An American Love Story

by Rona Jaffe

  She remembered one night, a few years before, when she and Clay had been coming home from dinner, and he had stopped her at the door with a touch on her arm. “Look at the moon,” he said. She looked up. There was a small, silver full moon sailing over the tops of the palm trees. “How beautiful it is,” he said, “and how much we love each other.” They had stood there looking at it, and she had been filled with an amazing happiness because he knew how much she loved him.

  She and Clay were partners, lovers, and best friends. Since the change in his finances she paid for dinner on alternate nights, and always paid for the groceries. It had been her idea, and he accepted quite naturally. “I’m a tax deduction,” he told her.

  Sometimes during the week when Clay was working Susan met Dana for lunch and then they went shopping. There was something eerie about Town, as they called Beverly Hills and its environs. The hot streets were too quiet, everybody was so isolated, either in their cars or hidden away in buildings. Nobody walked, and they didn’t seem to shop much either, except for the visiting wealthy Japanese solemnly promenading along Rodeo Drive. It was convenient and also scary to see a department store with only one or two customers in it, like a science fiction movie, where at home it would have been mobbed.

  Dana’s marriage to Henri Goujon was in its fourth year. She seemed to have tamed the difficult man, as much as one could. They were still living in Malibu, and on other weekday afternoons Susan went out and took long walks with her on the beach. It was supposed to be good for shaping the legs.

  “I’m forty-four years old and still not a star,” Dana said. “It makes me so depressed sometimes. There are starring parts, but I don’t get them. I’m never just quite right. Remember when I used to play the corpse? Now I play the killer. I don’t even have a chance of returning as a continuing character; at the end I go away to life in jail, or off a cliff, or out the window. Flying glass is very big these days.”

  “Why doesn’t Goujon put you in something?” Susan said.

  “He would. Except now he’s putting together that series with all male soldiers and one bimbo nurse. I told him I’d go in drag, I don’t care. I said, what about a head nurse, someone older with brains? He says I’m too young to play an older woman.”

  “Well, that’s flattering.”

  “Nah. An ‘older woman’ has to be his age. I’m his little child bride. He could never let me play mature. Sophisticated yes, mature bite your tongue. Frankly, I think the show is a reprehensible piece of retro shit, and women’s groups will picket it. I bet it doesn’t even get on unless he makes some big changes.”

  “Did you tell him?”

  “Sure, and I told him I was upset. He told me to go buy a hat.”

  “A hat?”

  “That’s what I said. He said, well, he didn’t mean a hat exactly, he meant whatever a hat meant to me. You know, in his day that’s what the little woman did when she had a problem. Bought a hat.”

  “Oh God,” Susan said.

  “Sometimes I don’t know why I stay with him,” Dana said, “Except that I love him. And he can be nice.”

  They walked on in companionable silence for a while. “Are you sure walking on sand is good for the legs?” Susan said. “It hurts.”

  “Remaining lovely always hurts,” Dana said. “Maybe I should do a play. There are some good people doing plays out here.”

  “Maybe you should.”

  “And you and Clay, still together, still romantic, still happy … It’s a phenomenon.”

  “That’s what everybody says.”

  “I think it may be because you don’t see each other all the time.”

  Susan tried to cheer herself up with that thought as she packed to leave. She needed her summer clothes in New York, but her closet in the apartment on North Oakhurst looked so lonely without them. She left Clay with a rough draft of what she was working on, and they discussed ways to do it as a possible television movie. He was positive and optimistic.

  “I’ll be out again as soon as I do the rewrites,” Susan said.

  “Don’t rush through it,” he said. “You want it to be good. This could be another step in your career.”

  “It goes without saying, don’t show it to anybody until I finish it.”

  “Of course not. I’ll just keep it with me so I can think of some ideas on how to do it.”

  In the fall Susan finished the article and the revisions the magazine wanted. Clay had to go to Europe on business in a few weeks, and since he wanted to fly over the pole directly to Germany for two days of meetings, they decided that they should meet in Paris at their beloved Plaza-Athénée. She would go there first for five days on a well-deserved holiday, and then they would spend another week there together. He told her to be sure they had a suite when he arrived, that he always had a suite, that he wasn’t going to change his life-style. She was looking forward to being with him again, but it seemed unnecessarily long to wait.

  “Why don’t I come out to see you now?” she said.

  “Honey, that’s silly. We’ll be together as soon as I finalize the dates.”

  The happy summer was over. She always felt let down when she had finished a project, and at loose ends. As always Clay’s phone calls started and ended her days, and somehow she managed to putter around her apartment without leaving until they had spoken. On the rare times that an appointment kept him from calling her by midmorning she called him, concerned. She was his creature. The place in her heart that had been filled by her creative obligations was empty again, waiting for him to fill it and make her whole.

  So here she was, on a bright autumn Saturday, waiting in her kitchen next to the phone, drinking another cup of coffee, wondering if it was too early to call him. It was three hours earlier in California, and on weekends he liked to sleep late. She waited. Finally she called, but the service answered. She left a message, telling herself Clay might be in the shower, or perhaps at the barber, or a breakfast meeting. Of course the service never told anyone where he was, even her; they said to try the office, which was closed. She wished he would get an answering machine, as she had recently done, and enter the twentieth century, so she could leave more than her name.

