An American Love Story

by Rona Jaffe

  “Are you going to write about all this?” he asked.

  “Some.”

  “Not about buying me the food. I don’t want people to think I can’t feed my own kid.”

  “It’s not your fault,” Susan said.

  He looked at her wisely. “Sure it is,” he said. “You know it is.”

  Silence. Why lie? “Yes,” Susan said. “I know.”

  “Just say how much I love her,” Gabe said. “Will you? Nobody’s ever seen her but you; I never let anybody get that close to me. I trust you. Will you be sure to say how much I love her?”

  Susan felt a lump in her throat. “I promise,” she said.

  At the end of the week Maisie went home to her mother in the Midwest, Gabe crashed and then went off to his new gig in another city, and Susan went home and wrote the piece. She was pretty sure she had detailed and intimate material no other writer had, but she also felt she and Gabe were friends, and that made it more difficult to do the article because she wanted to be objective. Caring about him made it unexpectedly complicated.

  Just write what happened, she told herself. Except, of course, for the sex. To the public he’s a person and a symbol. Make him real. Do it as a kind of diary; his, not yours. You are the anonymous fly on the wall to whom he speaks. Start with the club, the act, then go to the man.…

  It took her four weeks to get the piece written the way she wanted it. She finished at eleven o’clock at night, poured herself a glass of wine, and turned on the evening news.

  Gabe Gideon had been found dead in his hotel room, of an overdose of a variety of illegal drugs. He was thirty-two years old.

  Her heart turned over. He knew, he always knew, and he did it anyway. It wasn’t fair, or even sane. He had no right to throw away his life. What about Maisie? What would the little girl think, what would she remember? Tell them how much I love my daughter. He hadn’t asked for a eulogy, an exoneration, or an excuse … only to be forgiven. Susan thought that perhaps she had already given him more than he had expected, but now the piece needed a new ending, because it had become an epitaph.

  She took a swallow of her wine and her eyes filled with tears. She put down the wine, wiped away the tears, and went back to her typewriter.

  She finished the last and final draft of “Gabe Gideon: Laughter on the Dark Side of the Moon” at two in the morning. Then she drank most of the wine, tried unsuccessfully to sleep, and watched the sun come up through her flowered paperweight. At ten o’clock when her agent got to his office she called him.

  “I guess you heard, Gabe Gideon died yesterday,” she said. “I just finished revising the piece.”

  “Bring it over,” her agent said. “I’ll messenger it to Esquire. You’ll be first.”

  “I’ll also be best,” Susan said.

  Esquire bought her article, and before it was even published three movie studios were bidding for it. Her agent sold the film rights to Magno, the highest bidder. Susan insisted she be allowed to write the first draft of the screenplay, and that it be put into the contract as a condition of the sale. She wanted that control, to be sure it was done truthfully. They agreed. The producer, a man named Ergil Feather, was coming in to New York to meet with her, and later she would be sent out to Hollywood.

  Movies! She could hardly believe it. Her creative life was opening out. She was on her way.

  4

  1967—SEATTLE

  Bambi Green and Simon Green, linked at school whether they liked it or not, now liked it very much. From six-year-old outcasts they had finally progressed to being fourteen-year-old eccentrics. It was far from Bambi’s dream of being special, and her heart hurt when she thought about it. Simon was her best friend—actually they were probably each other’s only friend—and they spent all their free time together. She looked around her at what popular girls were supposed to be, and because she could not think of one attribute she had like theirs she was torn between making fun of what they had and being envious of it.

  Those other girls had poise and power. They were beginning to like boys, and the boys to like them, but she and Simon were still uncomfortable with members of the opposite sex and nobody was interested in them anyway. At fourteen you were pretty much a prisoner of your parents’ wishes. You couldn’t drive a car, you couldn’t go to a rock concert, you couldn’t even go to a movie—her parents wouldn’t let her take the bus alone at night and walk around, even with Simon. She had to go to the movies with them, and they did the picking. Fourteen was nowhere.

