Love Story (9 page)

‘A good piece. A really good
piece.’

That’s all Joel Fleishman, the
senior editor, could repeat again and again. Frankly, I had expected
a more articulate compliment from the guy who would next year clerk
for Justice Douglas, but that’s all he kept saying as he checked
over my final draft. Christ, Jenny had told me it was ‘incisive,
intelligent and really well written.’ Couldn’t Fleishman match
that?

‘Fleishman called it a good piece,
Jen.’

‘Jesus, did I wait up so late just
to hear that?’ she said. ‘Didn’t he comment on your research,
or your style, or anything?’

‘No, Jen. He just called it ‘good.”

‘Then what took you all this long?’

I gave her a little wink.

‘I had some stuff to go over with
Bella Landau,’ I said.

‘Oh?’ she said.

I couldn’t read the tone.

‘Are you jealous?’ I asked
straight out.

‘No; I’ve got much better legs,’
she said.

‘Can you write a brief?’

‘Can she make lasagna?’

‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘Matter of
fact, she brought some over to Gannett House tonight. Everybody said
they were as good as your legs.’

Jenny nodded, ‘I’ll bet.’

‘What do you say to that?’ I
said.

‘Does Bella Landau pay your rent?’
she asked.

‘Damn,’ I replied, ‘why can’t
I ever quit when I’m ahead?’

‘Because, Preppie,’ said my
loving wife, ‘you never are.’

We
finished in that order.

I mean, Erwin, Bella and myself were
the top three in the Law School graduating class. The time for
triumph was at hand. Job interviews. Offers. Pleas. Snow jobs.
Everywhere I turned somebody seemed to be waving a flag that read:
‘Work for us, Barrett!’

But I followed only the green flags.
I mean, I wasn’t totally crass, but I eliminated the prestige
alternatives, like clerking for a judge, and the public service
alternatives, like Department of Justice, in favor of a lucrative job
that would get the dirty word ‘scrounge’ out of our goddamn
vocabulary.

Third though I was, I enjoyed one
inestimable advantage in competing for the best legal spots. I was
the only guy in the top ten who wasn’t Jewish. (And anyone who says
it doesn’t matter is full of it.) Christ, there are dozens of firms
who will kiss the ass of a WASP who can merely pass the bar. Consider
the case of yours truly: Law Review, All-Ivy, Harvard and you know
what else. Hordes of people were fighting to get my name and numeral
onto their stationery. I felt like a bonus baby - and I loved every
minute of it.

There was one especially intriguing
offer from a firm in Los Angeles. The recruiter, Mr. - (why risk a
lawsuit?), kept telling me: ‘Barrett baby, in our territory we get
it all the time. Day and night. I mean, we can even have it sent up
to the office!’

Not that we were interested in
California, but I’d still like to know precisely what Mr. - was
discussing.

Jenny and I came up with some pretty
wild possibilities, but for L.A. they probably weren’t wild enough.
(I finally had to get Mr. - off my back by telling him that I really
didn’t care for ‘it’ at all. He was crestfallen.) Actually, we
had made up our minds to stay on the East Coast. As it turned out, we
still had dozens of fantastic offers from Boston, New York and
Washington. Jenny at one time thought D.C. might be good (‘You
could check out the White House, Ol’), but I leaned toward New
York. And so, with my wife’s blessing, I finally said yes to the
firm of Jonas and Marsh, a prestigious office (Marsh was a former
Attorney General) that was very civil-liberties oriented (‘You can
do good and make good at once,’ said Jenny). Also, they really
snowed me. I mean, old man Jonas came up to Boston, took us to dinner
at Pier Four and sent Jenny flowers the next day.

Jenny went around for a week sort of
singing a jingle that went ‘Jonas, Marsh and Barrett.’ I told her
not so fast and she told me to go screw because I was probably
singing the same tune in my head. I don’t have to tell you she was
right.

Allow me to mention, however, that
Jonas and Marsh paid Oliver Barrett IV $11,800, the absolute highest
salary received by any member of our graduating class.

So you see I was only third
academically.

CHANGE OF ADDRESS

From July 1, 1967

Mr. and Mrs. Oliver Barrett IV

263 East 63rd Street

New York, N.Y. 10021

‘It’s so nouveau riche,’
complained Jenny.

‘But we are nouveau riche,’ I
insisted.

