Beginnings

The Train had come down from Boston and it was jam-packed when it stopped at New Haven. She had her crap spread out all over the seat---two valises, a guitar and a duffel bag---as if she were going on a grand tour of the Bahamas instead of probably just home for the Thanksgiving weekend. I had come through three cars looking for a seat, and when I spotted her living in the luxury of this little nest she'd built, I stopped and said, "Excuse me, is this taken?"

She had dark-brown eyes and long black hair, parted in the middle of her head, falling away straight on both sides of her face, framing an oval that gave a first impression of being too intensely white, lips without lipstick, cheeks high and a bit too Vogueish, a finely sculpted nose and a firm chin with a barely perceptible cleft. The look she gave me was one of extreme patience directed at a moron, her glance clearly saying, Can't you see it's taken?

"Well, is it?" I asked.

"I've got my stuff on it," she answered. Her voice sounded New Canaan or mid-80s Park Avenue. It rankled immediately.

"I see that," I said, "but is anyone sitting here?"

"I'm sitting here."

"Besides you."

"No."

"Then would you mind putting your stuff up on the rack?"

Her look of patience turned instantly to one of annoyance. I was forcing her to move her furniture out of the apartment just after she'd painted and settled in. She turned the look off, got up without as much as glancing at me again, lifted the guitar onto the rack and then reached for the heavy duffel.

"I'll get it," I said.

"Don't bother," she said.

She was wearing sandals and tight chinos, and I discovered her backside as she lifted the duffel up onto the rack with a great show of delicate college-girl maidenhood being strained to its physical limits. The gray sweat shirt she had on over the chinos rode up as she lifted one of the valises, revealing a well-defined spine, the halves of her back curving into it like a pale ripe apple into its stem. She turned to pick up the other valise and I saw MIT's seal on the front of the sweat shirt, flanked by a rounded pair of breasts too freely moving to have been confined by a bra. She saw my goofy leer, made a face, hoisted the valise up onto the rack, slid back into the seat, cupped her chin in her hand and stared through the window.

"Thank you," I said.

She did not answer.

"Look," I said, "your bags didn't pay for a seat, you know."

"I moved them, didn't I?" she said, without turning from the window.

"OK," I said.

"OK," she said, but she still did not turn from the window.

"You coming down from Radcliffe?" I said.

"What gives you that impression?" she said, and turned from the window at last, and assumed again the patient expression of someone talking to a cretin.

"You sound like a Radcliffe girl."

"And just how do Radcliffe girls sound?" she asked, so annoyed by my presence on her turf and so confident of her own allure in sweat shirt and chinos, brown eyes burning with a low, angry, smoky intensity, white face pale against the cascading black hair, completely stepping down several levels in the social stratum by deigning to utter in her New Canaan nasal twang anything at all to someone like me, who should have been up a tree someplace eating unpeeled bananas, instead of trying to start a conversation with the WASP princess of the Western world. I was already half in love with her.

"Radcliffe girls sound rude and surly and sarcastic," I said.

"So do Yalies," she said.

"Are you from Radcliffe?"

"No. I'm from BU."

"Is that a school?"

"Ha-ha," she said. "You're from Yale, all right."

"How can you tell?"

"I can tell," she said in dismissal, and turned to look through the window again, pulling her long legs up under her.

"Must be fascinating, watching all those telephone poles go by," I said.

"Yes, it is."

"My name's Wat Tyler," I said.

She turned to me with a reproachful look. Certain she had tipped to a put-on, she said, "Mine's Anne of Bohemia."

"Hey, how'd you know that?" I said, surprised.

"How'd I know what?"

"About Wat Tyler. Not many people do."

"Luck," she said.

"Come on, how'd you know?"

"I had to do a paper on the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse."

"What's that got to do with Wat Tyler?"

"Nothing. But that's how I got to him."

"How?"

"Well---can you name the Four Horsemen?"

"Sure. Plague, Pestilence------"

"Wrong."

"You're not talking about the Notre Dame foot------"

"No, the Bible."

"Plague------"

"Wrong."

"I give up."

"I'll give you a clue."

"Give me a clue."

"They're on different-colored horses---white, red, black and pale."

"Pale what?"

"Just pale."

"I still give up."

"Death's on the pale horse," she said. "War's on------"

"The black one."

"Wrong, the red one. Famine's on the black one."

"Then Plague's on the white one."

"There isn't any Plague."

"Has to be a Plague."

"That's what I thought, too. But there isn't."

"Then who's on the white horse?"

"Christ. At least, a lot of people suppose it was Christ. Nobody really knows for sure who John the Divine meant."

"But you thought it was Plague."

"Yes. That's why I went to the library to see what they had."

"What'd they have?"

"Plagues, epidemics, blights, everything. But there was a very popular plague back in 1348------"

"Popular?"

"In that it was widespread. The Black Death, you know?"

"From the Tony Curtis movie of the same name," I said.

"It was bubonic."

"It certainly was."

"Killed a third of England's population."

"The Sound of Music was even worse."

