Seventy-four slowly written and rewritten pages between mid-June and mid-September, and two weeks after he started riding the subway back and forth to Brooklyn again, his collected works were published by Tumult Books. After such a hard summer, Prolusions sprang up out of the earth as unexpectedly as the first crocus in early spring. A flash of purple bursting through the mud and blackened snow on the chilly ground, a beautiful spear of color in an otherwise colorless world, for the dust jacket of Prolusions was indeed purple, the shade of purple called mauve, the color Ferguson and Ron had selected out of the numerous colors available to them, an austerely designed typographical cover with his name and the title in black bordered by a thin white rectangle, a glancing nod to the Gallimard covers in France, elegant, so very elegant, Ferguson thought, and when he held a copy of the book in his hands for the first time, he experienced something he had not been prepared for: a thunderbolt of exaltation. Not dissimilar to the exaltation he had felt after winning the Walt Whitman Scholarship, he realized, but with this difference: the scholarship had been taken away from him, but the book would always be his, even if no more than seventeen people ever read it.
There were reviews. For the first time in his life, he was bussed and slapped in public, thirteen times over the next four months by his reckoning, long, medium, and short reviews in newspapers, magazines, and literary quarterlies, five satisfying tongue kisses, a friendly pat on the back, three punches to the face, one knee to the balls, one execution by firing squad, and two shrugs. Ferguson was both a genius and an idiot, both a wonder boy and a supercilious oaf, both the best thing that had happened this year and the worst thing that had happened this year, both brimming with talent and utterly devoid of it. Nothing had changed since the Hank-Frank rumpus with Mrs. Baldwin and the contravening opinions of Aunt Mildred and Uncle Don half a century ago, the push and pull of positive and negative, the endless standoff in the courtrooms of judgment, but try as he did to ignore both the good and the bad that were said about him, Ferguson had to admit that the stings went on stinging long after the kisses had worn off, that it was harder to forget being attacked as “a frantic, out-of-control hippie who doesn’t believe in literature and wants to destroy it” than it was to remember being praised as “a bright new kid on the block.” Fuck it, he said to himself, as he filed away the reviews in the bottom drawer of his desk. If and when he ever published another book, he would stop up his ears with candle wax, cover his eyes with a blindfold, strap his body to the mast of a ship, and then ride out the storm until the Sirens could no longer touch him.
Not long after the book came out, Mary Donohue came back in. Celia had been gone for five months at that point, and the solitary, sex-starved Ferguson was more than interested to hear from Joanna that her sister had recently broken up with her boyfriend of the past eighteen months, and if Ferguson had any wish to see Mary again, Joanna would be more than happy to invite both of them to dinner one night in the coming days or weeks. Mary was all done with Michigan now and was back in New York studying law at NYU, fifteen or twenty pounds slimmer, according to Joanna, and she was asking him because Mary had asked her, and if Ferguson was willing, it appeared Mary would be willing, too, and so it was that Ferguson and Mary started seeing each other again, that is, started sleeping together again as in the old days back in the summer of 1966, and no, it wasn’t love, it would never be love, but in some ways it was even better than love, friendship, friendship pure and simple, with immense quantities of admiration on both sides, and so deeply had Ferguson come to trust Mary by the second month of their second affair that she was the one he chose to unburden himself to about Celia, opening up for the first time about the Artie business, the baseball business, and the shameful diaphragm business, telling her what he had never been able to tell anyone else, and when he had marched to the end of that wretched tale of silence and deceit, he turned away from her, looked at the wall, and said: What’s wrong with me?
Being young, Mary replied. That’s the only thing that was ever wrong with you. You were young, and you thought the thoughts of an undeveloped young person with a big heart and an overdeveloped case of youthful idealism. Now you’re not so young anymore, and you’ve stopped thinking that way.
Is that all?
That’s all. Except for the other thing, which has nothing to do with being young. You should have told her, Archie. What you did was … how can I say this without hurting your feelings…?
Reprehensible.
Yes, that’s the word for it. Reprehensible.
