Twentieth Entry. In the scarlet notebook, I am happy to report, there is a violent curse against each and every person who has ever wronged me.
Twenty-third Entry. Not everything in the scarlet notebook is what it seems to be. The New York that dwells inside it, for example, does not always correspond to the New York of my waking life. It has happened to me that while walking down East Eighty-ninth Street and turning the corner onto what I was expecting to be Second Avenue, I have found myself on Central Park South near Columbus Circle. Perhaps this is because I know those streets more intimately than any others in the city, having just settled into an apartment on East Eighty-ninth Street at the beginning of the summer and having gone to Central Park South hundreds of times since the beginning of my life to visit my grandparents, whose apartment building on West Fifty-eighth Street also has an entrance on Central Park South. This geographical synapse would suggest that the scarlet notebook is a highly personal instrument for each person who owns one and that no two scarlet notebooks are alike, even if their covers all look the same. Memories are not continuous. They jump around from place to place and vault over large swaths of time with many gaps in between, and because of what my stepbrother calls this quantum effect, the multiple and often contradictory stories to be found in the scarlet notebook do not form a continuous narrative. Rather, they tend to unfold as dreams do — which is to say, with a logic that is not always readily apparent.
Twenty-fifth Entry. On every page of the scarlet notebook, there is my desk and everything else in the room where I am sitting now. Although I have often been tempted to take the scarlet notebook with me on my walks through the city, I have not yet found the courage to remove it from my desk. On the other hand, when I go off into the scarlet notebook itself, I always seem to have the scarlet notebook with me.
So began Ferguson’s second swim across the lake, his Walden Pond of solitary word-work and seven to ten hours of desk time per day. It would turn into a long and messy splash, with frequent submersions and ever more exhausted arms and legs, but Ferguson had an inborn talent for jumping into deep and perilous waters when no lifeguards were around, and given that such a book had never been written or even dreamed of by anyone before him, Ferguson had to teach himself how to do what he was doing in the process of doing it. As seemed to be the case with everything he wrote now, he discarded more material than he kept, whittling down the 365 entries he composed between early June and mid-September 1966 to 174, which filled one hundred and eleven double-spaced typewritten pages in the ultimate draft, making his second novella-length book slightly shorter than the first, and when it was boiled down further on Gizmo’s single-spaced stencils, the text came to fifty-four pages, an even number that absolved Ferguson of the onerous responsibility of having to write another autobiographical note about himself.
HE ENJOYED LIVING in his small hush-money apartment, and all through his first summer there in 1966, as Joanna worked on the typing of Mulligan’s Travels and Ferguson sweated out the pages of The Scarlet Notebook, he continued to think about the ten thousand dollars and how slyly and underhandedly his grandfather had explained the “gift” to his daughter Rose, calling her at home the very next day, which was the same day Ferguson had met Billy and Joanna Best for the first time, to tell her he had started his own informal equivalent of the Rockefeller Foundation, i.e., the Adler Foundation for the Promotion of the Arts, and had just bestowed a ten-thousand-dollar award on his grandson to encourage his progress as a writer. What a colossal mound of bullshit, Ferguson thought, and yet how interesting that a man who had been shamed into tears and had written out a check to cover up his guilt could turn around the next day and start bragging about what he had done. Crazy, stupid old man, but when Ferguson talked to his mother from Princeton the following Monday, he had to suppress his laughter as she reported what her father had said to her, the incredible phoniness of it all, the show-off self-aggrandizement of his unparalleled generosity, and when his mother said, Just think, Archie — first the Walt Whitman Scholarship and now this amazing gift from your grandfather — Ferguson replied, I know, I know, I’m the luckiest man on the face of the earth, consciously repeating the words Lou Gehrig had spoken at Yankee Stadium after he found out he was dying from the disease that would eventually be named after him. Sitting pretty, Ferguson’s mother said. Yes, that was it, sitting pretty, and what a grand and beautiful world it was if you didn’t stop to look at it too closely.
A MATTRESS ON the floor, a desk and a chair found on a nearby sidewalk and hauled up to the room with Billy’s help, some pots and pans bought for nickels and dimes at a local Goodwill Mission store, sheets, towels, and bedding donated by his mother and Dan as housewarming gifts, and a second typewriter bought secondhand at Osner’s typewriter shop on Amsterdam Avenue to avoid having to lug a machine from Princeton to New York and then back to Princeton every Friday and Sunday, an Olympia manufactured in West Germany circa 1960 with an even finer and faster touch than his dependable, deeply loved Smith-Corona. Frequent dinners with the Bests, frequent dinners with Amy and Luther, occasional get-togethers with Ron Pearson and his wife, Peg, and solo expeditions for early dinners at the Ideal Lunch Counter on East Eighty-sixth Street, the eating hole with a sign over the door that read: SERVING GERMAN FOOD SINCE 1932 (a significant date that established no connection with what happened in Germany the following year), and how Ferguson liked to chow down on those heavy, lump-in-the-stomach dishes, Königsberger Klopse and Wiener schnitzel, and to hear the large, muscular waitress behind the counter shout into the kitchen with her thick accent, Vun schnitzel!, which never failed to evoke memories of Dan and Gil’s dead father, that other crazy grandfather in the tribe, Jim and Amy’s cantankerous, crackpot Opa. The luckiest man on the face of the earth also had the good fortune to meet Mary Donohue that summer, Joanna’s twenty-one-year-old younger sister, who was spending those months with the Bests and working in an office before heading back to Ann Arbor for her senior year, and because the plump, jovial, sex-mad Mary took a shine to Ferguson, she often came to his apartment at night and crawled into bed with him, which helped diminish the constant longing he still felt for Evie and turn his thoughts from the vile thing he had done to her by cutting it off without a proper good-bye. Mary’s soft and abundant flesh — a good place to drown in and forget who he was, to throw off the burden of being himself — and the sex was good because it was simple and transitory, sex without strings, without delusions, without hope for anything more lasting than it was.
Ferguson’s initial plan was to barge in and settle the Amy-Luther problem himself, to go behind their backs in the same way Noah had done with his manuscript and call his mother to tell her what was going on and ask how she thought Dan would react to the news. Then he reexamined that approach and concluded he didn’t have the right to deceive his stepsister or act without her consent, so one evening in the middle of June, as Ferguson, Bond, and Schneiderman sat in the West End inhaling and imbibing another round of cigarettes and beers, the son of Rose asked the stepdaughter of Rose if she would allow him to speak to his mother on her behalf in order to get this nonsense over with. Before Amy could respond, Luther leaned forward and said, Thanks, Archie, and a moment later Amy said more or less the same thing, Thank you, Arch.