I'll Be There (17 page)

“t tarold, I don’t know what the fuck’s going on,” she said, while a makeup lady with a sponge was dabbing more concealer under her eyes. “Look up, Cee Cee,” the makeup lady said, and Cee Cee tipped her head up a little and kept talking. “He’s available. Lonely even, thinks he wants to be with me, seems to have changed, and now he’s coming out here to see if he can find happiness in Tinsel Town. So how do I know what’ll happen? I’m a shell-shocked, gun-shy, beaten up broad who’s so short on trust that even when the talking scale in my bathroom tells me how much 1 weigh every morning, I say, ‘Bullshit.’ So who am I to tell you how I feel?”

Within weeks John arrived and was living at the Sunset Marquis Hotel. He looked more professorial than Hollywood, Nina thought, wearing corduroy pants no matter how hot the day and a sweater vest over a shirt, and a brown tweed blazer, that same brown tweed blazer he wore so often Nina joked to Cee Cee that pretty soon it might crawl off him and walk on its own to the cleaners. He would show up a few nights a week for dinner, and sit at the kitchen table with them, telling them funny stories about his adventures in show business.

Cee Cee acted relaxed with him, wearing no makeup and her hair in that funny way it looked after she took off the wigs she wore on her show, or pulled out the hairpins and just let it fly everywhere, and the three of them would eat and talk and most of all laugh at the stories, which came with John’s fresh point of view about the Hollywood whackos and their habits. About the crazy producer who invited him to the racetrack, where John watched the guy lose fifty thousand dollars on one race. The friend of the producer John worked for who had a portable bathroom in the back of his Mercedes limousine. “Hello? Yes this is his car phone, but he can’t talk to you now. He’S in his car men’s room,” John said. Nina was starting to like him, even starting to understand what it was about him that made both Cee Cee and her mother think he was attractive. And she also liked that he called his children in Ohio every day. Sometimes she over

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heard him say things like, “I love you too, and can’t wait to have you come here to be with me.”

When you do find a man with whom you develop a deep relationship that is leading toward marriage, you will discover that your children will have mixed feelings toward your husband-to-be. Your children will want a father surrogate in their lives, but on the other hand, they have had you to themselves and will be hesitant to give that up.

After Cee Cee read that in one of her books, she t,r.ied to include Nina as much as she possibly could so the kid wouldn t feel left out.

One night she brought out a pile of very old photographs she had’ found. One was taken on the day she and John were married. Cee Cee was wearing the weirdest white dress, and looking really goo-goo eyed. And while they looked at it they argued for ten minutes about who had taken the picture, the judge or one of those bizarre witnesses they had dragged in off the street because having the wedding had been such a last-minute decision they hadn’t invited anyone. One of the pictures was inside a little red plastic viewer that Nina put against her eye and held up to the light to see. It was taken at the pool of some hotel in Miami Beach, and in it both Cee Cee and John wore annoyed expressions as if they weren’t too happy that the picture was being taken at all. “That was the week we broke up,” Cee Cee remembered to John, and then told Nina. “And the week your mother and I made up after a long fight we had.”

“About what?” Nina asked her.

Cee Cee took another turn looking at the picture in the viewer. “I don’t remember,” she said.

Nina’s favorite picture was one she’d seen before, which John looked at now. It was of Cee Cee anc John and Bertie in Hawaii. Cee Cee was so skinny it was amazing, and they all looked so happy and young. John shook his head the way people do when they’re about to say, “Where does the time go?” But he didn’t say that, he just looked at Cee Cee and said, “You haven’t changed a bit.” And she said, “Neither have you. You’re still as full of shit as you always were,” and gave him a little punch on the arm.

It felt good to be so comfortable with a man, and the odd part was that she wasn’t sleeping with him. Particularly odd since everything below her waist fluttered every time he walked into the room. But for

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once in her life, instead of being led by the underpants she was trying to behave like a grown woman, to reserve judgment, to see what happened.

