An American Love Story (48 page)

“It was probably there for a while.”

“
What
was?”

“That’s what we’re going to see,” Dr. Samuels said.

They drove into the city on Monday and Edward insisted on going to the doctor alone. He said Tanya and Laura could come to get him afterward, talking to them as if they were Siamese twins
because he obviously knew that Tanya could never handle this by herself. It was hours before they could see him, and when they did, Edward already knew and the neurologist had to explain it to them. Two X rays were hanging from clips, the results of the CAT scan. There was Edward’s brain, and on the lower left side there was a round white mass.

“You see?” Dr. Nelson said, pointing to it. “That’s a tumor.”

Oh my God, Laura thought, what’s going to happen to him?

“It’s benign,” Tanya said, “isn’t it?” She was clutching Edward’s hand.

“That’s what we’re going to see,” the doctor said. “We have to get it out in any case. I have an excellent neurosurgeon for you and I’d like him to do it as soon as possible.”

Laura sat there numb with fear as Edward decided on the following week for the operation and the doctor prescribed Dilantin for him so he would not get a seizure in the meantime. There was also some medication for the queasiness, and they stopped off at the pharmacy on the way home and then they went to the apartment. Edward called his office and was on the phone for a long time.

“Do you know what I’d like to do?” he said then.

“What?” Tanya asked.

“I’d like to go back to East Hampton for a couple of days just to relax. This is going to be an ordeal for everybody, but there’s nothing more we can do right now, and this is still supposed to be my vacation. My will is in the study in the lower right-hand drawer of my desk, just in case something happens to me, which it won’t; but I want you to know.”

“Why are you talking about your will?” Tanya said. “You’re not going to die from this.”

“Because I have always been an organized person,” Edward said, and smiled at her.

He is going to die, Laura thought. If it’s malignant, he’ll start to die. She could not remember ever feeling this kind of fear. For too few months she had been a child in the happiest of families, healing the wounds of her past, and now in a matter of two days
their happiness was shattered. Don’t let yourself think it’s malignant, she told herself; you don’t know.

They went back to the beach. At sunset she left Tanya and Edward alone and walked by herself, thinking about their three lives. A picture came into her mind of the back of Edward’s head, his thick straight gray hair growing in perfect whorls like the lines on a certain kind of seashell, around and around until it ended in the perfect pink pinpoint of his healthy scalp. Inside that beloved head was the energy and miracle of a human brain, something you took for granted, with all its intelligence, humor, kindness and love. And inside too was that growing lump, pushing aside the infinitesimal fibers that made him who he was. She could not bear to think that too soon someone was going to cut into him and reveal his destiny. Their destiny. Edward had been their rock.

She had lost Clay, if indeed she had ever had him. She wasn’t sure if she had ever really had Nina. She had never even thought of losing Edward, but in fact he was the only one who had always been there for her, the one she should have been the most frightened of losing.

Tanya will survive, Laura thought. Tanya will just plan to meet him in another life, and communicate with him through the spirits. It’s I who will have no resources.

She sat on the sand on the shelf the tide had made. Far away down the beach a man was playing Frisbee with his dog. If only she had something to believe in the way Tanya had, or an organized religion the way her parents had had, but she did not believe in spells and she was not sure she believed in God although she was too superstitious to admit it. If there was a God she could offer something up, she could pray, she could make promises. But even if there was a God, she was not necessarily going to get anything. Good people like Edward died every day for no reason.

She knew what Edward wanted of her. He had always wanted only one thing of her: to stop taking her pills and get detoxed. They were not just “pills”—they were drugs. Why didn’t she just admit it in its worst light: she took drugs and always had. She was an addict with money.

Somewhere there had to be a higher order, if only so you had someone to try to make a bargain with.

Please let Edward’s tumor be benign, she thought. Please let him get well. I promise I will go into a clinic and stop taking drugs, no matter how hard it is, if you will only let Edward be all right.

I’ll be fat, she thought.

No, I won’t; they deal with that too. I may not be as thin as I am, but I will never be fat.

I am not taking this bargain back, I was just equivocating a little.

If you let Edward live I will get detoxed. I have already taken the first step by admitting what I am.

It was dark. She got up and walked back to the house, following the line of lighted houses she knew so well; and never told anyone what she was planning, because telling would spoil the magic.

The very delicate operation took hours. Tanya insisted on waiting at the hospital so Laura did too. “Now I understand all the brain surgeon remarks people make,” Tanya said. “Like, well, he’s no brain surgeon; or, what do you think she is, a brain surgeon?”

“Yes,” Laura said.

It was no longer a question of spoiling the magic by telling; she felt trivial and silly even though the bargain she had made was the most important decision she had made in decades.

She went to the phone to call Nina again. Ever since this had happened she had been calling Nina every night, trying to turn her daughter into the strong supportive friend she needed so much right now, and Nina had risen to the challenge as best she could; but what was there for her to do except listen? It must be very difficult for Nina too.

