Miss America: A Novel

By Daniel Stern

A former pageant queen struggles with the realities of life off the runway in a novel “reminiscent of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and the Damned” (The State News, Lansing).
  After being crowned Miss America a decade ago, Cathy Forester has been in some glamorous settings—but she has little to show for it. She’s endured a string of failed loves, a divorce, and the death of her parents. Restless by temperament, Cathy thinks she may have found a new life with a younger man, Peter Shaw. Peter is the son of a famous musician and is still battling to come into his own. Smitten by Cathy’s beauty, he jumps at the chance to step out of his father’s shadow. Together, the pair finds solace from the outside world, but have their frailties really disappeared? Ringing with authentic intimacy, Miss America is a powerful study of disenchanted love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Sep 24, 2013
• ISBN: 9781480444409

Daniel Stern

Daniel Stern is director of operations at an entrepreneurial company, a screenwriter who placed in the top four in Project Greenlight, and was a Sundance Lab screenwriting finalist. He lives in Los Angeles.

Book preview

Prologue

THE MASK

Long has paled that sunny sky:

Echoes fade and memories die:

Autumn frosts have slain July

Still she haunts me, phantomwise,

Alice moving under skies

Never seen by waking eyes.

—THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

I WOULD AWAKEN SOMETIMES in the middle of the night and look at her as she lay sleeping at my side. Time and again, after she had made the decision to leave, I would find myself suddenly conscious, unaware of time and place, and, leaning an elbow on my pillow, I would observe her with a powerful sense of transience conquered; for as long as she slept and I could gaze at her pale face (eyes covered by the black sleep-mask that made her seem like a thief who had come into my life and, growing tired, had fallen asleep), as long as she was there, the restless moving to and fro was stilled.

I could believe, briefly, there at the center of the night, that all the mistakes I had made were tiny flaws of judgment to be laughed at on a sunny morning; could be certain that all her flights were only unchanneled energy and that she would not soon leave me for the fantasies of travel that I had allowed to become more real than my own presence, than my existence in the bed beside her, or walking in the chilly park, or everywhere in my own city, which she had made so unfamiliar for me.

There she was, my myth and my Miss: Miss America. Something within me would still struggle with the unreality of the idea. My mind’s eye could not encompass the image; the vision of Cathy ten years before, a brash young beauty with her hair piled on top of her head as had been the fashion then (I had seen photographs), wearing the ritual costume (a bathing suit), parading before some monstrous audience of nameless faces. Miss America. What insane magic was attached to such a title? What made people at parties, unaware that Cathy and I had arrived together, nudge me and whisper, "She was a Miss America," although a few feet away there might be a woman quite as beautiful.

And how fantastic to give to one young girl the name of a country of three thousand miles and one hundred and forty million people. Each year there was another crown and another supposed apotheosis of all the womanhood between two oceans. Even as a joke, as an essentially laughable idea, there was something of epic proportions about it.

And, lying on my side in the tiny bedroom of that small apartment, I would light a cigarette (carefully so as not to wake her), and, beclouding the bed in smoke, I would be intensely aware of the journey she had made from that autumn in Atlantic City ten years ago to this small apartment in Greenwich Village, sleeping the sleep of the traveler, with the black sleep-mask shielding her eyes against the anticipated intrusion of the morning sun.

Then my midnight calm would vanish and I would rake her body with my eyes in an agonized anger. Her sleep no longer protected her for me, no longer halted the process of time. It was another enemy now; something else between us, like the mask, which was a little frayed at the edges and behind which, for all I knew, she could be wide awake. But her breathing was quite regular; and I knew, as well, that she had taken a Seconal before getting into bed.

There on the little night table beside the bed were all her goodies: the almost-finished glass of Scotch; the pill box in which rested Seconal and French sleeping pills which lasted all night; Dexedrine, if she were to wake up too logy or depressed; an extra black sleep-mask; cigarettes; and a lighter on which was engraved Miss America.

