I'll Be There (11 page)

I’LL BE THERE

69

tunity to snap a few pictures of them in their pajamas with a tiny camera they didn’t notice. Within a few days those pictures were all over the tabloids. The sleazoids.

The day Cee Cee stopped at the Colony Market to pick up a few groceries and spotted the issue of the Enquire; she felt as if she’d been slapped, wanted to call an attorney and sue those lousy sneaky lowlifes, in fact she was about to pick up the phone and call her lawyer to see if there was anything they could do to avoid that kind of invasion of privacy when the phone rang. It was Barbara Gilbert.

“Cee Cee,” she said, “I apologize for taking so long to get back to you but I had to present the idea of you and Nina to our board, and I’m so sorry to say, they don’t feel your family will work in our school community. But thanks for thinking of us, and I wish you luck.”

Cee Cee put the phone down and went back to get her list of private schools. Nina was in the kitchen reading Weekly Variety.

“Boy, if this is the schedule of shows that are coming on,” she said without looking up, “I’d think they’d be begging you to come back and do yours.” Cee Cee had to hold in a snort of surprise at the attitude of expertise that accompanied the comment.

“Thanks,” she said moving nearer as Nina closed the paper because an item on the front page caught her eye. FLAHERTY EXITS WEB FOR IND1E PROD. Her eyes skimmed the column which was written to make it sound as if Peter Flaherty had chosen to resign from the network to become an independent producer, but probably, Cee Cee thought, the psychic scandal had finally caught up with him.

“Neen, they won’t take us at Elmhurst … but I want you to know it’s because of me … not because of you … so I think we should …”

“I don’t care,” Nina said. “I’m glad. I want to go to the public school .”

Cee Cee sighed and looked down at her list. She was not going to let an eight-year-old girl decide what was best for herself. She would continue the search until they found the right school and that was that. “I’ll call Crossroads tomorrow,” she said. Crossroads was another private school in Santa Monica.

“Oh, while you were t the market, Larry Gold called,” Nina remembered. “It’s important too. You’re doing The Tonight Show.”

70

IRIS RAINER DART

Cee Cee had a simultaneous surge of elation and terror. “When?”

“This atternoon. He said somebody dropped out at the last minute and the talent coordinator wants to see you as soon as you can get there. Can I come and watch?”

“Of course,” Cee Cee said.

“Larry Gold’s office.”

“It’s Cec Ccc Bloom for Larry.”

“Hold on.”

Larry Gold clicked on. Cee Cee heard the triumphant note in his voice. “So, you told me to get you a job..I’m still working on it. In the meantime I got you an appearance on The Tonight Show. They’re excited to have you.”

“Larry, how can I do The Tonight Show with no notice? I’m a wreck here. I haven’t sung in months, I look like something the cat dragged in, I have nothing planned to talk about. I’ll bomb out there. You know if you don’t get big laughs, Johnny gets that bored look on his face and never wants you to come back. I can’t even find a writer with this kind of notice.”

“Cee Cee, calm down. There’s a hairdresser over there, a good makeup man. I’ll drive you over, you’ll pitch some ideas with the talent coordinator about what you want to talk about with Johnny. I just put down the phone with Hal, he’s going to meet us there with a half a dozen or so songs you’ve sung a million times. You bring any music you like, and Doc is going to be there to rehearse the music

with you. You’re not going to bomb.”

“How do you know?”

“I know,” he answered. “And if you do? You’re no worse off than you were a few weeks ago.”

“You mean it isn’t too late to say yes to the feminine hygiene commercial?” she asked, but Larry had clicked off.

There was an eerie, dreamlike state that went along with being on The Tonight Show. Maybe, Cee Cee thought, it was because the scene of Johnny Carson at his desk and the famous sofa with the hot seat next to him was so familiar after seeing them on TV year after year, that suddenly when they were there, real and three-dimensional and it was

I’LL BE TItERE

71

you sitting next to Johnny in the seat usually occupied by Burt Reynolds or David Steinberg, it was like stepping into a familiar book and becoming part of the story. And it was the real you Johnny was talking to, whoever the hell that was. Not a character you were playing in a movie.

