by Rona Jaffe
She asked him if The MAW was with him in New Orleans, and he said she had come down to visit for a while, that he had given her a small part with two lines, hoping she could become more independent.
“She and I have nothing to talk about,” he said. “We talk about the relationship.”
But so did they. In Susan’s apartment there were the cozy dinners, the flowers and wine he always brought, the music and candlelight; and sometimes they got up exuberantly from her dining table and disco danced. There were the coiled and sweaty sheets, their clothes and the bedcovers tangled on the floor, his beautiful damp body glowing like a lost alien in the lowered light. But somehow, at some point, the subject always got back to Brooke, to why he hadn’t left her yet, to what was wrong with her so he knew he should go. It was a tug of war: they were both pulling at him, and Susan knew that no matter what he said he secretly enjoyed it.
His miniseries was being edited and he went to Hollywood. Susan had begun traveling to other cities for her interviews, the way she had with Like You, Like Me, and now she was listening to women as well as men. She was busy all the time, and had accepted no more lecture dates for the duration. Her work was beginning to bring back her self-esteem; she told him and he was happy for her. Wherever she and Andy were they talked on the phone; keeping in touch, promising, reminiscing, confiding, flirting. One weekend he flew out to see her in Chicago for twenty-four hours, and they never left her hotel room.
“We’re like two kids, and one of us is going to die,” he said in bed. “And it’s going to be me.”
He finished his miniseries and came back to New York. It was hot, steamy, humid and miserable. Water ran down the outside of her windows as she sat in her air-conditioned apartment writing about other people’s lives, trying to understand her own. There were the men who traded in their wives for a younger zippier version, and those who traded in for something entirely different, as if they could thereby shed a skin. Love came first and adaptation later: the man now liked what he used to dislike because it was part of the package.
“Our children always wanted an animal,” one woman told her. “They begged for a cat. My husband hated cats, and he was so allergic to them that if he was in a room with one for twenty minutes his throat would close and he would have to leave. At night, when it was cold, the stray cats would come to sit on the hood of our car because it was warm. He would run outside and scream at them to get off, and sometimes he even threw stones. Then he met her, and left me to live with her. She has three cats. His nose was stuffed up for about a year, but now … the kids went to visit and said their father carries one of the cats around in his arms all the time, like a baby. I don’t know why, but I think that hurts me more than anything.”
“He said the suburbs were out of the question because they were so far away,” another woman said. “So we lived in the city. I liked it too. He was so funny, he wouldn’t even go to a party in the suburbs, wouldn’t hear of it. Then he left me for her. She has a house in the country and he commutes every day.”
“He made me dress like a wife,” the Kewpie doll blond woman said in a tiny voice. “Always suits, skirts, dresses. Miniskirts were forbidden. Never jeans. Then he went off with her. She’s a graduate student. I don’t think she owns a dress.”
“The death of a thousand tiny cuts,” Susan wrote.
She called Dana and interviewed her about Henri Goujon. He had been seen at the local grocery with a new woman and was probably on his way to his fifth marriage—Susan was including him just under the wire. “Why is there always another woman ready to take on a man with a short attention span?” Dana said. “We always think we’ll be his last. Actually, so does he.”
Susan was even more involved in this project than she had been in Like You, Like Me because she identified with it much more. She worked obsessively because she needed the answers; her feeling of accomplishment kept her pain at bay. And in between there was Andy. She felt she could never have enough sex with him. Such tenderness toward him filled her that she thought it might even be love.
She wondered what would have happened if it had been she who met Andy while she was with Clay instead of Clay who had met Bambi. Sometimes she fantasized about it. How could she have refused this need, this amazing obsessive pleasure? Would she have been able to send Andy away, or would she have had a secret affair with him? She could almost imagine it: wanting to keep Clay, much as Clay had wanted to keep her. But it would have been different—she would never have considered leaving Clay, she would never have lived with Andy—she would have seen him on secret afternoons while Clay was in California without her. But of course it was only a fantasy. While she had been with Clay she had never been at all available to any man.
“Let’s go to the Hamptons for a weekend,” Andy said. It was one of the rare cool evenings and they were having dinner in the garden of a restaurant.
“When?”
“This weekend? Would you like to do that?”
“I’d love it.”
“Tonight I told Brooke I never want to see her again.”
She was surprised. “Just like that? Good-bye?”
“Yes.”
She felt the tiniest flutter of warning. “Wasn’t it a little … abrupt?”
“It was the only way I could do it.”
They held hands at the table and kissed in public. She was both flattered and embarrassed because he looked so young. At the end of the evening he walked her home, and then, because it was late and he had an early meeting, he left. “We have all the time in the world now to be together,” he said.
