An American Love Story (29 page)

And Danielle ate. She ate at meals and she ate between meals. She made peanut butter and banana sandwiches on bagels at three in the afternoon. She kept candy bars in her dressing room. She was always at the hot table for seconds, piling up her plate. Soon the pleats at the top of her pants began to open up, but what was more difficult to hide was what was happening to her face.

Susan was allowed to go to the dailies every evening, and there on the large screen it was quickly apparent that Danielle had jowls. Thalia blamed the makeup woman, who cried. Thalia apologized. Afterward she directed all of Danielle’s scenes from below, with Danielle holding her head up like a seal. It made her look slightly demented. But no matter what Danielle did, in Thalia’s eyes she could do no wrong.

The two of them began to change the lines. At six in the morning Danielle would be sitting in the makeup chair marking up the script, and by the time Thalia started to shoot everything was different. At night Thalia and Danielle often had dinner together, and changed the lines then. No one knew what to expect in the morning, and Clay was getting angrier every day. He started coming to the set before anyone else so he could keep control, and Susan watched the lines she had so carefully polished for so long being paraphrased into some strange semblance of cinema verité.

She told herself that the film had its own reality, that the actors had to do whatever they could with what she now realized were their limitations, and that even if different from her premise at least the relationship between Charles and Meredith would have its own veracity. She wondered why Danielle had so much influence over Thalia, who apparently thought she was brilliant. Could they be lovers? People could be anything in Hollywood, but Susan
strongly doubted it. The answer seemed to be something surprising but obvious: Thalia only wanted to be liked. Clay glared at her, she resented Mark, and she didn’t feel Susan belonged there; so who were her friends? To who else could she be the mentor?

Thinking these sanguine thoughts, proud of herself for being so mature, Susan walked past Danielle’s dressing room. The door was open, and Danielle and Mark were inside. Danielle was holding the script, reading aloud in a Transylvanian accent and cackling, pretending to be a vampire woman. “Sometimes I think you love death more than you love me,” she read. Mark laughed. “Are you actually going to say that?” Danielle asked him, making a face. “It makes me sound like a necrophiliac.” Susan walked in.

Her moment of being sanguine was over; she was angry and hurt at hearing her lines made fun of. But she was also beginning to realize that her own feelings had little to do with anything; all that mattered was seeing that these people didn’t destroy the movie. Nibble away, yes; destroy, no. Danielle didn’t even look embarrassed at having been overheard. “You’re not in love with the dead,” Susan said gently. “You’re in love with death.”

“Oy vey, poor me, I’m such a weirdo,” Danielle said. Now she was being Yiddish. Susan was starting to dislike her.

“It’s a challenge to play such an interesting part,” Susan said sweetly.

“Freak of the week,” Danielle said.

“That’s television.”

The line stayed in. The scene went without a hitch. It was Friday, and they were all exhausted. Susan and Clay spent much of the weekend listening to the background music the composer was putting together, and catching up on lost sleep.

On Monday morning they felt fine again and ready to go. Susan thought how lucky she was that Clay let her watch everything and learn, instead of sending her away the way they often did with the writer. She remembered her long-ago disastrous experience with Ergil Feather, and thought she would never want to work with anyone but Clay. They were drinking coffee and waiting for Thalia when suddenly an apparition came running onto the set. It was
Danielle, and her formerly long straight blond hair was sticking out wildly in Medusa-like curls. She was excited and happy.

“Look what I did this weekend,” Danielle announced. “I got a permanent!” Clay turned pale again. “Sammy did it,” Danielle went on, oblivious. Sammy was the picture’s hairstylist. “Isn’t it nice?”

“You got a permanent?” Clay said. His voice was quiet and deadly.

“It will make my hair easier to manage,” Danielle said weakly.

“I want you to have long straight hair,” Clay said. “Meredith had long straight hair. Where’s Sammy?” He marched into the makeup room without waiting for an answer, and after a moment Susan sneaked after him to hear what was going on.

She could hear Clay’s angry voice through the closed door. “I want her to have long straight hair,” he was yelling. “She’s old and she’s fat. I want her to look eighteen. You get her hair straight and you keep it that way. Do you understand?” The answer was a vanquished mumble.