I remember the gradual unfolding of the rhythmic mysteries of her goodies: before taking a sleeping pill, the counting off of the hours to be certain that there would be enough time to sleep it off; the hesitation in front of the liquor cabinet to decide if she really wanted another Scotch before dinner, or if one more would totally destroy her appetite, or make her sleepy, or give her a sinus headache. At first I had been fascinated as by some strange ritual. Then the array by the bedside and the daily evaluation of eating, drinking, sleeping rhythms that were peculiarly her own, grew familiar.

As I gazed at her, it was as if I saw her spinning off in space (whether I meant the sky or the space in which dreams take place, I had no idea). I knew that I had encountered her in mid-flight: from the beginning I’d sensed I was with a person who was involved in journeys, in voyages; that the black sleep-mask she wore at night (I never told her how the mask added to the dreamlike quality in which our first weeks together immersed me) told me that the same sun did not shine into our eyes in the morning; that at first, although she wore the mask, it was my masquerade.

I knew also that she, more than anyone else I had known, carried with her the orders under which she sailed, almost always kept up to date.

I had even, I reflected, seen and kept an actual copy of orders she had written to herself. We were shopping in a department store in mid-town in preparation for her trip to Europe. Pulling out her wallet with which to pay for a purchase, she let a crumpled piece of paper flutter to the floor. I picked it up and, glancing at it before handing it back to her, I saw it immediately for what it was: her own brand of traveling orders. It should have been written out in proper form, like this:

Memo: From Miss America to Miss America

Subject: The Conduct of Life

Actually, it was a very tattered remnant of a desk memo sheet and on it was scribbled in pencil, rather hard to decipher accurately:

Truth makes things easier

A darkness of the heart is sometimes inevitable

Not all good things are possible

Beauty without is within

Foolish pride is a hindrance

Order is necessary to freedom

Humor is in all things

Humility—ah—humility

It is wasteful not to be alive

People can love and still betray

Have fun anyway

Fear not, fair lady

I had then, on swiftly reading this collection of personal maxims, a sudden sense of her extraordinary honesty. When had I ever looked for guides of conduct? Who that I knew could, almost naïvely, scribble a list of virtues to be attained? I was sure that this was a list carried over from some former and longer list; a confession at one and the same time of failure and hope.

She looked embarrassed and smiled at me. When I asked if I might keep it she said yes, that she’d forgotten all about that little list. I put the paper in my pocket, making some joke or other about it, but knowing, as one does at certain times, that it would for a long time possess the power to haunt me. It was something I’d learned from her: how to distinguish between the various moments as they passed; not afterward, but to separate the moments before one’s history becomes an hour old; this was a kind of living I had never before been aware of.

It was, I imagine, this sense of the relative value of moments that demanded I wake up in the middle of the night and stare at her in my own quiet frenzy. There was no puerile attempt to deny the forward movement of time and its deprivations, but rather an awareness of the present moment, observing it pass and seeing as exactly as possible what it was that was being moved away from one and what was still left for one’s own. This she taught me, quite inadvertently.

And, watching the paleness of her body half concealed by the coverlet (so oddly harmonious with itself in a world of grossly unproportioned bodies), I saw what it was the moment had taken away from me. I saw that she had already left, that she was voyaging again asleep or awake. As on all voyages, she was on rations: a liquor ration, a Seconal ration, a sleep ration. And so, shut out while she consumed her sleep ration, I felt a ferocious desire to touch her in a secret place, but there are no secret places after the deep body-hysteria of love.

Now she was well locked away from me, and I turned instead to remembering how the most banal phrases became, beneath her magic or my own self-hypnosis of love, furious joys. Like the time when, after making love, we rested quietly and she told me, as if she were speaking of a gift she had bought me and hidden, that she felt her body was mine, literally, to do with as I pleased. It was probably the quietness of her voice that triumphed over whatever absurdity was inherent in such a statement. And so, consoled by this remembrance, I would fall asleep next to the masked stranger whose body touched mine.

