An American Love Story (56 page)

“We’ll get you new business cards as soon as we get home.”

“And new memo pads and stationery,” she said.

That night Clay had an anxiety attack and she was very solicitous. The next day on the plane going back to America he gave her a script to read, which Max April had given him to drop off at the Beverly Hills Hotel for a possible investor who was staying there. It was called “Teckel and Hyde,” and was a comedy about a detective named Teckel and his assistant Ms. Hyde who fought but were really very attracted to each other. The folder it was in was terribly dog-eared and the edges of the pages were yellow.

“You should make Penny retype this before you show it to anybody,” Bambi said.

“I intend to. I think it’s good, don’t you? It’s sort of like that stupid thing that’s such a hit …”

“Moonlighting,”
Bambi said.

“Yes. It would depend on the actors we get.”

“It’s awfully English …”

“A lot of the best shows were originally English,” Clay said. “We would adapt it.”

“Then what do you need this for?” Bambi asked.

He grabbed the script back from her. “What do you know?” he said.

“Then why did you ask me?”

“I wanted your opinion.”

But only if I agree with you, she thought. She comforted herself by thinking of the logo she wanted on her new business cards, and when after a while he took her hand she squeezed it back. They sat there holding hands until he fell asleep.

When she got back to Hollywood she told everybody that her business trip to London and Paris had been very productive, very interesting. She ordered the new business cards, memo pads and stationery, and showed off her clothes. Penny retyped the ancient script, and Bambi went with Clay to the Beverly Hills Hotel to drop it off. They were walking through the lobby when Clay suddenly tapped her arm.

“Look!” he said. “There’s Link Murphy. He starred for me in a series years ago at RBS. It made him rich and famous.”

Bambi looked at the tall, lean, craggy-faced middle-aged man. She had never even heard of him. “Link!” Clay called, and walked up to him. The actor turned. “Clay Bowen,” Clay said, and extended his hand.

Link Murphy’s blank look turned to pleased surprise. “Clay Bowen!” he said. “We were just talking about you. We thought you were dead.” Then he realized how that sounded and tried to cover up. “I mean, I said: he was very well known, if he was dead we would have heard.” He trailed off, dimly aware he was making it worse.

“Well, I’m not dead yet,” Clay said, and chuckled. “This is Bambi Green.”

“Bambi,” Link said, and shook her hand. She glanced at Clay. He looked smaller somehow, shrunken; like a carapace, with all the light gone out inside him. She wondered how long he had looked like that.

“Nice to see you, Clay,” Link said.

“Nice to see you.”

Seven years since Clay had had anything on television. Was there a statute of limitations? She had been with him over three years and they hadn’t managed to get anything on. Nothing but promises from him and rejections from the networks. Maybe he really was dead.…

“Well, how are you?” Link said. He obviously didn’t ask Clay
what he was doing now because it might be embarrassing; he waited for Clay to offer.

“Just great,” Clay said. “I’m doing a comedy series called ‘Teckel and Hyde.’ ”

No you’re not, Bambi thought. You hope you’re doing it.

“And a miniseries based on a book called
Like You, Like Me
, by Susan Josephs. And Bambi is working on a Movie of the Week script for me.”

“You’re very busy,” Link said.

“It’s a living.” He chuckled again, jovially. “And you?”

“Couple guest shots. RBS wants me to star in a new series, but I don’t know. I don’t need the money and I’m awfully lazy. To get up every morning that early again … we’ll see.”

“Yes …” Clay said.

“Well, it was nice seeing you, Clay. Bambi.”

“Nice seeing you,” Clay said.

“Lovely meeting you,” Bambi said.

They walked away and Clay didn’t say anything. She couldn’t look at him. Reluctantly she let the realization sink in. He’s a has-been, she thought. He’s not powerful. All this time he’s been pretending. She felt sick.

They waited in front of the hotel for the parking attendant to bring Clay’s car. She looked at the expensive cars with the tanned men in them and wondered who they were. Most of them looked like movie and TV executives. This town was full of them. She would have to start networking again.

