An American Love Story

by Rona Jaffe

  She wondered if secretly he thought that what she was now was as special as she was ever going to be. If so, he would have thought that was fine. The thought made her grit her teeth and she almost couldn’t look at him.

  Matt had turned out to be the dick brain she should have known he was from his previous behavior. She had shown him her first completed script and he had said it wasn’t in any way ready to be shown to anyone in the business. He wouldn’t do a thing for her, and he told her not to call his agent.

  She did anyway, and used his name. She spoke to the agent’s assistant, who said to send along the script, so she dropped it off, and a few weeks later it came back with a little note from the assistant, not even the agent himself, saying that his eminence was not taking on any new clients.

  When Matt married his skinny girlfriend and they stopped going out at night so much anymore, Bambi was relieved. She could sit at the writers’ booth in Simon Sez without having to look at this person who didn’t believe in her talent, or even in auld lang syne.

  After a while she began to notice the writer named Bob, who had been around all this time but wasn’t the sort of man you’d notice first off. Bob was young and short and exuberant and had beautiful skin. He was going bald in the back, but who looked at the back of someone’s head anyway? He had a lot of credits: movies, TV. He seemed shy, like someone who would be grateful for her attentions. Eventually she asked him if the two of them could get together sometime so he could give her some writing tips, and he agreed.

  Bambi went to his house in the afternoon. She had never seen such a neat bachelor house in her life, but he wasn’t gay. He proved it after he told her that she should write about the things she knew, that fantasy was not her forte. Having learned from her experience with Matt that she was the one with sexual power, that it was within her and the man was just an instrument, Bambi enjoyed sex with Bob very much. He was gentler than Matt, sweeter, and his skin smelled like meadow grass.

  “The first thing a writer usually tries is something autobiographical,” Bob said. “And you should watch a lot of television. Maybe you’ll get an idea for an episode.”

  “How can I watch television when I’m stuck in Simon Sez every night?” Bambi said.

  “Tape it. Don’t you have a VCR?”

  “Oh, sure. Simon has every gadget ever invented. He tapes the news, can you imagine? I tell him, why do you need to watch the evening news in the middle of the night when in a few hours you’ll have the Today show with the new news, but he doesn’t listen. Simon is extremely dogmatic.”

  “I would be very upset if Simon ever found out about this afternoon,” Bob said.

  “You would be upset? What about me? He’d leave me.”

  “Simon would never leave you, Bambi,” Bob said. “He worships you. You have no idea how lucky you are. How long have you two guys been married—ten years?”

  “Mmm.”

  “Ten years in this town? You have a good thing; stick with it.”

  “Then why did you sleep with me?” Bambi said.

  Bob grinned sheepishly. “Nobody’s perfect.”

  She discovered quite quickly that Bob meant it to be a one-night stand, but it didn’t bother her because she was already hard at work on her new script, for a movie—for television or a feature she wasn’t sure—about herself. He had said autobiographical and she certainly had a plot: She and Simon and how he had betrayed her by being ordinary. Although she had never had any close women friends, she was sure a lot of women would be able to identify with that subject.

  She wrote her new script rapidly, secretly and angrily. When Simon asked if he could “take a peek” she said no, not yet. He smiled at her in anticipation and she turned away. Wouldn’t he be shocked to see what she was saying about them?

  She decided to start it at school when they had no friends and he was on her side. She painted herself in the rosiest possible light; she was unappreciated because of her sensitivity, and the wimpy little boy hung around because he had no one else to be kind to him. They grew up to be cute, and fell in love; adolescent passion that led to an early marriage right after college, and a dream for the future. But then, the betrayal. The real Simon surfaced. Simon the dull. He was no longer the anchor that gave her security but the anchor that dragged her down, the heavy piece of metal that prevented the adventurous boat from skimming away into the sun-dappled waters of its future. She had to stay with him because otherwise no one would come to his coffeehouse, since they only came to see her. But finally she couldn’t bear it anymore, and when a producer offered to do her script she left, became a famous writer and then a triple threat writer/director/producer, and when she found out that Simon Sez was languishing she made a surprise appearance and rescued it, for old times’ sake. She no longer loved Simon, but she was merciful. At the end there was a sad little scene between them where he admitted he had never been good enough for her, they said good-bye, and she went off in her chauffeur-driven limousine. She named the movie “The Far Waters,” after the boat.

  Of course she changed their names.

  In the rewrite she decided it needed more plot so she put in her lover. He was a famous writer, he had no girlfriend, and he was the one who went after her. The two of them could have done great things together, but she gave him up because Simon couldn’t exist without her. That was before she finally decided to become a famous person anyway. She thought very long and hard about whether she wanted the rejected writer to be revealed sitting in the limousine when she left, or whether she should leave alone. Damn, damn; she had no one to ask! She couldn’t show it to Simon, and even if she could have, he never had suggestions, only praise.

  If she went off with the writer it was romantic. If she went off alone she was strong.

  Was it good to be perceived as a feminist? Was it better to make the audience cry? Would they cry either way? She finally wrote it with the two different endings, marked A and B, and left the script on the ottoman in front of the fireplace.

