I'll Be There (8 page)

“I’ve got a lot of stuff cooking,” she said, trying to sound even. “Well, that’s good,” the headmaster said, “because I’m a big fan.” Now Nina was standing next to her. When the headmaster put out his hand for the girl to shake, she gave him a look-intheeyefirm-grip Cee Cee knew Bertie must have insisted on, said, “Thank you so much for your time,” and she and Cee Cee were off down the hall.

“So, what do you think?” Cee Cee asked her when they got into the car.

“I think I should go to the public school in our neighborhood,” she answered. “I don’t want to go to a school for weird kids from weird families. I want to feel like I’m with real kids. And anyway, all they did on the tour was drop names and ask me what you were like.”

“Neen, your life is special now and your circumstances are too.” “I’m not special, you are.”

“Well, the public school in our neighborhood won’t work,” Cee Cee said.

“And Buena Vista won’t either,” Nina snapped.

Cee Cee drove silently for a few blocks, their mutual frustration hanging in the air.

More stars than the Milky Way. The kid’s right, Cee Cee thought. That’s not the place for her. But somehow she had to find a school that offered some degree of safety and privacy to a child whose family profile was so high, one that would give Nina the feeling of normalcy her homelife with Cee Cee would never provide. Someplace where she could see that another lifestyle was possible, and where she would be among lots of families, whole ones, the kind she might want to have herself someday. “Don’t worry. We’ll find the right place,” she said, not sure if she was talking to herself or Nina. It would have to be a good school too, because this kid was one smart little cookie, very intense, with an overanalytical mind that never quit. At bedtime she

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and Cee Cee would take turns reading to one another, and Nina always had a million serious questions about even the most frivolous storybooks.

“At Piglet’s house the water was coming in through the window. He had just written a note which read ‘HELP, PIGLET, ME.’ Piglet put the note in a bottle whichfloated out of the window and out of sight. And then Piglet floated out of the window and out of sight.” Nina had stopped after reading that paragraph aloud to Cce Cec and asked, “I)o you think Piglet wrote ‘Help Piglet’ and then signed the note The’? Or do you think he wrote ‘Help’ at the top and The’ at the bottom and then only had room in the middle to sign it ‘Piglet’? Or do you think he wrote ‘Help Piglet’ and then thought he should explain that the note was written about himself so he wrote The’ in the middle of the page?” Cee Cee couldn’t believe the worried expression on the little girl’s face while she waited for the answer to those questions. And that was the way her compulsive little mind worked all the time.

“Honey, I think,” Cee Cee had said, putting an arm around her, “that when the water’s too deep, we just blurt out the message and don’t stop to think how it comes out.” That seemed to satisfy Nina for the moment, and as they read on, Cee Cee thought about her own life. Like Piglet she was in too deep. When Larry Gold called and said Peter Flaherty at the network had finally agreed to “take a meeting” with her, she knew she was supposed to be happy, but instead she felt afraid, because she was so desperate for it to work out.

“Tell them I have a child now, Larry. Tell them I’m the new Nixon. Say I need to work more than ever. One of those people must have kids, somebody there should understand that.” She couldn’t believe his response.

“Trust me, you’re gonna have to kiss a few asses to pull this one off. Cee Cee, you know what the numbers were. You cost them a million five by walking out and going to be with your sick friend. And don’t get me wrong, because I understand that kind of stuff, I cry at the drop of a hat, but you’re nuts if you think Peter Flaherty gives a shit. Remember the joke about the guy who needed the heart transplant, and he couldn’t find a donor? And finally they brought in Denton Cooley, the specialist, who looked the patient over and said, ‘I recommend giving him Peter Flaherty’s heart. After all, he never

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uses it.’ I promise you, Cee, the network only cares about people who are dying if there’s a Movie of the Week in it.”

The next morning on the way over to the meeting in Larry’s Jaguar xjs convertible with the top down, the wheel of which he was barely tall enough to see over, he said, “It’s pretty amazing that even after the article on the front page of the Calendar section, Flaherty is still in that job. I mean, you know every word of it was true.”

