The Stork Club (23 page)

"I understand," he said, rising. She stood too, her pumpkin of a belly protruding in a kind of point from under the maternity blouse. Then she moved her notebook and her Bic pen into her left hand, thrust her right hand out for Rick to shake, and when he had, she walked briskly to the front door and was gone.

Rick looked down at the lavish spread of food he'd had his housekeeper put out on the coffee table in order to impress the girl, who hadn't touched one bite: an elaborate cheese tray, a caviar mousse, homemade brownies, and fruit. And after he heard Lisa's sister's rented car pull away, he sat down and ate most of the food himself.

18

W
ITHIN A FEW WEEKS he was relieved to find that despite Nat Ross's opinion, there were still some studios who were interested in him as a director, and soon his lawyer was negotiating to make a fine deal for him at Universal.

"And who told you so?" Bobo asked. The old man had been moved from the lodge to the hospital a few days before, when he complained of leg pains. Seeing him lying in a bed hooked up to an IV made Rick feel panicky. "Now you'll get some projects going and maybe forget all this nonsense about babies, you lunatic. Yes?"

Three more birth mothers had rejected Rick in the last two months, and each time he'd told Harvey Feldman to throw away his application. "It was a mistake. I can't handle it. Please, don't call me anymore."

But Feldman persisted. After the last one, a pretty twenty-year-old, walked into his house, took one look at
Rick, and said, "No way, José," and left, he'd actually started a new and serious diet.

"Ingeleh," Bobo said, "I think I'm supposed to have a pain pill and the nurse isn't answering my buzzer. Do me a favor and check the nurses' station for me."

"Sure, Uncle B.," Rick said, and as he walked to the door he bumped into Bobo's nurse.

"Here I am, Mr. Reisman," she said to Bobo and then added quietly to Rick, "Why don't you step out for a while while I bathe him too?"

As he walked down the carpeted hospital hallway, Rick saw someone wave at him. It was Harvey Feldman.

"Essie's in for surgery," the young lawyer told Rick as he walked closer. "How's Bobo?"

"Okay, I think."

"Listen," Feldman began.

"Never mind," Rick said, putting up a hand to stop him.

"I have an idea for you. There's a little girl named Doreen, from Kansas, who's very far gone in her pregnancy and getting very worried so—"

"No."

"Wait. She was supposed to give her baby to my clients who flew her out here a few weeks ago to meet her. The couple, I'm sorry to say, are what you'd call 'Beautiful People,' so when she stepped off the airplane—did I mention it was
their
airplane, which they sent to fetch her—anyway, after they saw her, she's short, bucktoothed, and wore glasses, they sent her back."

"Nice folks," Rick said.

"Needless to say, Doreen is heartbroken," Harvey said, "and she probably wouldn't come back here. On the other hand . . . "

"Not for me. Honest to God, Harvey. I'm sorry I
ever took your time in the first place. I can barely hold my own life together let alone be responsible for a—"

"Mr. Feldman." A nurse stepped out of a room down the hall where Harvey Feldman's aunt Essie was.

"Call me," Feldman said over his shoulder to Rick, "if you change your mind."

Kate Sullivan's picture was on the cover of two magazines in the airport newsstand. There was no question she was an exquisite-looking broad. Rick bought some chewing gum and the
Wall Street Journal
, picked up a pack of his favorite, Peanut M&Ms, and was going to have the cashier add them to his tab when he decided to be a good boy and put the candy back. He folded the paper under his arm and walked down the airport corridor, watching the people pass him on both sides, his eye as always framing much of what he saw as shots in a film: a picturesque moment of two women who were clearly a mother and daughter reuniting in a tearful hug, a Sikh walking hurriedly along at the same pace and side by side an old Hasidic Jew.

I'm losing my mind, Rick thought. I've been moving rapidly in this direction for years, but now I've arrived. In exactly four minutes, according to the schedule on the television screen above my head, an airplane will land and in it, courtesy of tickets purchased on my Visa card, will be Doreen Cobb, a fourteen-year-old pregnant girl from Kansas, and her mother, Bea. If all goes well in our conversation, which the mother insists has to take place in the airport, Bea will leave Doreen here, so I can move her into my secretary's apartment to have a baby for me.

