I'll Be There

by Iris Rainer Dart

So when the painful vigil was over and she came home and looked at the years stretching before her, her first impulse was to goddamn enjoy them in a big way, to live it up. There were no men who interested her and vice versa, she knew from past experience that indulging in too much food would be bad for her career, she already had a great car, so she bought a house, a big gorgeous house on the beach for herself and for Nina.

  Every day since they’d left Carmel she had taken an emotional tally of how they were doing together, watching and monitoring the ups and downs. Worried because there had been quite a few little explosions between them. Like the one last week when Nina had given her

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  some of that haughty more-elegant-than-thou shit at which she was an expert and which could always start some sparks flying. There was no getting away from the fact that this kid had been so well trained by Bcrtie, she could go to lunch with the Queen of England and know what to do, and just like her mother, she didn’t hesitate to make a point of telling Cee Cee what she was doing wrong.

  “Did you send a thank-you note for those flowers?” she asked Cee Ccc the other day. That was what started it.

  wPlat.

  “The world doesn’t owe you a living, Cee Cee. Your agent didn’t

  have to send those roses just to welcome you back.”

  “I)o you have any idea how much money I made for that agency

  last year? Believe me, my agent had to send the roses. He ought to

  send me a thank-you note for the privilege of sending them.”

  “I don’t agree. My mother taught me that when someone takes the

  time and effort to send you something —”

  “He had his secretary send them,” Cee Cee had said, her voice rising, astonished at how much the kid’s getting on her case like that

  really bugged her.

  “But the thought was his,” Nina replied in a tone calm enough to

  make Cee Cee’S flaring temper feel stupid.

  “I already had a mother,” Cee Cee said, steaming.

  “Well, she must have forgotten to mention thank-you notes.” Hah! That time Cec Cee had burst out laughing, because the idea of Leona mentioning thank-you notes was pretty funny. “The only person Leona ever thanked was the doctor who told her after I was born hat she probably wouldn’t have any more babies.” Of course the truth was Nina was right about a lot of things. Especially the goddamned thank-you note. It took exactly three minutes for Cee Cee to dash off this really full-of-it thank-you note, and the other day when she stopped by Larry Gold’s office, she nearly fainted. The little twirp had framed the goddamned thing and it was hanging on his office wall.

  Then there was the constant battle about clothes. Cee Cee remembered how the saleslady at Saks had just about bust a gut overhearing

  that conversation.

  “Why?” Cee Cce asked looking at Nina’s choices for school clothes,

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  “does an eight-year-old kid want to dress like a forty-year-old

  woman ?”

  “And vice versa?” Nina had asked looking Cee Cee right in the eye, and when she did, Cee Cee glanced over her head at herself in the three-way mirror and realized she was wearing an off:the-shoulder sweatshirt, hicycle pants, lace tights, and high-topped basketball shoes.

  “Good point,” she said, and the subject was closed.

  And naturally, since Nina was Bertie’s daughter there had to be the whole discussion about language, just like the ones Cce Cee used to have with Bertie all the time. In fact sometimes when Nina opened that mouth of hers, it was so spookily like talking to Bcrtie, Ccc Cee had to look around to make sure it was the kid.

  “I’d like to ask you if you’d kindly stop saying F-U-C-K in front of me,” Nina said one night at the dinner table, pronouncing the letters

  of the word as carefully as if she were a finalist in a spelling bee. “I didn’t realize I ever did say it in front of you.” “That’s because it’s a bad habit.” “Huh?”

  “You say it automatically at least ten times a day.” “Me? Get the fuck outta here.” “Just like that.”

  “Ten times a day is impossible.”

  “Well, if you think it’s impossible, what if I fine you for every time

  you say it, and I get to keep the money?” “How much?” “A dollar.” “A nickel.” “A quarter.” “You’re on.”

  Okay, so by the end of the first week she owed Nina six bucks. But last week it was only a buck seventy-five, which was a big improvement. And now they had made it through six weeks. Six weeks of settling in, getting that this was forever. Figuring out what they were going to do next. Six whole weeks since the day the people came and carried Bertie out of the house in Carmel shoved into a body bag, so just the fact that it was still that fresh, and she and the pip

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  squeak had already survived tons of little battles and the big one of moving out of one house and into another, they were doing all right.