The first thing that happened was that John’s producer friend was offered a power job at an agency, which he took, so he no longer needed John, which meam that John was out looking for a job every day. Cee Cee called some of her friends at the studios, who said they would look out for something for him, and she asked Larry Gold to try to get some producers he knew to try to find something for John, but after some time passed and he couldn’t find any job at all and didn’t even have a job interview in sight, he started hanging around at the studio on Fridays when Cee Cee’s show was taping.

Nobody seemed to mind him being at the tapings, everyone was friendly to him. He chatted with all of the people on the staff of the show. Sometimes after they’d repeated the same sketch again and again, and he was tired of watching it, he would walk down and sit in the commissary to have a cup of coffee and read the trade papers, and soon people who ate there regularly knew him by name and knew that he had something to do with Cee Cee, probably he was her boy friend. Seemed like a decent guy.

Then he started coming to the rehearsals during the week too, sitting in the back on a folding chair with a little spiral notebook in which every now and then he’d scratch some notes. Later, when Cee Cee was taking a break, he’d come into the dressing room and when everyone was gone but the two of them, he would take out the spiral notebook and say things to her like, “You know that spot in the hospital sketch where you’re the doctor giving the patient the reflex test? Well whoever that day player is, he’s mugging so much it upstages everything you’re doing.”

“He’s not a day player. He’s part of the company of people who do the sketches with me.”

“Well, the director is doing you a major disservice if he keeps letting him get away with that behind you.”

“I’ll look into it,” she said. There were more notes like that. They were good notes. Good for Cee Cee, from someone who seemed to care more about her than about the general welfare of the show. It was much more personal care than she’d ever had from Larry Gold. And it felt familiar, because it was the way John had advised her when

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she was a young struggling singer, and the way Leona had focused on her, from the phrasing of each line she sang to the color of the mascara she wore. But she liked it for another reason too. Because John was telling it to her like it really was and, with very few exceptions, she was already up to her ears in yes-men. People who always said, “You were brilliant, Cee Cce,” even when she knew she wasn’t.

“That sketch is completely tasteless,” John would tell her after

watching the rehearsal. “Beneath you and the show. Don’t do it.” “Arc you sure?”

“Think about what it says. Is that the kind of statement you want to make?”

This man directs Shakespeare, she would think. He must have class. I do hooker jokes. What do I know? I’ll have them cut it,” she would say after reading it again through newly educated eyes, and go out to face the producer and the head writer to tell them to cut the sketch, knowing they would exchange looks and tell her she was being difficult, but she didn’t care what they did. John was right, and she was starting to feel very tied to him again. The man she had been the most intimate with in her life.

How odd that she had been continuing to fend off their sexual intimacy. Hadn’t let him lay a finger on her all this time, though they joked about it and it was always in the air between them. But she had to admit she was starting to feel so hooked into him that she didn’t want to think of what adding sex to what they had now could mean to them emotionally.

It didn’t take people long to start thinking of John as a good way to get to Cee Cee. If the netvork wanted her to do some promotions or get her to come and perform at the affiliates convention, something she hated, they would start the convecsations with John to feel out how he liked their ideas, or to have him help them determine what was the best way” to approach her. One afternoon at the commissary a successful television producer named Jay Green put his coffee cup on the table across from where John was sitting, and when John looked up, Jay Green smiled and introduced himself. After they’d talked for a while, he told John he’d like to give him a script to read that was a potential miniseries with a part in it that was perfect for Cee Cee.

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“She won’t do a miniseries. We think she should only do features,” John told him.

The television producer’s eyes smiled at that statement, but the rest of his face was serious as he said something about how he was sure John would change his mind when he read the script he had in mind and also, he dropped, it might be something John would be interested in co-producing with him. So John took the script and read it several times, making notes about things in the story he thought should be changed and parts of what the lead character did that wouldn’t be suitable for Cee Cee, and over the next two weeks he took several meetings with Jay Green before even mentioning the project to Cee Cee.

