An American Love Story (31 page)

“I guess I have something around,” he said. He looked dubious. “Do you really want to be a writer?”

“Oh yes. I won all the writing awards at school,” Bambi lied. “My teachers told me writing would be my career.” She waited for him to tell her he had liked her act, but he didn’t, so she went on. “After graduation I was published in lots of literary magazines, but then I got sidetracked when I got married. I had to help Simon put the coffeehouse together, and of course the little sketches and songs I do here don’t give you an idea of my range.”

He looked more impressed. “What kind of things do you do?”

“I was a little avant-garde but now I’m more realistic,” she said. “I’m working on something now … well, I guess it’s bad luck to talk about it.”

“We don’t steal,” Al said.

“No, she’s right,” Matt said. “You talk about it all the time you’ll never get to do it.”

“That’s just how I feel,” Bambi said sincerely. She didn’t know what she was going to do, but she was sure she would get an idea.

“Do you use a computer?” the one called Bob asked.

“No. Should I?”

“I couldn’t get along without mine.”

“I don’t know what kind to get,” Bambi said.

They started discussing the merits of various computers. They might as well have been talking Swahili for all it meant to her. She started taking notes on a napkin. Simon had a computer for the business, but she had never paid much attention to it. All he ever used it for was numbers, and she had never thought of it as anything creative, and apparently neither did he. There was so much she still had to learn.

“If you want,” Matt said, “when you’re ready to buy one, I’ll go over to Computerland with you and help you pick it out.”

“You would? But you’re so busy—that would be so nice of you!”

“I know more about computers than anybody,” he said. “If you listen to these clowns they’ll have you spending too much money.”

“Oh, no, I’ll rely on you,” Bambi said. They smiled at each other. She had plenty of money in her bank account; they could go right away. “I’m always free days,” she said.

“I’m usually working, but sometimes I take a break in the afternoon.” He handed her his phone number. “Call me. If I’m not taking calls I just leave the machine on.”

She looked up to see Simon standing across the room looking at her. He crooked his finger at her and gestured toward the microphone. The cavalier gesture infuriated her. What was she, his chattel? She didn’t even feel like singing tonight. She was sitting with the people she wanted to know, so why waste time?

“Simon wants you,” Al said.

“Oh, I know,” Bambi sighed. “Having to entertain here at night is such a bore.”

That night when she and Simon went home, for the first time
she had nothing to say to him. “What was all that scribbling going on tonight?” he asked.

“What scribbling?”

“With the writers.”

“I’m going to buy a computer,” Bambi said.

“Oh. Good idea. I’ll go with you.”

“That’s not necessary,” she said. “I’d like to do it by myself.”

When they went to bed Simon insisted on making love to her. Bambi felt numb again, and she was even more upset than she had been last night in Simon Sez when he had touched her and she had felt dead. He had been the only man in her life, the only one she’d ever wanted, her sexual ideal, and now, suddenly: nothing. If all the passion they’d had was gone forever she didn’t know if she could bear to pretend. His body on hers felt like an imposition, and when he nibbled at her she wanted to snap at him to stop. She tried to ignore what he was doing and let her mind wander.

Matt … She saw his face and wondered what his body was like under his jeans and bulky sweater. Nice, she’d bet. Matt … She imagined the mouth on hers was his, the body his, the penis filling her was his; and suddenly, without even trying, she felt the familiar heat and throbbing and began to thrust, push, clutch at him until she melted away into one of the best orgasms of her life.

She thought about the experience all the next morning when she was alone in the house and Simon was at work. Nothing like that had ever happened to her before, and it was so powerful that she wandered around in what seemed like a trance. It had to be destiny; what else could it be? After a while she got into her car, the Honda Accord sedan she’d bought because it was the closest thing she could find that looked like a Mercedes, and drove up the mountain to the plateau under the Hollywood sign where her heart had flown out of her body. It looked different in the daytime, and the sign seemed shabby. That was because it was so old. How many people had lost their dreams trying to get what that word represented? She didn’t intend to be one of them.

