You have no idea how precious these things are to me, Ferguson wrote to his stepfather, thanking him for the letter and the books. They’ve crystalized my thoughts and given me a new way into what I want to write about next. Serious. Because of you, the thrust of the thing has been lifted up to a new level of seriousness, and I can only hope I have it in me to do it justice. Tennis outfits. Barbed-wire villages watched over by machine guns. Greta Garbo laughing for the first time. Romping on the beaches of California as a typhoid epidemic breaks out in the capital of Mud. Time for cocktails, everyone. Time for the lime pits, my starved little dying children. How can we love one another anymore? How can we go on thinking our selfish thoughts anymore? You were there, Gil, you saw it firsthand and breathed in the smells, and yet you’ve given your life to music. Impossible to tell you how much I admire you and love you.
BEING WITH ALBERT meant not being with Albert for the bulk of the daylight hours. Albert on the rue Descartes adding words to his novel, Ferguson in his chambre de bonne reading the books on Gil’s list and working on his essay, and then at around five o’clock Ferguson would put down his pen and walk over to Albert’s place, where they sometimes played basketball and sometimes didn’t, and depending on whether they did or didn’t, afterward they would walk down to the noisy market on the rue Mouffetard and shop for dinner, or else not shop for dinner and go to a restaurant later, and because Ferguson couldn’t afford to eat in restaurants, Albert would pay for his share of the check (he was consistently generous with money and again and again would tell Ferguson to eat up and forget about it), and then, after going or not going to a movie (usually going), they would return to the third-floor apartment across from the basketball court and crawl into bed together, except on the evenings when Albert came to dinner at Vivian’s apartment and would spend the night in Ferguson’s little room on the sixth floor.
Ferguson imagined it would go on forever, and if not forever a long time, many more months and years of time, but after two hundred and fifty-six days of living in that enthralling routine, the thing he had been dreading about his mother on the morning he’d said good-bye to her in May weirdly and unexpectedly happened to Albert’s mother. A telegram at seven A.M. on January twenty-first while the two of them were still asleep in Albert’s bed on the rue Descartes, the concierge knocking loudly on the door and saying, Monsieur Dufresne, un télégramme urgent pour vous, and all of a sudden they were both climbing out of bed and jumping into their clothes, and then Albert was reading the telegram, the blue telegram with the black news that his mother had tripped and fallen down a flight of stairs in her Montreal apartment house and was dead at the age of sixty. Albert said nothing. He handed the telegram to Ferguson and continued to say nothing, and by the time Ferguson had finished reading the telegram, which ended with the words COME HOME AT ONCE, Albert had begun to howl.
He left for Canada at one in the afternoon that same day, and because there were many complicated family matters and financial matters to attend to while he was there, and because he decided to go down to New Orleans after he buried his mother to find out more about his father’s life, as he put it in a letter to Ferguson, he wound up staying on the other side of the world for two months, and because Ferguson had only forty-three days left to live on the day of Albert’s departure from Paris, they never saw each other again.
FERGUSON WAS CALM. He knew that Albert would be coming back at some point, and meanwhile he would forge on with his work and take advantage of Albert’s absence to resume his old habit of drinking wine at dinner, glass after glass of drunk-making wine if necessary, for even though he was calm, he was also worried about Albert, who had been hammered by the telegram and had seemed half-deranged when they’d hugged good-bye at the airport, and what if he couldn’t hold it together and stumbled into using again? Stay calm, he said to himself, and have another glass of wine, stay calm and keep pushing forward. The Anne Frank essay was more than a hundred pages long by now and had grown into a book, another book that would take at least another year to finish, but then it wasn’t January anymore, it was February, and with the publication of Laurel and Hardy just one month away, he was beginning to find it hard to concentrate.
Aubrey had not returned to Paris since his brief visit in April, but he and Ferguson had written to each other a couple of dozen times over the past ten months. So many large and small details to go over concerning the book, but also jocular and affectionate allusions to the hours they had spent together in the fifth-floor room of the Hôtel George V, and even though Ferguson had written that he was more or less shacked up with someone in Paris, the ruler of the elves remained undaunted and was fully prepared for a repeat performance or several performances during his author’s upcoming visit to London. That seemed to be how things worked in the no-woman world Ferguson was traveling in now. As Albert had once explained to him, the fidelity rules in force for men and women did not apply to men and men, and if there was any advantage to being an outlaw queer over a law-abiding married citizen, it was the liberty to bonk at will with whomever you wished whenever you wished — as long as you didn’t hurt the feelings of your number one. But what did that mean, exactly? Not telling your number one that you had been with someone else, Ferguson supposed, and if Albert was bonking someone or several someones on his peregrinations through North America, Ferguson wouldn’t want to know about it, nor would he say anything to Albert if he wound up bonking Aubrey in London. No, not if, he said to himself, but when, when and where and how many times during the days and nights he would be in England, for even though he loved Albert, he found Aubrey irresistible.
The plan was to release the book on March sixth, a Monday. Ferguson would celebrate his twentieth birthday in Paris on the third, then take the boat train from the Gare du Nord on the night of the fourth and arrive at Victoria Station on the morning of the fifth. In his most recent dispatches, Aubrey had confirmed that interviews and events had been lined up as promised, including the Laurel and Hardy evening at the National Film Theatre, a program of shorts that would bring together the twenty-minute Big Business, the twenty-one-minute Two Tars, the twenty-six-minute Blotto, and the thirty-minute howler of the century, The Music Box, and once the NFT’s decision was passed on to him, Ferguson spent a full week composing one-page introductions to each of the four films, panicked by the thought of freezing up in front of the audience if he tried to wing it onstage without notes, and because he wanted his little texts to be charming and witty as well as informative, it took many hours of writing and rewriting before he was even remotely satisfied with the results. But what fun that night was going to be — and what a thoughtful and generous thing Aubrey had done for him — and then, just twenty-four hours after he finished the introductions, two advance copies of the book arrived in the afternoon mail on Wednesday, February fifteenth, and for the first time in Ferguson’s experience of the world, the past, the future, and the present were one. He had written the book, and then he had waited for the book, and now the book was in his hands.