An American Love Story (3 page)

The kids in back were throwing little bits of eraser at Simon.
Thunk.
She heard the missile hit the back of his head and bounce off.
Thunk.
There went another. He just didn’t even move, hoping they would stop. All of a sudden Bambi felt something bitter rise up in her throat. Bitter and sweet and sad and terrible. She couldn’t stand that soft little sound of the rubber hitting Simon’s head. She didn’t know why it made her feel so sad.

“People!” Mrs. Collins said, rapping her pointer. “No more horseplay! No more spitballs!”

Somebody in the back giggled because they weren’t spitballs. Then the class behaved. Bambi hunched into her sweater, hoping nobody would decide to throw something at
her.

The next night was the play. The auditorium was filled with parents and grandparents and brothers and sisters of the kids who were in it, everybody all dressed up. There was a hum of anticipation that Bambi could hear right through the heavy velvet curtain. She wasn’t nervous because her part was so small and she didn’t even have any lines, but she felt the excitement and wished more of it could be for her, that she too would be noticed and loved by those strangers out there.

Then the curtain rose and the play began, and of course it went fine, they had rehearsed so much. When it was over, there were five curtain calls, the Silver Princess coming out alone at the end, everyone applauding and cheering. Then they pulled the boy who had written it onto the stage, the eighth-grade boy who had been sitting in the first row, wearing a suit and tie; his proud parents sitting next to him beaming. “Author, author,” people yelled. At first Bambi thought they were calling “Arthur.”

He bowed to the audience. His face was shiny with pride and delight. His parents were looking up at him, just glowing, the same way the parents of the mean girl who played the Silver Princess were glowing, the way everybody was, looking up at these two.

It was at that moment Bambi realized the one thing she wanted
most in life. The feeling was so strong it seemed to fill her whole body, like heat, and she knew it would never go away. The one thing she wanted most in life, even though she was only six years old and didn’t yet know exactly how to be it, was to be Special.

2

1960—NEW YORK

T
here
were thirty “adult westerns” on prime time television that year, more than ever before or since. There were hip detectives surrounded by beautiful women, Kookie combed his hair on the exotic Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, and there were warm, loving, wholesome families whose teenage children bore nicknames like Princess, Bud, and Kitten. Television housewives were always slim and well coiffed, they wore makeup, aprons and high heels with their housedresses. They sometimes even wore pearls in the kitchen, and their feet never hurt. The lucky viewers who could afford to had color TV.

Laura and Clay had several color sets in their new apartment at The Dakota, and Laura, who had been confined to bed during the last few months of her pregnancy, watched everything. Clay had become quite a star at the agency, having developed two of his own star clients and made two successful packages with them for television, and he talked to Laura of how he wanted to become a
producer. Television was now on film and came from the big Hollywood studios instead of New York. During the long, boring days of forced immobility Laura waited for him to come home to tell her about this vital new world of his. She was proud she was a part of this progress and knew so much, and she encouraged him like a cheerleader. She was not aware that she knew nothing.

The huge apartment was only partly furnished. The immense living room with its tall French windows and rich wood-paneled walls, its elegant marble-manteled fireplace and glistening wooden floors, lay dreaming, waiting for her touch. It was Versailles, it was a fantasy, it was being an adult. It would be family. When she looked at it Laura’s breath caught in her throat with joy, thinking of the long years of their future to come.

Some of the things she’d ordered hadn’t arrived yet, but there were still so many more to be bought to fill all those rooms. Clay wanted antiques and good paintings, and said that when she was liberated from her bed again they would go to auctions together. Meanwhile he had gotten her a decorator. Laura held court in her king-size bed while the decorator’s lively male assistant brought her swatches and objects, photos and sketches. Something about it reminded her of mounting a new ballet, and kept her from feeling uncomfortable with her new responsibility.

She never heard from anyone at the company. Anyway, they were on tour. She had been thrown into a different world, while theirs continued, and she realized they didn’t have much in common with her anymore. They wouldn’t want to hear every detail of her preparations for the baby, the way her best friend Tanya did.

Tanya came to see her every day. Seeing her round, lovely face and merry eyes, or even hearing her indestructibly happy voice on the phone, always cheered Laura up. They had been best friends since they were children at ballet school. It had become apparent by the time they were in their teens that Laura would someday be a great ballerina and Tanya never would. Tanya didn’t care. “Always a cygnet, never a swan,” she had said laughing, and when she was twenty she married Edward Rice and retired.

Edward was a theatrical lawyer seven years older. They had no children; Tanya was Edward’s baby. Laura thought of them as a
couple from an F. Scott Fitzgerald story. Edward was kind, handsome, good and gallant; Tanya was totally fey. They adored each other. Clay only tolerated them—Tanya because he said she was crazy, Edward because he was so protective of Tanya—and Laura was disappointed, because she had hoped the two couples could be the best of friends. But it really didn’t matter, and she understood. In a way she was almost relieved, because it meant Clay would never look at Tanya and she would never have to be jealous.

“I’m enormous,” Laura said to Tanya in her ninth month. “Somehow I thought I would look just the same as always, but with breasts at last and a small, round Madonnalike bulge in the front. But I’m a blimp!”

“Do you remember that girl in the company with the tiny little head? What was her name? When she got pregnant she put sheets over the mirrors so she couldn’t see anything below the neck.”

“Pinhead Penelope,” Laura said, and they laughed until tears came to their eyes. “Oh my God, can you imagine
her
pregnant?”

“Do you want me to put up sheets?” Tanya asked.

