Conclusion: Two and a half weeks after his father’s death, when the fire of the moment spread its flames to the Columbia campus, Celia put on a green armband and helped the cause by making sandwiches for the students inside the buildings, one of several dozen volunteers in the Ferris Booth Hall Chow Brigade. Not the red armband of the activists but the green band of sympathizers and supporters, a reasonable position for someone who took no part in campus politics and devoted all her energies to studying for her classes, but Celia had political opinions, and even if she wasn’t cut out for the front-line actions of manning barricades and occupying university buildings, those opinions were strong enough to put her on the side of the students against the administration, no matter what qualms she might have had about the students’ tactics and no matter how often she cringed when she heard a hundred or five hundred voices shouting Up against the wall, motherfucker! As Ferguson saw it, Celia was acting in accord with the fundamental principles of the Federman Bill of Rights, the same impulse that had prompted her to put down the dollar in front of the old man at the automat when she was sixteen, and now that she was nineteen, nothing had changed. She called him at his apartment on the night of the twenty-third, and as Ferguson listened to her describe what had happened at Columbia that day, the noon rally at the Sundial in the middle of the campus, the attack on the gym construction site in Morningside Park, and then the takeover of Hamilton Hall by a coalition of SDS and SAS, white students and black students working in concert to shut down the university, he started to laugh — partly out of surprise, he imagined, but mostly out of happiness. When he hung up the phone, he understood that it was the first good laugh he had produced since before the evening he had picked up the same phone and talked to Allen Blumenthal.
At one o’clock on Friday afternoon (the twenty-sixth), he decided to suspend work on his novel for the rest of the day and head crosstown to check out what was happening at Columbia. It was too late to call Celia, who was undoubtedly with her fellow sandwich makers in the Chow Room at Ferris Booth Hall, but it wasn’t going to be difficult to find her, and once he managed to tear her away from her platters of ham, bologna, and precut slices of packaged bread, they could walk around the campus together and see what was going on. As the crosstown bus traveled up Madison Avenue, he fell into the same conversation he seemed to have with himself every time he went to Morningside Heights: What if he had gone to Columbia instead of Princeton? And if he had gone there, how would his life have been different from the one he was leading now? No Brooklyn College for one thing. No East Eighty-ninth Street for another. No walking in on his grandfather’s porn movie for yet another. No ten thousand dollars, no Nagle, and no Howard Small — which would have meant no barroom fight in Vermont, no trial, no miraculous rescue by Aunt Mildred, no imaginary tennis matches, and no romance between Howard and Amy, which had turned into a hot romance that showed no signs of cooling off anytime soon. The same three books with Gizmo, however, although the second and third would have been slightly different books. And the same roles for Mary Donohue, Evie Monroe, and Celia. But if he had gone to Columbia, would he be sitting in one of the occupied buildings with the protesting students now or would his life have put him on this same crosstown bus that was traveling along the northern edge of Central Park on its way to Morningside Heights?
The situation had altered since the twenty-third. The black-white alliance had broken apart, but four more buildings had been taken over by students, and the chairman of SDS, the acknowledged leader of the rebellion, happened to be one of Ferguson’s old friends from high school, Mark Rudd. Yes, Mike Loeb was part of it too — Amy’s ex-tormentor, ergo Ferguson’s ex-friend — but according to what Celia had heard, Loeb was just another one of the SDSers taking part in meetings at Mathematics Hall, whereas Rudd was in charge, the SDS spokesman and instigator-in-chief, and he and Ferguson had always gotten along well, sitting in many of the same English, French, and history classes together, going out on double dates with their almost identically named girlfriends, Dana and Diana, and cutting school together one morning to run off to New York, where they visited the Stock Exchange on Wall Street in order to see capitalism in action, and how fitting and oddly funny it was that Mark, who had taught him how to drive a standard-shift car in the spring of their junior year, which had allowed Ferguson to operate Arnie Frazier’s Chevy van and spend another summer as a mover of large, heavy objects, was now leading a student rebellion and had his picture in the paper every day.
As it happened, Ferguson didn’t quite make it to Columbia that afternoon. The number 4 crosstown bus traveled from the East Side to the West Side along 110th Street, alternatively known as Cathedral Parkway in the blocks between Central Park West and Riverside Drive, and when the bus reached the corner of Broadway and 110th, Ferguson jumped off and began walking north toward the campus on 116th Street, but in order to get to where he was going, he first had to go by the block where Celia lived, West 111th between Broadway and Amsterdam, and curiously enough, as he passed 111th and plodded on toward the next corner, he unexpectedly caught sight of Celia herself, Celia in a flowing blue skirt and pink blouse, about half a block ahead of him and also walking north, no doubt on her way to the Chow Room at Ferris Booth Hall. The fact that Celia wasn’t alone did not disturb him, even though the person she was with was not one of her Barnard roommates but a man, in this case a twenty-two-year-old man named Richard Smolen, whom Ferguson recognized as one of the Columbia pre-med students he had talked to back in October when Celia had been setting up interviews for him as an aid to writing his novel, and because Smolen was from New Rochelle and had played on baseball and basketball teams with Artie as a boy, Celia had known him all her life, and why would Ferguson feel the slightest envy or apprehension to discover that Celia was walking uptown with an old friend? He quickened his pace in order to catch up with them, but before he could get within shouting distance, Celia and Richard Smolen stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, threw their arms around each other, and began to kiss. It was a passionate kiss, a prolonged kiss, a lustful kiss of pure and uncontrollable desire, and from all Ferguson could gather as he stood on the sidewalk not twenty feet from where they were embracing, it was a kiss of love.
If it was love, one could only assume they had just emerged from Celia’s apartment, where they had spent the past however many hours rolling around on Celia’s bed, and now that they had put their clothes back on and were walking north to Columbia to make sandwiches for the students in the occupied buildings, the afterglow of their lust binge was burning so brightly that they couldn’t keep their hands off each other and were still hungry for more.
Ferguson turned around and began walking south.
Epilogue: He didn’t call, and she didn’t call until Monday — to tell him about Smolen (which was old news to him by then) and to call it quits. A silent weekend, during which he concluded that he was to blame for the disaster and that Smolen wasn’t the cause of his troubles so much as a symptom of them, and because he had been dishonest with her from the start, he deserved to be dumped. Celia the beautiful. Celia and the manifold deliriums of touching Celia and folding her body into his. But sex wasn’t enough. It seemed unimaginable to have arrived at that thought, but sex wasn’t enough, and nearly everything else about them had been wrong. He had willed himself to love her, but he had never loved anything but the idea of loving her, which wasn’t love but a form of gross and unforgivable stupidity, so let her go off with her handsome pre-med boy, he said to himself, let her walk with her future heart specialist and current heartthrob back into the whirlwind at Columbia, for the fire was still spreading, and the time had come for Ferguson to let her whirl out of his life and go to the next place without him.