From then on Danielle’s penance was to sit with her hair in hot rollers every moment she wasn’t in a scene. She took it with surprising equanimity, munching chocolates and reading magazines.

By the end of the second week of dailies Susan could see Thalia’s vision irrevocably placed instead of her own: a strong, dominating Meredith instead of a mysterious one, a wimpy Charles who stumbled sweetly into his lover’s trap. It was not what Susan had ever meant the relationship to be, and yet it made sense in its own way. People would believe it. She wondered if she was turning into the kind of script whore Ergil Feather had been, or if she was just becoming realistic and even a bit cynical, as Clay was. You did the best you could.

But the movie was turning into the hair wars. When Danielle kept everyone waiting on the set for two hours one day after lunch it was a selfish annoyance; they all stood around bored, chafing, wondering why she was so late. And then she emerged from the makeup room, and her hair was in corn rows. Tiny, painstakingly made little braids; there was no hope of taking them out today and re-creating the long straight hair that Clay wanted. Susan had to
admit she looked pretty dreadful. Danielle had her lips set in an expression that dared anyone to criticize her. For the first time Thalia didn’t look pleased, but she didn’t say anything and got on with the scene. Danielle smiled.

In the makeup room Clay was screaming at Sammy again. “I did not hire Danielle Chedere to audition for other movies! This is not a showcase for her different looks! Not on my money! She’s not Bo Derek—no way! She is going to have long straight hair, and if you ever change it again you’re fired. Do you understand?”

Clay came out looking pleased. “Why did you yell at him instead of at Danielle?” Susan whispered.

“If I yell at her she’ll get too upset to act. Don’t worry, he’ll tell her. That faggot has a big mouth.”

The hair wars. Protocol. The army. Danielle’s defiance had turned the issue into a power struggle, and whatever upset Clay made Susan furious.

He was under great stress. One day when Danielle refused to say a line that was essential for the relationship, and Thalia let her cut it, Clay faced off with Thalia. The two of them stood there for a long moment, both implacable, until he turned and walked away. When he got a cup of coffee Susan could see his hand shaking.

“I almost fired Thalia,” he said quietly. His voice was shaking too.

“Why didn’t you?”

“I don’t have a completion bond.”

“What’s that?”

“Insurance in case we go over schedule. It’s expensive and I hoped I wouldn’t need it. It was a gamble. If I fire the director we have to go through a cooling-off phase and the movie stops dead until it’s over. Then I can hire someone else or keep her. It would take me too long to find someone else. I can’t even afford the two days for us to ‘cool off.’ I’ll tell you one thing. Thalia Perret will never work for us again.”

“Thalia Ferret,” Susan said. She was happy to see him finally smile. “Never. No more ferrets, ever.”

“Only monkeys,” Clay said.

“Yeah.”

For all the frustrations and worries it was still a happy time. At work, Clay flourished. Between crises he and Susan joked and teased each other on the set. He had told Laura that Susan was staying at his apartment, “to save money for the production,” and made sure to mention that the second bedroom was perfectly adequate for her needs. Surprisingly, Laura didn’t appear to mind the arrangement.

And now Nina was going to fly out to California for a week to watch them film, and stay with her father and Susan. Laura assumed she would sleep on the living room couch, and seemed to think of Nina as a sort of chaperone.

Through all these years Susan and Laura had never met, and Susan supposed they never would. But she had wanted to meet Nina. She and Clay had talked about it many times. He had always wanted them to meet someday and become friends. He kept saying that Susan would become his daughter’s role model.

Role model? Successful, independent, unconventional … that was good. Her father’s lover … that was not so good. Susan was afraid that Nina would hate her, but Clay insisted so often that Nina would love her that she finally believed him. Secretly, she had always had a bit of ambivalence in her mind about Nina; the child whose existence had been the barrier to a normal life with Clay, and yet along with the resentment was guilt, because Nina was obviously not responsible for any of this. But now Nina was an adult, and there was no longer either resentment or guilt but only a longing to have Clay’s daughter acknowledge and accept her.

