Эрик Сигал – Love Story / История любви (страница 5)

I stopped walking. Who was she talking to? It wasn’t Davidson – there was no Phil in any part of his name. I had long ago checked him out in our Class Register: Martin Eugene Davidson, 70 Riverside Drive, New York, High School of Music and Art. His photo suggested sensitivity, intelligence and about fifty pounds[43] less than me. But why was I bothering about Davidson? Clearly both he and I were denied by Jennifer Cavilleri for someone to whom she was at this moment blowing kisses into the phone!

I had been away only forty-eight hours, and some bastard named Phil had crawled into bed with Jenny!

“Yeah, Phil, I love you too. Bye.”

As she was hanging up, she saw me, and without blushing, she smiled and waved me a kiss. How could she be so twofaced?

She kissed me lightly on my unhurt cheek.

“Hey – you look awful.”

“I’m injured, Jen.”

“Does the other guy look worse?”

“Yeah. Much. I always make the other guy look worse.”

I said that as ominously as I could, sort of implying that I would punch out any rivals who would creep into bed with Jenny while I was out of sight and evidently out of mind[44]. She grabbed my sleeve and we started toward the door.

“Night, Jenny,” called the girl on bells.

“Night, Sara Jane,” Jenny called back.

When we were outside, about to step into my MG[45], I put the question as casually as I could.

“Say, Jen…”

“Yeah?”

“Uh – who’s Phil?”

She answered calmly as she got into the car: “My father.”

I wasn’t going 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, a baker, in Cranston, Rhode Island. When she was very young, her mother was killed in a car crash. She had told me all this 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.

“What do you call yours?” she asked again.

I had been so distracted that I hadn’t heard her question.

“My what?”

“What term do you use when you speak of your father?”

I answered with the term I’d always wanted to use.

“Sonovabitch.[46]’

“To his face?” she asked.

“I never see his face.”

“He wears a mask?”

“In a way, yes. Of stone. Of absolute stone.”

“Come 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 you?”

I liked the way she enjoyed my athletic qualities. But I had to shoot myself down by giving her my father’s.

“He rowed single sculls[47] 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.

“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.

I told her how I hated the fact that I was programmed for the Barrett Tradition. And I had 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 unemotional, when I do come through. I mean he just takes me absolutely for granted[48].”

“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 suspicion of a cultural gap between us.

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

I told her about 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[49] 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?”