Love Story

  “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.

  “She’s only twenty-four!” I told the doctor, shouting, I think. He nodded, very patiently, knowing full well Jenny’s age, but also understanding what agony this was for me. Finally I realized that I couldn’t just sit in this man’s office forever. So I asked him what to do. I mean, what I should do. He told me to act as normal as possible for as long as possible. I thanked him and left.

  Normal! Normal!

  18

  I began to think about God.

  I mean, the notion of a Supreme Being existing somewhere began to creep into my private thoughts. Not because I wanted to strike Him on the face, to punch Him out for what He was about to do to me—to Jenny, that is. No, the kind of religious thoughts I had were just the opposite. Like when I woke up in the morning and Jenny was there. Still there. I’m sorry, embarrassed even, but I hoped there was a God I could say thank you to. Thank you for letting me wake up and see Jennifer.

  I was trying like hell to act normal, so of course I let her make breakfast and so forth.

  “Seeing Stratton today?” she asked, as I was having a second bowl of Special K.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Raymond Stratton ’64,” she said, “your best friend. Your roommate before me.”

  “Yeah. We were supposed to play squash. I think I’ll cancel it.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “What Jen?”

  “Don’t go canceling squash games, Preppie. I don’t want a flabby husband, dammit!”

  “Okay,” I said, “but let’s have dinner downtown.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “What do you mean, ‘why’?” I yelled, trying to work up my normal mock anger. “Can’t I take my goddamn wife to dinner if I want to?”

  “Who is she, Barrett? What’s her name?” Jenny asked.

  “What?”

  “Listen,” she explained. “When you have to take your wife to dinner on a weekday, you must be screwing someone!”

  “Jennifer!” I bellowed, now honestly hurt. “I will not have that kind of talk at my breakfast table!”

  “Then get your ass home to my dinner table. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  And I told this God, whoever and wherever He might be, that I would gladly settle for the status quo. I don’t mind the agony, sir, I don’t mind knowing as long as Jenny doesn’t know. Did you hear me, Lord, sir? You can name the price.

  “Oliver?”

  “Yes, Mr. Jonas?”

  He had called me into his office.

  “Are you familiar with the Beck affair?” he asked.

  Of course I was. Robert L. Beck, photographer for Life magazine, had the shit kicked out of him by the Chicago police, while trying to photograph a riot. Jonas considered this one of the key cases for the firm.

  “I know the cops punched him out, sir,” I told Jonas, lightheartedly (hah!).

  “I’d like you to handle it, Oliver,” he said.

  “Myself?” I asked.

  “You can take along one of the younger men,” he replied.

  Younger men? I was the youngest guy in the office. But I read his message: Oliver, despite your chronological age, you are already one of the elders of this office. One of us, Oliver.

  “Thank you, sir,” I said.

  “How soon can you leave for Chicago?” he asked.

  I had resolved to tell nobody, to shoulder the entire burden myself. So I gave old man Jonas some bullshit, I don’t even remember exactly what, about how I didn’t feel I could leave New York at this time, sir. And I hoped he would understand. But I know he was disappointed at my reaction to what was obviously a very significant gesture. Oh, Christ, Mr. Jonas, when you find out the real reason!

  Paradox: Oliver Barrett IV leaving the office earlier, yet walking homeward more slowly. How can you explain that?

  I had gotten into the habit of window shopping on Fifth Avenue, looking at the wonderful and silly extravagant things I would have bought Jennifer had I not wanted to keep up that fiction of…normal.

  Sure, I was afraid to go home. Because now, several weeks after I had first learned the true facts, she was beginning to lose weight. I mean, just a little and she herself probably didn’t notice. But I, who knew, noticed.

  I would window shop the airlines: Brazil, the Carribbean, Hawaii (“Get away from it all—fly into the sunshine!”) and so forth. On this particular afternoon, TWA was pushing Europe in the off season: London for shoppers, Paris for lovers…

  “What about my scholarship? What about Paris, which I’ve never seen in my whole goddamn life?”

  “What about our marriage?”

  “Who said anything about marriage?”

  “Me. I’m saying it now.”

  “You want to marry me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  I was such a fantastically good credit risk that I already owned a Diners Club card. Zip! My signature on the dotted line and I was the proud possessor of two tickets (first class, no less) to the City of Lovers.

  Jenny looked kind of pale and gray when I got home, but I hoped my fantastic idea would put some color in those cheeks.

  “Guess what, Mrs. Barrett,” I said.

  “You got fired,” guessed my optimistic wife.

  “No. Fired up,” I replied, and pulled out the tickets.

