by Rona Jaffe
“Yes!”
“Well, she looks as if she has about twenty-two minutes to live. She could be on disease of the week without TV makeup. She’s totally anorexic, totally on something unhealthy, and she twitches all the time. Clay keeps running around the room avoiding her. She just keeps running around the room.”
“Is it a good party?”
“Same insufferable jerks.”
“I hope they miss me,” Susan said.
“The men are with their wives and the women are with their husbands, and I’m sure they’re all too busy missing their lovers to give it a thought.”
“And you want to get married.”
“Goujon is very attractive, quite bright, and extremely devoted to me,” Dana said. “The first few years should be nice.”
“My sentimental friend,” Susan said, laughing. “You haven’t changed.”
“Why would I change? I have to go back now. He’ll think I have a bladder infection. Sleep well, you have nothing to fear.”
Dana hung up and Susan smiled. She felt much better, ready to go to bed. Tomorrow morning she would go back to the article she’d been working on, with renewed fascination.
She was doing it for New York magazine, and they were considering it for a cover story, which would be her first. The piece itself concerned a case that was being called The Romeo and Juliet Murder, because at the end only one of the two young lovers had died. Two privileged New York teenagers, Meredith Perry and Charles Sheridan, intelligent and attractive Ivy League college students, made a suicide pact. She died, he didn’t. They took poison together—actually a bottle full of barbiturates—but after taking them he panicked at the last moment and managed to save himself. He was “too sick” to save her too, although there was a question about that. But there was something else that made the case of particular interest.
Meredith had always been depressed, from her earliest childhood. Charles, on the other hand, was apparently happy and normal. She was beautiful, fragile, moody, strange. He was a star athlete, an excellent student, fond of parties and practical jokes, popular, sexy, pursued.
She had been obsessed with suicide, idolizing Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, memorizing the parts of their work that dealt with her fixation, writing prophetic poetry of her own, discussing death with her friends with the pleasure other girls her age discussed boys and clothes. Meredith and Charles, these two very opposite people, were in love.
As their intense relationship grew, so did her influence over him. The body of material available in interviews with their friends and families, and the psychiatrist Meredith had been going to for years, showed that her obsession with suicide began to be matched by Charles’s obsession with her. She had managed to talk him into their suicide pact, and both of them had obtained the pills. Perhaps he didn’t really want to die, but she certainly did.
She died, he didn’t. Was it murder by default, or just an accident?
In the end, the investigation exonerated him of a possible negligent homicide charge because he was “the instrument of her will.”
The instrument of her will …
The entire concept of this case held Susan. She was fascinated by the nature of love and obsession; that of the young couple, of Laura’s strange relationship with Clay, perhaps even of her own with him. She would never give up her life for him, would she? Giving up the possibility of other men, putting up with the painful loneliness when he was inaccessible, was not anything like a suicide pact. Yet, she could understand single-minded need: she had it when she was waiting for Clay’s daily early morning phone call, unable to work, to leave the apartment, until the moment she finally heard his voice, and then such a wave of relief swept over her that she hardly listened to what he was saying. All she was aware of was their link, her safety.
It was this great emotional love that had kept the two of them together so long. Her friends, who had at first considered their affair a brief lark or a reckless folly, now envied the romance of their long attachment. Just before she went to bed Susan took out her scrapbook.
“Dearest Susan: Here we are all these Christmases later, and with each one I love you more and you mean more to my life than the one before. Thank you for just being you. Merry Christmas and the best year of all! With all my love xxx Clay.”
“Susan Dearest—Happy birthday! With all my love and thanks because you have made the last ten years the happiest of my life … I love you. Clay.”
He always seemed to think they had spent a year longer together than she did, and sometimes they argued about it good-naturedly. She counted on her fingers and got confused. If they were in their tenth year, then … She wanted it to be by his counting; as long as possible. The duration of their love never ceased to awe her, she who had thought she would be doomed to live her life forever alone.
“Dearest Susan: I love you now more than ever. You are the best and my precious monkey. I wish you more than you can ever have because you deserve it. With all my thanks and all my love—always. Clay.”
There were many more cards, all so romantic and loving, full of thanks for his happiness. But it was she, she felt, who should thank him, for saving her from what her life might have been without him. She looked at the snapshots; Clay clowning in his bathrobe in a foreign hotel room, she smiling and squinting into the California sun in front of their apartment, the two of them glowing at each other at a party: obviously a couple. And then the idea came to her about the article she was writing, and she was surprised she hadn’t thought of it before.
The Romeo and Juliet Murder was a perfect television movie: timely, true, suspenseful, simple yet about complicated issues of love, domination, and madness. Clay was looking for material now that he was going to Sun West. She would give him an option on the article without letting her agent talk to anyone else. The story had already been in the newspapers and on the TV news, but having the rights to her published magazine article would give him the edge over anyone else who wanted it. She could even help him. The people she had talked to had all signed releases. She always made them do that when they weren’t celebrities, who were fair game without a release. Clay would be all set.
