An American Love Story (57 page)

“I know you don’t like this triangle,” he said. “You already had it with Clay. I understand, and I’m doing the best I can.”

“I want to be able to go out and do normal things with you,” Susan said.

“We will.”

They went back to her apartment after lunch and made love for two hours. “You and I are going to be friends forever,” he said. “If we were the same age we’d get married. We’d be fucking all the time, and you have all the other qualities. I love you. I always will.”

“Well, we’re not the same age,” she said.

“I can’t talk to her,” he said. “I don’t have any interest in her friends. They’re shallow. They think I’m old. I
feel
old with them.”

Susan smiled.

Brooke finally took all her things out of his apartment. “She begged me to just have dinner with her from time to time,” he said. “She says she doesn’t want to be with her friends, they take cocaine. She’s very lonely. So I said I’d see her.”

“Mmm.”

“No one ever loved me as much as she does,” he said wistfully. “There’s something very flattering about that. She’d do anything to keep me. She’s emotional and unpredictable. I’m fascinated by her and afraid of her.”

“Afraid?”

“Yes. In a way.”

“Did you ever see
Fatal Attraction
?” Susan said.

“Of course.”

“Being flattered wasn’t the point of the movie.”

“I wish she’d go away and disappear,” Andy said.

One day when she was expecting Andy to call she answered the phone and it was Clay. She realized with complete surprise that she was disappointed. She held on to the feeling of disappointment, cherishing it.

“How are you?” Clay asked.

“Fine. How are you?”

“Okay. What’s new?”

“I’m working hard on my new book, and I’m seeing a very attractive younger man,” Susan told him. She did not add, although she wanted to, that the new man was a much more successful producer than he. She was not sure she wanted Clay to know even as much as she had already said, since he never told her anything.

Clay chuckled. “I know you,” he said. “You’ll get bored with him.”

Bored? she thought, indignantly. When did I ever get bored with anyone?
You
ditched
me.
You don’t know me at all. Maybe it’s just wishful thinking.

“Probably,” she said lightly, as if there were a dozen more to take Andy’s place.

That fall she talked to Andy every day, and they saw each other once or twice a week. Then one afternoon when she came home and played back the messages on her answering machine she heard a strange woman’s voice, no one she knew. It was shrill and angry; a kind of lethal Minnie Mouse. “Susan,” the voice said, “you keep your fucking hands off Andy Tollmalig!”

Susan was so filled with rage she thought she would explode. She thought of all the things she wanted to say to that bitch for intruding on her life, her phone; wished she would call again so she could scream at her. When she saw Andy for dinner that night at a new restaurant they both wanted to try she told him about the call. “Yes,” he said tiredly, “it’s Brooke.”

“You told her you were going out with me?”

“No,” he said. “She came in my apartment when I wasn’t there and played all my messages. There were some from you. She went through my address book and got the number. She called other women too, business people. I was very embarrassed. They all called to tell me.”

“I guess you didn’t change your lock.”

“I guess not.”

“But what she did was atrocious.”

“I know. I called her and yelled at her and hung up.”

“I can just imagine me doing that to Bambi,” Susan said.

“You’re sane,” he said. “Sometimes I’m really worried about what she’ll do next. But she does it because she loves me so much.”

“You call that love? It’s crazy obsession.”

She looked at him, and for the first time she thought how weak he was. He blamed a neurotic girl for his own ambivalence, he was flattered by behavior that would drive any secure man away. Maybe Brooke wasn’t so weak—maybe she was strong, devious and manipulative. She had certainly managed to hang in there.

But what was she to do about it? She felt she had been in a time warp all those years with Clay, and now, out in the world again, what was here? Nothing but dreadful blind dates, younger men, and sharing? Were there so few attractive, available, straight men that you had to do battle for one? All the women she spoke to complained there were no men in New York. Andy was all she had.…

“I’d better go home tonight,” he said after dinner. “I have some scripts to read, and I’m afraid to leave the apartment alone. Brooke might come back. I’ll change the lock tomorrow.”

“All right.”

“We’ll go to a movie this week,” he said. “Think of what you want to see.”

“Okay.”

“I wish she’d kill herself and get it over with,” he said with a little smile. He kissed her good night at her door.

Fall came, winter … she was working twelve hours a day on
Tiny Tombstones
, researching, writing, in a frenzy of inspiration. Brooke was still in Andy’s life, although he claimed she was no longer acting wild. She certainly, however, was resourceful. Every time he told Susan another ruse she’d gotten away with to delay the final break, Susan wondered if she should have fought harder or differently for Clay, and had to remind herself that there were many different factors and she was in no way to blame.

The book was almost finished and she was aiming for a late spring publication. Nina was reading it and loving it. Susan let Andy read part of it, and at one point he actually had tears in his
eyes. “Some of it is so sad,” he said. “It’s all so good. I’m in awe of you.”

He took her to his apartment, which she had not ever seen. It was a floor-through in a town house, obviously professionally decorated. There was a framed photo of Brooke hanging up in the kitchen; pretty, anonymous-looking, with waist-length hair. “We put the picture in the kitchen because that’s the one room she’s never in,” he said.

We …

“I notice it’s still there,” Susan said.

“I can’t throw her away. I wouldn’t throw you away.”

If I could do it to my wife I could do it to you
 …

The words resonated in her mind. I
can
leave this guy, she suddenly thought, I really can. Maybe not right now, but when the drawbacks outnumber the rewards, I’ll walk.

