last day, he stopped by the Hôtel Pont Royal to see them off. The city was at its best and most beautiful that morning, a bright blue sky overheard, the air warm and clear, good smells floating out of the neighborhood boulangeries, pretty girls in the streets, honking cars, farting mopeds, the whole glorious, Gershwinian dazzle of Springtime in Paris, the Paris of a hundred cornball songs and Technicolor movies, but the fact was that it truly was glorious and inspiring, it truly was the best place on earth, and yet as Ferguson walked from the apartment house on the rue de l’Université to the hotel on the rue Montalembert, even as he took note of the sky and the smells and the girls, he was struggling against the immense weight that had fallen upon him that morning, the dumb and childish dread of having to say good-bye to his mother. He didn’t want her to go. A week hadn’t been long enough, even if a part of him knew he would be better off with her gone, that bit by bit he always turned into a baby again when he was with her, but now the ordinary sadness of another farewell had mutated into a premonition that he would never see her again, that something was going to happen to her before they had another chance to be together and that this good-bye would be their last one. A ridiculous thought, he said to himself, the stuff of feebleminded romantic fantasies, a surge of adolescent angst in its most embarrassing form, but the thought was in him now and he didn’t know how to get rid of it.
When he arrived at the hotel, he found his mother in a whirling state of hustle and excitement, wrapped up in the moment with no time to talk about dark premonitions of fatal diseases and deadly accidents, for on this particular morning she was going to the Gare du Nord, she was going to Amsterdam, she was on her way out of Paris to another city, another country, another adventure was about to begin, and there were satchels and suitcases to be loaded into the trunk of the taxi, there were last-minute peeks into her handbag to make sure she had Gil’s stomach tablets with her, there were tips to be handed out and doormen and bellhops to thank and say good-bye to, and after giving her son a quick and ebullient farewell hug, she turned to head for the cab, but just as Gil opened the door for her and she was about to climb into the backseat, she turned around and blew Ferguson a big, smiling kiss. Be a good boy, Archie, she said, and suddenly the bad feeling he had been carrying around with him since early in the morning went away.
As he watched the taxi disappear around the corner, Ferguson decided he was going to ignore his mother’s wishes and cut the passage from the book.
THE BAD FEELING vanished, but as events would prove ten months later, Ferguson’s premonition had not been wrong. The farewell hug he exchanged with his mother on May sixth was the last time they ever touched each other, and once she climbed into the backseat of the taxi and Gil shut the door, Ferguson never saw her again. They spoke to each other on the telephone, one call on the night of his twentieth birthday in March 1967, but after Ferguson hung up the receiver, he never heard her voice again. His premonition had not been wrong, but neither had it been exactly on the mark. The deadly accident or disease that Ferguson had imagined would strike down his mother did not happen to her but to him, in his case a traffic accident that occurred during his visit to London to celebrate the publication of his book, which meant that after he said good-bye to his mother in Paris on May 6, 1966, he had three hundred and four days to live.