An American Love Story (25 page)

Susan sometimes thought she was two people. There was the one who was the strong, independent woman with a career, who needed her time alone, whose creative work was of such importance she could not imagine life without it. This woman had to travel, to research, to interview, and, most difficult of all, to painstakingly write the best piece she could, which not only would be accepted by the magazine but would draw praise and attention. Although she spent as much time as possible in California, she had to continue to live in New York because that was where her work was, and where the energy was for what she did.

The other woman was Clay’s little monkey. They had been together almost ten years, and in that time he had become her life. If he called to say he was going out to dinner and would call her again when he got home, she couldn’t sleep until he did, worried that something had happened to him. In a private scrapbook she kept her snapshots of him, and all the loving notes he had written to her with his many presents, and she read and reread them for solace when he was away. She went into the closet and inhaled his bathrobe, imagining him. She was always afraid he would die.

She had asked him once, earlier in their relationship, what she should do if he died in the middle of the night, in their bed, and he had said quite calmly: “Walk away and pretend you don’t know me.” She had been stunned by the unexpected heartlessness of his remark. It was a side of him she had never seen before.

It made her too aware that no matter what he said about their “marriage” she was still an outsider; the lover of a man who was married to someone else; and as an outsider she was someone who had only existed along with their love and then was meant to vanish for appearances’ sake, not even allowed respect from the world for her mourning. Perhaps, she had thought, he found the subject too painful to discuss and was trying to avoid it. But no: his wife, no matter how unbearable he considered her, was still his wife, officially joined to him. He would never sleep with Laura, he would never die in Laura’s bed, but she wouldn’t have to walk away either.

Susan thought about this during the party Laura was giving for Clay. If Laura wanted to prove publicly that she was still his wife
and therefore the immutable victor, that was pretty ironic. Parties and burials aside, what did she have? Laura was a woman unwanted and obsessed. She hardly ever saw him. How could she hang on this long when everyone knew their-marriage was a farce? Even she had to notice.

But there was the child. In college now, Nina wouldn’t be a child much longer. She would have her own life, and it wouldn’t matter if Clay got divorced. There would be no more obligation to pretend, no more excuse to stay. Maybe Clay will marry me, Susan thought. Maybe things are different now. I’ll bring it up when I see him again.…

At midnight the phone rang. It was a collect call from Dana. “You’ll never guess where I am.” Her unexpected voice cheered Susan up immeasurably.

“Where?”

“At Clay’s birthday party.”

“No! What are you doing there?”

“I’m with Henri Goujon.”

“You’re dating that male chauvinist French asshole?”

“I like him,” Dana said.

“I imagine then he speaks to you,” Susan said. “He knew me nine years before he would address a word to me. He would only talk to Clay. And then one night he walked into a restaurant to meet us and he kissed me on the cheek hello and I thought, well, I guess I’ve finally made it.”

“That must be because I’ve made him a nicer person,” Dana said. “I think I’m going to marry him if he asks me.”

“Marry Henri Goujon?” Susan shrieked. “But he’s so old, and he’s been married three times.”

“
Chacun à son goût
,” Dana said calmly. “Now, do you want to hear about Clay’s wife or what?”

“Yes!”

“Well, she looks as if she has about twenty-two minutes to live. She could be on disease of the week
without
TV makeup. She’s totally anorexic, totally on something unhealthy, and she twitches all the time. Clay keeps running around the room avoiding her. She just keeps running around the room.”

“Is it a good party?”

“Same insufferable jerks.”

“I hope they miss me,” Susan said.

“The men are with their wives and the women are with their husbands, and I’m sure they’re all too busy missing their lovers to give it a thought.”

“And you want to get married.”

“Goujon is very attractive, quite bright, and extremely devoted to me,” Dana said. “The first few years should be nice.”

“My sentimental friend,” Susan said, laughing. “You haven’t changed.”

“Why would I change? I have to go back now. He’ll think I have a bladder infection. Sleep well, you have nothing to fear.”

Dana hung up and Susan smiled. She felt much better, ready to go to bed. Tomorrow morning she would go back to the article she’d been working on, with renewed fascination.

She was doing it for
New York
magazine, and they were considering it for a cover story, which would be her first. The piece itself concerned a case that was being called The Romeo and Juliet Murder, because at the end only one of the two young lovers had died. Two privileged New York teenagers, Meredith Perry and Charles Sheridan, intelligent and attractive Ivy League college students, made a suicide pact. She died, he didn’t. They took poison together—actually a bottle full of barbiturates—but after taking them he panicked at the last moment and managed to save himself. He was “too sick” to save her too, although there was a question about that. But there was something else that made the case of particular interest.

Meredith had always been depressed, from her earliest childhood. Charles, on the other hand, was apparently happy and normal. She was beautiful, fragile, moody, strange. He was a star athlete, an excellent student, fond of parties and practical jokes, popular, sexy, pursued.

She had been obsessed with suicide, idolizing Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, memorizing the parts of their work that dealt with her fixation, writing prophetic poetry of her own, discussing death with her friends with the pleasure other girls her age discussed
boys and clothes. Meredith and Charles, these two very opposite people, were in love.

As their intense relationship grew, so did her influence over him. The body of material available in interviews with their friends and families, and the psychiatrist Meredith had been going to for years, showed that her obsession with suicide began to be matched by Charles’s obsession with her. She had managed to talk him into their suicide pact, and both of them had obtained the pills. Perhaps he didn’t really want to die, but she certainly did.