She drove back home, and in the afternoon she called Matt.

He happened to be taking a break, and Bambi asked if she
could stop at his house to pick him up before they went to Computerland, so she could first look at his own computer and maybe also borrow one of his scripts. He said fine, come on over. When she hung up Bambi realized her hands were shaking; but she felt less nervous than euphoric.

Matt lived in a small Spanish-style house with a pool in the back, and he gave her a tour. What impressed her most was his den; the things he had written, the photos of actors and actresses who had appeared in them, the life he had made for himself. Now he would teach her to have it too …

She looked in the bedroom. He had a king-size bed and a lot of stuffed Garfields lying on the furniture. “You like cats?” Bambi said.

“They belong to my ex-girlfriend. She likes Garfield.”

“If she’s your ex, why do you keep them?”

“We might get together again,” he said.

Bambi twisted her wedding ring. “It’s so easy to make a mistake,” she said. She looked away wistfully.

“Problems with Simon?”

“Yes.”

“He seems like a nice guy.”

“He’s not so nice.” She sighed.

“Do you want a beer?”

“Sure.” She gave him a little smile.

They went into the kitchen. Matt opened two bottles of beer and gave her one. “I’m not so nice either,” he said. “I’m self-centered and I have a short attention span.”

“Who told you that?”

“My ex-girlfriend.”

“You should hear some of the terrible things my husband says to me.”

“People are stupid,” Matt said.

“I know.”

“So I try to lose myself in my work,” he said.

“Me too,” Bambi said.

They stood there looking at each other. He smiled. “Of course, I don’t always succeed.”

“Neither do I.”

He ran his fingers lightly along her bare forearm and the little guard hairs stood straight up. “Look at that,” he said softly.

“Mmm.” She felt his touch clear down to her toes. She moved closer to him. Wouldn’t he die if he knew about her sex fantasy about him last night! She wondered how the reality would be. Already she felt the signs that it would be the same. Without a word they both put their bottles of beer down on the counter at the same time, and then he kissed her, at first tentatively, then deeply. It was just like her fantasy. “Oh God,” she breathed.

They stood there kissing for a while and then he led her into the bedroom. They were holding and caressing each other and trying to get their clothes off at the same time, her heart pounding, his too, she could feel it against her own. She was breathless and stunned with the excitement of this newness with a near stranger, the astonishment of their quick passion, her first lover. His penis sprang up like a stone flower in her hand, and then she heard a soft thump as he tossed fat Garfield off the bed and enfolded her in his arms.

Afterward he kept drawing his finger over her body as if sketching her. “You are something,” he said.

“You are too.”

He glanced at the clock on the bedside table. “I guess it’s too late to go for the computer today.”

“Tomorrow,” Bambi said.

He grinned. “We’ll have to meet there or we’ll never get there.”

“Do you think I have so little self-control?”

“No, I think I do.”

She kissed him. She felt like a woman of the world.

They bought the computer a week later, after five hopeless tries to get out of Matt’s house in the afternoon. When Simon asked how she had been spending her time she said she had been taking a computer course. In the evenings Matt stayed away from Simon Sez because he needed to make up the lost writing hours, and because he said it made him uncomfortable to face Simon. Bambi sat in the writers’ booth and talked to her new friends. When she finally got the computer and printer home Simon put them together
for her, and then she put her mind to studying the bewildering instruction books. Matt had chosen a second program disk for her that formatted scripts. Life was good.

She tried to feel something for Simon, but whatever they used to have was gone. She was tired anyway, from her afternoons with Matt, and put Simon off as long as she could. After ten days she couldn’t make any more excuses, so they went to bed together, and the only way Bambi could feel anything with Simon was to pretend he was Matt. That worked, and it actually wasn’t so bad.

