I'll Be There (18 page)

Again with the agility he’d always had, which she used to think was almost sleight of hand and be jealous of every woman he had been with, since it was obviously a result of years and years of practice, he unbuttoned the top button on her slacks, then unzipped them and gentled them down to the floor by rubbing his own body against hers until the pants moved to her thighs, then to her knees, and when they were piled around her ankles, before she could step out of them he slid his fingers under the lace on the thigh of her panties and pressed them into the swollen throbbing folds longing to be caressed.

Oh, yes, she wanted it, and she pressed her pelvis hard against his fingers so he could feel the urgency in her, and he lifted her and carried her to the bed, quickly removing his own clothes, then the rest of hers, while she somehow managed to find an instant of presence of mind to grab for her purse on the floor and fish around inside it for one of the condoms she’d shoved in there just before she left her house.

But by the time she found it, he was moving astride her, and she helped him on with the balloonlike piece of rubber, afraid one of her nails might tear it, then looked at his very familiar body and his very familiar cock, and his face contorted with a passion she remembered so long ago could make her wild with desire for him, and realized with a sudden discomforting wave of sobriety she never had during sex, as he entered her with a first thrust, that it was only the lubrication of the condom that made his slide inside of her anything but unyielding,

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because she felt nothing. Then he thrust harder and this time she was wetter as her body responded to the sex, any sex because it had been so long, but she knew as she began to relax into the physical feelings, that this moment she had hoped for was nothing more than what she’d heard people call a mercy fuck. Because all she felt for him now was sorry.

Sorry he was pushing sixty and still trying to find himself, sorry he had left his family instead of hanging in and working on his relationships with them because he had some fantasy that being with Cee Cee could fix his life, and that she had been a party to the fantasy because she’d needed it so badly herself. And now she knew that the security she had begun to feel about leaning on him had been a result of her bottomless need, and also a result of the front he’d developed to get her to depend on him so that he could manipulate her, and the truth was that she couldn’t go back again and find solace in him and security and a mind she respected the way she had when they were just starting out their life together. She had come too far to ever go back.

John was lost now in that other world of sexual heat, eyes closed, moving inside her against her to his own rhythm, and Cee Cee beneath him felt as detached as if she was watching from the back row of a movie theater. “Baby, we’re so close, we’re one person, how did I ever leave you, baby? Oh God, you feel so good to me, you’re mine, you’re still mine, aren’t you, baby? Oh, Cee Cee, oh yes.” It did feel good having a naked man against her own nakedness, it had been much too long and even in her removed watching-froma-distance place she had to admit that. But each time she opened her eyes and saw John there on top of her, so fi/led with the passion she was lacking for him, she knew that though it might be sad to feel anger or hatred about someone you once loved so much, what was much more heartbreaking was to feel pity.

After that night in Santa Barbara things started to slide badly. Cee Cee turned down the miniseries, John went out for a brief spurt of job hunting, and the tension between the two of them became palpable. Once Cee Cee snapped at him and overheard somebody on the crew joke, “Uh oh, trouble in paradise.” One Friday night Nina had stayed up late, but shortly after she’d fallen asleep she was awakened

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by the sound of Cee Cee and John having a fight downstairs. They were probably sitting at the dining-room table, which was directly under her room, so she could hear every word rising from their heated quarrel.

“Hcy, nothing pcrsonal, but you and I both know television is simply a lot of mindless bullshit for morons, which is why your show has been so successful for so long. Because it has no substance.”

“Is that right?” Cee Cee said. She had never thought her show was fodder for PBS, but bullshit for morons was a little low. “If television is such shit, then I’d like to know why you’ve been kissing up to so many people trying to worm your way into it.”

“Oh, now that’s funny. Who in the hell have I been kissing up to?” “Everyone I introduce you to. Everyone I don’t introduce you to. Everyone in the business.”

“You couldn’t be more wrong. Of course with your upbringing you wouldn’t know the difference between someone with charm and someone who is, to use your classy phrase, ‘kissing up.’”

