There was so much to admire about her, he felt, so much to love in her, but Ferguson never deluded himself into thinking he would be able to hold on to her, at least not past another few months or weeks or days. Right from the start, in the earliest moments of his budding infatuation, he could sense that her feelings were not as strong as his, and much as she seemed to like him, much as she seemed to enjoy his body and his record albums and his way of talking to her, he was destined to love more than he was loved in return, and within a month of their first kiss, he understood that he would have to play by her rules or else risk not being with her at all. What maddened him most was her inconsistency, how often she broke promises, how often she forgot things he said to her, how often she backed out of dates at the last minute, telling him that she wasn’t feeling well or that there was trouble at home or that she thought they were supposed to meet on Saturday, not Friday. He sometimes wondered if there was another boy, or several boys, or a boy back in Belgium, but it was impossible to know from observation, since the first rule she demanded he adhere to was an injunction against any public displays of affection, meaning that Montclair High was off-limits, that even when they crossed paths in the classrooms, corridors, and cafeteria they would have to pretend not to be involved with each other, that they could nod, say hello, and talk as if they were passing acquaintances, but at no time were they allowed to kiss or hold hands, which was normal conduct for every other steady couple in the school, and if that was the game she wanted to play with him, who knew if she wasn’t also playing it with someone else? Ferguson felt foolish for having agreed to such an absurd bargain, but he was living under a deranged sort of enchantment just then, and the thought of losing her was far worse than the humiliation of pretending to be someone he was not. Still, they went on seeing each other, and the times they spent together always seemed to go smoothly, he always felt happiest and most fully alive when he was with her, and whatever conflicts or disagreements they had invariably seemed to take place on the telephone, that strange instrument of disembodied voices, each invisible to the other as they talked through the wires that ran from his house to hers, and if and when he caught her at a bad moment, he often found himself listening to a cranky, pigheaded, impossible kind of person, someone altogether different from the Anne-Marie he thought he knew. The saddest, most demoralizing of these conversations came in the middle of March. After a month of tryouts for the high school baseball team, of living through the weekly postings of names on the locker room bulletin board, the anxious search for his own name on the slowly shrinking list of players who had survived the latest cut, he called to tell her that the final list had gone up and that he was one of only two sophomores who had made the varsity. A long silence on the other end of the line, which Ferguson broke by saying: I just wanted to share the good news with you. Another pause. And then her response, delivered in a flat, cold voice: Good news? Why should I think it’s good news? I hate sports. Especially baseball, which must be the dumbest game ever invented. It’s empty and childish and boring, and why would a smart person like you want to waste your time running around a field with a pack of morons? Grow up, Archie. You’re not a kid anymore.
What Ferguson didn’t know was that Anne-Marie was drunk when she said those words, as she had been several other times during their recent talks on the phone, that for some months she had been smuggling bottles of vodka into her room and drinking whenever her parents were out, long solo binges that freed the devils inside her and turned her tongue into a weapon of cruelty. The sober, well-mannered, intelligent girl of the daylight hours vanished when she was alone in her room at night, and because Ferguson never set eyes on that other person, only talked to her and listened to her angry, half-baked pronouncements, he had no idea what was going on, no idea that the first love of his life was headed for a crack-up.
That last conversation took place on a Thursday, and Ferguson was so peeved and bewildered by her hostile denunciations that he was almost glad when she failed to show up at school the following morning. He needed time to think things through, he said to himself, and not having to see her that day would make it less difficult to recover from the hurt she had caused him. Struggling against the impulse to call her after school on Friday, he left the house the instant he dropped off his books and went down the block to see Bobby George, who was the other sophomore who had made the varsity team, bulky, broad-necked Bobby, now a first-rate catcher and champion goofball, one of the morons from the pack of morons Ferguson would soon be playing with. He and Bobby wound up spending the evening with some of the other baseball morons, fellow sophomores who had made the J.V. team, and when Ferguson walked into his house a few minutes before midnight, it was too late to call Anne-Marie. He restrained himself on Saturday and Sunday as well, fighting off the temptation to dial her number by keeping his distance from telephones, determined not to give in, aching to give in, desperate to hear her voice again. He woke up on Monday morning fully cured, the rancor purged from his heart, prepared to forgive her for Thursday’s unaccountable outburst, but then he went to school, and once again Anne-Marie was absent. He figured it was a cold or the flu, nothing of any consequence, but now that he had granted himself the right to talk to her, he called her house at lunchtime from the pay phone next to the cafeteria entrance. No answer. Ten rings, and no answer. Hoping he had dialed the wrong number, he hung up the receiver and tried again. Twenty rings, but no answer.
He called steadily for two days, panic mounting with each failed attempt to get hold of her, ever more confused by what appeared to be an inexplicably empty house, a telephone that rang and rang and was never picked up, what in the world was happening, he asked himself, where had everyone gone, and so early on Thursday morning, a good hour and a half before the first bell at school, he walked to the Dumartins’ house on the other side of town, a large gabled house with an immense front lawn on one of Montclair’s most elegant streets, the Street of Mansions, as Ferguson had called it when he was a small child, and even though Anne-Marie had insisted he stay away from there because she didn’t want him to meet her parents, he had no choice but to go there now in order to solve the mystery of the unanswered phone, which in turn might help him solve the mystery of what had happened to her.
He rang the doorbell and waited, waited long enough to conclude that no one was at home, then rang the doorbell again, and just as he was about to turn around and leave, the door opened. A man was standing in front of him, a man who was clearly Anne-Marie’s father — the same round face, the same jaw, the same gray-blue eyes — and even though it was just seven-twenty in the morning, he was already fully dressed, smartly outfitted in his dark blue diplomat’s suit and his starched white shirt and his striped red tie, cheeks smooth from his early morning shave, a hint of cologne hovering around his head, which was a rather good-looking head, Ferguson thought, but somewhat weary around the eyes, perhaps, or else in the eyes, a fretful, distracted, melancholic sort of gaze, which Ferguson found moving somehow, no, not moving exactly, compelling, no doubt because this was the face that belonged to Anne-Marie’s father.
Yes?
I’m sorry, Ferguson said, I realize it’s quite early, but I’m a friend of Anne-Marie’s from school, and I’ve been calling the house for the past few days, wanting to know if she’s all right, but no one ever answers, so I got worried and walked over here to find out.