  He didn’t call her back all day, and in the evening Susan called again. The service, rude as usual, refused to tell her if he had picked up his messages. She tried not to panic, but at the back of her mind was the thought that something had happened to him. Maybe he had been taken sick, maybe he was dead. In spite of his medication he could have had an anxiety attack while he was driving, and crashed. But someone would have told Laura, who would have called Nina, and Nina would have called her. Be calm, Susan told herself. There’s a good reason.

  That evening she went to a movie and dinner with friends, and when she got back there was still no message on her machine from Clay. He never stayed out very late; she called again.

  “He’ll be back tomorrow,” the woman at his answering service told her.

  “Then he called in!”

  “Yes.”

  “Where is he?”

  “He didn’t say.” The woman sounded cold and irritated, a protective robot.

  “But this is me! You know me. Did he get all my messages?”

  “We’re not allowed to give out that information.”

  Go fuck yourself, bitch, Susan thought. Of course he got my messages.

  She hardly slept that night. She spent Sunday distractedly reading the paper next to the telephone, and in the late afternoon Clay finally called.

  “Where were you?” Susan asked. “I was so worried.”

  “I was only away one day.”

  “It was all weekend.”

  “It was one day.”

  “But you never do that without calling me.”

  “I had to go to San Diego on some last-minute business.”

  “What’s in San Diego?”

  “Some people with money.”

  “Oh.” She was so relieved he was back that she drop
ped it. “I wish you’d get an answering machine,” she said. “Your service is very nasty.”

  “I’ll yell at them,” he said. “So how is the monkey? What did you do this weekend?”

  She was ashamed to tell him.

  The following weekend it happened again: Clay disappeared and didn’t call until Sunday night. “Why didn’t you tell me you were going away again?” Susan said.

  “I’ll tell you all about it in Paris,” Clay said.

  “Why in Paris?”

  “We’re going in two weeks.” He gave her the dates.

  “Why can’t you tell me before that?”

  “Because I want to tell you in Paris.”

  It was strange. She didn’t like mystery and she didn’t like waiting, but Paris had always been their special romantic place, and she was sure it was going to be something good.

  Susan’s spirits picked up as soon as she got to Paris. Their friends sent welcoming flowers, took her out, and made her feel completely at home. The only thing that marred her reunion with Clay a little was that he was very annoyed about the suite; it wasn’t big enough.

  “I told you I wanted a suite.”

  “This is a suite. It’s what they said you ordered.”

  “I would never order anything like this.”

  She remembered once, years before, when they had been in Paris during the Air Show, when one was lucky to get any accommodations at all, and they had been given a small room with a small double bed. “Now we’ll see if our romance can last,” Clay had said, smiling. Of course it had.

  And now, despite his irritation, apparently their romance was even rekindled by the suite he didn’t like, or perhaps in spite of it. He was more sexual and attentive than he had been in ages, turning to her to make love the moment they got into bed, waking her during the night to do it again, and again in the morning; every night and every day. It was like a honeymoon. Sometimes he lied to get out of going to dinner with their hospitable friends. “I’m tired, I just want to be with you,” he told her.

  “Tell me what you said you would tell me in Paris,” Susan said.

  “I will.” Why was he making such an issue of it?

  At last, one afternoon, they were walking up the Champs-Elysées in the rain to change money, and Clay turned to her. His tone was very grim. “Okay,” he said, “now I’ll tell you why I disappeared. But I’ll only tell you once, and then I don’t want to discuss it. I felt like a failure. I was driving around, thinking about committing suicide.”

  Suicide! She was horrified. “But what about the monkey?”

  “The monkey is why I didn’t do it,” Clay said. “I decided to divorce Laura, and start a new company and be big again, just like I used to be. But I’ll be very busy. I won’t be able to see you as often as I used to, while I’m putting this together.”

  Susan was so stunned by all of this that she could hardly take it in. She pictured him distraught and desperate, driving for miles, staying at some motel, planning his death. But his love for her had saved him. He couldn’t do that to her. Yes, it was good that he divorce Laura, they should have been divorced a long time ago.

  All she could say was “Promise you won’t kill yourself.”

  “I promise,” Clay said. He didn’t sound so grim anymore. “The glum thoughts are over.”

  For years afterward she would think about that day, Clay carrying their umbrella, the two of them walking along like normal people, him telling her about his thoughts of suicide; two tourists on the Champs-Elysées in the rain, that terrible frightening day. She did not know about Rose Ossonder. She did not know about Bambi Green.

  Susan and Clay went back to New York, and he stayed at The Dakota where he told Laura he wanted a divorce. Then he went directly back to California to go to work, telling Susan that since he had broken off with Laura he couldn’t stand to be under the same roof with her anymore, even for the holidays.

  “We’re going to have to sell the apartment,” he said.

  “Are you very sad about it?” Susan asked.

