Rebuttal: A gap between them, but not so broad a gap as to thwart their efforts to bridge it. Celia read books, listened to music, and merrily trotted off to movies and plays with Ferguson, and Ferguson himself was studying biology that year, needing one more science course to fulfill his requirement, but making that course biology because of her, in order to master the rudiments of the language she spoke, and, as he explained to Celia, to immerse himself more deeply in his book, which they both understood could be written only by penetrating the Noyesian realm of physical bodies, the tissues and bones of the ill and healthy bodies his man had been treating for more than twenty years as a medical doctor. Beyond helping him with the work for his biology class, Celia also took it upon herself to arrange interviews for him with pre-med students from Barnard and Columbia, with young interns at St. Luke’s, Lenox Hill, and Columbia Presbyterian, and an invaluable four-hour meeting with her own family doctor since childhood, Gordon Edelman from New Rochelle, a compact, round-chested man who calmly walked Ferguson through the history and day-to-day routines of his practice, the dramas he had confronted over the years, and even talked for a while about Celia’s brother’s early death, explaining that Artie did not present symptoms of an aneurysm and consequently was not subjected to the dangerous procedure of an angiograph, which was the only method for examining a living brain in 1961, as opposed to the more reliable procedure of picking apart a dead brain during an autopsy. Did not present. In other words, there was nothing anyone could have done, and then the day arrived when the vessel broke and the doctor’s words were scrambled into three different words that carried an altogether different meaning: No longer present.
Because of his novel, Ferguson was also making the bleak but necessary journey through the literature of suicide, and in order to keep pace with him, Celia read some of those books as well, beginning with philosophical, sociological, and psychological essays and studies by Hume, Schopenhauer, Durkheim, and Menninger, then numerous accounts from the distant past and near present, Empedocles and his mythic leap into the flames of Mount Etna, Socrates (hemlock), Mark Antony (sword), the mass suicide of Jewish rebels at Masada, Plutarch’s description of Cato’s self-murder in Parallel Lives (plucking out his own bowels in front of his son, his doctor, and his servants), the disgraced boy genius Thomas Chatterton (arsenic), the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva (hanging), Hart Crane (jumping off a ship into the Gulf of Mexico), George Eastman (a gunshot to the heart), Hermann Göring (cyanide), and, most pertinent of all, the opening sentences from The Myth of Sisyphus: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.”
F: What do you think, Celia? Is Camus right or wrong?
C: Probably right. But then again …
F: I agree with you. Probably right, but not necessarily.
Not all things all the time, but more than enough things to make a decent go of it, perhaps a splendid and lasting go, but they were still just eighteen and twenty when the school year began, and one of the good things they shared was the double conviction that work came before pleasure and that neither of them had any aptitude for domestic life. Even if Ferguson’s apartment on East Eighty-ninth Street had been big enough for two rather than one, they never would have considered living together, not because they were too young for the rigors of steady cohabitation but because they were both essentially loners and needed long stretches of time alone in order to do their work. For Celia, that meant her studies at Barnard, where she was excelling not only in science and math but in all her subjects, which put her firmly in the grind camp, an obsessive, round-the-clock grind who had joined up with four other Barnard grind-girls for her sophomore year and was living in a large, gloomy dump on West 111th Street, an apartment she teasingly referred to as the Cloister of Perpetual Stillness. For Ferguson, the exigencies of work were no less demanding, the taxing double job of trying to do his best at Brooklyn College while trying to write his novel, which was advancing slowly because of that, but one more good thing about the obsessive Celia was how deeply attuned she was to his obsessions, and several times that year, on the Fridays and Saturdays and Sundays when they had made plans to see each other and Ferguson found himself on a sudden roll with his book, she didn’t take offense when he called her at the last minute to cancel the date, telling him to forge on and write his heart out and not to worry. That was the crux of it, he realized, the comrade spirit that set her apart from everyone else he had known, for there was never any doubt that she was disappointed by those last-minute calls but had the guts (the strength of character) to pretend she wasn’t.
Second Cause: A mostly harmonious meeting of minds and bodies when it was just the two of them alone together, but whenever they stepped out into the world and mixed with other people, life became problematic. Beyond the four girls she shared her apartment with, Celia had few close friends, perhaps no close friends, and therefore the bulk of their infrequent socializing consisted of floating in and out of Ferguson’s world, which was mostly an alien world to Celia, a world she tried to understand but couldn’t. She had no difficulties with the older generation and felt warmly treated by Ferguson’s mother and stepfather, she enjoyed herself at the two dinners they had with Aunt Mildred and Uncle Don, but Noah and Howard both rubbed her the wrong way, Noah because she found his sarcastic, nonstop jesting unbearable and Howard because she felt wounded by his polite indifference to her. She got along well enough with Amy and Jim’s wife, Nancy, but the ever-expanding circle of Ferguson’s poet and painter friends bored her and repelled her in equal measure, and it saddened Ferguson to see how unhappy she looked whenever they spent an evening with Billy and Joanna, who were as close to him as blood relations now, a sadness that turned into both guilt and irritation when he watched her sit through another one of his long, meandering talks about poets and writers with Ron, Lewis, or Anne, and even less did she comprehend why her noble, deep-thinking Archie found it so much fun to go to trashy Joan Crawford movies with Bo Jainard and his friend Jack Ellerby, those slender fey boys who sometimes kissed each other in the darkness of the balcony and never stopped laughing, they all laughed too much, she said, not one person in the crowd ever took anything seriously, they were sloppy, floppy, loosey-goosey starvelings with no aim in life except to prowl the margins of life and make art that no one wanted to see or buy, and yes, Ferguson admitted, perhaps that was true, but they were his boys and girls, his gallant, unembittered fellow outcasts, and because none of them was quite fit for this world, a burst of laughter now and then showed they were doing the best they could under the circumstances.
Rebuttal: By the beginning of the new year (1968), Ferguson understood that he could no longer subject Celia to his disreputable companions, some of whom were blatant homosexuals, some of whom were addicts and drunks, some of whom were emotionally disturbed cripples under psychiatric care, and even if some of them were contentedly married parents of young children, no matter how hard he tried to bring her into that small society of cracked-in-the-head monomaniacs, she would always resist it, and rather than go on punishing her for the sin of wanting to accompany him when he sought out the company of others, he would absolve her of the obligation to be with any others who were not to her liking. He knew it was a step in the wrong direction, that cutting her off from that part of his life would open a permanent space between them, but he didn’t want to run the risk of losing Celia, and how else could he hold on to her except by liberating her from those unhappy evenings with his friends?