I'll Be There (7 page)

“Well,” she said, “I thought you should hear this from me instead of on an answering machine after a beep.”

“Jesus, the suspense is killing me,” he said, laughing an uncomfortable laugh, which she interrupted by telling him the news. Then the laughter stopped and she saw him try to act as if he wasn’t feeling choked up, but he was.

“So can I count on you?” she asked him.

“I can’t think of anything that would keep me away,” he promised, and then he reached out a hand and took hers. After a while he let out a little giggle.

“What’s funny?” Cee Cee asked.

“Remembering when I met you when you first moved to Malibu. The first time I was ever in your house.” Cee Cee grinned as she remembered too, and then they reminisced, looking out at the view for so long that eventually they watched the sun, which had moved slowly down in the sky, drop like a giant orange egg yolk into the sea.

MALIBU, CALIFORNIA

October 1983

CEE CEE sat on the deck of the new house in Malibu wearing a frayed white terry cloth robe she’d had for so long it might have belonged to her ex-husband. She always pulled the now ratty thing out of the closet and wrapped herself in it when she needed to be near something familiar and homey. The breakfast tray she and Nina had shared earlier still sat on the glass and wrought-iron table piled up with their dirty breakfast dishes and the empty milk glasses they had clicked together in a toast to their own cleverness for moving to the beach.

The toast was one Nathan used to say when he drank his rare glass of schnapps on one of the Jewish holidays. “Look out teeth, look out gums, look out kishkes, here it comes.” Nina had never heard the word kishkes before and the sound of it made her laugh so hard, her milk bubbled up in her mouth and her eyes watered. Cee Cee loved the way the kid was starting to learn to be silly, giddy, childlike. And as odd as it seemed, so was Cee Cee for the first time in her life. Neither of them, in the years before their union, had ever learned much about playing or really letting go. Nina because most of her life had been filled with grownup problems, and Cee Cee because her own childhood had been so focused on the pursuit of a career.

“I’m getting this mother thing down to a science,” she told Hal one day. “For example, I already know that you can’t go to the playground in three-inch pumps. The goddamned heels stick in the grass and the next thing you know, you’re still walking, but the shoes are a half a mile back! After I figured that out, all was well until yesterday when my tiny little ass fell right through the humongous hole in the tire

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swing. In fact it took two very attractive single fathers to pull me out. Did I mention that the park is a veritable treasure trove of parents without partners?”

This norning Nina was down the road at the home of one of her new friends and Cee Cee scrunched down a little lower in the lounge chair wondering how she’d hccn crazy’ enough to put herself so deeply in debt by impulsively buying this big expensive house on the beach. At first when her business manager grumbled about it being more than she could afford, she used the excuse that she was buying it because of Nina. That she wanted the child to feel at home after living near water all her life in Sarasota.

Then she said it was because the house was on a street protected by a guard gate and that would keep the paparazzi out. Which it did, for a while, though an army of them seemed somehow to know where she was going at all times and managed to show up everywherc, snapping and flashing away at her and at Nina, immediately selling the pictures to the tabloids, which printed them constantly. But her real reason for buying the house was much more selfish than any of those.

She had come back to Hollywood feeling like an alien. Realizing, though nothing there had changed, that after her months in Carmel she was seeing it all through new eyes. A perspective that had been changed by the lesson of those bleak and endless days and nights of sitting at Bertie bedside where under fire she had learned about how fragile the line was between life and death. And the time with nothing to do but care for someone else had given her the opportunity to think about the unimportant attitudes and ridiculous posturing that got in the way of most people’s living their lives.

So when the painful vigil was over and she came home and looked at the years stretching before her, her first impulse was to goddamn enjoy them in a big way, to live it up. There were no men who interested her and vice versa, she knew from past experience that indulging in too much food would be bad for her career, she already had a great car, so she bought a house, a big gorgeous house on the beach for herself and for Nina.