Cee Cee wondered as she looked at Larry Gold’s tiny hands clutching the wheel of the Jaguar, then at his serious little face, if when he drove the car and there was no one in the passenger seat, whether people who were driving behind him thought his car was a runaway vehicle. The idea of that made her smile.

“Yeah, pretty funny, wasn’t it?” Larry said, taking her smile as a response to his question.

“Wasn’t what?” She hadn’t heard a word.

“That article in the Times. Oh maybe you were in Carmel when it came out. About Flaherty and the psychic?”

Cee Cee had no idea what he was talking about, and she could see that Larry Gold warmed to the telling of the gossip the way the old women on her front stoop in the Bronx always did, just after some neighbor passed by whom they were eager to trash.

“Flaherty actually had some girl on the network payroll, with a three-year contract, and the girl was. a psychic who told him which shows to pick up and which to cancel and where to slot them in the lineup.”

“Didn’t seem to do him any good,” Cee Cee said, pulling down the visor in front of her and looking at herself in the mirror. “His network is still number four out of a possible three.”

“Which is why after two years of bad predictions, Flaherty dumped the girl, who was not too happy about it.”

“If she was any kind of a psychic, she’d have seen it coming,” Cee Cee said, and she and Larry both laughed.

“So instead of just saying, ‘I had a nice ride for a couple of years on the network’s dough,’ the psychic …”

“Calls the L.A. Times and tells them the story,” Cee Cee interrupted.

“Yeah. How didyou know?” Larry asked driving up Highland Avenue toward the freeway.

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“I’m psychic,” Cee Cee said.

“Everyone went crazy while it was in the papers. Even Johnny Carson was doing jokes about it, but I guess it passed.”

Cee Cee’s hair blew wildly around her face as they sailed along the Hollywood Freeway. She hadn’t had a haircut or hair color in more than three months, hadn’t done anything for herself the entire time she was in Carmel, and then this morning in anticipation of the network meeting she’d spent hours trying to get her hair not to look like a bad imitation of Harpo Marx. But after this ride there was no hope. She hated that she felt nervous, and that she couldn’t even seem to calm herself with the news that she was on her way to meet with a man who was so insecure himself he had to hire a psychic to tell him what to do.

“Hey, these people were ready to sue you,” Larry told her as he pulled into the parking lot at the network, gave a friendly wave to the guard, and found a spot next to what Cee Cee recognized as Peter Flaherty’s Ferrari, “but I parlez-voused a little, and I think now they get the idea that when you walked out on the show, you had no choice. I mean, that’s what I told them. I said to them … ‘People, this girl is not difficult, this girl is not Judy Garland. She doesn’t even

touch drugs anymore.’”

“Did you say that?”

“No! Are you crazy?” Larry Gold laughed. “I’m kidding you. It’s like that joke. ‘When did you stop beating your wife?’ No, what I said to Flaherty and that girl who works for him, Michelle, I said, ‘Do yourself a favor, let Cee Cee come in, we’ll sit, she’ll explain it, you’ll hear her side of the story and we’ll get the whole thing back together in no time.’”

Peter Flaherty’s office was furnished with white sofas, white chairs, and glass tables on chrome bases so that the sun pouring in through the floor-to-ceiling windows bounced off the reflecting surfaces, making Cee Cee want to put on her dark glasses, but she didn’t because she was afraid that would make her look too Hollywood, and for this meeting she had to look down-to-earth and sincere.

Flaherty was wearing a tailor-made shirt and an expensive tie and gray suit pants. The jacket was hung neatly on the back of his desk chair. He had a slim, boyish body, a fair complexion with freckles,

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and perfectly coiffed strawberry blond hair. There was no doubt the guy was great looking. Cee Cee knew that in television circles he was known as a cocksman and was sometimes referred to as “The Red Fox.” Probably, Cee Cee thought, he had given that name to himself, then hired a press agent to pass it around. As she watched him chatting with Larry Gold, she remembered one night at a party at Jerry Wcintraub’s house when Flaherty had pulled her into the powder room and made a pass at her. He was the president of the network. The girl, as Larry Gold had called her, was Michelle Kleier, the executive vice-president of programming. She was bouncy and cute with short blond hair and big brown eyes, and she was very obviously pregnant. Her greeting to Cee Cee was a little warmer than Flaherty’s, but there was a strain in her smile that made Cee Cee know this wasn’t going to be a welcome home party.

