Four years had gone by, and it was going to be Clay’s forty-ninth birthday. Laura, holding fast to her decision to keep up the facade, had decided to give a big party for him in California. She thought a forty-ninth birthday celebration was better than a fiftieth; it was whimsical, fun. The message was: Enjoy the last year of your forties! He had been grumpy and nervous lately, more irritable than usual, and she thought this would help cheer him up. His birthday was in December, near Christmas, and she had been planning the party for months.
At first she had wanted to make it a surprise, but then she realized that Clay’s schedule was so unpredictable this would be impossible, so she told him when he came to New York on business. He tried to talk her out of it.
“Don’t waste money on me,” he said.
“I want to.”
“Where are you having it?”
“In California, at the Beverly Hills Hotel, your old stamping ground.”
“You don’t know how to arrange a party in California; you live here.”
“Your secretary is helping me,” Laura said, proud to be so efficient.
“Penny?”
“Yes. She has a list of all your friends and business associates, and the invitations have already been sent out so there’s nothing you can do. We’ve both been on the phone with the hotel a million times, reserving the private room, planning the menu, the wines, and I’ve even chosen the flowers. I’m coming out a week before to be sure everything is perfect. You’ll love it, and so will your friends.”
“I have no friends,” Clay said.
“That’s not what Penny’s Rolodex says.”
He lowered his head like an angry bull and glared at her. “I don’t want parties.”
“Don’t be silly.” Nothing he said or did could quell her excitement. Having a project had made her manic, and this particular one meant a great deal to her. No matter what he did with Susan Josephs, no matter if that woman was his girlfriend or not, she, Laura, was still his wife. She would give his birthday party, she would be the hostess, and the television community would see that she still had importance. No matter what Clay did behind her back, she was permanent.
A wife had power. A wife was there. And his mistress would be absent.
“Where do you think you’re going to stay in California?” Clay asked nastily. “There’s no room at my place, you won’t like it.”
Let the bitch move out, Laura thought. “It will be perfectly fine,” she said. “Penny said you have a week of business meetings in New York just before the party, so I’ll stay at your apartment and it won’t even bother you. Leave the keys to your car.”
“I have to put it in the shop for a checkup,” Clay said. “It’s an old car, it’s delicate. Have Penny rent you one.”
She was winning. She smiled at him. “You’ll see how much fun it will be,” she said.
“Just watch the drugs,” he said.
“Oh, Mr. Gracious, Mr. Charm.”
He peered at her suspiciously. “What’s wrong with you?”
“I’m happy,” Laura said. “It’s a condition you haven’t seen me in very often for a very long time.”
“Are you planning to put a bomb in my cake?”
She laughed.
It was true she was more erratic lately, more unpredictable. The amount of pills she was taking was larger, the combination more complicated, ever since the shock of finding out about Susan, and Nina’s attempted suicide. But Nina had been normal since then, and surprisingly undamaged; studying harder than ever, at Yale now, her first choice, majoring in psychology. Nina had said she couldn’t go to the party because she had so much work at school. Laura didn’t try to dissuade her, knowing by now it was useless to try to change Nina’s mind about anything.
A week before Clay’s birthday party Laura flew to California. It was the first time she had ever seen his apartment, the probable love nest. It was not as small as he had complained it was, and she was quite comfortable, although she knew she would have done a better job of decorating it if he had allowed her to. The sheets on his (his and Susan’s?) bed had been freshly changed, but she looked at it with revulsion. She couldn’t bring herself to sleep in it, choosing instead the comfortable couch in the den. There was ample closet space and an empty bathroom for her use.
One of the closets had a lock on it, and she wondered what he kept in it. Some of Susan’s things perhaps? But after all these years Laura had learned not to pry. It was enough victory that Susan had been temporarily banished … and maybe, just maybe, she didn’t actually live there, she only visited. When Laura had finally made Clay say something about Susan he had said that she was a platonic friend, someone he knew through business, and that he suspected she was a lesbian.
It was things like that which kept Laura off balance. Was Susan really a lesbian? Would that matter? Maybe she was a bisexual; some men found that a turn-on. People in Hollywood were so depraved. But it didn’t matter now. This was the first time Laura had given a big party, the first time she had gone anywhere all by herself, and she was enjoying it. She even had her old ballet classes to go to. And when Clay returned for the party they would be in his apartment together. She knew he would sleep in his own room and not with her, but no one else would know. He would not be here with another woman, he would be with his wife, and everyone would be damn sure to see it.
