I'll Be There (24 page)

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IRIS RAINER DART

So he was a few years younger, like seven or eight, maybe nine, but he was a hot little honey, and she needed that now.

Nina’s dance teacher was rehearsing the curtain call, and she was having a hard time getting everybody lined up on the stage. The girls fussed and took forever coming from one side of the wings, where they’d been crowded, since the Elks Club wasn’t exactly the Hollywood Bowl, waiting for a turn to enter and take an individual bow. Each time the teacher tried to get them out onstage it was an endless struggle with bad timing, giggles, improper spacing, so she’d stop the music and send them off to try their entrances again from the beginning. Cee Cee looked at her watch. It was five o’clock. She was supposed to have a conference call with Martin Kane and the producer of the new film at six. If the rehearsal kept going like this, she’d never make it. Maybe she could help move things along here so they could all go home.

“Excuse me,” she said, walking down to the front row of folding chairs and tapping the dance teacher on the shoulder. The teacher turned quickly and Cee Cee could tell by the woman’s expression that she was harassed and tense. She now had the entire cast, thirty girls

between the ages of ten and fourteen, up on the stage.

“Yes?” she said to Cee Cee.

“Well, I wanted to tell you that I know a little bit about this kind of thing and maybe if I could just explain how we did…”

The teacher’s look stopped her. She was a long-necked longwaisted, regal-looking woman in her fifties with white hair pulled back in a severe bun. She was wearing a long-sleeved black leotard under a rehearsal skirt, which made her look like one of those modern dancers in an old Jules Feiffer cartoon who leap and dance to poetry.

“Mothers in the back row, or wait in the car, please,” she said tensejawed to Cee Cee.

This woman’s got to be kidding, Cee Cee thought. She obviously has no idea who she’s talking to. “Hey,” she said, “I understand you’re under pressure, but I’ve been in a lot of Broadway musicals. I’ve worked with every choreographer from Jerome Robbins to Jeffrey Hornaday and I’m telling you if you start with half of the girls on one side and the other half on the other, you’re going to move them faster and get the feel of a bigger production number.” There, she thought, that ought to do it.

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The teacher’s face was stone. “I never have them enter from both sides,” she said in measured tones.

“Yeah, well maybe not, but if you try it you’re gonna see that it takes half the time.”

“Will you please sit down?” the teacher said. Obviously she wasn’t understanding Cee Cee’s point.

“Actually you could have the two groups cross one another. That’s how we did it in the revival of tligh Button Shoes.”

Miss Olivia snapped her head away from Cee Cee, looked at the girls on the stage, and said loudly to them, “All right, one more time. Clear the stage.” Some of the girls straggled slowly in the direction of the wings, a few didn’t move. This woman is crazy, Cee Cee thought. Here I am offering her the highest-priced help around for free. About to teach her and the girls Jerome Robbins’s choreography, and she’s ignoring me? Oh | get it! She probably thinks I’m one of the regular women who come here all the time. Those mothers who have nothing else to do but sit and drive her crazy all year round. She figures I’m one of them. Doesn’t know who I am. Of course once I explain, she’ll know it’s a matter of one professional talking to another,

“Uh… Miss Olivia,” Cee Cee said, and the teacher turned to her with narrowed eyes. “You realize of course who I —”

But before Cee Cee could tell her exactly which credentials she had that gave her the right to interrupt the rehearsal, the teacher leaned toward her and spoke so close into her face Cee Cee could smell the Dynamint she had in her mouth. “In this room,” she said, “you are Nina’s mother.” Without looking, Cee Cee could feel that the girls who had been standing upstage and the ones who had started to walk away were now all in one clump downstage listening to the exchange between the two women.

She could hear the rustling of the net tutus as they brushed against one another and the whirr of the overworked air conditioner while she looked into the huge Keane painting eyes of the stonefaced Miss Olivia and realized there was no getting around the fact that this woman, who had knocked herself out all year to get these girls this far, was ten thousand percent right, and Cee Cee had been a total jackass to intrude.

