Mercifully, he was not aware of the cruel plan the gods had devised for him. Mercifully, he did not know he was destined to have such a brief entry in The Book of Terrestrial Life, and therefore he went on living as if there were thousands of tomorrows in front of him rather than just three hundred and four.
Two days after his mother and Gil left for Amsterdam, Ferguson backed out of going to a party with Vivian and Lisa when he found out that Fleming had been invited. It had been more than three months since the night of the money and the tears, and he had long since absolved Fleming of any blame for his part in the misunderstanding. It was the memory of what he had allowed himself to do with Fleming that continued to haunt him, the conviction that it had been his own fault, all his fault, and because Fleming hadn’t forced him to do anything he hadn’t said he was willing to do, how could he hold Fleming responsible for what had happened? It wasn’t Fleming, it was himself, his own shame, the memory of his own greed and degradation that had prompted him to rip up Fleming’s letters and not return his calls, but even if he bore no grudge against Fleming now, why would he ever want to see him again?
At breakfast in the kitchen the following morning, Vivian told him about someone she had met at the party, which had been thrown in the courtyard garden of Reid Hall, Columbia University’s outpost in Paris, a young man of twenty-five or twenty-six who had made a strong impression on her, she said, someone she thought Ferguson would like just as much as she had. A Canadian from Montreal with a white Québécquoise mother and a black American father originally from New Orleans, a person by the name of Albert Dufresne (Al-bear Du-frenn) who had graduated from Howard University in Washington, where he had played on the basketball team (something Vivian supposed would interest Ferguson, which it did), and who had moved to Paris after his father’s death, where he was working on his first novel (another thing Vivian supposed would interest Ferguson, which it did), and now that she had captured his attention, he asked her to tell him more.
Such as?
Such as, what is he like?
Intense. Intelligent. Engaged — as in engagé. Not a big sense of humor, I’m sorry to report. But very alive. Captivating. One of those burning young men who wants to turn the world upside down and reinvent it.
Unlike me, for example.
You don’t want to reinvent the world, Archie, you want to understand the world so you can find a way to live in it.
And what makes you think I’d get along with this person?
A fellow scribbler, a fellow basketball player, a fellow North American, a fellow only child, and even though his father died only a couple of years ago, a fellow fatherless boy, since his old man absconded when Albert was six and went back to live in New Orleans.
What did the father do?
Jazz trumpet, and according to his son, a hard-drinking, dyed-in-the-wool, lifelong son of a bitch.
And the mother?
A fifth-grade schoolteacher. Just like my mother.
You must have had a lot to talk about.
I should also say that Mr. Dufresne cuts a fine figure, a most unusual figure.
How so?
Tall. About six-one or six-two. Lean and muscular, I would guess, although he was standing there with his clothes on, of course, so I can’t be more precise. But he seems to be an ex-athlete who’s managed to keep himself in shape. Says he still plays hoops whenever he can.
That’s good. But I fail to see what’s unusual about it.
It’s his face, I think, the striking qualities of his face. Not only was his father black, but there’s Choctaw blood in there, too, he told me, and when you mix that up with his white mother’s genes, he comes across as a light-skinned black person with somewhat Asiatic features, Eurasian features. A remarkable skin color, I found, with a glowing, coppery cast to it, skin that’s neither dark nor pale, Goldilocks’s just right, if you know what I mean, such lovely skin that I kept wanting to touch his face while I was talking to him.
Handsome?
No, I wouldn’t go that far. But nice-looking. A face you want to look at.
And what about his … his innermost inclinations?
I can’t say for sure. Usually, I can tell right off, but this Albert is something of a puzzle. A man for other men, I’d presume, but a manly sort of man who doesn’t want to broadcast his attraction to other men.
A macho queer.
Perhaps. He mentioned James Baldwin a few times, if that means anything. He loves Baldwin above all American writers. That’s why he came to Paris, he said, because he wanted to follow in Jimmy’s footsteps.
I love Baldwin, too, and I agree that he’s the best American writer, but just because he happens to swing toward men doesn’t prove anything about the men who like his books.
Exactly. In any case, I talked about you quite a bit, and Albert seemed mightily impressed when I told him about your book, maybe even a little envious. Nineteen, he kept saying. Nineteen, and already about to be published, and there he was in his mid-twenties still grinding away at the first half of his first novel.
