An American Love Story (52 page)

“Where were you for forty-five minutes?” she said.

“Buying seltzer.” His eyes were innocent and he had a bag under his arm with two bottles in it. “I had to go all over, everything was closed.”

“The Korean downstairs isn’t closed.”

The innocent look changed to a closed-off annoyance. “Why are you interrogating me?”

She felt tears trying to break though and fought them down. “If you have a girlfriend just tell me,” Nina said. “I won’t attack you, I’ll accept it, but just don’t lie to me.”

“A girlfriend?” He was all innocence again; injured innocence. “That’s ridiculous. There’s no one else.” He put the seltzer into the refrigerator along with the seltzer that was already there.

“You must be very thirsty,” Nina said.

“We’ll use it up.”

“If you have a girlfriend I’ll catch you,” she said.

“Don’t be paranoid. There’s nothing to catch.”

Was she imagining it? She was tired, and she had to get up early the next morning to go to work. She didn’t want to spend another sleepless night wondering what she had done wrong. “If we’re having problems, Stevie, let’s discuss them,” she said.
“Please.”

“There are no problems, Quackers. You’re so dumb.”

When he was asleep she went into the bathroom to cry so he wouldn’t hear her.

During the week she and Stevie tried to pretend everything was all right. On Friday afternoon he called her at the office just as she was about to leave. “I’m going to the gym with Dave,” he said. “And afterward I’ll have a drink with him, so don’t get nervous if I’m late.”

“How late?” she said.

“I’ll be home by ten.”

“But what do you want to do about dinner?”

“We can go to the cheap Thai place up the street, it won’t be crowded by then. Or, you know what? Why don’t we play it by ear; if you get hungry you eat, and I’ll just find something at home.”

Friday night … He was leaving her alone again. She could, she supposed, try to get into a movie. But walking home, looking at the couples who were already lifting their first beers at the neighborhood cafés, she suddenly realized that he couldn’t possibly be with Dave. Dave was married. His wife had just had a baby. They lived out in Queens. There was no way Dave was going to hang around Manhattan on a Friday night having a drink with his bachelor friend. Nina ran the rest of the way home.

She found Dave’s number in Stevie’s address book and dialed, but when his wife answered she got so rattled she hung up. What was she going to do, ask for Dave? Then she formulated her plan. She called again, but this time Dave himself answered.

“Well, hi,” Nina said with false cheer. “I haven’t talked to you guys since you had the baby and I wanted to know how things were.”

“Hectic,” Dave said. “We never get out anymore. But the baby’s great.”

“I’m glad.”

“How are you two?” he asked.

“Fine,” Nina said.

“Well, when things settle down we’ll have to get together.”

“Absolutely,” she said.

Just wait till Stevie calls him for his alibi, she thought as she replaced the receiver. I wonder what story he’ll have for me then. She was so angry she didn’t even cry. She walked around the apartment looking at the things that were hers. None of them were really important; all she wanted was her clothes and her art. She could put some things at Aunt Tanya’s, in her mother’s closet. She’d hear what Stevie had to say when he got home, and then tomorrow she would go.

Go where? A hotel was too expensive. She’d have to find another apartment, unless he was willing to leave and let her have this one. She was making enough now to pay the entire rent if she economized on everything else. She looked at her possessions. On second thought, why should she leave him anything? He wouldn’t have a dish or a spoon or a decent towel if she took everything that she had brought into this relationship. He wouldn’t even be able to watch TV. Let him go move in with his new girlfriend if he didn’t like it.

Why did he have to be such a liar? Why couldn’t he have just told her the truth? Stevie, her father … What was wrong with men anyway? Why did honesty frighten them so much?

She called Susan and told her what had happened, and then in spite of her best control she finally started to cry.

“You can sleep on my couch until you find something,” Susan said.

“I hate to impose.”

“I don’t mind.”

“I guess I could sleep in my mother’s room at Aunt Tanya’s until she comes back, but I just don’t feel like being charming.”

“You’re staying with me,” Susan said.