What was adding to my overall feeling
of euphoric triumph was the fact that the monthly rate for my car was
damn near as much as we had paid for our entire apartment in
Cambridge! Jonas and Marsh was an easy ten-minute walk (or strut - I
preferred the latter gait), and so were the fancy shops like Bonwit’s
and so forth where I insisted that my wife, the bitch, immediately
open accounts and start spending.

‘Why, Oliver?’

‘Because, goddammit, Jenny, I want
to be taken advantage of!’

I joined the Harvard Club of New
York, proposed by Raymond Stratton ‘64, newly returned to civilian
life after having actually shot at some Vietcong (‘I’m not
positive it was VC, actually. I heard noises, so I opened fire at the
bushes’). Ray and I played squash at least three times a week, and
I made a mental note, giving myself three years to become Club
champion. Whether it was merely because I had resurfaced in Harvard
territory, or because word of my Law School successes had gotten
around (I didn’t brag about the salary, honest), my ‘friends’
discovered me once more. We had moved in at the height of the summer
(I had to take a cram course for the New York bar exam), and the
first invitations were for weekends.

‘Fuck ‘em, Oliver. I don’t want
to waste two days bullshitting with a bunch of vapid preppies.’

‘Okay, Jen, but what should I tell
them?’

‘Just say I’m pregnant, Oliver.’

‘Are you? ‘I asked.

‘No, but if we stay home this
weekend I might be.’

We had a name already picked out. I
mean, I had, and I think I got Jenny to agree finally.

‘Hey - you won’t laugh?’ I said
to her, when first broaching the subject. She was in the kitchen at
the time (a yellow color-keyed thing that even included a
dishwasher).

‘What?’ she asked, still slicing
tomatoes.

‘I’ve really grown fond of the
name Bozo,’ I said.

‘You mean seriously?’ she asked.

‘Yeah. I honestly dig it.’

‘You would name our child Bozo?’
she asked again.

‘Yes. Really. Honestly, Jen, it’s
the name of a super-jock.’

‘Bozo Barrett.’ She tried it on
for size.

‘Christ, he’ll be an incredible
bruiser,’ I continued, convincing myself further with each word I
spoke. ‘ ‘Bozo Barrett, Harvard’s huge All-Ivy tackle.’ ‘

‘Yeah - but, Oliver,’ she asked,
‘suppose - just suppose - the kid’s not coordinated?’

‘Impossible, Jen, the genes are too
good. Truly.’ I meant it sincerely. This whole Bozo business had
gotten to be a frequent daydream of mine as I strutted to work.

I pursued the matter at dinner. We
had bought great Danish china.

‘Bozo will be a very
well-coordinated bruiser,’ I told Jenny. ‘In fact, if he has your
hands, we can put him in the backfield.’

She was just smirking at me,
searching no doubt for some sneaky put-down to disrupt my idyllic
vision. But lacking a truly devastating remark, she merely cut the
cake and gave me a piece. And she was still hearing me out.

‘Think of it, Jenny,’ I
continued, even with my mouth full, ‘two hundred and forty pounds
of bruising finesse.’

‘Two hundred and forty pounds?’
she said. ‘There’s nothing in our genes that says two hundred and
forty pounds, Oliver.’

‘We’ll feed him up, Jen.
Hi-Proteen, Nutrament, the whole diet-supplement bit.’

‘Oh, yeah? Suppose he won’t eat,
Oliver?’

‘He’ll eat, goddammit,’ I said,
getting slightly pissed off already at the kid who would soon be
sitting at our table not cooperating with my plans for his athletic
triumphs. ‘He’ll eat or I’ll break his face.’

At which point Jenny looked me
straight in the eye and smiled.

‘Not if he weighs two-forty, you
won’t.’

‘Oh,’ I replied, momentarily set
back, then quickly realized, ‘But he won’t be two-forty right
away!’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Jenny, now
shaking an admonitory spoon at me, ‘but when he is, Preppie, start
running!’ And she laughed like hell.

It’s really comic, but while she
was laughing I had this vision of a two-hundred-and-forty-pound kid
in a diaper chasing after me in Central Park, shouting, ‘You be
nicer to my mother, Preppie!’ Christ, hopefully Jenny would keep
Bozo from destroying me.

It is not all that easy to make a baby.