She died, he didn’t. Was it murder by default, or just an accident?

In the end, the investigation exonerated him of a possible negligent homicide charge because he was “the instrument of her will.”

The instrument of her will …

The entire concept of this case held Susan. She was fascinated by the nature of love and obsession; that of the young couple, of Laura’s strange relationship with Clay, perhaps even of her own with him. She would never give up her life for him, would she? Giving up the possibility of other men, putting up with the painful loneliness when he was inaccessible, was not anything like a suicide pact. Yet, she could understand single-minded need: she had it when she was waiting for Clay’s daily early morning phone call, unable to work, to leave the apartment, until the moment she finally heard his voice, and then such a wave of relief swept over her that she hardly listened to what he was saying. All she was aware of was their link, her safety.

It was this great emotional love that had kept the two of them together so long. Her friends, who had at first considered their affair a brief lark or a reckless folly, now envied the romance of their long attachment. Just before she went to bed Susan took out her scrapbook.

“Dearest Susan: Here we are all these Christmases later, and with each one I love you more and you mean more to my life than the one before. Thank you for just being you. Merry Christmas and the best year of all! With all my love xxx Clay.”

“Susan Dearest—Happy birthday! With all my love and thanks
because you have made the last ten years the happiest of my life … I love you. Clay.”

He always seemed to think they had spent a year longer together than she did, and sometimes they argued about it good-naturedly. She counted on her fingers and got confused. If they were
in
their tenth year, then … She wanted it to be by his counting; as long as possible. The duration of their love never ceased to awe her, she who had thought she would be doomed to live her life forever alone.

“Dearest Susan: I love you now more than ever. You are the best and my precious monkey. I wish you more than you can ever have because you deserve it. With all my thanks and all my love—always. Clay.”

There were many more cards, all so romantic and loving, full of thanks for his happiness. But it was she, she felt, who should thank him, for saving her from what her life might have been without him. She looked at the snapshots; Clay clowning in his bathrobe in a foreign hotel room, she smiling and squinting into the California sun in front of their apartment, the two of them glowing at each other at a party: obviously a couple. And then the idea came to her about the article she was writing, and she was surprised she hadn’t thought of it before.

The Romeo and Juliet Murder was a perfect television movie: timely, true, suspenseful, simple yet about complicated issues of love, domination, and madness. Clay was looking for material now that he was going to Sun West. She would give him an option on the article without letting her agent talk to anyone else. The story had already been in the newspapers and on the TV news, but having the rights to her published magazine article would give him the edge over anyone else who wanted it. She could even help him. The people she had talked to had all signed releases. She always made them do that when they weren’t celebrities, who were fair game without a release. Clay would be all set.

And he was the best. No matter how bad his luck had been recently, this one couldn’t fail. She would write the script. They would work together, at last, sharing their lives in the area where previously they hadn’t been able to, a creative partnership. She
fantasized them as a successful husband-and-wife team, being interviewed on television about their habits. In her mind she saw the TV screen and the two of them sitting there, belonging together.

It reminded her of when she was little and had fantasized about someone interviewing her for a newspaper article, actually asking her opinion when no one in her family ever did or would even listen when she tried to give it.

Once, when she was in high school, the
New York Post
had asked to interview her after she had won an interscholastic writing contest. They wanted to present her as a sort of prodigy. Her mother had refused. “I want my daughter to have a normal life,” she said, as if being singled out for any kind of momentary fame would ruin her chances forever.

What would her mother think now of her normal life? Susan patted Clay’s picture and put the scrapbook away. There were framed photos of him all over the apartment. Sometimes Susan talked to them. “Good night,” she said to the one next to her bed, and went to sleep, dreaming of The Romeo and Juliet Murder.

He came back to New York for Christmas week, to be with Nina and Laura and pretend to his own version of a normal life, which Susan realized that by now meant to act grumpy, ignore them by hiding in his room, and buy them expensive presents; less expensive this year because he was economizing (he made sure they knew it) and because he was still annoyed at the expense of the birthday party. He sneaked off to see her, and took her to lunch as “business.” But now it was business. She told him the details of the story he knew she was doing, and told him it should be his first project for Sun West.

“I’ll try,” he said. She had never heard him sound so mild.

“It’s a natural,” Susan said. As she talked to him excitedly she saw the light come back into his eyes. Soon he was smiling and nodding, mentioning screenwriters he knew, directors he had worked with. He was enthusiastic about her writing the script, and she told him she would begin as soon as she finished the article and whatever revisions the editors wanted.

“If I get this into production I’ll put you on the picture with me,” he said.

“Can I be there the whole time? I want to learn, and I also want to be sure that nobody changes the lines. If they can’t say the lines,
I’ll
change them.”

“Sure.” He chuckled. “The more work you do the better it is for me.” He held her hand under the table and ordered champagne. “For our Christmas lunch,” Clay said.

“Is this it?” She felt a stab of pain. “It’s so soon …”

“Pre-Christmas lunch,” he said. He held up his glass. “I love you. To our future together.” They clinked glasses and drank. “Ah,” he sighed, “I wish I had married you years ago. We would have had such a productive life together.”

“You can marry me now,” Susan said.