She thought of her new title. What good was it to be vice-president in an office of two? Did anybody know that? Not unless she told them, and she wouldn’t. She would simply say, quite truthfully, that she had gone as far in her current position as she was able to go, and it was time to move on. Other independent producers had problems too. These things happened all the time.

Of course she would have to be very discreet. But she had always been good at that.

38

1988—NEW YORK

S
usan was immersed in her research for
Tiny Tombstones
while Andy was on location for his miniseries. He called her every few days and came to see her twice. She was beginning to think that a romance based on hot sex and supportive friendship was probably ideal, but sometimes the damage Clay had done intruded and made her feel old, depressed, and alone, needing more reassurance from Andy than he could give. She never told him that. He kept telling her he loved her, and that they would be friends forever, and she tried not to think about the probable end.

She asked him if The MAW was with him in New Orleans, and he said she had come down to visit for a while, that he had given her a small part with two lines, hoping she could become more independent.

“She and I have nothing to talk about,” he said. “We talk about the relationship.”

But so did they. In Susan’s apartment there were the
cozy dinners, the flowers and wine he always brought, the music and candlelight; and sometimes they got up exuberantly from her dining table and disco danced. There were the coiled and sweaty sheets, their clothes and the bedcovers tangled on the floor, his beautiful damp body glowing like a lost alien in the lowered light. But somehow, at some point, the subject always got back to Brooke, to why he hadn’t left her yet, to what was wrong with her so he knew he should go. It was a tug of war: they were both pulling at him, and Susan knew that no matter what he said he secretly enjoyed it.

His miniseries was being edited and he went to Hollywood. Susan had begun traveling to other cities for her interviews, the way she had with
Like You, Like Me
, and now she was listening to women as well as men. She was busy all the time, and had accepted no more lecture dates for the duration. Her work was beginning to bring back her self-esteem; she told him and he was happy for her. Wherever she and Andy were they talked on the phone; keeping in touch, promising, reminiscing, confiding, flirting. One weekend he flew out to see her in Chicago for twenty-four hours, and they never left her hotel room.

“We’re like two kids, and one of us is going to die,” he said in bed. “And it’s going to be me.”

He finished his miniseries and came back to New York. It was hot, steamy, humid and miserable. Water ran down the outside of her windows as she sat in her air-conditioned apartment writing about other people’s lives, trying to understand her own. There were the men who traded in their wives for a younger zippier version, and those who traded in for something entirely different, as if they could thereby shed a skin. Love came first and adaptation later: the man now liked what he used to dislike because it was part of the package.

“Our children always wanted an animal,” one woman told her. “They begged for a cat. My husband hated cats, and he was so allergic to them that if he was in a room with one for twenty minutes his throat would close and he would have to leave. At night, when it was cold, the stray cats would come to sit on the hood of our car because it was warm. He would run outside and
scream at them to get off, and sometimes he even threw stones. Then he met her, and left me to live with her. She has three cats. His nose was stuffed up for about a year, but now … the kids went to visit and said their father carries one of the cats around in his arms all the time, like a baby. I don’t know why, but I think that hurts me more than anything.”

“He said the suburbs were out of the question because they were so far away,” another woman said. “So we lived in the city. I liked it too. He was so funny, he wouldn’t even go to a party in the suburbs, wouldn’t hear of it. Then he left me for her. She has a house in the country and he commutes every day.”

“He made me dress like a wife,” the Kewpie doll blond woman said in a tiny voice. “Always suits, skirts, dresses. Miniskirts were forbidden. Never jeans. Then he went off with her. She’s a graduate student. I don’t think she owns a dress.”

“The death of a thousand tiny cuts,” Susan wrote.

She called Dana and interviewed her about Henri Goujon. He had been seen at the local grocery with a new woman and was probably on his way to his fifth marriage—Susan was including him just under the wire. “Why is there always another woman ready to take on a man with a short attention span?” Dana said. “We always think we’ll be his last. Actually, so does he.”

