I'll Be There (34 page)

IRIS RAINER DART

and every fucking ticket anybody ever bought to come and see me anywhere. But the phone didn’t ring with any word of Nina, and after a blazing hot shower, which Cee Cee took with the shower door open and the phone pulled across the bathroom so she could hear it in case it rang while she was in there, and three cups of coffee she brewed so strong they could wake the dead, she answered the door to her makeup lady by saying, “I think you’ve got your work cut out for you today, girl.”

She could hear Barbara Walters’s crew arriving as the base coat and concealer and blusher were being applied, and while her face was being powdered in place, and her hair Was teased, combed, and sprayed into obedience, she tried desperately from some reserve tank of wherewithal to dredge up some enthusiasm for the interview she had made a commitment to give. Finally with a face painted on that magically brightened her own pale-with-fatigue one, she dressed in a soft pink jersey shirt and pants and went into her living room, which was now filled with cameras and technicians and lights, to chat with Barbara Waiters. And as she passed the assistant producer, she thought she heard the young woman doing a last-minute check on details before they started to shoot.

“Telephone bells turned off?” Cee Cee heard her ask.

“No!” Cee Cee vhirled around and shouted. “You can’t shut the

phones off, I’m expecting an urgent call!”

“But we —”

“No! You can’t shut the phones off and that’s final!”

The young woman looked over Cee Cee’s head at the producer, who gave an everybody-has-their-own-craziness nod back to say it was okay to leave the phone bells alone, and Cee Cee went in to meet Barbara Walters. But the phone didn’t ring at all.

“You’re a busy lady. A movie star, a producer, a single mother. Tell me about your daughter.”

The lights were hot and Cee Cee held tightly to the arm of the sofa. She was trembling and weak and so sick inside she was sure it had to show, but she fixed her face into the Cee Cee Bloom position and answered. “She’s sensational,” she said. “A joy and a gem and the light of my life.”

The interviev seemed to take all day. Questions about her past, her marriage, her television show, her films, her future plans, but

I’LL BE THERE

later when the lights were turned off and Barbara Waiters left after thanking her for a great interview and the crew had cleared out, she sat by the telephone again, and all she could remember about the interview was what she had said about Nina.

There was no word that night either, and the next morning, after about an hour’s sleep, she went to have her dress for the ()scars fitted at Bob Mackie’s studio. The dress was long and slinky and covered with bugle beads, and when it was finished it would fit her like a glove. Cee Cee stood still as Bob Mackie circled her, congratulating her for the nomination with his sweet boyish smile, amazed at how thin she was these days. And that was when she realized she hadn’t eaten anything in nearly two days.

When the fitting was over, she went into the three-way-mirrored dressing room to slip the dress off carefully to avoid the pins, but before she did, she leaned against the center mirror and watched as an infinite number of Cee Cees in all directions covered their faces and wept.

Three days had passed. It was a Monday afternoon and Cee Cee was in her office, in a meeting for her next film. The director, the writer, the two producers, and all of the development people, Cee Cee’s and the studio’s, sat spread around the room, on chairs, on the sofas, and on the floor, talking about the script and some of the last-minute changes, when the door opened.

“Cee Cee,” her secretary said, “it’s Nina.” Her face looked alarmed. Cee Cee left the meeting, walked to her secretary’s desk in the outer

office, and took the phone.

“Hello?”

The voice on the other end of the line was Nina’s but in a panic that made it sound shrill and eerie. “Cee Cee, you have to help me. I can’t breathe and my face is swollen and I… I’m sorry, but I snorted something at Lisa’s and I…”

“Where’s Lisa’s house?” Cee Cee asked her.

“On Tigers Trail. Six four one.”

“Hang on, I’m coming,” Cee Cee said and hung up.

She drove like a maniac over the canyon, running stop signs and red lights, and when she reached Lisa’s house she double-parked and ran up the steps, tried the door, and barged into the house. There

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were dozens of crumpled tissues all over the floor and the chairs, and

Lisa sat crying on the sofa, holding bunched-up tissues to her face. “I’m okay,” she said, “but she’s really bad.”