Clay flew back the day of his birthday party. He took a tranquilizer on the plane to make him be able to walk into the apartment. A part of him wanted to strangle Laura for being such a master of bad timing. She had no idea yet what he had been doing the last two months, or in New York, but by now it was on the grapevine, and next week it would be in the trades. It was common knowledge that both of his two on-air pilots had flopped. They were too good; he was too good. But who would understand that? All they would hear, or perhaps had already heard, was that his deal with RBS was over. He was out.
He had been meeting with independent TV production companies. There was resistance. He told himself, and Susan, that people were afraid to have someone as prestigious and experienced as he was come in and compete with them; someone who would quickly rise to replace them. He had to find a company in need, or one that was stagnating, whom he could convince he was the man to save them. He blamed his few past bits of bad luck on the “chaos” at RBS, and said he didn’t want to stay with a dying mastodon; he wanted a company that was smaller, more exciting.
Now he was finally about to close a deal for his new position, and as soon as the papers were signed he would take out a big announcement in the trades.
The press release would say that he had joined Sun West, an independent TV production company. It would not say how small Sun West was. Nor would it say that Clay Bowen had accepted—had traded—a much smaller salary for a generous expense account that would enable him to keep up appearances.
Appearances were everything. You had to tough it out. No matter how well he handled this, some people were bound to say he had lost his job at RBS because he had lost his touch, and sometimes, on a sleepless night, he worried that he had. He was only forty-nine, no longer the golden boy, but not old. His problem was that he had been spoiled by such an early success.
Laura was out having her hair done for the party. He wondered whether he should tell her before the party or wait until afterward, taking the chance that no one would mention his change of employment. Laura was so unpredictable, so emotional, he didn’t know what she would do. He decided to wait.
He called Susan in New York. “How’s the monkey?”
“Okay. How are you?” She knew about his new plans. He had told her Sun West would give him more freedom to do what he wanted, and when he complained about making less money she had said that it seemed like a great deal. What did she know?
“I’m dreading tonight,” Clay said.
“I’ll be thinking of you.”
“The monkey will be with me,” he said in the voice he reserved only for her. It was the way a man spoke to his beloved child. “In my pocket, next to my heart. The monkey always goes with me.”
“The monkey will put its paw out of your pocket and grab the best hors d’oeuvres and eat them up,” she said, in the little girl voice she used for their banter. “And I’ll leave crumbs in your pocket.”
“And monkey shit.”
“Yeah.”
He chuckled, with love. “Oh, you’re a tough monkey.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re the only person who can make me laugh. I love you.”
“I love you,” Susan said.
“I’ll call you tomorrow from the office.”
“Okay …”
“Good night, sweetheart.”
“Good night …”
They both waited, reluctant to be the first to hang up. The air sang along the wires joining them together so fragilely. He could hear her breathing. He knew she would never hang up first, so finally, reluctantly, he did. At moments like this, surrounded by burdens and fears, tired and angry, he felt she was the only good thing in his life.
Before he walked into the party with Laura, Clay took another tranquilizer. The last thing he needed was to have an anxiety attack here. The room was beautifully decorated; she had done a good job. But in that warm and tasteful room, smiling to greet him, were most of the people he had known through the years, who knew him as the powermaker, and now were gathered to see if he would even survive. He smiled at them, shook hands, turned on all his charisma. There was Henri Goujon, with that dippy actress friend of Susan’s … what was her name? Dana. She looked as if she couldn’t decide whether to keep mauling Goujon or look for the nearest pay phone to make her report on The Wife.
“So I hear you’re moving on,” Goujon said.
“Yes, yes,” Clay said jovially. “To a new and better place.” That was what you said when someone died. “You and I will do something together. I have some ideas.”
“So do I,” Goujon said. “We’ll have lunch.”
At least he had one supporter. Clay began to feel better. It was his birthday party, they wouldn’t have come if they didn’t think he was still important. He made sure to spend some time with each one of them. He still knew how to work the crowd. “Exciting … new … surprise developments … opportunity …” He looked like a man who had never been happier. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Laura, like a whirling dervish. He hoped she would stay away from the bar.
She came over then and linked her arm in his like a possessive wife. He felt as if her eighty-seven pounds were a burden made of rock. “Let me do some business,” he whispered in her ear, pretending to be affectionate, and moved away.
By the time they were ready to sit down to dinner Clay was feeling almost normal. He believed everything he had told the others, as he believed everything he said.
Susan sometimes thought she was two people. There was the one who was the strong, independent woman with a career, who needed her time alone, whose creative work was of such importance she could not imagine life without it. This woman had to travel, to research, to interview, and, most difficult of all, to painstakingly write the best piece she could, which not only would be accepted by the magazine but would draw praise and attention. Although she spent as much time as possible in California, she had to continue to live in New York because that was where her work was, and where the energy was for what she did.
