An American Love Story (33 page)

“Why do you always make me sleep on the wet spot?” she
would say, pretending indignation, perhaps feeling it if she would have let herself think at all. “Why do you always do it on
my
side?” And Clay would chuckle and answer: “Because I’m smart.”

The wet spot. She remembered how hard he had been when they first became lovers, how long he could last. He was still as hard, but now he lasted thirty seconds, if he even got inside her before the deluge. Sometimes she longingly imagined what she thought of as Real Sex, and realized she might never know it again. She had never cheated on Clay. She wondered what it would be like to spend the rest of her life with this man, and his sexual limitations, as her only partner. But she knew she would never be disloyal to him, that they would go on, with her dissatisfaction and her overwhelming love, and the tender teasing to stave off embarrassment. He gave the best head in North America. She should be grateful. Some men wouldn’t do it at all.

“Get on my back,” Clay said, preparing to sleep, “and I’ll take you for a ride.”

“Where?” Susan asked, fastening herself to him in their ritual.

“Up in the sky,” he said. His voice was so dear she saw the heavens, filled with stars.

She was his, no matter what. They slept.

When Susan got back to New York she called Nina. The two of them had gotten close during these two years, and spoke to each other every few days, saw each other almost every week. Neither of them was quite sure how to define their relationship—they were not stepmother and stepdaughter, although with nineteen years between them they could have been—they were more like pals.

Seeing Nina was a package deal now: she was living with a young man. It was something she had thought would never happen, and yet the two of them had already been together for a year. His name was Stevie Duckworth, he was twenty-six, and an illustrator for children’s books. They had met at work. Nina was an associate editor at Rutledge and Brown now, according to her game plan; still the dynamo, the perfect overachiever. She had moved out of her small place with the window bars, and she and
Stevie had taken a larger walk-up apartment together in the same neighborhood; four rooms so he could work at home.

“Do you like Stevie?” she sometimes asked Susan. “I want you to like him.”

“
You
have to like him,” Susan said. “But yes, I do too.”

Susan didn’t like him that much. He was cutesy sweet and bland, white bread. Handsome and boyish with long eyelashes and dimples; the kind of looks that had long enabled him to get away with things with young women who didn’t know better yet. He signed his illustrations with a tiny line drawing of a duck—that was nice—and called Nina Quackers. That was fairly sickening, but not any worse than The Monkey. There was also a side of him that was not so sweet. Although both had time-consuming careers and the two of them shared all the expenses, Nina did all the cooking and cleaning up, while Stevie lay on the couch watching TV. Sometimes she argued with him about it, but he said he didn’t care if he ate or not; she was the one who wanted normal meals. But in spite of that Nina seemed happy and secure. Perhaps it was the normal meals; despite what he said Stevie ate like a trencherman.

“Let’s you and I have dinner alone,” Nina said to Susan on the phone. “Stevie has a class. We haven’t been alone in aeons.”

They met at a Spanish restaurant and ordered frozen margaritas, no salt. “I’ve been thinking about your article,” Nina said. “Now that I’m aware of it, I keep finding women who’ve been abused in all kinds of subtle ways as well as the big stuff. And the big stuff is appalling. I met a girl whose mother used to be a musician, until her father broke all her mother’s fingers.”

“Oh my God!”

“He was jealous. I’ve been thinking about this a lot. The way you’ve been going, according to our talks, your project seems to me to have the potential for something more than an article. You could travel to other cities, see other representative women, and this could be expanded into a book, kind of like a study by Robert Coles. Not too many women, just some more case histories in depth to make it national, dramatizing what’s going on.”

“But this is an article assignment,” Susan said.

“I mean afterwards,” Nina said. She sipped her drink. “When your cover story comes out it will engender attention and prestige. I think I could get you a book contract at R and B. It’s part of my job to find new books.”

Susan thought about it. “I’ve never written a book.”

“It will be just like what you’re doing already only more of it.”

“Maybe I could …”

“Of course you can.”

“You know,” Susan said, thinking out loud, “I could show the way they escaped, the people and places they went to for help, the discussions about why it happened … And then maybe show one who couldn’t escape.… It could be a television movie or a two-part miniseries afterward, and Clay could produce it. They’re doing things based on real life more often now.” She felt warm and excited at the thought of working again with Clay.

“It would be kind of a family project,” Nina said, her eyes gleaming. “And a hell of a lot better than Stalin.”

“Ah yes, Stalin.” They both began to giggle uncontrollably.

“What’s wrong with my father?” Nina asked.

“I don’t know. I think he’s too intellectual for television.”

“Well, ‘Like You, Like Me’ is very worthy. He can be proud of it.”

They ordered another round of frozen margaritas and some food. Nina had stopped giggling; she seemed sad and far away. “I need your help, Susan,” she said.

“Of course. What is it?”

There was a long moment of silence. “I’m pregnant.”

Little Nina! But she wasn’t so little, she was twenty-three. “What are you going to do?” Susan asked.

“I’m going to get an abortion.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. I’ve agonized over this a lot. I can’t have a baby. I certainly can’t have one with Stevie. I don’t think we’re going to last more than another year. After my childhood, my life, I could never see myself as a mother. Did you know that having me was what ruined my parents’ marriage? After I was born my father didn’t want to be with either of us anymore. I can’t go to my mother
about this; she’d be completely hysterical. My father would just think I’m a stupid fool who can’t take care of myself. I don’t want you to tell anyone I’m pregnant; not my father, not anyone. I’m not even telling Stevie.”

