They made their way upstairs, walked down a corridor, turned left down another corridor, and slipped into an empty room with a couple of thousand books in it and six or seven paintings hanging on one of the walls. Something turned out to be a business proposition, if a minute, bound-to-be-unprofitable operation such as Tumult Books could be called a business. As Ron explained it, the triumvirate in charge of running the press had voted to include Ferguson on next year’s list by gathering together his three Gizmo titles and publishing them as a single book. According to their calculations, it would come out to around 250 or 275 pages, and they could have it ready sometime in the next eight to twelve months. What did he say to that?
I don’t know, Ferguson said. Do you think those books are good enough?
We wouldn’t be making the offer if we thought they were bad, Ron said. Of course they’re good enough.
And what about Billy? Doesn’t he have to give his permission?
He already has. Billy’s all in behind it. He’s with us now, and he wants you to be with us, too.
What a guy. I grapple with my groots and shoot down the grovelers and medicine men with my trusted blunderbuss. No one has ever written a cooler sentence than that.
I should also mention the money.
What money?
We’re trying to act like real publishers, Archie.
I don’t understand.
A contract, an advance, royalties. Surely you’ve heard of those things.
Vaguely. In some other world where I don’t happen to live.
Three books in one book, published in an edition of three thousand copies. We thought a two-thousand-dollar advance would have a nice asymmetrical ring to it.
Don’t joke, Ron. Two thousand would save me. No more begging on street corners, no more handouts from people who can’t afford to hand out money, no more midnight sweats. Please tell me you’re not pulling my leg.
Ron smiled one of his thin, minimal smiles and sat down in a chair. The standard procedure is to get half when you sign the contract, he continued, and the other half when the book is published, but if you need the full amount up front, I’m sure that can be arranged.
How can you be sure?
Because, Ron said, pointing to a Mondrian on the opposite wall, Trixie can do anything she wants.
Yes, Ferguson replied, as he turned around and looked at the canvas, I suppose she can.
There’s just one last thing to discuss. A title, an overall title for the three books. There’s no rush, but Anne came up with one at the meeting that we all thought was pretty funny. Funny because you’re still so shockingly young and new to the world that we sometimes ask ourselves if you still wear diapers.
Only at night, but I don’t need them during the day anymore.
Mr. Sloppy Pants walks around in clean undies now.
Most of the time, in any case. And what did Anne suggest?
Collected Works.
Ah. Yes, it’s pretty funny all right, but also … what’s the word I’m looking for?… a bit funereal. As if I’d been embalmed and was about to set off on a one-way trip to the past tense. I think I’d prefer something a little more hopeful.
It’s your book. You’re the one who gets to decide.
How about Prolusions?
As in those early works by Milton?
That’s right. “A literary composition of a preliminary or preparatory nature.”
We know what the word means, but will anyone else know?
If they don’t, they can look it up.
Ron removed his glasses, rubbed down the lenses with a handkerchief, and then put them back on. After a small pause, he shrugged and said: I’m with you, Archie. Let them look it up.
Ferguson walked back into the party feeling stunned and weightless, as if his head were no longer attached to his body. When he tried to tell Celia the good news, the din of voices circling around them was so intense that she couldn’t hear what he was saying to her. Never mind, Ferguson said, as he squeezed her hand and kissed her on the neck, I’ll tell you later. Then he looked out at the throng of vertical people gathered in the room and saw that Howard and Amy were still talking to each other, standing quite close now, each one leaning into the other and entirely absorbed in their conversation, and as he watched how his stepsister and former roommate were looking at each other it dawned on Ferguson that they could be turning into an item, that with Mona and Luther both gone and no doubt forever gone for both of them, it made sense for Howard and Amy to be exploring the possibilities, and how curious it would be if Howard wound up inserting himself into the tangled, mixed-up tribe of overlapping clans and lineages to become an honorary member of the Schneiderman-Adler-Ferguson-Marx traveling vaudeville team, which would turn his friend into an unofficial brother-in-law, and what an honor that would be, Ferguson said to himself, welcoming Howard into the inner circle and giving him advice on how to duck when Amy started throwing Necco wafers at his head, the extraordinary Amy Schneiderman, the girl he had wanted so badly that it still hurt to think about what might have happened but never did.
HE HAD ENOUGH money to live on for a year, and for the first five months of that year Ferguson managed to hold himself together by sticking to his plan. Only four things mattered to him now: writing his book, loving Celia, loving his friends, and going back and forth to Brooklyn College. It wasn’t that he had stopped paying attention to the world, but the world was no longer simply falling apart, the world had caught fire, and the question was: What to do or not to do when the world was on fire and you didn’t have the equipment to put out the flames, when the fire was in you as much as it was around you, and no matter what you did or didn’t do, your actions would change nothing? Stick to the plan by writing the book. That was the only answer Ferguson could come up with. Write the book by replacing the real fire with an imaginary fire and hope the effort would add up to something more than nothing. As for the Tet Offensive in South Vietnam, as for Lyndon Johnson’s abdication, as for the murder of Martin Luther King: watch them as carefully as he could, take them in as deeply as he could, but other than that, nothing. He wasn’t going to fight on the barricades, but he would cheer for the ones who did, and then he would return to his room and write his book.
He understood how shaky that position was. The arrogance of it, the selfishness of it, the art above all else flaw in his thinking, but if he didn’t hold fast to his argument (which probably wasn’t an argument so much as an instinctive reflex), he would be giving in to a counterargument that posited a world in which books were no longer necessary, and what moment could be more important for the writing of books than a year when the world was on fire — and you were on fire with it?
Then came the first of the two big blows that crashed down on him that spring.
At nine o’clock in the evening on April sixth, two days after the murder of Martin Luther King, as real fires were burning in half the cities in America, the telephone rang in Ferguson’s apartment on East Eighty-ninth Street. Someone named Allen Blumenthal wanted to talk to Archie Ferguson, and was that Archie Ferguson on the line now? Yes, Ferguson said, trying to remember where he had heard the name Allen Blumenthal, which seemed to set off a distant bell in some far corner of his memory … Blumenthal … Blumenthal … and then the jolt of recognition arrived at last: Allen Blumenthal, the son of Ethel Blumenthal, the woman his father had been married to for the past three years, Ferguson’s unknown stepbrother, sixteen at the time of the wedding and therefore nineteen now, just two years younger than Ferguson — Celia’s age.