The Stork Club (25 page)

Before she could shut the door in the stunned Mona's hang-jawed face, Mona bellowed, "Who the fuck
are
you? I'm going to tell Rick about this and he's going to fire your fat ugly little ass for treating me like this. So I just want you to tell me right now who you are!"

"I," Doreen said, realizing that she was wearing Rick's robe, untied it and let it fall dramatically to the floor as she told the flabbergasted Mona, "am the mother of Rick Reisman's baby." And then she closed the door in Mona's stunned face.

Doreen remembered what her mother once told her about how to deal with a man: Wait until his stomach is full before you break any bad news to him. So she waited until she and Rick finished the dinner Nellie had left for them that night and were about to watch the news on television. Then she told him about Mona's visit. He didn't react visibly until the end of the story, when to Doreen's delight he let out a big laugh. There was enormous relief in it, and he obviously loved imagining little Doreen pushing big Mona out the door. "I'm sorry," he said, hoping Doreen wasn't insulted by his laughter, but the feeling was too rich to hold inside.

Things were coming together for him at Universal the way they never had before. All of his new projects were exciting, and within six months one of them was sure to move onto the floor, and he would be back in the world where he operated best. Interacting with the actors, taking close-up pictures of human behavior. That was when he felt most comfortable, creating those moments of truth.

There was one script that had its hooks deeper into him than the others. The leading character was a brilliant scientist who discovers a possible cure for cancer, and the story is about the battles he fights when he enters a nightmarish world of people who don't want that cure to be found just yet.

"Robert Redford," Doreen said the minute she finished reading the script, "and nobody else. Maybe with you directing, Clint Eastwood could pull it off."

Sometimes Rick had to stifle a laugh when she talked that way. Since she'd started doing some of his reading she was beginning to sound like a salty, too hip, William Morris agent.

"Redford is perfect," Doreen went on, "because this character has to have that kind of gorgeousness, since
every woman in the whole movie falls in love with him."

"I'll send it to his agent," Rick said.

"Smart move," Doreen told him and moved on to the next script in the pile. She had two weeks to go until the baby was born, and these days she just kind of slid from room to room, from chair to chair. The big event of her day was, without fail, turning on the television and watching "Jeopardy!"

"What is Soledad prison?" he heard her say out loud, answering the question with a question like the "Jeopardy!" contestants. "Who was Geppetto?" And when she got the answer wrong she would say to herself, "
Doreeeen
, you are so stupid!"

"Last year in school we had a discussion about our ideal man," she said one night when Rick got home just as the "Jeopardy!" closing credits were rolling by. "Guess who I picked."

"Who?"

"Alex Trebek. He is truly brainy, which to me is the most important quality anyone can have."

"I have a bachelor's degree and two master's," Rick said, realizing he was feeling jealous of the game-show host.

"I know," she said. "When I found out I was going to meet you, I went to the library in Kansas City and read about you in that big book about directors that came out a few years back. It tells all the details of your life. It had everything in it about you and your parents and Uncle Bobo, with pictures of them when they were young."

"Kansas City was a long way for you to go to check up on someone," he said.

"Not someone," she said abruptly. "Maybe the father of the only baby I might ever have. Those other
people from Los Angeles, the first ones Mr. Feldman introduced me to, they didn't seem as if they had a lot going for them upstairs, and that's why I didn't pick them."

A lie. She thought she had to tell Rick a lie to cover, and it made him want to reach over, touch her hair gently, and tell her that he knew the truth about what had happened with that couple, and it didn't matter to him. But there was something about the way her jaw was set that told him to allow her to rewrite the uncomfortable story about that rejection with any ending she wanted.

"It's also why I went to the library to check up on you."

"How did I stack up?" he asked her gently.

"Not bad," she answered.

Sid Sheinberg called that night to tell Rick that Robert Redford not only loved the project but wanted to meet on the fifteenth about doing it, less than a week away, and Rick excitedly told Doreen. She nodded.

"There you go," she said.

At Doreen's most recent doctor's appointment, the doctor set Rick up with a beeper system.

