An American Love Story (43 page)

Not a Hollywood “I love ya, babe.” Clay had never been that. Real love.
I love you
. She felt a chill. Susan Josephs had won.

“Who was that?” Laura asked. “Your girlfriend?”

“No, my boyfriend,” he said.

Laura looked at him. He seemed perfectly serious. Her head was whirling. “You have a … boyfriend?”

He gave her an enigmatic smile. Then he nodded.

“You’re in love with a man?” Shock made her bold. “Who is he?”

“I won’t discuss it.” Clay said.

“Is it that very rich Arab you keep going to visit?”

“Maybe.” He picked up his glass and looked away.

Oh, poor Clay. He was gay. Now at last Laura understood why he had not touched her for so many years, why he had kept his life so secret and away from her. Susan Josephs had been just what he had said. She wondered if Clay had known he was gay before he married her. He must have. But he had wanted a family. Perhaps he had even wanted her. She had known so many gay dancers, but Clay had been different. He had slipped right under her guard.

“Cheers,” he said. They touched glasses lightly and sipped their champagne. She looked at him; her love, her lifetime obsession. He had certainly fooled her.

“Tell me something,” Laura said. “When you married me, did you love me?”

“Of course,” he said. “I had to.”

It was not her fault. She had not failed him as a wife: there was nothing she could have done. For the first time in years and years she felt strangely peaceful.

When he left soon afterward, for one brief moment he let her hug him gently good-bye.

29

1987—NEW YORK

I
t was spring. The carts with hot dogs, souvlaki, latkes, candy, and fruit began to appear everywhere on the streets again, and hardy, invisible birds arrived to sing wherever there was a patch of green. Office workers ate lunch outside on steps of buildings. People had already rented houses in the Hamptons for summer, complaining that the prices were even higher this year. And Susan, seeing another empty day, another empty month, another empty year ahead, felt she could not go on.

It was the first time she had felt that way. At least it was a realization, something with some substance.
I can’t go on
. The endless hours by the phone waiting for Clay’s daily call, the letdown when it was over, the now fruitless attempts to work, or read, or even think, could continue forever if she let them. Nothing would change or get better. Immobilized, she didn’t want to kill herself and had no desire to live.

Night after night, on the telephone, Jeffrey and Dana
had been the recipients of her grief. It had been only to Nina that she covered up, and she had no idea why.

“You must be in such pain,” Nina had said to her, finally, when they met alone for dinner.

“Why?”

“The way my father has been treating you.”

“He’s busy.”

“I don’t think he’s been living in his apartment.”

“He spends a lot of time with Anwar,” Susan said. “He loves me. He calls every day and says he loves me. You should see the cards he wrote me all these years, saying I was his life.”

Nina just looked sad.

But to Jeffrey, Susan went over and over her doubts and confusion, thinking as an outsider he might have some answer. “Why don’t you go to a psychiatrist?” he said finally.

“A what?”

“A therapist. You can’t go on like this, you’re too miserable. I know a really good one, Joan Giacondo. I interviewed her when I was doing that piece on shrinks, and then I sent a couple I know to her and she saved their marriage. I could send you to some others, but I think she’s the best. Tell her you want short-term marital therapy. She’s probably hard to get an appointment with, but mention my name, and my friends.”

“I’ve heard of her,” Susan said.

So here she was on her way to meet her potential new therapist, and tell her what she wanted. Help me escape Clay … No! Help me save my relationship. Or get out of it. No! She was even afraid to say the words, for fear this magical therapist would break her and Clay apart.

Joan Giacondo was tall and thin and cheerful. Susan liked her right away. She listened intently while Susan poured out everything she could think of about Clay and the situation. “I feel like killing myself,” Susan said.

“Well, before you kill yourself,” Joan Giacondo said pleasantly, “let’s see if there’s anything to kill yourself over. You want to know, don’t you?”

“Yes … but how?”

“Hire a detective.”

“A detective?”