I mean, there is a certain irony
involved when guys who spend the first years of their sex lives
preoccupied with not getting girls pregnant (and when I first
started, condoms were still in) then reverse their thinking and
become obsessed with conception and not its contra.

Yes, it can become an obsession. And
it can divest the most glorious aspect of a happy married life of its
naturalness and spontaneity. I mean, to program your thinking
(unfortunate verb, ‘program’; it suggests a machine) - to program
your thinking about the act of love in accordance with rules,
calenders, strategy (‘Wouldn’t it be better tomorrow morning,
Ol?’) can be a source of discomfort, disgust and ultimately terror.

For when you see that your layman’s
knowledge and (you assume) normal healthy efforts are not succeeding
in the matter of increase-and-multiply, it can bring the most awful
thoughts to your mind.

‘I’m sure you understand, Oliver,
that ‘sterility’

would have nothing to do with
‘virility.” Thus Dr. Mortimer Sheppard to me during the first
conversation, when Jenny and I had finally decided we needed expert
consultation.

‘He understands, doctor,’ said
Jenny for me, knowing without my ever having mentioned it that the
notion of being sterile - of possibly being sterile - was devastating
to me.

Didn’t her voice even suggest that
she hoped, if an insufficiency were to be discovered, it would be her
own?

But the doctor had merely been
spelling it all out for us, telling us the worst, before going on to
say that there was still a great possibility that both of us were
okay, and that we might soon be proud parents. But of course we would
both undergo a battery of tests. Complete physicals. The works. (I
don’t want to repeat the unpleasant specifics of this kind of
thorough investigation.) We went through the tests on a Monday. Jenny
during the day, I after work (I was fantastically immersed in the
legal world). Dr. Sheppard called Jenny in again that Friday,
explaining that his nurse had screwed up and he needed to check a few
things again. When Jenny told me of the revisit, I began to suspect
that perhaps he had found the insufficiency with her. I think she
suspected the same. The nurse-screwing-up alibi is pretty trite.

When Dr. Sheppard called me at Jonas
and Marsh, I was almost certain. Would I please drop by his office on
the way home? When I heard this was not to be a three-way
conversation (‘I spoke to Mrs. Barrett earlier today’), my
suspicions were confirmed. Jenny could not have children.

Although, let’s not phrase it in
the absolute, Oliver; remember Sheppard mentioned there were things
like corrective surgery and so forth. But I couldn’t concentrate at
all, and it was foolish to wait it out till five o’clock. I called
Sheppard back and asked if he could see me in the early afternoon. He
said okay.

‘Do you know whose fault it is?’
I asked, not mincing any words.

‘I really wouldn’t say ‘fault,’
Oliver,’ he replied.

‘Well, okay, do you know which of
us is malfunctioning?’

‘Yes. Jenny.’

I had been more or less prepared for
this, but the finality with which the doctor pronounced it still
threw me.

He wasn’t saying anything more, so
I assumed he wanted a statement of some sort from me.

‘Okay, so we’ll adopt kids. I
mean, the important thing is that we love each other, right?’

And then he told me.

‘Oliver, the problem is more
serious than that. Jenny is very sick.’

‘Would you define ‘very sick,’
please?’

‘She’s dying.’

‘That’s impossible,’ I said.

And I waited for the doctor to tell
me that it was all a grim joke.

‘She is, Oliver,’ he said. ‘I’m
very sorry to have to tell you this.’

I insisted that he had made some
mistake - perhaps that idiot nurse of his had screwed up again and
given him the wrong X rays or something. He replied with as much
compassion as he could that Jenny’s blood test had been repeated
three times. There was absolutely no question about the diagnosis. He
would of course have to refer us - me -

Jenny to a hematologist. In fact, he
could suggest -

I waved my hand to cut him off. I
wanted silence for a minute. Just silence to let it all sink in. Then
a thought occurred to me.

‘What did you tell Jenny, doctor?’

‘That you were both all right.’

‘She bought it?’

‘I think so.’

‘When do we have to tell her?’

‘At this point, it’s up to you.’

Up to me! Christ, at this point I
didn’t feel up to breathing.

The doctor explained that what
therapy they had for Jenny’s form of leukemia was merely palliative
- it could relieve, it might retard, but it could not reverse. So at
that point it was up to me. They could withhold therapy for a while.

But at that moment all I really could
think of was how obscene the whole fucking thing was.