by Rona Jaffe
She looked over at Clay and he winked at her. Then he looked at her plate and his face changed, hardened, and he shook his head almost imperceptibly: Don’t be weird again tonight, our host ordered it.
Didn’t he appreciate how difficult it had been for her to lose fifty pounds, and to keep it off, and how long it had taken? Did he even care? She looked back at him defiantly and ate.
As soon as the plates were removed she excused herself and went to the ladies’ room. She had made herself throw up for years when she was a dancer, and even though she hated the way it made her feel she still knew how to do it. When she had finished she went to the sink and mirror to rinse her mouth and repair her eye makeup, hoping no one would notice how red and tear-filled her eyes were from her effort.
The attendant had a radio that picked up the television channels and was listening to one of Clay’s shows. She would have to tell him.
“Are you all right?” the woman asked, peering at her.
“I’m fine, thank you.” Laura smiled and put a dollar in the little dish above the sink, and went back to join the others, straight-backed, poised, and serene.
They drove back to the hotel with the top up; desert nights in early spring were cold. “I’m tired,” Clay said.
“Me too. Was I all right tonight?”
“Of course you were.”
“I never know,” she said.
“It’s just that you have to try harder because you’re the famous prima ballerina from New York.”
“Ex-ballerina.”
“They don’t know what to expect.”
“They’re used to stars. They should just try to like me.”
“You don’t like them,” Clay said.
“I don’t know them.”
“They’re awful and you know it,” he said, and laughed.
She felt a rush of love for him. “Oh, Clay, I want a house. Please let’s buy a house. I want to plant a garden, I want to buy sheets.”
“You’d die of boredom here,” he said. “You are already.”
“Because we have nothing of our own.”
“We have our beautiful apartment in New York,” he said reproachfully. It was that little-boy tone again, the one that filled her with such sad and terrible tenderness. The tone that said: It was expensive.
“I want to live with you all the time. I want Nina to have a full-time father.”
“I’ll never be that, wherever we live,” Clay said reasonably. “I work too hard.”
“But at least we’d live in the same place.”
“I don’t want Nina to be brought up here,” he said. “This is a horrible, superficial place filled with people whose values are not the ones I want for our child. I want her to be an intellectual.”
“I’m sure there are some intellectuals here,” Laura said.
“We don’t seem to have found them.”
“I’ll start looking.”
“Honey, I’m tired. I don’t want to talk about it anymore tonight.”
“Okay.”
That night she dreamed that she was with Tanya, and they were buying sheets. White sheets with ecru-embroidered borders for a king-size bed. She missed her friend, she missed her husband, she missed a life. When she woke up Clay had already left for the office. She called Tanya in New York to say hello, and for the first time Laura cried.
3
1965—NEW YORK
There was a certain schizophrenia about New York for girls just starting their careers, underpaid and scrounging: on the one hand the gritty vileness of tiny walk-up apartments with aggressive cockroaches and no air-conditioning, or larger apartments crammed with roommates; near strangers; all wanting to get ahead or get married and leave, whichever came first. And on the other hand, the newness, the excitement, the world out into which one constantly fled those dismal apartments, the bright and glowing belief that the wonderful career, the perfect romantic man, and love, were right out there somewhere in that churning world.
A week after her graduation from college in 1961, when most of her friends were getting married, or at least planning to spend the summer preparing for a fall wedding, Susan had moved into an apartment with three roommates and started her new job. Whenever she had free time during her final semester she had been job hunting. She was an excellent typist, and now she was a secretary at Teen Life magazine (an Ivy League English major should consider herself lucky), which had a readership that seemed to stop at age twelve. There, in addition to her secretarial duties, she wrote an occasional article on how to talk to a boy.
Through her contacts at Teen Life she managed to get an agent, and began writing articles for women’s magazines on the side. “Seven Ways to See If He Loves You.” “Seven Ways to Meet New Men.” “Seven Reasons Girls Pick the Wrong Men.” “Seven Ways to a Better You.” She was queen of the seven ways, and she knew it was corny and formula and not at all what she wanted to do with her life, but she was being published, and trying to do better.
The roommates kept leaving and being replaced, and mostly they hated each other after a while. There were notes on everything in the refrigerator—This is MY milk!!!—and in the kitchen—Do not wash your underwear in the kitchen sink, I am sick of seeing curly little hairs in the lettuce, this means YOU!!! The best writer of nasty notes was her friend Dana, who wanted to be an actress. Susan and Dana often went out to Downey’s restaurant in the theatre district to meet actors from Dana’s acting class, who used the bar as a social club. Willowy, beautiful, and languid, Dana never liked anybody, but she went to bed with a lot of them anyway. Susan eventually started having lovers too, but mainly because she was lonely. It made her feel she was still a woman, not the solitary old maid her mother reminded her daily on the phone that she would become.