In the morning, we would sometimes recount to each other our dreams. Mine were usually abstract, whereas in hers, people she had known would appear. Some time after she had gone, I dreamt, with unusual clarity, that I was waiting for Cathy in an enormous waiting room. I waited until she finally came flying down the stairs after saying good-bye to some friends whom I didn’t know. I noticed once again how beautiful she was, as if I had deliberately tried to forget it. At that moment she was very much Miss America again.

I picked up her bag and suggested going home; home being any point of rest after a journey. She said no, she was off somewhere. I took her hands in mine and she looked at me gaily. Cocking her head a little to one side in that way she had, she said to me, "And where are you going now?"

I knew she meant not in the immediate vicinity but was speaking in terms of voyages. And she spoke it with love and hope for me, but abstractedly, as from a great distance, quite removed from me and any journeys I might make. I woke up then.

And I have been trying to wake up ever since. Again and again the Miss America image returns (is it my retrospective weapon against her?) all through this drizzling, half-lighted autumn of her absence; rainy as she once told me that other autumn ten years ago was rainy. And I have tried to understand what it was that was born there, in that mythic ceremony by the sea—a ceremony which had so little and still so much to do with Cathy and her life. (Once she said to me, laughing wryly, They promised me it would all last ten months and it’s lasted ten years so far.)

And, rising on my elbow to my secretive task of watching, I knew that Miss America, the girl who was sent by whatever success or prestige-driven people to display herself in the fabulous market place (she herself had so few of those desires) was really Miss America. For Cathy was Pygmalion to her own Galatea. Constantly divesting herself of the past, hers was the American task of making contact with the multiplicity of life unaided by any rules or regulations laid down for her. Every city was the New World in which she played her Columbus.

And so, knowing at last that Miss America is truly Miss America, I have lost her. And, what is worse, I have been robbed by her (after all, she wore a black mask at night) of the old safeguards which she tried so hard to make me do without: dishonesty, cowardice, the unjourneying life, the crutch of a father so great and respected that nothing I did could stand the measuring rod.

But where is the malice I should feel? Where is the hatred of the robbed for the robber; of the destroyed for the destroyer? I have always known, unlike many of my complaining friends, when I am in love and when I am not. It is not as simple with hatred.

I know, for example, that I loved the paper-thin, delicate spring on which we sketched our casual line drawings of lovers at a Greenwich Village sidewalk café, of lovers buying the first pale lilacs of the year; but I am not as certain that I hate this damp and muggy autumn which I had never expected to spend alone.

BOOK ONE

Dreams

One

TRUTH MAKES THINGS EASIER

IN THE DAYS WHEN I was first discovering that one could be in love more than once in a lifetime, my father, then not as famous and not as poor as he was to be before his death eight years later, suggested that I read Romeo and Juliet. Although I enjoyed the play as extravagantly as I seem to have enjoyed everything during my adolescence, I could see in it no answer to my self-reproach of inconstancy.

Now, of course, I am certain what it was he expected me to notice and apply to myself. The very day on which Romeo fell in love with his star-crossed thirteen-year-old, he was in amorous despair over a lady named Rosalind. My father was in effect saying to me: Don’t worry over being insubstantial of heart. Surely if Romeo…

I was not exactly in despair over Jeanette, during those last months of winter, but I did love her. She, however, saw in me only, or at least mainly, the son of a man whose reputation as a composer was, following his death eleven months before, becoming legendary as quickly as the fashion my father despised would allow. She was interested, too, by the metamorphosis which I was undergoing.

I was twenty-four when my father died, and until two years before that, I had been as completely a musician as one can be. It was more than being a musician. Since my mother’s death just before the war, our life had overflowed more and more with music.

There were the Friday afternoon philharmonic concerts and the string quartets at our home three or four times a week and the Composer’s Society concert at the Modern Museum once a month; and during the day, our piano being attacked by this or that pianist for whom Dad was writing a new work.

