The next time she slept over at his place, he picked up on something she said and then moved in on the subject as delicately as he could. They were lying in bed together, sharing one of his Camels after a richly satisfying hour under and on top of the sheets and down comforter, talking about nothing of any importance, or perhaps not talking at all (he couldn’t remember), perhaps just looking at each other, as they tended to do at such moments, each one filled up with the other and yet prolonging the moment by running their hands up and down and over the other’s naked skin, no words other than Ferguson telling her how beautiful she was, if indeed he was saying that much, but he remembered that Celia’s eyes were closed and she was humming to herself, a soft little tuneless sound that resembled a purr, languorous, long-limbed, panther-woman Celia lounging on her side and whispering to him in a throaty voice: I love it when we’re like this, Archie. Just the two of us on our island together with the waves of the city splashing outside.
Me, too, Ferguson said. That’s why I’m proposing a moratorium, a ban on any more contact with the outside.
Are you saying we should lock ourselves in this room and never go out?
No, we can go out. But just the two of us. No more running around with other people.
That’s fine with me. What do I care about other people?
There’s just one problem. (A pause to puff and think about how to say it without upsetting her.) We’ll have to start seeing each other a bit less often.
Why would we want to do that?
Because the people you don’t care about are not people I don’t care about.
And which people are we referring to?
The ones I’ve forced down your throat. Billy Best, Howard Small, Noah Marx, Bo Jainard — the whole lot of unacceptables.
I’m not against them, Archie.
Maybe not, but you’re not for them either, and I don’t see why you should have to put up with them anymore.
Are you saying this for me or for you?
For both of us. It kills me to see you go into those funks of yours.
I know you’re trying to be nice, but you think I’m a twit, don’t you? An uptight, bourgeois noodlehead.
That’s right. A girl with straight A’s and an invitation to go back to Woods Hole for the summer must be a twit and a noodlehead.
But they’re your friends. I don’t want to let you down.
They’re my friends, but there’s nothing that says they have to be your friends.
It’s kind of sad, don’t you think?
Not really. It’s just a new arrangement, that’s all.
I’m talking about less, about seeing each other less often.
If the quality of that less is more than the more we have now, then less will compensate for all the miserable hours I’ve spent watching you suffer with those people, and less will end up trumping more, less in fact will be more.
They settled into a new rhythm of weekends only, two late afternoons, evenings, and nights per weekend, either Friday and Saturday, Friday and Sunday, or Saturday and Sunday, except on those rare Fridays, Saturdays, or Sundays when Ferguson called to cancel at the last minute, which left him free to associate with one or more of the unacceptables on the weekend night that was not shared with Celia, not to mention the weekday nights when he was not overburdened with schoolwork, the roughly one night in four when he had dinner with Billy and Joanna at their place down the street, talking about writers, politics, movies, painters, and sports as they took turns holding and playing with one-year-old Molly, big-brother Billy Best, who had believed in Ferguson before anyone else and was his only prose-writer friend in the fish tank of poets where he was swimming now, the only one with an ear for prose who could follow his arguments about why Flannery O’Conner and Grace Paley were bolder, more inventive stylists than Bellow, Updike, or any other American man except perhaps Baldwin, and in that way Ferguson managed not to lose contact with the Bests or Noah or Howard or the Tumult trio or any of the other necessary ones who kept him anchored to the world. Yes, it was a little sad, as Celia had put it, but after a month and then another month of the new arrangement, he felt they were beginning to do better, breathing less fitfully because there were fewer distractions and exasperations to contend with, and yet Ferguson also knew there was much work still to be done, that the small problem he had solved was nothing compared to the big problem of hiding too much of himself from her, and unless he found the strength to open up to Celia and tell her everything she needed to be told about him, he would eventually destroy their future and end up with nothing.
Third Cause: It could be argued that the entire affair had been built on a false premise. It wasn’t that Ferguson had lied to Celia, but he had persisted in withholding the truth from her about the primacy of Artie’s death in the love-equals-divine-justice formula, and even though he felt he had largely surmounted that problem with the game of catch in Riverside Park last spring, which had evolved into one-on-one games of wiffleball with Celia throughout the summer, both in Woods Hole and on the farm in Vermont, especially during the grim weeks before his trial when those festive, laughing games had momentarily kept him from thinking about his day of reckoning in court, he still hadn’t said a word to her about any of it. The mad, six-year-long fixation had come to an end, but if he was cured now or even just partially restored to health, why hadn’t he summoned the courage to tell Celia about the abnegations he had imposed on himself as a tribute to his dead A.F. twin? Because he was scared. Because he feared she would judge him insane and want nothing to do with him anymore.
Even worse, there was his inability to tell her about his condition, to reveal the secret of his abnormal birth as the progeny of a male donkey and a female horse, the braying jack who had mounted the comely mare in a New Jersey barn one night in the summer of 1946 and had impregnated her with a mule, Ferguson the Talking Mule, who was a creature who could sire no offspring and therefore fell into the category of genetic dud, and so crushing was that truth to Ferguson, so damaging to the phallic certainties of his male self, he could never bring himself to share it with Celia, which meant that he allowed her to go through the needless exercise of taking birth-control precautions every time they went to bed together, never once telling her there was no point in inserting her diaphragm because making love with him guaranteed that she would never have to worry about becoming pregnant.
An inexcusable error. Cowardice on such a grand scale that it turned him into the one thing he had vowed never to become: dishonorable.
Rebuttal: There was no rebuttal. In Ferguson’s mind, however, the possibility that Dr. Brueler’s diagnosis had been wrong continued to give him hope. Until and unless he consulted another doctor, the inexcusable would remain excusable because there was always a small chance that birth control was necessary, and he didn’t want Celia to know the shameful truth of his condition until he was one hundred percent certain of it. All he had to do was go to another doctor and have himself tested again — but he was too afraid to go, too afraid to find out, and he kept putting it off.