I hope you told him it was a short book.
I did. A very short book. And I also mentioned that you’ve been dying to play basketball. Believe it or not, he lives on the rue Descartes in the fifth, and right across the street from his building there’s an outdoor court. The fence is always locked, he says, but it’s easy to climb over it, and no one has ever given him any trouble about going in and playing there.
I’ve walked past that court a dozen times, but the French are so strict about locks and keys and regulations, I assumed I’d be deported if I tried to go in.
He said he’d like to meet you. Are you interested?
Of course I am. Let’s have dinner with him tonight. There’s that little Moroccan restaurant you like so much, the one just off the Place de la Contrescarpe, La Casbah, and the rue Descartes is right up the hill from there. If he doesn’t have other plans, maybe he could join us for a platter of couscous royale.
DINNER AT LA Casbah that night with Vivian, Lisa, and the stranger, who showed up fifteen minutes late, looking just as Vivian had described him with that remarkable skin of his and his intense, confident bearing. No, not a person given to small talk or cracking jokes, but he was capable of smiling and even laughing when he felt there was something to laugh about, and whatever hard thing had been locked up inside him was softened by the gentleness of his voice and the curiosity in his eyes. Ferguson was sitting directly across from him. He could see the whole of his face front-on, and while Vivian had probably been right to call it a less than handsome face, Ferguson found it beautiful. No thank you, Albert said, when the waiter tried to pour some wine into his glass, and then he looked at Ferguson and explained that he was off the stuff for now, which seemed to suggest he had been on it earlier, no doubt more than he should have been, an admission of a weakness, perhaps, and coming from such a restrained, self-possessed figure as Albert Dufresne, Ferguson welcomed it as a sign that the man was human, after all. Again the gentle, evenly modulated voice, which reminded Ferguson of how much he had enjoyed listening to his father’s voice when he was a boy, and with the bilingual Albert, who spoke with a small trace of a Canadian accent when he spoke French and a small trace of a French accent when he spoke his idiomatic North American English, Ferguson found himself experiencing a similar if not wholly identical sort of pleasure.
A meandering conversation that went on for two hours, with Lisa more subdued than Ferguson had ever seen her, contributing only a couple of funny interjections instead of a hundred, as if she were under the spell of the stranger and understood that her antics would have struck the wrong note with him, but how relaxed Albert seemed to be with Vivian, who had that effect on most people, of course, although in this case the effect might have been enhanced because there was something about her that echoed some quality of his mother, a person he was very close to, he said, the white mother of this black man with his despised lout of a dead black father, how complicated it must have been, Ferguson realized, and how much heavy baggage Albert must have been carrying with him, and then they were on to New York and the year and a half he had spent in Harlem after graduating from college, followed by the decision to come to France because America was a mass grave for every black person who lived there, especially for a black person like him (meaning a man-man person like him, Ferguson wondered, or was he referring to something else?), and then they were all talking about the long history of black American writers and artists who had come to live in Paris, the nude and numinous Josephine Baker, as Albert put it, and Richard Wright, Chester Himes, Countee Cullen, and Miles Davis in the arms of Juliette Gréco, Nancy Cunard in the arms of Henry Crowder, and Albert’s heroic Jimmy, who had been so rudely insulted by not being asked to speak at the March on Washington three years ago, he said, but with Bayard Rustin already on the list of speakers maybe they figured one black fag was enough (the evidence was mounting), and then Ferguson jumped in and started talking about Giovanni’s Room, which in his humble, heartfelt opinion was one of the bravest, most elegantly written books he had ever read (a comment that received an approving nod from Albert), and a moment later, as so often happened with dinner conversations, they were on to another subject and the two of them were talking about basketball, the Boston Celtics, and Bill Russell, which led Ferguson to ask Albert the same question he had asked Jim many years before, Why is Russell the best when he’s not even good? to which Albert replied: But he is good, Archie. Russell could score twenty-five points a game if he wanted to. It’s just that Auerbach doesn’t need him to do that. He wants him to be the conductor of the team, and as we all know, a conductor doesn’t play an instrument. He stands up there with his baton and leads the orchestra, and even though it looks simple, if there were no conductor to do that job, the musicians would go off-key and hit all the wrong notes.