  “No. I hate it by now. Besides, I’ll need the money, although after taxes it will be very little.”

  “It’s worth millions,” Susan said.

  “That’s what we’re asking, but we’ll see. And she gets half. Plus I’m giving her the house in East Hampton. She’s making lists, dividing everything. We’ll sell some things, put some things in storage.”

  “I’ll come out to spend Christmas with you,” Susan said. “It will be great; we’ve never done that before.”

  “My lawyer says you can’t stay at the apartment in the middle of the property settlement,” Clay said. “Right now Laura is being nice, but she would turn nasty in a minute if she thought all this had to do with you. You and I will have to be very discreet for a while.”

  “Oh. Well, I could stay with Dana.”

  “Honey, I’m going to be up to my eyeballs. You know Christmas doesn’t mean anything to me, especially this year when I’m strapped for money. I’ll probably work right through it and try to forget it exists.”

  “All right.”

  She and Clay had bought each other’s Christmas presents in Paris; paintings by a new artist they had discovered in a Left Bank gallery. They were surrealistic but sentimental—I love you hidden among the patterns of brushstrokes, each painting different. He had liked them so much he had bought an extra one.

  “Nina will love this,” he said.

  “Yes,” Susan said. “And she’s starting to collect art.”

  Nina called to tell her that Laura had taken the shock of Clay’s departure as a cue to go into a frenzied bout of sorting and listing, labeling through her tears. Clay, apparently, had refused to say which of their possessions he wanted and had left the decisions to her. Laura was trying to be fair. She was fifty-five and being dumped; she couldn’t even pretend anymore that she had a marriage. And yet, even in this last sacrificial task of dividing up their past, she was still the wife taking care of the household, trying to do what was best.

  “My childhood home is gone,” Nina said sadly. “Even though I don’t live there anymore, it’s so strange …” She was silent for a moment and then she brightened. “Well, maybe this is an awful thing to say about my own mother, whom I love, but I hope you and my father get married. You guys are so right for each other.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Of course, if you decide not to, it’s fine too—you’re so independent, you could just go on the way you have been.”

  “We’ll see,” Susan said.

  They hadn’t discussed marriage yet, and Susan wondered if after all these years marriage would be a good idea: she knew how Clay felt about wives, that they were the enemy. The man who considered it the worst insult and put-down to tell her, “You sound like a wife,” who felt they were married in the best sense, perhaps should not be pushed. During her almost sixteen romantic and loving years with Clay it was never as if she were marking time waiting to be the next Mrs. Bowen; their affair and every day with him were her happiness. She had proposed to him, and perhaps she would again and this time he would say yes, or he might even propose to her; but right now he was so pressured and frightened about his career that she knew him well enough to let the other issue wait.

  “I’ll be there whenever you need me,” Susan told him.

  “I always need the monkey. We’ll be together soon.”

  She spent Christmas with her friend Jeffrey and four others who didn’t want to be with their families or who had none. It was a smaller group than ever. The people she knew were settling down; getting married, going steady, or now, since the new AIDS terror had made them celibate, they were going back to reclaim their parents on the holidays for warmth. Since Jeffrey had always eventually driven away every lover he ever had, he seemed to take to the new celibacy with contentment; he no longer had to tell anyone not to love him so much. The six of them cooked a huge dinner at his apartment, played the new albums, ate and drank too much, and
exchanged inexpensive gifts. When she got home she called Clay. He was still out, so she went to sleep, the night disturbed by bad dreams she didn’t want to recall.

  He phoned her the next morning. “Where were you so late?” she asked him.

  “Oh, you remember I had dinner with my old friend George, whose wife just died. I called you when I got home but you were asleep. Don’t you remember talking to me?”

  She tried to think. “No.”

  “I said Merry Christmas and you were sound asleep. I got off the phone fast because I didn’t want you to get too awake.”

  “Oh.” Susan tried to remember, then to imagine him talking to her, and finally she was sure he had. The wine must have really put her away.

  Just before New Year’s Clay told her he had found a rich Arab named Anwar Akmal to put venture capital into his company. “He doesn’t care if it’s a tax loss,” Clay said cheerfully. “It’s fun for him. He’s in oil and real estate, but he wants to get into the entertainment business.”

  “That’s wonderful news,” Susan said. She hadn’t heard Clay sound so happy in a long time.

  “I have to work on the prospectus with my lawyer. And Anwar wants to be a part of everything, so I have to spend a lot of time with him.”

  “You sound really good,” Susan said.

  “Well, we’ll see how it goes.”

  January and part of February passed, and Clay did not sound happy anymore. His morning phone calls were briefer. He always started with baby talk. “How is the monkey today? Is the monkey dancing, with the cymbals, and the little red hat?” But he didn’t want to hear her problems, he who had always been so sympathetic, and sometimes he would snap that he had called her to be made to feel better, not upset. So she stopped telling him anything. She was sweet, supportive, neutral; the dancing monkey. He was nervous, frantic, in a hurry, always “up to my eyeballs.” Susan began to hate the expression, or perhaps it was just the way he said it.