And who are you?
I’m you, of course. Who else do you think I am?
The one constant in his world that wasn’t shit were his nightly talks on the phone with Amy. Her first question to him always was How are you doing, Archie? and every night he would give her the same answer: Better. A little better than yesterday—which was in fact true, not only because his physical condition was slowly getting better as time went on but because talking to Amy always seemed to give his old self back to him, as if her voice were the snapping fingers of a hypnotist ordering him to come out of his trance and wake up. No one else had that power over him, and as the weeks passed and Ferguson continued to recover, he began to suspect it had something to do with Amy’s reading of the accident, which was unlike anyone else’s, for she refused to regard it as a tragedy, and therefore, among the people who loved Ferguson, she was the one who felt least sorry for him. In her view of the world, tragedies were reserved for death and ravaging disabilities — paralysis, brain damage, brutal disfigurement — but the loss of two fingers was no more than a trivial matter, and given that a car smashing into a tree should have led to death or brutal disfigurement, one could only rejoice that Ferguson had survived the accident without any tragic consequences. Too bad about baseball, of course, but that was a small debt to pay for the privilege of being alive with only two missing fingers, and if he was having trouble writing poems just now, then give poetry a rest for a while and stop worrying about it, and if it turned out that he never managed to write another poem, that would only mean he hadn’t been cut out to write poetry in the first place.
You’re beginning to sound like Dr. Pangloss, Ferguson said to her one night. Everything always happens for the best — in this, the best of all possible worlds.
No, not at all, Amy said. Pangloss is an idiot optimist, and I’m an intelligent pessimist, meaning a pessimist who has occasional flashes of optimism. Nearly everything happens for the worst, but not always, you see, nothing is ever always, but I’m always expecting the worst, and when the worst doesn’t happen, I get so excited I begin to sound like an optimist. I could have lost you, Archie, and then I didn’t. That’s all I can think about anymore — how happy I am that I didn’t.
For the first weeks after he came home from Vermont, he wasn’t strong enough to travel into New York on Saturdays. Going back and forth to school from Monday to Friday was just barely feasible, but Manhattan would have been too hard on his aching, stitched-together body, the jostling bus to begin with, but also the long climb up subway stairways, the crowds of people bumping into him in the pedestrian tunnels, and then the impossibility of walking for any length of time through the cold winter streets with Amy, so they reversed the process for all of February and halfway into March, and for five Saturdays in a row Amy visited him in Montclair instead. The new arrangement was short on outward stimulation, but it also had several advantages over the old routine of wandering in and out of bookstores and museums, of sitting in coffee shops, of going to films and plays and parties, the first one being that Ferguson’s parents worked on Saturday, and because they worked the house was empty, and because the house was empty he and Amy could go upstairs into his room, shut the door, and lie down on the bed with no fear that anyone would discover what they were doing. But still there was fear, at least for Ferguson, who had convinced himself that Amy would want no part of him anymore, and the first time they went into his room in the Montclair house, his fear was no less great than it had been the first time they went into Amy’s room in the New York apartment, but once they were on the bed and their clothes began to come off, Amy surprised him by taking hold of his wounded hand and kissing it, slowly kissing it twenty or thirty times, and then she put her mouth against his bandaged left forearm and kissed it a dozen times, followed by another twelve kisses on his bandaged right forearm, and then she pulled him down against her chest and began kissing the small bandages on his head, one by one by one, each one six times, seven times, eight times. When Ferguson asked her why she was doing that, she said it was because those were the parts of him she loved best now. How could she say that? he replied, they were disgusting, and how could anyone love what was disgusting? Because, Amy said, those wounds were a memory of what had happened to him, and because he was alive, because he was with her now, what happened to him was also what hadn’t happened to him, which meant that the marks on his body were signs of life, and because of that they weren’t disgusting to her, they were beautiful. Ferguson laughed. He wanted to say, Pangloss to the rescue again!, but he didn’t say anything, and as he looked into Amy’s eyes, he wondered if she was telling the truth. Could she possibly believe what she had just said to him, or was she only pretending to believe it for his sake? And if she didn’t believe it, how could he believe her? Because he had to believe her, he decided, because believing her was the only choice he had, and the truth, the so-called almighty truth, meant nothing when he considered what not believing her would have done to them.
Sex for five straight Saturdays, sex in the early afternoon as the thin February light wrapped itself around the edges of the curtains and seeped into the air around their bodies, and then the pleasure of watching Amy climb back into her clothes, knowing that her naked body was inside those clothes, which somehow prolonged the intimacy of sex even when they weren’t having sex, the body he carried around in his mind as they went downstairs to fix themselves some lunch or listened to records or watched an old movie on television or took a short walk around the neighborhood or he read out loud to her from Pictures from Brueghel by William Carlos Williams, his newly anointed favorite, who had pushed Eliot off the throne following a bloody skirmish with Wallace Stevens.