It is a delicate balance, this living with music, so that at one moment a life is delightfully colored by the sounds and filled and activated by the rhythms, and the next moment it is all too much; a bursting of the ears and a saturation of the heart. Then with Dad’s prolonged illness it seemed as if musicians filled the house more than ever, and I grew tired of them so easily; tired of the self-concern and the self-pity which seemed to be their stock-in-trade. And I hated their assurances to my father that his work was too advanced for the philistine world about them: But some day… they would say.

And they were right. Within six months of my father’s death, there were two memorial concerts: one in Carnegie Hall and the other at the Museum. There were several recordings of his string quartets on the market, and a pianist gave a recital devoted entirely to his works. It was enthusiastically received in the press. What magic or alchemy death has I do not know. I only know that the effect it had on my father’s reputation was phenomenal and quite the expected thing.

It brought me, however, no immediate income and there had been no financial legacy. With the few hundred dollars left in the bank, I moved to a furnished room in the Village, having decided to turn down an offer to play in a symphony orchestra in the Midwest. I hardly touched the piano or the violin any more. It was as if I had been waiting for some event like my father’s death to free me from the artificial energy with which music had filled my life. I stopped listening to the radio and never played the phonograph. The friends with whom I’d played chamber music regularly for years stopped calling after a while, a little hurt but (they thought) understanding.

For a time I played the underground game and then, coming up for air, I began to accept invitations again. It wasn’t that I was so distraught at my father’s death. The long illness had somewhat prepared me for that. (Or so I thought at the time. Actually, it wasn’t until about six months later that I really experienced the impact of his death.)

Something seemed to demand of me this particular solitude at this particular time. Possibly it was the money that brought me out. I began to receive small royalty payments from the sale of the records of my father’s music. They didn’t amount to much; about fifty dollars a week, but enough for my modest expenses.

It doesn’t matter at whose home I met Jeanette. I no longer see the people who gave us dinner that night. What matters is that Jeanette was the hint of a new world of which Cathy was to be the full statement. I was instantly infatuated with her. She was a singer, but not of the sort I knew well. She sang in a small East Side supper club. The moment she told me this I looked at her slender form and rather round pretty face and said, Tell me; do you sing the Gershwin songs that nobody knows and the Rodgers and Hart songs that were dropped from their shows out of town?

She laughed. It was an infectious tinkle of a laugh. I cannot help comparing the way I liked her delicate laughter with the feeling I had for Cathy’s rich half-scream of mirth which shook her entire body. But Jeanette’s laugh, like everything else that was miniature and fey about her, charmed me.

Yes, she said. Those are the songs I sing, all right. You’re pretty smart for someone so young.

I’ve always been younger than anybody, I said.

Oh? Well, I’m thirty-one. How old are you?

Twenty-five. I told you I was younger than anyone.

When I took her home and tried to kiss her good night she turned her cheek to me and smiled. It seemed an eloquent smile. Outside, it was raining. The river was a block away, and I could imagine the dark surface agitated by the rain. The streets glowed with a wet light. For the first time that I could remember, the rain did not depress me.

Often when it rains I imagine that it is raining all over the world; that innumerable streets are gleaming in a damp dusk like the one in which I walk, one from which no one on earth can escape until the skies above me clear. But this night I was aware that it was only a small place in the world that was drenched and gray. Somewhere, I knew, someone was being very gay under a different sky.

The evening with Jeanette had been an adumbration of a strange, serio-comic world. Mostly it was the names, I think; a constant dripping of success names, of money names, of prestige names. (I realized later how much of a dripping it was when, in the first week with Cathy, I was submerged in a flood of names which for me had the aura of rulers-of-the-world names.)

I saw myself freed from the prison of the constant analysis of the interior world (that incessant probing of the inner life over the cafeteria tables), from the sunless constriction of the brownstone houses where my artist friends had their studios. Jeanette mentioned that she had flown to Vermont for a week end of skiing three days before. When I met Cathy, she was recently returned from Europe. They were involved with movement, with space. They came into my life trailing ocean spray and snow.