“Sure.”

“How can I find a detective?”

“You’re smart. You can find one.”

It was like something out of cops and robbers. It had nothing to do with her life at all. Women she knew didn’t put detectives on the men they loved. But … married women did it. She had been with Clay for longer than most marriages. Single women had rights too. That night she called Dana.

“I need a California detective,” Susan said. “I’m going to put him on Clay. And don’t tell
anyone
.”

“You’re in the right hands,” Dana said. “I’ve been the handkerchief bringer at lots of extremely acrimonious divorces. I’ll ask around.”

“Be discreet. No one can know who it’s for.”

“No one will know.”

She would be going to Dr. Giacondo twice a week. Dana would get her a detective. She would take control of her own life. She felt better now; for the first time she had something to do about all this, at last something was going to happen.

Dana called a few days later. “Three people recommended these guys. They all spoke very highly of them. Their name is—get this—The Sherlock Holmes Detective Agency. Is that gumshoe or what? This is getting exciting.”

“They sound like something out of a bad movie.”

“I know. I love it. Call them. And you’re to ask for Bill Montana.”

Bill Montana sounded just like a private eye on the phone, including the terminology. Susan said she wanted to know where Clay was living. He asked for home and offices addresses, phone numbers, Clay’s usual schedule, a complete description of “the subject,” and told her to send him a photo. “We’ll put him under surveillance,” he said, adding it up on a calculator. “At thirty dollars an hour, that will be, let’s see, forty-five hundred dollars. In advance. We usually catch them by then.”

“Forty-five hundred dollars!”

“People are hard to follow. We’ll do other things too, call the office, do the package delivery ruse. The detective business is based on lies and deception. Remember that—lies and deception.”

“And forty-five hundred dollars.”

“I’ll send you a contract to sign and mail back to me.”

“What if you find him before my money runs out?”

“It’s nonrefundable, but you’ll see, the hours go by very fast.”

It was high, but worth it. She was glad she had the money.

She went through her photos of herself and Clay when they were still happy. He had his arm around her and looked in love and protective. Susan had one copied and cut the copy in half. She put the half that was Clay, now smiling at no one, into the envelope with the signed contract and mailed it back with her check.

There was a link between her and Clay again; unknown to him she would be a part of his life, she would be with him. This terrible mystery would end. She actually felt something akin to elation.

She called Bill every few days. “We sat outside his house all weekend,” Bill reported, sounding surprised, “and he never came out.”

“Maybe he wasn’t there,” Susan said. “Did you look for his car?”

“We can’t go into the underground parking garage. We can’t get that close because someone will see us.”

After another week Bill reported that an operative had been following Clay’s car in traffic and had hit another car, thus making following him impossible that day. Since Clay had been on his way from a restaurant to his office it didn’t seem like a great loss. Susan reported that Clay was finally coming to New York to see her, and that when he went back to L.A. they should follow him from the airport. She was beginning to think she was the detective and they were the Keystone Kops.

Clay was in and out in two days. He did not try to make love to her, and although he was pleasant he seemed distant, and Susan wondered if she was too. His presence seemed less real than the person she was having followed in California. She was impatient
for him to leave. He took her to lunch before he made his plane and told her he didn’t feel well, that his anxiety attacks were worse and he was afraid it might be something more serious. He promised to go to the doctor, and, as always, she felt afraid that he was going to die.

He called her that night. “I’m calling you from a pay phone at the airport,” he said. “My plane got in an hour late. I didn’t want you to worry that something had happened to me because I didn’t feel well. I’m feeling much better now. Oh, someone wants the phone. I have to go.”

“Thank you for calling,” Susan said, relieved and touched at his thoughtfulness. “I
was
worried.” Now they’ll go after him, she thought. Now, at last, I’ll know.

The next morning Bill called. “We lost him,” he said. “Usually we get to the airport in plenty of time, but there was a traffic accident on the freeway that delayed us, and his plane was early, so we pulled in to the airport right after he was gone.”