"Anyway," she said, and raised her eyebrows and quirked her mouth as though in exasperation, but it was clear she was enjoying herself now, feeling comfortable enough with me to be able to make a fleeting facial comment on my corny humor and then move right on unperturbed to the very serious business at hand, which was how she happened to know anything at all about Wat Tyler, who had been killed by the mayor of London in 1381, lo, those many years ago, when both of us were still only little kids. "Anyway," she said again, and turned her brown eyes full onto my face, demanding my complete attention, as though knowing intuitively it was wandering to other less important topics, never once suspecting, heh-heh, that I was lost in thought of her alone, of how absolutely adorable she looked when she struck her professorial pose, relating tales of poxes and such, and I stared back into her lady-hypnotist eyes and wanted to bark like a dog or flap like a chicken. "Anyway, when I was looking up all this crap, I learned that a couple of the labor statutes put into effect around the time of the plague were thought to have caused the great peasant rebellion of 1381, do you see?" she said.

"You have a tiny little beauty spot right at the corner of your mouth," I said.

"Yes," she said. "Listen, are you sure you know who Wat Tyler was?"

"Oh, sure," I said. "He led the great peasant rebellion of 1381. Against Richard the Second."

"So what did I just say?"

"I don't know, what did you just say?"

"I said that certain labor statutes------"

"That's right. ..."

"... caused the rebellion of 1381."

"So?"

"So Richard the Second was married to Anne of Bohemia."

"I know."

"So that's why, when you said you were Wat Tyler, I said I was Anne of Bohemia. Because when I was looking up plagues in the library ... the hell with it," she said. "What's your real name?"

"That's my real name."

"Wat Tyler, huh?"

"Walter Tyler. Everybody calls me Wat, though. Except my grandfather sometimes. What's yours?"

"Dana. Don't laugh."

"Dana what?"

"Castelli. Guess who I'm named after?"

"I can't imagine."

"You can imagine."

"Oh, no! Really?"

"Really. I was born in 1946, right after my mother saw him in The Best Years of Our Lives."

"When in 1946?"

"Was I born or did she see the picture?"

"Born."

"December. Two days before Christmas."

"So what did you find out about him?"

"Dana Andrews?"

"No, Plague. On the white horse."

"I told you, there was no Plague. Only War, Famine, Death and Jesus."

"Then all your research was for nothing."

"I didn't mind. I like libraries." She smiled again. "Besides, it gives me something to talk about on trains."

"Listen," I said, "I'm really sorry I asked you to move your bags."

"Don't be silly. I was being a hog."

"Would you like a beer or something?"

"I don't think there's a bar car."

"Has to be a bar car."

"Had to be a Plague, too, but there wasn't."

"You watch the seats," I said. "I'll check it out."

In the next-to-the-last car on the train, I ran into Scott Dundee, who was now a freshman at Tufts and who was sitting with a girl he introduced as "Gail Rogers, Simmons '67," the same asshole he'd always been. He asked if he could give me a lift home from Stamford, but I lied and said I was being picked up, preferring a taxi to his Great Swordsman company, and then hurrying into the last car, knowing by then, of course, that Dana Castelli had been right, there was no bar car. I lurched and staggered my way forward again, the New Haven Railroad performing in its usual glassy-smooth style, and when I got back to where she was sitting, I nearly dropped dead on the spot. The guitar, the duffel bag and both suitcases were piled onto the seat again and Dana was turned away from the aisle, legs up under her, one elbow on the window sill, staring out at the goddamn telephone poles. I felt, I don't know what, anger, rejection, embarrassment, stupidity, clumsiness, everything. And then, suddenly, she turned from the window, whipping her head around so quickly that her black hair spun out and away from her face like a Revlon television commercial, and her grin cracked sharp and clean and wide, confirming her joke, and we both burst out laughing.

That was the real beginning.

We talked all the way to Stamford.

She told me her father was Italian and her mother Jewish, this WASP princess of the Western world. They had met while he was still a budding psychoanalyst in medical school, an ambition that cut no ice at all with her mother's father, who objected to the marriage and who threatened to have this "Sicilian gangster" castrated or worse by some gangster friends of his own, he being the owner of a kosher restaurant on Fordham Road in the Bronx and therefore familiar with all kinds of Mafia types who rented him linens and collected his garbage. Joyce Gelb, for such was her mother's maiden name, was then a student at Hunter College and running with a crowd the likes of which had only recently signed petitions for the release of the Scottsboro boys. She wasn't about to take criticism of her Sicilian gangster, who in reality was descended from a mixture of Milanese on his mother's side and Veronese on his father's and who anyway had blue eyes, which she adored. Joyce told her father he was a bigot and a hypocrite besides, since he hadn't set foot inside a synagogue since her mother's death eight years before, when he had said the Kaddish and promptly begun playing house with his cashier, a busty blonde specimen of 24. The couple, Joyce Gelb and Frank Castelli, eloped in the summer of 1941, fleeing to Maryland, where they were married by a justice of the peace in Elkton, Frank constantly glancing over his shoulder for signs of pursuing mohelim. (continued on page 90)Beginnings(continued from page 78) In 1942, the Castellis bought a small house in Hicksville, Long Island. Secure from the draft (he had been classified 4-F because of his asthma), Frank began analyzing the neurotics in Hempstead and environs.

