THEN THERE WAS Celia, first and last there was Celia, for that was the year when Ferguson fell in love, and the most perplexing thing about it was that no one but his mother saw in her what he did. Rose judged her to be a magnificent girl, but all the others were confused. Noah called her a gawky stalk from Westchester, the female version of her ghosty-boy brother but with darker skin and a more attractive face, a Barnard geek who would spend her life in a white lab coat studying rats. Jim thought she was good-looking but too young for Ferguson, not yet fully evolved. Howard admired her intelligence but wondered if she wasn’t too conventional for Ferguson, a bourgeois goody-good who would never understand how little he cared about what everyone else seemed to care about. Amy weighed in with a single word: Why? Luther called her a work in progress, and Billy said: Archie, what are you doing?
Did he know what he was doing? He thought he did. He had thought so when Celia put down the dollar bill in front of the old man at Horn & Hardart’s. He had thought so when she insisted on no more fake-brother stuff while walking from Grand Central to the automat. And he had thought so when she dropped his book to the floor and declared she wanted to kiss him.
How many kisses had followed that first kiss over the ensuing months? Hundreds of them. Thousands of them. And the unexpected discovery on the night of October twenty-second, when they lowered themselves onto the mattress in Ferguson’s room and made love for the first time, that Celia was no longer a virgin. There had been the aforementioned Bruce in the spring of her last year of high school, and there had been two American travelers on her tour of Europe with her cousin Emily, an Ohioan in Cork and a California boy in Paris, but rather than feel disappointed by the knowledge that he wasn’t her first one, Ferguson was heartened by it, encouraged that she was adventurous and open and had a carnal appetite strong enough to push her into taking risks.
He loved her body. He found her naked body so beautiful that he could barely speak the first time she took off her clothes and lay down beside him. The impossible smoothness and warmth of her skin, her slender arms and legs, the curving cheeks of her round, clutchable ass, her small, upright breasts and dark, pointed nipples, he had never known anyone as beautiful as she was, and what the others couldn’t understand was how happy it made him to be with her, to run his hands over the body of the person he now loved more than any person he had ever loved. If the others couldn’t get that, too bad for them, but Ferguson wasn’t about to ask the minstrel boys to unpack their violins and lay it on thick with the schmaltz. One violin was enough, and as long as Ferguson could hear the music it was playing, he would go on listening to it by himself.
More important than the others or what the others thought was the simple fact of the two of them, and now that they had advanced to the next stage, there was the ever more urgent need to understand precisely what was going on. Was his burgeoning love for Celia still connected to Artie’s death, he asked himself, or had her brother finally been dropped from the equation? That was how it had started, after all, back in the days of the New Rochelle dinners when the world had split in half and the arithmetic of the gods had provided him with a formula to glue it together again: fall in love with his dead friend’s sister, and henceforth the earth would continue to revolve around the sun. The mad calculations of an overheated adolescent mind, of an angry, grieving mind, but however irrational the numbers might have been, he had hoped he would eventually fall for her, and if and when he did, he had also hoped she would fall for him, and now that both of those things had happened, he didn’t want Artie to be involved in it anymore, for the things that had happened had mostly happened on their own, starting with the day in New York when he saw a compassionate girl pull a dollar from her purse and give it to a broken-down old man, with that same girl one year later standing in the light of his apartment and overpowering him with the force of her beauty, with twenty-four letters from foreign countries stashed away in a wooden box, with an excited girl dropping his book to the floor and wanting to kiss him, none of which had anything to do with Artie, and yet now that he and Celia had fallen for each other, Ferguson had to admit that it felt good and right that she was the one he was with and no one else, even if something in him cringed at the thought of that good and right, because now that he loved Celia he understood how sick his desire for her had been in the first place, to look upon a living, breathing person and turn her into a symbol of his campaign to rectify the injustices of the world, what had he been thinking, for God’s sake, and how much better it would be if Artie were out of it for good now. No more ghosts, Ferguson said to himself. The dead boy had brought him together with Celia, but now that he had done his job, it was time for him to go away.
Never a word to her about any of that, and as 1966 turned into 1967 it was remarkable how little they talked about her brother, how determined they both were to avoid the subject and get on with the business of being just two so the invisible third would not be standing between them or floating above them, and as the months rolled on and their connection tightened and Ferguson’s friends gradually came round and began to accept her as a permanent part of the landscape, he realized there was one necessary act still in front of him before the spell could be broken. It was spring by then, and having celebrated their double March birthdays on the third and sixth of the month, they were now twenty and eighteen years old, and one Saturday afternoon in the middle of May, one week after Ferguson had written the final paragraph of The Souls of Inanimate Things, he traveled across town to Morningside Heights, where Celia was ensconced in her dormitory room at Brooks Hall working on two end-of-the-year term papers, which meant that weekend would be different from most other weekends and would not include their customary walks and talks and nighttime explorations in Ferguson’s bed, but he had called Celia at ten o’clock that morning and asked if he could “borrow her” for thirty or forty minutes later in the day, and no, he said, not for that, although he dearly wished it could be that, but rather to do something for him that would be both simple and unstrenuous and yet, at the same time, of utmost importance to their future happiness together. When she asked him what that thing was, he said he would tell her later.
Why so mysterious, Archie?
Because, he said. Just because, that’s why.
As he traveled along the edge of Central Park on the crosstown bus, his right hand was in the pocket of his spring jacket, and the fingers of that hand were wrapped around a pink rubber ball, which he had bought that morning at a candy and cigarette store on First Avenue, a commonplace pink rubber ball manufactured by the Spalding Company and widely referred to in New York as a spaldeen. That was Ferguson’s mission on that bright afternoon in the middle of May: to walk into Riverside Park with Celia and have a catch with her, to renounce the vow he had taken in the silent depths of his misery six years ago and have done with his obsession at last.
Celia smiled when he told her what the thing of utmost importance was, giving him a look that seemed to suggest she knew he was playing a joke or had something else up his sleeve and was still hiding it from her, but she was happy to be liberated from her room, she said, and what better way to pass the time than by having a catch in the park? Celia was doubly up for it because she was an athletic girl, an excellent swimmer, a decent tennis player, and a not-bad shooter of baskets, and having observed her on the tennis court a couple of times, Ferguson knew she could catch a ball and didn’t throw the way girls usually did, with the arm cocked at the elbow, but more or less as boys did, with a thrust from the shoulder of a fully extended arm. He pressed his lips against her face and thanked her for coming along. No matter how much he might have wanted to, he could never tell her why they were doing this.