An American Love Story

by Rona Jaffe

  “I didn’t know that,” Seltzer said.

  “And I’m all alone. I have no one to celebrate my birthday with.”

  “You have us,” Susan said. The words just came out of her mouth. She didn’t even know this man, and he was a cult figure, which should have been intimidating, but she felt so sorry for him, he seemed so lonely and gentle, and nobody should ever have to be alone on his birthday. “We’ll go out and have a party for you afterward. Ice cream, and cake with candles on it, and champagne.” She looked at the others. “Right?”

  “Right!” they all said in unison. Gabe Gideon smiled at her.

  “Tell me your name again,” he said.

  The second show was exactly as Susan had been warned it was. This time the club was packed. It was the late show that the true fans liked; the one where Gabe Gideon could at last detonate and sail off into orbit. If he had been obscene and outrageous the first time, this time he was bizarre. Sometimes he didn’t even make sense. When he did, he was devastating. More people were walking out, some were cheering, and some were just sitting there in shock. For once Seltzer didn’t get angry, as he was obviously used to it. And when Gideon excused himself in the middle of his monologue and walked off the stage again Seltzer just shook his head. The fans waited calmly for his return, obviously used to it too.

  “Is this a schtick or is it real?” Susan asked.

  “You never know,” Seltzer said.

  They had the birthday party in the hotel bar, where a votive candle in a bowl of pretzels served as the birthday cake. The hotel did not have twenty-four-hour room service and the kitchen was closed. The bar did, however, have several bottles of champagne, which the four of them drank happily, making toasts. Gabe, as Susan was now calling him, smiled with innocent pleasure. “It’s so nice of you to have a birthday party for me,” he said. “I hate to be all alone, and I almost always am.”

  “Everybody’s alone,” Dana said. “It stinks.”

  “You have me,” Seltzer said. “You’re not alone.”

  Dana raised an eyebrow. “I’m alone.”

  After a while Seltzer and Dana got up and went upstairs.

  Gabe turned to Susan. “Do you want to see something I care about very much?”

  She nodded. He reached into his jeans pocket and took out a well-worn-looking envelope, and from it a photograph of a pretty, towheaded little girl. “My daughter. She’s almost four. She lives with her mother … my wife … well, ex-wife soon. My wife is twenty. She wants her own life, and I can’t blame her. We got married because she was pregnant and we were in love. It wasn’t dumb then, but it seems dumb now. I miss my daughter a lot.”

  “I’m sorry,” Susan said.

  “A lot of people don’t understand what I’m trying to do with my work, and it makes me feel badly because of my daughter and what she’ll grow up thinking of me after I’m gone.”

  “Why would you be gone? You’re thirty something.”

  “I don’t think I’m going to live long,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  He shrugged. “I just know it.”

  Susan looked at him, long and hard. He wasn’t faking. Behind the comedy and the outrageousness there was so much sadness in him. Loneliness. She could certainly identify with that. “Could I interview you?” she asked.

  He chewed his lip. “I guess so. My gig is over the end of the week and I’ll be back in New York for a while.”

  “Maybe for Esquire,” Susan said. “Or that new magazine, New York. I want to hang around with you for a while, is that okay?”

  “Sure,” he said mildly.

  She smiled. “I think I’ll call it ‘Gabe Gideon: Laughter on the Dark Side of the Moon.’ They’ll change it of course.”

  “I hope they don’t,” he said.

  When a man started vacuuming the bar carpet they finally left and went to their separate rooms. Dana wasn’t in the room she was supposed to share with Susan in order to be protected from the lech. Susan wasn’t a bit surprised.

  A week later Susan was in her apartment when Gabe Gideon called. “Can I come over and visit you?”

  “Sure.”

  He arrived in his black jacket and jeans, but this time he was wearing a white clerical collar, not a Nehru collar. He wandered slowly around her apartment looking at things, touching them curiously as if they were unusual.

  “Why are you wearing that collar?” Susan asked.