They went back to her apartment and made love. “I love you,” he said.

“I love you too,” she said.

“We’ll always be special friends, always.”

I already have friends, she thought.

They had lunch a week later. It was in a different restaurant, cold and unfriendly, and for the first time he didn’t take her hand. “Brooke wants to have children,” he said. “That’s all she wants: to marry me and have babies. I want that too someday; after all, I’m twenty-nine, almost thirty, and I want a family of my own.”

She nodded.

“Can you have children?” he asked. She glared at him. “I mean …”

“You mean am I too old?”

“Well …”

“Maybe I can, but I don’t want them,” she said.

“Why do you keep thinking you’re old?” he said.

“Because you keep bringing it up.”

“I never mean to hurt you. But you are older than I am.”

“I thought that was one of the attractions,” she said.

“Everything about you was the attraction,” Andy said. “I’ll always love you.”

“Was?”

“I’m going back to her,” he said.

She felt disappointed, resentful and numb. She wished he had stayed around until she got tired of sex with him.

“Oh,” she said.

“I’ll probably marry her,” he said. “We’ll have beautiful kids.”

Stay numb … “She’ll be as good a first wife as any,” Susan said.

They said good-bye on the street and hugged. She squeezed out a tiny tear. “We’re going to move to L.A.,” he said. “It’s easier for my work and Brooke will have a better chance to break into TV. All the work is out there.”

“I thought she wanted to have a family.”

“She has to do both,” he said. “I want her to.”

“It’s over,” Susan told Nina, Dana, Jeffrey.

They all told her Andy had been a perfect interim lover and she would find someone else. She agreed about the first part but she was not so sure about the second.

She completed
Tiny Tombstones
and handed it in. Her publishers were very excited about it, but free of the manuscript she felt both relieved and let down; a sort of postpartum depression. Nina told her they felt that when it came out next year there was a good chance it could be a best seller, but to Susan that seemed far away and unreal.

A couple she’d known through Clay came to New York and took her to lunch. “Tell me about Bambi,” she said.

“I don’t want to say anything bad about her,” the wife said, “because she reminds me of what I think you must have been like when you were young.”

That hurt. After the lunch she called Dana and told her what had happened. “He took the best years of my life,” Susan said.

“No, you had the best years of his,” Dana said. “Your life is ahead of you—his isn’t. Let
her
wake up with the corpse.”

“You’re so outrageous.”

“No,” Dana said, “I’m realistic. Act Three: He Finds a Future Nurse.”

“I guess you and I both escaped being that.”

“And speaking of corpses,” Dana said, “I have great news. I did a guest shot on
Murder, She Wrote
, and for the first time I didn’t play either the killer or the corpse. I didn’t die! And today my agent called and said they’re going to let me come back again. If it goes well, I might be written in for an occasional continuing part. Do you realize what that means? A hit show like that? I’m going to be on my way to a real career.”

“That’s fabulous,” Susan said.

“All I want,” Dana said, “is to be able to complain that I have to go to work every day. I want to say I’m bored.”

“You will, too.”

Dana laughed happily. “Don’t forget to watch me. I was very good.”

Yes, there were things that still kept coming up to hurt her; chance unthinking remarks, like the wife at lunch, like Andy. But she was feeling better. Time did make distance, distance made understanding. She would survive.

39

1989—HOLLYWOOD

I
t was the new year, the eternal time of hope for new beginnings, and in her spare time, which was now winding down, Bambi was writing a script about this next phase of her life. It was called “Stages.” There were the stages on which people acted out their parts, the characters they had to present to the world; and then there were the stages of womankind. The first had been the young girl married to her early love, the second the appearance of the older mentor, and now the heroine was ready to move on. In her next stage she would be working, but she would have no love life. That seemed to be what was happening to all her friends, and frankly she thought she wouldn’t miss a man at all.

She had decided to become truly independent, and if an attractive man came along, well, she could always have a fling, but she couldn’t see living with anyone again. She looked around her cluttered little house with disgust at what he had done to it. The computerized treadmill she
had spent so much money on served as a depository for Clay’s extra books and scripts—the other available surfaces were already loaded with them—and she had to yank everything off when she needed a run. Clay, of course, wouldn’t use it.

Next week she was going to work for Vaughan Soskins, and she would have to tell Clay. Her networking had paid off in a big way: Vaughan had a development deal with Universal. He needed an office slave. She didn’t mind having to take something lower than what she had, since what she had wasn’t getting her anywhere. And when her script was finished she would show it to Vaughan and then who knows?

Clay had always hung on to that apartment he had on North Oakhurst, and at the end of the year he had given up his Beverly Hills office as too expensive and moved the office to the apartment since he didn’t live in it anyway. Bambi hated it. It had no cachet. But lucky for him it had two bedrooms, because after she went to work for Vaughan, Clay would have to live in it. They couldn’t share her house when she was working for a rival producer.

Clay came back from a meeting and she put her script away where he couldn’t see it.

“Hi,” he said. “How’s the work going?”

“Fine. How was your meeting?”

“Those guys are just spinning their wheels.”

So was he, of course. He never resented her asking for free time off from the office to write her script, because there was little for her to do anyway, and that was how she had managed to go to job interviews.

“My wife called me this afternoon,” he said. “To tell me she just graduated from her drug program. She’s been clean for a year.” He didn’t sound proud, just surprised.

“Did you ever think of going back to her?” Bambi said.

“Laura? Are you crazy? I can’t stand her.”