Just before she went to bed she called him. His line was busy. She called him several more times during the next hour to reconfirm what she already knew; that he was on the phone with Brooke. Brooke had probably left urgent tearful messages on his answering machine, and now he was explaining (yet again) the problems leading to their breakup, and trying to comfort her. Susan hung up. No matter how miserable she had been in her life she had never been able to beg or to throw scenes, and she felt annoyed at that young and emotional girl for having, in her weakness, so much power. It was a long time before she fell asleep.
When he didn’t phone her the next day she called him. “I can’t talk now,” he said quietly, his voice tense. He didn’t call for two days. “Brooke has been in my apartment for forty-eight hours,” he said. “She’s hysterical. She tried to commit suicide. She says nobody ever loved her. She won’t leave, she won’t go to work. I’m afraid she’s going to cut up my clothes or jump out the window.”
“Doesn’t she have a family you can call?” Susan asked.
“She wanted to call them and tell them what I did to her,” Andy said, “but I wouldn’t let her. She was incoherent. They would think I was a monster.”
“What are you going to do?”
“She’s a little better now. She’s asleep. I want her to take her clothes away. I thought she had only one or two outfits here, but when I looked in my closet I was surprised at how many clothes she had brought and left here over a period of time.”
“That’s the first time you ever looked in your closet?”
“I just never noticed.”
I remember something like that, she thought. “Has she been living with you?” she said.
“No,” he said indignantly. “She doesn’t stay here every night. And she doesn’t have a key.”
“Oh, yes she does,” Susan said. “Trust me.”
“How could she have a key?”
“Did you ever lend her your key to go pick up the laundry?”
“Yes …”
“She made a copy. Believe me.”
“Then she could come in when I’m not here and do something.”
“If you’re worried, change the lock.”
“You and I are not going to be able to go away this weekend,” Andy said. “I can’t leave her in the condition she’s in. I’m going to have to wean her away from me.”
“All right,” she s
aid. What else could she say: I’m going to kill myself too?
“She’s only a little girl,” he said. “Even though she’s a beautiful model she has no self-esteem. I shouldn’t have let it go this far, it’s my fault.”
“Poor kid,” she said finally.
She went back to her work. He called her every day with a bulletin. Brooke had actually packed some things. He had helped her put them into a cab. Brooke had been called back after an audition; maybe she would have a part in an off-Broadway play and then she would be busy. She would meet other people. Maybe he would have to go back to California soon; then he could get away from her. He and Susan met for lunch in a restaurant.
“I know you don’t like this triangle,” he said. “You already had it with Clay. I understand, and I’m doing the best I can.”
“I want to be able to go out and do normal things with you,” Susan said.
“We will.”
They went back to her apartment after lunch and made love for two hours. “You and I are going to be friends forever,” he said. “If we were the same age we’d get married. We’d be fucking all the time, and you have all the other qualities. I love you. I always will.”
“Well, we’re not the same age,” she said.
“I can’t talk to her,” he said. “I don’t have any interest in her friends. They’re shallow. They think I’m old. I feel old with them.”
Susan smiled.
Brooke finally took all her things out of his apartment. “She begged me to just have dinner with her from time to time,” he said. “She says she doesn’t want to be with her friends, they take cocaine. She’s very lonely. So I said I’d see her.”
“Mmm.”
“No one ever loved me as much as she does,” he said wistfully. “There’s something very flattering about that. She’d do anything to keep me. She’s emotional and unpredictable. I’m fascinated by her and afraid of her.”
“Afraid?”
“Yes. In a way.”
“Did you ever see Fatal Attraction?” Susan said.
“Of course.”
“Being flattered wasn’t the point of the movie.”
“I wish she’d go away and disappear,” Andy said.
One day when she was expecting Andy to call she answered the phone and it was Clay. She realized with complete surprise that she was disappointed. She held on to the feeling of disappointment, cherishing it.
“How are you?” Clay asked.
“Fine. How are you?”
“Okay. What’s new?”
“I’m working hard on my new book, and I’m seeing a very attractive younger man,” Susan told him. She did not add, although she wanted to, that the new man was a much more successful producer than he. She was not sure she wanted Clay to know even as much as she had already said, since he never told her anything.
Clay chuckled. “I know you,” he said. “You’ll get bored with him.”
Bored? she thought, indignantly. When did I ever get bored with anyone? You ditched me. You don’t know me at all. Maybe it’s just wishful thinking.
“Probably,” she said lightly, as if there were a dozen more to take Andy’s place.
That fall she talked to Andy every day, and they saw each other once or twice a week. Then one afternoon when she came home and played back the messages on her answering machine she heard a strange woman’s voice, no one she knew. It was shrill and angry; a kind of lethal Minnie Mouse. “Susan,” the voice said, “you keep your fucking hands off Andy Tollmalig!”
Susan was so filled with rage she thought she would explode. She thought of all the things she wanted to say to that bitch for intruding on her life, her phone; wished she would call again so she could scream at her. When she saw Andy for dinner that night at a new restaurant they both wanted to try she told him about the call. “Yes,” he said tiredly, “it’s Brooke.”
