An American Love Story by Rona Jaffe Read Free Book Online

stopped. The tiny dance floor cleared. “And now,” a disembodied amplified voice said, “the number one hit from America.” Everyone sat in reverent silence, not even thinking of dancing, as Bobbie Gentry’s voice poured through the speakers singing “Ode to Billy Joe.” Why was the number one hit from America so important, Susan wondered, when she was here to find out what everyone in America wanted to copy about Swinging London?
    She had been away long enough never to have heard that song before. This boy killed himself. And before that he and the girl threw something off the bridge. What did they throw? Nobody knew, even afterward when she asked everyone, everywhere, nobody knew. Was it flowers? Drugs? No, you wouldn’t throw drugs away. A dead baby? Their aborted baby? Things weren’t so swinging back home in those little towns. You couldn’t just have a baby with your boyfriend, even now. The question and the image haunted Susan for a long time afterward.
    Back home again she continued to pursue the life she had planned for herself, always trying to be a better writer, often working at her typewriter in the middle of the night when it was very dark and still so she could get closer to her feelings and use them honestly. Two years went by. She knew that in many ways she was lucky. She was in her twenties and self-supporting and free and busy and on her way; she had friends and acquaintances, people to laugh with and complain to, her own queen-size bed, an air conditioner, a stereo, a wall full of filing cabinets, grown-up dishes and stainless flatware that she had paid for herself, a case of nice red wine under the sink; she was pretty and lively and well regarded; she even knew when she walked into a party that if there was a man there she wanted she could almost always get him, at least for a week or so—and there was a hole of loneliness in the middle of her heart and the middle of her life that never went away.
    Sometimes the pain was very quiet, waiting, so that she thoughtit was gone, but then it came bouncing back to overwhelm her and repay her for having felt safe. It was her dreaded destiny, the punishment.
    She was so lonely.… And loneliness was one thing people didn’t want to hear about. If you complained of that, too much or too long or too seriously, you would end up really alone.
    Dana was being pursued by a successful (and married and middle-aged) actors’ agent named Seltzer. He was very debonair, dressed well, was a foot shorter than she was, and had a German accent. Dana persisted in referring to him as The Nazi, even though he was Jewish, which was probably a comment on her opinion of his profession. Her boyfriend with the good job didn’t seem to mind this friendship; she went out at night without him whenever she pleased, and was not obliged to tell him what she did.
    “I had dinner with The Nazi again last night,” Dana said in her daily phone call to Susan. “He wants to go to bed with me. I’d rather kill myself. But he is also considering being my agent. I’d like that. You know what a bitch my agent is; I can’t even get her on the phone, and then when I ask her to send me to an audition I should have gone on in one second she doesn’t seem to remember who I am. I want to ask: How’s your lobotomy? So anyhow, The Nazi wants me to go out of town with him to this club in New Haven to see Gabe Gideon, who’s a client of his. We’re to stay overnight, so I want you to come along to protect me.”
    “You don’t have to stay overnight,” Susan said reasonably.
    “He says we do, because we have to wait to see the second show too. That’s the one where Gabe Gideon gets really filthy.”
    Susan knew who Gabe Gideon was—who didn’t? He was more than a nightclub comic, he was a cult figure; beloved and hated, banned in Boston, considered both a foul-mouthed destroyer of morality and values and a perceptive protector who warned that the emperor had no clothes.
    “I’d