  There were no mistakes in life, only destiny.

  Afterward she supposed a part of her had secretly wanted Simon to find and read the script so he would know she didn’t respect him anymore, and another part wanted him to read it so she could ask him which ending was better. A saner course would have been to show the script to Bob and ask him for his advice, but she was afraid he would crab that she was going to hurt Simon. So because she believed there were no mistakes, only destiny, Bambi promptly forgot that she had left the script in the living room at all.

  She had taken to coming home at night before Simon did, leaving him to close up. She always taped either a movie or several of the evening’s TV shows now, and that gave her a chance to watch them before they went to bed. With a long-running tape they could have the shows and the news too, so Simon was happy.

  She was lying on the bed watching Miami Vice when she heard him come in. “Hi,” he called.

  “Hi.” She continued watching Don Johnson. Simon was poking around out there, going to the kitchen, unwinding. She hoped he’d stay there for a while. She wished Don Johnson would come into Simon Sez some night so she could meet him, and allowed herself to drift into a sexual fantasy. It was only when the news came on and Simon was still in the living room that she began to wonder. “Simon,” she called, “the news is on.”

  Then Simon walked into the bedroom looking very pale and strange, and when she looked down she saw that he had her script clenched in his hand.

  “What is this, Bambi?” he said. Her heart lurched. From his voice she could tell that he knew perfectly well what it was.

  “I can’t get the ending right,” Bambi said.

  “Is this what you think of me? Of us?”

  She shrugged and looked away. What should she say? Then she looked right back at him. “Yes,” she said.

  “I’m a wimp? A failure? An anchor?”

  She felt trapped and vulnerable lying on the bed, so she jumped up and walked past him into the living
room. He followed her. It was all right though, he only looked as if he were in shock. “Yes,” she said.

  “You didn’t try to disguise it at all.”

  “How do you know?”

  “The boyfriend?” Simon said. “Did you make that up or is it true?”

  God, he was so weak. Suddenly she wanted to have a fight. They had never had a real fight; maybe that was what was wrong, why she always felt as if she were choking. “I made up that she left him,” Bambi blurted. “If I had a boyfriend like him I wouldn’t leave him.”

  “Did you ever cheat on me?” Simon asked in horror.

  “In this town ten years is considered a long time to be married,” she said. “Especially to a man who never changes.”

  “You did! Who was he?”

  “Who cares?”

  “We should never have come here,” Simon said.

  “Oh, I’m sure you would have been happy to stay embedded in Seattle forever,” she snapped. “As long as you’re in your stupid coffeehouse playing Mr. Nice Guy it doesn’t matter where you are. You don’t know what it is to have dreams.” She didn’t understand what was happening to her. As soon as she started letting it all out she couldn’t stop, it was as if she were pushing herself into a frenzy. All the frustration she had felt at Simon’s complacency, at her disappointing life, came pouring out of her like some long held-in poison. “You betrayed me,” she screamed.

  “I … I? You did, you betrayed me …”

  “We were going to be somebody. That’s all you ever told me, all those years, how wonderful we were, how we’d show everybody … Bullshit! You are the class geek, Simon, you always were and you always will be. Every word in that script is how I feel about you. I haven’t respected you for years. Yes, I slept with other men, and I respected them, that’s why I did it. It’s sexy to respect a man, and nauseating not to.” Bambi gasped for breath and went on, wild, reckless, contemptuous. “I’d call you an asshole, but an asshole has a function.”

  She stopped. The words hung there. It was probably the cleverest thing she had ever said. And while she stood admiring the vile product of her rage, Simon’s eyes filled with tears and he gave her the softest, saddest, most uncomprehending look of pain she had ever seen except on a dog. He opened his fingers as if her script were contaminated and dropped it on the floor, and then he turned, grabbed his car keys from the table, and ran out of the house.

  She heard his tires squeal as he drove away.

  The police came to the house a few hours later to tell her. Simon had been barreling down that winding and treacherous road, the narrow road with the mountain on one side and the steep drop on the other, and for some reason he had been on the wrong side so the larger car heading toward him had no way to escape. The two had hit head-on. Both cars had burned. They had identified Simon’s car from his license plate, and Simon’s body from his wedding ring, which had engraved inside: Bambi and Simon Forever.

  Bambi went into a kind of shock. She couldn’t believe Simon was gone. There were his things, just as he had left them; her script on the floor, his jacket on the chair, his toothbrush like a splayed caterpillar in the bathroom holder. She had been going to get him a new one. She thought of Simon and she felt something touch her very lightly, like a drop of liquid: it was his sweetness. Then she cried.

  His parents came, and hers. She let them do everything. They had him cremated, what the car hadn’t already cremated, and took the box home to Seattle for the funeral. She found it macabre, but she was in no mood to make any other decisions. She hid her script, and no one knew about their fight. But she knew. She felt guilty and responsible for Simon’s death, confused and sorry for herself, and cried on and off for days; which everyone took as a sign that she was inconsolably grieving for her lost love.