After graduating from Yale, Nina had taken the Radcliffe publishing course, and was about to start her first job, at Rutledge and Brown, a small up-and-coming publishing company. She had moved out of The Dakota into a walkup on the West Side. Her parents considered it a slum and Nina said it was chic; the fact was, it was nearly a slum, but she was too young to mind. Her mother viewed the apartment with alarm, her father with amusement. His attitude was: she’ll learn; but at Susan’s insistence he bought her window bars.

Susan had been living Nina’s life at a distance, secondhand, for so long, and Nina didn’t even know it.

Clay was calm about the meeting. He bought flowers and put them into the second bedroom for Nina, assuming that Susan would sleep in his bed as always, that they would now be a family unit. What he had told Laura had been necessary to keep peace. What Nina would see would be her own business. This was the family unit he wanted, and he was absolutely convinced it was perfectly normal and for the best.

On Saturday, Clay and Susan met Nina at the airport. The photographs she had seen had in no way prepared Susan for the reality. Nina was small, dark and delicate, with Clay’s smile. Her pale skin was translucent, almost poreless, and her eyes in a certain light were golden. She was wearing jeans and a leather jacket, a Hermès scarf, and two pearl earrings in each ear. Susan had never seen anyone so pretty in her life; she couldn’t stop looking at her. I’m besotted by that child, she thought. She knew Nina wasn’t a child anymore, and that there were only nineteen years between them, but there was something very young and breakable about Nina that had nothing to do with her size. Clay introduced them and they shook hands solemnly, Nina trying hard to appear sophisticated, which only made her seem vulnerable.

In the car she talked to Clay about her new job. “I’m the youngest assistant editor there,” she said. “They can’t give me the title for a few months because it will make the other people jealous, but the editor in chief says I’ll have it by Christmas, and by next year I expect to be an associate editor. It’s a small company so I’ll have much more of a chance to rise. Right now I’m going to do a little of everything, to learn, but soon I’ll have my own authors. I’ve already been doing book reports at home, and they bought one of the manuscripts I recommended on my tryout.”

It reminded Susan of the little voice she’d heard long ago on the phone; Nina telling her Daddy about all her accomplishments at school, trying to please him. She was still trying to impress him; the desperate earnestness in her voice gave her away. By now, Susan suspected, Nina was trying to impress everybody. Her bosses were probably thrilled.

“Nice apartment,” Nina said. Her eyes took everything in.

Clay gestured to the second bedroom and she put her bags there. “Are you tired?” he asked.

“No.”

“Then Susan, why don’t you take my daughter somewhere for lunch and a little sightseeing? I have to go to the office for a few hours, but tonight we’ll all go out for dinner.” What he meant was: Get to know each other.

“All right,” Susan said. She smiled at Nina. “I’ll take you to the Bistro Garden; it’s very chic.”

They sat under an umbrella at a small white wrought-iron table among fresh flowers, and ordered salads. Susan tried to be interesting and to put Nina at her ease; she told her stories about things that had happened during her career; anecdotes about celebrities, her travels, the aggravation and pleasures of being a journalist. While she told the stories Susan realized that it
had
been fun, or at least the parts of it she trotted out.

“You’ve had such an exciting life,” Nina said, impressed.

“I guess so.”

“I want to do so many things. I never want to settle down. I’m never going to get married or have children.”

“You may change your mind,” Susan said.

“Did you ever want to get married?”

Ah, you should only know, Susan thought. “I guess it was never my first priority,” she said.

“I’ve never seen anything about family life that made me want to marry,” Nina said. “You know what a strange relationship my parents have. When they’re together they’re like two people who happen to be staying in the same hotel. I have no faith in marriage. I think it’s better to be like you; always having your independence, your own identity, your career.”

I guess I seem a glamorous figure, Susan thought. “Do you have a boyfriend?” she asked.

“No. I had one at Yale, but he wanted to marry me and I wouldn’t, so we broke up. I’ve never really dated much. I’m too shy, and boys don’t like me; they think I’m cold. I’ve spent my whole life studying and trying to get good marks.”

“You’re so pretty I’d imagine you had lots of boys after you.”