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Bud Grossmann’s
Words of the Week
for the Week of
November 14, 2010
Previously unpublished fiction.
© 2010 by Bud Grossmann.
All Rights Reserved.
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Hardbound Book, 2010
© 2010 by Bud Grossmann
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A WELL-LOVED STORY
On a cold, rainy Saturday afternoon in mid-November, well past the official close of the 2010 yard-sale season in south-central Wisconsin, David C. Fischer of Fjord took a look at the goods remaining at a moving sale and at a “final estate sale” he’d seen advertised in the Fjord Free Press. At the first place he offered two bucks for a nice-looking little pine bookshelf (marked three) and he got it. He planned to install it on a wall near his basement workbench to hold his WD-40, wood glue, and such.
At the estate sale Fischer paid full price, twenty-five cents, for the only item that tempted him, a hardbound first edition of Love Story by Erich Segal. The forty-year-old book had a tattered jacket and yellowed pages. Because of the novel’s one-time ubiquity and this volume’s poor condition, Fischer estimated that he was paying about twenty-three cents above fair market value. But he had years ago owned, read, enjoyed, and cast aside a paperback edition (and had seen the movie), and he had been hoping in recent years to run across a yard-sale copy because he wanted to find out how closely his memory of a certain favorite scene in the book matched Segal’s published version.
The passage was a description of the first meeting of Oliver Barrett and Jennifer Cavilleri. Fischer probably had read it only once, long ago, but he had retold it many times, even as recently as a month ago or so, usually to seemingly appreciative women.
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Late one night, Oliver, a student at, uh, Yale I guess it was, or, no, I think it was Harvard in the book, anyway, Oliver was working on a research paper in the library of, like, it must have been Radcliffe. A women’s school, in any case. An all-women’s college. He goes up to the reference desk and asks Jennifer, a student worker there—Ali MacGraw in the movie—he asks her for a particular book. It’s the first time they met.
Jenny stares coldly at Oliver, and she says to him, “Why doncha use your own library, preppie?”
Oliver gives her some good reason—later hours, better selection, better light at Radcliffe, I don’t know—and he asks her, “What makes you think I went to a prep school?”
Jenny says, “Because, preppie, you look rich and stupid.”
“Well, as a matter of fact,” Oliver tells her, “I happen to be poor and smart.”
“No, I don’t think so,” Jenny says. “I am poor and smart. You, preppie, look rich and stupid.”
“Well,” Oliver asks her, “what gives you the idea you’re so smart?”
And she tells him what: “I wouldn’t go to coffee with you.”
“Oh, is that so?” he says. “Well, I wouldn’t ask you.”
“That,” says Jenny, “is what makes you, preppie, so stupid!”
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More or less, that is how Fischer had told the anecdote those many times, or how he would probably lay out the lines today if someone brought up the idea of “going to coffee.” When he came home with his new WD-40 shelf and his new old novel, he typed out his version of the Love Story dialogue on his computer and saved it.
Then, without opening the book again, Fischer set it aside. He would someday find out how close he had come, but for now he had decided to protect Oliver and Jennifer’s conversation from any meddling by the late Professor Segal. ♦
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Thanks! BUD GROSSMANN
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