An American Love Story Read Online Free PDF Page A

would be better to visit Clay for the first time when she looked her best, and that finishing the Dakota apartment was a labor of love for the two of them.
    When summer came Clay said it was too hot for Laura to come to California. He gave her the weather report every day on the phone: a hundred, not fit for a human being. He kept insisting he was a New Yorker and different from the people out there, and had bought a little white two-seater Thunderbird convertible because all the other executives were driving around in boring big Cadillacs. She pictured him under the palm trees with the top down and felt left out. “I can’t even take the top down,” he said, as if reading her thoughts. “It’s too hot; I have to use the air conditioning. Why don’t you and Nina go to visit your mother for a while in East Hampton?”
    Laura’s parents had bought a summer house years ago in the Hamptons, on the beach, and ever since her father died her mother had spent most of her time there. Laura had never gottenalong very well with her mother, who really enjoyed being alone with everything just the way she liked it, but she took Clay’s suggestion. However, she confined her visits to long weekends. It was much cooler at the beach, and there were babies for Nina to play with. But all the fathers came to see their families on the weekends, and she felt out of place, uprooted. She lived for Clay’s phone calls.
    He came to New York for Thanksgiving and for Christmas, insisting the holidays wouldn’t be the same unless they were in their home together. By now the baby nurse had been replaced by a proper nanny, a cheerful Irishwoman named Mrs. Bewley, whom Nina called Boo. Clay was even missing his daughter’s rapidly expanding vocabulary of new words; an absent workaholic. Laura’s thoughts screamed, but she calmed herself and waited. She had been trained by the great Rudofsky. Rudofsky’s girls were obedient dolls: disciplined, patient, submissive. Stand by your man, whoever he was. All good women did that, even if they’d only been trained by less frightening authority figures like their parents.
    And at last, in February, in time for Valentine’s Day, Clay arranged for his wife and child to come to California to visit him. He had been there for nearly a year.

    He picked them up at the Los Angeles airport, in the famous white Thunderbird convertible, with the top down. Mrs. Bewley followed in a taxi with Nina and their luggage. Clay was wearing a short-sleeved T-shirt with an alligator on the breast and he suddenly looked like a stranger because Laura had always seen him in a suit and tie. Her husband, a stranger … But he was so glad to see her, so protective and anxious for her to like everything, that she gaped like the tourist she was and felt so full of excitement and joy she thought she would cry. The haze over the mountains that he said was smog looked to her like the soft focus of a romantic movie. Although she had never liked L.A. much on tour, now she was sure she could get used to living here.
    They drove through Beverly Hills, past the luxurious homes of movie stars and executives, all the houses silent and deserted inthe afternoon sun. And then to “The Pink Palace,” the famous Beverly Hills Hotel, painted cotton candy pink; a crowd of women all dressed up coming out from lunch, waiting for the uniformed boys to bring their cars. Attendants took Laura’s bags and Clay’s car; and with Boo carrying Nina they followed Clay through the lobby to the back where the bungalows were. Everything was neatly landscaped, with tall palm trees and brightly colored primroses bordering winding paths.
    “From now on you can come in through the side,” Clay said, “and avoid the hotel mess. I usually park my car on the street so the attendants don’t bury it. So … here we are.”
    It was so small! A bungalow. But that’s what it was supposed to be. The outside was painted pink, like everything else. There was a