They were standing in the middle of the room with sunlight pouring in on them, sunlight pouring in through the windows and onto Celia’s face, the illuminated face of a seventeen-and-a-half-year-old girl of such beauty that Ferguson was stunned by the sight of her, stunned into silence and awe and trembling uncertainty, and as he went on looking at her, looking and looking at her because he was unable to look at anything else, Celia smiled and said, What’s wrong, Archie? Why are you staring at me like that?
I’m sorry, he said. I can’t help it. It’s just that you’re so beautiful, Celia, so astonishingly beautiful, I’m beginning to wonder if you’re real.
Celia laughed. Don’t be absurd, she said. I’m not even pretty. Just your average workaday girl.
Who’s been feeding you that crap? You’re a goddess, the queen of all earth and every city in heaven.
Well, it’s nice that you think so, but maybe you should have your eyes checked, Archie, and get a pair of glasses.
The sun shifted in the sky, or a cloud passed in front of it, or Ferguson was beginning to feel embarrassed by his gushing pronouncement, but four seconds after Celia said those words the subject of her looks was no longer on the table, the subject was once again the table Ferguson didn’t have, the bookcase he didn’t have, the bureau he didn’t have, and if it meant so much to her, he said, maybe they could borrow Billy’s hand truck and go out looking for furniture on the streets, it was the tried and true method of decorating apartments in Manhattan, and with the rich people on the Upper East Side throwing out good stuff every day, all they had to do was walk a few blocks south and a few blocks west, where they were bound to find something on the sidewalk that would meet with her approval.
I’m game if you are, Celia said.
Ferguson was game, but before they left there were a couple of things he wanted to show her, and then he led Celia over to his desk, where he pointed to a small wooden box with the words Federman’s Travels written on it, and once she had absorbed the significance of that box and the loyalty to their friendship it demonstrated, Ferguson opened the bottom right-hand drawer of the desk, pulled out a copy of the Gizmo Press edition of Mulligan’s Travels, and handed it to her.
Your book! Celia said. It’s been published!
She looked down at Howard’s cover, ran her hand softly over the drawing of Mulligan, thumbed briefly through the mimeographed pages inside, and then, inexplicably, let the book drop to the floor.
Why did you do that? Ferguson asked.
Because I want to kiss you, she said.
A moment later, she put her arms around him and pressed her mouth against his, and all at once his arms were around her, and their tongues were inside each other’s mouths.
It was their first kiss.
And it was a real kiss, which gladdened Ferguson’s heart greatly, for not only did the kiss offer the promise of more kisses in the days ahead, it proved that Celia was in fact real.
THERE HAD BEEN no contact with his father in over a year. Ferguson rarely thought about him now, and whenever he did, he noticed that the rage he had once felt against him had subsided into a dull indifference, or perhaps into nothing, a blank in his head. He had no father. The man who had once been married to his mother had vanished into the shadows of an alternate world that no longer intersected with the world his son lived in, and if the man was not yet certifiably dead, he had gone missing a long time ago and would never be found at any time in the future.
Three days before he left for Princeton to begin his sophomore year, however, as Ferguson sat in the living room of the house on Woodhall Crescent watching a Mets game with his stepbrother, Jim, and Jim’s fiancée, Nancy, the prophet of profits unexpectedly jumped onto the TV screen in a between-innings commercial. Sporting thick sideburns with a touch of gray in them, and decked out in a natty, fashionable suit (color unknown since it was a black-and-white TV), he was announcing the opening of a new Ferguson’s outlet in Florham Park and hammering away at the low prices, the low, low prices you can afford, and come on over and check out the new RCA color televisions and the stupefying bargains that would be available next weekend when the store opened for business. How deftly and confidently he was making his pitch, Ferguson said to himself, assuring the audience how much their anguished, monotone lives would be enhanced by shopping at Ferguson’s, and for a man who had never learned how to talk, as his mother had once put it, he was doing a hell of a good job of talking now, and how relaxed and comfortable he looked in front of the camera, how pleased with himself, how perfectly in charge of the moment, and as he waved his arm and smiled, gesturing to the invisible masses to come on in and save a bundle, a quartet of unaccompanied soprano and tenor voices trilled brightly in the background: Prices never lower / Spirits never higher / At Ferguson’s, Ferguson’s, Fer-gu-son’s!
Two thoughts appeared in Ferguson’s mind after the commercial ended, the one forming so quickly after the other that they were almost simultaneous:
1) That he should stop watching baseball games on television, and 2) That his father was still hovering around the edges of his life, not yet fully effaced, still there in spite of the distance between them, and perhaps another chapter of the story still had to be written before the book could finally be closed.
UNLESS HE TOOK a crash course in ancient Greek and learned the language in a single academic year, there would be no more classes with Nagle. But Nagle was still his faculty adviser, and for reasons that had everything to do with his father, or perhaps nothing to do with his father, Ferguson continued to look to Nagle for validation and encouragement, wanting to impress the older man by doing top-quality work in his courses, by exhibiting proof of the soundness of character demanded from the participants in the Walt Whitman Scholars Program, but most of all by winning the professor’s support for the fiction he was writing, a sign that he was fulfilling the promise Nagle had seen in him after reading Eleven Moments from the Life of Gregor Flamm. At their first one-on-one conference of the fall semester, Ferguson handed Nagle a copy of the Gizmo Press edition of Mulligan’s Travels, ambivalent and fearful that he had jumped into publishing his work too soon, worried that Nagle would regard the mimeo book as the overly ambitious act of a young writer who wasn’t ready to be published, doubly worried that Nagle would read the book and find it awful, delivering another one of the punches Ferguson dreaded so much even as he longed for kisses from the people he admired, but Nagle accepted the book that first afternoon with a friendly nod and a few words of congratulations, knowing nothing about the contents, of course, but at least not condemning Ferguson for having rushed into premature publication and the inevitable regret and embarrassment that would follow from such an ill-conceived show of arrogance, and as Nagle held the book in his hands and studied the black-and-white illustration on the cover, he mentioned how good he thought the drawing was. Who’s H.S.? he asked, pointing to the abbreviated signature in the lower right-hand corner, and when Ferguson said it was Howard Small, his Princeton roommate, Nagle’s dour mien sent forth one of its unaccustomed smiles. Hard-working Howard Small, he said. Such a good student, but I had no idea he could draw so well. You boys are quite a pair, aren’t you?