An American Love Story (35 page)

“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

C
lay 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 characters. 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.

He leaned over the bathroom mirror again and began to shave.
Maybe it would be better if he cut his throat. Then he smiled. No, he was a survivor: he would never do that. He was still the cat who landed on its feet, even though it was a past middle aged feline.

Susan had come out to spend part of the summer with him when he had just moved into his new offices. They were tiny, but better decorated than the ones at Sun West. He had put his mementos of the old glory days around, from the height of his success at RBS, back before he and Susan had met: photos from his productions, all his Emmy awards, photos of himself with stars. Everyone in the pictures looked so much younger, including him. Some had gone on to become bigger stars, some had disappeared, and some were dead. From those gathered treasures you could see that he’d known everybody.

She had walked around looking at everything with cries of delight. “Look!” she said, “
The Romeo and Juliet Murder!
And look—Sylvia Polydor; we met at her party!”

“The party I gave for her,” Clay reminded her. He smiled. “I see. I put those there.”

“It’s sentimental.”

“That’s why I did it.”

And then suddenly, when she didn’t expect it, his glance slid to her, and he saw a quick sadness had washed over her face. Did she know this was nothing more than a museum of the history of television, his vanished past?

Laura didn’t hate Susan so much anymore now that he told her he needed Susan around for economic reasons because her book was an important property. Laura was alarmed by any downward change in their circumstances, and asked questions. This new development frightened her as much as it did him. But except for that telltale moment in his office, no matter how much he told Susan about his precarious financial situation she was unremittingly positive and encouraging.

“You’d be happy to live with me on a desert island,” he told her.

“Sure,” she said lightly. “Monkeys like bananas.”

“But I don’t,” Clay said.

An offer had come in for Susan to do another article, requiring
her to go back to New York. She was reluctant to leave, but he encouraged her, as he always had. This time she was doing an exposé on drugs in the “normal” middle class, and she hoped it would be something for him to develop for television.

What would he do without Susan? She was all he had. And now he was aware that for perhaps the first time, she really knew it. That hurt.

24

1985—HOLLYWOOD

A
year had passed since Simon’s terrible death, and Bambi had changed her entire persona. She had become The Widow. Not that she didn’t want success and specialness as much as she ever had, but somehow the way she now felt and acted seemed to bring it to her in a way she had not expected.

She had stopped sleeping with men, even though she was finally free to do so. Guilt kept her from it; she remembered and romanticized Simon, kept his memory, and looked sad; the survivor of a tragedy she had helped to cause. She had not planned to go to Simon Sez anymore, but after a few nights at home alone she was so bored that she went back. After all, it was still partly hers, and where she would find her elusive future. She went to Simon Sez every night, but she did not recite or sing; she sat in her own booth dressed in somber colors. Sometimes she held court in that booth, and sometimes she walked around and sat down with groups of patrons she wanted to know.
No one asked her why she had stopped performing, and no one even requested her. She assumed it was because they respected her mourning.