I USED TO COME over to her condo three, four times a week. Not just when we were working on the video. Just to hang out. Try on clothes, do each other’s hair, listen to tapes. God, we could talk all day and never run out of things. I’d tell her anything. She knew about Chester, my stepfather. She was the only one I ever told about that. “You got to just block that out of your memory,” she told me. “Pretend like it never happened and before you know it, the whole thing will be like a bad dream.” She said that’s what she did. Just focus on the good stuff. Things make problems in her life, it’s like her brain’s a TV screen. She changes the channel.
That was the day she told me things weren’t going so great with her and Larry. “I don’t know, Liddy,” she told me. “I think I might’ve made a mistake, getting married when I did. Cutting off my options like that. I was thinking twenty-four was so old. But you know Diane Sawyer was close to forty when she let herself get tied down to that movie director guy. And look at her career. Plus, she chose someone that could really support her career, help her along.” You know what Diane Sawyer’s husband, the movie director, did this one time, Suzanne told me? He didn’t think they were hanging the lights around her the right way. So he went over to the TV station himself, and fixed them just the way they should be, to make her look better. “That’s what I call love,” she said. “Imagine a guy that would know to do that for you. Larry, he thinks all they have to do is turn on a spotlight and start the cameras rolling. I mean, he’s a nice guy and all, but he doesn’t know a thing about television.
“And another thing,” she said. “He’s just so boring. All he wants to do is sit around watching TV and talking about what we’re going to name our kids.”
She told me she met this guy, at the TV conference she went to in Mansfield. He was a station manager or something like that, somewhere in New York State. This guy could’ve been a model in GQ, she said. He had this hair, not all gray, but at the temples, so he didn’t look that old, just distinguished. He was married, but his wife wasn’t there. He told Suzanne they weren’t getting along. They’d be getting a divorce soon, they were just waiting till their kid got into prep school.
“We had so much in common, Liddy,” she told me. “It was like I finally found someone that spoke the same language as me, someone that cared about the same things I did. It was like I’d known him all my life.”
She said she didn’t mean to hurt Larry, but after she got back from the conference, all of a sudden everything he did just started grating on her nerves, like fingernails scraping across a blackboard. The way his pants were always too short. The hair in his ears. The way he’d leave his socks on the sectional sofa. He just hung around all the time, she said, never doing anything but watch TV. He’d been putting on weight too. “Love handles,” he called it. But Suzanne called it fat.
“It’s horrible,” she said, “when someone’s crazy about you, and you wish they wouldn’t even touch you. Night after night I tell him I’m not in the mood. But the truth is, I don’t think I’ll ever feel like doing it with him again. And the worst part is, he doesn’t even get mad. He’s just like this dog that follows me around drooling.”
Not that her puppy Walter ever drooled, she said. But Walter was one dog in a million.