“Oh, honey, let me tell you something,” Cee Cee said in a tone Nina recognized as her haul-off-and-let-one-go voice. “You have been so charming to so many people out here, rumor has it that your nose is browner than George Hamilton’s.”

Nina wasn’t sure what that line meant, but the giddy triumph she heard in Cee Cee’s delivery meant she’d probably been rehearsing it for a while. Then it was quiet and Nina figured maybe they were both sorry for being so mean to one another and had probably made up and were kissing or something, but then she heard John say, “Cee Cee, I’ve been talking to my wife on the phone every night, and the truth is I really miss her. I love her, and I never should have left her for some unrealistic fantasy I had about what you could be for me, or what we could have together, because you were never right for me and you still aren’t.”

Nina felt sick when she heard that, because so many times over the last few months she had seen a girlish look on Cee Cee’s face when she referred to John as a joke, as her “once and future husband,” that made Nina know she wasn’t joking, and now she wished she could rush downstairs and put her arms around Cee Cee, who had to feel after that news as if John had punched her in the stomach.

“When did you start talking to her every night?” Cee Cee asked

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with the same hurt Nina had heard from her on the first Mother’s Day they had pent together, when Nina had flared at her, “Don’t keep hinting around that it’s Mother’s Day. You’re not my mother and I’m not getting you any gift.” “Oh, I understand,” Cee Cee had said in that voice which had hit a chord so deep in Nina she’d walked immediately over to the Malibu pharmacy and spent ten dollars on a silver

compact and another dollar fifty on a card that said MOTHER’S DAY

GREETINGS TO SOMEONE SPECIAl,. But apparently that voice didn’t have the same effect on John, because now he went on to say, “I’m going home. It’s almost the holidays and I want my family back. My flight leaves tomorrow morning.”

There was no response, and Nina leaned over the edge of her bed to get her face closer to the floor so she could hear the next.

“You talked to her every night? Even when we were in Santa Barbara?”

“Even when we were in Santa Barbara.” “When? You were with me every minute.” “When you were in the shower.” “You filthy rotten lowlife.”

“Likewise I’m sure,” he said, and then Nina heard nothing until the sound of the front door slamming shook the house, and it took Nina a long time after that to fall asleep.

In the morning when she went downstairs she could smell coffee, and when she walked into the kitchen, Cee Cee was there, red-eyed and edgy and fighting to be cheerful. “I think you, me, and Kevin ought to go to the movies tonight,” she said. “Let’s find out what’s playing at the Malibu Cinema.” She was wearing a silk kimono and her face looked as if she hadn’t taken off her makeup properly the night before, still smudged around the eyes, and there was a little red spot on her cheek.

“John went back to Ohio?” Nina asked her as Cee Cee absently bit into a piece of toast that was black around the edges.

“Yeah,” Cee Cee said. “How do you know? Did you hear us fighting last night?”

“Uh-huh. He was really mean to you.”

“Yeah, that was pretty bad. And as if he hadn’t hurt me enough, I, like a schmuck, followed him out to the car and stood there crying while he was putting his things in the trunk. It was like I was saying,

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I didn’t have enough. Give me more shit. Can you believe it? So he did. He told me I had a star complex, that I take myself too seriously, and that I’ve lost my sense of humor. I was so hurt by that, I forgot to mention that only six months ago the New York Times called me the comedy star of the decade.” She giggled a ripple of a giggle at that, then looked at Nina with a pained grin that had toast crumbs all around it.

“Well, why didn’t you?”

“Well, I would have but at that moment, I didn’t remember.” “What do you mean?”

Cee Cee put her elbows on the table now and rested her face in her two hands. “I mean I lost it. He was rejecting me so I totally lost it, forgot that every day for the last two weeks I woke up with a speech in my head I was planning to make to him, about how you can’t go backward in life, and how even though it felt good to see him and be with him, and how I’d be willing, even glad to help his career in any way I could if he wanted my help, I couldn’t keep allowing him to take over my life the way he was trying to, and the way he did when I was a kid.”

