An American Love Story

by Rona Jaffe

  She had lunch with Dana in the commissary. “So how’s the Academy Award-winning picture?” Dana said.

  “Dog food,” Susan said glumly. “I’m losing my sense of myself. I used to resent the editorial changes on articles when they bought them by the inch like ribbon, but Ergil doesn’t have any creative respect for me either. And I feel like a sellout because I’m almost ready to do anything he wants just to please him.”

  Dana looked at the notes and doubled over laughing. “This is the worst thing I ever saw,” she said.

  “It’s not that bad,” Susan said. “Is it?”

  “Listen to this line …”

  “No, don’t. I had to read it. I don’t want to have to hear it too. Let’s have lunch and get our blood sugar up. I’ll make it work out somehow. He really knows more than I do even though I don’t agree with him.”

  “Who said he knows more than you do?” Dana said. “He said it, naturally. So if he knows so much, how come he’s not a writer?”

  “Because producers have the power,” Susan said.

  There were the days, and there were the nights. In the days Susan went to her office waiting to be summoned, and at night she went out with her friends. One of her new friends was a young screenwriter named Marty. He had actually sold something, although it had never been made. Now he was in the writers’ building working on something else that had been optioned. “Do you know this screenwriter named David Enwin?” he asked Susan one day.

  “I met him once,” she said. “Why?”

  “Well, he came into my office yesterday and asked when you would be leaving.”

  “Does he want my office or my job?”

  “I don’t know,” Marty said. “Maybe he wants to go out with you.”

  “Fat chance.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about him,” Marty said. “You have a contract. And nobody likes him, so don’t pay any attention. There’s nothing he can do.”

  In the evenings Susan and Dana sometimes went to The Old World, an inexpensive restaurant with generous portions on the Strip, which was in some ways the West Coast version of Downey’s for her particular group of friends. Or they had people in to the bungalow for drinks, or went to someone’s apartment or house. They managed to be allowed to go to The Factory, a members-only club in what was actually an old factory, where many movie and television stars went. They rode through those carefree nights under the stars with the top down on Susan’s big blue car, and drank too much wine, smoked too many cigarettes, slept with too many attractive men they’d known for only a few hours and never saw again. Neither of them took drugs except for occasional pot, and of course sleeping pills. They never took LSD, or tried anything they didn’t know about, and didn’t even know anyone who took heroin. They considered themselves conservative and prudent, although Susan sometimes wondered. There was a part of her Fifties upbringing that had stayed with her, through all her years as a rebel, and she knew she had built an invisible wall around her heart in order not to be hurt. Sex was abundant and fun, but meaningless, love seemed to be for other people but not for her. She moved closer into the Gabe Gideon story, letting Ergil Feather change it more and more, and one night she even went to bed with him, even though he wasn’t from her world and made her nervous, and even though she didn’t respect him anymore.

  When she told Dana, Dana shrieked. “Ergil Feather? You went to bed with Ergil Feather? Oh my God, why? He’s such a schmuck!”

  “I felt sorry for him.” They both laughed until they cried.

  One night Susan and Dana went to a party at someone’s house high in the Hollywood Hills, surrounded by woods, to watch television, because Neil Armstrong was going to be the first man to set foot on the moon. The color TV had been put outside on the deck, but only a few people were watching. The rest were wandering around; stoned, laughing, talking, flirting, eating, getting drunk. Susan made a potato salad sandwich on rye bread and went out to the deck to watch the tiny white figure floating on the screen. She looked up at the moon between the trees and saw dark places on it, the peaks and the valleys, and thought how forever after there would be something on it that had never been there before. No more Man in the Moon. No more moon made of green cheese from her childhood. Ergil had changed the title of their movie again because of the astronauts. It was now called “Dark Laughter.” She didn’t want to think about it tonight.

  A few more of the party guests were hunched forward watching the moonwalk, but most still were not. Susan remembered other parties, other nights. The girls on the deck were so thin. They went on fasts, and changed their names to things like Sunshine, and lived with men who worshiped them. Ergil had started putting in too many camera shots. Someone didn’t just appear in a room, he had to open the door, establishing shot; go into an entrance hall, establishing shot; close-up; traveling shot; go into the room where he was supposed to be in the first place, establishing shot; start to talk—two shot—why did they need the entrance hall anyway? The script, which was supposed to be a hundred and twenty pages, was now a hundred and seventy-five pages long. Ergil said he would have it typed with small margins and no one would notice. He said if she objected to anything anymore he would fire her.

  “I can fire you, you know.” Words of dread.

  She was now ashamed to have her name on the script as its author. But she didn’t want to be fired either. The world she lived in was as strange to her as the tiny astronaut stepping out on white rocks, on a moon she could see in two places. Why did anyone want to go to the moon anyway? Why did she want to write a movie script, make a movie, be acclaimed? Because people wanted to do what everyone thought was impossible.

  Ergil had the script typed and Susan showed her screenwriter friend Marty. He laughed and said he’d never seen anything so ridiculous. The margins ran into the edge of the folder. Marty said it would fool no one, and Susan wished she still had her first draft, to show she’d had promise; but she didn’t know who to send it to, and it was only a first draft, and it was too late.

