Evan Hunter - Sons

There was pot in the apartment, of course, provided by Lenny as matter of factly as he provided the silverware and the sheets, nothing to write the Federal Bureau of Narcotics about, just enough for a little smoke every now and again. Actually, it would have been just as simple for Dana and me to have bought our nickel bags in Cambridge or New Haven, but it was more convenient to have the stuff waiting there for us in Providence each weekend (not to mention a good deal safer besides, what with all those state lines being crossed). Lenny would leave it in a little plastic bag in the refrigerator (“Oregano, in case anyone asks; livens up the cuisine”) and we would pay him for it on a consumer basis, using an honor system Dana and I scrupulously respected. Neither of us were potheads. We’d bust a joint on Friday night when we got to the apartment, and maybe have oh at the most two or three more over the weekend, something like that. It was good.

Everything was good that spring.

Dana said that nobody in Hollywood would have been interested in Our Love Story because it was so plebeian; we had not met cute, and we didn’t do any kookie offbeat things like buying red onions on Olvera Street, the commute being a long one from Providence. I informed her, however, that she possessed a couple of natural attributes long considered viable commodities on the Hollywood mart, and that perhaps we could approach a movie sale under the table, so to speak, Our Romance being weak on plot, true enough, but at least one of the characters being well-developed, if she took my meaning. (“Oh yes, sir,” she trilled, “I take your meaning, and I do so want to be a star!”) But I suppose our relationship was singularly lacking in spectator interest. We did not, for example, walk barefoot in the rain even once that spring. We walked — yes, sometimes when the sky over that old city was an unblemished blue, and the spring air came in off the Atlantic with a tangy whiff of salt and a promise of summer suddenly so strong it brought with it the tumbled rush of every summer past, the lingering images of crowded vacation highways and white sand beaches, fireworks and beer, hot dogs, lobster rolls, children shrieking, weathered oceanfront hotels, last summer crowding next summer in that Providence spring — we walked hand in hand and told lovers’ secrets no more important than that I had cheated to win a prize in the third grade (and had not been found out) or that Dana had lettered in eyebrow pencil when she was twelve years old, on her respective budding breasts, “Orangeade” and “Lemonade.”

But we had no favorite restaurant, we did not discover a great Italian joint with red-checked tablecloths and candles sticking in empty Chianti bottles dripping wax, where Luigi whom we knew by name rushed to greet us at the door (“Mama mia, you no binna here long time!”) and led us to a table near a cheerful fire that dispelled whatever winter’s bite still hovered, though spring was surely upon us and we were in love. We had no such rendezvous where jealous patrons watched as Luigi fussed over our glowing romance and waited while we tasted the rubious wine, and kissed his fingers and nodded and went out to the kitchen to tell his wife that the young lovers loved the wine, our personal Henry Armetta, while we ourselves grandstanded to the crowded cozy restaurant, I staring deep into Dana’s eyes, she touching my hand on the checked tablecloth with one slender carmine-tipped forefinger, we had no such place.

We had instead a hundred places, all of them lousy. We ate whenever we were hungry, and we were hungry often. Like frenzied teeny-boppers, we became instantly ravenous, demanding food at once lest heads roll, and then were instantly gratified by whatever swill the nearest diner offered — until hunger struck again and we became wild Armenians striding the streets in search of blood. Dana was at her barbaric worst immediately after making love. She would leap out of bed naked and stalk through the apartment, a saber-toothed tigress on a hunt, heading directly for the refrigerator where she would fling out food like the dismembered parts of victims, making horrible sounds of engorgement all the while, and then coming back to me to say, “Shall I make us something to eat?” She was an excellent cook, though a reluctant one, and she sometimes whipped up ginzo delights learned from her father’s mother, and unlike anything even dreamt of by my mother, Dolores Prine Tyler, with her Ann Page pasta.

The games we played were personal and therefore exclusive, lacking in universality and therefore essentially dull to anyone but ourselves. The Tyler-Castelli Television Commercial Award was invented one Saturday night while we were watching a message-ridden late movie on Lenny’s old set, wheeled to the foot of the bed. The judges for the TCTC Award (Dana and I) gave undisputed first prize to the Wrigley Spearmint Chewing Gum commercial as the best example of freedom from complexity, pretentiousness, or ornamentation; the coveted runner-up prize went to the Gallo Wine Company, whose handsome baritone actor-vineyard owner on horseback was forced to sing “wine country” as “wine cun- tree” for the sake of the jingle’s scan. In similar fashion, there was the Tyler-Castelli Award for Literary Criticism (first prize went to Martin Levin of the New York Times for having reviewed ten thousand books in five months, somehow skipping only the novels of Styron, Salinger, Bellow, Roth, Malamud, and Updike); the Tyler-Castelli Award for Athletic Achievement (first prize went to Sonny Liston for his recent one-minute performance in Lewiston, Maine); and the Tyler-Castelli Award for Quick Thinking (which went to Lyndon Baines Johnson for his speedy dispatch of the United States Marines to Santo Domingo, his second such award in three months).

There was (I knew, Dana knew) nothing very special about our love, except that it was ours and it was good. We floated, we drifted toward a limbo of not-quite irresponsibility, lulled by each other’s presence and the soporific vapors of spring. I was protected from the draft by my student status at Yale, and I was smart enough (Wat Tyler on black-and-white film asserts to his own high intelligence while assorted professors and scientists applaud his modesty) to be able to grapple with whatever old Eli threw at me in the semester to come, confident in short that I could preserve my deferment. Dana was a bright girl and an honor student, and if we slouched through most of our courses, it didn’t show in our grades. We bathed regularly. We wrote or called home even when we didn’t need money. We were a pair of passionate isolationists who sought neither followers nor converts, involved in a love we knew was genuine and true. And since it was ours alone, and since it was so good, we naturally felt free to abuse it.

(This is Wat Tyler’s first screen appearance in color, idol of millions, and he is disturbed by his red-faced image, did he look that way in the rushes? Apart, he wonders how Dana can have caused such rage in him. The flickering frames of film reveal the camera coming in for a tight close shot of his fists clenching and unclenching. The audience Wat Tyler watches the star Wat Tyler as the sound track shrieks under the tense, homicidal hands, “I can’t get no satisfaction.”)

Dana was sitting in the center of Lenny’s bed, eyes averted the way they’d been that first night here in January, partially turned away from me, hands in her lap. She was wearing faded blue jeans and a green sweater. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail. There was no lipstick on her mouth. It was ten o’clock on a Friday night. She usually caught the five o’clock train from Boston and was at the apartment by six-thirty.