A number of unpleasant incidents occurred in the wake of that dispiriting phone call. One: Getting drunk for the first time in his life on the evening of the party when he and fellow team member Brian Mischevski broke into the Nordstroms’ liquor cabinet and stole an unopened bottle of Cutty Sark, which they hid in the inside pocket of Ferguson’s winter coat and then carried back to Brian’s apartment when the fête at the Nordstroms’ was over. Fortunately, Brian’s parents were out of town for the weekend (which explained why they picked his apartment as their watering hole), and fortunately Brian remembered to tell Ferguson to call his own parents and ask permission to spend the night before they cracked open the bottle and downed two-thirds of its contents, two-thirds of that two-thirds scalding its way down Ferguson’s throat and landing in his stomach, where, unfortunately, it didn’t remain for long, for Ferguson had drunk just one can of beer and two glasses of wine before that night and had no experience with the intoxicating powers of eighty-six-proof distilled scotch, and not long before he passed out on the living room sofa, he puked up the entire swizzle on the Mischevskis’ Oriental rug. Two: Just ten days after that binge of weepy, semi-suicidal drunkenness, he tangled with Bill Nathanson, formerly known as Billy, the large toad who had been tormenting him since his first year at the Riverside Academy, at long last letting loose with a barrage of punches to Nathanson’s fat belly and pimple-studded face when the cretin called him a stupid prick in the lunchroom, and even though Ferguson was punished with three days of after-school detention, along with a sharp warning from Gil and his mother to shape up, he had no regrets about having lost his temper, and as far as he was concerned, the satisfaction of pummeling Nathanson was well worth the price he had to pay for it. Three:
On a Tuesday afternoon in late March, less than a month after his fifteenth birthday, he skipped out of school immediately following lunch, walked from West End Avenue to Broadway, and went to the movies. It was going to be a one-time-only exception, he told himself, but the rules had to be broken that day because the film he wanted to see would not be showing the next day, or on any other day in the foreseeable future, and cousin Jim, who had seen Children of Paradise at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, had told Ferguson that he must see it the next time it came to New York or else lose the right to call himself a human being. The picture was scheduled to start at one, and Ferguson covered the ten blocks to West Ninety-fifth Street and the Thalia Theater as quickly as he could, telling himself that if he had been a little bit older, he wouldn’t have had to resort to truancy, since there was another showing of the film at eight o’clock, but Gil and his mother never would have given him permission to go on a school night, especially not to a movie that was over three hours long. There would be the matter of inventing an excuse for them, he supposed, but nothing had come to mind so far, and the best and simplest one — that he had felt sick after lunch and had gone home to lie down — was not going to work in this case because Gil and his mother were almost certainly in the apartment, Gil in his study working on his book about Beethoven and his mother in her darkroom developing pictures, and even if his mother happened to be out, there was a ninety-nine percent chance that Gil would be in. Not having an excuse was a problem, but as with most of the problems Ferguson created for himself, he tended to jump first and worry about the consequences later, for he was a young man who wanted what he wanted precisely when he wanted it, and woe to the person who stood in his way. On the other hand, Ferguson reasoned, as he half-walked and half-trotted up the crowded sidewalk in the frigid March air, he wasn’t missing much of anything by cutting his Tuesday afternoon classes, which consisted of gym and study hall, and since Mr. McNulty and Mrs. Wohlers rarely bothered to take attendance, he might even get away with it. And if he didn’t, and if he still hadn’t managed to come up with a false explanation by the time he saw Gil and his mother again, he would simply tell the truth. He wasn’t committing a crime or an immoral act, after all. He was going to the movies, and few things in this world were better than going to the movies.
The Thalia was a small, oddly shaped theater of roughly two hundred seats with thick, sight-obstructing columns and a sloping floor that stuck to the bottoms of your shoes because of all the sodas that had been spilled on it over the years. Cramped and dingy, almost laughable in the range of its discomforts, with the ancient springs in the seat cushions digging into your ass and the smell of burnt popcorn wafting into your nose, it was also the best place on the Upper West Side for watching old films, which the Thalia presented at the rate of two per day, every day a different double feature, two French films today, two Russian films tomorrow, two Japanese films the day after that, which explained why Children of Paradise was on the Thalia program that afternoon and not showing anywhere else in the city, perhaps anywhere else in the country. Ferguson had been there a couple of dozen times by then, with Gil and his mother, with Amy, with Jim, with Jim and Amy together, with friends from school, but as he showed his student ID and paid the forty cents for his discount ticket, he realized that he had never been there alone, and then, as he found a seat in the middle of the fifth row, he further realized that he had never been to any movie alone, not just at the Thalia but anywhere, not once in his life had he sat in a movie theater alone, for movies had always been about companionship as much as the movies themselves, and while he had often watched his Laurel and Hardy movies alone when he was a small boy, that was because he had been alone in the room where he was watching them, but now there were other people in the theater with him, at least twenty-five or thirty other people, and he was still alone. He couldn’t tell if that was a good feeling or a bad feeling — or simply a new feeling.
Then the film started, and it no longer mattered if he was alone or not. Jim had been right about this one, Ferguson said to himself, and all through the three hours and ten minutes that Children of Paradise played before him on the screen, he kept thinking about how much it had been worth it to risk punishment in order to see this film, which was just the sort of film that would appeal to a fifteen-year-old of Ferguson’s temperament, a florid, high Romantic love saga punctuated by bursts of humor, violence, and cunning depravity, an ensemble piece in which every one of the characters is essential to the story, the beautiful, enigmatic Garance (Arletty) and the four men who love her, the mime played by Jean-Louis Barrault, a soulful, passive dreamer destined to limp through a life of longing and regret, the exuberant, bombastic, supremely entertaining actor played by Pierre Brasseur, the coldhearted, ultra-dignified count played by Louis Salou, and the devious monster played by Marcel Herrand in the role of Lacenaire, the poet-murderer who stabs the count to death, and when the film ended with Garance disappearing into a vast Parisian crowd as the heartbroken mime chases after her, Jim’s words came rushing back to Ferguson (The best French film ever made, Archie. The Gone with the Wind of France — only ten times better), and although Ferguson had seen only a handful of French films at that point in his life, he agreed that Les Enfants du Paradis was much better than Gone with the Wind, so much better that it was useless even to compare them.