An American Love Story by Rona Jaffe Read Free Book Online Page B

Seltzer didn’t get angry, as he was obviously used to it. And when Gideon excused himself in the middle of his monologue and walked off the stage again Seltzer just shook his head. The fans waited calmly for his return, obviously used to it too.
    “Is this a schtick or is it real?” Susan asked.
    “You never know,” Seltzer said.
    They had the birthday party in the hotel bar, where a votive candle in a bowl of pretzels served as the birthday cake. The hotel did not have twenty-four-hour room service and the kitchen was closed. The bar did, however, have several bottles of champagne, which the four of them drank happily, making toasts. Gabe, as Susan was now calling him, smiled with innocent pleasure. “It’s so nice of you to have a birthday party for me,” he said. “I hate to be all alone, and I almost always am.”
    “Everybody’s alone,” Dana said. “It stinks.”
    “You have me,” Seltzer said. “You’re not alone.”
    Dana raised an eyebrow. “I’m alone.”
    After a while Seltzer and Dana got up and went upstairs.
    Gabe turned to Susan. “Do you want to see something I care about very much?”
    She nodded. He reached into his jeans pocket and took out a well-worn-looking envelope, and from it a photograph of a pretty, towheaded little girl. “My daughter. She’s almost four. She lives with her mother … my wife … well, ex-wife soon. My wife is twenty. She wants her own life, and I can’t blame her. We got married because she was pregnant and we were in love. It wasn’t dumb then, but it seems dumb now. I miss my daughter a lot.”
    “I’m sorry,” Susan said.
    “A lot of people don’t understand what I’m trying to do with my work, and it makes me feel badly because of my daughter and what she’ll grow up thinking of me after I’m gone.”
    “Why would you be gone? You’re thirty something.”
    “I don’t think I’m going to live long,” he said.
    “Why not?”
    He shrugged. “I just know it.”
    Susan looked at him, long and hard. He wasn’t faking. Behind the comedy and the outrageousness there was so much sadness in him. Loneliness. She could certainly identify with that. “Could I interview you?” she asked.
    He chewed his lip. “I guess so. My gig is over the end of the week and I’ll be back in New York for a while.”
    “Maybe for Esquire ,” Susan said. “Or that new magazine, New York. I want to hang around with you for a while, is that okay?”
    “Sure,” he said mildly.
    She smiled. “I think I’ll call it ‘Gabe Gideon: Laughter on the Dark Side of the Moon.’ They’ll change it of course.”
    “I hope they don’t,” he said.
    When a man started vacuuming the bar carpet they finally left and went to their separate rooms. Dana wasn’t in the room she was supposed to share with Susan in order to be protected from the lech. Susan wasn’t a bit surprised.

    A week later Susan was in her apartment when Gabe Gideon called. “Can I come over and visit you?”
    “Sure.”
    He arrived in his black jacket and jeans, but this time he was wearing a white clerical collar, not a Nehru collar. He wandered slowly around her apartment looking at things, touching them curiously as if they were unusual.
    “Why are you wearing that collar?” Susan asked.
    “I like it.”
    She had a glass paperweight on her desk holding down papers; it had tiny colored flowers in it. He picked it up and looked at it, then he looked through it, and then he walked to the window and looked through the flowered paperweight at the trees outside, as if it were a telescope. He seemed like a man underwater, or in another space altogether from where she was. “Man!” he said softly. “This is beautiful. Look at it.” He handed her the paperweight.
    She looked through it at the trees. The view was beautiful; a bit like looking into a kaleidoscope. She thought Gabe was a little like a child, and she wondered if he was a genius or stoned, or perhaps both. She put the paperweight