  It rained a lot in the winter in the Pacific Northwest. Rain, snow, and more rain; forty degrees and damp. People read a lot. That, at least, Bambi and Simon both liked to do.

  Her mother told her these two years would be the worst of her life. From now on it would only be better: slowly, slowly she would get prettier, she would get breasts, her skin would clear up, the braces would be taken off her teeth. “That’s what a Sweet Sixteen parry is for,” her mother told her cheerily, “to celebrate the swan.” At least she’d had the decency not to say “Emerging from the ugly duckling,” but Bambi knew.

  She was also torn in her feelings about Simon. To everyone else he was the class geek; precise, erudite, unathletic. But he alone saw her specialness, her incipient talent. An avid reader, he had no desire himself to be a writer, but when Bambi started keeping a journal, and then writing poems and short stories, Simon encouraged her. He said she was good. Her English teacher told her she had very little talent and suggested she try art. Bambi fantasized poisoning that English teacher and watching her agonized death throes, and continued showing everything to Simon.

  It was from this unkind world that Bambi and Simon began their fantasy of the “magical kingdom.” They played it whenever they felt down. It was so long to wait until she turned sixteen, and so unfair. In the magical kingdom there was respect for things of the spirit. You didn’t have to be a flower child and live in the street to find happiness. Everyone was listened to, no one was dependent or deprived or lonely or ugly or friendless or made fun of. Bitchy shitty people like her English teacher would be turned into the people they had hurt so they knew what it felt like, and then if they reformed they would be allowed back into grace, albeit at a lower level. Of course there had to be levels in their magical kingdom. Otherwise how could Bambi and Simon be the rulers, the respected, the best?

  Out there in the real world which Bambi and Simon only partly inhabited because of their youth and insignificance, people worried about the war that was not supposed to be a war, about peace, politics, ecology, the draft. The boys worried about getting into college and staying there so they wouldn’t have to go to Vietnam; the girls worried about the boys they were in love with, and a lot of boys in Seattle talked about going over the border to Canada, to Vancouver, British Columbia, which was supposed to be just like home except that no one could send you off into a faraway jungle to be killed.

  “The only good part,” Simon said, “is that this will all be over when I’m old enough to worry about it.”

  “When we’re old enough,” Bambi said. And then to cover up her concern, because after all they were best friends, not a couple in love, she added: “In the magical kingdom they’re too smart to make war.”

  “In the magical kingdom I’m a rock star,” Simon said. “I’m Jim Morrison.”

  “His eyes are too small,” Bambi said.

  “I probably wouldn’t have time to read if I were a rock star,” Simon said. “And since I can’t sing anyway, I think I’ll stay an intellectual.”

  “I’ll need you to be my critic,” Bambi said.

  “Your editor,” he said. “Then I’ll send you out to the critics, and they’ll all say you’re wonderful and make you famous.”

  “In the real world or the magical kingdom?”

  “Here. We do have to live here, unfortunately,” Simon said.

  “I think I’ll write a play,” Bambi said. “Maybe I’ll star in it, too.”

  “Here?”

>   “Do you think I can’t?”

  “No,” Simon said, “I think you will someday. Meanwhile, show me your new poem.”

  “It’s a song,” she said. “I don’t have a tune for it, but I think it could be a song. So I’ll read it to you.”

  She sat on the kitchen stool. Her parents were out so she and Simon had the run of the house. “I wish I had a guitar,” Bambi said.

  “You can’t play the guitar.”

  “No, but I like the way it looks.”

  “Read.”

  “ ‘Up in a tree a bird says why, why are we put here just to die? No, says the crow, I know it’s not so. We are here to learn and grow. Da da dee, da da dee, come with me to my magic tree. We’ll be happy, we’ll live free.’ ” She stopped and scrutinized his face. “Well, that’s it.”

  “That’s brilliant, Bambi,” Simon said. “It reminds me a little bit of ‘Puff the Magic Dragon.’ ”

  She was annoyed. “I’m not derivative,” she said.