“You told her you were going out with me?”
“No,” he said. “She came in my apartment when I wasn’t there and played all my messages. There were some from you. She went through my address book and got the number. She called other women too, business people. I was very embarrassed. They all called to tell me.”
“I guess you didn’t change your lock.”
“I guess not.”
“But what she did was atrocious.”
“I know. I called her and yelled at her and hung up.”
“I can just imagine me doing that to Bambi,” Susan said.
“You’re sane,” he said. “Sometimes I’m really worried about what she’ll do next. But she does it because she loves me so much.”
“You call that love? It’s crazy obsession.”
She looked at him, and for the first time she thought how weak he was. He blamed a neurotic girl for his own ambivalence, he was flattered by behavior that would drive any secure man away. Maybe Brooke wasn’t so weak—maybe she was strong, devious and manipulative. She had certainly managed to hang in there.
But what was she to do about it? She felt she had been in a time warp all those years with Clay, and now, out in the world again, what was here? Nothing but dreadful blind dates, younger men, and sharing? Were there so few attractive, available, straight men that you had to do battle for one? All the women she spoke to complained there were no men in New York. Andy was all she had.…
“I’d better go home tonight,” he said after dinner. “I have some scripts to read, and I’m afraid to leave the apartment alone. Brooke might come back. I’ll change the lock tomorrow.”
“All right.”
“We’ll go to a movie this week,” he said. “Think of what you want to see.”
“Okay.”
“I wish she’d kill herself and get it over with,” he said with a little smile. He kissed her good night at her door.
Fall came, winter … she was working twelve hours a day on Tiny Tombstones, researching, writing, in a frenzy of inspiration. Brooke was still in Andy’s life, although he claimed she was no longer acting wild. She certainly, however, was resourceful. Every time he told Susan another ruse she’d gotten away with to delay the final break, Susan wondered if she should have fought harder or differently for Clay, and had to remind herself that there were many different factors and she was in no way to blame.
The book was almost finished and she was aiming for a late spring publication. Nina was reading it and loving it. Susan let Andy read part of it, and at one point he actually had tears in his eyes. “Some of it is so sad,” he said. “It’s all so good. I’m in awe of you.”
He took her to his apartment, which she had not ever seen. It was a floor-through in a town house, obviously professionally decorated. There was a framed photo of Brooke hanging up in the kitchen; pretty, anonymous-looking, with waist-length hair. “We put the picture in the kitchen because that’s the one room she’s never in,” he said.
We …
“I notice it’s still there,” Susan said.
“I can’t throw her away. I wouldn’t throw you away.”
If I could do it to my wife I could do it to you …
The words resonated in her mind. I can leave this guy, she suddenly thought, I really can. Maybe not right now, but when the drawbacks outnumber the rewards, I’ll walk.
They went back to her apartment and made love. “I love you,” he said.
“I love you too,” she said.
“We’ll always be special friends, always.”
I already have friends, she thought.
They had lunch a week later. It was in a different restaurant, cold and unfriendly, and for the first time he didn’t take her hand. “Brooke wants to have children,” he said. “That’s all she wants: to marry me and have babies. I want that too someday; after all, I’m twenty-nine, almost thirty, and I want a family of my own.”
She nodded.
“Can you have children?” he asked. She glared at him. “I mean …”
“You mean am I too old?”
“Well …”
“Maybe I can, but I don’t want them,” she said.
“Why do you keep thinking you’re old?” he said.
“Because you keep bringing it up.”
“I never mean to hurt you. But you are older than I am.”
“I thought that was one of the attractions,” she said.
“Everything about you was the attraction,” Andy said. “I’ll always love you.”
“Was?”
“I’m going back to her,” he said.
She felt disappointed, resentful and numb. She wished he had stayed around until she got tired of sex with him.
“Oh,” she said.
“I’ll probably marry her,” he said. “We’ll have beautiful kids.”
Stay numb … “She’ll be as good a first wife as any,” Susan said.
They said good-bye on the street and hugged. She squeezed out a tiny tear. “We’re going to move to L.A.,” he said. “It’s easier for my work and Brooke will have a better chance to break into TV. All the work is out there.”
“I thought she wanted to have a family.”
“She has to do both,” he said. “I want her to.”
“It’s over,” Susan told Nina, Dana, Jeffrey.
They all told her Andy had been a perfect interim lover and she would find someone else. She agreed about the first part but she was not so sure about the second.
She completed Tiny Tombstones and handed it in. Her publishers were very excited about it, but free of the manuscript she felt both relieved and let down; a sort of postpartum depression. Nina told her they felt that when it came out next year there was a good chance it could be a best seller, but to Susan that seemed far away and unreal.
A couple she’d known through Clay came to New York and took her to lunch. “Tell me about Bambi,” she said.
“I don’t want to say anything bad about her,” the wife said, “because she reminds me of what I think you must have been like when you were young.”