It never occurred to him that she might have been exaggerating, that the grief she felt over losing her mother had distorted her vision, that she had pushed away her stepmother without giving her a chance, turning her into an enemy for no other reason than the fact that she was not her mother and never would be, that her overworked father was doing the best he could for his enraged and obstinate daughter, that there was, as there always is, another side to the story. Adolescence feeds on drama, it is most happy when living in extremis, and Ferguson was no less vulnerable to the lure of high emotion and extravagant unreason than any other boy his age, which meant that the appeal of a girl like Anne-Marie was fueled precisely by her unhappiness, and the greater the storms she engulfed him in, the more intensely he wanted her.
Arranging to be alone with her was difficult, since they were both too young to drive and had to depend on their feet for transportation, which necessarily limited the range of their movements, but one dependable recourse was the empty Ferguson house after the end of the school day, the two hours before his parents came home from work when he and Anne-Marie could go upstairs to his room and shut the door. Ferguson gladly would have taken the plunge with her, but he knew Anne-Marie wasn’t ready for it, and so the subject of losing their virginity was never openly discussed, which was the way such matters were handled in 1962, at least for properly raised fifteen-year-olds from the middle and upper middle classes of Montclair and Brussels, but if neither one of them had the courage to defy the conventions of the era, that didn’t mean they neglected to make use of the bed, which fortunately was a double bed, with ample room on its surface for the two of them to stretch out side by side and take part in sex that wasn’t fully sex but which nevertheless had the taste and feel of love.
Until then, it had all been about kissing, prolonged excursions of tongues wandering through the insides of mouths, wet lips, napes and the backs of ears, hands clutching faces, hands traveling through heads of hair, arms enfolding torsos, shoulders, waists, arms wrapped around other arms, and then with Connie the previous spring the first hesitant move to put hands on breasts, well-guarded breasts to be sure, safely covered by both blouse and bra, but he wasn’t shoved or swatted away, which represented a further advance in his education, and now, with Anne-Marie, the blouse had come off, and a month after that the bra had come off, which coincided with the removal of his shirt, and even that partial nakedness was an undreamt-of pleasure that surpassed all other pleasures, and as the weeks went on it was only by pure force of will that Ferguson restrained himself from taking hold of her hand and thrusting it onto the bulge inside his pants. Sharply remembered afternoons, not just because of what they did on that bed together but because it all happened in broad daylight and was visible, as opposed to the blind fumbles in the dark with Connie, Linda, and the others, the sun was in the room with them and he could see her body, their two bodies, which meant that each act of touching was also an image of that touching, and on top of that there was a constant undercurrent of fear in the room, a dread that they would lose track of the time and one of his parents would knock on the door while they were still embracing or, even worse, barge into the room without remembering to knock, and while neither of those things ever happened, there was always a chance they would, which filled those afternoon hours with a sense of urgency, danger, and outlaw daring.
She was the first person he allowed into the inner chambers of his secret music palace, and when they weren’t rolling around on the bed or talking about their lives (mostly Anne-Marie’s life), they would listen to records on the small, two-speaker machine that sat on a table in the southern corner of the room, a present from Ferguson’s parents for his twelfth birthday. Now, three years later, 1962 had become the year of J. S. Bach, the year when Ferguson listened to Bach more than any other composer, in particular Glenn Gould’s Bach, with an emphasis on the Preludes and Fugues and the Goldberg Variations, and Pablo Casals’s Bach, which included endless playings of the six pieces for unaccompanied cello, and Hermann Scherchen conducting the Suites for Orchestra and the Saint Matthew Passion, which Ferguson had concluded was the finest piece Bach had ever written, hence the finest piece ever written by anyone, but he and Anne-Marie also listened to Mozart (the Mass in C Minor), Schubert (piano works performed by Sviatoslav Richter), Beethoven (symphonies, quartets, sonatas), and numerous others as well, nearly all of them gifts from Ferguson’s Aunt Mildred, not to speak of Muddy Waters, Fats Waller, Bessie Smith, and John Coltrane, which was not to speak of all sorts of other twentieth-century souls, both living and dead, and the best thing about listening to music with Anne-Marie was watching her face, studying her eyes and looking at her mouth as tears gathered or smiles formed, how deeply she felt the emotional resonances of any given piece, for unlike Ferguson she had been trained since earliest childhood and could play the piano well and had an excellent soprano voice, so excellent that she broke her vow not to participate in high school activities and joined the chorus midway through the first semester, and that was perhaps their greatest bond, the need for music that ran through their bodies, which at that point in their lives was no different from the need to find a way to exist in the world.