by Rona Jaffe
Her trips to Paris, her travels, her pretense of independence had changed nothing. Through the years her life had grown more enclosed. She had no real friends but Tanya and Edward. And she had her child, the elusive and secretive Nina; her beautiful little overachiever, who was fourteen now and almost ready to become her friend … or so Laura hoped.
So here she was in her house in East Hampton at the end of another summer, and another summer weekend, and Clay had not come to visit his family at all. Again. But Tanya and Edward were there, as they had been every weekend; Edward full of talk about the Watergate scandal, delighted when Nixon finally resigned in August, Tanya bringing strange teas that were made of everything except tea, teaching Nina to do macrame, cooking up her newest health food fads on the wok.
Edward had taken Nina horseback riding. Nina had been depressed since Boo left, her last link to the warmth of childhood, and Laura tried to cheer her up by teasing, but she had never been good with jokes.
“A girl who buys tampons doesn’t need a governess,” Laura had said.
“You looked in my room!” Nina shrieked. “You have no right to look in my room!” and ran away crying.
Laura was distressed. “Don’t worry,” Tanya said cheerfully. “She’s probably been looking in yours for years.”
“Oh, I hope not.” She thought of the pills.
Tanya gave her a knowing look. After all these years they could almost read each other’s minds. “She doesn’t have to read brand names to know you’re stoned,” Tanya said.
“I’m not stoned.”
“I’m not criticizing. But if you’d let me teach you to meditate you’d find peace without them.”
“Drop it,” Laura said gently.
“Dropped.” As gently.
So Nina was riding with Uncle Edward, the only close adult man in her life, and around her neck was the pink silk printed scarf from Hermès that Clay had given her four or five years ago.
What would we do without Edward? Laura thought, filled with bittersweet love. “Let’s walk on the beach,” she said to Tanya. “It’s so pretty at sunset.”
They took off their shoes and walked down the weatherbeaten planks that served as stairs, and then onto the soft sand, still warm on the surface, cool underneath. The beach was nearly deserted at this hour. They crossed to the firm damp bar of sand the tide had left behind, dotted with sea debris, and started to walk along it, beside the ocean slipping and foaming near their feet.
“Oh, look!” Tanya said. There in front of them was the most incredible sight: the rising full moon, so close and enormous it seemed to be sitting on the tip of the beach. It was orange, flame-colored, as if it were filled with little licks of fire.
“Ahh …”
“So beautiful …”
“It looks like an oriental doorway,” Laura said.
“To where, I wonder.”
They stood looking at it in awe, and then suddenly, first Laura, then Tanya, they began to dance along the beach as if they could actually reach it. They ran and leaped and dipped and flew: two former ballerinas in early middle age, one emaciated, one plump; both young again and light as air, dancing together into the great flaming doorway of the rising moon.
These beloved people, Laura thought; Tanya and Edward, my Nina, they’re my family, they’re all I need. And Clay, my dearest absent husband, out there but with me, he’s my security, my framework, my love. I have all these people and I’m happy. Perhaps at last I’ve made peace with my life.
She knew that later Tanya and Edward would sleep in each other’s arms, and she would be alone. But that was a thought to be pushed away. Now she was filled with love for everyone, dancing into the flame-colored doorway of the moon.
Back in New York again, Laura continued with her routine. On the phone she told Clay he was missing the invigorating fall weather, and he laughed and said he was too busy to look out of his own window. She chattered on to him with the news from the home front. Nina was in her first year of high school, with more homework than ever. Tanya had started another new group class to learn to become a healer. She and her group tried to heal afflicted people who lived in other states, using the strength of their many minds as one. Edward’s practice of theatrical law was doing very well and he had just signed a rock star. He and Tanya had season tickets to the opera as well as the ballet.
Usually while she was talking to Clay on the phone in the mornings, Laura heard him rustling papers and knew he was reading his mail.
One day she saw a blind item in the gossip column of the newspaper and at last had something to share with him that he might find less boring and provincial. “It says: ‘Captain’s Paradise: What ex-RBS executive has a wife in California and a wife in New York?’ ” Laura said to him. “Who is he? You know everybody.”
“I don’t know,” Clay said. “I don’t pry into people’s private lives.”
“Try to find out.”
“All right.” But he never did, and after a while she forgot about it.
The second item appeared in the same gossip column a month later, and this one shattered everything.
“Journalist Susan Josephs, who recently grabbed a coup with her interview with the much-married Elizabeth Taylor, is content living with the very much married—or is he?—former RBS exec Clay Bowen.”
Laura felt as if she had been punched. She read and reread it with shock, and then with mounting rage and humiliation. She hoped it wasn’t true, she knew that people had seen and believed it, and finally, feeling the pain seep in through all her defenses, she knew it was true. Her hands were shaking, and she ran to her medicine chest and took two pills to quiet the scream that threatened to burst from her throat. She wanted to kill … who? That woman? Clay? Certainly not Clay. She cut out the column and wrote on it: Now we know who the mystery ex-RBS executive is, and mailed it to Clay at his apartment.
