They can’t ever know. As long as you promise not to tell them, I’ll do anything you want.
Just stop, that’s all. Shut down the film and never do it again.
Look, Archie, what if I gave you some money? Would that help? I know you don’t want to stay here with me anymore, but if you had some money, you could go out and find yourself another apartment in New York. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?
Are you trying to bribe me?
Call it what you want. But if I gave you five … six … no, let’s say … ten thousand dollars … that would help you out a lot, wouldn’t it? You could rent your own little apartment somewhere and spend the summer writing instead of working at that job you told me about. What was it again?
Junk removal.
Junk removal. What a waste of time and energy.
But I don’t want your money.
Of course you do. Everyone wants money. Everyone needs money. Think of it as a gift.
As a bribe, you mean.
No, as a gift.
FERGUSON TOOK THE money. He accepted his grandfather’s offer with a clear conscience because in point of fact it wasn’t a bribe but a gift, since he never would have said a word to his mother or Aunt Mildred anyway, and if his grandfather was so flush that he could afford to write a check for ten thousand dollars, better that the money should go to his grandson than to finance another woebegone fuck-film. But what a jolt it had been to walk in on that bizarre scene, and how crazy and perverse his grandfather was becoming in his old age — widowed and alone with no restraints on him anymore, free to indulge himself in any debauched whim that caught his fancy, and what further embarrassment would be coming tomorrow? Ferguson still loved his grandfather, but he had lost all respect for him and perhaps even despised him now, enough never to want to stay in the apartment again and yet not half as much as he despised his father, who was altogether gone from his life now, gone for reasons that largely had to do with money, and there he was gladly accepting money from his grandfather and shaking his hand to thank him for it. Another complicated business, another daunting fork in the road, and just as Lazlo Flute had found out in Right, Left, or Straight Ahead?, whatever choice he made was bound to be the wrong one.
Nevertheless, ten thousand dollars was a monumental sum in 1966, a bundle beyond imagining. With small apartments in run-down New York neighborhoods renting for less than a hundred dollars a month, sometimes for as little as fifty or sixty, Ferguson would be able to find something for his escapes from Princeton and still have enough to live on during the summers without having to work at summer jobs. It wasn’t that he had been dreading the prospect of hauling junk in the interim between his freshman and sophomore years. He knew from his high school summers with Arnie Frazier and Richard Brinkerstaff that menial work had numerous satisfactions to offer and that one could learn valuable lessons about life in the process, but there were many years of that sort of work still in front of him, and the chance to take a pause from heavy lifting during his time in college was an unanticipated lucky break. All because he had walked in on his grandfather and caught him with his pants down. A revolting discovery, yes, but how not to laugh about it at the same time? And he who would have kept his lips sealed until the last breath in his body had exited his lungs was rolling in a pile of hush money. If you couldn’t laugh at that, there was something wrong with you, something not quite right in your head.
Ferguson went out for a dinner of pizza and beer with Noah in the Village, then spent the night on the floor of his cousin’s NYU dorm room, and the next day, when he traveled uptown to meet Billy Best, more startling things kept on happening to him. Billy was so relaxed and genial, so effusive in his praise of Ferguson’s book, which he called the weirdest fucking shit he had read in a long time, that the young author again silently thanked his cousin for having put him in touch with this person, who resembled no other person he had ever known. Billy was both a working-class roughneck and a sophisticated avant-garde writer, born and raised on the block where he still lived, super of his building because he had inherited the job from his father, a street-savvy native son who watched over the neighborhood like a sheriff in a Hollywood Western, but also the author of a complex, hallucinatory novel in progress set during the French and Indian Wars called Crushed Heads (Ferguson adored the title), and to listen to his publisher’s melodious New York Irish-American tenor voice made him feel as if the very bricks of the buildings on East Eighty-ninth Street were vibrating with words. On top of that, Billy’s pregnant wife, Joanna, spoke with the same voice he did, down-to-earth and welcoming, a legal secretary by day, typist — stencil cutter for Gizmo Press by night, she was the one who would be working on Ferguson’s book as her baby grew inside her, bringing Ferguson’s baby to life even if it was only a book and he would never have anything to do with the production of real babies, and when Joanna and Billy asked him to stay for dinner on that first Saturday night of their new friendship, Ferguson mentioned that he would be looking for an apartment in the coming days, just as soon as the check in his wallet had cleared, and because Billy and Joanna knew everything that went on in their small neighborhood, they tipped him off about an apartment six doors down the block, a one-room studio that went on the market just days after their first meal together, and that was how Ferguson wound up renting his third-floor digs on East Eighty-ninth Street for seventy-seven dollars and fifty cents a month.
HIS FIRST YEAR at Princeton was coming to an end. Howard would be taking off for the summer to work on his aunt and uncle’s dairy farm in southern Vermont, and although Ferguson had been invited to join him in that bucolic venture, the half-destroyed ex-lover of Evie Monroe, who had simultaneously become the half-resurrected author of the soon-to-be-published Mulligan’s Travels, had already backed out of his junk-removal job and was planning to spend the summer working on his next writing project, The Scarlet Notebook. Amy would be down in the city for those months as well (working as an editorial assistant for a trade magazine called Nurses Digest), and so would her new boyfriend, Luther Bond, who had found a spot filling in for someone in the Coming Events department at the Village Voice. Celia Federman, on the other hand, would be far away, profiting from the reward her parents had given her for graduating early from high schooclass="underline" a two-month trek through Europe with her twenty-year-old cousin Emily. As predicted, Bruce-the-boyfriend, a.k.a. the Human Buffer Zone, was a thing of the past. Celia promised to write Ferguson exactly twenty-four letters, which she instructed him to keep in a special box labeled Federman’s Travels.
Noah would be gone, too, unexpectedly and at the last minute gone, up to northern Massachusetts to take part in the Williamstown Theatre Festival, which he had tried out for on a whim because the girl he was pursuing had wanted to try out, but while she was turned down without a single callback, Noah wasn’t, and now he would be acting in two different plays over the summer (All My Sons and Waiting for Godot) and the plan to do a film version of Sole Mates was put on the shelf again. Ferguson was relieved. More than that, he was happy for Noah, who had always been the best actor onstage whenever he had seen him perform, which must have been seven or eight times over the years, and however much Noah wanted to become a filmmaker, Ferguson was convinced he had the stuff to become a top-of-the-line actor, not just in comedies, which he already excelled at, but in dramas, too, although perhaps not in tragedies, at least not the fifty-ton classics in which men plucked out their eyes and mothers boiled their children and Fortinbras entered as the curtain eased down slowly on a mass of bloody corpses. Ferguson also felt that Noah could have made people piss in their pants if he ever decided to do stand-up, but each time he had suggested it to him, Noah had frowned and said, Not for me. But he was wrong, Ferguson thought, dead wrong to resist, and one evening he had even gone to the trouble of sitting down and trying to write some jokes for Noah, just to get him started, but jokes were hard, so hard they were almost impossible, and except for some of the tennis matches he had done with Howard earlier in the year, he seemed to have no talent for them. Writing droll sentences in a story was one thing, but coming up with unforgettable, punch-out zingers required a different sort of brain from the one that had been planted in Ferguson’s skull.