An American Love Story (46 page)

Susan replaced the receiver. I can’t believe I did that, she thought, appalled.

But she knew she would do it again, and other things, with desperation and obsession; as if it were the only way she could prove to herself that all this was true … and to enter their lives, although they could never find out.

She went to therapy every day, with the Substitute Shrink, trying to stave off the pain, carrying scraps of paper with her nightmares written on them. She went to a psychic, a fat jolly woman named Riba, whose waiting room was filled with women who had been betrayed by men. She had been instructed to bring photographs. Susan brought one of herself and Clay and Nina, when everything had been good.

“He still loves you,” Riba said. For the first time, finally, Susan began to cry. “He does, he loves you.” Riba tapped Nina’s face. “Be kind to that little girl,” she said. “She’s been hurt too. She needs you. Do you have any questions?” Susan couldn’t speak, she was crying too hard. “Bring me a photo of his girlfriend,” Riba said. “I’ll tell you all about her.”

At five o’clock on Friday afternoons, when the rates changed, Susan had taken to calling Sean, her detective. There had been a chord of sympathy between them from the start. He remembered her well and said he was glad she had called, that he wanted to know what was happening to her. He had given her the terrible news, and now he wanted to help make her feel better. They talked about life. He said he had been hurt too, and they compared notes. He hadn’t been married either. She would mix a mimosa, take it to the phone, and they would talk for over an hour. She had never met a man with such an understanding of the human heart.

“What do you look like?” she asked one day.

“Six feet tall, about a hundred and fifty pounds, brown hair, green eyes.” That was a nice surprise.

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-five.”

“Twenty-five! I can’t believe it. I would have thought you were much older.”

“I feel much older,” he said.

Bambi was young enough to be Clay’s daughter, Sean was young enough to be her son; and he was the first man to be nice to her after Clay destroyed all her self-esteem. It made her feel better. From their strange beginning they had become friends.

“I need a picture of Bambi for my psychic,” she told him. “I’ll pay, of course.”

“That’ll be fun,” he said. “I’d like to see what she looks like myself. I’ll stake out the house early in the morning before she leaves for work. The photos may be a little blurry, because I can’t get too close.”

“How will you do it?”

“I’ll use a van with blacked-out windows and infrared film.”

“Wow!” She loved it when he told her the secrets of his trade, and always asked him questions. She knew all about how he had nailed Clay and Bambi. “The psychic says it doesn’t matter if the picture is clear or not because she uses the vibrations,” Susan said. She liked that he didn’t say she was silly to believe in these things. The way she was feeling she would believe in anything that could help at all.

When the photos came in the mail she looked at them for a long time. She spent little of it on Clay, coming out of the house, getting into his car. She knew what he looked like. She concentrated on Bambi: young and slim with pixie hair, the curve of her slender neck as she bent down to lock the door making her look vulnerable. Clay had fallen in love with that neck.

She looks like an elf, Susan thought. You have to love an elf.

She tried to figure out what the house looked like. It was difficult to tell because there were so many trees. I have proof now, she thought, I have photographs. Something else that Clay will never know.

Riba held the pictures in her hand and let out her hearty earth mother laugh. “Oh, this beauty,” she said. “She hates men.”

“You think she’s beautiful?”

“I’m being sarcastic. She thinks men are a means to an end. She thinks they should do things for her. This is one angry lady.”

“Does she love him?”

“No. She’s probably cheating already.”

Somehow that made Susan feel a little better, even though she wondered if Riba said that to everybody to make them less bereft.

She and Dana made plots for revenge. Susan tried to put all Clay’s things into a large trash bag to leave with her doorman, but it ripped. Then they hypothesized putting his things in a box with a dead cat in it, and sending it to him at Bambi’s house the slowest way, so it would really smell. When they talked about it they laughed, although Susan had no idea where to find a dead cat. There were times she actually hated Clay now. She told Dana about Clay’s recent problems in bed.

“So this is what you do,” Dana said. “You come to California, and you invite the two of them to lunch someplace chic; the Bistro
Garden, outdoors. And in the middle of lunch you turn to Bambi and say: ‘Isn’t it awful about Clay’s premature ejaculation? Don’t you just hate sleeping on the wet spot?’ And then you get up and leave her with the check and the corpse.”

“The check and the corpse!” Susan laughed hysterically. The only time she ever found anything funny these days was when she was planning her fictitious retribution with her best friend.

She had other women friends too, whom she called to tell what had happened, and who immediately became a support group of understanding. All of them had busy and often separate lives, most had families—husbands, children—but now these women, many of whom had been through similar abandonments, sympathized and included her in their plans. They went to dinner, to movies, but Susan forgot the plot of the movie as soon as it was over, forgot what she had eaten; remembered only what her friends had said to her in their long discussions about Clay. She wondered how these patient people could put up with her.

Her lectures loomed ahead in the fall. She had committed to them before she knew she would come apart, and now she wondered how she could get up in front of an audience and pretend to be an authority on anything. She had to talk about abuse, she who had been abused in her own way without even noticing the irony. The strangers who had come to hear her would have sympathized too, but she couldn’t bring herself to talk about it.

All she wanted was to be able to get through each day, and eventually to be able to get through those speeches giving the appearance of someone sane. Time expanded and pulled back like a rubber band. It would always be summer, and she would never be over him. She felt raw and vulnerable, and when she looked into the mirror her eyes were filled with fear.

And then one morning he called.

“Hi,” he said. “This is Clay.”