In fact, not only did she know that, but so did every kid on that stage, including Nina at whom Cee Cee couldn’t look, because she

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was afraid to see one of those expressions the kid had been giving her lately, expressions that according to the books were just what to expect from kids her age.

Children in this stage of their lives crave a lot of attention, but on the other hand they don’t want to stand out from the crowd. Nothing is more devastating than to be singled out for punishment or even praise in the classroom, or to be considered different in any way. If mother has the nerve to appear at school, daughter is mortified for days afterwards.

Nina had invited her to the rehearsal, but she hadn’t counted on Cee Cee behaving like an egomaniac in front of the entire dancing class. Now Cee Cee felt so dumb she thought that if life was fair, the ceiling would fall in on her head and everyone would feel so sorry for her they’d forget what a schmuck she’d been. And now they all were

waiting in this eternity of a moment for her to say something.

“I hear you,” she said to the teacher, “and I’m sorry.”

“What was that?” Miss Olivia asked, with the clear implication that she wanted Cee Cee to repeat her apology loud enough for the benefit of the girls.

“I said,” Cee Cee said, obligingly louder, “I’m sorry, Miss Olivia,” and as the rehearsal resumed, she moved to the back row where she sat for a long time trying to calm her feelings of despising herself, and eventually she became so caught up in watching the girls that she forgot all about the conference call she was expecting at home. In fact, by the end of the rehearsal she had to admit grudgingly the finale looked great, and so did every other number in the show.

Nina seemed actually to have talent, and her budding beauty was so mesmerizing that half the battle was won the minute she appeared onstage because you didn’t want to look at anyone else. At least Cee Cee didn’t. She sat watching her as dopey with admiration as any stage mother alive. So maybe the kid wasn’t a fireball, crazed and driven and needy for the audience’s love the way Cee Cee had always been, but there was a genuine spark there. Cee Cee wasn’t making it up, and it wasn’t just because Nina was hers that she thought that either. The kid was really good. Which was why she let what happened in Cabo San Lucas happen, and that was a mistake she wished she could erase.

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The night the plane landed bringing the two of them to the Los Cabos location, it was pouring rain. The airplane stood on the field far away from the terminal until finally around the building through the teeming rain came the lights of a car. After the pilot opened an umbrella and walked Cee Cee and Nina down the steps of the studio’s private jet and the driver made sure they were safe in the backseat of the limo, Nina settled comfortably into the seat and wanted to know all about the movie Cee Cee was here to make.

Over the last few years she had spent a great deal of time on the set of Cee Cee’s television show, but this would be her first time on location for a film, and the idea of spending a few weeks in a pretty place she’d seen in the brochures seemed to please her. They would be staying and shooting at the Palmilla Hotel. As the car moved along on the bumpy dark road toward the hotel, Cee Cee told her the story of the film, which was about a family who was vacationing together as the marriage of the parents was falling apart.

“You mean there’re kids in this?” Nina asked.

“Two kids,” Cee Cee told her. “Stacy and Sammy are the names of the characters, the dau.ghter and the son. Chelsea Bain plays Stacy. You’ll like her. She’s an amazing little actress.”

In the morning, in the dining room of the hotel, Nina was introduced to dozens of people involved with the production — the hairdresser, the makeup man, the assistant directors — and all of them fussed over her, and then looked at Cee Cee and said things like, “She’s so beautiful,” as if Nina wasn’t even sitting there, and Cee Cee would say, “Thank you,” as if she had something to do with it.

When Chelsea Bain and her mother walked into the beam-ceilinged, tile-floored room and Nina spotted her, her heart pounded and she felt a feeling in her throat she didn’t want to admit to herself was jealousy. And when the child actress who had obviously been chosen because of her close resemblance to Cee Cee was introduced to Cee Cee and told her, “You’re my idol,” and Cee Cee answered, “Aren’t you a doll!” Nina wanted to leave the table. And Chelsea was from New York, so she even had that little New York toughness in her speech that Cee Cee had. As the two of them talked about the script for the film, Nina definitely felt wounded, left out, more than she ever did when Cee Cee paid attention to other adults.

