LOVE STORY

What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died? That she was beautiful. And brilliant. That she loved Mozart and Bach. And the Beatles. And me. Once, when she specifically lumped me with those musical types, I asked her what the order was, and she replied, smiling, "Alphabetical". At the time I smiled too. But now I sit and wonder whether she was listing me by my first name - in which case I would trail Mozart - or by my last name, in which case I would edge in there between Bach and the Beatles. Either way I don't come first, which for some stupid reason bothers hell out of me, having grown up with the notion that I always had to be number one. Family heritage, don't you know? In the fall of my senior year, I got into the habit of studying at the Radcliffe library. Not just to eye the cheese, although I admit that I liked to look. The place was quiet, nobody knew me, and the reserve books were less in demand. The day before one of my history hour exams, I still hadn't gotten around to reading the first book on the list, an endemic Harvard disease. I ambled over to the reserve desk to get one of the tomes that would bail me out on the morrow. There were two girls working there. One a tall tennis-anyone type, the other a bespectacled mouse type. I opted for Minnie Four-Eyes. "Do you have The Waning of the Middle Ages?" She shot a glance up at me. "Do you have your own library?" she asked. "Listen, Harvard is allowed to use the Radcliffe library." "I'm not talking legality, Preppie, I'm talking ethics. You guys have five million books. We have a few lousy thousand." Christ, a superior-being type ! The kind who think since the ratio of Radcliffe to Harvard is five to one, the girls must be five times as smart. I normally cut these types to ribbons, but just then I badly needed that goddamn book. "Listen, I need that goddamn book." "Wouldja please watch your profanity, Preppie?" "What makes you so sure I went to prep school ?" "You look