Cee Cee heard a loud moan, which she recognized as Nina’s, and followed the sound to a little chintz and ruffled powder room where Nina crouched over the toilet retching and vomiting. Cee Cee put an

arm around her, brushed her hair from her face, and held her head. “Sorry, Cee, I’m sorry,” Nina said.

Cee Cee wet a washcloth with cold water to wash Nina’s face, which, now that the girl turned to her, she could see was swollen and distorted. And when Nina looked up and. caught sight of herself in the mirror, she wailed, “Oh God,” and Cee Cee could hear by the gurgled sound of the wail that her throat was closing.

The doctor in the emergency room told Cee Cee they had to intubate Nina because her vocal chords were swollen and her airway was in jeopardy of obstructing, which could have killed her if they’d been a few minutes later. The swollen face was an angioneurotic edema, caused by the drug. It was crank, a mixture of speed and God knows what else that had been used to cut it. Lisa had been put into a separate hospital room from Nina with only a dripping nose, and by the time her parents, a curly haired conservative-looking man in a gray suit, and a pretty blond mother, arrived at the hospital, Cee Cce was standing beaten and drained in the waiting room, placing her fourth phone call to Florrie, but still getting only the answering service. The parents didn’t see her as they passed, but Cee Cee, who recognized them from school meetings, heard the father say to the mother, “| told you Nina probably got drugs from that piece of garbage Cee Cee Bloom and then gave them to Lisa. But you’d never listen, would you ?”

“Shut up, Frank,” she heard the woman answer.

Cee Cee’s first impulse was to run after the guy, grab him by the throat, and scream obscenities into his face. To tell him it was his kid who got the dope, not her kid, and she started out the door to go after him, but stopped when she saw Florrie walking briskly down the corridor toward her.

“I got your message and came immediately. Is she all right?”

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“The doctor said she will be,” Cee Cec said. “Can I see her?” I’ll take you in.”

Nina had a tube in her nose that was draining and a tube coming out of her mouth, and though Cee Cee had already seen her, each time she looked at her this way she had to hold on to the footboard of the bed to keep her knees from buckling under her. Nina narrowed her eyes when she looked at Florric and realized who it was, and she wouldn’t even look at Cee Cee.

“Nina,” Florrie said, “it must feel pretty horrible being in that bed with all of those tubes in you, knowing that you came very close to dying. And I think it’s significant that you called Cee Cee to come and save you instead of calling an ambulance yourself. Does that just mean you were afraid the police would find out about the drugs? Or does it mean that you’re finally ready to accept Cee Cee’s help with your drug problem?”

Nina stared at the ceiling. Cee Cee’s face and body hurt with anxiety and pain, looking at this baby, this young child, so disfigured and destroyed by the abuse she’d brought on herself in this horrible way. God give me strength, she used to hear her own mother utter every day of her life. And now it was what she found herself asking, God give me the strength to get through this one. Leona, she thought, I’m using your prayer because I finally get it, l finally understand you, and I’m sorry for every time I ever made you worry about me. For every time I shrieked at you, hated you, wanted to hurt you and didn’t know why. Because now, at last, I understand how you felt. How a mother feels. And I wish you were around to say you told me so.

“Dear girl,” Florrie said to Nina, “perhaps now we can begin our treatment, because I’m sure that after this you’ll be willing to make a commitment to stop using drugs. Won’t you?”

Nina’s response to Florrie’s question was to turn her face back to the ceiling with an expression that, despite the helpless state and her supine position, still managed to look defiant. Florrie took Cee Cee by

the elbow and moved her out of the room into the hospital corridor. “What do I do?” Cee Cee asked.

“You put her into detox and then a rehab program. I know an excellent one in Newport Beach. You take her there, you leave her there,

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you do whatever you can to find out why she uses and try to change that, which can be a long and painful process. But Cee Cee, mostly • . .” Florrie put her hand on Cee Cee’s arm. “Mostly you pray.”