"Do you know the kind of town Hicksville was?" Dana said. "When I was still a kid, the suggestion came up that they should change the name of the town to something better, you know? Like, there are some towns on Long Island with really beautiful Indian names---Massapequa, Ronkonkoma, Syosset---and even some very nice, well, suburban-sounding names, like Bethpage and Lynbrook and, well, you know. So guess what? The town fathers objected! They actually preferred Hicksville, can you imagine that? Which is just what it is, of course---Hicksville, U. S. A. I lived there until I was thirteen years old; the most thrilling thing that happened was the erection of a shopping center, you should pardon the expression."

At the age of 13, as she was entering puberty ("and beginning to blossom," Dana said, and winked and gave me a burlesque comic's elbow), Dr. Castelli moved his practice and his family to Park Avenue.

"In the mid-Eighties, right?" I said.

"Seventy-ninth," Dana said.

"Close," I said.

"No cigar," she said.

And Dana began attending the Dalton School, no mean feat for a kid whose Italian grandfather still ran a latticeria on First Avenue and whose Jewish grandfather made a good living keeping the fleishedig plates from the milchedig. She was now, she told me, an English major at Boston University, and she hoped one day to write jokes for television comedians, which I might think a strange and curious ambition for a girl, but after all, some of the funniest people in America were women, witness Lady Bird Johnson, she said, without cracking a smile.

We began talking about Kennedy then, both of us realizing with a sudden shock that he had been killed just a year ago, and then doing what people inevitably did when talking about that day in November, remembering with almost total recall exactly where they were and what they were doing when the news broke. ("I could hear them saying, 'The head, the head,' and I listened in bewilderment and fear, because I was sure now that something terrible had happened to me, that they were all talking about my head, that maybe my neck was twisted at a funny angle, maybe there was a line of blood trickling from under my white helmet.") Dana had been in her father's office, necking on his couch with a boy from CCNY, Friday being Dr. Castelli's day at Manhattan General, where he worked with addicts on the narcotics service. The radio had been tuned to WABC, Bob Dayton spewing machine-gun chatter and canned goodies from the Beatles, when the announcer broke in to say that Kennedy's motorcade had been fired upon, the news causing Dana to leap up from the couch not a moment too soon, being as she was in a somewhat vulnerable position just then.

"What do you mean?" I said.

"You know," she said.

"Oh," I said, and felt violently protective all at once, ready to strangle the snot-nosed, pimply-faced City College rapist who had dared put his hand under her skirt or whatever it was he'd been doing.

"Well, you know," Dana said.

"Sure," I said.

Which led us into talking about the MIT sweat shirt she was wearing and how she had come into possession of it so early in her college career, the fall term at BU having started only in September.

She told me that she had met this dreamy boy at the Fogg Museum one rainy Saturday ("Oh, please," I said, "where are the violins?") and he'd turned out to be a very sensitive young man who had managed to get out of East Berlin immediately after the Russians lifted their blockade in 1949. ("A German," I said, "that's real groovy. What was his father during the War? A baker?") His father, Dana promptly informed me, was Jewish and, in fact, a survivor of Auschwitz, which, I might remember, was a German concentration camp; in fact, the camp where 4,000,000 Jews were annihilated, in fact. His father had chosen to continue living in Germany------

"What's this guy's name?" I said.

"I don't see what difference that makes," she said.

"I like to know who we're talking about, that's all," I said.

"His name is Max Eckstein," she said.

"He sounds like a Max Eckstein," I said.

"The way I sounded like a Radcliffe girl, right?" she said.

"All right, go on, go on," I said.

His father had chosen to continue living in Germany, Dana told me, rather than emigrating to Israel or America, because he felt that Hitler had almost succeeded in destroying the entire German Jewish community, and if there were to be any Jews at all in Germany, some survivors had to elect to stay and raise their families there. But whereas he had been slow to recognize what was happening in Germany in 1938 and 1939, he immediately realized in 1949 that the Communists were constructing in Berlin a state not too dissimilar from Hitler's. He had packed up his wife Dora, his seven-year-old daughter Anna, and his five-year-old son Max, and together they had fled to America. Anna had since married a football player for------

"A what?" I said.

"A football player. For the New York Giants," Dana said.

"How'd a German refugee get to meet a------"

"She's quite American," Dana said. "She was only seven when she came here, you know."

"Yes, and little Maxie was five."

"Little Maxie is now twenty," Dana said. "And not so little."

Her relationship with Max, she went on to say, was amazingly close, considering the fact that she'd known him such a short time; actually, only a month and a half, she'd met him in the middle of October on a------

"Yes," I said, "a rainy Saturday, I know."

"He's a very nice person. You'd like him."

"I hate him," I said.

"Why?"

"Just how close is this relationship?" I asked.

"Close," Dana said.

"Are you engaged or something?"

"No, but------"

"Going steady?"

"Well, we don't have that kind of an agreement. I mean, I can see anybody I want to, this isn't the Middle Ages, you know. I just haven't wanted to go out with anyone else."

"Well, suppose I asked you out?" I said.

"Well, I don't know," she said. "I mean, I don't know what you have in mind."

"You mean you want to know where I'd take you?"

"No, no. I mean the relationship between Max and me is very close, and I haven't really any need for what you might have in mind, if it's what you have in mind. That's what I mean."

"What do you mean?" I said.

"I mean Max and I are very, well, close," she said, and shrugged. "Do you see?"

"No."

"Well, I really don't think I need to spell it out," she said.

"Oh," I said.