If things don't go well, Doreen will fly on to Nevada with her mother, who's leaving tonight to see her eldest son and his wife. Harvey Feldman had explained that Rick was going to be Doreen's final try at open adoption
and if there was no match to be made, the girl agreed to give the baby up to a home in Nevada.

I shouldn't be doing this, he thought with a pang of guilt mixed with fear. There's much too much potential for pain for everyone concerned. The little pregnant girl, her mother, me, but especially the innocent unborn baby. I shouldn't be doing this. Then why am I so swept up in the forward motion of this plan? The girl has already been hurt by some phonies, or should I say some other phonies, who thought she was too ugly to ever bring forth the brand of baby they thought they should have. Wouldn't another rejection be too much for her adolescent ego? Isn't it exquisitely selfish of me to drag her through that possibility one more time?

No, he thought, arriving at the gate and watching through the window as the big carrier was being motioned in toward the gate. Because I won't reject her. If she'll have me as the adopting parent of this baby, I'll grab the chance and commit myself to making the experience good for the girl and for the baby.

He needed love in his life so desperately. To give it, to get it, to exchange it, to hang on to it because he was finally starting to know it was all there really was in this world that mattered. And not having it was making him shrivel into nothingness. Bobo and Charlie and Patty and the kids had been the greatest source of his pleasure, his strength, his good feelings about himself for most of his life. Now Charlie was gone and Bobo was hanging on by a thread. Somehow he had to find a repository for all the love he knew he could give, and maybe a little baby was the answer. Babies required so much attention. Perhaps giving that attention would make him stop thinking only about himself.

So that's why I'm here, he thought, joining the group at the gate waiting for the passengers to emerge from the flight. As the stream of people began to flow, he
looked closely at the faces of every passenger, until he saw the unmistakable mother and daughter step arm in arm through the door. Within an instant the tiny gray-haired woman spotted him, looked piercingly into his eyes, tapped her wide-eyed daughter on the arm, and the girl, seeing him now too, flushed red. Then they all moved together to meet face to face.

Rick extended his hand but Bea Cobb ignored it. She was all business. "Where can we go?" she asked.

"We can go to one of the conference rooms at the Red Carpet Club, where I'm a member," Rick offered, but Bea waved that idea away with a gesture, then pointed to a nearby cocktail lounge. "What's wrong with that place over there?" she asked.

For the first time in his always-running-the-show life Rick thought to himself, I will not make waves. I'll do whatever she says. "That'll be just fine with me," he said.

The two women walked hand in hand and Rick looked at the face of the girl, who snuck a peek back at him, and when their eyes met it was with the mutually awkward shy and wary smile that probably characterized the meeting of a mail-order couple. With each of them thinking, If this works out, this stranger will soon be related to me in a lifelong way.

She was as described, wearing glasses, with an upper lip that protruded in that way it does with people who have an obvious overbite. She looked very much like her mother, who was a few inches taller and also shaped like a little fireplug, except that Doreen's hair was wispy and fine and blond and the mother's hair was gray and cropped close.

The cocktail lounge had the malty stink of stale alcohol, and Bea Cobb, squinting to adjust her eyes to the low light, spotted a table in the corner, tugged her daughter in that direction, and when they got there sat.
There were no waiters, only a bartender, so Rick took their orders. After a few minutes he brought two diet Cokes and a light beer for himself.

"Well now," Bea said, looking at him while Doreen looked everywhere else but. "I guess the first thing I want to know is how come you're not married?"

"I can't explain it," he said. "I
wish
I hadn't let all this time go by without having one woman to feel close to and love, but I guess I was afraid."

"Afraid of what?" she asked him. "Why would you be afraid? Being married and having a family are the best things anyone can do in this world. You think making movies is more important?"

Rick held tightly to the cold beer glass and tried to decide what to tell her. He thought back over the last few months, and how he'd wanted to impress the young pregnant girls he'd met in his living room and in Harvey Feldman's office, and that the harder he seemed to try, the easier it was for them to see through the ruse. Maybe, you asshole, he thought, you ought to take a deep breath and tell the truth.