Susan was even more involved in this project than she had been in
Like You, Like Me
because she identified with it much more. She worked obsessively because she needed the answers; her feeling of accomplishment kept her pain at bay. And in between there was Andy. She felt she could never have enough sex with him. Such tenderness toward him filled her that she thought it might even be love.

She wondered what would have happened if it had been she who met Andy while she was with Clay instead of Clay who had met Bambi. Sometimes she fantasized about it. How could she have refused this need, this amazing obsessive pleasure? Would she have been able to send Andy away, or would she have had a secret affair with him? She could almost imagine it: wanting to keep Clay, much as Clay had wanted to keep her. But it would have been different—she would never have considered leaving
Clay, she would never have lived with Andy—she would have seen him on secret afternoons while Clay was in California without her. But of course it was only a fantasy. While she had been with Clay she had never been at all available to any man.

“Let’s go to the Hamptons for a weekend,” Andy said. It was one of the rare cool evenings and they were having dinner in the garden of a restaurant.

“When?”

“This weekend? Would you like to do that?”

“I’d love it.”

“Tonight I told Brooke I never want to see her again.”

She was surprised. “Just like that? Good-bye?”

“Yes.”

She felt the tiniest flutter of warning. “Wasn’t it a little … abrupt?”

“It was the only way I could do it.”

They held hands at the table and kissed in public. She was both flattered and embarrassed because he looked so young. At the end of the evening he walked her home, and then, because it was late and he had an early meeting, he left. “We have all the time in the world now to be together,” he said.

Just before she went to bed she called him. His line was busy. She called him several more times during the next hour to reconfirm what she already knew; that he was on the phone with Brooke. Brooke had probably left urgent tearful messages on his answering machine, and now he was explaining (yet again) the problems leading to their breakup, and trying to comfort her. Susan hung up. No matter how miserable she had been in her life she had never been able to beg or to throw scenes, and she felt annoyed at that young and emotional girl for having, in her weakness, so much power. It was a long time before she fell asleep.

When he didn’t phone her the next day she called him. “I can’t talk now,” he said quietly, his voice tense. He didn’t call for two days. “Brooke has been in my apartment for forty-eight hours,” he said. “She’s hysterical. She tried to commit suicide. She says nobody ever loved her. She won’t leave, she won’t go to work. I’m afraid she’s going to cut up my clothes or jump out the window.”

“Doesn’t she have a family you can call?” Susan asked.

“She wanted to call them and tell them what I did to her,” Andy said, “but I wouldn’t let her. She was incoherent. They would think I was a monster.”

“What are you going to do?”

“She’s a little better now. She’s asleep. I want her to take her clothes away. I thought she had only one or two outfits here, but when I looked in my closet I was surprised at how many clothes she had brought and left here over a period of time.”

“That’s the first time you ever looked in your closet?”

“I just never noticed.”

I remember something like that, she thought. “Has she been living with you?” she said.

“No,” he said indignantly. “She doesn’t stay here every night. And she doesn’t have a key.”

“Oh, yes she does,” Susan said. “Trust me.”

“How could she have a key?”

“Did you ever lend her your key to go pick up the laundry?”

“Yes …”

“She made a copy. Believe me.”

“Then she could come in when I’m not here and do something.”

“If you’re worried, change the lock.”

“You and I are not going to be able to go away this weekend,” Andy said. “I can’t leave her in the condition she’s in. I’m going to have to wean her away from me.”

“All right,” she said. What else could she say: I’m going to kill myself too?

“She’s only a little girl,” he said. “Even though she’s a beautiful model she has no self-esteem. I shouldn’t have let it go this far, it’s my fault.”

“Poor kid,” she said finally.

She went back to her work. He called her every day with a bulletin. Brooke had actually packed some things. He had helped her put them into a cab. Brooke had been called back after an audition; maybe she would have a part in an off-Broadway play and then she would be busy. She would meet other people. Maybe
he would have to go back to California soon; then he could get away from her. He and Susan met for lunch in a restaurant.