Like the wind over terrible seas, like the wind
That creeps slowly over every horizon.
So Ferguson had his extracurricular jobs of translating and reviewing, each of them alternately and often simultaneously both a struggle and a pleasure for him, the pleasure of the struggle to get it right, the frustrations of not getting it right more often than he should have, the poems that defeated him and could not be rendered into acceptable English after two dozen stabs at them, the failure of his piece on the effect of listening to different kinds of music as sung by different kinds of female voices (Janet Baker, Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin) because in the end it was impossible to write about music, he decided, at least impossible for him, but still he managed to produce some articles that were less than awful enough to hand in and publish, and still the pile of translations continued to grow, and in the midst of all that there were the classes he was taking as well, mostly seminars in English and French literature at that point because he had fulfilled all his academic requirements except one, science, the abominable two-year science requirement that was an utter waste of time and effort in his opinion, but he discovered there was a course designed for lunkheads like himself, Introduction to Astronomy, which apparently no one failed because the professor was against flunking non-science students in science, and even if you never showed up for any of the classes, all you had to do was take a multiple-choice exam at the end of the year, a test you could not fail even if you failed to beat the guesswork odds and scored only ten percent, so Ferguson registered for that lunkhead course in celestial mathematics, but because he was living in a stranger’s body and didn’t know who he was anymore, and because he felt nothing but contempt for the rulers of Columbia and the pointless subjects they were forcing him to study against his will, he went into the college bookstore at the beginning of the first semester and stole the astronomy textbook, he who had never stolen anything in his life, who had worked at Book World during the summer after his freshman year and had caught six or seven students in the act of stealing books and had thrown them out of the store, now he was a book thief himself, slipping a ten-pound hardcover under his jacket and calmly walking toward the exit and out into the sunshine of Indian summer, now he was doing things he never would have done in the past, behaving as if he were no longer himself, but then again, perhaps this was the person he had become now, for the truth was that he didn’t feel guilty about pinching the book — he didn’t feel anything about it at all.
Too many nights at the West End, too many nights getting plastered with Zimmer and Fogg, but Ferguson craved the company and the talk, and on the nights when he went into the bar alone there was always the off chance of running into a girl who was just as lonely as he was. Off chance rather than chance because he was so dreadfully inexperienced when it came to such matters, having spent close to five years of his youth and early adulthood with one girl, the eternally departed Amy Schneiderman, who had loved him and then not loved him and had tossed him aside, and now he was starting from the bottom again, a beginner in the art of amorous conquest, knowing next to nothing about how to approach someone and start a conversation, but a tipsy Ferguson was more charming than a sober Ferguson, and three times during his first three months back at Columbia, when he had tippled enough to overcome his shyness but was not too far gone to have lost control of his thoughts, he wound up in bed with a woman, once for an hour, once for several hours, once for the whole night. All of the women were older than he was, and on two of those three occasions he was the one who was approached rather than the other way around.
The first occasion was a disaster. He had enrolled in a graduate seminar on the French novel, the only undergraduate in a class with two graduate-student men and six graduate-student women, and when one of those women turned up at the West End in the third week of September, he walked over to her and said hello. Alice Dotson was twenty-four or twenty-five, not unattractive or unwilling but plump and awkward, perhaps not accustomed to the protocols of casual sex, perhaps even more shy than he was, and when he found himself in her arms later that night, her body looked and felt so different from Amy’s that he was thrown by the unfamiliarity of it all, and then, to compound his confusion, she was far more passive in bed than the ardent and spirited Amy had been, and as Ferguson went about the job of trying to copulate with her, his mind kept wandering from the task at hand, and even though Alice seemed to be enjoying herself in a mild, dreamy sort of way, he couldn’t finish what he had started, which was something that had never happened in all his years with Amy, and the pleasant tumble he had been looking forward to was turned into a wretched hour of impotence and shame. Nor was he ever allowed to forget that blow to his masculine pride, since the class met for two hours every Monday and Thursday, and twice a week for the rest of the year there was Alice Dotson sitting around the table with the other students, doing her best to ignore him.