The night he did mention it to her, her mind was in a million different places, and later when she thought back to it, all she remembered was John saying he had a chance to produce some television show, and she had thought, Thank God, he’s going to have a job, and she said “Great.” So when Larry Gold called her at home and said he needed to talk to her without anybody else around, she couldn’t imagine what was such a big deal and a secret, but she took the call in her bedroom and closed the door.

“Look, forgive me,” he started out. “But you and I have been together for a lot of years. Okay? And I’m hoping we’ll continue to be for a lot more years, so I’ll be straight with you. Are you shtupping that guy Perry? I mean is that why he thinks he can take meetings on projects and make promises to people that you’re gonna do the projects without even checking in with me?”

“What?”

“Jay Green thinks that I should be opening negotiations on your behalf for some piece of dreck miniseries I don’t think you would spit on. And he says he knows you’re available to do it because Perry’s his partner, and that’s what Perry’s saying. Cee Cee, what’s the haps here? I thought we decided no miniseries and no Movies of the Week.”

Cee Cee searched her mind trying to think if she had said yes to something and forgotten about it, or led John to believe she wanted to do a miniseries. To begin with she hadn’t even read whatever script Larry was talking about. But she didn’t want to tell that to Larry. It would make John look ridiculous, so instead she said, “Well, we did discuss the fact that it was a terrific part.”

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“You’ve got to be kidding!” Larry said. “With a page-one rewrite by Alvin Sargent, maybe it’s a good part. But other than that, this thing belongs in the trash masher. Cee Cee, I’m always the first one

to tell you how brilliant you are. But, in this case.., reconsider.”

Reconsider. Reconsider what? John had committed her to something and she wasn’t even certain what the something was.

“Not really committed. How could I commit you without you seeing it? Don’t be crazy,” he told her that night. Antonia, the housekeeper, was off, Nina was at Kevin’s, and John had brought takeout Chinese from the Mandarin for dinner for the two of them. “Look, I have to admit the script is not one hundred percent. But Jay says once we get the network to say yes, we can afford to bring in a new writer and I’ll supervise the writing. That way we’ll know from day to day exactly what we’re getting. I’ll tell you what. On Saturday morning, let’s drive up to Santa Barbara. You can read the script in a bungalow at the Biltmore, and we can get away from all the tensions here. I know you’re going to see the potential in this, and drop your prejudices about miniseries.”

Cee Cee watched him while he said all that, opening all of the little

white cartons of Chinese food, as the steam rose from each one, not looking at her while he talked. For a long time she’d recognized that to be in her position was to be a target for every person who thought she could help to get them something they needed or somewhere they wanted to go, and though that had probably been true for years and years, this was the time when she prayed it wasn’t the case. Figured that John, since he had loved her when she had been nowhere and nobody, would be exempt from needing her that way. And on Saturday night in the bungalow at the Santa Barbara Biltmore she let him make love to her for the first time in fifteen years, hoping the act of sex would not only ease her worries but rekindle some deeply rooted passions from years before.

Every man she’d been with since him, no matter how hot and sexy,

took a while to psych her out, and of course the reverse was true, too. To know exactly where and when to touch one another, how hard to press here, how gently to rub there, which moans meant go on and which meant stop. But within seconds the two of them had one another going the way they always had during their ten-year mar° riage. He was holding her face in his two hands, telling her how he’d

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never stopped loving her, knowing how she always needed to hear the words, how protestations of love were more erotic to her than any touch. She was holding his great ass and pulling his pelvis toward her, while he promised her they were going to be together forever, telling her how much he wanted her, how he’d lived his life just waiting to come back to her this way, then pulling her to him hungrily and kissing her with a long searching kiss, during which he moved his hands under her sweater, easily in one move unfastening the front clasp on her bra, then finding her nipples and taking them between his thumb and forefinger the way he remembered she loved it and playing with them first softly, then squeezing until she moaned, and then if only from the long absence of sex in her life she was filled with heat, the aching needy place inside her that had to have him there to fill it, and she felt her knees getting weak.