“Thank you … you’re such a good friend. I’ll repay you someday.”

“You already have.”

Stevie came home at half past one in the morning. Nina was just finishing packing, and she had cried all the tears she had in her for one night. She looked calm. He looked drunk.

“What are you doing, Quackers?”

“Leaving you.”

“I didn’t have a drink with Dave,” he said.

“Oh?” He must have called Dave and found out his alibi had been blown.

“The reason I haven’t been coming home,” Stevie said, “is that lately you’ve been wanting to get married, and it scares me.”

“Married?” Nina said. “Me? There is no one on earth who less wants to get married.”

“Your mother said she wants grandchildren.”

“She never said any such thing.”

“And you’ve been reading
Bride’s
magazine.”

Nina was astonished. “The only time I ever read
Bride’s
magazine was that night at the 7-Eleven when you were taking so long buying chips that I had to do something, and there was nothing else to read there but
Playboy
and
Popular Mechanics.
”

“I don’t want to get married,” he said.

What a lame excuse! “Obviously I don’t either,” Nina said, “since I’m moving out in the morning.”

“You can’t.”

“Watch me.”

“But why?”

“So you can live with Leslie, I guess,” Nina said.

Such an obvious look of guilt flashed over his face that she wanted to hit him. He didn’t have to say anything more.

She dropped some things at Susan’s on the way to work. The Stevie story wasn’t over, and wouldn’t be until she was clean away from him and never had to see him again. She knew she would never take him back, but still she missed him, and knew the feeling wouldn’t just go away. Now she really began to understand
how Susan felt about her father, but of course that was far, far worse.

She called Stevie a few days later to ask him what he wanted to do about their apartment. She had to call several times before she could find him in. “I guess I’ll move downtown,” he said.

With Leslie, she thought. Suddenly she didn’t want the apartment either. There were too many memories, and a woman alone should have a doorman. She began looking at available apartments at night, sure it would be easy to find something, but they were all claustrophobically small and frighteningly expensive. A woman alone, she told herself, doesn’t need much space.

The days of her childhood at The Dakota were long gone. For the first time she wished that she were really rich. In the end she compromised on a studio that had been advertised as “a flexible one bedroom,” with air-conditioning and a doorman, for what she and Stevie had been paying for their entire four-room apartment. It was already painted the obligatory white, and she could move right in. The only thing she had to buy was a bed without a past—a sofa bed, to look nice for company in the small room. Who did she even know to invite?

She sat in Susan’s apartment and they talked about men. “They’re all vile,” Nina said. “No matter how old, no matter how young. Why do they have to lie? I begged him to tell me if there was someone else, but he denied it.”

“I asked Clay, and he denied it too.”

“Do you think there really is an Anwar?” Nina said.

“Who knows? Clay never mentions him anymore.”

“Well, he doesn’t have to ‘visit’ him anymore, does he.”

They sat there thinking about their betrayal. “I can’t believe I didn’t know when I saw his clothes were gone,” Susan said. “I kept refusing to see everything I should have seen, because I wanted things to work.”

“Why do we stay with them and try to make it work?” Nina said.

“Love. Maybe we’re just neurotic.”

“They’re the ones who are neurotic! Why do they need to cheat? All right, Stevie and I had problems, and we grew apart, but
you and my father had a perfect relationship. You two had so many things in common. He was lucky to have you. Why did he have to pick her?”

“Maybe he wanted a new life and he thought he could find it through a new woman.”

“Why couldn’t he make a new life with you?”

Susan shrugged. “I’m going to show you something I wrote,” she said. “I never showed it to anybody. I wrote it when I was in the hospital.” She got up and went into the bedroom, and then she came out with a piece of lined paper in her hand. She unfolded it. “Read this.”

“Tiny Tombstones …” Nina read the paragraph and then read it again.

“It’s a subject I’ve been thinking about a lot lately,” Susan said. “And I wonder if this has anything to do with the answer. Once men had to move on to survive, to protect and sustain the family—but women don’t die young anymore, and men are still doing it; trading them in, only now they’re breaking the families up. A new marriage, new children … Is it biological, sociological, atavistic?”

