Erich Segal - The Class

I bet a lot of guys who thought he was a weenie are now boasting to their wives and kids that they were buddies with him in the college days. I confess that I even exaggerate my passing friendship with him, too.

Ted Lambros’s entry was also brief and to the point. He and Sara had enjoyed the decade at Harvard. He was gratified that his Sophocles book had received favorable reviews, and he and his family were looking forward to the new challenge of living and teaching at Canterbury.

Neither Jason Gilbert nor George Keller sent in a response, both for reasons I well understood. Jason, with whom I’m still in touch by letter, has been through a hell of a lot.

And George is just the same old paranoid, suspicious nut. He didn’t even vouchsafe any of the meager information he gives me when we have lunch.

Unlike a lot of my classmates, I thought I’d try to be honest in my capsule history.

My two years in the navy got a sentence, and I didn’t glorify them. Then I simply noted that after seven years at Downs, Winship, I’d been elected a vice-president.

Then I said that the greatest joy I’ve had is watching my children grow. And the greatest disappointment that my marriage didn’t work.

I don’t think many people bothered reading my entry, but I didn’t give much away.

I didn’t mention that I’m really not that much of a success in investment banking. I owe my promotion to the fact that a couple of buddies and I helped float Kintex, which grew to be the world’s largest producer of The Pill. And hence took off like a wild rocket. (Sheer luck — or was it a subconscious way of regretting that I had allowed myself to have children with such an unfit mother?)

I didn’t say that though there are thousands of new singles’ bars sprouting all over First Avenue for so-called successful guys like me to meet fairly neat women, my life is desperately lonely.

I spend every weekend trying to reconnect with my kids (Andy now seven, Lizzie four), to little avail. Faith seems to have given up sex in favor of booze — and her face shows it. Apparently the only time she sobers up is when she’s telling the kids what a bastard I am. And I only have a couple of hours on Saturdays to try to counter this calumny.

My one solace still seems to come from Harvard. Though I’ve bought a fancy pad in a new high-rise on East Sixty-first Street, I spend most of my time playing squash at the H-Club and socializing with the guys. I help the Schools Committee recruit good men for “the age that is waiting before.” I’m even thinking of running for the Alumni Council — which would give me a nice pretext to go up and walk in the Yard again.

In short, I’m no happier than the garrulous shoe salesman. On the other hand, I think I hide it a little better.

Ted Lambros prepared himself for his new life at Canterbury with typical enthusiasm. He spent the summer of ’68 packing books and notes, improving his old lectures, and — most important — taking tennis lessons at Soldier’s Field.

As they were settling into the ramshackle house they had rented from the college on North Windsor Street, Sara cautioned him, “You know, honey, if you actually beat Bunting, he’ll never vote for you.”

“Hey,” he replied jocularly, “you’re speaking to the great tactician. I’ve got to be just good enough for him to want to keep me as a sparring partner — or whatever they call it.”

But there was more than the tennis vote to worry them. The department had three other senior classicists — and also influential wives.

Naturally, there had to be a separate dinner with each couple. Henry Dunster made the first move and invited them. The present Mrs. D. was Henry’s third, and there was every indication that she might not be the last. Predictably, he made a sort-of-pass at Sara. Which did not flatter her at all.

“I mean, he wasn’t vulgar,” she complained to Ted as they drove home, “it’s that he was so ludicrously tentative. He wasn’t even man enough to be an honest flirt. God, what a creep.”

Ted reached over and took Sara’s hand.

“One down,” he whispered, “three to go.”

The next hurdle on this steeplechase to tenure was a dinner with the Hendricksons — Digby, the historian, and his loving wife, Amelia. Theirs was indeed a marriage of true minds, for they thought as one. They shared a love of hiking, mountaineering, and a fervid paranoia that everyone in the department was out to steal Digby’s history courses.

“I think it’s awful,” Sara commented, “but in a way their jealousy is understandable, History, after all, is the foundation of the classics.”

Digby took her point and ran with it a little further.

“Not just the foundation, Sara, it’s the whole shebang. Literature is nice, but what the heck, when all is said and done it’s only words. History is facts.”

“I’ll buy that,” said Ted Lambros, specialist in literature, clouding his mind and swallowing his pride.

Sara had already started action on the distaff front. In fact, her “friendship” with Ken Bunting’s wife had blossomed into weekly soup-and-sandwich luncheon dates at The Huntsman.

Dotty was a self-styled social arbiter who neatly pigeon-holed the Canterbury wives into one of two categories: “real class” or “no class.” And Sara Lambros of the New York banking Harrisons was certainly genuine cream, not ReddiWhip. And since Dotty was, as she put it, a blueblood from Seattle, she regarded Sara as a soulmate.

The only difference was their marriages.

“Tell me,” Dotty asked in furtive tones, “what’s it like being married to, you know, a Latin type?”

Trying mightily to keep a straight face, Sara patiently explained that Greeks, though dark and — to some eyes, perhaps — a little swarthy, weren’t quite the same as “Latins.” Still, she understood the interrogatory innuendo and replied that she assumed all men were basically alike.

“You mean, you’ve known a lot?” asked Dotty Bunting, titillated and intrigued.

“No,” Sara answered calmly, “I just mean — you know — they have the same equipment.”

Dotty Bunting turned a vivid crimson.

Sara quickly changed the subject and sought Dotty’s counsel on the “real class” children’s dentists in the area.

One thing was clear. If Mrs. Bunting had a vote, Sara certainly would have it. It remained to be seen what influence she had on her husband. And that could be determined only when the two couples actually met for dinner. Again, consistent with traditional collegiality, the Buntings asked the new arrivals to their home.

The conversation, as anticipated, was tennis-oriented. Bunting jocularly accused Ted of dodging his innumerable invitations to “come and hit a few.” Ted volleyed back that he’d been so involved in setting up the house and starting courses that his game was far too rusty to give Bunting even token competition.

“Oh, I’m sure he’s only being modest, Sara,” Dotty Bunting gushed. “I bet he even played for the varsity.”

“No, no, no,” Ted protested, “I wasn’t nearly good enough. Tennis is one of the few sports Harvard actually is not bad in.

“Yes,” Ken allowed, “it was a Harvard guy who beat me for the IC4A title back in fifty-six.”

Unwittingly, Ted had reopened the most painful wound in Bunting’s sporting memories. Ken now began to hemorrhage verbally.

“I really should have won it. But that Jason Gilbert was such a crafty New York type. He had all sorts of sneaky little shots.”

“I never thought of New York people as particularly ‘crafty,’ ” Sara said ingenuously. “I mean, I’m from Manhattan too.”

“Of course, Sara,” Bunting quickly said apologetically. “But Gilbert — which was probably not his name for very long — was one of those, you know, Jewy characters.”