  As for Gabe Gideon, she hardly recognized him anymore.

  And she didn’t recognize Maisie either.

  “We’re going to a terrific party,” Dana told her. “It’s at the house of Charlotte Jute—her husband is an executive at Magno, and she has lots of interesting people. I can make contacts and maybe you can find someone sane to fall in love with.”

  “Or vice versa,” Susan said.

  “Or both.”

  The party was at a really grown-up house, with servants and a lot of expensively arranged flowers. Through the doorway to the dining room Susan could see that the buffet supper was to be served on a flowered tablecloth that matched them. Ergil Feather was nowhere in evidence, but there were movie stars whom Susan recognized from her childhood, and a few people her age as well. Charlotte Jute had her hair up in a pigtail and was dressed like a Hare Krishna. She flowed around the room, touching each guest lightly, saying something to make them smile. She descended on Susan with an apologetic look.

  “Susan Josephs, how nice to meet you. I’m so sorry that David Enwin left just before you got here. I wanted you to meet him. He’s writing ‘Gabe Gideon—Laughter on the Dark Side of the Moon.’ ”

  “No,” Susan said, “I’m writing it.”

  “Oh, but no. My husband is at Magno, the studio that’s doing the picture, and he’s so excited about David Enwin’s script. I thought you and David would enjoy talking. I know you wrote the fabulous article.”

  “I also wrote the script,” Susan said. What is this; Wonderland? “David Enwin didn’t write the script, I did.”

  “No,” Charlotte Jute said. She smiled.

  “How long has he been writing this script?” Susan asked. She felt everything inside her starting to churn.

  “Well, he was hired quite a while ago, I think, but he’s really only been on it four weeks.”

  “Excuse me,” Susan said, shaking, clenching inside to stop the shaking, trying not to burst into tears and make
a fool of herself in front of this stranger. “May I use your phone?”

  Charlotte Jute waved toward the study. “In there.” Susan fled.

  She called Ergil at home. He answered, and finally she began to cry. “Who is writing my script, me or David Enwin?”

  Ergil sounded subdued and embarrassed. “Well,” he said, “David’s on it now.”

  “Since when?” she demanded.

  “A while.”

  “You never intended me to write it at all, did you?” she said. She was crying so hard it was difficult to speak. “You were just humoring me because I wouldn’t sell the article unless I had a crack at the first draft. That’s why he was hanging around my office waiting for me to leave. He knew he had the job. Why did you do this to me?”

  There was a silence. Finally Ergil sighed. “We had a good time,” he said. “Didn’t we?”

  “A good time?”

  “And you had your chance. I’m sorry.”

  She remembered what he had said about the Academy Award. What bullshit. Had he said the same thing to David Enwin?

  “What did the studio say about the script we did?”

  “They turned it down,” Ergil said.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  There was another long silence. “Maybe you should start thinking about when you want to go home,” Ergil Feather said, not unkindly.

  She left the party, and four days later she left California and flew back to New York. Dana was staying on to try to get something in the movies. She was going to share a small apartment with two actor friends. When Susan got back to New York she put the script into the bottom drawer of her file and never looked at it again. Even seeing the cover was too painful.

  At the end of the Sixties everyone had his or her own idea of the day the music died. For some it was the assassinations, or the riots, or the political upheaval. For some it was when the Manson “family” killed Sharon Tate and three other people in the house on Cielo Drive, at a gathering where many people said they had almost been, and suddenly hippies weren’t cute anymore. For Susan, it was her experience in Hollywood. She knew only one thing: from now on she was going to see to it that she was in control of her own work.

  The script of the Gabe Gideon story was now called “Simple Promises.” And then a movie called Easy Rider came out and it changed everything. Moviemakers didn’t want stories about sad little children and their down-and-out fathers, even with sex in them. They wanted films about the drug culture, about rebellion, nonconformity, youth on motorcycles. David Enwin threw out Maisie and played up Gabe’s drugs. There were lots of scenes of hallucinations. But, too quickly, the public got tired of youthful rebellion. Black pride was visible in the news, the streets, and prime time TV. Ergil Feather had an inspiration, and brought in another writer who made Gabe Gideon black. In the end, the movie, in any of its incarnations, was never made.

  8

  1969—NEW YORK

  Nina Bowen was nine now, and every morning she went off to school in her uniform of blue blazer, short plaid skirt, and white blouse, her dark hair pulled back neatly in two silver barrettes; and she looked exactly like everyone else. But she was not. Perhaps there was a different secret story for every girl in her class, but Nina thought she was the only one.

  It had become apparent that her mother was not like other mothers, or even like other people, and her father was almost never home. Nina spent all her time trying to be the perfect child, to excel, to achieve, to have straight A’s, to be singled out by the teachers as the best, hoping that her father would love her for it and come home more often. He praised her abilities when she and her mother told him about them in his daily phone calls, but he didn’t change his schedule, and Nina just kept trying harder.