The other woman was Clay’s little monkey. They had been together almost ten years, and in that time he had become her life. If he called to say he was going out to dinner and would call her again when he got home, she couldn’t sleep until he did, worried that something had happened to him. In a private scrapbook she kept her snapshots of him, and all the loving notes he had written to her with his many presents, and she read and reread them for solace when he was away. She went into the closet and inhaled his bathrobe, imagining him. She was always afraid he would die.
She had asked him once, earlier in their relationship, what she should do if he died in the middle of the night, in their bed, and he had said quite calmly: “Walk away and pretend you don’t know me.” She had been stunned by the unexpected heartlessness of his remark. It was a side of him she had never seen before.
It made her too aware that no matter what he said about their “marriage” she was still an outsider; the lover of a man who was married to someone else; and as an outsider she was someone who had only existed along with their love and then was meant to vanish for appearances’ sake, not even allowed respect from the world for her mourning. Perhaps, she had thought, he found the subject too painful to discuss and was trying to avoid it. But no: his wife, no matter how unbearable he considered her, was still his wife, officially joined to him. He would never sleep with Laura, he would never die in Laura’s bed, but she wouldn’t have to walk away either.
Susan thought about this during the party Laura was giving for Clay. If Laura wanted to prove publicly that she was still his wife and therefore the immutable victor, that was pretty ironic. Parties and burials aside, what did she have? Laura was a woman unwanted and obsessed. She hardly ever saw him. How could she hang on this long when everyone knew their-marriage was a farce? Even she had to notice.
But there was the child. In college now, Nina wouldn’t be a child much longer. She would have her own life, and it wouldn’t matter if Clay got divorced. There would be no more obligation to pretend, no more excuse to stay. Maybe Clay will marry me, Susan thought. Maybe things are different now. I’ll bring it up when I see him again.…
At midnight the phone rang. It was a collect call from Dana. “You’ll never guess where I am.” Her unexpected voice cheered Susan up immeasurably.
“Where?”
“At Clay’s birthday party.”
“No! What are you doing there?”
“I’m with Henri Goujon.”
“You’re dating that male chauvinist French asshole?”
“I like him,” Dana said.
“I imagine then he speaks to you,” Susan said. “He knew me nine years before he would address a word to me. He would only talk to Clay. And then one night he walked into a restaurant to meet us and he kissed me on the cheek hello and I thought, well, I guess I’ve finally made it.”
“That must be because I’ve made him a nicer person,” Dana said. “I think I’m going to marry him if he asks me.”
“Marry Henri Goujon?” Susan shrieked. “But he’s so old, and he’s been married three times.”
“Chacun à son goût,” Dana said calmly. “Now, do you want to hear about Clay’s wife or what?”
“Yes!”
“Well, she looks as if she has about twenty-two minutes to live. She could be on disease of the week without TV makeup. She’s totally anorexic, totally on something unhealthy, and she twitches all the time. Clay keeps running around the room avoiding her. She just keeps running around the room.”
“Same insufferable jerks.”
“I hope they miss me,” Susan said.
“The men are with their wives and the women are with their husbands, and I’m sure they’re all too busy missing their lovers to give it a thought.”
“And you want to get married.”
“Goujon is very attractive, quite bright, and extremely devoted to me,” Dana said. “The first few years should be nice.”
“My sentimental friend,” Susan said, laughing. “You haven’t changed.”
“Why would I change? I have to go back now. He’ll think I have a bladder infection. Sleep well, you have nothing to fear.”
Dana hung up and Susan smiled. She felt much better, ready to go to bed. Tomorrow morning she would go back to the article she’d been working on, with renewed fascination.
She was doing it for New York magazine, and they were considering it for a cover story, which would be her first. The piece itself concerned a case that was being called The Romeo and Juliet Murder, because at the end only one of the two young lovers had died. Two privileged New York teenagers, Meredith Perry and Charles Sheridan, intelligent and attractive Ivy League college students, made a suicide pact. She died, he didn’t. They took poison together—actually a bottle full of barbiturates—but after taking them he panicked at the last moment and managed to save himself. He was “too sick” to save her too, although there was a question about that. But there was something else that made the case of particular interest.
Meredith had always been depressed, from her earliest childhood. Charles, on the other hand, was apparently happy and normal. She was beautiful, fragile, moody, strange. He was a star athlete, an excellent student, fond of parties and practical jokes, popular, sexy, pursued.