She told no one about the item, and to her relief no one mentioned it to her. She waited, and after a week, when she was sure Clay had received the clipping, she spoke. “Well, did you get my letter?”
“What letter?” He sounded more irritated than usual.
“With that nice little item about you and Susan Josephs,” Laura said.
“Honey, I never got it,” he snapped. The way he said honey was like a curse. She didn’t know whether she should pursue it further. “I have to work,” he said, and hung up.
She didn’t know what to do. An extra hour of ballet did nothing for her agitation. By evening, when Clay still hadn’t called back and she knew he wouldn’t, Laura opened a bottle of champagne. The hell with the calories, tonight she would drink it all. At seven, having consumed most of the bottle and a dozen cigarettes, she telephoned Tanya. There was no answer, and she remembered Tanya and Edward were going to the opera tonight. They wouldn’t be home for hours. She finished the bottle of champagne and opened another.
As she often did now, Nina had eaten alone, taking her dinner into her bedroom so she could read while she ate. Laura walked into Nina’s room without knocking, drunk and desperate, a glass of champagne in her hand.
“My baby,” Laura said. “We’re all alone now.”
Nina looked up at her with an expression that a less drugged and intoxicated woman would have seen was primal fear.
“Your father has a girlfriend,” Laura said. “Her name is Susan Josephs. Everybody knows about it. They’re living together. People think she’s his wife. I think she’s his whore.”
Nina just kept on looking at her. The book she had been reading slid to the floor. She didn’t say a word.
“We will, of course, go on as always,” Laura said. “A facade. We will continue … the facade.” Her words were becoming very slurred. She was not used to drinking so much, and the pills made the effect of the alcohol even worse. She lit a cigarette and took a gulp of the champagne. “He has betrayed us,” Laura said.
She wanted to hold out her arms to take her baby to her breast, but her arms felt leaden
and her baby was a young woman now, a confidante. She took a drag of her cigarette and realized there was no ashtray in Nina’s room, not even as a souvenir. The ash at her cigarette’s tip was growing longer. She couldn’t make a mess on Nina’s pretty carpet. These are the tiny ridiculous things that come to mind in the middle of violence and tragedy. Laura turned and walked out of Nina’s room.
Nina sat there and felt her heart beating; beat, beat; surprised it was still functioning. All these years, all her life, her efforts had done nothing. The animal Supreme Court had been right, and now her destiny was apparent to everyone. She was a failure. They were all failures, and so was their life. She hated her mother for what she had become, and her father for his omissions, and Susan Josephs, whoever she was, just for being there. If her parents had loved each other, if their life had been normal, there would have been no Susan Josephs. The light in her room was so bright it was beginning to make black zigzags in front of her eyes. She turned it off.
She took her empty dinner plate from underneath the bed and brought it into the kitchen, rinsed it, and placed it neatly into the dishwasher. The apartment seemed very large and filled with shadows. When she was gone it would be emptier still, and they might miss her. Right now all she wanted to do was sleep forever. She tiptoed silently out into the living room, past the lighted den where her mother, head back, was flung on the couch like an armature, listening to sad music, lost in her own world. Nina continued unseen into her mother’s bedroom.
Of course she knew where the pills were. She took the bottle that said Take one at night, and slipped it into her pocket. Then she returned to her own bedroom and shut the door.
She wondered how many you had to take in order to die. She brought a glass of water from the bathroom to her bedside table along with the pills and started swallowing them. They tasted bitter, and she had always hated taking pills. Nevertheless, she persisted. After she had finished half the bottle she was starting to gag. If one at night was enough to make her mother look like a dead woman, surely as many as she had just taken would make her a real one.
Not a dead woman, a dead girl. She would never grow up.
And that was just fine, she didn’t want to.
Nina lay on top of her still-made bed in her clothes and thought about ice-skating. She had seen a photograph once of the lake outside their apartment building, in Central Park, in 1880. Nothing was there but The Dakota, and trees, and families skating on the ice. There were men and women and children, the grown-ups in long coats, the children still in short ones, everyone having a good time. Those were simpler days; there was less to do. The air was clean, and people read, and told stories, and sometimes sang at parties. There was no television. She didn’t think there was any Hollywood. She could not, in her wildest imagination, picture herself and her father and mother all ice-skating on a frozen lake together on a weekend afternoon.
But of course some of those people were probably miserable too. Scratch the surface of a life and you never know what you’ll find. She couldn’t move anymore. She imagined music playing and herself skimming and twirling on the ice. It was a peaceful image. Cold air came up from the ice and then there was nothing at all.
In the morning Edward came to the apartment to fetch Nina to go bicycle riding in the park as they had planned. He rang the bell and nobody answered. Finally, instead of Nina, who was always eager and ready, opening the door, Laura did. She looked terrible.
“I have a hangover,” Laura said. “If you want coffee you’ll have to make your own. We have no help on weekends now that my husband has decided to economize.”
“That’s all right,” Edward said. “I had some at home. Where’s Nina?”
Laura looked blank.