“Hell, no. I’m going to enjoy this. Clay calls me The Goddess of Fecundity. He keeps saying he doesn’t know how such a little thing like me could have such a big baby. He doesn’t know the baby’s little and it’s me that’s big.”

“Do you remember how we used to weigh ourselves three times a day?”

“And before and after we went to the bathroom,” Laura said. They smiled at how fanatical they had been. “Isn’t it wonderful to be commanded to eat instead of forbidden?”

“It will all fall off afterward,” Tanya said reassuringly.

“I’ll see that it does!”

“Now don’t forget, when she’s born you have to look at the clock to get the exact birth time so I can have her horoscope done.”

“How can you be so sure it’s a she?”

Tanya laid her hand gently on Laura’s stomach. “I can feel her aura,” she said.

Nina Bowen was born in June. She was a Gemini baby, destined to be talented and creative in the arts, charming and verbal, with quicksilver moods; at least according to the horoscope Tanya had made. She also weighed six pounds. When Laura got on the scale after Nina’s birth she discovered she had gained fifty. It was more than half her original body weight and she was appalled. She had another project ahead of her, and immediately started a strict diet, and, as soon as the doctor permitted it, ballet classes every day. But it had all been worth it: Nina was exquisite. Clay was immediately enamored of his daughter and carried her around the apartment, looking down at her and chuckling. He often came home late from meetings after the office, but the first thing he did was go to Nina’s lacy, beribboned bassinette, and if she wasn’t awake he would wake her, pretending he hadn’t.

If motherhood had made Laura balloon, fatherhood had made Clay bloom. Babies giggled at him in elevators; even the ill-tempered screaming ones stopped crying and smiled. The baby would look at him with big affectionate eyes and he would do that chuckle of his. “I’m on his side,” he would say to the admiring mother, and she would smile at him too.

“You really love babies,” Laura said to him. “I never knew that.”

“I hate them,” he said calmly.

She was stunned. “But not Nina? You don’t hate Nina?”

“Of course not,” Clay said. “She’s ours. She’s special.”

“And when they get older …?” Laura persisted. “Do you hate them then too?”

“Sure. Kids are worse than babies.”

“But what kind of a father are you going to be if you hate kids?”

Clay smiled his winning smile and put his arms around her, hugging her to him. “If you want to know the truth, I pretty much hate all adults.”

She put her head on his chest, relaxing in the warm circle of his arms. “Loonybird,” she said.

She thought about it: Clay could charm people he didn’t even like or care about; it was his incredible charisma. No wonder he was so good at his work, being able to engender trust—that, and
his talent of course. She began to like being a part of his secret, and being one of the few people in the world he cared about. She felt his sly appeal was not hypocritical or manipulative, but admirable. And so, from that moment on, Laura became his co-conspirator.

They had a baby nurse for Nina, and someone to clean the apartment, and someone to cook. Often Laura met Clay downtown after his cocktail meetings and they had dinner in a restaurant together. She ate almost nothing. The weight was coming off quickly, but she felt uncomfortable and unattractive now that there was no longer an excuse for her to look so different from what she had always looked like. She couldn’t wait to be herself again, perhaps not as thin as she had been before, but at least she wanted to look like a former ballerina, the woman Clay was so proud of, not just anybody. Every morning she took an hour and a half class, feeling her stamina come back and her identity with it.

There was still the apartment to finish. Somehow Clay was so busy that they never did get to go to an auction together; Laura went with Tanya. He was working longer and longer hours now; up before she was, kissing her gently and telling her to sleep; making her wait an hour in the restaurant (with two phone calls from his secretary) while he was still in meetings; coming home too tired to do more than blow a kiss at the baby. Laura understood all this, but what confused her was that their sex life, which had once been so passionate and loving, was now almost nonexistent. Sometimes three or four weeks went by before he wanted to make love, and when she made timid overtures she would find that instead of becoming aroused under her touch he had fallen asleep, curled into a ball with his back to her, mumbling softly: “No, no.”

She didn’t know what to say. It was difficult for her to talk about sex—doing it was easy, but discussing it was humiliating, pushy. She was afraid if she made an issue of it things would get worse. The only one she could talk to about it was Tanya.

“When people get married does the sex go away?”

“Not away,” Tanya said.

“But less?”

“I guess so,” Tanya said. “But I’ve only been married to one man. And I was a virgin when I married him.”

“You weren’t! You said you’d had lovers,” Laura said.

Tanya grinned mischievously. “I didn’t want to seem square. Lots of the girls at ballet school lied about our sex lives and pretended we had them.”

“Well,” Laura said, “I did have lovers, but I don’t know anything about marriage. I never discussed things like that with anyone who was married. It’s so personal.”

“Ask me anything.”

“Clay’s so busy and so tired, and he’s always thinking. He’ll get into bed with a pile of scripts and he seems … so forbidding. It’s cozy, and I love being next to him, but I’m afraid to touch him.”

“You don’t mean he never does anything?”

“Oh, not never. But it’s just not what I’d imagined. He’s changed. Sometimes I wonder if it’s me.”

“It’s not you,” Tanya said. “Edward’s the same way. You know how much he adores me, and he thinks I’m sexy, but sometimes he forgets I’m there. They’re so interested in their careers right now. We’re going to be with them forever. If it gets too bad put some anise seeds into a bottle of vodka and let them marinate for two weeks. Then give him a little glass of that. It’s an aphrodisiac.”

“How do you know?”

“It works on dogs,” Tanya said. “If you sprinkle a trail of anise seeds all the way to your door a strange dog will follow it and be yours forever. What works on a dog will work on a man. Or kill him.” She giggled. “And don’t strain it. Actually, it tastes very good.”