On Billy’s advice, Ferguson found himself a literary agent to handle the business of setting him up with a new publisher. Her name was Lynn Eberhardt, and needless to say she was Billy’s agent as well (not because Billy had finished another book but because she was hoping to sign up Crushed Heads with a paperback house now that Tumult had stopped breathing), and Ferguson was heartened by her response to The Capital of Ruins, which she called a brilliant anti-war novel in the letter she wrote accepting him as a client, and then, two days later on the phone, described it as a Bergman movie transplanted to America and rendered into words. Ferguson had mixed feelings about Bergman’s films (he liked some and didn’t like others), but he understood that Lynn considered it to be a high compliment and thanked her for her generous remark. Lynn was young and enthusiastic, a small, pretty woman with blond hair and bright rouged lips who had struck out on her own about one year earlier, and as a young, independent agent with no former clients in her stable, she was on a mission to find the best of the new young writers, and at twenty-two years and three months old, Ferguson was nothing if not young. Then she started sending out the manuscript to the New York publishers on her list, and one by one the rejections started coming in. It wasn’t that any of those publishers thought Ferguson’s book was bad or unworthy or didn’t show signs of what one of them called “a remarkable talent,” but the unanimous judgment was that The Capital of Ruins was so flagrantly uncommercial that even if they paid an advance of fifty dollars or no advance at all, they would have a hard time earning back the costs of printing the book. By the end of the year, after traveling through the mailrooms and offices of fourteen publishing companies, the manuscript had received fourteen rejection letters.
Fourteen straight punches, and every one of them hurt.
Don’t worry, Lynn said. I’ll think of something.
2) The four youngest members of the tangled-up clan graduated from their respective colleges in early June, Amy from Brandeis, Howard from Princeton, Noah from NYU, and Ferguson from his rural retreat near the Flatbush subway stop in Midwood, and now that the commencement exercises were over, all four of them had commenced their journeys into the future.
After spending the bulk of his adolescence and all of his youth preparing for a life in film, Noah had bushwhacked Ferguson and the others by reversing course and declaring his intention to stick to the theater from now on. Film acting was a mug’s game, he said, a stop-and-start mechanized sham that couldn’t compare to the real sham of performing in front of a live audience with no retakes or editor’s scissors to save your skin. He had directed three little films of his own and had acted in three others, but now he was saying good-bye to celluloid and heading off to study three-dimensional acting and directing at the Yale School of Drama. Why more school? Ferguson asked him. Because I need more training, Noah said, but if it turns out that I don’t, I’ll quit the program, come back to New York, and move in with you. It’s an awfully small place, Ferguson said. I know that, Noah answered, but you won’t mind sleeping on the floor, will you?
More school for Noah, as not expected, and more school for Amy and Howard, as already promised and planned. Columbia for both of them, along with the splendors of unmarried conjugal life as Amy worked for a Ph.D. in American history, but Howard had backed off from philosophy and would be studying in the Classics Department, where he could delve ever more deeply into the gnomic utterances of the pre-Socratics and not have to waste his time on the doltish Anglo-American analyticals currently in fashion. Wittgenstein yes, but Quine gave him a headache, he said, and reading Strawson was like chewing glass. Ferguson understood how much Howard adored his old Greeks (the Nagle influence had been profound, far more lasting on Howard than it had been on him), but Ferguson couldn’t help feeling a little disappointed by his friend’s decision, for it seemed to him that Howard was better suited to art than to scholarship, and he wanted him to push on dangerously with his pens and pencils and try to make a go of it with his drawings, living off the hand that was already more skilled than the professional hand of Amy’s father, and after the covers he had done for Billy and the cartoons he had published in the Princeton Tiger and the sidesplitting tennis matches and the dozens of other marvels he had zipped out over the years, Ferguson at last confronted Howard and asked him why school and not art? Because, his old roommate said, art is too easy for me, and I’m never going to get any better at it than I am now. I’m looking for something that will test me, a discipline to push me beyond where I think I can go. Does that make sense, Archie? Yes, it made sense, perhaps a good deal of sense, but still Ferguson was disappointed.
As for Ferguson himself, there had never been any question of more school. Enough was enough, he announced to the other members of the clan, and sometime late that spring he found himself a job, which was precisely the sort of job his father would have disapproved of, a job that was no doubt causing him to turn over in his grave now, but Fritz Mangini, the smartest and most reliable of Ferguson’s friends at Brooklyn College, had a father who ran a contracting company, and one of the services that company contracted for was painting apartments, and when Fritz told Ferguson his father was looking for another painter to join the crew that summer, Ferguson met with Mr. Mangini in his office on Desbrosses Street in lower Manhattan and was hired. It wasn’t a regular five-day-a-week job as most jobs were but a job-to-job situation with pauses in between, which would suit his purposes well, he figured, working for a week or two and then not working for a week or two, and the periods when he was on would generate enough money for him to eat and pay the rent during the periods when he was off. Now that he had graduated from college, he therefore was both a writer and a housepainter, but because he had just finished his first novel and was not yet prepared to begin something else (his brain was exhausted and he had run out of ideas), he was mostly a housepainter.