  “I mean the genre,” he said quickly. “I mean childlike and whimsical and idealistic.”

  “That song is about pot,” she said. “Mine is not.”

  “How do you know it’s about pot?”

  “They were talking in the hall at school about all the songs that secretly have drugs in them.” What she didn’t say was, no one was talking about it to me, but Simon knew.

  “I just had a picture in my head,” Simon said. “I am the proprietor of a coffeehouse which is also a bookstore, and people come there to read books and talk and listen to you read your works. You’re sitting on a high stool just like that one, and there’s a spotlight over your head. Golden maybe, or pink. I make the room darker when you come on, and everybody stops talking and visiting with each other and listens to you.”

  Bambi sighed. “In real life or the kingdom?”

  “Real life,” Simon said without hesitation. “I need a career and so do you. In the coffeehouse all the customers would be my friends. I’d table-hop, sit down with them, give them free herb tea if I liked them. And you’d be the star.”

  Star, she thought. Like the fucking Silver Princess.

  “Well, what do you think?” he asked.

  “I like it. When do we do it?”

  “After college.”

  “And what will you call it?”

  He thought for a while, his lips pursed, his eyes slits. Say Bambi and Simon, she thought, willing him to have mental telepathy.

  “I’m going to call it Simon Sez,” he said finally. “Spelled S.E.Z.” He grinned. “What a great name! I love it!”

  How geeky, Bambi thought. Sometimes I think the kids at school are right about you. “It’s unusual,” she said unenthusiastically.

  “Get it?” Simon said. “We’ll all be talking to each other, I’ll be saying things to everyone, I’ll be the social arbiter so to speak, and so it’s Simon Says, but that’s a game, and anyhow it’s too pompous, so I call it Simon Sez. S.E.Z. A little humor, a little lightness. Do you like it?”

  Poor Simon, she thought, her annoyance turned to tenderness in the face of his wistful need to have people to talk to … to have friends. “I love it,” Bambi said.

  “I knew you would.”

  The next day Bambi handed in her new poem to English class for homework. Her teacher said it was doggerel and suggested she set her sights on marriage and motherhood. Bambi wondered which poison was the most undetectable and caused the most horrible death. She also thought about which color spotlight would be the most dramatic for her coffeehouse readings.

  Maybe she should let the slime bitch live.

  5

  1967—NEW YORK

  The seasons went by, then the years, and Laura refused to give up her dream or her fantasy. Her dream had been to have a happy married life and family, her fantasy was that she had one. Clay was still in Hollywood, still in his bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, now head of programming at RBS. He jokingly said that RBS stood for “Royal Bullshit,” but Laura knew it was his life.

  Her life was the long weekend every month when he came to New York to visit her and Nina, and his daily phone calls. She took Nina to visit him briefly in California on school holidays, but he was always working and paid so little attention to them that she wondered why she always looked forward so much to these oases in time when they were never what she kept hoping them to be. Clay was the most romantic, most elusive, most mercurial man in the world. He could also, she discovered, be the coldest. She devoured his profile when he was not looking, she embraced him without touching him, she accepted what sparse tenderness he gave her and relived it over and over, wishing for more, grateful for what she had, afraid to lose it altogether. She was thirty-six. Other men could still find her attractive but she didn’t want them to. She wanted only Clay.

  The other part of her life, the one she lived between the moments of warmth and joy, was separate and secret from him. She was now thinner than she had been as a ballerina, stepping on her scale every morning with trepidation, relieved that she was always under ninety pounds. Eighty-seven was what she usually weighed now, and she worked at it. It made her feel beautiful. It was the Sixties—you could buy anything you wanted to be thin or high or energetic or to get to sleep. Laura had always been able to have the pills, mother’s little helpers, but now it was easier. She needed them to keep her appetite at bay, to cheer her up, and to enjoy, not endure, the four hours she spent every day at ballet class. An hour and a half, as she had once planned to be enough, was not enough anymore. The frantic energy from anxiety, her loneliness, her fear of losing control, and finally from the amphetamines themselves, made her dance as if she would die of it, like Moira Shearer in The Red Shoes.

