Free An American Love Story by Rona Jaffe Page B

him.
    “The drugs are talking,” he’d say to her in almost a snarl. This would be when they were alone.
    “No, they’re not.” Her eyes would fill with tears and she would tremble.
    “Look how you’re shaking.”
    “I’m upset, you upset me when you use that voice.”
    “You’re a drug addict.”
    “I am not!”
    “Diet pills. I see the stars get hooked. You think you’re the only one? Why can’t you act normal? You have responsibilities … a child …”
    “So do you! You have a daughter and you have me. Why can’t we be together?”
    “What can I do with a junkie?” Clay would now say in these fights.
    “Don’t you call me a junkie, you bastard! Any excuse not to be with me, any excuse!”
    “I’ll talk to you when you get detoxed.”
    Laura would clench her fists, hold her arms to her sides, trying not to hit him or fly into a million pieces. “You always say what a good job I’ve done with Nina. If I’m a junkie how could I have done such a good job?”
    “Flying on automatic pilot,” he’d say.
    “Then I’m a good person. I am! Flying on automatic pilot means I don’t even have to try to be good.”
    “Women who take drugs disgust me,” Clay would say, and go to bed. He would no longer let her touch him to make up, and Laura wondered if uppers and downers seeped out of one’s pores like a noxious odor. Maybe she smelted dreadful and didn’t know it, maybe she looked repulsive and couldn’t see it, maybe she was cursed. The thought only made her take more.
    When Clay had left again for California, Laura would be both depressed and somewhat relieved. No more fights, no more trying to please him. He didn’t belong in her safe little world. And then the next day he would call her and be adorable, as if none of it had happened.
    “I thought you hated me,” Laura would say.
    “I love you. Are you crazy?”
    “But you screamed at me.”
    “I feel so pressured when I’m away from the studio.”
    “I wish you didn’t have to feel that way,” Laura would say.
    “But that’s the way I am. You knew that when you married me.”
    By now Laura felt as if they could just have mailed in their fights.
    The good thing about summers in East Hampton was thatTanya and Edward came every weekend when Clay wasn’t there. They had the same guest room all summer as if it were their own, and kept some things in it. Edward had several clients in the Hamptons and he got Laura invited to parties with him and Tanya. Mrs. Bewley was still with Laura—Nina’s Boo—and could baby-sit. She was a case of a middle-aged woman who had devoted her life to other people’s families, to such an extent that she was deaf to fights, impervious to tension, immune to the boredom of having no friends of her own at the beach. Laura wondered how Boo could stand it. But she seemed totally self-sufficient when not needed to be available, and she had color TV.
    Dear, kind Edward, Laura thought; truly a man of grace. Tanya was so lucky. She herself thought of Edward as no one she would ever be tempted to want to go to bed with, even though he had the kind of classic good looks that made women turn to look at him, but she loved him as her other best friend, after Tanya. Perhaps the same as Tanya. They were the two halves of one coin. Tanya was pretty and chirpy and rounded. She put her head on Edward’s shoulder with the trust of a beloved child, with a look of such perfect peace it made Laura’s throat close with held-back tears. And when Edward saw the longing look on Laura’s face at this tableau, he would reach out and scoop her up with his other arm and hold her to him too.
    “My family,” he would say.
    “Edward has two wives,” Tanya would sometimes say, laughing because she didn’t really believe it. “Would you like two wives, sweetheart? It would be terribly outrageous, doing it all by ourselves in New York instead of moving to a commune. I think every man needs two wives anyway, then he wouldn’t