An American Love Story (22 page)

None of that mattered. He was a seller again, not a buyer. The cat had been declawed and defanged. That bastard upstairs had given him a “saving face” contract because RBS didn’t like to fire people directly; it looked as if they had made a big mistake. In this business you were only as good as your last success or failure. The competition was too rough, the stakes too high. Of course Susan had believed him when he told her this was to be a creative move for him, exciting and good. What else would she think? People always believed Clay Bowen.

No they didn’t. Not the professionals. They knew he had lost his job.

He still went to the Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel for his drinks meetings, and even when he had no one to meet he would drop in to see who was there. It had been his club for many years. Contacts were more important than ever now. Sure, people sent him scripts—a man with a two-pilot deal had an in, had power—but now he had to go out and look for them too. So what? It was fun to discover new properties, to develop new ideas. RBS, financially, still treated him like one of their most prized men. He concentrated on the work at hand.

He was driving home to the new apartment from a meeting when the nausea hit him. Suddenly his heart began to pound with a ferocity that terrified him, and he was doused in cold sweat. Everything around him—the road, the sidewalk—was distorted, wavery, unreal. His hands were so numb he could hardly feel the wheel, and disoriented, breathless, he had to stop the car and pull over to what he could make out to be the curb.

He slumped there in his car, trying to wait out the attack without panicking further. It was the same as that episode so long ago at the Emmys, when he had been a young man just starting out. Now he was an older man starting out, beleaguered with this sickness. He had thought it was gone forever, but it was back. Oh God, this was all he needed!

Finally, after what seemed an eternity, the panic attack receded. He took out his handkerchief and wiped his face. Looking at himself in the rearview mirror he saw with relief that only his eyes looked different: they were almost glazed with fear. He waited until that, too, went away.

To explain his damp and disheveled appearance he told Susan the air-conditioning in the office had broken down during the afternoon. The next morning he went to the doctor and got another batch of tranquilizers. He had been lucky: what if it had happened on the freeway? This time Clay was careful to carry the medication with him.

He had found himself calling Laura more often lately, secretly, to tell her his troubles. “I had to give up the bungalow,” he told
her. “I’ve rented a little place in Beverly Hills.” She wanted to fly out to help him furnish it. “Oh, no,” he said, attempting a chuckle. “It’s already furnished; it came that way. And it’s so small I can’t fit in another thing.” She expressed interest in seeing it and he told her she wouldn’t want to. He resented that she was spending money, and he made things sound worse than they were. Finally she dropped the subject. Concerned, she was more interested in his career and his future.

“Who knows?” he said. “But I think it’s time you fired Boo.”

“Oh, dear,” Laura said. She hated confrontations.

“Nina is almost fourteen and too old for a baby-sitter. I’ll fire her myself if you want me to.”

“I’ll do it.” So Mrs. Bewley left their lives.

Clay told Laura he hadn’t been feeling well. Of course she was worried and sympathetic. He didn’t know why he called her when most of the time she drove him crazy, but being able to tell someone about it, even if it was only her, was comforting.

“Did the doctor tell you you’ve been working too hard?” Laura asked.

“I always work too hard,” Clay said. “I wouldn’t know what else to do.”

“Smell the flowers,” Laura said. “Watch the sunsets.”

“You sound like your nutty friend Tanya.”

“Well, sometimes she’s right,” Laura said.

He wondered what she was on now. “I better get off the phone,” Clay said. “It costs too much money.”

He hung up in the middle of her sigh.

14

1974—NEW YORK

L
aura had always been able to handle physical pain; she was used to it. She was a good, basic, athletic animal, instinctive, not intellectual, and it was emotional pain she was unable to bear. It dug too deeply and was too frightening. During all these years with Clay, no matter what he did to confuse and grieve her, her instinctive response had been to inflict a substitute pain upon herself, something physical and familiar, to cover the emotional pain and shove it away. Starvation. Hours and hours of ballet practice. A hundred laps in an unheated pool.

But even that was not enough, and then the pills came to her rescue. She was still only in her early forties, and while the possibility that her drugs might some day destroy her hovered at the edge of her mind, for now she felt safe. Besides, what difference did it make if they killed her, when she could no longer live without them?

They made it possible for her to believe that the life she was leading was normal, the way it was supposed to be:
She was the lonely wife of an ambitious man. She could have married someone else, but Clay was like the drugs, and no matter what he did to her she could not live without him either.

When she had been healthier Edward had asked her why she stayed with Clay. “I love him,” she had answered. “And he’s my husband.” She refused to discuss it further, and now no one bothered to ask.

She wondered if Clay ever felt loneliness, and somehow she doubted it. He never said that he missed her, but he phoned, and lately he had been confiding in her about his business worries. They had been married almost seventeen years. She had never heard any scandal concerning his private life while he was so far away, and judging from his behavior with her she had decided that his sexual desires were completely sublimated to his love of working.

Her own sexual desires had been dulled by her eroded self-esteem, her determined willpower, frantic activity, and the pills that sent her into a dreamless stupor every night the moment after her head touched the pillow, before her hand could investigate and awaken her need. She had been a sensual young woman once, but now she made little jokes about being unwanted, and would not dream of looking for a lover—afraid of not finding one, more afraid of finding one and losing that tenuous thread that bound her to her phantom marriage: her fidelity.

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.