"In case," the doctor explained, "you're not in your office when she goes into labor, and we need you right away." Every morning before Rick left for work, he attached the beeper to his belt and gave it a little pat.

"No false alarms," Doreen promised him. "I know you're busy, so I won't call unless I'm as sure as I can be that I'm ready to burst."

"I'll be there for you," he promised in return.

There was something indescribable about being in a room with Robert Redford. Even to Rick, who had known and worked closely with many famous stars. Maybe it was seeing with one's own eyes that the actor's
look, the exquisite face, the stance, the bright-eyed boyishness, had nothing to do with the camera, but was very real.

"He'll only be in town for these eight hours. At five-thirty he gets on an airplane and will be out of the country for six months. He loves the script. He loves the character, he loves your work. There are a few creative points he'd like to change."

That was the part of what the agent said that stuck in Rick's stomach. What could those points be? The character of the scientist was certainly not perfect. He was neurotic, a drinker, maybe Redford didn't like that. But changing that would take all the bite out of the work.

"I'm sure you know if he says yes, it's a go project, and my sense of it is that if you iron out those three points, he'll be ready to shoot it the minute he gets back."

Redford. The image of Doreen's little face the day she suggested Rick try to get him came rushing back to Rick as he began telling Robert Redford about the genesis of the project and what had made him interested in it in the first place. Redford nodded and smiled, and Rick could tell by the comments he interjected that they agreed completely on the tone of the piece.
Thank God
.

Doreen. Last night when he walked by her room, he heard her reading passages of
Alice in Wonderland
out loud. Any day now she would be going into labor, and his baby would be born. A baby. A fifty-year-old man adopting a baby. Somehow in the conversation with Redford, the subject of children came up. Probably because Phillips, the character in the script, had children, and Redford asked Rick if he had any. "Well. . . almost," Rick said, and he found himself rattling out the entire story of Doreen and the impending birth and adoption.

"Now
that's
a story for a movie," Redford told him. Everyone in the meeting, all the executives and agents laughed at that comment. And now they were coming to the down side. The part of the meeting where Robert Redford would tell Rick what changes he thought the material required. Rick knew he would have to determine then and there if he thought the changes would work for or destroy the material as he saw it. He was about to steer the conversation in that inevitable direction when the unmistakable sound of the beeper he was wearing on his belt filled the entire room. Everyone turned and looked at Rick.

"Must have been something I ate for lunch," Rick joked as he jumped to his feet. Doreen, the baby, his baby, was about to be born. To come into the world and be his heir, his family. Now, it was happening now, right in the middle of this coveted meeting with Robert Redford. A meeting that couldn't be changed or rescheduled for at least six months, after which the chance for the project to happen, the intense interest that could get Robert Redford to commit and the movie to be a certainty, would surely be gone.

"Gentlemen," Rick said, with a slight bow of his head, "the scientist with the cure for cancer will just have to wait, because as of this moment, I'm about to be a father." And on very light feet, he left Robert Redford's meeting and went to take Doreen Cobb to the hospital.

20

O
NE DAY AT PANACHE, Carin told Lainie she had heard about a way that adopting mothers could actually breast-feed their babies. The adopting mother taped to her nipple a tiny tube that was attached to a container of formula. The baby sucked on the tube and the mother's nipple at the same time, and eventually the adopting mother's hormones took over and her own breast milk came in. Lainie didn't tell the well-meaning Carin that her body would be unable to produce those hormones. Just thanked her for the information.

Lainie and Jackie had agreed that probably it was best that their next meeting would not be until the amniocentesis, which was fourteen weeks away. Time went by quickly, and no news from Jackie was good news, because it meant that the pregnancy was holding. When the Jackie phone rang in her house and Lainie heard Jackie's by-now-familiar voice saying, "I'm a tank.
You'll faint when you see me," she meant it when she answered, "I can't wait."

As she opened the door to the neonatal doctor's reception area and saw Jackie, something about looking at her there made Lainie reel in disbelief. This wasn't just an idea anymore. There was exquisitely apparent evidence, round and swollen evidence, that Mitch's baby was inside this woman.