The third henchman was Tim Weiss, vice-president of specials. He was young and handsome, with dark wavy hair and horn-rimmed glasses, and he looked as if he had just walked straight out of some magazine ad for men’s cologne. Cee Cee remembered him from last summer, when he was the executive assigned to her special, as being wide-eyed and idealistic. This morning he looked at her with the helpless look people give to the mourners at funerals.

When everyone had greeted one another, Peter Flaherty announced to his secretary that he would stop taking phone calls, the door to the outer office was closed and everyone was seated, and then there was a long cold silence during which everyone looked at Cee Cee, making it obvious that she was the one who was supposed to talk first. She had made a big expensive mistake, and now they were waiting for her to explain why and to apologize humbly. All of their faces blurred in front of her, and she was sure she would never remember what it was she had rehearsed and then promised Larry she would say, but she started talking anyway, hoping it would come to her, and it did.

“Larry and I both thought it would be a good idea if I came in and told you why I walked out on the show. I’m sorry if it seemed irresponsible to you, and I understand why you’d be angry, but something very emotional happened to me and at the time I felt as if I had no choice but to do what I did.” Dumb, she thought to herself as she said it. I sound like a fourth-grader, apologizing for cutting school.

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“Yes,” Peter Flaherty said, “we heard there was a death in your family, and that kind of threw you for a while.”

“It was my best friend. She called me one day when I was in rehearsal for the show and said she needed to see me right away. So I rushed out and went up to Carmel, thinking I’d just stay the night and be back at rehearsal in the morning. But when I got there she told me she’d invited me because she wanted to let me know that she was dying and to say goodbye, and she wanted to do that in person in order to let me know she was okay about it.

“And she was okay. Brave and tough, with all her papers in order and ready to hit the road. Only the thing was that I wasn’t okay about it because she was the first real friend I ever had in my life, and also the only really close one I ever had, and I wasn’t ready to let her go. So I never stopped to figure out what it was going to cost anybody down here if I stayed with her until she died, because all of a sudden, all I could think about was that I couldn’t let her be escorted out of this life by people who might do a good job of keeping her sickroom clean and getting her fed, but who had already written her off as dead when there was still enough life left in her that she could be enjoying.

“So I stayed. I didn’t take the time to come down here and work out how and when to reschedule everything, because there wasn’t any time to take, and I guess I knew if I called to discuss it with Larry or my business manager, Wayne, they’d try to convince me to come back, and I couldn’t come back. Because, my plan was to escort her out laughing, since that was how she and I always handled everything bad in our lives. We laughed about them and made them okay. So when she was feeling low because she probably wouldn’t make it till Christmas, I got a tree and we had Christmas in July, and I sent for her daughter and got her to come out from Florida and be with us, and we all sat out on the beach and laughed and argued and did dumb jokes about dying. We really enjoyed the time until finally my friend had nothing left.., and I had to let her go.”

That was the end of what she had to say, and the minute she spoke those last words, she knew there was something irreverent and wrong about making the speech in the first place. Because now she understood that what Larry Gold told her was true. These people would never understand in a lifetime how much it had meant to her to be able to spend those months with Bertie.

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“Look, I apologize for screwing up the show by walking out, because when I finally took time to think about it I realized that part was wrong, very wrong, but I also know that staying with my friend in Carmel was right. The rightest thing I’ve ever done.”

The two men didn’t react at all, and the woman lowered her eyes and looked down at the floor.

“And now I’m okay,” Cee Cee said, knowing it was a dirty lie, because she wasn’t anywhere close to okay. She still woke up in the middle of the night feeling around for Bertie’s medication, sometimes jumping up out of bed to go to her, and some nights getting as far as her own bedroom door before she realized where she was and that Bertie was dead. But she needed these people to think she was okay so they’d give her back her show, and then she would be. She’d take off the extra weight she’d put on while she was in Carmel, work any hours she had to. Do whatever it would take to get the old show happening again.