There was such an air of sex and camaraderie and promise in the bars, and in the discos, and in the after-hours clubs where Susan eventually began going with groups of friends. She didn’t seem to need more than four hours sleep on those nights, arriving at the office looking wide-awake. Eventually she began chronicling the bar scene, and the roommate scene, and finally everything she saw of single people doing things that would send the editors and readers of the women’s magazines into a dead faint; and her agent sold these to the men’s magazines.
With the additional money Susan took the chance of renting her own three-room apartment in a rent-controlled building for a hundred and fifty dollars a month. Dana had already gone off to live with a man who had a real job, which gave her peace of mind while she was going to auditions, and there was no one else Susan felt she could stand to share an apartment with anymore anyway.
Then her editor at Teen Life called her in. She was a nice woman in her forties who didn’t seem to mind her boring job. “Is it possible there’s another Susan Josephs who writes articles for magazines?”
“I don’t think so,” Susan said. Her heart plummeted. She had always known she was taking a risk by selling elsewhere and tarnishing their squeaky clean image, even though she had been reporting the truth.
“Then I’ve been seeing your pieces.”
“Yes.”
“They don’t fit in with what we’re doing here.”
“I guess not,” Susan said, trying to act calm. They’re going to fire me. Or they’re going to make me stop. She didn’t know which would be worse: losing her job and her beloved brand-new nest or not being able to continue writing things she knew were good.
“The people upstairs are upset. We understand that you need the money. But we want you to start using a nom de plume for those other articles—it’s only fair to us. Will you do that?”
“I can’t,” Susan said. She was finding it hard to breathe.
“Why not?”
“Because I wrote them; they’re mine.”
“If you won’t do that we’re going to have to let you go.”
Fired … Susan’s mind was racing now. Could she live, adrift? She quickly added up how much money she had been making
, and she suddenly realized that she could survive without this job after all. Now she would have the time she had always longed for to write what she liked. She could write even more, and sleep too! She felt heady with the possibilities of freedom.
“I guess I’ll have to go, then,” Susan said.
Her editor gave her a long, searching look, and then she nodded. “I’d get my head handed to me for saying this, but you’re wasting your time at Teen Life. You’re very talented. Develop it. It’s time for you to try it on your own now. I believe you can be a big success.”
“Thank you.” A success, she thought, me …!
Her ex-editor smiled. “It breaks my heart to lose you, but you’re welcome.”
For the next year Susan worked free-lance as if she were on a tightrope; always something accepted just in time to pay the rent, buy the groceries (not that girls who lived alone ate much) and even buy clothes. Then in 1965 the women’s magazine field changed with the metamorphosis of Cosmopolitan from just another women’s magazine to something very zippy and alive, made for the swinging single girl. Instead of articles on what to cook for your family’s breakfast there were articles on what to cook for your overnight lover for breakfast, and what to wear while doing it. Susan began writing for them quite regularly, doing interviews and essays.
Dana took her to a going-away party one of her actress friends was giving for her live-in boyfriend who was moving to California. He was an actor, and had gotten a series. His girlfriend was staying in New York. No one asked why he didn’t take her with him; they seemed to think it was natural. Susan couldn’t help noticing that under her celebration face she looked terribly sad. Why wasn’t she going with him? Was this an easy way to break up? Did he want a new, free life? Was he expected to have one? Did she really want to stay behind and try for the theatre? The girl seemed like an object; disposable. The image and the question haunted Susan for a long time afterward. She had no one special and didn’t have to make these decisions; and she wondered if they would even be hers to make.
Cosmo sent her to London in 1967 to report on the Youthquake, as people were calling the new worship of everything that was young. Still shy, she forced herself to phone people whose names she had been given, and made a lot of new friends. Together they roamed Portobello Road, bought miniskirts at Biba and Mary Quant, lunched at Aratusa with male movie stars and skinny girls on the make, smoked hashish instead of pot, loaded on false eyelashes and teased their hair. For once Susan’s auburn mane was an asset instead of a liability.
One night she was at a disco with some friends when suddenly the music stopped. The tiny dance floor cleared. “And now,” a disembodied amplified voice said, “the number one hit from America.” Everyone sat in reverent silence, not even thinking of dancing, as Bobbie Gentry’s voice poured through the speakers singing “Ode to Billy Joe.” Why was the number one hit from America so important, Susan wondered, when she was here to find out what everyone in America wanted to copy about Swinging London?
She had been away long enough never to have heard that song before. This boy killed himself. And before that he and the girl threw something off the bridge. What did they throw? Nobody knew, even afterward when she asked everyone, everywhere, nobody knew. Was it flowers? Drugs? No, you wouldn’t throw drugs away. A dead baby? Their aborted baby? Things weren’t so swinging back home in those little towns. You couldn’t just have a baby with your boyfriend, even now. The question and the image haunted Susan for a long time afterward.