Or maybe the whole thing was so strange because it was loaded with pressure, since everybody knew that a shot on The “Ibnight Show was always seen by so many people, which meant that scoring could make a nobody into a star or revive a flagging career. So the urgency of having every second count must be just like it was for a batter who stepped up to the plate during the World Series. Cee Cee remembered reading articles about ballplayers who described the moment when the ball was hurtling toward them, as seeming to be slowed in time, when the ball looked huge to them as their expanded consciousness readied them to slam the home run. And it was with her adrenaline pumping and that same kind of altered perception of time during which she heard Johnny set her up for what she planned to say, loud and in quotation marks.

“We haven’t seen you around for a long time. How’ve you been?” he asked, eyes twinkling, after the applause which followed her entrance.

“How have I been?” she asked, then held up two tabloid covers she had brought with her from home. Each of them had a full-page color picture of Cee Cee and Nina at home, candid photos of them in their pajamas. “You’d have to live on Mars not to know how I am.”

There was a close-up shot of the pictures. “That’s you at home with your little girl,” Johnny said. “How do they get pictures like that?” he asked, with his perfect timing.

“Well, in this case, I ordered a pizza and the deliveryman came and asked us, ‘What did you want on your pizza?’ So we said, ‘Cheese’ … and he took our picture.”

The audience laughed, and the glorious sound of the laughter sent a flush of triumph through Cee Cee.

“No!” Johnny said, in feigned disbelief, tapping his pencil. Cee Cee nodded.

“Some people get pepperoni with their pizza?” she told him. Beat. Beat. Beat. “I get paparazzi.”

Another big laugh. Johnny laughed.

72

IRIS RAINER DART

“Well, you too. Right?” Cee Cee asked him. “I heard the photographers were hiding on the beach right outside your house in Malibu. In fact, if I’m not mistaken, all America drooled over the picture of the gorgeous creature sitting on the deck in a brief little bathing suit.” Johnny nodded, as Cee Cee added, “And your date wasn’t bad either.” Big laugh and then she turned to the audience and just as the laughter was beginning to ebb she asked, “The old boy still looks pretty good, doesn’t he?”

The audience applauded, Johnny pretended to blush, and the rest of the interview sailed along with laughs and approving nods from Johnny and it seemed as if only seconds had gone by and then he asked her to get up and sing. Singing would be the easy part. She’d been vocalizing all afternoon.

“This song is for Nina,” she told Johnny. “She’s in the audience.” Then she turned to the camera and said, “For those of you who don’t read the tabloids, her mother was my best friend and she died, and now I’m her guardian, and I’m sorry I lost my friend but I’m glad I have Nina.” The camera got a shot of Nina, dressed up for the occasion, grinning, while Cee Cee walked over to the piano where Hal sat waiting, and as Cee Cee perched on a stool he played the intro and she sang,

You and me against the world

Sometimes it feels like you and me against the world

When all others turn their back and walk away

You can count on me to stay…

It was a Paul Williams song Cee Cee had always loved, and the way things had been going it felt right to sing it to Nina.

And for all the times we’ve cried

I’ve always felt that God was on our side…

When the song was finished, the studio audience, especially Nina, applauded, and even Johnny wiped away what might have been a tear before he pointed the eraser end of his pencil at the camera and said, “We’ll be right back.”

That night when the show aired Cee Cee couldn’t bring herself to watch it, and when no one called after it was over she told herself it

I’LL BE THERE

was because it was too late at night. As she tried to fall asleep, the beats of everything she’d said earlier at the taping of the show played themselves over and over in her head. “And your date wasn’t bad either.” In the morning she woke up so early it was barely light and she slipped on a kimono and sat for a long quiet time in the windowseat of her room looking out at the people already on the beach. A man with white hair walked south along the water’s edge with a big black dog splashing happily through the surf next to him, and jogging along in the other direction a hot-looking young hunk of a guy, his big chest wet with the effort of the run, his blue-and-white-striped shorts clinging to him. Cee Cee watched him all the way up the beach, thinking she couldn’t even remember the last time she’d had a good hard man next to her, on top of her, wanting her.

