An American Love Story (51 page)

All she knew was that this man would want to see her again, and she hoped it would be soon.

34

1987—NEW YORK

N
ina had been with Stevie Duckworth for five years—nearly a fifth of her life. It was as long as she had spent learning how to walk and talk and dress herself and read, longer than she had spent in college, almost as long as she had been in publishing.

She was a senior editor now at Rutledge and Brown, and making decent money, as he was with his illustrations. She thought they should think of moving to a better apartment, take a trip to Europe, try to widen their lives and have some interests together. He said they did, but the fact was they were very different. Even their hours were different. He worked at home and she worked at the office. When she came back after her day, relieved to be away from office politics and eager to be alone with him, he needed to get out of the house, to go running or to the gym, and after she cooked dinner if he wasn’t immersed in TV he wanted to go to play pool and drink with his friends.

Frat Hogs, she called them. She had to bring manuscripts home most nights, to finish reading by morning, so she often let him go by himself. She didn’t like that he came home hammered at one
A.M.
, but hanging around watching him do it wasn’t any better. He didn’t like her to try to play pool because he said she was lousy at it. She who had always tried to excel at everything didn’t even really care. She had noticed that when some bimbo with big tits and a small brain tried to play, Stevie was much more charitable. Sometimes she wondered if their relationship was worth saving.

But another part of her insisted she save it. Women, she believed, were stronger than men. Men were out of touch with their feelings, even their thoughts. It was up to the woman to shape up her hapless creature, to sustain romance when he took it for granted, to instigate discussions about what was going wrong. A man certainly wouldn’t try. She thought of her parents and her strange childhood. She knew she couldn’t spend her life with Stevie, but she wasn’t ready to give up on him either.

Every so often when she was feeling annoyed and ambivalent this way she strayed to their bookcase and took down the children’s book about the little girl that he had illustrated two years ago. She remembered the day when she had gone to his drawing board to look at what he was keeping so mysterious. There was his painting of the tiny girl, sitting on a mushroom in the forest; pretty, delicate and winsome … with
her
face! It was unmistakably her, immortalized in his brushstrokes, an homage. She was surprised and deeply touched.

“You caught me,” he said, smiling, sneaking up behind her.

“Oh, Stevie, she’s me.”

“I wanted to surprise you.”

“You did. It’s wonderful.”

He had beamed.

She would get so angry at him and then he would do something totally unexpected and nice and she would remember all over again why she had fallen in love with him.

Unfortunately, recently she had to drag up the happy days of the past more and more. She put the book back, glanced at her watch
and finished her coffee. He came stumbling out of the bedroom as she was rinsing her cup.

He looked so cute and boyish in the morning, with his hair all touseled, a little vague and grumpy. She felt a rush of tenderness toward him. “Why don’t I make a special dinner tonight,” she said, “and we’ll really spend time together. I won’t bring home any work, you won’t watch TV, and we’ll talk.”

“Talk about what, Quackers?”

Somehow lately in one second he managed to ruin her mood; she was on an emotional roller coaster. She restrained herself from telling him, for the millionth time, that she hated it when he called her Quackers. He would only say that she used to like it, and she would reply that she never did, and ten minutes later he would be calling her that again.

“How about where we’re going to go for our vacation?”

He looked nonplussed. “I thought we were going to Club Med in Mexico again,” he said. “Our friends are going.”

“Wouldn’t you like to go somewhere different? Europe, for instance? We could go to Paris and I’d show you all around. It would be so romantic. And then we could go to the South of France, or to England, where I’ve never been, or even Italy. There are so many places I want to see.”

“But our friends are going to Club Med,” Stevie said.

“They’re not our friends,” Nina said, “They’re yours. They don’t like me.”

“You don’t like them, Quackers.”

“True,” Nina said. “And since that’s the case, why would I want to spend my precious limited vacation with them?”

“Because I do.”

She held in her temper. She was going to have a romantic evening if it killed her. “Why don’t I make something new and wonderful for dinner, and you pick up some nice wine?”

