Love Story

'Night, Jenny,' called the girl on bells.

'Night, Sara Jane,' Jenny called back.

When we were outside, about to step into my MG, I oxygenated my lungs with a breath of evening, and put the question as casually as I could.

'Say, Jen … '

'Yeah?'

'Uh — who's Phil?'

She answered matter-of-factly as she got into the car: 'My father.'

I wasn't about to believe a story like that.

'You call your father Phil?'

'That's his name. What do you call yours?'

Jenny had once told me she had been raised by her father, some sort of a baker type, in Cranston, Rhode Island. When she was very young, her mother was killed in a car crash. All this by way of explaining why she had no driver's license. Her father, in every other way 'a truly good guy' (her words), was incredibly superstitious about letting his only daughter drive. This was a real drag during her last years of high school, when she was taking piano with a guy in Providence. But then she got to read all of Proust on those long bus rides.

'What do you call yours?' she asked again.

I had been so out of it, I hadn't heard her question.

'My what?'

'What term do you employ when you speak of your progenitor?'

I answered with the term I'd always wanted to employ.

'Sonovabitch.'

'To his face?' she asked.

'I never see his face.'

'He wears a mask?'

'In a way, yes. Of stone. Of absolute stone.'

'Go on — he must be proud as hell. You're a big Harvard jock.'

I looked at her. I guess she didn't know everything, after all.

'So was he, Jenny.'

'Bigger than All-Ivy wing?'

I liked the way she enjoyed my athletic credentials. Too bad I had to shoot myself down by giving her my father's.

'He rowed single sculls in the 1928 Olympics.'

'God,' she said. 'Did he win?'

'No,' I answered, and I guess she could tell that the fact that he was sixth in the finals actually afforded me some comfort.

There was a little silence. Now maybe Jenny would understand that to be Oliver Barrett IV doesn't just mean living with that gray stone edifice in Harvard Yard. It involves a kind of muscular intimidation as well. I mean, the image of athletic achievement looming down on you. I mean, on me.

'But what does he do to qualify as a sonovabitch?' Jenny asked.

'Make me,' I replied.

'Beg pardon?'

'Make me,' I repeated.

Her eyes widened like saucers. 'You mean like incest?' she asked.

'Don't give me your family problems, Jen. I've got enough of my own.'

'Like what, Oliver?' she asked, 'like just what is it he makes you do?'

'The 'right things,'' I said.

'What's wrong with the 'right things'?' she asked, delighting in the apparent paradox.

I told her how I loathed being programmed for the Barrett Tradition — which she should have realized, having seen me cringe at having to mention the numeral at the end of my name. And I did not like having to deliver x amount of achievement every single term.

'Oh yeah,' said Jenny with broad sarcasm, 'I notice how you hate getting A's, being All-Ivy — '

'What I hate is that he expects no less!' Just saying what I had always felt (but never before spoken) made me feel uncomfortable as hell, but now I had to make Jenny understand it all. 'And he's so incredibly blasé when I do come through. I mean he just takes me absolutely for granted.'

'But he's a busy man. Doesn't he run lots of banks and things?'

'Jesus, Jenny, whose side are you on?'

'Is this a war?' she asked.

'Most definitely,' I replied.

'That's ridiculous, Oliver.'

She seemed genuinely unconvinced. And there I got my first inkling of a cultural gap between us.

I mean, three and a half years of Harvard-Radcliffe had pretty much made us into the cocky intellectuals that institution traditionally produces, but when it came to accepting the fact that my father was made of stone, she adhered to some atavistic Italian-Mediterranean notion of papa-loves-bambinos, and there was no arguing otherwise.

I tried to cite a case in point. That ridiculous nonconversation after the Cornell game. This definitely made an impression on her. But the goddamn wrong one.

'He went all the way up to Ithaca to watch a lousy hockey game?'

I tried to explain that my father was all form and no content. She was still obsessed with the fact that he had traveled so far for such a (relatively) trivial sports event.

'Look, Jenny, can we just forget it?'

'Thank God you're hung up about your father,' she replied. 'That means you're not perfect.'

'Oh — you mean you are?'

'Hell no, Preppie. If I was, would I be going out with you?'

Back to business as usual.

5

I would like to say a word about our physical relationship.

For a strangely long while there wasn't any. I mean, there wasn't anything more significant than those kisses already mentioned (all of which I still remember in greatest detail). This was not standard procedure as far as I was concerned, being rather impulsive, impatient and quick to action.

If you were to tell any of a dozen girls at Tower Court, Wellesley, that Oliver Barrett IV had been dating a young lady daily for three weeks and had not slept with her, they would surely have laughed and severely questioned the femininity of the girl involved. But of course the actual facts were quite different.

I didn't know what to do.

Don't misunderstand or take that too literally. I knew all the moves. I just couldn't cope with my own feelings about making them. Jenny was so smart that I was afraid she might laugh at what I had traditionally considered the suave romantic (and unstoppable) style of Oliver Barrett IV. I was afraid of being rejected, yes. I was also afraid of being accepted for the wrong reasons. What I am fumbling to say is that I felt different about Jennifer, and didn't know what to say or even who to ask about it.

('You should have asked me,' she said later.) I just knew I had these feelings. For her. For all of her.

'You're gonna flunk out, Oliver.'

We were sitting in my room on a Sunday afternoon, reading.

'Oliver, you're gonna flunk out if you just sit there watching me study.'

'I'm not watching you study. I'm studying.'

'Bullshit. You're looking at my legs.'

'Only once in a while. Every chapter.'

'.'That book has extremely short chapters.'

'Listen, you narcissistic bitch, you're not that great-looking! '

'I know. But can I help it if you think so?'

I threw down my book and crossed the room to where she was sitting.

'Jenny, for Christ's sake, how can I read John Stuart Mill when every single second I'm dying to make love to you?'

She screwed up her brow and frowned.

'Oh, Oliver, wouldja please?'

I was crouching by her chair. She looked back into her book.

'Jenny — '

She closed her book softly, put it down, then placed her hands on the sides of my neck.

'Oliver — wouldja please.'

It all happened at once. Everything.

Our first physical encounter was the polar opposite of our first verbal one. It was all so unhurried, so soft, so gentle. I had never realized that this was the real Jenny — the soft one, whose touch was so light and so loving. And yet what truly shocked me was my own response. I was gentle, I was tender. Was this the real Oliver Barrett IV?

As I said, I had never seen Jenny with so much as her sweater opened an extra button. I was somewhat surprised to find that she wore a tiny golden cross. On one of those chains that never unlock. Meaning that when we made love, she still wore the cross. In a resting moment of that lovely afternoon, at one of those junctures when everything and nothing is relevant, I touched the little cross and inquired what her priest might have to say about our being in bed together, and so forth.