An American Love Story (5 page)

She had been a sensual woman once—only a few short years ago—and now she felt her pleasure in lovemaking eroding with her self-confidence.

After that first awful dinner with Goujon, Laura tried very hard to be perky and interested whenever she was included with Clay’s business people. Whatever she did turned out to be wrong. She would venture an opinion and they would look at her as if she were the village idiot. Despite her best efforts, sometimes she wasn’t invited along at all. Wives weren’t tonight, Clay would say.

On weekends she and Clay sat together by the hotel pool. He read scripts, she tried to teach Nina how to swim. Often he would leave her alone and go off for a business lunch with a writer. She had the pool all week—she needed
him.
She had always believed that marriage meant togetherness. Perhaps she should have married a man with an ordinary job, who left work at five o’clock and spent the weekends cooking up a family barbecue.

But she wanted the man she had. Or almost had … The fact that he was talented and successful and obsessed with his creative work was a part of who he was. The sentimental, tender, loving part she had known was hiding.

On their anniversary they had to go to a business dinner at Chasen’s with two other couples. “I wish we could go there alone,” Laura said.

“Anniversaries are silly,” Clay said. “You and I are going to be together forever. We can have our own anniversary party anytime.” Before they left for the dinner he gave her a blue velvet box. Inside was a large fluted gold pin with a diamond in it. It wasn’t what she would have chosen for herself; it was much more something her mother would wear; and it made her feel guilty and weak with tenderness for him because he had chosen it for her with love and she didn’t much like it.

“I hope you like it,” he said in a little-boy voice. “Because it was very expensive.”

She felt even guiltier that it was expensive. She determined to wear it every day.

Chasen’s was rich and red and dark and glowing. The six of them were seated at one of the V.I.P. tables in the front. The three men sat together at one end of the table, the three wives at the other. Naturally, Laura thought with annoyance. What could we silly ignorant ornamental women have to say to these so-important men anyhow? Wives talked about clothes and tennis and vacation trips and charity balls; husbands made television. The two other women were older than she was, so they had no interest in discussing babies. Laura wondered if they ever had. Maybe later, when Nina was in school, she could join the PTA and have friends with whom she had things in common. She looked down at the plate that had been placed in front of her: Chasen’s famous hobo steak, encrusted with salt, that had to be ordered in advance; leaking fatty juice and flanked by their famous creamed spinach. It would be another night when she wouldn’t eat and Clay would have to make excuses for her.

She looked over at Clay and he winked at her. Then he looked at her plate and his face changed, hardened, and he shook his head almost imperceptibly: Don’t be weird again tonight, our host ordered it.

Didn’t he appreciate how difficult it had been for her to lose fifty pounds, and to keep it off, and how long it had taken? Did he even care? She looked back at him defiantly and ate.

As soon as the plates were removed she excused herself and went to the ladies’ room. She had made herself throw up for years when she was a dancer, and even though she hated the way it made her feel she still knew how to do it. When she had finished she went to the sink and mirror to rinse her mouth and repair her eye makeup, hoping no one would notice how red and tear-filled her eyes were from her effort.

The attendant had a radio that picked up the television channels and was listening to one of Clay’s shows. She would have to tell him.

“Are you all right?” the woman asked, peering at her.

“I’m fine, thank you.” Laura smiled and put a dollar in the little dish above the sink, and went back to join the others, straight-backed, poised, and serene.

They drove back to the hotel with the top up; desert nights in early spring were cold. “I’m tired,” Clay said.

“Me too. Was I all right tonight?”

“Of course you were.”

“I never know,” she said.

“It’s just that you have to try harder because you’re the famous prima ballerina from New York.”

“Ex-ballerina.”

“They don’t know what to expect.”

“They’re used to stars. They should just try to like me.”

“You don’t like them,” Clay said.

“I don’t know them.”

“They’re awful and you know it,” he said, and laughed.

She felt a rush of love for him. “Oh, Clay, I want a house. Please let’s buy a house. I want to plant a garden, I want to buy sheets.”

“You’d die of boredom here,” he said. “You are already.”

“Because we have nothing of our own.”

“We have our beautiful apartment in New York,” he said reproachfully. It was that little-boy tone again, the one that filled her with such sad and terrible tenderness. The tone that said: It was expensive.

“I want to live with you all the time. I want Nina to have a full-time father.”

“I’ll never be that, wherever we live,” Clay said reasonably. “I work too hard.”

“But at least we’d live in the same place.”

“I don’t want Nina to be brought up here,” he said. “This is a horrible, superficial place filled with people whose values are not the ones I want for our child. I want her to be an intellectual.”

“I’m sure there are some intellectuals here,” Laura said.

“We don’t seem to have found them.”

“I’ll start looking.”

“Honey, I’m tired. I don’t want to talk about it anymore tonight.”

“Okay.”

That night she dreamed that she was with Tanya, and they were buying sheets. White sheets with ecru-embroidered borders for a king-size bed. She missed her friend, she missed her husband, she missed a life. When she woke up Clay had already left for the office. She called Tanya in New York to say hello, and for the first time Laura cried.

3

1965—NEW YORK

T
here was a certain schizophrenia about New York for girls just starting their careers, underpaid and scrounging: on the one hand the gritty vileness of tiny walk-up apartments with aggressive cockroaches and no air-conditioning, or larger apartments crammed with roommates; near strangers; all wanting to get ahead or get married and leave, whichever came first. And on the other hand, the newness, the excitement, the world out into which one constantly fled those dismal apartments, the bright and glowing belief that the wonderful career, the perfect romantic man, and love, were right out there somewhere in that churning world.