Of course being at the beach seemed to magnify her lack of a lover because it was such a sexy, oily, half-naked, lusty place, and when the sun set, the balmy evenings seemed to scream for someone to love, hold, be with, and failing that, she laughed to herself, a nice hot little roll around in the sack. But there was no one. This morning she padded downstairs and made herself a pot of coffee in the kitchen which was silent, except for the crashing of the waves outside, then she sat down at the round oak breakfast table to look again at the list of remaining private schools.

What was she doing to this kid? If she didn’t get her into a school soon, some truant officer or welfare person was going to come and put Cee Cee in bad-parent prison. No joke, she thought, since there would, in fact, be a hearing coming up about her guardianship and surely they would want to know not only all about Nina’s education so far, but whether or not Cee Cee had a job.

Ass in gear, she thought. I’ve gotta get my ass in gear and find a school today. At eight o’clock she was on the phone to all the private schools left on her list. Some of them had no room in Nina’s grade, some said they would be glad to interview the child and put her on a waiting list for next year. By ten o’clock she had found a few private schools on her list with available spots for Nina, so she made two appointments a day for the next three days at those, and then stood to go and tell Nina. She could hear by the laughter in her room that she was in there playing with one of her friends. God, she thought, aren’t kids lucky, the way they can just meet another kid and say,

74

IRIS RAINER DART

“Wanna play?” and two minutes later they were in business. Too bad that wasn’t the way it worked with grownups.

“Hi, kids,” Cee Cee said, trying not to trip on all the toys on the floor of Nina’s room.

“This is Kevin,” Nina said.

“Yeah, hiya, Kevin,” Cee Cee said, nodding in the boy’s direction, then looked down at her list and proceeded to read off the names of the schools they were going to visit and the times of the visits.

“Cee Cee …” Nina said when she’d finished. “I don’t want to go to a private school.”

“I know you don’t,” Cee Cee said, hoping they weren’t going to end up in an argument in front of some kid who had come to play. “But there’s no choice so let’s not go through it,” she said, trying to keep her voice even.

“I want to be a real person,” Nina said, her voice sounding suddenly adult. “Kevin doesn’t go to a special school for the same reason. We don’t want to be weirdos,” Nina said, standing, and Kevin stood too, and now Cee Cee looked at him for what was really the first time.

His hands were knotted fists, and his arms were raised in a V, upward from his elbows. His head was tossed loosely back as if he needed to look at her from his lower eyes, since heavy and unmoving eyelids covered his upper eyes.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “You didn’t have too much to drink. I always look like this. I have cerebral palsy.” And then he laughed, a kind of cackle of a laugh, and Nina smiled a big smile.

“He lives on the Old Road just down from here, and he told me his mother fought to be able to get him into the public school. She went into the office and hollered at people to let him stay there.”

Kevin wasn’t easy to look at. He was only nine or ten, but the struggle he must have already lived was apparent in his wise gaze, and Cee Cee leaned against the bedpost of Nina’s canopied bed for support. Dear God, she thought as she got the point loud and clear. If you’re unusual, you long for sameness. To be part of the mainstream. The same way she had longed just to go to school and out for a cheeseburger with the other kids instead of going to dancing school to become a funny-faced tap-dancing outcast, the way this kid Kevin must long to be treated every day of his life and Nina too. Maybe, she thought, I have to let this one go.

I’LL BE THERE

“Let me think about it,” she said folding the paper with the private school names on it, and folding it again and again and one more time, then slipped it into the pocket of her kimono. Later that day she called Webster Elementary School, the public school in her neighborhood, to tell them that tomorrow she would bring Nina by to register.

“There’s a to-die-for part in a picture at Universal,” Larry Gold told her a few days later.

“Thank God,” she said.

“But they want you to test for it.”

“Test for it? Come on.”

“Big people are testing. Not just you.”

“You mean a lot of people are being considered for the part besides me?”