"When I was a little boy my parents were looked on as royalty in Hollywood. He was a brilliant producer and director and she was one of the most beautiful and gifted actresses alive. When their private plane went down with my dad flying, it was an enormous tragedy. I was their only child. They doted on me. My father had been an astute businessman who invested his money wisely. So after their death, as a heartbroken, emotionally needy adolescent boy, I found myself with millions of dollars. The news hit the papers, and when the numbers got out, I became very popular. In fact, it didn't take too long, after I moved in with Uncle Bobo and Aunt Sadie, for women to start finding me. Dozens of them, every size and shape and age, some of them nearly my mother's age.

"It was every boy's dream, but too much, too soon, and I knew instinctively that I couldn't trust any of them. Because it wasn't my beautiful eyes they were after, or all the other things they claimed made me so attractive. I was a little boy, and I missed my mother, so I went out with these women and that wasn't the answer. And pretty soon, I started to eat. Because food was something I could trust. Food didn't have an ulterior motive for making me feel good.

"I never really got obese; pudgy enough to make sure that certain women keep their distance, but most of the time the combination of the money and the burgeoning success of my career made up for the fat, and made a lot of them hang in there and put up with my neurosis. Eventually, when it came down to it, by the time I was really at an age where getting serious with someone was what I should be doing, I found myself so cynical, so burnt out, that I never could close a deal with any woman." What a lousy story that is, he thought, but sadly it's the truth.

Doreen's mother clucked her tongue, and the sound broke Rick's reverie. "How long ago was the accident?" she asked.

"Thirty-two years. I was eighteen."

"You're fifty?"

He nodded. "Will be this year."

"Same as me." She laughed, outraged at that idea. Rick was surprised. None of the women he knew in Los Angeles who were fifty would ever let their hair get gray, or for that matter admit they were fifty.

"I'm a grandmother seven times already, and you're wanting to adopt a baby?" She laughed again. "I think you're crazy."

He smiled. She was looking at him now in a friendly way, as if their mutual age made them comrades.

"What'll my daughter do here for the next few months?" she asked him.

"There's a young woman who's been my secretary for several years. She has a large apartment in a nice neighborhood. I'll pay Doreen's share of the rent while she lives there as the girl's roommate, and provide all of Doreen's other expenses, find her the best medical care, and if she wants to, I'll help her enroll in some continuing-education classes at a nearby college."

She was nodding a little nod that Rick hoped was a nod of approval.

"My other seven kids all had a meeting this week. They told me I was crazy if I let Doreen go off with some sharpie who's trying to buy her baby. They think she ought to have it at a home somewhere, and then forget about it for the rest of her life."

"And why don't you?"

"Because," she said, looking over at her daughter, who looked back at her wistfully as if she knew what her mother was about to tell him, "I didn't have eight kids, I had nine. My first one was born when I was Doreen's age. But in those days they didn't have any such thing as open adoption. So my child, my oldest son, who is thirty-six years of age this year, is out there somewhere, and I don't know where. I don't know anything about him, except his birthday, which is March third. And on that day I always think about him. I light a candle for him every year."

"That's very sad," Rick said.

Her eyes held his for a while and then a smile broke out on her face and she said, "Fifty years old! You and I were teenagers at the same time. Did you like Elvis?"

"To me he was the King," Rick answered, grinning

"To me too," Bea Cobb said.

"I had the good fortune to meet him," Rick told her.

"No! Spare me," she said. "How did you meet the King?"

"In the seventies I had a secretary who used to be a dancer. She danced in some of his movies, and they became great friends. So she invited me on the set of a television special he was shooting, and I actually shook his hand."

"With
this
hand?" she asked, taking Rick's right hand in her two small ones.

He nodded.

"Ooooh," she said, doing a little mock shiver. "I touched the hand that touched the King."

Bea Cobb and Rick Reisman laughed together, and then she said, "I want to tell you something, okay? And you might as well say okay, 'cause I'm going to tell you what I think even if you don't. You don't know what in the hell you're getting into. You think having a baby is something that'll do the same thing for you as buying a new car. Lift your spirits, make you feel sexier.