“Okay. And then you come with me to play pool.”

The truth was she had been thinking more on the lines of sex after dinner. They had not made love for a month, and it hadn’t been very good for a long time before that. Stevie’s idea of foreplay was her sucking his cock. He had chased her so ardently in the
beginning, which now seemed so long ago, but as soon as they had settled down he had reverted to what she now reluctantly realized was his true self. Men only did things to you to get you. They really didn’t like it. He didn’t even seem to like her body. What he liked was getting it off.

“Let’s play it by ear,” she said, trying to sound seductive, but not so seductive that she would scare him. She had to leave for the office or she would be late. She kissed him good-bye. “We have a date,” she said. “Seven o’clock.”

“White wine or red?” he asked.

“You pick. I’ll make something that goes with either one.”

She gave him a lingering look when she left. He certainly didn’t look thirty-one. Didn’t act it either, the mean thought crept in. But she didn’t feel twenty-seven, and she hoped she didn’t look it. “You’re so adorable,” she said. “My Ducky.”

“Quack,” he said.

She was so late now she would have to take a cab.

After an editorial meeting, a business lunch with an agent, an editing session with a reluctant author, and a last-minute rewrite on jacket copy she wasn’t satisfied with, Nina left the office at six o’clock and rushed to the supermarket and the Korean to buy the things she needed to make dinner. She had decided on a fairly quick chicken recipe she had seen in
Gourmet
magazine. She bought flowers at the Korean too, and hurried home with her purchases. Stevie wasn’t there yet, good.

She put on tights, because Stevie liked her legs, and a loose T-shirt, because he said she was flat-chested so why bother, and played her favorite albums while she cooked. When he got home she would replace them with his favorites. It wasn’t until eight o’clock that she began to get upset.

Maybe he’d met some friends at the gym and stopped for a drink afterward. She didn’t like it when he did that, but he got carried away. Then he would have to stop at the liquor store for their dinner. She’d give him another half an hour and then she’d let herself get mad.

At nine o’clock the dinner was finished and getting dry. She called the gym but he wasn’t there, and then she called his favorite
bar, the one near the gym, but he wasn’t there either. She called the dump where he played pool, but no one had seen him. She began to worry that he had been mugged or hit by a car.

What if he was in the hospital? If he was waiting in the emergency room he would call her, unless he was too sick, but then eventually the hospital would have to. She didn’t know what to do, and finally she started to cry a little. She wondered if she should start phoning the hospitals herself, and eventually, at eleven o’clock, after she had called the pool place again, she did. He wasn’t there.

It was midnight. He hadn’t called, and she was in a cold sweat. She thought of telephoning Susan to have someone to commiserate with, but it was too late, and besides she was so used to handling things alone that she thought it would be better just to wait some more until she found out what had happened. She had no idea what could have happened, and that scared her more than any fantasy she could have.

She was a little hungry but too upset to eat. There was nothing in the apartment to drink except seltzer. She was tired, but sleep was out of the question. She had stopped trying to keep her ruined dinner warm, and now she left it on the table next to the flowers and the candles and the cloth napkins just in case he was all right, so he would see what he had missed. She heard him fumbling with his key in the lock at half past one.

He was dead drunk but not dead. Her fear slipped away and anger replaced it, the repressed rage of the entire evening. “Where were you?” she screamed.

“I went to the gym and then I had a couple of drinks with Dave.”

“I called the gym.”

“You must have missed me.” He didn’t seem to remember their plans at all.

“You were supposed to be home at seven o’clock,” Nina said. “I made a special dinner, remember? We had a date.”

“Oh, Quackers,” Stevie said, not really contritely, “I’m sorry. I forgot.”

“You
forgot
?”

“Yes.” He went into the bathroom.

“How could you forget?” she shouted through the closed door, but somehow to her dismay her angry shout sounded more like a hurt puppy’s whine. “I was scared to death that something happened to you.”

He flushed the toilet and came out. “These things happen,” he mumbled, and fell on the bed and went to sleep.