He sounded tentative, testing; unsure if she would still let him have a place in her life. Despite everything she felt the familiar relief flood through her at the sound of his voice.

“I know who it is,” Susan said gently, waiting.

“How are you?”

“Okay. And you?”

“Struggling along,” he said. “Another day, another dollar.”

“Another day, another fifty cents.”

He chuckled. “That’s about it with these vultures out here.”

And how is Bambi? she thought. Is she going to meetings with you and the vultures? Is she thrilled?

“You got some mail at the apartment,” he said. “It was addressed to Mrs. Bowen.”

“There are several Mrs. Bowens,” Susan said. And besides, she thought, you don’t even live at the apartment.

“No,” he said, “this was for you. Do you want it?”

“I don’t care.”

“I’ll have Penny send it.”

“Fine.”

“How’s the weather?”

“Hot.”

“It’s very hot here,” he said. “You remember how terrible summer is in L.A.”

We loved being there together, she thought. “Yes,” she said.

“How’s the work going?” he asked.

Work? What work? I work at the therapist on my broken heart. “Okay,” she lied.

“How’s Dana?”

You don’t like Dana. “She’s fine.”

“And Jeffrey?”

You don’t give a shit about Jeffrey. “He’s fine.”

“I always liked Jeffrey,” Clay said.

You hardly even knew him. You just liked that I had a safe man to go out with when you were away. “I’ll tell him you said hello,” Susan said.

“Yes, do that.”

And you tell Anwar hello from me, she thought. “When are you coming to take away your things?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Clay said, suddenly abrupt. “I have a call from Europe, I have to go now.” He hung up.

He still needs me, she thought.

He called her again several days later, and then he began calling
every few days. She stopped being surprised to hear from him, and was simply glad. He no longer bothered to identify himself, and now before he hung up he said, “I’ll talk to you in a few days, sweetheart.” Sometimes she missed him so much she phoned him, at the office of course. He always seemed grateful. Although going back on their conversations, and even while they were having them, she realized they had nothing to say to each other because they could not talk about what really mattered, that was not the point.

He came to New York for two days and took her to dinner. They sat in one of their favorite little restaurants, side by side, and after a while he held her hand under the table. She tried to ask him again why he had done all this to her, and again he cried. “I can’t talk about it,” he said.

“At least tell me how you met her.”

“Someone sent me a bad script,” Clay said.

“Did Bambi send it?”

“No, she wrote it.”

He didn’t even mind that it was bad, Susan thought.

He acted irritated when she mentioned his things, and said he had no time to take them. Finally, when he had gone back to California again, she had her cleaning woman throw them into a carton, because she could not bear to touch them herself, and she sent them off to the apartment. She had wanted to send them to Bambi, to make trouble, but she was afraid either Bambi would gloat or Clay would manage to make up some plausible lie. She had the cleaning woman put his favorite bathrobes on top so he would see them and perhaps feel sad for a moment, although she suspected he never opened the carton at all.

Sean had said Clay had everything he needed in the house in the Hollywood Hills.

31

1987—HOLLYWOOD

“I
need to sharpen up my image,” Bambi told Clay. They were having Sunday breakfast in her house, surrounded by the newspapers. It was strange how Clay took up so much more space than Simon ever had. For one thing, Simon had hardly ever been there, while Clay was home a lot, and for another, Clay brought all these scripts and books, and things he intended to file. After scavenging the papers their Sunday routine was then to go through all the magazines that had arrived at the office during the week, looking for famous dead people or worthy news events that might make good material for television. She no longer lived in Little House on the Prairie, she lived in a media executive mess.

“What’s wrong with your image?” Clay said.

“I should probably wear Armani. It’s expensive, and big shoulders command respect.”

“I respect you,” Clay said.

“I know you do, but I’m talking about meetings. I was going to buy some designer suits in Paris, but we never got there.”

“We’ll get there.”

She certainly hoped so. She had been looking forward so much to the MIP last spring, but then one of the men Clay had wanted to see had decided not to go there, and the other one had come here the month before so there was no point. So far the only trip the two of them had taken in their two years together had been a weekend in Miami, trying to get the rights to a book. It had been hot and oppressively humid, with enormous ugly bugs, and the water in their highly recommended small hotel had come out brown. It certainly wasn’t the French Riviera. And after all their trouble the networks had turned down the project anyway.

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

“Good,” he said mildly. He was reading the book review section.

“I can’t go to meetings in an old Honda,” Bambi said. “It’s worse than your secretary’s car. People here judge you by what kind of car you drive.”

“Remember, it was I who told you that,” Clay said.

“I wish I had a Fifties Thunderbird convertible like yours,” Bambi said. “Everybody would notice me.”

“They’d see it in the parking lot at the restaurant and rob your house while you were eating lunch.”

“Nobody ever robbed us,” she said, annoyed.

“Why don’t you get a Jaguar?” Clay said. “You can afford it.”

“I’m not the Jaguar type. I’d like to get a De Lorean with the gull wing doors.”

“I bet the people who bought that one are sorry,” he said.

“I bet they’re glad. It’s going to be a classic someday. Like your T-Bird.”

“I’m smart,” he said, and tapped his forehead.

“And I’m going to get a computerized treadmill,” Bambi said.

“What for?”

“To run on. You and I are the only people in Hollywood who don’t do any exercise.”

“You look great to me.”

“Thank you, but I’m talking about health.”

“I’ve lived this long without doing anything; I’m not going to start now,” Clay said. He poured another cup of coffee from the pot Bambi had made and started to take it into the bedroom. “I’m going to take a shower.”