And always there were the names. Because I had always lived in an environment of conscious unsuccess, it was the success image in which these names were involved that constituted their strangeness and accounted for their attractiveness. It was a prestige world my father had hated; one which he and his friends had assumed I despised as well. I wondered how long the apostles of failure who had haunted our house would be able to tolerate my father’s posthumous success.

One of the names that Jeanette had mentioned stayed with me in a kind of amused memory: Catherine Forester (a Miss America, Jeanette had added immediately). She was by no means impervious to the name-aura surrounding her friends, an aura which her own name missed always by a hair’s breadth. I noticed also that she did not say former Miss America, but rather a Miss America. Only the newspapers used the more correct term. To everyone else the title was a continuing one.

At Jeanette’s urging I arranged to play string quartets at the home of a friend of hers. I called several of my old friends, whom I had not seen since my father’s death. I remember riding out to Forest Hills that night on the train and thinking that I had been in a sort of a fever and that this was the beginning of the coolness and relaxation setting in at last.

I was looking forward to seeing friends I hadn’t seen for months: Jerry, the violinist who had been a childhood friend but who had become sort of a close enemy in the last few years (I referred to him as my arch-friend); Max Redfield, the pianist with whom I’d played my first and only recital. And, there was to be this Miss America Jeanette had promised. Promised is the proper word, too; as if sensing my reluctance to play again, Jeanette had held this beauty out as an enticement.

She’s not just a beauty, she’d said. This girl has read everything. Just everything. And smart, shrewd. I can’t tell you how clever.

All right. I laughed. You can go back to her beauty now.

"I wish I could," Jeanette said quietly, and her hand made a quick aborted movement, as if she wanted to smooth her hair or touch her cheek.

Will you please stop that silliness, I said brusquely, suddenly tired of this pretty girl’s sensitivity about her looks.

Now, riding on the train, I hoped she wasn’t still angry with me. I hoped, too, that I would play well, and I hoped that the Miss America would not be as pretty, charming and intelligent as Jeanette, and I hoped that the evening would not last too long and that it would not rain, since I had lost the rainproof cover for my instrument case. I had, I reflected, many hopes but no hope.

The first thing I saw upon entering the room, looking past the shoulder of the thin, nervous boy who was the host, was Cathy’s so pale face above a dress which had an angora neckpiece. How that dress has haunted me and twisted and turned in my consciousness, becoming a visual image which could conjure up a whole world of sensations and memories; how it has become more than a dress. I was aware, at this first instant, of the separation made between her face and her body by that delicate froth of white fur at her throat. It was as if there were two different kinds of beauty which had been joined here but were oddly irreconcilable. I had the impression of someone at war with herself but temporarily united in the face of the common enemy; the social evening to be gotten through; the strangers to be met and charmed or antagonized and conquered.

In thinking back over that evening, I find it hard to believe something I know is true. Under the impact of this beauty, I failed to make the connection between her and the Miss America I had expected to meet. Only about five minutes later, when Larry Cressman introduced me to her and spoke her name carefully—Catherine Forester—so that it sounded like a title in itself, did I think, Ah, Miss America, and begin to wonder immediately if she was quite as beautiful as I had thought at first.

I have no recollection of the trivial things we must have said to each other. I know that we made absolutely no contact at all until I mentioned that I had written a few short stories. Actually I had written one, about the few days preceding my father’s death, and had only sketched out a few more. She seemed to straighten up in her chair. Her back made a perfect straight line from the waist up and her face shone with a smile. She had then a radiance of health about her that was a sharp contrast to the smoky room, the drink in her hand, the sensual curve of her bosom. I wondered suddenly where she had come from and what her childhood had been like. But soon her smile began to fade under the mechanical need for conversation with a stranger.

I’ve been reading a great deal since I got back from Europe, Cathy said. I remembered Jeanette’s remark and thought with hostility, All right, so you can read, but I said politely, What have you been reading?

She began to rattle off a list and my annoyance grew. I excused myself and began to tune up.

The quartets were quite a