While Chelsea’s mother took a seat at a distant table and Cee Cee

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moved to another table to talk to the producer, Chelsea remained, looking Nine. over, sizing her up, then said, “You’re her daughter? Are you kidding? I look more like her than you do! Oh, yeah. That’s ‘cause

you’re not her real daughter. Right?”

Nina didn’t answer.

“My mom told me about you and her, and your real mom is dead. Right?”

Nina nodded.

“Tough break,” Chelsea said, only it wasn’t at all sympathetic, and then she walked away and Nina hated her. And she hated her even more when Cee Cee came back to the table and after ordering breakfast for them in her version of Spanish, which sounded to Nina like Speedy Gonzalez talking to Daffy Duck, she told Nina, with a gesture toward the table where Chelsea and her mother sat, “I saw that kid’s screen test. She was so good she jumped right off the screen. Wait till you see her work.” She also told Nina for the hundredth time to drink only the bottled water.

The atmosphere on the set was loud and friendly, and Nina couldn’t decide which member of the crew was the cutest. All of the men were handsome and flirted with her, and when they were together buzzing around the set, the abundance of maleness made her think of the way she imagined a band of pirates to behave, muscular and sweaty and sexy. But the process of making a movie was so slow and painstaking, that after a few days she realized that watching it was extraordinarily dull.

The amount of time it took so many people to move so many cables so few feet seemed ridiculously long to her, and finally she dropped out and spent most of her time under a beach umbrella near the water reading. At night she would have dinner with Cee Cee and the cast and crew from a big Mexican buffet and watch Scott, the young still photographer, flirt with Cee Cee and Cee Cee flirt back. And she suspected that when she was asleep Cee Cee was probably slipping away to be alone with him.

The tropical muggy evenings after dinner were spent in the large bar off the lobby, overlooking the sea, where the grating sound of the blender mixing the margaritas was a counterpoint to the three-piece combo. One night there was a band in the lounge after dinner, and while everyone from the film sat being cooled by the breeze from the

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sea, Cee Cee went up on the little bandstand and sang, “Here’s That Rainy Day,” and “My Funny Valentine” and some other really old songs. And afterward while the crew was cheering and stomping for her singing and Scott handed her a bottle of beer, Nina heard her say to him, “Bet you never even heard of those songs, kid,” and he laughed and put his arm around her waist, and when the band played some other moony love song, he tugged Cee Cee by the arm and pulled her out on the dance floor.

“I think if we dance any closer than this we get thrown in a Mexican prison,” Nina heard Scott say, and Cee Cee laughed.

“Looks like Cee Cee’s mushing out,” Nina heard a voice say, and it was Chelsea Bain, whose mom was drinking a margarita at the bar and smoking a cigarette and talking to one of the cameramen. And it was true, Cee Cee was definitely looking with goo-goo eyes at Scott, who Nina had to admit was really cool, but still she felt weird about it. As if she should maybe run over there and stand in front of them so nobody else could see.

“My mom’s single too, so I understand,” Chelsea told her. “They get horny.” Nina felt her own face and body fill with an uncomfortable heat at that thought. “Afterward they always hate themselves, but at the moment if you try and warn them, they make you go to your room and play with your Barbies.” Nina knew Cee Cee hadn’t had any real boyfriend in a long while, maybe since John Perry left her for the second time. There were dates, guys who came over, took her to a screening at the studio, even some who sent her flowers, but the ones she liked, the men she got all dolled up to be with, talked to in her “other voice” on the phone, were always the ones who didn’t seem to stay around too long, and the ones who were crazy about her, like sweet and wonderful Hal Lieberman, she didn’t even consider as boy friends.

“Wanna come over to my room?” Chelsea asked. Nina looked into Chelsea’s eyes. There was something she had learned to look for in the eyes of kids who made overtures of friendship to her over the last few years, a subtle, indescribable, too-eager look which meant they had no real interest in her but were longing somehow to be connected to Cee Cee. At home in Los Angeles it came in the form of invitations to birthday parties of kids she hardly knew, kids who, probably encouraged by their parents, would invite Nina in the hope that Cee