Nina slept on the couch that night, partly because she was so angry at him and partly because he was taking up the whole bed. In the morning she left him still sleeping and went to work. She couldn’t even look through his pockets, not that she expected to find anything, because he was wearing his clothes.

She wondered what was wrong with her that she was still willing to try to save what little they had. She didn’t want to be like her mother, holding on to something that didn’t exist, but she couldn’t just throw away five years of her life either. She and Stevie were an unfinished story.

Why did love disappear like that? They had been in love once; she remembered the happy times, the excitement, the early passionate sex, the close and euphoric feeling of being a couple. She thought of the sweet surprises, the little girl on the mushroom … But she had grown, she thought, and he hadn’t.

If that was the case, why wasn’t she the one leaving him?

At eleven o’clock flowers arrived at her office. They were from Stevie. He had gotten them himself, not just phoned; there was his trademark duck drawing on the card. Above it he had written: “In vino piggyness. Forgive me?”

She sat there for five minutes trying to figure out what to do. He had never been an alcoholic and she was sure he was not one now. He hadn’t gotten drunk and forgotten, she was certain of it. But the alternative was that he had chosen not to come home, and not to call. That was even worse. Finally she picked up the receiver.

“I got the flowers,” she told him.

“Did you like them?”

“Yes.”

“Am I forgiven?”

“Will you promise not to do it again?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Yes you promise, or yes you’ll do it again?”

“Yes I promise.”

“I was very hurt and scared,” Nina said.

“I know.”

“Did you see the dinner?”

“I ate it for breakfast,” Stevie said.

“Didn’t you have a hangover?” For an instant she thought that he had been pretending to be drunker than he was, that he had only been pretending to be asleep when she left.

“It cured my hangover,” he said. “See you tonight after work?”

“Yes,” Nina said.

After all, where else did she have to go?

She made another special dinner the following week, and he showed up on time and tried to be charming, although he was still adamant about their vacation trip. After dinner Nina went with him to the loathed pool hall. There was a red-haired girl there named Leslie who greeted Stevie like an old friend, or perhaps more, and flirted with him right in front of her. Nina sized her up. Enormous boobs, great legs, face like a horse. Giggle for chitchat. Practically drooling on him. Good player. Habitué of the hall. Nina did not like their relationship one bit, but kept it to herself.

When they came home it was late. She wondered if she should make a romantic overture. The part of her that was angry at him for flirting said no, but the part that wanted to believe he still preferred her to anyone else said yes. But when she snuggled up to him he turned his back, mumbled good night, and went to sleep.

So much for that, but she was hurt. She had a hard time falling asleep, going over all her physical deficiencies, real and imagined, permanent and fixable. At least she was intelligent, although perhaps that, too, was a drawback. But she had no intention of pretending to be stupid to please anybody.

Thanksgiving came. They couldn’t go to her mother’s, because Laura was still in the detox hospital, learning how to eat and have an accurate idea of what her body really looked like. Nina admired her very much for her courage and hoped she would make it. They
certainly weren’t going to go to California to visit her father and Bambi—they hadn’t even been invited, not that she wanted to go. So once again they went to Stevie’s parents in Florida.

Nina had always liked Stevie’s parents and the warm feeling of a normal family that she had never had as a child. His parents liked her too, and as usual his mother made hints about their getting engaged. Stevie had two sisters and two brothers, all married, all with kids. Even his friends in New York had finally made commitments. Nina realized that she and Stevie were the only couple they knew their age who were still just going together; neither married, engaged, nor even talking about it. She couldn’t imagine being married to him. It would be nice to have his family without him coming along too, but that was life.

The night she and Stevie came back from Florida he went out to buy seltzer and didn’t come back for forty-five minutes. The fact that they already had seltzer seemed to have escaped him. Something was very wrong; this was not rational behavior. And then, she knew. He was seeing someone, she was suddenly sure of it, or at the least making a long phone call, and she felt sick. She thought about Leslie, the temptress of the pool table, his “buddy,” and something in her said: It’s her. She had no idea why she was so certain of it, but she was. When he came back she was ready for him.