  Consider what happens when we are learning any new skill, whether it is playing bridge, playing golf, riding a motorcycle, playing the piano or anything else. We learn hy making literally thousands of mistakes. Why should learning the complex skills of raising a child be an exception to the rule? We should take it for granted that we will make mistakes and not berate ourselves or feel guilty about it.

  Cee Cee had closed the over-the-counter child psychology book after reading those words and said, “Yeah!” out loud. This was new to her, but eventually she’d get the hang of it and be great. Now she needed to get back into the swing of things in the business. Needed to call people and tell them she was back, needed to get a real good job to pay for this big fucking house. Frigging house. Fancy house. Some days she would call her agent five times in a row with ideas about how to get her career back on track, but other days she would sit incapacitated, numbly staring at the ocean for hours, not knowing or caring what time or even what day it was.

  And most important of all she had to find a school for Nina. In the last few days, after talking to everyone she could think of who had a child, she compiled a list of all the recommended private schools within a reasonable distance of the beach house, then she phoned the admitting offices of those schools and set a time to visit. This afternoon the two of them dressed, and as usual looked one another’s outfits over with patent disapproval, then headed off to the Buena Vista School, which had been recommended highly by Larry Gold, whose three kids were all registered there. While Nina was escorted on a tour of the place, Cee Cee sat talking with the headmaster. She had a list of questions a mile long, and after he had answered all of them, he took a long deep breath and launched into what, she could tell by the way he delivered it, had to be an often-repeated sales pitch.

  “Cee Cee, listen to me, our school caters specifically to the special needs of the children of people like yourself. Let’s face it. We all put our kids into schools where we’re comfortable, right? Of course I mean by that where the policies of the school are the same ones we live by at home. But also where we ourselves fit in with the parent body, if you know what I mean.” He waited for Cee Cee to nod and let him

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  know she knew what he meant, then he went on. “Now it’s pretty hard for me to believe you’d be more comfortable than in a school like ours where you’re surrounded by your colleagues.” He handed her the school’s roster. “Go ahead,” he said, “feel free to look through it. We’ve got more stars than the Milky Way. And the reason for that,” he added, “is because we’re cognizant of the needs of these families for privacy.”

  Cee Cee wanted to ask this guy if the school had such a great respect for privacy, why he was letting her, an outsider, look at the list of the names of people who were registered there. But instead she just shuffled through it, and had to agree that a lot of well-known people’s kids were registered
in that school.

  “This child has had a few tough breaks,” she said, looking into his eyes.

  “Oh, I know.” The headmaster’s name was Jason, and the more Cee Cee looked at him, the more she thought he looked too young to even be a teacher, let alone a headmaster. “I read about it in the paper,” he said, nodding, and Cee Cee wondered if he meant the Enquirer. “But she’ll be in understanding company here, because there are many kids from unusual situations, multiple stepfamilies, cohabiting parents who have never married one another, single parents whose spouses aren’t around anymore, or single parents who never had spouses in the first place. In fact in this school it’s the nuclear families who are unusual.” When his smiling eyes met Cee Cee’s concerned ones, he shrugged, laughed a little laugh, and said, “That’s show biz.”

  Cee Cee looked around his large office. There were a lot of pictures of this guy on every wall, eight-by-ten framed pictures of him standing among small groups of people. Now Cee Cee looked more closely and saw that one of the groups was Sylvester Stallone and one of his kids, and in another he was with Lesley Ann Warren and her son, then there was another of Jason with Goldie Hawn and her kids.

  “Well, we’ll give it a lot of thought,” Cee Cee said, standing, relieved that at that moment, through the floor-to-ceiling window that faced the school’s back lawn with a wide-angle view of the ocean, she could see Nina on her way back toward the administration building. Cee Cee shook the young headmaster’s outstretched hand and thanked him.

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  “So what are you working on now?” he asked, walking out the door of his office with her, and the question felt like a blow to her stomach. Larry Gold was trying to get a meeting for her with the network people she had walked out on when she went to Carmel all those months ago, but so far they were refusing even to listen to her apology. Trouble, she was known in the industry as trouble, her agent told her bluntly, but he was trying to smooth things over.

  “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.’”