Back home again she continued to pursue the life she had planned for herself, always trying to be a better writer, often working at her typewriter in the middle of the night when it was very dark and still so she could get closer to her feelings and use them honestly. Two years went by. She knew that in many ways she was lucky. She was in her twenties and self-supporting and free and busy and on her way; she had friends and acquaintances, people to laugh with and complain to, her own queen-size bed, an air conditioner, a stereo, a wall full of filing cabinets, grown-up dishes and stainless flatware that she had paid for herself, a case of nice red wine under the sink; she was pretty and lively and well regarded; she even knew when she walked into a party that if there was a man there she wanted she could almost always get him, at least for a week or so—and there was a hole of loneliness in the middle of her heart and the middle of her life that never went away.
Sometimes the pain was very quiet, waiting, so that she thought it was gone, but then it came bouncing back to overwhelm her and repay her for having felt safe. It was her dreaded destiny, the punishment.
She was so lonely.… And loneliness was one thing people didn’t want to hear about. If you complained of that, too much or too long or too seriously, you would end up really alone.
Dana was being pursued by a successful (and married and middle-aged) actors’ agent named Seltzer. He was very debonair, dressed well, was a foot shorter than she was, and had a German accent. Dana persisted in referring to him as The Nazi, even though he was Jewish, which was probably a comment on her opinion of his profession. Her boyfriend with the good job didn’t seem to mind this friendship; she went out at night without him whenever she pleased, and was not obliged to tell him what she did.
“I had dinner with The Nazi again last night,” Dana said in her daily phone call to Susan. “He wants to go to bed with me. I’d rather kill myself. But he is also considering being my agent. I’d like that. You know what a bitch my agent is; I can’t even get her on the phone, and then when I ask her to send me to an audition I should have gone on in one second she doesn’t seem to remember who I am. I want to ask: How’s your lobotomy? So anyhow, The Nazi wants me to go out of town with him to this club in New Haven to see Gabe Gideon, who’s a client of his. We’re to stay overnight, so I want you to come along to protect me.”
“You don’t have to stay overnight,” Susan said reasonably.
“He says we do, because we have to wait to see the second show too. That’s the one where Gabe Gideon gets really filthy.”
Susan knew who Gabe Gideon was—who didn’t? He was more than a nightclub comic, he was a cult figure; beloved and hated, banned in Boston, considered both a foul-mouthed destroyer of morality and values and a perceptive protector who warned that the emperor had no clothes.
“I’d love to see him,” she said. “When is it?”
“Tonight.”
“It’s wonderful the way you always give me so much notice,” Susan said, which of course meant yes.
The nightclub in New Haven was small and dark, with black velvet walls, and it was nearly full. They ordered drinks and Seltzer looked at his watch. “Son of a bitch is late again,” he said.
“Isn’t it nice the way our agents talk about us behind our backs,” Dana murmured.
Then Gabe Gideon came running into the spotlight on the tiny stage. He was younger than Susan had expected, with a boyish exuberance; slim, lithe and medium sized, blond curly hair, an altarboy’s face, black Nehru jacket and jeans. He had a midwestern accent, and looked as if he’d grown up somewhere like Ohio, with a basketball hoop on the back of his parents’ garage door, and had been devastated when he didn’t grow tall enough to make the team.
“This is the Beelzebub of the bars?” she whispered.
“Wait,” Seltzer said.
In the next five minutes Gabe Gideon must have said “fuck” twenty times. He had also mentioned every bodily protuberance and orifice in the terms usually reserved for rest room graffiti, insulted everything people continued to hold sacred, and seemed to want to overthrow the world. But somehow Susan didn’t find him repulsive, or even annoying. He was very funny, he was obviously an enemy of hypocrisy, and she thought he was right. At the end of twenty minutes the entire audience was in his hand, even the ones who were shocked, except for one elderly couple who had walked out.
Then Gideon said, “Excuse me, I’ll be right back,” and walked off the stage.
“Son of a bitch!” Seltzer said
.
“What’s he doing?” Susan asked.
“Son of a bitch.”
“He’s taking drugs,” Dana said calmly. “He’ll be back.” Seltzer’s face was purple.
“In the middle of a show?”
“Actually,” Dana said, “nobody really knows. It could just be one of the crazy things he does.”
“If he goes to jail again I’m leaving him there,” Seltzer said.
The minutes crawled by, and no one seemed to know what to do. Then Gideon came back, looking happy and relaxed, and went on with his monologue. He was a little looser and wilder now; there was an air of euphoria, as if this time he might just for the fun of it go too far and say something that would pull everything down around him. Susan was relieved when the first show was finally over without disaster.
They went to his dressing room during the intermission, and Seltzer introduced them. Gideon had his black jacket off and was wearing a white T-shirt; he looked more than ever like that nice blond kid from the Midwest, but now he no longer looked happy; he seemed rather damp and sad.
“Hey, man, guess what,” he said to Seltzer, to all of them really, “it’s my birthday today.”