“His plane was early?”

“Yes. It wasn’t our fault. I’m really sorry.”

Clay had said the plane was late. He hadn’t called from the airport; he had called from wherever he lived. He had wanted to reassure her so she wouldn’t call his apartment and find he wasn’t there. Susan would have felt angry if she hadn’t felt so miserable.

Clay called her the next day to tell her he was going into the hospital overnight for tests. Susan told Bill. She seemed to be the one who was doing all the research here. The next day Bill reported that Clay had been driven from his office to the hospital in his car by “a young gofer who said her name was Bambi. She was about twenty-four and had on jeans. There was no visible sign of affection. She just dropped him off and drove away.”

“How did you know her name was Bambi?”

“We were using a female operative who’s very clever. She has ways. I can’t tell you or you’d be in our business instead of us.”

“Yes,” Susan said, remembering. “Bambi is that girl who works for him.”

“Well, she’s nobody.”

The Sherlock Holmes Detective Agency did not manage to follow
Clay from the hospital back to his home because that day they were shorthanded and had no one to send. Susan was furious. Another opportunity wasted. She was beginning to think she and Dana could do better by following Clay themselves, but of course, he would recognize them.

When Bill called two days later he had better news. “You said Anwar Akmal lives in the Hollywood Hills,” he said. “There’s no record of that. So we tried the package ruse. We called Clay’s office after he had left for the day and said we had a package to deliver for him but he had to sign for it personally. His secretary Penny is a very nasty middle-aged woman, right?”

“She’s not nasty,” Susan said. “She’s very nice.”

“Well, she was nasty to us. We said since Clay had left we’d just have to try the place in the Hills. And she got all upset and snapped: ‘How do you know about that? You’re not supposed to know about that! Nobody knows about that!’ She wouldn’t tell us anything else, so we called again today and said we still had the package and we might as well take it to his place in the Hollywood Hills, and this time she said: ‘There
is
no place in the Hollywood Hills.’ So now we know Clay has a house up there somewhere.”

Susan suddenly felt she didn’t know him at all anymore. What kind of pain was he going through that he couldn’t share with her? He was living secretly in some rented house she didn’t know about and he had never told her. He obviously needed space and time; his life was a disaster. Maybe he was going through his middle-aged crisis and was having an affair with someone they both knew, some old friend. She could stand that, even understand. Or maybe he was all alone. Being all alone in that hideaway wouldn’t make it much better; in a way it made it worse. He had excluded her from his life, and for that the entire structure of their relationship was irrevocably changed.

“Why?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Bill said. “Maybe he’s depressed. He could be on drugs. That would be typical.”

“Not Clay. Keep looking.”

When Clay called her the next morning Susan could hardly think of anything to say to him. He talked and she was silent.
Finally she took a chance. “I know what you’re doing in the Hollywood Hills.”

“What?” he said innocently.

“You know.”

“What am I doing?”

“You know.”

He either knew she was faking or he thought she was too scared to confront him. He ended the conversation sweetly and she felt like a fool.

It was taking so long to find out what she needed to know. Every time she called Bill she hoped he would have something substantial to report, but it was an exercise in frustration. She was waiting grimly for him to ask her to send another check. But she knew that he would find out eventually, and whatever he found out could not be good.

As if Clay too sensed the impending disaster, he came back to New York to see her much sooner than usual. And this time he stayed at her apartment all night.

Neither of them could sleep. They dozed fitfully, trying not to disturb each other. This is the last time we’ll be together like this, Susan thought. I know I’m never going to be in bed with him again. She glanced at Clay, and he held his arms out to her; with such a look of love on his face that it broke her heart. She dove into the safety of his arms and they lay there hugging all night, with fear and love and intensity, holding on.

In the morning he ate toast and jam at her table while she stood there and watched at a careful distance. “The reason I couldn’t sleep all night,” she said, “is that I know the next time you see me I’ll have changed.”