A week after her graduation from college in 1961, when most of her friends were getting married, or at least planning to spend the summer preparing for a fall wedding, Susan had moved into an apartment with three roommates and started her new job. Whenever she had free time during her final semester she had been job hunting. She was
an excellent typist, and now she was a secretary at
Teen Life
magazine (an Ivy League English major should consider herself lucky), which had a readership that seemed to stop at age twelve. There, in addition to her secretarial duties, she wrote an occasional article on how to talk to a boy.

Through her contacts at
Teen Life
she managed to get an agent, and began writing articles for women’s magazines on the side. “Seven Ways to See If He Loves You.” “Seven Ways to Meet New Men.” “Seven Reasons Girls Pick the Wrong Men.” “Seven Ways to a Better You.” She was queen of the seven ways, and she knew it was corny and formula and not at all what she wanted to do with her life, but she was being published, and trying to do better.

The roommates kept leaving and being replaced, and mostly they hated each other after a while. There were notes on everything in the refrigerator—This is MY milk!!!—and in the kitchen—Do not wash your underwear in the kitchen sink, I am sick of seeing curly little hairs in the lettuce, this means YOU!!! The best writer of nasty notes was her friend Dana, who wanted to be an actress. Susan and Dana often went out to Downey’s restaurant in the theatre district to meet actors from Dana’s acting class, who used the bar as a social club. Willowy, beautiful, and languid, Dana never liked anybody, but she went to bed with a lot of them anyway. Susan eventually started having lovers too, but mainly because she was lonely. It made her feel she was still a woman, not the solitary old maid her mother reminded her daily on the phone that she would become.

There was such an air of sex and camaraderie and promise in the bars, and in the discos, and in the after-hours clubs where Susan eventually began going with groups of friends. She didn’t seem to need more than four hours sleep on those nights, arriving at the office looking wide-awake. Eventually she began chronicling the bar scene, and the roommate scene, and finally everything she saw of single people doing things that would send the editors and readers of the women’s magazines into a dead faint; and her agent sold these to the men’s magazines.

With the additional money Susan took the chance of renting her own three-room apartment in a rent-controlled building for a
hundred and fifty dollars a month. Dana had already gone off to live with a man who had a real job, which gave her peace of mind while she was going to auditions, and there was no one else Susan felt she could stand to share an apartment with anymore anyway.

Then her editor at
Teen Life
called her in. She was a nice woman in her forties who didn’t seem to mind her boring job. “Is it possible there’s another Susan Josephs who writes articles for magazines?”

“I don’t think so,” Susan said. Her heart plummeted. She had always known she was taking a risk by selling elsewhere and tarnishing their squeaky clean image, even though she had been reporting the truth.

“Then I’ve been seeing
your
pieces.”

“Yes.”

“They don’t fit in with what we’re doing here.”

“I guess not,” Susan said, trying to act calm. They’re going to fire me. Or they’re going to make me stop. She didn’t know which would be worse: losing her job and her beloved brand-new nest or not being able to continue writing things she knew were good.

“The people upstairs are upset. We understand that you need the money. But we want you to start using a nom de plume for those other articles—it’s only fair to us. Will you do that?”

“I can’t,” Susan said. She was finding it hard to breathe.

“Why not?”

“Because I wrote them; they’re mine.”

“If you won’t do that we’re going to have to let you go.”

Fired … Susan’s mind was racing now. Could she live, adrift? She quickly added up how much money she had been making, and she suddenly realized that she could survive without this job after all. Now she would have the time she had always longed for to write what she liked. She could write even more, and sleep too! She felt heady with the possibilities of freedom.

“I guess I’ll have to go, then,” Susan said.

Her editor gave her a long, searching look, and then she nodded. “I’d get my head handed to me for saying this, but you’re wasting your time at
Teen Life.
You’re very talented. Develop it. It’s
time for you to try it on your own now. I believe you can be a big success.”

“Thank you.” A success, she thought, me …!

Her ex-editor smiled. “It breaks my heart to lose you, but you’re welcome.”

For the next year Susan worked free-lance as if she were on a tightrope; always something accepted just in time to pay the rent, buy the groceries (not that girls who lived alone ate much) and even buy clothes. Then in 1965 the women’s magazine field changed with the metamorphosis of
Cosmopolitan
from just another women’s magazine to something very zippy and alive, made for the swinging single girl. Instead of articles on what to cook for your family’s breakfast there were articles on what to cook for your overnight lover for breakfast, and what to wear while doing it. Susan began writing for them quite regularly, doing interviews and essays.

Dana took her to a going-away party one of her actress friends was giving for her live-in boyfriend who was moving to California. He was an actor, and had gotten a series. His girlfriend was staying in New York. No one asked why he didn’t take her with him; they seemed to think it was natural. Susan couldn’t help noticing that under her celebration face she looked terribly sad.
Why
wasn’t she going with him? Was this an easy way to break up? Did he want a new, free life? Was he expected to have one? Did she really want to stay behind and try for the theatre? The girl seemed like an object; disposable. The image and the question haunted Susan for a long time afterward. She had no one special and didn’t have to make these decisions; and she wondered if they would even be hers to make.

Cosmo
sent her to London in 1967 to report on the Youthquake, as people were calling the new worship of everything that was young. Still shy, she forced herself to phone people whose names she had been given, and made a lot of new friends. Together they roamed Portobello Road, bought miniskirts at Biba and Mary Quant, lunched at Aratusa with male movie stars and skinny girls on the make, smoked hashish instead of pot, loaded on false eyelashes
and teased their hair. For once Susan’s auburn mane was an asset instead of a liability.