  And then, there was Nina. What would she do without Nina? Laura wondered. Her beautiful child was perfect at everything. Nina was seven now, dark and delicate and graceful like her mother, with Clay’s magic smile. She was taking ballet classes, piano lessons, horseback riding, and a full course load at the best private school, with all A’s and rave reports from her teachers. At home she was soft and loving … most of the time. But sometimes, she too, like Clay, drew back, and Laura wondered why. Clay was secretive, but Nina seemed frightened. She cried easily and slept in a bed full of toy animals. Sometimes Laura offered to let Nina sleep in her bed with her, but after the first time Nina always refused.

  “A typical Gemini,” Tanya said. “You have to keep them on a very long string.”

  “No, nobody wants to sleep in my bed,” Laura said, trying to make a joke out of it.

  Tanya had been taking a course in past lives, and discovered that in one of hers she had been an Egyptian princess. The fact that everyone in that particular session had discovered they had once lived in Ancient Egypt delighted her. It never caused her to wonder. She had had many incarnations, as had they, and their collective memory had brought this one back. In another trance, or whatever she called it—vision?—Tanya discovered she had once been a Yugoslavian peasant and Nina had been her little sister.

  “That’s why I feel so close to her,” Tanya said.

  “You feel close to her because she’s your goddaughter, I hope,” Laura said. “If anything happens to me or to Clay …”

  “Nothing’s going to happen to you,” Tanya said cheerfully. “You have the longest lifeline, look!” She took Laura’s hand and traced the line. “You’ll live forever.”

  “And Clay?” Laura didn’t really believe in this stuff, but it was good to know you had all the right aspects on your side.

  “Oh, Clay’s too mean to die,” Tanya said.

  “Is that true?”

  “Of course it’s true.”

  Laura had been thinking about death often lately because her mother had died of an unexpected stroke. Clay had flown in for only one day—for the funeral—and it had hurt her, even though she had been so overwhelmed with the funeral, with relatives and old friends of her mother’s who had appeared from the woodwork, and having to be
her mother’s executor, that she felt she wouldn’t have had the proper time for him. But yes, it had hurt like hell. He should have been there, not just standing beside her at the service for appearances, but afterward, and he should have been with Nina to help explain to her that absence because of business was not the same as death.

  Nina knew what Sweeps Week was, she knew all about Pilot Season, but she didn’t know what it was to have a father who took her for a walk. Besides, Clay didn’t take a walk. He drove his white Thunderbird convertible. He lived in a culture three thousand miles away.

  Laura had inherited the house in East Hampton, and threw herself into fixing it up with the same energy she had spent decorating their apartment in New York. The old furniture her mother had loved had become antiques of a sort, but the house was dark and gloomy, too full of things that had been kept not for sentiment or value but from stinginess. Laura weeded out the mistakes, painted the whole place white, mirrored some walls, and it was hers.

  She had a fondness for mirrored walls; she liked to dance in front of them. When Nina saw her doing it she left the room, and when Laura tried to get Nina to dance with her, because after all, she knew the steps from ballet class, Nina said she had homework. So Laura danced alone.

  Now Laura and Nina spent the summers in East Hampton, in her new house, and Clay came to visit once a month, reading scripts in the sun or talking nonstop on the phone. The three of them would go to a restaurant for dinner, and Nina would talk to him very seriously about what wonderful things her teachers had said about her work, about what project she was doing over the summer to learn and keep busy. It was as if Nina were trying to bribe Clay to think she was of value, to notice her, to love her, and it broke Laura’s heart. Nina would go on, in her sweet, precise little voice, and Clay would beam at her. He did love her, he did. How could he not love her with that adoring look on his face? He would nod approvingly at Laura.

  “You’ve done a good job,” he’d say.