I wanted to marry her, you see, or at least I thought I wanted to marry her, and if I’d told her we would never be able to have children, she probably would have turned me down.
Still. It was wrong not to say anything about it.
Well, I’ve told you, haven’t I?
It’s not the same with me.
Oh? And why is that?
Because you don’t want to marry me.
Who knows if I do or don’t? Who knows if you do or don’t? Who knows anything?
Mary laughed.
At least you can stop taking the Pill now, Ferguson continued.
You’re not the only man in New York, you know. What happens if I stumble out one night, bump into Señor Magnifico, and get swept off my feet?
Just don’t tell me about it, that’s all I ask.
In the meantime, Archie, you should go to another doctor — just to make sure.
I know, Ferguson said, I know I should, and I will, someday soon, of course I’ll go, someday soon, I promise.
NINETEEN SIXTY-NINE WAS the year of the seven conundrums, the eight bombs, the fourteen refusals, the two broken bones, the number two hundred and sixty-three, and the one life-changing joke.
1) Four days after Richard Nixon was installed as the thirty-seventh president of the United States, Ferguson wrote the last sentence of The Capital of Ruins. The first draft was done, the long-labored-over first draft, which had been through so many revisions by then that it probably could have counted as the ninth or tenth draft, but Ferguson still wasn’t satisfied with the manuscript, not fully satisfied at any rate, feeling there was more work to be done before he could declare it finished, so he held on to the book for another four months, tinkering and refining, cutting and adding, replacing words and sharpening sentences, and when he sat down to type up the final, final version in early June, he was in the middle of his final exams at Brooklyn College and almost ready to graduate.
There was only one publisher Ferguson knew, only one publisher he wanted to publish with, and now that he had completed his novel, how pleasant it would have been to hand over the manuscript to his friends at Tumult Books, who again and again had told him they would go on publishing his work forever. But things had changed in the past several months, and the still developing young company, which had brought out twelve books since its birth in the summer of 1967, was on the verge of extinction. The twice-married Trixie Davenport, the sole financial backer of the small but not invisible press, had married for a third time in April, and her new husband, Victor Krantz, who seemed to have no visible occupation beyond managing Trixie’s investments, was not a lover of art (except for the art produced by dead painters such as Mondrian and Kandinsky) and advised the Tumult angel to stop throwing her money away on “useless causes” such as Tumult Books. Thus the plug was pulled. All contracts for future books were canceled, copies not already in bookstores or in the distributor’s warehouse were to be remaindered, and those not remaindered were to be pulped. In the nine months since it had been published, Prolusions had sold 806 copies. Not so many, perhaps, but by Tumult standards a decent showing, the fourth-best seller on the list after Anne’s book of erotic poems (1,486), Billy’s Crushed Heads (1,141), and Bo’s racy diaries about downtown queer life after dark (966). In late May, Ferguson bought one hundred copies of his own book for two dollars each, stored the boxes in the basement of the house on Woodhall Crescent, and then returned to New York that same evening to attend a crowded party at Billy’s place, where all who had worked for or published with Tumult Books along with their wives, husbands, girlfriends, and boyfriends gathered to curse the name of Victor Krantz and get themselves snockered. Even sadder, now that Joanna was pregnant again and Billy was working as a furniture mover to bring more money into the household, there was the inevitable moment when Billy stood up on a chair in the middle of the party and announced the end of Gizmo Press, but at least, Billy said, shouting drunkenly as the veins bulged in his neck, at least I’m going to carry on until I’ve published all the books and pamphlets I promised I would, because I’m A Person Who Honors His Commitments!, a pointed reference to the pulled plugs at Tumult, and everyone applauded and praised Billy for being a man of his word as Joanna stood next to him with tears rolling down her cheeks and Mary stood next to Joanna with her arm around her sister’s shoulder, and then Mary took out a handkerchief and started dabbing off the tears from Joanna’s face, and Ferguson, who was standing close by and watching the scene carefully, loved Mary for doing that.