“Let me know what happens as soon as you know,” Nina said. “I’m sorry, but I have to go to a meeting now.” It was easier for Nina; she had her work, her lover—worthless as he usually was—and Edward was only her “uncle.” She had a real father … worthless as
he
usually was. For the first time, Laura was feeling
angry toward Clay. She had not even called him to tell him about Edward. Clay had never thought much of Edward anyway, calling him henpecked.

Laura went back to wait with Tanya. Tanya had her eyes shut and was in her private world, sending messages of health and healing into the operating room, into Edward’s skull. My pact is worth something too, Laura thought. It has to be.…

Then, at last, the door opened and the surgeon came out. It was over, and he was smiling! “Good news,” he said. “The tumor has been completely removed and the report shows it was benign. There will of course be postoperative swelling, which will go away; and there has been a certain amount of neurological trauma, some of which I’m optimistic will go away because it’s part of the swelling. At worst there might be a permanent loss of some peripheral vision on one side. But it could have been a great deal worse. Edward can reasonably expect to have a long and healthy life.”

“Oh, thank you,” Tanya said. She was smiling back. “We did it together.”

“That’s right,” he said, but you could see he was only being polite.

You’d be surprised, Laura thought.

A month later, when Edward was coming along well and Tanya could handle things, when the first fiery turning leaves appeared in the New England hills, a small gaunt woman in large sunglasses and a turban got out of a rented chauffeur-driven car and entered the private drug rehabilitation center there. There was really no reason for Laura Hays Bowen to disguise herself this way, since no one had known who she was for years. But she liked doing it. It gave her a touch of drama.

She was very nervous but also elated, and for that single moment of stage fright before she opened the door to the building she remembered again what it had felt like to be a star.

33

1987—NEW YORK AND LOS ANGELES

I
t was fall. For Susan every day was a baby step, and some of them backward. Framed photographs of Clay still smiled at her from her dresser top, loving and reassuring and not belonging there at all anymore. She tried to put them into the drawer, but at night she had to take them out again or else she could not sleep. She put her stuffed monkey away too, but somehow it always ended up in her arms. She had not sent his half empty bottle of cologne to him but she was not able to throw it away either. Sometimes she smelled it, bringing back such a flood of deliberately fragmented memories that she felt sick. Only a masochist, she thought, would do a thing like this.

She had lecture dates to fulfill. Work, it seemed, had always been the only thing, she was good at, and she got through them as if she were an actress in a play. There was local press, and when she was interviewed the reporter always asked her if she had a husband. She said she was divorced. The truth was too bizarre, too difficult to
explain. When they asked about children, sometimes she said she had a daughter.

She was unable to write because of her grief, and she needed the money from these lectures on being trapped by a destructive love object to pay her therapist. There seemed a certain irony in this.

Dutifully, seeking some balm, she asked people to get her blind dates, but even the men said there were no good men around who weren’t taken. Joan Giacondo, who had told her to get the detective, now told her to take an ad in the personals to see how many eager males were out there looking for connection. It resulted in a flood of letters, frequently from men who were insane. Susan called a few of the probably sane ones, and sat through agonizing meetings in safe public places, during which she could not think of a thing to say. She had not dated anyone for seventeen years, and in the Sixties people didn’t date. She felt like a miserable teenager, carefully made up, trying to hide her emotional problems, stung by anything unkind this meaningless stranger said to her; giving him an hour, “giving him a chance,” as her mother used to say.

She had forgotten how to talk to a man. She had never had to think of how to talk to Clay. These strangers always wanted to know about her past marital status, and if she said she had never been married they waited for her to tell them why, or so it seemed. Why would an attractive, intelligent, interesting woman like her have remained single all these years? Perhaps there was something wrong with her? The men always had a former marriage, sometimes two, as if they had passed some test. She felt dead; she did not have the slightest interest in meeting anybody. She finally told Joan Giacondo she didn’t feel she was ready to date unless it happened by accident. Giving up was a great relief.

And then what she had been waiting for all this time happened: her work took her to L.A. One lecture, one free plane ticket, a good excuse, and time to spy.

“I’m coming,” she told Sean. They still had their long talks every week and were eager to meet. They arranged to have drinks in the Polo Lounge the first night she was there, as soon as she
finished her speech. She had made the client put her in the Beverly Hills Hotel for the one night, in spite of the memories. After all, everything had memories. The Wilshire memories were worse. The next day she would go to Dana’s.

“I’m coming to Los Angeles,” she told Clay.

“We’ll have dinner,” he said. “I know you’ll be busy, so you tell me when you’ll be free and I’ll make it my business to be free too.”

He acted as if he had no other life, no Bambi, no real work. Susan restrained herself from telling him what a hypocrite he was.

“One thing you must promise me,” she said to Dana on the phone. “I want you to come with me to look at Bambi’s house. I don’t know my way around there and I’m afraid to go alone.” She felt childlike and vulnerable, lost without Clay, although with him she had never been this dependent.

“I have a friend who’s renting a house in the Hollywood Hills,” Dana said. “Not far from the young lovers, in fact. I’ll get her to invite us for lunch.”