  “I like it.”

  She had a glass paperweight on her desk holding down papers; it had tiny colored flowers in it. He picked it up and looked at it, then he looked through it, and then he walked to the window and looked through the flowered paperweight at the trees outside, as if it were a telescope. He seemed like a man underwater, or in another space altogether from where she was. “Man!” he said softly. “This is beautiful. Look at it.” He handed her the paperweight.

  She looked through it at the trees. The view was beautiful; a bit like looking into a kaleidoscope. She thought Gabe was a little like a child, and she wondered if he was a genius or stoned, or perhaps both. She put the paperweight back on the desk.

  “People complain about my act,” he said, “because they don’t understand what I’m trying to do. Okay, society decided fuck is a dirty word. So if I say it often enough and long enough it becomes meaningless. Then it isn’t dirty anymore. For this I get banned in Boston, in big clubs, I have to work in cellars. I don’t care where I work as long as people come to see me and understand what I’m trying to do. Do you take notes, or what?”

  “I used to, but it made people nervous,” Susan said. “Now I just remember. I have a very good memory.”

  He nodded. “Humor exists to keep away fear. Our deepest, most primitive fears—if you can turn them around and make them ridiculous, then you’re not so afraid of them anymore. But we’re all afraid of so many things.”

  “I know,” Susan said.

  “You don’t even have to make something ridiculous to make it funny,” Gabe said. “You can just say something true. If it’s absolutely true it can be funny or scary; it’s how you put the sentence together, where you hang the last word. The punchline is the one that opens the door and says ‘You’re safe now.’ ”

  “Yes,” she said. Agreement was how she always worked when she was interviewing someone: the agreement, the rapt attention, her soft compliance like a gentle sponge, and, if they wanted it, her near invisibility. Sometimes she offered something of her own life, her own feelings and thoughts, like a friend; which in fact she felt she was. She almost became that other person after a while, with no preconceptions, and no conclusions until afterward when she was writing all her discoveries down.

  And yet, today, without obliterating herself, she understood everything Gabe was saying and felt as he did: the unwarranted great sadness, and the isolation in the midst of merriment she had first responded to that reminded her of herself.

  He sat on the floor, so she did too. “My work is the only thing that makes me really happy,” Gabe said. “I look at it and I think: I’m not so bad. I’m pretty good. When it comes down to it your creative work is the only thing that means anything; don’t you feel that way?”

  “Sometimes, yes,” Susan said. “When I’ve finished writing something that was really hard for me, and I think ‘I actually did it!’ I feel so relieved, as if I’ve exonerated myself. I don’t know of what.”

  “Of the demands you’ve put on yourself,” Gabe said. “But doesn’t it feel great after you’ve done it?”

  “Yes,” Susan said. She smiled. “Sometimes for about half an hour I don’t feel as if I need anybody but myself.”

  “I know,” he said. “I look for love, sex, appreciation, friendship, but nothing comes near the satisfaction of knowing I’ve created something out of my own soul. I think I should marry myself.”

  She laughed. “Marry yourself?”

  He toyed with the words, trying them out, listening to them. “Marry yourself. Marry yoursel
f. Why not? It’s the only person I understand … and sometimes I’m not sure I do … just pieces.”

  They were lying on her living room rug. “Would you like a drink or something?” she asked.

  “No thanks.”

  She wondered if she should ask him about the drugs, but this wasn’t the time. He would let it out sooner or later.

  His voice was getting dreamier. “Have you interviewed a lot of comics?”

  “No.”

  “They try out jokes on you,” he said. “He’ll come out with a great line, you laugh, you think how clever, but it’s something he’s been working on at home for weeks.”

  “Do you?”

  “Sure. Not with you, though. You’ll write what I said and I’ll look like some putz who uses his nightclub act to impress girls.”

  “Do you?”

  He smiled. “Why don’t you tell me something about you.”

  “Me.”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t think I know enough about myself to tell you anything more than I have,” Susan said.