“Good speech,” Nina said, putting a piece of bread in the toaster for herself.

“Isn’t it?” Cee Cee said. “Too bad it’s on the cutting room floor. I was even gonna say that he ought to start to meet some other women and date them because I didn’t want to go back to a romance with him, and certainly not a marriage. And all of a sudden when I heard him saying he was on his way back to Ohio, all my plans to be rational went right out the French doors. I mean, I panicked because all I could think was ‘He’s leaving me. How can he leave me?’ And I looked at the same man I couldn’t wait to get rid of two weeks before and thought, ‘How am I going to live without him?’

“So I said, and this is the part I hate myself for, in this real dramatic voice I said, ‘John … don’t go to her. Stay here and we’ll try to work it out.’ I still can’t believe I was so crazed I was asking him to stay and I didn’t even want him to. And then, as if it wasn’t bad enough, he said something that really got me. He said that after all this time, he’d better confess the truth, which was that when he showed up in Atlantic City, he was really coming to ask me to be an investor in the Sunshine… you know, that theater he used to own?

Not to renew, anything, not because he cared about me, but then when he aw me onstage that night he got tangled up in the web of his feelings’ for me. Do you love that phony bullshit? The web of his feelings? Like I was the spider and he was the fly, and that it took him till now to realize it was all just him reacting to the bad way his wife had treated him a few years back and trying to get back at her was childish and that he wanted to go home. ‘Of course, you do,’ I told him. ‘Maybe she can bask in your glory. But as far as I can see, you don’t even need any sunscreen to bask in that goddamned glory.’”

Cee Cee wiped her mouth with a napkin. Her eyes were full and her face was red, and she stood and walked away toward the sink for no apparent reason except to hide that fact from Nina. For a while she stared out the window at the ocean, then finally she asked Nina, “Can I fix you anything?”

“No thanks,” Nina told her, “I’ll just have my toast.” Then she walked over to the sink and put an arm around Cee Cee as the day filled with sunshine and a couple wearing matching white sweat suits jogged north along the beach outside the window.

I’LL BE THERE

Dear Cecilia,

First I’ll start by saying don’t get excited, it’s not a big deal because if it was I would call you up instead of writing it in this letter, but I’m not so hot in the ticker department if you know what I mean.

Believe me, you have got enough on your mind with a television show and somebody else’s daughter to worry about without having to think about me. So all I’m doing is writing to say “hello” and thanks for all the money you send me from some guy named Wayne Gordon’s office whoever he may be.

Time goes by so fast, it’s hard to believe your mother, may she rest in peace, is already gone so many years. If she was alive she would be calling you every day saying why don’t you come and visit once in a while, but I don’t believe in telling children what to do.

You know that old expression “all I know is what I read in the paper”? That’s what I should say, since down the street at the newsstand I see your picture in the paper all the time.

Everyone here thinks you’re some big deal, and when I tell them you’re my daughter, they think I am too.

Your father,

Nathan Bloom

MIAMI BEACH, FLORIDA

IN MIAMI BEACH the light of the day is so soft and flattering, Cee Cee decided, as her taxi drove down Collins Avenue, the reason why so many old people moved there had to be because the light made them look younger. Her father had lived in an apartment in Miami Beach off and on for years in which it had cost her a fortune to keep him, and now he was dying there in a Jewish convalescent home where it was costing her even more. She had been summoned by his doctor twe days ago, who told her Nathan was having chest pains and trouble breathing but that he refused to go into a hospital, and maybe her input would change his mind.

The call made Cee Cee want to pick up the phone, call Nathan, and shout, “Daddy, get your ass into the hospital,” but a lifetime of guilt for ignoring him prompted her to call off a few days of production meetings for her show and ask her travel agent to book her to Miami (God’s waiting room) Beach.

“Can I come too?” Nina asked. She was a skinny beanpole now, with long curly fly-away hair that was always in her eyes and a closelipped smile she used, to try to cover the mouthful of braces on her teeth.