  She felt uncomfortable and out of place at the house in which she had grown up, and left as soon afterward as possible, using as an excuse that she had to take care of Simon’s affairs. Back in Los Angeles, Simon’s friends, the regulars at Simon Sez, gave a memorial service. Bambi had no idea there were so many people who had liked him. Several of them got up and spoke, including Bob.

  “Simon was a good and decent man,” Bob said. “This is something we see very seldom today, a quality in a human being which too often goes unappreciated, an expression we don’t often hear. A decent man. Simon Green was that decent man.”

  And you fucked his wife, Bambi thought. She looked at Bob’s little balding head and wanted to punch him. How dare he throw Simon’s goodness in her face so she only felt guiltier?

  On the other hand, she thought, listening to his smarmy eulogy, it was reassuring to know that the world was full of hypocrites. It was something she had always known. She suddenly realized she could go on quite well.

  23

  1985—HOLLYWOOD

  Clay stepped out of his morning shower and dried himself, inspecting his hair in the bathroom mirror. It was thinning, no doubt about that; he could see the vulnerable scalp. And it was time to have it colored again, in the gold and sandy flecks that covered the white. His barber had suggested that they tone down the color now to be more brownish-grayish, now that he was fifty-five. It would look more natural. I’m so old I have to dye my hair gray, Clay thought.

  His skin had that shiny look of polished leather that afflicted certain California sun fanatics; a look he had often laughed at on other men, and now it was his. He looked like a handbag. There were deep grooves on his face, some of which he attributed to worry. It was said that this was always attractive on a man, acceptable, virile, not like wrinkles on a woman. He certainly wasn’t ready for a face-lift … was he? It didn’t matter, he didn’t have the money or the time.

  His eyes traveled down his body. Thin and unexercised, flabby, he needed a gym. He had been one of the lucky ones who never had to do anything, but time had changed all that. He looked away from the mirror, further downward, and flicked his small limp penis with contempt. Even this had betrayed him.

  If he had not had so much to worry about in his struggle for his very existence, his premature ejaculation would have frightened him, but put in the whole picture it seemed just another part of his beleaguered life. He had attributed it to exhaustion and tension and tried not to think about it. Sex wasn’t that important anyway, he told himself, first things first. He remembered now, vaguely, that his doctor had told him the medication he was taking for his anxiety attacks could cause sexual problems as a side effect. But what could he do? He couldn’t work when he was falling apart.

  You could live without impressive sex but you couldn’t live without money.

  Clay wondered if anyone could feel his frustration and terror. Perhaps Susan could. He always liked to present things to her a little lightly; it was too painful for him to admit them even to himself. They had been together fifteen years. She still looked the same to him, although he knew he looked very different now. He was losing his vigor and power, his life and career were slipping away, everything in the business was changing so fast. He had not sold anything to television for four years, including her book.

  Like You, Like Me had appeared to critical acclaim and sold well. But when he tried to peddle it he met with no success at all. When his option expired Susan made her agent give him another one. Susan was somebody now, and Clay was proud of her. He wondered when he would ever again do something that would make people proud of him.

  His phone rang. He let the answering service take it, picking up the receiver very quietly after a moment to hear. It was, as he had expected, Laura. Laura called him every day, a millstone around his neck, talking and talking to make some kind of connection; an irritant he couldn’t wait to hang up on. He wished he could get rid of her. He couldn’t even stand the sound of her voice.

  His partners wanted to know why he hadn’t yet sold Like You, Like Me, or for that matter anything, and finally even Susan had started to ask him about her book. Clay told her there was no market for a story with so many charact
ers. Susan said, “Miniseries are full of them.” He told her that people didn’t want to see actresses over thirty. She said, “That’s silly.” And then, last March, a very successful TV movie called The Burning Bed came out starring Farrah Fawcett, the true story of an abused wife who finally killed her sadistic husband, and Clay didn’t know what he was going to do with Like You, Like Me. The Burning Bed did not start a trend, as he had hoped, it simply made his property temporarily useless.

  Things ordinarily went in cycles, but these days for him the cycles never seemed to go the way they should.

  All the doors that had been wide open to him in the old days were now apparently shut. He said it was hard for a small company to compete in the big world, and then he saw luck striking for someone else, some young newcomer. He felt cursed. His anxiety attacks were more frequent, as were his new frustrated rages, and he raised his medication.

  In a way Clay had been expecting the worst development for a while, but when it came it shocked him all the same. When his contract was up for renewal Sun West terminated him. He managed to make them give him the Stalin project, which they had never believed in, and some other things he had brought in when he came. He also took Susan’s book. The option had expired again, and they didn’t want to spend any more money on it. It belonged to Susan now, and she agreed to let him tell everyone it was his. He left to become an independent producer.

  He found a small office in the right postal address—since appearances were still everything—but now he had to pay for the office and all his expenses out of his own pocket. He intended to keep his longtime secretary Penny, and she got paid a fortune. There was no more salary coming in for him to tide him through until he managed to put together and sell another Clay Bowen production. But worst of all, there was no longer an expense account. He would have to live on his savings.