Every day since they’d left Carmel she had taken an emotional tally of how they were doing together, watching and monitoring the ups and downs. Worried because there had been quite a few little explosions between them. Like the one last week when Nina had given her

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some of that haughty more-elegant-than-thou shit at which she was an expert and which could always start some sparks flying. There was no getting away from the fact that this kid had been so well trained by Bcrtie, she could go to lunch with the Queen of England and know what to do, and just like her mother, she didn’t hesitate to make a point of telling Cee Cee what she was doing wrong.

“Did you send a thank-you note for those flowers?” she asked Cee Ccc the other day. That was what started it.

wPlat.

“The world doesn’t owe you a living, Cee Cee. Your agent didn’t

have to send those roses just to welcome you back.”

“I)o you have any idea how much money I made for that agency

last year? Believe me, my agent had to send the roses. He ought to

send me a thank-you note for the privilege of sending them.”

“I don’t agree. My mother taught me that when someone takes the

time and effort to send you something —”

“He had his secretary send them,” Cee Cee had said, her voice rising, astonished at how much the kid’s getting on her case like that

really bugged her.

“But the thought was his,” Nina replied in a tone calm enough to

make Cee Cee’S flaring temper feel stupid.

“I already had a mother,” Cee Cee said, steaming.

“Well, she must have forgotten to mention thank-you notes.” Hah! That time Cec Cee had burst out laughing, because the idea of Leona mentioning thank-you notes was pretty funny. “The only person Leona ever thanked was the doctor who told her after I was born hat she probably wouldn’t have any more babies.” Of course the truth was Nina was right about a lot of things. Especially the goddamned thank-you note. It took exactly three minutes for Cee Cee to dash off this really full-of-it thank-you note, and the other day when she stopped by Larry Gold’s office, she nearly fainted. The little twirp had framed the goddamned thing and it was hanging on his office wall.

Then there was the constant battle about clothes. Cee Cee remembered how the saleslady at Saks had just about bust a gut overhearing

that conversation.

“Why?” Cee Cce asked looking at Nina’s choices for school clothes,

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“does an eight-year-old kid want to dress like a forty-year-old

woman ?”

“And vice versa?” Nina had asked looking Cee Cee right in the eye, and when she did, Cee Cee glanced over her head at herself in the three-way mirror and realized she was wearing an off:the-shoulder sweatshirt, hicycle pants, lace tights, and high-topped basketball shoes.

“Good point,” she said, and the subject was closed.

And naturally, since Nina was Bertie’s daughter there had to be the whole discussion about language, just like the ones Cce Cee used to have with Bertie all the time. In fact sometimes when Nina opened that mouth of hers, it was so spookily like talking to Bcrtie, Ccc Cee had to look around to make sure it was the kid.

“I’d like to ask you if you’d kindly stop saying F-U-C-K in front of me,” Nina said one night at the dinner table, pronouncing the letters

of the word as carefully as if she were a finalist in a spelling bee. “I didn’t realize I ever did say it in front of you.” “That’s because it’s a bad habit.” “Huh?”

“You say it automatically at least ten times a day.” “Me? Get the fuck outta here.” “Just like that.”

“Ten times a day is impossible.”

“Well, if you think it’s impossible, what if I fine you for every time

you say it, and I get to keep the money?” “How much?” “A dollar.” “A nickel.” “A quarter.” “You’re on.”

Okay, so by the end of the first week she owed Nina six bucks. But last week it was only a buck seventy-five, which was a big improvement. And now they had made it through six weeks. Six weeks of settling in, getting that this was forever. Figuring out what they were going to do next. Six whole weeks since the day the people came and carried Bertie out of the house in Carmel shoved into a body bag, so just the fact that it was still that fresh, and she and the pip

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squeak had already survived tons of little battles and the big one of moving out of one house and into another, they were doing all right.

Consider what happens when we are learning any new skill, whether it is playing bridge, playing golf, riding a motorcycle, playing the piano or anything else. We learn hy making literally thousands of mistakes. Why should learning the complex skills of raising a child be an exception to the rule? We should take it for granted that we will make mistakes and not berate ourselves or feel guilty about it.