The sky was a muddy brown as Cee Cce drove south on the San Diego Freeway. Nina was asleep in the passenger seat; her face, though still puffy around the eyelids, was almost back to it’s normal size. That morning at St. Johns Hospital she had stared out the window, sullen and pouting while Cee Cee packed the few toiletries she had used in the last few days and was allowed to take with her to the rehabilitation clinic. Her clothes were packed and waiting in the car per Florrie’s instructions that Cee Cee take her directly to the drug clinic, because a stop at home could be disruptive to the process.

“Many times parents have said, ‘We’re just stopping off to pick up some clothes,’ and when they got home, they were manipulated into changing their minds.”

For a few minutes before they checked out, Florrie sat with the two of them in the cold, metallic, stripped-bare hospital room. A nurse came by pushing a wheelchair as standard hospital procedure to take Nina down to the car, but Cee Cee waved her off.

“Nina,” Florrie said very softly, “can you connect with the specific

pain you’re feeling when you use?”

Nina didn’t answer.

“What does being high give you that you can’t get on your own?” It looked as if Nina wasn’t going to answer, because she continued to stare out the window at the hospital wing opposite, but then she said, “Because my outsides don’t match my insides. Outside I’m this nice

quiet, okay-looking girl, but inside I want to be something else.” “What kind of something else?”

Again she thought for a while, then said, “I want to be able to be funny and tell jokes and have people like me because I have guts, and wear something with rhinestones in it … and unless I’m high I’m too scared.”

Cee Cee couldn’t believe what she was hearing. The kid was gorgeous; so many times she had looked at her in awe of her burgeoning beauty, thinking that she looked like all the beautiful girls Cee Cee had envied all her life. And with a brain and a sense of humor to

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match that beauty. How could she not know that about herself? “So I get high to go to school, because otherwise I’m nobody, and if I have to be nobody, I’d rather be dead.”

“Nina, when you’re high, who’s your behavior model?” Florrie asked her.

The answer was so obvious Cee Cee wanted to blurt it out and would have if Florrie hadn’t raised a hand to stop her. When Nina replied, there was amazement in her voice, because she spoke the answer just as she realized what the answer was.

“When I’m high, I act like Cee Cee does all the time. Gutsy, saying anything I feel like and cracking people up.”

Dear God, Cee Cee thought, why would anyone want to act like that? I do it because it’s all I know how to do.

“Has it been hard over the last seven years to keep up with whatever it means to belong to Cee Cee Bloom?”

There was a silence, then Nina smiled, a smile that looked eerie on her bright red face, and said in a voice that sounded odd coming from her, “You bet your ass,” and all three of them laughed a laugh of recognition.

Now as Cee Cee pulled up to the admitting entrance of the hospital in Newport Beach, what at another time might have brought rage simply caused a blanket of weariness to fall over her, because standing in wait, festooned with their cameras, was an army of fanmagazine photographers. Somehow the sons-of-bitches knew everything, maybe from someone who worked at the other hospital, maybe from someone on Cee Cee’s own staff who was selling the information about her troubles. And there they stood, waiting to take shots of Nina’s entry into the hospital so that they could sell the pictures to the tabloids.

Instead of pulling into the portico where they stood, Cee Cee stopped and with a screech of tires backed up and found herself waking Nina and walking her into the hospital through an obscure entrance she found, just behind the linen service man who was making a delivery.

A nurse frisked her. Cee Cee stood and watched a big black nurse, wearing a plastic pin that said that her name was Marvel, actually frisking Nina for drugs, while Cee Cee stood there feeling as guilty

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as if she had been caught red-handed killing the very person she cared about the most.

While the nurse patted Nina down Cee Cee noticed Nina hung her head in a way that looked so tough, she must have seen it in some old “women in prison” movie on television. It was almost as if she was relishing the role of the beaten-down bad kid because it was so unlike the perfect girl she’d been, or pretended to be, up until so recently. Cee Cee’s stomach was cramped and twistcd, and she could feel every touch of the nurse’s hands on Nina as if she was living through the humiliation herself. Marvel handed Nina a plastic specimen cup and was ushering her toward a door marked RESTROOM.