She had been obsessed with suicide, idolizing Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, memorizing the parts of their work that dealt with her fixation, writing prophetic poetry of her own, discussing death with her friends with the pleasure other girls her age discussed boys and clothes. Meredith and Charles, these two very opposite people, were in love.
As their intense relationship grew, so did her influence over him. The body of material available in interviews with their friends and families, and the psychiatrist Meredith had been going to for years, showed that her obsession with suicide began to be matched by Charles’s obsession with her. She had managed to talk him into their suicide pact, and both of them had obtained the pills. Perhaps he didn’t really want to die, but she certainly did.
She died, he didn’t. Was it murder by default, or just an accident?
In the end, the investigation exonerated him of a possible negligent homicide charge because he was “the instrument of her will.”
The instrument of her will …
The entire concept of this case held Susan. She was fascinated by the nature of love and obsession; that of the young couple, of Laura’s strange relationship with Clay, perhaps even of her own with him. She would never give up her life for him, would she? Giving up the possibility of other men, putting up with the painful loneliness when he was inaccessible, was not anything like a suicide pact. Yet, she could understand single-minded need: she had it when she was waiting for Clay’s daily early morning phone call, unable to work, to leave the apartment, until the moment she finally heard his voice, and then such a wave of relief swept over her that she hardly listened to what he was saying. All she was aware of was their link, her safety.
It was this great emotional love that had kept the two of them together so long. Her friends, who had at first considered their affair a brief lark or a reckless folly, now envied the romance of their long attachment. Just before she went to bed Susan took out her scrapbook.
“Dearest Susan: Here we are all these Christmases later, and with each one I love you more and you mean more to my life than the one before. Thank you for just being you. Merry Christmas and the best year of all! With all my love xxx Clay.”
“Susan Dearest—Happy birthday! With all my love and thanks because you have made the last ten years the happiest of my life … I love you. Clay.”
He always seemed to think they had spent a year longer together than she did, and sometimes they argued about it good-naturedly. She counted on her fingers and got confused. If they were in their tenth year, then … She wanted it to be by his counting; as long as possible. The duration of their love never ceased to awe her, she who had thought she would be doomed to live her life forever alone.
“Dearest Susan: I love you now more than ever. You are the best and my precious monkey. I wish you more than you can ever have because you deserve it. With all my thanks and all my love—always. Clay.”
There were many more cards, all so romantic and loving, full of thanks for his happiness. But it was she, she felt, who should thank him, for saving her from what her life might have been without him. She looked at the snapshots; Clay clowning in his bathrobe in a foreign hotel room, she smiling and squinting into the California sun in front of their apartment, the two of them glowing at each other at a party: obviously a couple. And then the idea came to her about the article she was writing, and she was surprised she hadn’t thought of it before.
The Romeo and Juliet Murder was a perfect television movie: timely, true, suspenseful, simple yet about complicated issues of love, domination, and madness. Clay was looking for material now that he was going to Sun West. She would give him an option on the article without letting her agent talk to anyone else. The story had already been in the newspapers and on the TV news, but having the rights to her published magazine article would give him the edge over anyone else who wanted it. She could even help him. The people she had talked to had all signed releases. She always made them do that when they weren’t celebrities, who were fair game without a release. Clay would be all set.
And he was the best. No matter how bad his luck had been recently, this one couldn’t fail. She would write the script. They would work together, at last, sharing their lives in the area where previously they hadn’t been able to, a creative partnership. She fantasized them as a successful husband-and-wife team, being interviewed on television about their habits. In her mind she saw the TV screen and the two of them sitting there, belonging together.
It reminded her of when she was little and had fantasized about someone interviewing her for a newspaper article, actually asking her opinion when no one in her family ever did or would even listen when she tried to give it.
Once, when she was in high school, the New York Post had asked to interview her after she had won an interscholastic writing contest. They wanted to present her as a sort of prodigy. Her mother had refused. “I want my daughter to have a normal life,” she said, as if being singled out for any kind of momentary fame would ruin her chances forever.
What would her mother think now of her normal life? Susan patted Clay’s picture and put the scrapbook away. There were framed photos of him all over the apartment. Sometimes Susan talked to them. “Good night,” she said to the one next to her bed, and went to sleep, dreaming of The Romeo and Juliet Murder.
He came back to New York for Christmas week, to be with Nina and Laura and pretend to his own version of a normal life, which Susan realized that by now meant to act grumpy, ignore them by hiding in his room, and buy them expensive presents; less expensive this year because he was economizing (he made sure they knew it) and because he was still annoyed at the expense of the birthday party. He sneaked off to see her, and took her to lunch as “business.” But now it was business. She told him the details of the story he knew she was doing, and told him it should be his first project for Sun West.
