The bed was exceedingly narrow, but Amy was naked in that bed, and once he stripped off his jockey shorts and slipped in beside her, Ferguson was naked in that bed, too, and everything felt so good to him, so perfectly in accord with how he imagined it would feel, that for once in his life the real and the imagined were identical, absolutely and as never before one and the same thing, which had to make it the happiest moment of his life so far, he believed, since Ferguson was not someone who subscribed to the notion that desire fulfilled was desire disappointed, at least not in this case, where wanting Amy was no good now without having Amy, no good without having Amy want him, and the miracle was that she did want him, and therefore desire fulfilled was in fact desire fulfilled, the chance to spend a few moments in the ephemeral kingdom of earthly grace.
They had learned so much during that tumultuous weekend two months earlier, fumbling at first because they had known next to nothing about almost everything, but gradually achieving a certain knowledge about what they were trying to do, not an advanced knowledge, perhaps, but at least the rudiments of how the other’s body worked, for without that knowledge there could be no true pleasure, especially for Amy, who had to teach the ignorant Ferguson about the various ways in which women differed from men, and now that Ferguson was beginning to get the hang of it, he felt calmer and more confident than he had in New York, which made everything better this time, so much better that after a few minutes in the pitch-black dark of that room in Vermont they had stopped thinking about where they were.
The bed was an old iron bed with a thin mattress poised on top of two dozen coiled springs, and like the wooden floor that supported the bed, it creaked. It creaked under the weight of one body, but when two bodies began to move around on that mattress together, it thundered. The noise made Ferguson think of a steam locomotive traveling at seventy miles an hour, whereas Amy found the noise similar to the one made by a printing press churning out half a million copies for the morning edition of a tabloid newspaper. Either way, the noise was too loud for the delicate French farce they had written in their heads, and now that they had begun to hear the noise, there was no longer anything in their heads but the noise, the infernal screech of their frantic coupling, and yet how to stop themselves when they were on the brink, tottering on the very precipice of desire fulfilled? They couldn’t, and therefore the two of them went on until they had both fallen off the edge, and when the locomotive stopped moving and they could hear something other than the noise, they heard another noise coming from the floor below, the wail of a startled, frightened child, no doubt the little one, David, who had been jolted from sleep by the ruckus they had made upstairs, and a moment after that they heard the sound of footsteps, no doubt Francie’s, mother Francie going in to comfort her boy as father Gary snored on, at which point the horrified and embarrassed Ferguson leapt out of Amy’s bed and scampered back to his room, and thus the curtain came thudding down on their Grand Boulevard entertainment.
At seven-thirty the next morning, Ferguson walked into the kitchen and found Rosa and David sitting at the table, banging the surface with knives and forks as they cried out in unison: We want pancakes! We want pancakes! Gary was sitting across from them, quietly drinking a cup of coffee and smoking his first Parliament of the day. Francie, on her feet by the stove, flashed an irritated look at her cousin and then returned to the job of cooking scrambled eggs. Amy was nowhere in sight, which probably meant she was still asleep in her little bed upstairs.
Gary put down his coffee and said: We promised them pancakes yesterday, but then we forgot to pack the stuff to make them with. As you can see, they’re not too happy with the idea of scrambled eggs.
Red-headed Rosa and blond-haired David continued to attack the table with their knives and forks, timing the blows to the drumbeat of their favorite chant: Wé wánt páncákes!
There must be a store somewhere around here, Ferguson said.
Down the hill, then left for three or four miles, Gary answered, blowing out a large puff of smoke that seemed to suggest he had no intention of driving there himself. I’ll go, Francie said, as she transferred the now finished eggs from the frying pan into a large white bowl. Archie and I will go together, won’t we, Archie?
Anything you say, Ferguson replied, somewhat startled by the vehemence of Francie’s question, which didn’t sound like a question so much as a command. She was angry at him. First the hostile look when he walked into the kitchen and now the aggressive tone in her voice, which could only mean she was still thinking about last night’s attic commotion, the damned locomotive bed that had blasted the little one awake on the second floor, an inexcusable offense he had hoped she would tactfully pretend to have forgotten, and although Ferguson knew he should apologize to her right then and there, he was too embarrassed to say a word. Going out to buy pancake mix and maple syrup had nothing to do with appeasing the children. That was her excuse, but the real motive was to get him alone with her for a little while in order to scold him, to have it out with him.
Meanwhile, the children were clapping and cheering, celebrating their victory by blowing kisses to their valiant mother, who was about to brave the cold and the snow on their behalf. Gary, who seemed oblivious to what was going on, or at least indifferent to it, put out his cigarette and dug into the scrambled eggs. After one bite, he filled up his fork again and held it out to David, who leaned forward and took it into his mouth. Then a forkful for Rosa, followed by another forkful for himself. Pretty good, he said, don’t you think? Yummy, said Rosa. Yummy in the tummy! said David, who laughed at his own joke and then opened his mouth for another bite. Watching this scene as he laced up his boots and put on his winter jacket, Ferguson thought of two infant birds at feeding time. Worms or scrambled eggs, he said to himself, the hunger was the same hunger, and the open mouths were the same open mouths, stretched open as far as they could go. Pancakes, yes, but first a little something to get the morning off to a good start.
There were real birds outside, a speckled brown sparrow, an olive-green female cardinal with a dull scarlet crest, a red-winged blackbird — sudden splotches of color darting across the white-gray sky, a few bits of breathing life in the austere winter morning — and as Ferguson and his cousin crossed the snow-covered yard and climbed into the blue station wagon, he found it a pity that the weekend was about to be spoiled by a senseless argument. He and Francie had never argued in all the years they had known each other, not one unkind word had ever passed between them, their mutual devotion had been constant and unbending, the one deep friendship he had formed with any relative on that side of his family, the fractured clan of crazy, destructive Fergusons, only he and Francie among all the cousins and brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles had been able to avoid those stupid animosities, and it pained him to think she might turn on him now.