"So if you want to just go to a movie or something, or maybe take a walk if you're in the city one weekend------"

"Gee, thanks a whole heap," I said.

"Well, there's no sense being dishonest."

"You're sure Maxie won't disapprove? I certainly wouldn't want to get him upset."

(continued on page 192)Beginnings(continued from page 90)

"His name is Max," Dana said.

"Say, maybe the three of us could go to a movie together," I said. "You think Max might be able to come down one weekend?"

"He's carrying a very heavy program," Dana said.

"Then I guess we'll just have to go alone," I said. "How about Thursday?"

"Thursday's Thanksgiving."

"Friday, then."

"All right. So long as you understand------"

"I understand only one thing."

"Which is what?"

"Which is that I'm going to marry you."

• • •

On the weekends I had to play, I would die from wanting Dana.

I had got together with three other freshman guys at Yale, one of whom was in premed and who had suggested the name for the group, a great name, The Rhinoplasticians, a rhinoplastician being a doctor who does nose bobs. We didn't sound as great together yet as the old Dawn Patrol had, but we were getting there, and also we were beginning to play a lot of local jobs, especially at preppie parties in the vicinity, where college men made a big hit with all the little girls from Miss Porter's. We usually pulled down about 25 bucks a man whenever we played, and we played approximately once every other weekend, which meant that I was earning between $50 and $75 a month, more than enough to pay for the apartment in Providence. I was living on a tight allowance from my father, and I didn't think it was fair to ask him for additional money to pay for the apartment, so the new group was a godsend. But at the same time, whenever I played to earn money to pay for the apartment, I couldn't get up to Providence to use the apartment; it was something of a dilemma, not to mention painful besides.

The apartment belonged to a guy named Lenny Samalson, who was studying graphic design at Risdee. Lenny had a girlfriend in New York, and her name was Roxanne, and she went to sarah Lawrence, but her parents were very strict, making it necessary for Lenny to go down to the city each weekend, if he wanted to see her. Roxanne lived in the same building as Dana, on 79th and Park, and when Dana casually mentioned, you know, that it would be convenient if she and I had, you know, a place where we could be alone together on weekends, Roxanne said, Well, how about Lenny's place in Providence? and we grabbed it. Lenny was delighted to let us have it, because I paid him $30 a month for using it only on weekends, and not every weekend, at that. On the other hand, we were delighted to get it, because it was only two hours from New Haven and an hour from Boston, which meant that Dana and I could both leave for Providence after our respective Friday-afternoon classes and get there for dinner, by which time Lenny was already on his way to New York and the carefully guarded Roxanne, who, Dana said, had lost her virginity at the age of 14 on the roof with the boy from 12-C.

I had very little difficulty getting away from Yale for weekends, but our trysts involved a certain amount of subterfuge on Dana's part. Dana was but a mere female freshman living in Shelton Hall and blanket permission (pun unintended by the administration of BU, I'm sure) for overnights had to be in writing from her parents. With permission, she was entitled to unlimited weekends, provided she signed out before the two-A.M. curfew and left a telephone number where she could be reached. Dana had little difficulty convincing Dr. Castelli that blanket permission would be far simpler than having to call home each time she was invited to spend a weekend with a girlfriend. And the telephone number she left at Shelton each Friday afternoon before putting her check in the overnight column was, of course, the one at Lenny's apartment.

Providence was a singularly grubby town, but Lenny's apartment was really quite nice. I had always thought artists were sloppy people who left twisted paint tubes and dirty rags all over the place, but Lenny was very tidy. In fact, since he was in graphic design rather than fine arts, he hardly ever worked in oils, and the place was miraculously free of the aroma of paint or turpentine, which could have been disastrous in a one-room apartment with a screen separating the kitchen from the bedroom--living room. Lenny had hand-decorated the screen himself, using the symbol in various sizes as an over-all black-and-white pattern. The symbol, Dana informed me, was a composite of the semaphore signals for the letters N and D, a visual representation of the words "Nuclear Disarmament," this information having incidentally been garnered by her in library research for a paper she was doing on William Shakespeare, figure it out. The screen stood at the foot of the bed, and tacked to it was a very decorative poster Lenny had painted in blues and reds, advising everyone to Make Love, Not War, though actually we didn't need any reminders.

I loved Dana very much.

Before Dana, I had a relationship with only one other girl in my life, and that had been Cass Hagstrom. The time with Cass had been very exciting for me, because she was the first girl who had let me do anything substantial to her and I was overwhelmed and grateful. That was also when everything else was really going great for me---Dawn Patrol was playing almost every Friday and Saturday night, I was the football team's captain and quarterback and I was maintaining a 90 average at Talmadge High. I was as much in love with life, I guess, as I was with Cass.

But even the most exciting times with Cass, and there were some, did not compare with what I experienced with Dana. I loved everything about Dana, and this wasn't a matter of a first sex experience, nor were things going so great at Yale, either, because they weren't. In fact, to be perfectly truthful, I was having a very difficult time adjusting to college life, being burdened with two creepy roommates and carrying a full program of English, French, history, economics and physics. Moreover, I was confused about a lot of things.