Cee Cee had closed the over-the-counter child psychology book after reading those words and said, “Yeah!” out loud. This was new to her, but eventually she’d get the hang of it and be great. Now she needed to get back into the swing of things in the business. Needed to call people and tell them she was back, needed to get a real good job to pay for this big fucking house. Frigging house. Fancy house. Some days she would call her agent five times in a row with ideas about how to get her career back on track, but other days she would sit incapacitated, numbly staring at the ocean for hours, not knowing or caring what time or even what day it was.

And most important of all she had to find a school for Nina. In the last few days, after talking to everyone she could think of who had a child, she compiled a list of all the recommended private schools within a reasonable distance of the beach house, then she phoned the admitting offices of those schools and set a time to visit. This afternoon the two of them dressed, and as usual looked one another’s outfits over with patent disapproval, then headed off to the Buena Vista School, which had been recommended highly by Larry Gold, whose three kids were all registered there. While Nina was escorted on a tour of the place, Cee Cee sat talking with the headmaster. She had a list of questions a mile long, and after he had answered all of them, he took a long deep breath and launched into what, she could tell by the way he delivered it, had to be an often-repeated sales pitch.

“Cee Cee, listen to me, our school caters specifically to the special needs of the children of people like yourself. Let’s face it. We all put our kids into schools where we’re comfortable, right? Of course I mean by that where the policies of the school are the same ones we live by at home. But also where we ourselves fit in with the parent body, if you know what I mean.” He waited for Cee Cee to nod and let him

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know she knew what he meant, then he went on. “Now it’s pretty hard for me to believe you’d be more comfortable than in a school like ours where you’re surrounded by your colleagues.” He handed her the school’s roster. “Go ahead,” he said, “feel free to look through it. We’ve got more stars than the Milky Way. And the reason for that,” he added, “is because we’re cognizant of the needs of these families for privacy.”

Cee Cee wanted to ask this guy if the school had such a great respect for privacy, why he was letting her, an outsider, look at the list of the names of people who were registered there. But instead she just shuffled through it, and had to agree that a lot of well-known people’s kids were registered in that school.

“This child has had a few tough breaks,” she said, looking into his eyes.

“Oh, I know.” The headmaster’s name was Jason, and the more Cee Cee looked at him, the more she thought he looked too young to even be a teacher, let alone a headmaster. “I read about it in the paper,” he said, nodding, and Cee Cee wondered if he meant the Enquirer. “But she’ll be in understanding company here, because there are many kids from unusual situations, multiple stepfamilies, cohabiting parents who have never married one another, single parents whose spouses aren’t around anymore, or single parents who never had spouses in the first place. In fact in this school it’s the nuclear families who are unusual.” When his smiling eyes met Cee Cee’s concerned ones, he shrugged, laughed a little laugh, and said, “That’s show biz.”

Cee Cee looked around his large office. There were a lot of pictures of this guy on every wall, eight-by-ten framed pictures of him standing among small groups of people. Now Cee Cee looked more closely and saw that one of the groups was Sylvester Stallone and one of his kids, and in another he was with Lesley Ann Warren and her son, then there was another of Jason with Goldie Hawn and her kids.

“Well, we’ll give it a lot of thought,” Cee Cee said, standing, relieved that at that moment, through the floor-to-ceiling window that faced the school’s back lawn with a wide-angle view of the ocean, she could see Nina on her way back toward the administration building. Cee Cee shook the young headmaster’s outstretched hand and thanked him.

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“So what are you working on now?” he asked, walking out the door of his office with her, and the question felt like a blow to her stomach. Larry Gold was trying to get a meeting for her with the network people she had walked out on when she went to Carmel all those months ago, but so far they were refusing even to listen to her apology. Trouble, she was known in the industry as trouble, her agent told her bluntly, but he was trying to smooth things over.