Then Matt went away for the weekend, and when he was supposed to be back Bambi called but all she got was his answering machine. He didn’t return her calls, even though she left a message saying what time Simon would be gone. She was getting frustrated and annoyed with him. And then one night, two weeks after they had first made love, she went to say hello to her pals in the writers’ booth and there was Matt with a thin blond girl Bambi recognized from one of the photographs in his house. The girl was acting much too possessive.

Bambi slid into the booth. “Bambi, this is Alyssa,” Matt said.

“Garfield?” she inquired sweetly.

“I’ve been talking about you,” he said to this blonde, and turned red.

“He said you told him he had a short attention span,” Bambi said pleasantly, but she was looking at Matt. She couldn’t believe she wasn’t more angry or upset with him; she just thought he was the biggest putz she had ever met. He had been afraid to face her and so he brought his reunited girlfriend in instead. What a completely convoluted jerk.

“He does,” Alyssa said.

“Bambi and I are buddies,” he said.

“Computer nerds,” Bambi said, and wrinkled her nose. Then she rose gracefully and moved on. His loss, she thought; dick for brains.

The next morning she got up and cut off her braid. It represented the past, and she was no longer a naive little thing. Her new very short haircut stood up in a kind of cute punk rock style, and made her brown eyes look enormous, her neck long and
vulnerable. She turned her head from side to side, inspecting her appearance in the mirror, and decided it was a distinct improvement. She had no more respect for Matt, but she didn’t regret for a minute that she’d had the affair. Men were, by and large, idiots. It wasn’t that Simon was so sexy and appealing, or that Matt was;
she
had the capacity, that was what was important. She would always be sexual. Men were only a device.

She would make up a story, learn to use the computer, and write a script. And if he was guilty enough—and she would see that he was—Matt would read her script when she finished it, and tell her what to do then. It never occurred to her that he might tell her to throw it away.

20

1983—NEW YORK

T
he walls of The Dakota were very thick and very old. It was Laura’s fortress, one in which she now lived alone. Nina had her own apartment. Clay, well … Clay was still Clay, the reluctant visitor; the only difference was that he never pretended to be charming anymore. Nina had become a reluctant visitor too, pleading work; her father’s daughter after all. Laura was only fifty-two, but seemed ancient, ageless. Her health was deteriorating from years of starvation and substance abuse: naked she looked like a Shar-Pei. She covered her wrinkled body with lovely floating clothes, her pale gray face with makeup. And on this particular evening, the household help gone home, the doors locked and bolted, Laura was sewing pills into her shower curtain.

So no one could get at them and take them away from her.

More than ever the pills were all she had, but everyone who had loved her was against her now, trying to beg or
frighten her into giving them up. Crazy Tanya Tattletale, even kind Edward; Nina Buttinski, who thought an appearance for dinner was a cue for a lecture and tears. No one could be trusted. The help—who knew if they had been bribed? Laura had two different doctors now, four different pharmacies, and a cache of security that nestled in the hem of her shower curtain and the pockets she had made along the sides. Of course no one used that shower, and the plastic liner was firmly attached, with an extra loose one within. No one would ever look in a shower curtain. She herself took tepid baths, as steam was bad for pills.

She had, of course, her trusty vial in the medicine cabinet above the sink, and a spare one in her handbag. The others were a backup. She felt as if she were always in a state of siege.

The weather was fresh again, early spring. In the park outside Laura’s window tiny green buds had appeared on the trees almost overnight, and people walked more slowly and lingered where before they had hidden from the cold. Strange people were there too, sometimes, dressed in layers of filthy rags, talking to themselves or to listeners who weren’t there. At night they slept on benches now, surrounded by tattered plastic bags filled with “treasures” they had found in the trash cans. Laura wondered who they had been before.

She wondered who
she
had been before. She had her scrap-books from the years when thousands of people had stood up and applauded her, the nights of the red roses, and when Nina came to dinner Laura brought them out and made her look.

“Do you see anyone you know?” Laura would ask.

Nina would look away.

“Do you think Susan Josephs is still your father’s mistress?”

“I have to go now.”

“Not yet. It’s early.”