Free An American Love Story by Rona Jaffe

unenthusiastically.
    “Get it?” Simon said. “We’ll all be talking to each other, I’ll be saying things to everyone, I’ll be the social arbiter so to speak, and so it’s Simon Says, but that’s a game, and anyhow it’s too pompous, so I call it Simon Sez. S.E.Z. A little humor, a little lightness. Do you like it?”
    Poor Simon, she thought, her annoyance turned to tenderness in the face of his wistful need to have people to talk to … to have friends. “I love it,” Bambi said.
    “I knew you would.”
    The next day Bambi handed in her new poem to English class for homework. Her teacher said it was doggerel and suggested she set her sights on marriage and motherhood. Bambi wondered which poison was the most undetectable and caused the most horrible death. She also thought about which color spotlight would be the most dramatic for her coffeehouse readings.
    Maybe she should let the slime bitch live.

5
    1967—NEW YORK
    T he seasons went by, then the years, and Laura refused to give up her dream or her fantasy. Her dream had been to have a happy married life and family, her fantasy was that she had one. Clay was still in Hollywood, still in his bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, now head of programming at RBS. He jokingly said that RBS stood for “Royal Bullshit,” but Laura knew it was his life.
    Her life was the long weekend every month when he came to New York to visit her and Nina, and his daily phone calls. She took Nina to visit him briefly in California on school holidays, but he was always working and paid so little attention to them that she wondered why she always looked forward so much to these oases in time when they were never what she kept hoping them to be. Clay was the most romantic, most elusive, most mercurial man in the world. He could also, she discovered, be the coldest. She devoured his profile when he was not looking, she embraced him without touching him, she acceptedwhat sparse tenderness he gave her and relived it over and over, wishing for more, grateful for what she had, afraid to lose it altogether. She was thirty-six. Other men could still find her attractive but she didn’t want them to. She wanted only Clay.
    The other part of her life, the one she lived between the moments of warmth and joy, was separate and secret from him. She was now thinner than she had been as a ballerina, stepping on her scale every morning with trepidation, relieved that she was always under ninety pounds. Eighty-seven was what she usually weighed now, and she worked at it. It made her feel beautiful. It was the Sixties—you could buy anything you wanted to be thin or high or energetic or to get to sleep. Laura had always been able to have the pills, mother’s little helpers, but now it was easier. She needed them to keep her appetite at bay, to cheer her up, and to enjoy, not endure, the four hours she spent every day at ballet class. An hour and a half, as she had once planned to be enough, was not enough anymore. The frantic energy from anxiety, her loneliness, her fear of losing control, and finally from the amphetamines themselves, made her dance as if she would die of it, like Moira Shearer in The Red Shoes.
    And then, there was Nina. What would she do without Nina? Laura wondered. Her beautiful child was perfect at everything. Nina was seven now, dark and delicate and graceful like her mother, with Clay’s magic smile. She was taking ballet classes, piano lessons, horseback riding, and a full course load at the best private school, with all A’s and rave reports from her teachers. At home she was soft and loving … most of the time. But sometimes, she too, like Clay, drew back, and Laura wondered why. Clay was secretive, but Nina seemed frightened. She cried easily and slept in a bed full of toy animals. Sometimes Laura offered to let Nina sleep in her bed with her, but after the first time Nina always refused.
    “A typical Gemini,” Tanya said. “You have to keep them on a very