Free An American Love Story by Rona Jaffe Page A

long string.”
    “No, nobody wants to sleep in my bed,” Laura said, trying to make a joke out of it.
    Tanya had been taking a course in past lives, and discoveredthat in one of hers she had been an Egyptian princess. The fact that everyone in that particular session had discovered they had once lived in Ancient Egypt delighted her. It never caused her to wonder. She had had many incarnations, as had they, and their collective memory had brought this one back. In another trance, or whatever she called it—vision?—Tanya discovered she had once been a Yugoslavian peasant and Nina had been her little sister.
    “That’s why I feel so close to her,” Tanya said.
    “You feel close to her because she’s your goddaughter, I hope,” Laura said. “If anything happens to me or to Clay …”
    “Nothing’s going to happen to you,” Tanya said cheerfully. “You have the longest lifeline, look!” She took Laura’s hand and traced the line. “You’ll live forever.”
    “And Clay?” Laura didn’t really believe in this stuff, but it was good to know you had all the right aspects on your side.
    “Oh, Clay’s too mean to die,” Tanya said.
    “Is that true?”
    “Of course it’s true.”
    Laura had been thinking about death often lately because her mother had died of an unexpected stroke. Clay had flown in for only one day—for the funeral—and it had hurt her, even though she had been so overwhelmed with the funeral, with relatives and old friends of her mother’s who had appeared from the woodwork, and having to be her mother’s executor, that she felt she wouldn’t have had the proper time for him. But yes, it had hurt like hell. He should have been there, not just standing beside her at the service for appearances, but afterward, and he should have been with Nina to help explain to her that absence because of business was not the same as death.
    Nina knew what Sweeps Week was, she knew all about Pilot Season, but she didn’t know what it was to have a father who took her for a walk. Besides, Clay didn’t take a walk. He drove his white Thunderbird convertible. He lived in a culture three thousand miles away.
    Laura had inherited the house in East Hampton, and threw herself into fixing it up with the same energy she had spent decoratingtheir apartment in New York. The old furniture her mother had loved had become antiques of a sort, but the house was dark and gloomy, too full of things that had been kept not for sentiment or value but from stinginess. Laura weeded out the mistakes, painted the whole place white, mirrored some walls, and it was hers.
    She had a fondness for mirrored walls; she liked to dance in front of them. When Nina saw her doing it she left the room, and when Laura tried to get Nina to dance with her, because after all, she knew the steps from ballet class, Nina said she had homework. So Laura danced alone.
    Now Laura and Nina spent the summers in East Hampton, in her new house, and Clay came to visit once a month, reading scripts in the sun or talking nonstop on the phone. The three of them would go to a restaurant for dinner, and Nina would talk to him very seriously about what wonderful things her teachers had said about her work, about what project she was doing over the summer to learn and keep busy. It was as if Nina were trying to bribe Clay to think she was of value, to notice her, to love her, and it broke Laura’s heart. Nina would go on, in her sweet, precise little voice, and Clay would beam at her. He did love her, he did. How could he not love her with that adoring look on his face? He would nod approvingly at Laura.
    “You’ve done a good job,” he’d say.
    Say to Laura? To Nina? In his mind they were one: his. But Nina was the good one. Laura was the bad one, who burst into tears unexpectedly and had to take a tranquilizer, who couldn’t eat, who smoked too many cigarettes, who couldn’t stay still or look serene anymore, who sometimes acted paranoid or nagged