“You should do a study on it,” Nina said. “It’s exactly the kind of thing you do so well.”

“Tiny Tombstones: Sequential Monogamy in America.”

“That’s your new book.”

Susan looked at her. “Do you think so?”

“Absolutely! I think it’s a great idea. I personally would like to find out.”

“Well, so would I,” Susan said.

“Then do it,” Nina said, excited. “You’ve been looking for a project. Give me a proposal and I know I can get you a contract. You’ll interview the men, the women, see the patterns, maybe even find a couple of those guys who have a modicum of insight about themselves.”

“They don’t have to have insight,” Susan said. “I’ll just let them talk.”

“How will you find them?”

“I’ll start with people I know. They’ll give me names of people
they know. It’ll be like a human chain letter. Give me six months and I’ll have a list as long as your arm.… I don’t know, Nina—do you think I’m ready yet to tackle something as hard as this?”

“Yes. Think of it as therapy.”

“Answers are a kind of therapy, aren’t they,” Susan said. “And for me, my work is. It might even be fun. I’ll do it.”

It was the first time since before the hospital, no, even before that, at least a year before, that she had seen Susan look alive.

35

1987—NEW YORK

“M
y wife was a nice woman. I just got bored.” Susan had already interviewed two men for her survey, to begin to get the flavor of it, and she decided to use that line as a chapter heading.

She was going through her notes for the presentation of
Tiny Tombstones
. Two marriages didn’t count as real serial monogamy, she decided. Anyone could make a youthful mistake. But probably she should include those men as a kind of yardstick since there were so many. She would have to get statistics on how many men in this country had been married more than twice. Men who had had three marriages would be good candidates for an interview. One woman for each act of his life. Four marriages could be revealing too, depending on what the man said. More than four marriages was too freaky. She decided that living together for a long time in a serious committed relationship would count as a marriage. That might up the total of marriages for a man and it should be interesting.

All those people, meeting and falling in love and parting. She thought of the women. While you are living your life, some stranger somewhere is living hers, neither of you the slightest bit aware that she will enter yours and ruin it. In the hospital at this very moment there is a baby with your name on it, who is going to grow up and take away your future husband. On Bambi Green’s wedding day to Simon, she never dreamed she was going to end up with Clay.

She went back to her notes to pull herself back from being depressed.

Generational differences in male behavior? she wrote. Do men in their thirties trade in for contemporaries? Do the older men keep marrying the “same” woman, only a younger version? Do they try to make time stand still by finding a New One the age the Old One was when they met? “Trading in, trading up, trading down,” possible chapter heading.

She had decided to stay within the upper middle class, the area she had covered in
Like You, Like Me
, and one she felt comfortable with. It was the marriage she should have made when she was young—it was the one she
had
made. Maybe she would do some rich people too, not showy multimillionaires, but the very successful men who did what they pleased because they could afford to. Big alimony no obstacle, she wrote in her notes.

The man who had said he just got bored had been totally clueless about how he functioned. But maybe, she thought, what you see is what you get. Boredom might have been enough. Did she seem boring to Clay near the end? Should she have tried harder, been different? Her therapist said not to blame herself, that women blamed themselves for everything too much. Still, she couldn’t get the thought out of her mind.

She had learned long ago in her interviews never to have a preconception. She would just listen and the answers would come, a pattern would emerge. This would be the survey that would try to explain her life to her, and perhaps Clay’s.

She started thinking about Andy. He had called her a couple of times in the two weeks since their lunch, to touch base, he said; and they had talked about their work, and then he had flown to
California for a few days of meetings. He should be back by now. She was still as much in love with Clay; she would be ashamed for Andy to know how obsessed she was. She was sure Andy also didn’t know that she was still so hurt that she was constantly afraid she was a loser and was going to say the wrong thing to him and drive him away. She didn’t know how to flirt anymore; she kept seeing herself only as the woman Clay had rejected.