  “Yeah,” he said thoughtfully. “I can dig that.”

  They lay there quietly for a while. It was late afternoon, starting to get dark. She thought how she was still a bit in awe of him, and waited to see what he would do next. What he did was totally unexpected. Slowly and dreamily he lifted her skirt, pulled down her underpants, and went down on her.

  It was as if she were the tree he was looking at through the paperweight, with fascination, pleasure, and curiosity. He tasted her, and looked at what he was about to eat, and then set to work, demanding nothing, apparently hoping that she approve. She let herself slip into waves of pleasure, and came gently for a long time. Then he got up and went to look out the window.

  It was obvious he didn’t want or expect her to continue what he had started, or to do anything to him in return. This was not foreplay, it was all he had wanted to do. They had not even touched. She wondered if he was impotent, and if it was from the drugs; if he had gone down on her to establish some sort of connection, or because he found her sexually attractive. She certainly wasn’t going to ask him any of these questions.

  He turned. “Do you want to go out to dinner? Let’s find a terrific Puerto Rican restaurant.”

  He took her to the upper West Side to a neighborhood that scared her to death. It was dark out now, and sinister-looking young men eyed her handbag. “This is making me very nervous,” Susan whispered.

  “You’re safe with me.”

  “Why? The collar?”

  “No,” Gabe said, “they like me. I’m invincible. If you believe no one can hurt you no one will.”

  He sounded so sure of himself that she found herself believing him. “Hi,” he kept saying to these unfriendly potential muggers; “Hi, man,” smiling and waving. And to Susan’s relief they all smiled and nodded back.

  “That restaurant looks right,” Gabe said, heading for a small seedy place that looked no different from any of the others. There was none too clean oilcloth on the tables, but the food was very good. He insisted on paying, and she felt as if she were out on a date.

  “Do you want to see where I live?” he asked.

  “Sure.”

  He was staying at a very depressing transient hotel downtown, which looked better suited for prostitutes and alcoholics than a famous comedian. There was no lobby, just a desk. The walls in the public halls and in his room were all painted institutional gray, and the paint around the windows was peeling off. Furniture was minimal and ancient. Gabe had a room with a double bed, a bathroom, and a small pullman kitchen with some unused pots on the stove. He excused himself and went into the bathroom, and Susan looked around.

  There were large piles of unused disposable hypodermic needles in their paper wrappers on the dresser; and scattered all around the room, as if he wanted to be sure no one would miss them in a raid, were mimeographed letters from a doctor. To the arresting officer: My patient, Gabriel Gideon, suffers from narcolepsy, and needs these prescribed amphetamines to stay awake so he can pursue a normal life. Well, who’s that going to fool? Susan thought.

  He came out of the bathroom and didn’t look in the least nervous about her knowing about the drugs. He seemed to take the whole thing for granted. “Do you want a drink?” he asked. “I have a bottle of whiskey here.”

  “I will if you will,” Susan said, although she didn’t like the taste of whiskey. He poured it into two water glasses and they lay on the bed.

  “Usually I don’t sleep for three days,” Gabe said, “and then I crash and sleep for twenty-four hours. I think the day after tomorrow is when I’ll sleep.”

  “That must be awful,” Susan said.

  “I’m used to it. I son of like it by now.”

  “What about when you’re performing?”

  “Then it’s difficult. But I work it out.”

  She thought about his trips off stage.

  “Would you stay here tonight?” he asked. “Just to keep me company?”

  “Okay.”

  He took off his clothes and lay there in his Jockey shorts. Susan tried not to gasp. He looked like a human pincushion, his pale body covered with black and blue needle marks. Lying on the rough hotel sheets that appeared as if they were hardly ever changed, his tortured body with its self-inflicted signs of even deeper damage, the still innocent face of a still young man who should have lived differently and now never would, was an image Susan knew she would never forget. He gave her a clean T-shirt to sleep in, but they didn’t sleep, they talked, and finally, about six in the morning, she fell asleep from exhaustion, holding him in her arms like a child.