  “Up, up and away,” I said. “Tomorrow night to Paris.”

  “Bullshit, Oliver,” she said. But quietly, with none of her usual mock-aggression. As she spoke it then, it was a kind of endearment: “Bullshit, Oliver.”

  “Hey, can you define ‘bullshit’ more specifically, please?”

  “Hey, Ollie,” she said softly, “that’s not the way we’re gonna do it.”

  “Do what?” I asked.

  “I don’t want Paris. I don’t need Paris. I just want you—”

&n
bsp; “That you’ve got, baby!” I interrupted, sounding falsely merry.

  “And I want time,” she continued, “which you can’t give me.”

  Now I looked into her eyes. They were ineffably sad. But sad in a way only I understood. They were saying she was sorry. That is, sorry for me.

  We stood there silently holding one another. Please, if one of us cries, let both of us cry. But preferably neither of us.

  And then Jenny explained how she had been feeling “absolutely shitty” and gone back to Dr. Sheppard, not for consultation, but confrontation: Tell me what’s wrong with me, dammit. And he did.

  I felt strangely guilty at not having been the one to break it to her. She sensed this, and made a calculatedly stupid remark.

  “He’s a Yalie, Ol.”

  “Who is, Jen?”

  “Ackerman. The hematologist. A total Yalie. College and Med School.”

  “Oh,” I said, knowing that she was trying to inject some levity into the grim proceedings.

  “Can he at least read and write?” I asked.

  “That remains to be seen,” smiled Mrs. Oliver Barrett, Radcliffe ’64, “but I know he can talk. And I wanted to talk.”

  “Okay, then, for the Yalie doctor,” I said.

  “Okay,” she said.

  19

  Now at least I wasn’t afraid to go home, I wasn’t scared about “acting normal.” We were once again sharing everything, even if it was the awful knowledge that our days together were every one of them numbered.

  There were things we had to discuss, things not usually broached by twenty-four-year-old couples.

  “I’m counting on you to be strong, you hockey jock,” she said.

  “I will, I will,” I answered, wondering if the always knowing Jennifer could tell that the great hockey jock was frightened.

  “I mean, for Phil,” she continued. “It’s gonna be hardest for him. You, after all, you’ll be the merry widower.”

  “I won’t be merry,” I interrupted.

  “You’ll be merry, goddammit. I want you to be merry. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay.”

  It was about a month later, right after dinner. She was still doing the cooking; she insisted on it. I had finally persuaded her to allow me to clean up (though she gave me heat about it not being “man’s work”), and was putting away the dishes while she played Chopin on the piano. I heard her stop in mid-Prelude, and walked immediately into the living room. She was just sitting there.

  “Are you okay, Jen?” I asked, meaning it in a relative sense. She answered with another question.

  “Are you rich enough to pay for a taxi?” she asked.

  “Sure,” I replied. “Where do you want to go?”

  “Like—the hospital,” she said.

  I was aware, in the swift flurry of motions that followed, that this was it. Jenny was going to walk out of our apartment and never come back. As she just sat there while I threw a few things together for her, I wondered what was crossing her mind. About the apartment, I mean. What would she want to look at to remember?

  Nothing. She just sat still, focusing on nothing at all.

  “Hey,” I said, “anything special you want to take along?”

  “Uh uh.” She nodded no, then added as an afterthought, “You.”

  Downstairs it was tough to get a cab, it being theater hour and all. The doorman was blowing his whistle and waving his arms like a wild-eyed hockey referee. Jenny just leaned against me, and I secretly wished there would be no taxi, that she would just keep leaning on me. But we finally got one. And the cabbie was—just our luck—a jolly type. When he heard Mount Sinai Hospital on the double, he launched into a whole routine.

  “Don’t worry, children, you’re in experienced hands. The stork and I have been doing business for years.”

  In the back seat, Jenny was cuddled up against me. I was kissing her hair.

  “Is this your first?” asked our jolly driver.

  I guess Jenny could feel I was about to snap at the guy, and she whispered to me:

  “Be nice, Oliver. He’s trying to be nice to us.”

  “Yes, sir,” I told him. “It’s the first, and my wife isn’t feeling so great, so could we jump a few lights, please?”

  He got us to Mount Sinai in nothing flat. He was very nice, getting out to open the door for us and everything. Before taking off again, he wished us all sorts of good fortune and happiness. Jenny thanked him.

  She seemed unsteady on her feet and I wanted to carry her in, but she insisted, “Not this threshold, Preppie.” So we walked in and suffered through that painfully nit-picking process of checking in.

