An American Love Story by Rona Jaffe

Author:Rona Jaffe [Jaffe, Rona]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8041-5401-7
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2014-11-25T16:00:00+00:00

20

1983—NEW YORK

The walls of The Dakota were very thick and very old. It was Laura’s fortress, one in which she now lived alone. Nina had her own apartment. Clay, well … Clay was still Clay, the reluctant visitor; the only difference was that he never pretended to be charming anymore. Nina had become a reluctant visitor too, pleading work; her father’s daughter after all. Laura was only fifty-two, but seemed ancient, ageless. Her health was deteriorating from years of starvation and substance abuse: naked she looked like a Shar-Pei. She covered her wrinkled body with lovely floating clothes, her pale gray face with makeup. And on this particular evening, the household help gone home, the doors locked and bolted, Laura was sewing pills into her shower curtain.

So no one could get at them and take them away from her.

More than ever the pills were all she had, but everyone who had loved her was against her now, trying to beg or frighten her into giving them up. Crazy Tanya Tattletale, even kind Edward; Nina Buttinski, who thought an appearance for dinner was a cue for a lecture and tears. No one could be trusted. The help—who knew if they had been bribed? Laura had two different doctors now, four different pharmacies, and a cache of security that nestled in the hem of her shower curtain and the pockets she had made along the sides. Of course no one used that shower, and the plastic liner was firmly attached, with an extra loose one within. No one would ever look in a shower curtain. She herself took tepid baths, as steam was bad for pills.

She had, of course, her trusty vial in the medicine cabinet above the sink, and a spare one in her handbag. The others were a backup. She felt as if she were always in a state of siege.

The weather was fresh again, early spring. In the park outside Laura’s window tiny green buds had appeared on the trees almost overnight, and people walked more slowly and lingered where before they had hidden from the cold. Strange people were there too, sometimes, dressed in layers of filthy rags, talking to themselves or to listeners who weren’t there. At night they slept on benches now, surrounded by tattered plastic bags filled with “treasures” they had found in the trash cans. Laura wondered who they had been before.

She wondered who she had been before. She had her scrap-books from the years when thousands of people had stood up and applauded her, the nights of the red roses, and when Nina came to dinner Laura brought them out and made her look.

“Do you see anyone you know?” Laura would ask.

Nina would look away.

“Do you think Susan Josephs is still your father’s mistress?”

“I have to go now.”

“Not yet. It’s early.”

“I have to read a manuscript for tomorrow morning.”

“They make you work too hard.”

“I like it.”

“I used to work hard when I was your age,” Laura would say. “I don’t even remember if I liked it.

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