“I won’t tell,” Susan said. She felt so touched by Nina’s aloneness that she reached over and took her hand. “But why not Stevie?”

“No! I’m not telling Stevie. He might want to stop me, make me have the baby. It wouldn’t bother him if I had it, he never does anything to help anyway.”

“No one can
make
you have it,” Susan said. “But Stevie should go through this with you; he’s half of what made you pregnant, you didn’t do it alone.”

“He’d say I did,” Nina said. “Stevie always says contraception is the woman’s responsibility. He refuses to use anything so I have to. But care didn’t help in my case. Ninety-nine percent safe and I’m the one percent. Or whatever the odds are. So if this is my responsibility then I’m taking it.”

“You’re angry at him.”

“I’m angry at accidents. I love Stevie; he’s not so bad. If he were, I’d leave him. If I
ask
him to be helpful he will. He takes out the garbage.”

“Can you think of any other good points?” Susan asked.

“Oh …” Nina sighed. “You know, when I first found out I asked him, just theoretically, if I ever had to have an abortion would he pay for half. And he said no. He said it was the woman’s responsibility. Just like everything else, apparently. He wouldn’t mind if I had a little plaything for him to look at when he was in the mood. So, here’s what I’m trying to ask you. I’m afraid to go to the family doctor who could do it in a hospital, because he might tell my mother, so I’ve been to a clinic. They gave me counseling, and I’m to go back next week to have the abortion, but I have to bring someone to wait for me and take me home because I’m going to be groggy and I won’t feel well. Could you be the one? Could you stay with me?”

“Of course,” Susan said. An unexpected wave of sadness swept over her. Nina’s baby … What if it were a little Nina; so bright,
so beautiful … As for herself, she had hardly ever thought about having a child—marriage and children had simply not been her destiny. She’d had friends who didn’t care either, like Dana, and ones who regretted being childless, like Jeffrey. But how much she would have loved Nina’s baby, Clay’s grandchild, the perpetuation of their family.

But that was just what Nina wanted to avoid. And besides, what if it turned out to be like Stevie?

“Why are you looking like that?” Nina asked. “Are you upset with me?”

“No, of course not.” The inescapable truth was, emotional problems aside, Nina wouldn’t have been able to take care of a baby all alone and support herself, and it would have meant giving up her career and the future she had so carefully planned for so long.

“Did you ever want to have children?” Nina asked gently.

“No …”

“I wondered.”

“It’s strange, isn’t it,” Susan said, “how some people who have unhappy childhoods, like you and me, don’t want a child, while other people just can’t wait to have a lot of them and relive everything differently through them.”

“I wonder why my father never liked kids,” Nina said.

“But he loves you!”

Nina shook her head and her eyes were far away again. “No,” she said quietly. “No, he doesn’t.”

Susan and Nina went to the clinic the following week. They had to sit there for a long time before it was Nina’s turn, and neither of them spoke, each involved in her own thoughts. Then, just before she went in, Nina murmured something mysterious.

“The Supreme Court of Animals was right,” she said.

After it was over Nina lay on a cot in a room with other women while Susan waited, and then finally Susan took her home where she went to bed.

“Hey, Quackers,” Stevie said, looking up from his TV, “aren’t you going to make dinner? Quack?”

“She has the flu,” Susan said. “You’ll have to do it.” You’re old
enough to fuck, you’re old enough to cook, she thought; but of course, as usual, she didn’t say it.

“Where were you last night?” Clay asked when he called the next morning.

“Oh, I went over to have dinner with Nina and Stevie,” Susan said.

“Yecch.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t like him,” Clay said. “So how is my daughter?”

“She’s fine. Listen, I’m going to do ‘Like You, Like Me’ as a book after the article comes out. Nina’s going to get me a contract at Rutledge and Brown. I was thinking it would also make a good television movie or a two-part miniseries. The issue is timely, it’s explosive, it’s true; I’m very excited about it.”

“We’ll do it,” Clay said. “But why not a three-part miniseries?”

“I really don’t think I’ll have enough material to sustain six hours.”

“There’s more money in six hours than four,” he said. “But honey, why don’t you see if you can write the book first.”

“I know I can write the book,” Susan said.

“I know you can too.” He was the warm, confident Clay she had always known and had come to rely on.

“As soon as the article is finished I’ll Fed Ex it to you,” Susan said. “Then we’ll talk about the book. I’m going to have to travel and do a lot of research; this project is going to be hard.”

“We always work hard,” Clay said. “That’s what we do. This is a terrific project. I know it’s going to be your best. And we’ll be partners again.”

Partners … She loved the feeling of being joined to him. “I won’t let Glenn show it to anyone else,” she said.

“About Glenn Galade,” Clay said. “Those agents always want money. I’m having some financial problems right now in terms of loose cash. We’re a small company, we just can’t compete with the bigger ones. Why don’t you and I make up our own agreement, and I’ll give you the money when I get a deal with the network.
Then I’ll tell them I gave you a big advance and they’ll pay me back and I’ll pay you.”

“Glenn might scream,” Susan said.