Ferguson liked Nora because he was attracted to her, or he was attracted to her because he liked her, but he also understood that Nora was a mess, that she drank too much and took too many drugs, that she had evolved into what the guardians of virtue would have called a trollop or a slut, a young woman traveling down a fast road to rack and ruin, too outspoken for her own good, too comfortable in the gorgeous body God had given her for no other purpose than to test the morale of weak men and wavering sinners, a woman who fucked whomever she pleased and openly talked about her cunt, her clit, and the pleasures of having a hard cock rammed up her ass, but at the same time Ferguson found her to be one of the more intelligent members of the West End crowd, a girl with a warm heart and kind impulses, and even though he suspected she wouldn’t live past thirty or thirty-five, he felt nothing but affection for her.
He hadn’t seen her in months, perhaps not for half a year, but there she was one night in early November, just a couple of days after Nixon had defeated Humphrey, which had further darkened the already dark mood that had enveloped Ferguson that fall, and when he sat down next to her at the bar, Nora laughed one of her big laughs and planted a kiss on his left cheek.
They talked for about an hour, covering a number of vital subjects such as the arrest of Nora’s ex-boyfriend for selling drugs, Amy’s definitive exit from Ferguson’s life, the disappointing announcement (for Ferguson) that Nora would be leaving for Arizona the next morning, and the curious fact that while Nora had been jiggling her boobs in Nome (a phrase he vowed never to forget), she had managed to keep abreast (Nora’s joke) of what had been going on at Columbia last spring by reading issues of the Spectator, which had been sent to her every day from New York by her friends Molly and Jack. As a consequence, she had read all of Ferguson’s articles about the occupation of the buildings, the police bust, the strike, and everything else.
The news might have been slow in getting to Alaska, but his articles were damned good, she said to him, fucking terrific, Archie, and after he thanked her for the compliment, he told her that he had retired from reporting. Perhaps permanently, he said, perhaps temporarily, he wasn’t sure yet, but one thing he was sure of was that he didn’t know what to think anymore, that his brain had been bled dry and that shit (thank you, Sal Martino) was everywhere.
Nora said she had never seen him looking so low.
I’m lower than low, Ferguson answered. I’ve just reached the ninety-third sub-basement, and the elevator is still going down.
There’s only one solution, Nora said.
A solution? Out with it — please — at once.
A bath.
A bath?
A nice warm bath, with the two of us in it together.
Never had a proposal been so graciously offered to him, and never had Ferguson been so pleased to accept.
Twenty-five minutes later, as Nora turned on the faucets of the tub in her apartment on Claremont Avenue, Ferguson told her that God had indeed given her a glorious body, but more important than that, He had also given her a sense of humor, and even though she would be leaving for Arizona in the morning, Ferguson wished he could marry her now, and even though he knew he couldn’t marry her now or at any time in the future, he wanted to spend every minute of the next eleven hours with her, to be with her every second until she walked onto the plane, and now that she was being so nice to him, he wanted her to know that he loved her for it and would go on loving her for the rest of his life, even if he never saw her again.
Come on, Archie, Nora said. Kick your clothes into the corner and climb in. The bath is full, and we don’t want the water to get cold, do we?
NOVEMBER. DECEMBER. JANUARY. February.
He was still in college but already finished with college, limping his way to the end as he pondered what to do with himself after they handed him his degree. First of all, there would be the matter of letting Nobodaddy peer into his anus and examine his testicles, of coughing the obligatory cough and taking a written test that would prove whether he was intelligent enough to die for his country. The draft board would be summoning him for his army physical sometime in June or July, but he wasn’t worried about that because of his two absent fingers, and now that the pro-war Quaker with a secret plan to end the war was sitting on his throne and talking about troop reductions, Ferguson doubted the military would be desperate enough to start filling its regiments with one-thumbed soldiers. No, the problem wasn’t the army, the problem was what to do after the army rejected him, and among the dozens of things he had already decided against was graduate school. He had considered it for three or four minutes over Christmas break with his parents in Florida, but just saying the words out loud had made him understand how deeply the thought of spending one more day of his life in a university revolted him, and now that February was about to turn into March, the deadline for sending off applications had passed. Teaching school was another option. A push was being made to enlist recent college graduates to teach in poor neighborhoods around the city, the black and Latino slums of upper and lower Manhattan, the tumbledown wards of the outer boroughs, and at least there would be something honorable about doing that for a couple of years, he told himself, trying to educate the kids from those disintegrating barrios and in the process no doubt learning as much from them as they would ever learn from him, Mr. White Boy doing his small bit to make things better rather than worse, but then he would come back to earth and think about his inability to talk in front of people when more than five or six strangers were in the room, the paralyzing self-consciousness that made it a torture for him to stand up and speak in public, and how could he manage a classroom of thirty or thirty-five ten-year-olds if no words ever came out of his mouth? He wouldn’t be capable of doing it. Even if he wanted to do it, it wouldn’t be possible for him.