And he was the best. No matter how bad his luck had been recently, this one couldn’t fail. She would write the script. They would work together, at last, sharing their lives in the area where previously they hadn’t been able to, a creative partnership. She fantasized them as a successful husband-and-wife team, being interviewed on television about their habits. In her mind she saw the TV screen and the two of them sitting there, belonging together.
It reminded her of when she was little and had fantasized about someone interviewing her for a newspaper article, actually asking her opinion when no one in her family ever did or would even listen when she tried to give it.
Once, when she was in high school, the New York Post had asked to interview her after she had won an interscholastic writing contest. They wanted to present her as a sort of prodigy. Her mother had refused. “I want my daughter to have a normal life,” she said, as if being singled out for any kind of momentary fame would ruin her chances forever.
What would her mother think now of her normal life? Susan patted Clay’s picture and put the scrapbook away. There were framed photos of him all over the apartment. Sometimes Susan talked to them. “Good night,” she said to the one next to her bed, and went to sleep, dreaming of The Romeo and Juliet Murder.
He came back to New York for Christmas week, to be with Nina and Laura and pretend to his own version of a normal life, which Susan realized that by now meant to act grumpy, ignore them by hiding in his room, and buy them expensive presents; less expensive this year because he was economizing (he made sure they knew it) and because he was still annoyed at the expense of the birthday party. He sneaked off to see her, and took her to lunch as “business.” But now it was business. She told him the details of the story he knew she was doing, and told him it should be his first project for Sun West.
&nbs
p; “I’ll try,” he said. She had never heard him sound so mild.
“It’s a natural,” Susan said. As she talked to him excitedly she saw the light come back into his eyes. Soon he was smiling and nodding, mentioning screenwriters he knew, directors he had worked with. He was enthusiastic about her writing the script, and she told him she would begin as soon as she finished the article and whatever revisions the editors wanted.
“If I get this into production I’ll put you on the picture with me,” he said.
“Can I be there the whole time? I want to learn, and I also want to be sure that nobody changes the lines. If they can’t say the lines, I’ll change them.”
“Sure.” He chuckled. “The more work you do the better it is for me.” He held her hand under the table and ordered champagne. “For our Christmas lunch,” Clay said.
“Is this it?” She felt a stab of pain. “It’s so soon …”
“Pre-Christmas lunch,” he said. He held up his glass. “I love you. To our future together.” They clinked glasses and drank. “Ah,” he sighed, “I wish I had married you years ago. We would have had such a productive life together.”
“You can marry me now,” Susan said.
“But we are married.”
“No. I mean really marry me. Nina’s almost grown. She’ll understand.”
He looked pained. “Do you know what it would cost me to get a divorce? I’d have to give Laura half of everything I made, plus support her and Nina and that expensive apartment in The Dakota, and Nina’s college … all from my half. I’d be broke. I’m not making nearly enough to handle that.”
“I don’t understand,” Susan said. It seemed so illogical and unfair. “If you gave her half why would you have to pay all the other bills too? Why only you and not Laura too?”
“You don’t understand,” Clay said. “Don’t you think I’d be relieved if she’d go live in East Hampton and not bother me? I wish she would.”
“You love that apartment in The Dakota,” she said gently. “It means a lot to you.”
“My first success,” Clay said. “I’d have to sell it.” His tone said lose it. Susan’s heart went out to him, the young man she had never known, with all his optimistic dreams.
“It’s a symbol. I do understand.”
“I don’t care about a symbol for me,” he said. “I love that apartment but I’m beginning to hate it too. I need it as a symbol for the world. Look—” For the first time he sounded testy. “I hardly have a job. Let me get on my feet. I’d be strapped if I tried to divorce Laura now. I’d have nothing.”
Susan sighed. She couldn’t contest his logic. But, it hurt.
He smiled then and squeezed her hand. “You’re my life,” he said. “You’re my precious magical monkey. We’re together. We’re going to make movies together and make love together and be together for the rest of our lives. Come on, have a glass of champagne and be happy. It’s Christmas!”
Their “Christmas celebration” the next night was drinks at the Russian Tea Room, a properly decorated and festive place; iced vodka with smoked salmon and caviar; early, because he had to go home for dinner with Nina and to watch her trimming the tree. “I just put on one ornament and escape to my bed as quickly as possible,” Clay said. “Don’t be lonely and don’t be sad. If you’re sad it makes me sad.”
“I won’t be,” Susan lied.
First he had come to her apartment where they exchanged presents. She had bought him cuff links yet again because they were the only jewelry either of them approved of for a man to wear aside from a watch. He gave her a beautiful necklace of delicate gold petals. It was obviously expensive and she felt guilty.
He had written another beautiful card for her. His cards always made her feel inadequate about hers, even though she was the writer. She stood it on her dresser, where it would stay throughout the holidays and then be put into her scrapbook along with the others.
At the restaurant they were loving but subdued. This wasn’t the way it should be, but it was part of the bargain, part of the tradeoff when you gave your heart to a married man. Soon they would be together again in California, and they would be working on The Romeo and Juliet Murder movie, she knew it.