I had dutifully registered for the draft in October of 1964, within five days after my 18th birthday, aware that I owed the Army two years of compulsory service, and ready though reluctant to pay my debt to the country. Well, that's corny, banners waving and bugles blowing and all that crap. But I believed in freedom, you see, I believed in the concept of self-government, and I recognized that a great nation did have responsibilities to the rest of the world, and I was committed to sharing those responsibilities. I knew my Army duty would be postponed as long as I kept up my grades at Yale and continued to be classified a student, but I knew that eventually I would have to serve; and whereas the idea was a pain in the ass, patriotism aside, I was nonetheless ready to do what had to be done.

In February of 1965, I began to get confused.

I don't think Dana had anything to do with my confusion, though perhaps she may have. She was a very opinionated beautiful young lady, and her contempt for President Johnson was something monumental. Like a lot of girls, she had accepted Kennedy as a sort of father image with whom incest was not only thinkable but perfectly acceptable. And then, cut of all cuts, this positively groovy guy had been replaced by a real father type who had a stern demeanor and a disapproving downturned mouth, who wore eyeglasses when he read his speeches, who whooped it up with all the ladies at the Inaugural Ball, and who spoke in a lazy Texas way designed to alienate every kid on the Eastern Sea-board, if not the entire world. Dana's favorite nickname for him was "Ole Flannelmouth," though she also began calling him "Loony Bins Johnson" shortly after the inauguration. In Lenny's apartment one night, she performed for me a ten-minute argument between L. B. J. and his daughter, which ended with him shouting, "Well, I reckon Ah'm the Pres'dent, and y'all kin not have the automobile tonight!" When I told her that he was a good administrator who could goose Congress into giving us some much-needed legislation, Dana said, "Oh, crap, Wat," and tacked another anti-Johnson Feiffer cartoon to Lenny's Ban-the-Bomb screen, and then did a devastating take-off of Johnson collaring unsuspecting Senators in the cloakroom and twisting their arms to vote for legislation on new bird sanctuaries, her imitation developing to the point where I'm positive it was slanderous (through I have to admit it was funny as hell, too).

February got confusing.

I'm not trying to say that everything wasn't pretty confusing to begin with. I had two roommates in Edwin McClellan Hall. One was named Alec Kupferman and he was a spooky kid with a beard who hardly ever said a word to anyone, wandering around the campus and the room immersed in whatever private thoughts consumed him day and night. I don't think he attended classes. He would appear like a sudden hallucination in the doorframe and merely nod, and go to his bed, and put his hands behind his head and stare up at the ceiling. I felt very uneasy whenever he was around, which, thank God, was not too often. My other roommate was a winner, too. He was a kid named Abner Nurse from Salem, Massachusetts, who claimed that he was a direct descendant of Rebecca Nurse, who had been tried and hanged for a witch in 1692. I believed it. If ever there was a warlock in the world, it was Abner Nurse. He had red eyes. I swear to God, they were red. Not fire-engine red, of course, but a brown that was so close to orange it was red, especially when he sat at his desk late at night with the single lamp burning, probably reading up on evil potions and deadly brews from a witch book hidden behind his Playboy magazine. He had black hair that stuck up on his head in two spots, exactly like horns. I had never seen him naked, because he was very shy about taking showers when anybody else was around, but I think that's because he had a long tail he kept tucked up inside his underwear. He changed his underwear every day. He always left his Jockey shorts in a corner of the room, like a neat little burial mound, until there was a week's supply piled up there, and then he would pick them up and carry them down the hall to the John, where he would handlaunder them as though they were dainty, delicate unmentionables. I once heard him talking in his sleep, and what he said was, "Hanna-Kribna" over and over again in rising cadence, which I'm sure was authentic Salem witch talk. When I caught him reading a rather personal letter from Dana to me, I told him I would bust him in the mouth if he ever did it again, and he rooted me to the spot with his red-eyed satanic gaze and shouted, "Descend in flames, turd!" and then laughed maniacally and stalked out of the room. I didn't hit him, because he was somewhat larger than I, measuring six feet, four inches from the top of his head to the tips of his cloven hooves, and weighing 220 pounds in his Jockey shorts.

So the room situation at old Eli was somewhat confusing, as was the situation with The Rhinoplasticians (Jesus, I really dug that name!), because we were trying to develop a unique and original sound that was far out and divorced from hard rock; but at the same time, we knew we couldn't get too experimental or we'd never get any jobs, and I needed the job money to keep up the Providence apartment, but I couldn't get to use the apartment if we played too many jobs, which we wouldn't play if our sound got too shrill or unintelligible.

"Now, this is what I call providence," Dana said the first time we used the apartment, and then sat shyly on the edge of the bed, her hands folded in her lap as demurely and expectantly as a bride. And though we had made love before, several times in the back of the station wagon and once in her bedroom on Park Avenue while Dr. Castelli and his wife were at the opening of I Had a Ball, this was in a sense the first time for us.

She studied me with a solemn brown-eyed look, as though aware that something memorable was about to happen, that we were really about to commit to each other here in Lenny Samalson's apartment on Lenny Samalson's bed, about to share an intimacy that would be infinitely more binding than our previous hurried and awkward couplings had been. She stared at me for several moments, as though trying to read on my face the knowledge that I, too, knew this was extremely important. And then she rose silently and fluidly from the bed and walked toward the John at the other end of the apartment, near the kitchen, and came back to me naked not five minutes later.