  She wondered why he didn’t love her, even though he said he did. He talked to her as if she were a business appointment; charming but always in a hurry. She had also. realized that he didn’t love her mother, couldn’t stand her even; and she attributed this to Laura’s nervousness and frantic physical activity. She was already aware that her mother took pills. Several times, when her mother was away from the apartment, Nina had looked through her bathroom medicine cabinet, her closets, her bureau drawers. Laura had various kinds of capsules and tablets in the bathroom, and more hidden under her lingerie. Nina had heard her parents fighting about them, and knew they were not for an illness but caused one. She wished she could throw them all out, but then her mother would know how much she knew, and might not love her anymore, and then she wouldn’t have anyone.

  Nina had her large collection of stuffed animals: bears and rabbits, dogs and cats. She chose nine of the most intelligent-looking ones and made them into a Supreme Court. They sat in a row on the top of her bookcase and she conducted her mock trials. Whose fault is this? Is my mother to blame because she’s so different, or is my father to blame because he doesn’t care about us? Am I to blame? Have I done something wrong, or is it just that I’m a kid and he doesn’t like kids? I’m much more grown up than other girls my age—my teacher said I was “unusually mature”—but obviously that’s not good enough. I’m still a child. Why would he be interested in me?

  But the fathers of my friends (most of them, anyway) love their daughters. Those fathers come to school events with the mothers, even when they’re divorced. My father never came to anything for me.

  She sent cards and letters and drawings to her father. She did the same for her mother so she wouldn’t feel left out. Her mother was too sensitive and too possessive, and scared her a little. Her father scared her too, because there seemed no way she could please him or win him. It had occurred to her finally that she would have to find herself, and be perfect, in order to survive, for surely she would have to exist alone. Of course she could confide none of this to her mother, who was already so unhappy. The animal judges had come down with their verdict: Guilty, and the punishment was isolation. Nina accepted it, but she walked around in a haze of perpetual anxiety and low-grade depression because of what she now knew was her fate.

  Sometimes she had nightmares that made her wake up with tears pouring down her cheeks. Her mother often asked her to sleep in her bed, to snuggle and be cozy together. And once, Nina had. On that night she saw her mother as a terrifying creature she had never seen before. It was the drugs. Laura had fallen asleep with her eyes partly open; little white slits showing and no pupil, as if her eyeballs were turned up under the lids, and she slept as if she were drugged or dead. But she was not dead; she was snoring. This strange unseemly sound came from between her delicate lips, a gurgle and moan, but no matter how Nina prodded her she did not wake up. This stranger looked like her mother, but she was not. Asleep, she looked even thinner than she did when she was awake and moving like a whirlwind. Her cheeks were sunken, the bones on the sides of her forehead stood out, and her nose was too big. This stranger would never save her child. This dead woman could not even save herself.

  Afterward, Nina would never sleep with her mother again. She slept with her animals. Her father teased her that she was going to take them to college. Nina thought she probably would.

  She and her mother and Aunt Tanya and Uncle Edward had been to Paris together, and it had been fun. At night in the hotel room she shared with Boo, Nina wrote long letters to her father, as if they were school papers, telling him everything she had learned. “We went to the Musée du Jeu de Paume, and there was a Degas sculpture there of a ballerina, with a tutu on it made of material. I was surprised that the material had lasted so long, because it was such an old sculpture. The statue reminded me of mother when she was young and was a famous dancer, although of course I wasn’t around because I wasn’t born yet.” She had wanted to add: “Were you two happy before I was born?” but she didn’t. You could never ask either of your parents a thing like that.

  Nina was doing well in ballet class, and her teacher said she had great promise. Laura was thrilled. “It’s in the genes,” she would exclaim happily. “
Look, you have my turnout!” A ballerina like her, Nina thought; I’d rather die. I want to work in an office. I want to read.

  But of course, being the child she was, while hating and fearing the talent she thought would trap her in a reenactment of her mother’s unhappy life, Nina couldn’t help but try to be as good at ballet as she could. She had to be perfect, even when she wanted nothing so much as to fail.

  They were doing an abridged version of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream at school, and because Nina was so graceful and elfin she had been chosen to play Puck. The other girls were pleasant to her, except for the ones who were so jealous they couldn’t contain themselves, but she had never had any really close friends. Everyone had a best friend, to confide in and giggle with, but she didn’t. She studied too hard, her marks were too good, she was too exact and seemingly poised. The other girls admired her, but they didn’t invite her to their homes on weekend afternoons. Although this hurt, Nina felt it was best, because she was ashamed to invite them to her home where they could see how peculiar her mother was. Laura was delighted that Nina had such an important part in the school play. She honestly felt that Nina had a normal, average academic life—the kind she had missed as a child—and she had never breathed the dreaded word Rudofsky. It was good to be a star in the sweet little world of private school. After all, Puck was not the Firebird. As for Nina, she felt like an automaton on a treadmill.

  There was a playhouse in the schoolyard. It was painted white and had red shutters. It had originally been built to hold gym equipment, but the students loved it and used it for fantasies. They also occasionally used it as if it were itself a piece of gym equipment, and because it was as high as a garage it had become off-limits for climbing. Nina found herself looking at it often lately. Her fantasies about it were of a different nature.