“I’ll try,” he said. She had never heard him sound so mild.
“It’s a natural,” Susan said. As she talked to him excitedly she saw the light come back into his eyes. Soon he was smiling and nodding, mentioning screenwriters he knew, directors he had worked with. He was enthusiastic about her writing the script, and she told him she would begin as soon as she finished the article and whatever revisions the editors wanted.
“If I get this into production I’ll put you on the picture with me,” he said.
“Can I be there the whole time? I want to learn, and I also want to be sure that nobody changes the lines. If they can’t say the lines, I’ll change them.”
“Sure.” He chuckled. “The more work you do the better it is for me.” He held her hand under the table and ordered champagne. “For our Christmas lunch,” Clay said.
“Is this it?” She felt a stab of pain. “It’s so soon …”
“Pre-Christmas lunch,” he said. He held up his glass. “I love you. To our future together.” They clinked glasses and drank. “Ah,” he sighed, “I wish I had married you years ago. We would have had such a productive life together.”
“You can marry me now,” Susan said.
“But we are married.”
“No. I mean really marry me. Nina’s almost grown. She’ll understand.”
He looked pained. “Do you know what it would cost me to get a divorce? I’d have to give Laura half of everything I made, plus support her and Nina and that expensive apartment in The Dakota, and Nina’s college … all from my half. I’d be broke. I’m not making nearly enough to handle that.”
“I don’t understand,” Susan said. It seemed so illogical and unfair. “If you gave her half why would you have to pay all the other bills too? Why only you and not Laura too?”
“You don’t understand,” Clay said. “Don’t you think I’d be relieved if she’d go live in East Hampton and not bother me? I wish she would.”
“You love that apartment in The Dakota,” she said gently. “It means a lot to you.”
“My first success,” Clay said. “I’d have to sell it.” His tone said lose it. Susan’s heart went out to him, the young man she had never known, with all his optimistic dreams.
“It’s a symbol. I do understand.”
“I don’t care about a symbol for me,” he said. “I love that apartment but I’m beginning to hate it too. I need it as a symbol for the world. Look—” For the first time he sounded testy. “I hardly have a job. Let me get on my feet. I’d be strapped if I tried to divorce Laura now. I’d have nothing.”
Susan sighed. She couldn’t contest his logic. But, it hurt.
He smiled then and squeezed her hand. “You’re my life,” he said. “You’re my precious magical monkey. We’re together. We’re going to make movies together and make love together and be together for the rest of our lives. Come on, have a glass of champagne and be happy. It’s Christmas!”
Their “Christmas celebration” the next night was drinks at the Russian Tea Room, a properly decorated and festive place; iced vodka with smoked salmon and caviar; early, because he had to go home for dinner with Nina and to watch her trimming the tree. “I just put on one ornament and escape to my bed as quickly as possible,” Clay said. “Don’t be lonely and don’t be sad. If you’re sad it makes me sad.”
“I won’t be,” Susan lied.
First he had come to her apartment where they exchanged presents. She had bought him cuff links yet again because they were the only jewelry either of them approved of for a man to wear aside from a watch. He gave her a beautiful necklace of delicate gold petals. It was obviously expensive and she felt guilty.
He had written another beautiful card for her. His cards always made her feel inadequate about hers, even though she was the writer. She stood it on her dresser, where it would stay throughout the holidays and then be put into her scrapbook along with the others.
At the restaurant they were loving but subdued. This wasn’t the way it should be, but it was part of the bargain, part of the tradeoff when you gave your heart to a married man. Soon they would be together again in California, and they would be working on The Romeo and Juliet Murder movie, she knew it.
“I love you,” he said.
“I love you.”
When it was time to go he dropped her off first in the cab. Susan saw the familiar lights of her apartment building coming toward her, and looked at them with a kind of dread. No matter how unhappy he was spending the night with his family, he was going to be with them. He was hers, she had lived with him, and did, and would, but there were times like this when she felt abandoned.
His lips when he kissed her good night were gentle and cool. Her doorman was still holding the cab door open, but she nodded no, Clay would be going on. A cab behind them was honking impatiently.
“Merry Christmas, monkey,” Clay said lightly, preparing himself for the ordeal to come at home.
“Merry Christmas, monkey catcher.”
They kissed again, briefly, and the cab with him in it drove away. Susan went upstairs, pulled the silver foil off her large chocolate Santa and bit his head off. Then she sucked and ate the rest until she was both comforted and sick, staring out the windows at the lights on the Christmas trees in other people’s apartments.
This was the way it was.