Her body was a contradiction; I observed it at first with all the professional aloofness of a gynecologist. She had large breasts with pink-tipped nipples; I had touched her often, I knew the feel of her by memory, but this was the first time I'd seen her naked, and now she seemed too abundant, somehow, as though her mother-earth ripeness, her bursting fullness had been designed for another body and not hers. The triangle of her pubic hair was thick and black. An equilateral tangle of Neapolitan density, it sprang from the whiteness of her belly and thighs like some unexplored jungle, promising fecundity, combining with the lush womanliness of her breasts to deny the girlishness of her breasts to deny the girlishness of her narrow hips and long legs. She did a self-conscious model's turn for me, and her backside came as another surprise, hinted at before in skintight jeans, but nonetheless startling now in its swelling nakedness, an unsubtle echo of her breasts. Her body advertised its erogenous zones in billboard blatancy, refusing secrecy to her sexuality, brazenly inviting what her downcast nun's eyes sought to conceal.

She had learned some things from Max that I had never learned from Cass, but she taught them to me only subversively in the weeks that followed, never once indicating they were skills acquired in another man's bed, pretending we were learning everything together for the first time ever on earth. There was a gleeful exuberance to the way she made love. Cass Hagstrom had approached sex with all the joy of a mortician, her brow covered with a cold sweat, a tight grim look on her face, her eyes widening in frightened orgasm as though she were looking into her own open coffin. But Dana entered our Providence bed with nothing less than total abandon, an attitude I naturally and mistakenly attributed to my own great prowess, until I learned she took the pill religiously each and every morning and, thus liberated, could fearlessly express and expose herself. Each time we began making love, a small pleased smile would light her face and her eyes, lingering as we crossed those separate male-female boundaries to that suspended genderless territory where we each became the other. It was then that something else moved onto Dana's face to replace the smile, drifting into her eyes and swiftly, smokily stretching them out of focus. Reason, intelligence, conscious will drained from her features as an utterly wanton look took complete possession, flushing onto her face, rising there directly from the hungrily demanding slit between her legs. In those few mindless moments before she came, she was totally and recklessly female, completely trusting my maleness, paradoxically fortifying our oneness, our commingled identity, receiving and demanding and responding and succumbing, until everything surrounding me and containing me was Dana, this cloud, my love, this sweet sweet Dana. In January, we found each other, and in the discovery found ourselves as well.

In February, the way Dana and I later reconstructed it, everybody in Vietnam decided it was time for a little truce, little rice-wine break in the heat of battle, get these troops out of the hot sun, Captain, don't you know it's time for the Year of the Dragon to become the Year of the Snake? Let's get some of these lads back to Saigon for some fun there, hey, Captain? Charley wants a seven-day cease-fire, why, fine, we'll give him a seven-day cease-fire.

Dana: Oh, Colonel, it was nasty! Those wily Orientals, they was all the while hiding ammunition and putting up they mortars, sir, while we was guzzling beer in Saigon bars with Hello, Joe, you likee fig-fig girls, oh, sir, I can tell you it was terrible. Where they was heading for, sir, was Pleiku, down around Quinhon, Phumy, Kontum and Hanna-Kribna, I swear that boy is a witch, sir! And what they done, they pound the hell out of us, sir.

Me: Well, sir, the cease-fire ended at midnight, and we was sitting around having a last smoke 'fore we hit the sack, when all of a sudden Charley come running out of the high grass either side of the airstrip, musta cut a sizable hunk thu the barbed wire to get thu that way with them satchel charges, sir, and he begin blowing up everything he could lay his hands on, he hits the choppers, he hits the recon planes, he just determined, sir, to blow Camp Holloway clear off the map.

Me again, different voice: They opened up with the 81s along about the same time, they musta been hiding, oh, 600 or 700 yards from the compound, and them mortars come banging in, man, they musta fired 50, 60 rounds of them. Knocked down a quarter of the goddamn billets, killed 7 of our guys and wounded about 100.

Dana, doing her now-world-famous President Johnson imitation: The worst thing we could possibly do would be to let this go by. It would be a big mistake. It would open the door to a major misunderstanding. I want three things: I want a joint attack. I want it to be prompt. I want it to be appropriate.

She got what she wanted.

Or, rather, he did.

The United States aircraft carriers Ranger, Hancock and Coral Sea, cruising in the South China Sea, launched 49 Skyhawks and Crusaders 12 hours after the Viet Cong attack on Pleiku. The planes roared over Donghoi, 50 miles above the 17th Parallel, and bombed and strafed the staging area there. The next day, Vietnamese Skyraiders joined United States jets from the Danang base and flew north to bomb Vinhlinh, a Red guerrilla communications center.

Dana: He come striding across the field, you dig, man, and he ain't bad-looking for a gook, he got this real pretty girl gook with him, she look like the Dragon Lady. He got this black mustache and these six-guns slung on his hips, man, he look like a real marshal, 'stead of a gook marshal. His name Nguyen Cao Ky (Man, I'm positive now that boy a witch!) and he wearing this all-black fly suit and a white crash helmet, man, he going to shoot every motherless Cong clear off the face of the earth.

Me, assuming the role of the President's press secretary: Today's joint response was carefully limited to military areas that are supplying men and arms for attacks in South Vietnam. As in the case of the North Vietnamese attacks in the Gulf of Tonkin last August, the response was appropriate and fitting.

