BY THANKSGIVING, THERE was no question in his mind that it was love. He had lived through numerous infatuations in the past, starting with the kindergarten crushes on Cathy Gold and Margie Fitzpatrick when he was six, succeeded by a furious whirl of dalliances with Carol, Jane, Nancy, Susan, Mimi, Linda, and Connie at twelve and thirteen, the weekend dancing parties, the kissing sessions in moonlit backyards and basement alcoves, the first tentative advances toward sexual knowledge, the mysteries of skin and saliva-coated tongues, the taste of lipstick, the smell of perfume, the sound of nylon stockings rubbing together, and then the breakthrough at fourteen, the sudden jump from boyhood into adolescence, and with it a new life in an alien, ever mutating body, unbidden erections, wet dreams, masturbation, erotic longings, nightly lust dramas performed by shadows in the sex theater now lodged in his skull, the somatic cataclysms of youth, but all those physical changes and upheavals aside, the fundamental quest both before and after his new life began had always been a spiritual one, the dream of an enduring connection, a reciprocal love between compatible souls, souls endowed with bodies, of course, mercifully endowed with bodies, but the soul came first, would always come first, and in spite of his flirtations with Carol, Jane, Nancy, Susan, Mimi, Linda, and Connie, he soon learned that none of those girls possessed the soul he was looking for, and one by one he had lost interest in them and allowed them to disappear from his heart.
With Anne-Marie Dumartin, the story was playing itself out in reverse. The others had all begun as intense physical attractions, but the better he had come to know them, the more disenchanted he had felt, whereas he had barely noticed Anne-Marie in the beginning, had not exchanged more than a few words with her throughout the month of September, but then their European History teacher arbitrarily paired them to work on a project together, and once Ferguson began to know her a little, he discovered that he wanted to know her more, and the more he came to know her, the higher she rose in his estimation, and after three weeks of daily meetings about the decline and fall of Napoleon (the subject of their joint paper), the once plain-looking Belgian girl with the slight French accent had been transformed into an exotic beauty, and Ferguson’s heart was entirely filled up with her, bursting with her, and he meant to keep her there for as long as he could. A sudden, unforeseen conquest. A fifteen-year-old boy caught with his guard down, and then Cupid lost his way and accidentally wound up in Montclair, New Jersey, and before Psyche’s husband could buy a new ticket and head back to New York or Athens or wherever he was going, he shot off an arrow for the sport of it, and thus began the agonizing adventure of Ferguson’s first great love.
Small but not uncommonly small, a shade under five-five with no shoes on, dark, medium-length hair, round face with symmetrical features and a sturdy, unbashful nose, full lips, slender neck, dark brows crowning gray-blue eyes, vivid eyes, illuminated eyes, slender arms and fingers, breasts fuller than might have been expected, narrow hips, thin legs and delicate ankles, a beauty that did not declare itself at first glance, or even at second glance, but one that emerged with growing familiarity, gradually boring itself into the eye and thereafter indelible, a face difficult to turn away from, a face to dream on. A smart and serious girl, an often somber girl, not prone to outbursts of laughter, parsimonious with her smiles, but when she did smile, her whole body turned into a knife of radiance, a gleaming sword. A newcomer, and therefore friendless, with little desire to ingratiate herself or fit in, a stubborn self-possession that appealed to Ferguson and made her different from any other girl he had known, the laughing teenage girls of northern New Jersey in all their splendid frivolity, for Anne-Marie was determined to remain an outsider, a girl uprooted from her house in Brussels and forced to live in vulgar, money-obsessed America, sticking fast to her European style of dressing, the ever-present black beret, the belted trench coat, the plaid jumpers, the white shirts with men’s ties, and even though she would sometimes admit that Belgium was a dismal country, a gray and dreary patch of land wedged between the Frogs and the Huns, she would also defend it whenever she was challenged, claiming that small, almost invisible Belgium had the best beer, the best chocolate, and the best frites anywhere in the world. Early on, during one of their first meetings, before Psyche’s husband had strayed into Montclair and loosed his arrow on his unsuspecting victim, Ferguson brought up the subject of the Congo and Belgium’s responsibility for the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of oppressed black people, and Anne-Marie fixed her eyes on his and nodded. You’re a clever boy, Archie, she said. You know ten times more than any ten of these idiot Americans put together. When I started this school last month, I decided I would stick to myself and not make any friends. Now I think I was wrong. Everyone needs a friend, and you can be that friend if you want to be.
By the night of their first kiss on October twenty-second, Ferguson had learned just a few scant facts about Anne-Marie’s family. He knew that her father worked as an economist for the Belgian delegation to the U.N., that her mother had died when Anne-Marie was eleven, that her father had remarried when she was twelve, and that her two older brothers, Georges and Patrice, were university students in Brussels, but that was the extent of it, along with the micro-detail of her having lived in London between the ages of seven and nine, which accounted for the fluency of her English. Before that night, however, not a single word about the stepmother, not a word about the cause of the mother’s death, not a word about the father except for the job that had brought the Dumartins to America, and because Ferguson understood that Anne-Marie was reluctant to talk about those matters, he didn’t press her to open up to him, but little by little, over the weeks and months that followed, more information came out, the grisly story of her mother’s cancer to begin with, cervical cancer metastasizing to levels of such pain and hopelessness that her mother ultimately killed herself with an overdose of pills, which was the official story, in any case, but Anne-Marie suspected her father had started his affair with her future stepmother months before her mother’s death, and who knew if the widowed Fabienne Corday, a so-called family friend of long standing, for three years now the second wife of Anne-Marie’s blind and adoring father, the wretched woman who was now her stepmother, hadn’t forced those death pills down her mother’s throat in order to accelerate the transition from clandestine affair to marriage sanctified by the Catholic church? An outrageous slander, no doubt entirely untrue, but Anne-Marie couldn’t help herself, the possibility continued to eat away at her thoughts, and yet even if Fabienne was innocent, that wouldn’t have made her any less despicable, any less worthy of the hatred and contempt Anne-Marie felt for her. Ferguson listened to these revelations with mounting sympathy for his beloved. Fate had wounded her, and now she was stuck inside a troubled household, at war with an odious stepmother, disappointed by a selfish, inattentive father, still mourning her dead mother, bereft at having been exiled to a harsh, unwelcoming America, angry, angry at everything, but rather than scare Ferguson off, the operatic scale of Anne-Marie’s difficulties only drew him closer to her, for now she had been turned into a tragic figure in his eyes, a noble, suffering character hounded by the blows of fortune, and with all the fervor of an inexperienced fifteen-year-old boy, his new mission in life was to rescue her from the clutches of her unhappiness.