“Nina!” he called. There was no answer. “Nina?” She had never been late in her life. He went to her bedroom and knocked on the door. “Nina? You’re not still asleep? Nina?” He pushed the door, gently, not to intrude. It opened. He looked in cheerfully, expecting her to come bounding out. Then he saw her.
She was lying on the bed fully clothed and she didn’t seem to be breathing at all.
The white place was a hospital, with footsteps and hospital noises. The whiteness was the light through her closed eyelids. Her throat hurt terribly and there were things attached to her. She could hear people murmuring in the near distance, and she pretended to be still asleep so she could hear what they were saying about her. A voice she didn’t know said: “She’s coming around.” Nina waited to hear if they said anything else, but she was too sleepy to wait, and she drifted off, surprised she wasn’t dead and wondering what miracle had happened to save her.
Later, a doctor came and asked her what had happened. He didn’t seem to be accusing her of anything, but that was probably a trap.
“I couldn’t sleep,” Nina lied. “I really needed some sleep so I borrowed some of my mom’s pills.”
“How many did you take?”
“Just to go to sleep,” Nina said mildly.
“Four? Six? Ten?”
She looked at him as if she didn’t have the faintest idea what he was talking about. She knew how to do that look because she had seen it on her father. Now she was beginning to understand what it meant, that it could cover any number of things, like a cake full of snakes.
“Why would you want to do that without asking?” the doctor said.
Cake full of snakes, Nina thought.
“Wouldn’t it have been better to tell your mother?”
“She was asleep,” Nina said.
When they let her go home Laura cried. She kept sobbing and hugging Nina, alternately, and saying how guilty she felt. “Oh, my dearest child, I’m so upset. If I hadn’t had those pills around …”
But you always will, Nina thought.
“You must never, never do that again.”
I guess I won’t, Nina thought. She nodded.
“Say you won’t. Promise.”
“I won’t do it again.”
“We mustn’t tell your father. He’ll never forgive me. I’ll never forgive myself.” Nina wished her mother would stop crying. “And your father would be so disappointed in you,” Laura went on. “He thinks so highly of you. He would never understand why you did a crazy thing like that.”
“I wouldn’t want to tell him either,” Nina said. “We’ll keep it our secret.”
Of course she would never tell. She would never want her father to know that his “perfect” daughter had done something so imperfect as try to commit suicide just because everything she had tried to believe in all of her life had turned out to be a lie.
15
1975—SEATTLE
It was Bambi’s wedding day, and she had never been so happy in her life. Bambi Green and Simon Green, together forever. Their friends at college had made jokes: Why get married when you can just live together? You don’t even have to change your name.
It had never occurred to either of them not to get married after they graduated. Their lovemaking, consummated at last when they were finally away from home, was as powerful as she had expected it to be. They had the same dreams for the future, the same needs, the same plans. And above all, they were in love.
It had turned out that Simon’s parents could deny their brilliant boy nothing. They had paid his tuition, but Simon had insisted on working at his part-time job anyway, and persuaded them to lend him the money to start him in his new business venture after graduation; his longed-for coffeehouse, Simon Sez. He presented them with a very good business prospectus he had put together with two partners he had met at school. Simon’s parents were not rich people, but they were willing to do whatever they could. His two partners’ parents were of course contributing too. And Bambi had talked her parents into investing as their wedding present. She and Simon intended to be equals in everything.
Simon’s mother never quite forgave Bambi for changing her son’s destiny, but Bambi ignored her wounded little looks.
Their last year at college
, while Simon was working long hours finding the right place for the coffeehouse and putting it together, Bambi was writing. She had poems and brief dramatic sketches prepared for her appearances under the pink spotlight. There would be other people performing too—new comics trying out their material, guitar players, singers—anyone who wanted to be discovered, but she would be the star.
Simon Sez was in Seattle, near the university. Simon had given up his plan to combine the coffeehouse with a bookstore as too complicated economically; instead it would be a gathering place. It was very small and cozy, and inside it looked like a library, with dark wooden walls, and bookshelves filled with secondhand paperback books he had bought for a nickel apiece, knowing people would borrow them and not return them even though he had placed a sign-out book near the door. Tables were jammed together, with room for him to walk around and be the jovial host. Their little apartment was only a block away, waiting for them. They were not even going to bother with a honeymoon right now, much too excited to get on with their project.
But all that was tomorrow, and today was Bambi’s wedding day, a day she knew she would remember all her life. Her wedding dress was beautiful; a palest ecru lace shift she had insisted on buying in a vintage-clothing store. (Her mother had been annoyed about that, naturally. She had no style.) Her long hair was loose and flowing, with a crown of fresh early summer flowers holding her veil. The sweet tones of a flute player would accompany her walk down the aisle.
She and Simon had written their own vows. The minister was twenty-eight and had sideburns. They were being married in the garden of Bambi’s home, where she had had her Sweet Sixteen party. How long ago that seemed, and what a baby she had been! She thought about her little fears of not being popular, and her joy when she found she was. She was going to be an independent career woman from now on, so far beyond silly things.