I honestly did not know how appropriate or fitting it was, because I honestly did not know just what was going on over there. Nor did anyone seem anxious to tell me. There were rumors that Maxwell Taylor, our ambassador to South Vietnam, would soon be recalled because of differences with General Nguyen Khanh, the current head of the Saigon government, not to be confused with Nguyen Cao Ky, the vice air marshal, he of the black jump suit and white crash helmet, Nguyen apparently being a Vietnamese name as common as Tom. I had no idea what Khanh looked like, because the South Vietnamese seemed to change their leaders as often as Abner Nurse changed his underwear, very often leaving them in little piles in the corner, too. Our new man who'd been sent to Saigon to investigate the developing situation was called McGeorge Bundy. (I didn't believe his name, either.) He was the President's top White House national security advisor. To show how important he was, it was shortly after he arrived in Saigon that the Viet Cong decided to kick hell out of us. General Westmoreland, who I guessed was running the whole shooting match for us over there, was shocked by Charley's audacity. "This is bad," he said, "very bad."

I, too, was beginning to think maybe it wasn't so good.

On the other hand, President Johnson assured the nation that there had been no change in the position of the country in regard to our desire or our determination to help the people of Vietnam preserve their freedom. "Our basic commitment to Vietnam," he said, "was made in a statement ten years ago by our President Dwight Eisenhower, to the general effect that we would help the people of Vietnam help themselves." Dana's respect for Eisenhower was exceeded only by her respect for Johnson, but she doubted that our policy of containing communism had originated with dear old Ike, preferring to believe instead that we'd been chasing Reds at home and abroad for such a long time now that anyone becoming President was duty-bound to continue the pursuit, the present echoing the past, the course already charted, the future preordained, and all that jazz. Ten years ago, when Eisenhower made the statement to which Johnson now alluded, I was only eight years old and thought the President was that nice bald man who sounded a lot like Sally Lawrence's grandfather. I had no idea what he was saying about the country nor what he was doing for it ("Nothing," Dana insisted). What I did remember about ten years ago was being led into the basement of the Talmadge Elementary School, which had been stocked with food and water and blankets and battery-powered radios, and being told by Mrs. Weinger that this was a practice air raid and that we would remain in the basement until we heard the all clear sounding from the firehouse roof. She then went on to tell us a little about radiation, all of us sitting wide-eyed and fearful, and I could remember wondering aloud what would happen if my father were caught in New York when the bomb fell (Shhh! Mrs. Weinger warned me) and my mother were at our house on Ritter Avenue and I were here at school---would we ever get to see one another again? I was terrified.

Now, everyone seemed to have forgotten all about shhh the bomb, everyone seemed to have passed it off as just another nasty little weapon no one in his right mind would use, the way no one in his right mind would have used gas in World War One, the way no one in his right mind would even think of waging war in this day and age, because war was hell (we had been taught to believe), war was foolish and war was suicidal. Yet we were waging war in Vietnam. Or so it seemed.

Something was happening, and I didn't know what. But whereas I was confused, I did not begin to get frightened until Sunday, February 21.

Dana had an old beat-up straw hat she used to wear whenever she was studying for an exam. She had bought it six years ago, when she'd gone to Nassau with her parents, and it was just about falling apart now, its red ribbon faded and torn, its edges jagged, its crown full of open holes. But it was her "study hat," and she compulsively pulled it down over her ears before cracking a book, as though isolating herself from the outside world within its tattered straw confines. She was wearing the hat and nothing else that Sunday, sitting cross-legged and naked in the center of Lenny Samalson's bed, surrounded by open French textbooks. She was in the midst of intoning some Baudelaire out loud, Ma jeunessene fut qu'un ténébreux orage, when the news announcement interrupted the music, this must have been, oh, a little past three in the afternoon, Traversée ça et là par de brillants soleils, and the music stopped, and the announcer said that Malcolm X had been shot to death by a man with a double-barreled sawed-off shotgun at the Audubon Ballroom on Upper Broadway in Manhattan. The announcer went on to say that Malcolm's murderer had been a Negro like himself (small consolation to the dead man) and that he had been immediately apprehended by the police and charged with homicide.

Sitting in the center of Lenny's bed, wearing only her study hat, Dana began to weep softly, and I went to her and took her in my arms, and we huddled together, suddenly chilled, as the radio resumed its program of recorded music.

• • •

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 pot heads. 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 ocean-front 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 12 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 grand-standed 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 fore-finger; 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 dreamed 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 T.C.T.C. 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 10,000 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 6:30.

"Why are you so late?" I asked her.

"I ran into someone."

"Who?"

"An old friend."

"Where?"

"In Boston, where do you think? My God, Wat, it's only------"

"Why didn't you call?"

"I wasn't anywhere near a phone."

"Well, where, what do you mean, there're phones all over Boston, how could you possibly not be anywhere near a phone? Didn't you know I'd be worrying?"

"No, I didn't know."

"Well, I was."

"I'm sorry."

"Where were you?"

"By the river."

"What river?"

"There's only one undergraduate river in Boston, which river do you think?"

"I'm not that goddamn familiar with Boston."

"The Charles," Dana said softly.

"With who, whom?"

"With Max."