  They spent part of the next day together, and then he went to see Seltzer and Susan went home to take notes. The next day was the one when Gabe would crash. They arranged to meet at his hotel the day after that. When Susan got home there were three messages on her service from Dana.

  “Seltzer wants to be my new agent,” Dana said when Susan called. “I don’t know what to do. Will I have to keep going out with him? I cringe at the disgusting thought.”

  “You like him,” Susan said. “He fascinates you.”

  “I’m using him.”

  “You’re ashamed to admit you have feelings. I know you.”

  “Sure I have feelings,” Dana said. “Hate, revulsion, anger, and a need to gag.”

  “I think that’s what I like about you,” Susan said, laughing. “You’re always so cheerful.”

  “So where were you? Are you having an affair with the big G?”

  “I’m interviewing him,” Susan said. She told Dana what had been happening.

  “What are you going to call the article?” Dana asked. “A Blow Job from a Junkie?”

  “What I also like about you is your impeccable literary taste.”

  “I’m an actress.”

  “Do you realize our icons are killing themselves, or already have?” Susan said. “We’re supposed to be so free, so happy having whatever we want, but people are getting so self-destructive. It’s like they’re all really miserable. The drugs make sex with strangers bearable. I hated the way it was before, but I don’t like this much either.”

  “The only thing that makes me miserable is not getting a good job,” Dana said. “Those people turning their brains into mush are self-indulgent cretins. Not your friend—I liked him. Do you think I should sign with The Nazi, or what?”

  “Sign with him,” Susan said. “He’s powerful.”

  “That’s what he says,” Dana sighed.

  When Susan went back to see Gabe the man at the desk said she should go right up, the door was open. When she walked into his room the first thing she noticed was that all evidence of drugs had been hidden away. Then she saw the little towheaded girl from the photo, standing on a chair to enable her to reach the stove, stirring something in a pot. Gabe was on the battered couch reading the newspapers. He smiled when he saw her.

  “Susan, this is my daughter, Maisie.�
�

  “Hi, Maisie. What are you cooking?”

  “Oatmeal.”

  “I get her until the end of the week,” Gabe said. He looked both happy and sad.

  “That’s great!” Susan looked into the kitchen cabinet and the refrigerator. There was nothing but a box of oatmeal and a canon of milk.

  “Seltzer wouldn’t give me an advance.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that after bribing my wife to get my daughter here I can’t feed her anything but cereal for three days.”

  “But a little kid has to eat real food.”

  “Oatmeal’s real food,” Maisie said.

  “I can’t believe Seltzer would be that cruel,” Susan said, but she already knew what Seltzer must have been thinking. Too much money had gone into drugs and he didn’t trust Gabe anymore. “He should have sent you something.”

  “Sure, a gourmet basket from that place near his office.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  Gabe shrugged. “We’ll survive. We have before.”

  “I’ll be back,” Susan said. “Don’t go anywhere.”

  She went to the A&P a couple of blocks away, feeling like a social worker. She bought fruit, salad things, diet dressing, bread, orange juice, more milk, peanut butter, grape jelly, sliced fake turkey breast, coffee, sugar, detergent and paper towels. There was enough for a three-day siege. When she brought the food back and put it away Gabe looked grateful but embarrassed.

  “Hey,” he said, “you didn’t have to do that.”

  “You bought me dinner,” Susan said.

  She spent parts of the next three days with Gabe and his daughter, going home so they could be alone, coming back. He slept on the couch, Maisie slept in the double bed looking like a tiny doll, and Susan slept in her own apartment. He was good with children, telling his daughter fanciful stories, really listening to her when she talked. She was a quiet child and didn’t talk very often, and smiled even less. The three of them went to the zoo and the park, but Gabe’s major idea of how to entertain an almost four-year-old child was to take her walking around the streets, showing her New York. Maisie seemed to enjoy it.