“I love you,” he said.
“I love you.”
When it was time to go he dropped her off first in the cab. Susan saw the familiar lights of her apartment building coming toward her, and looked at them with a kind of dread. No matter how unhappy he was spending the night with his family, he was going to be with them. He was hers, she had lived with him, and did, and would, but there were times like this when she felt abandoned.
His lips when he kissed her good night were gentle and cool. Her doorman was still holding the cab door open, but she nodded no, Clay would be going on. A cab behind them was honking impatiently.
“Merry Christmas, monkey,” Clay said lightly, preparing himself for the ordeal to come at home.
“Merry Christmas, monkey catcher.”
They kissed again, briefly, and the cab with him in it drove away. Susan went upstairs, pulled the silver foil off her large chocolate Santa and bit his head off. Then she sucked and ate the rest until she was both comforted and sick, staring out the windows at the lights on the Christmas trees in other people’s apartments.
This was the way it was.
17
1979—SEATTLE AND LOS ANGELES
Four years out in the world was the same as a college education, Bambi was thinking, as she dressed to go to Simon Sez for the evening. At college she had been first excited and challenged by the newness, then finally impatient and bored, waiting to graduate and get on to her wonderful grown-up life and career with Simon. By the end she hadn’t even cared what grades she got as long as she didn’t get thrown out. And now, after four years at Simon Sez, she realized that instead of the glamorous showcase she had envisioned it was really a cozy womb for Simon, a dead end where they would remain two big fish in a small pond.
Simon was so bright, so attractive and sexy, so good with people, but in some ways he was like a leftover flower child from the Sixties. He thought Simon Sez was the “magical kingdom,” and for him it was; but she no longer did.
Big fish, Bambi thought, and ran to get a pad of paper and a pen to write down the new lyrics of a song. “You want to be a biiiig fish, you think that’s such a cool wish …” It didn’t matter that she couldn’t write conventional music, or that her voice was thin. She considered herself innovative. At Simon Sez the people who got up on the tiny stage to perform were weird or amateurs or both, and half the time the audience was so busy yapping that they didn’t even pay attention. She deserved better. She wanted more out of her life.
“Big fish alone in L.A., you keep waitin’ for your day, didn’t I tell you to stay … back home, back home.” It was genius! Her best song ever. And written in an instant of inspiration, the way some of the great songs were. Hadn’t John Lennon said that about a couple of his songs, or was it Paul McCartney? Maybe both of them … “Nobody sees how lonely you look, nobody even throws you a hook, poor fish, poor fish.” She folded the paper and put it into her pocket. She would try out the song tonight.
She had learned to play a few chords on the guitar, and, bent over it, her long walnut-colored braid gleaming in the spotlight over her head, her big brown eyes looking up every once in a while soulfully, she felt she made a pretty picture. Someone should discover her, but they wouldn’t be likely to here in Seattle, in a tiny little coffeehouse; no way.
When she walked into Simon Sez all the regulars were there. Simon was working the room as always; his two partners Judd and Tom were sitting in the back booth they used as a throne. The new waitress, a college girl making money to help toward her tuition, smiled, and Bambi smiled back. She stopped to say hello at each table and booth, to friends and strangers alike. Everyone knew who she was, even if they didn’t know her personally.
“Ah! The Lady Green.” Topo, the semi drag queen, who pl
ucked his eyebrows and wore a ton of makeup, but didn’t have the nerve to wear a dress, was at his usual booth with his other nelly friends. They were all crazy about her. “Divine outfit. Do you have a new song for us tonight?”
“As a matter of fact, I do,” Bambi said.
“Be still, my heart,” Topo said, and put his hands over his breast. Bambi moved on.
“She’s so terrible she’s wonderful,” he whispered to a first-timer as Bambi went past, but she heard him. She stopped dead.
“What did you say?” she asked in a voice of absolute ice.
“Nothing.”
“I heard you.”
“Just teasing …”
“I want you to get the fuck out of my club,” Bambi said quietly, in that same cold voice. Inside she felt like bursting into tears. Hypocritical little shit, making fun of her behind her back! Did anyone else think she was ridiculous?
“Kidding …”
“Out.”
Simon was beside her then, his arm around her shoulders, as if he had radar. He smiled pleasantly at the party of six he didn’t want to lose. “What’s the problem?”
Topo shrugged extravagantly. “The Lady Green is persecuting this poor queen, I have no idea why.”
“Did he do something?” Simon asked her.
She tensed. She was smart enough to know that if Simon threw out Topo and his friends, by the next day it would be all over town—what he had said to her, and then the jokes and insults at her expense. “He doesn’t seem to appreciate the entertainment,” she said.
“But I worship you,” Topo said.
“A free round of whatever you’re having for the entire table,” Simon said pleasantly. His smile said You’re forgiven. but his eyes said Watch it. He kissed Bambi on the cheek.
“Hemlock,” Bambi said sweetly. She followed Simon through the room.
“What did he say to you?” Simon asked.
“He said I was so terrible I was wonderful,” Bambi said, and her voice caught in her throat.