The second occasion left no scars but taught him a valuable lesson. A thirty-one-year-old secretary of pleasing but unremarkable aspect came into the West End one night with the express purpose of picking up a student. She called herself Zoe (last name never given), and when she fixed her eyes on the solitary Ferguson, she sat down next to him at the bar, ordered a Manhattan, and began talking about the World Series currently in progress between the Cardinals and the Tigers (she was pulling for St. Louis because she had been raised in Joplin, Missouri). After three or four sips of her drink, she tested the waters by placing her hand on Ferguson’s thigh, and because he was susceptible to provocations of that sort, he responded by kissing her on the back of the neck. Zoe downed the rest of her Manhattan, Ferguson polished off his beer, and then they climbed into a taxi and headed for her place on West Eighty-fourth Street, exchanging no more than six or seven words as they pawed and kissed each other in the back. It was all rather impersonal, he supposed, but her lithe body moved in ways that excited Ferguson, and after they reached her apartment, the sorry organ that had let him down so cruelly with Alice Dotson had no trouble finishing what it had started with Zoe No-Name. It was his first one-night stand. Or almost a night, in that there was a first round followed by a second round, but after the second round ended at two o’clock, Zoe asked Ferguson to leave, assuring him they would both feel better about it in the morning if they didn’t spend the rest of the night together. He didn’t know what to think. Fun while it had lasted, he said to himself, but sex without feeling had its decided limitations, and as he walked back to his apartment in the windy autumn night, he realized that it hadn’t been worth it.
The third occasion was memorable, the one good thing that happened to him during those long, empty months. Although the West End was essentially a student hangout, there were a number of regulars who had stopped being students or had never been students, the oddball dreamers and drunks who sat alone in booths plotting the overthrow of imaginary governments or were having one last round before they took another crack at A.A. or reminisced about the old days when Dylan Thomas used to sit at the bar reciting his poems. Among those regulars was a young woman Ferguson had met all the way back at the beginning of his freshman year, a slender, long-legged beauty from Lubbock, Texas, named Nora Kovacs, someone he had always felt attracted to but had never even flirted with because of Amy, a most unusual girl who had come up north to attend Barnard in 1961, had dropped out in the middle of her first semester, and had remained in the neighborhood ever since, foul-mouthed, raunchy, go-fuck-yourself Nora, who had drifted into the profession of removing her clothes in front of strangers, a striptease artist who toured far-flung outposts of American industry to enhance the lives of the womanless men who worked in oil fields, shipyards, and mills, a well-paid performer who would vanish from New York for a couple of months to bounce around Alaska or the Gulf Coast of Texas, but she would always come back to claim her seat at the bar of the West End, where she went nearly every night to chat with anyone who happened to be sitting next to her, talking about her adventures on the road and sounding off about the dimwitted Nobodaddies who were destroying the universe. Ferguson didn’t know her well, but over the years they had had five or six long conversations together, and because Ferguson had once helped her out on a matter of considerable importance, there was a special bond between them, even if they weren’t close friends. It went back to a night during his freshman year when he had gone into the West End without Amy and had spent four hours talking one-on-one with Nora in a side booth. She was about to go off on her first stripping tour, she had told him, and she needed to come up with a stage name for herself, since she sure as hell wasn’t going to hawk her wares as Nora LuAnn Kovacs. In a sudden flash of inspiration, Ferguson had said: Starr Bolt. Hot damn, Nora had said back to him, hot diggity damn, Archie, you’re a genius, and perhaps for that one moment he had been a genius, for Starr Bolt was a name that radiated glamour, freedom, and sexual power, the essential qualities every stripper needed to rise to the top, and whenever he had run into Nora over the ensuing years, she had always thanked him for turning her into what she playfully called the Queen of the Hinterlands.