(The close shot of Wat Tyler's eyes reveals jealousy, fury, fear, unreasoning black rage, all represented by a superimposed fireworks display erupting in each pupil. The sound track features his harsh breathing. The Stones' Satisfaction has segued into The Yardbirds' I'm a Man. It is wintertime in the film, the window behind Wat Tyler is rimed with frost, there is the distant jingle of Dr. Zhivago sleigh bells on the icebound street outside. In the room it is May and Lenny Samalson has put flowered Bon-wit Teller sheets on the bed in celebration of spring, but it is a dank winter in Wat Tyler's mind; her body will hardly have deteriorated at all when they find it naked in the snow a week from now.

"Max," I repeated.

"Yes. Max."

"You ran into him."

"Yes."

"Where?"

"I didn't exactly run into him. He called."

"When?"

"This afternoon. I went back to the dorm to pick up my bag, and Max called."

"To say what?"

"To say how was I, and it had been a long time, and all that."

"So how'd you end up by the river?"

"He said he had a few minutes and would I like to go for a walk or something? So I said I was on my way to catch the train to Providence, and he said, Oh, in that case. So I felt sorry for him and I said OK, I'll take a walk with you, Max."

"So you went by the river for a few minutes, and now it's ten o'clock at night, when you should have been here by six-thirty."

"We didn't stay by the river."

"Where'd you go?"

"Wat, I'm very tired. I really would like to get into my nightgown and go to bed. Can't this wait until morning? Nothing so terrible happened, believe me."

"What did happen?"

"We went up to Max' room, and we had a drink."

"And then what?"

"And then we had another drink."

"Did he try to lay you?"

"Yes."

"Did you let him?"

"No."

"Why'd you go up there, Dana? Didn't you know he'd try?"

"No, I didn't know he'd try. I wanted to see if he'd try."

"You were sleeping with the guy for a month before we met, did you expect him to get you up in his room and discuss the weather?"

"I didn't know what to expect. I hadn't seen him since December, when we ended it, and I was surprised when he called and ... I was curious, all right? I wanted to see."

"See what?"

"I wanted to see if ... there was anything there any more."

"What did you expect to be there?"

"Damn you, Wat, I loved him once!"

"The way you love me."

"Yes. No. Right now, I hate you."

"Why? Because I don't like you kissing around with your discarded boyfriends?"

"We didn't. ... Oh, all right, yes, he kissed me, all right? He kissed me several times, all right?"

"Good old trustworthy Max."

"You're a riot, do you know that? You even expect Max to be faithful to you!"

"I expect Max to get run over by a bus!"

"Go make a little doll, why don't you?"

"I'll make two while I'm at it."

(The image on the screen, the Victorian strait-laced stuffy impossible image of Walter Tyler, Esq., is amusing even to himself. He cannot believe the sound track, he cannot believe that these words are issuing from his mouth, and yet the camera never lies, and he can see his lips moving, he can hear the words tumbling sternly from his prudishly puckered mouth, what does he expect from her?)

"I expected more from you."

"More? Than what?"

"Than ... whatever you want to call it. An adventure in some guy's room. Kissing you and ... getting you drunk------"

"Oh, crap, Wat, I'm not drunk. Do I look drunk?"

"You look like a cheap cunt."

"Thank you," she said, and rose suddenly and swiftly from the bed, and walked immediately to the lone dresser in the room, where she began pulling out slips and bras and nightgowns and stockings, flapping each garment angrily into the air like a battle flag.

"Where do you think you're going?" I said.

(The words are familiar and clichéed, they suddenly reduce this love affair to the absurd, taking from it even its dullness, its lack of uniqueness. His face in close-up is clicheed, too, it expresses the emotional range of a stock-company James Garner. He looks by turn indignant, terrified, self-righteous and a trifle ill.)

"I'm going back to Boston," Dana said.

"You just got here," I said.

"Yes, and I'll get back, too."

"I thought you loved me."

"You don't own me," Dana said.

"I don't own you, but I thought you loved me."

"I do love you, but you don't own me."

"Well, stop flapping your goddamn clothes around like that."

"They're my clothes, I'll flap them however the hell I want to flap them, you silly bastard,"she said, and burst out laughing.

In bed, there was no quarrel, there was never any quarrel.

(There is no film, either. There is no second Wat Tyler when he is in bed with her, no alter ego, no schizophrenic superimage hovering somewhere in the air-conditioned spectator darkness.)

The long limp line of her lying still and spent against the rumpled sheet.

I came out of the bathroom and was surprised anew by her, each fresh glimpse a discovery. One arm raised above her head, elbow bent, hand dangling, she lay on her side with eyes closed and lips slightly parted, distant, oh, so distant from me and the apartment and Providence and the world, cloistered in whatever sun-dappled female glade we had led her to together. I stood with the bathroom door ajar behind me, one hand still on the knob, and watched her quietly, and knew something of her selfsame mood, felt it touch me from across the room to include me in a sweet and silent private peace.

The first time she blew me, I yelled when I came and the guy next door banged on the wall.

"Who taught you that?" I whispered later. "Max?"

"Oh, no, sir," she said. "That was my very first time."

"Sure," I said, and smiled. Max could not have mattered less. We were still discovering each other, Dana and I. We were falling in love over and over and over again.