  “Do you have Blue Shield or other medical plan?”

  “No.”

  (Who could have thought of such trivia? We were too busy buying dishes.)

  Of course, Jenny’s arrival was not unexpected. It had earlier been foreseen and was now being supervised by Bernard Ackerman, M.D., who was, as Jenny predicted, a good guy, albeit a total Yalie.

  “She’s getting white cells and platelets,” Dr. Ackerman told me. “That’s what she needs most at the moment. She doesn’t want antimetabolites at all.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “It’s a treatment that slows cell destruction,” he explained, “but—as Jenny knows—there can be unpleasant side effects.”

  “Listen, doctor”—I know I was lecturing him needlessly—“Jenny’s the boss. Whatever she says goes. Just you guys do everything you possibly can to make it not hurt.”

  “You can be sure of that,” he said.

  “I don’t care what it costs, doctor.” I think I was raising my voice.

  “It could be weeks or months,” he said.

  “Screw the cost,” I said. He was very patient with me. I mean, I was bullying him, really.

  “I was simply saying,” Ackerman explained, “that there’s really no way of knowing how long—or how short—she’ll linger.”

  “Just remember, doctor,” I commanded him, “just remember I want her to have the very best. Private room. Special nurses. Everything. Please. I’ve got the money.”

  20

  It is impossible to drive from East Sixty-third Street, Manhattan, to Boston, Massachusetts, in less than three hours and twenty minutes. Believe me, I have tested the outer limits on this track, and I am certain that no automobile, foreign or domestic, even with some Graham Hill type at the wheel, can make it faster. I had the MG at a hundred and five on the Mass Turnpike.

  I have this cordless electric razor and you can be sure I shaved carefully, and changed my shirt in the car, before entering those hallowed offices on State Street. Even at 8 A.M. there were several distinguished-looking Boston types waiting to see Oliver Barrett III. His secretary—who knew me—didn’t blink twice when she spoke my name into the intercom.

  My father did not say, “Show him in.”

  Instead, his door opened and he appeared in person. He said, “Oliver.”

  Preoccupied as I was with physical appearances, I noticed that he seemed a bit pale, that his hair had grown grayish (and perhaps thinner) in these three years.

  “Come in, son,” he said. I couldn’t read the tone. I just walked toward his office.

  I sat in the “client’s chair.”

  We looked at one another, then let our gazes drift onto other objects in the room. I let mine fall among the items on his desk: scissors in a leather case, letter opener with a leather handle, a photo of Mother taken years ago. A photo of me (Exeter graduation).

  “How’ve you been, son?” he asked.

  “Well, sir,” I answered.

  “And how’s Jennifer?” he asked.

  Instead of lying to him, I evaded the issue—although it was the issue—by blurting out the reason for my sudden reappearance.

  “Father, I need to borrow five thousand dollars. For a good reason.”

  He looked at me. And sort of nodded, I think.

&nbsp
; “Well?” he said.

  “Sir?” I asked.

  “May I know the reason?” he asked.

  “I can’t tell you, Father. Just lend me the dough. Please.”

  I had the feeling—if one can actually receive feelings from Oliver Barrett III—that he intended to give me the money. I also sensed that he didn’t want to give me any heat. But he did want to…talk.

  “Don’t they pay you at Jonas and Marsh?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  I was tempted to tell him how much, merely to let him know it was a class record, but then I thought if he knew where I worked, he probably knew my salary as well.

  “And doesn’t she teach too?” he asked.

  Well, he doesn’t know everything.

  “Don’t call her ‘she,’” I said.

  “Doesn’t Jennifer teach?” he asked politely.

  “And please leave her out of this, Father. This is a personal matter. A very important personal matter.”

  “Have you gotten some girl in trouble?” he asked, but without any deprecation in his voice.

  “Yeah,” I said, “yes, sir. That’s it. Give me the dough. Please.”

  I don’t think for a moment he believed my reason. I don’t think he really wanted to know. He had questioned me merely, as I said before, so we could…talk.

  He reached into his desk drawer and took out a checkbook bound in the same cordovan leather as the handle of his letter opener and the case for his scissors. He opened it slowly. Not to torture me, I don’t think, but to stall for time. To find things to say. Non-abrasive things.

  He finished writing the check, tore it from the book and then held it out toward me. I was maybe a split second slow in realizing I should reach out my hand to meet his. So he got embarrassed (I think), withdrew his hand and placed the check on the edge of his desk. He looked at me now and nodded. His expression seemed to say, “There it is, son.” But all he really did was nod.