"What do you think?" Jackie asked, stretching her legs out, then pulling herself up to her feet to come and give Lainie a Shalimar-scented hug.

"I think you look great," Lainie said.

Jackie stepped back and looked down at her own large middle. "
There's
our little honey," she said. "And today we're going to see it."

A young dark-haired pregnant girl across the waiting room put down her magazine, looked over at the two of them, and smiled. "We're having a baby together," Jackie told her. The girl raised her eyebrows, not sure what to say, and seemed relieved when the nurse opened the door and called for Jackie and Lainie to come into the examining room.

Now, from where she sat on the folding chair that the doctor had pushed into the back corner of the room for her, Lainie could see just the top of Jackie's round belly, which was shiny with oil. The neonatal doctor, handsome with gray hair which looked odd with his very young-looking face, had gently spread the oil on it, the way one lover spreads suntan lotion on the other. The oil made the instrument he held in his hand move more easily on Jackie's abdomen.

The room was dimly lit so that Jackie, Lainie, the nurse, and the doctor could better see the speckled, writhing figure projected on the tiny TV monitor that was mounted close to the ceiling in the far corner of the room. It looked to Lainie like bad reception on a broken
television, but this was the long-awaited picture. The doctor was using it to determine the location of the amniotic fluid, some of which he was going to extract. With the help of his nurse, who held a pointer against the screen, he very carefully showed Lainie and Jackie that the baby had all of its fingers and toes, a perfect spine, and a healthy heartbeat.

"Jesus, when my Tommy was born, they sure didn't have
this
kind of thing," Jackie said from her supine position on the table. "In those days, you just crossed your fingers and hoped for the best. Can you tell what it
is
yet, Doc?"

"Yes. It's definitely a baby," the doctor joked.

Jackie emitted a yelp of a laugh, and the grainy figure on the sonogram seemed to jump.

"I mean the sex," Jackie said.

"Not from this, but in a few weeks we'll know. Do you want us to tell you when we do, Mrs. O'Malley?"

"Hell yeah," Jackie answered. "Don't we, Lainie?"

Lainie had never even thought about knowing the baby's sex before it was born, and whether she wanted to or not. She had asked Jackie to have the amniocentesis to be certain the baby had no genetic defects. She had no idea how Mitch would feel about knowing the sex before the birth.

"Absolutely," Jackie told the doctor. "That way they'll know if they want to name the baby Jackie for a girl or Jack for a boy," and then she laughed again. "That's a joke, Doc.
My
name is Jackie, and it's
their
baby." The doctor nodded with a slight smile.

"Look," Jackie said, pointing suddenly. "Every time I laugh, it bobbles all around. Isn't that adorable?"

Lainie tried to focus hard on the screen, but couldn't tell which part of the baby was which, or where the baby stopped and the rest of the picture started. This wasn't what she'd imagined at all. She'd thought that
what she would see would look like the photos in the books she'd rushed out to buy the day she heard Jackie was pregnant,
A Child Is Born
and
The Secret Life of the Unborn Child
. Now she squinted when the nurse turned on the bright fluorescent overhead lights.

"Mrs. O'Malley, I'm going to give you a light local anesthetic on the spot from which I'll extract the amniotic fluid. You'll feel a slight ping and that's all," the doctor told Jackie.

"What about when you put the big needle in?" Jackie asked, her voice sounding almost childlike.

"That shouldn't hurt," the doctor told her.

"Easy for
you
to say." Jackie laughed nervously.

The doctor didn't react.

"Laine?" Jackie said, picking up her head to look back at the spot where Lainie sat.

"Yeah?"

"Could you move a little closer and like . . . hold my hand?"

"Sure," Lainie said, looking at the doctor to ask if that was all right with him. And when he nodded, she moved close to the table and gently took Jackie's hand in hers. While the doctor extracted the amniotic fluid and Jackie squeezed Lainie's hand, the two women looked into each other's eyes and talked about maternity clothes, and which store they would go to when the amniocentesis was over.