Where’s your dignity? Albert shot back at him, once again failing to realize that Ferguson was joking. And why all this talk about money? You might not get much from your parents, but Vivian takes care of you pretty damned well, it seems to me, so why talk about humiliating yourself for a handful of extra francs?
That’s just it, Ferguson said, leaving behind his whimsical fantasy to address something real, something that had been preoccupying him for the past couple of months. Vivian takes such good care of me, I’m beginning to feel like a moocher, and I don’t like that feeling, at least not anymore I don’t. There’s something wrong about taking so much from her, but I’m not allowed to work in this country, as you well know, so what am I supposed to do?
You could always hustle your ass in queer bars, Albert said. Then you’d get a real taste of what it feels like to live in the mud.
I’ve already thought about that, Ferguson answered, remembering the night of the money and the tears. I’m not interested.
As the younger of the two by seven years, Ferguson was the junior partner in the affair, the little one following the lead of the big one, which was the role he felt better suited to play, for nothing felt better to him than the feeling of living under Albert’s protection, of not having to be the responsible one or the one who was supposed to have figured everything out, and by and large Albert did protect him, and by and large he did take care of him exceedingly well. Albert was the first person he had ever known who shared his double but unified passion for the mental and the physical, the physical being first of all sex, the primacy of sex over all other human activities, but basketball and working out and running as well, running in the Jardin des Plantes, push-ups, sit-ups, squats, and jumping jacks on the court or in the apartment, and the ferocious, bruising games of one-on-one, which were challenging and fulfilling in themselves but also served as an elaborate kind of erotic foreplay, because now that he knew Albert’s body so well, it was hard not to think about the naked body hidden under Albert’s shorts and T-shirt as he moved around on the court, the splendid and deeply loved particulars of Mr. Bear’s physical self, and the mental being not just the functions and cognitive efforts of the brain but the study of books, films, and works of art, the need to write, the essential business of trying to understand or reinvent the world, the obligation to think about oneself in relation to others and to reject the enticement of living just for one’s self, and when Ferguson discovered that Albert cared about films as well as books, that is, cared about them as much as he himself now cared about books, they fell into the habit of going to films together on most evenings, all kinds of films because of Ferguson’s eclectic tastes and Albert’s willingness to follow him into any theater he chose, but of the many films they saw none was more important to them than the new film by Bresson, Au Hasard Balthazar, which opened in Paris on May twenty-fifth and which they sat through together on four consecutive nights, a film that roared into their hearts and heads with the fury of a divine revelation, Dostoyevsky’s Idiot transformed into a tale about a donkey in rural France, the downtrodden and cruelly dealt with Balthazar, emblem of human suffering and saintly forbearance, and Ferguson and Albert couldn’t get enough of it because each one of them saw the story of his own life in Balthazar’s story, each one of them felt he was Balthazar while watching the film play on-screen, and so they went back three more times after the first time, and by the end of the last showing Ferguson had taught himself how to replicate the piercing, discordant sounds that burst from the donkey’s mouth at crucial moments in the film, the asthmatic keening of a victim-creature struggling for the next breath, a horrible sound, a heartbreaking sound, and from then on, whenever Ferguson wanted to tell Albert that he was down in the dumps or aching over some injustice he had seen in the world, he would dispense with words and do his imitation of Balthazar’s atonal, in-and-out double screech, the bray from beyond, as Albert called it, and because Albert himself was incapable of letting go to that extent and therefore could not join in, every time Ferguson became the suffering donkey, he felt he was doing it for both of them.
Similar tastes in most things, similar responses to books and films and people (Albert adored Vivian), but as far as their writing went, they had fallen into a standoff because neither one of them could find the courage to show his work to the other. Ferguson wanted Albert to read his book, but he was reluctant to force it on him, and since Albert never asked to see it, Ferguson held back and said nothing, nor did he share any news with him about the copyedited manuscript Aubrey had sent from London, the decision to use his mother’s photograph on the cover, or the selection of ten Laurel and Hardy stills and ten other stills from movies released in late 1954 and 1955 (among them Marilyn Monroe in There’s No Business Like Show Business, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis in Artists and Models, Kim Novak and William Holden in Picnic, Marlon Brando and Jean Simmons in Guys and Dolls, and Gene Tierney and Humphrey Bogart in The Left Hand of God). Nor did he say a word about the first-pass galleys, the second-pass galleys, or the bound galleys after they showed up in early July, late July, and early September, and not once did he mention the letter he received from Aubrey telling him that Paul Sandler at Random House in New York (Ferguson’s ex-uncle Paul) would be copublishing an American edition of the book one month after it was released in England.
When Ferguson asked Albert if he could have a look at the first half of his novel in progress (a bit more than two hundred pages, apparently), Albert said it was still too rough and that he couldn’t show it to anyone until it was finished. Ferguson said he understood, which in fact was true, since he hadn’t shown his book to anyone until it was finished either, but at least maybe he could tell him what the title was. Albert shook his head, claiming the book didn’t have one yet, or rather that he was toying with three different possibilities and still hadn’t decided which one he preferred, an answer that could have been true or could have been a polite evasion. The first time Ferguson had stepped into Albert’s study, the manuscript had been sitting on the desk near the Remington typewriter, but after that day the manuscript had disappeared, no doubt into one of the drawers of the large wooden desk. On several occasions during the months they spent together, Ferguson found himself alone in the apartment while Albert was out on an errand somewhere in the neighborhood, which meant he could have gone into the study and pulled out the manuscript from the drawer it was hiding in, but Ferguson never did that because he didn’t want to be the kind of person who did those sorts of things, who betrayed the trust of others and broke promises and acted underhandedly when no one was watching, for taking a look at Albert’s manuscript would have been just as bad as stealing it or burning it, an act of such repugnant disloyalty that it would have been unforgivable.