"Shelly." She sat up, grabbed his arms, pulled him into a sitting position and shook him. "Shelly, you're alive," she screamed into his slack-jawed face, knowing she was supposed to do something to him, like breathe into his mouth, but she wasn't sure how. She had to find someone who knew what to do, so gently she placed his head back on the floor, ran into the darkened bedroom, slapped around until she found a switch to turn on the light, then grabbed the phone and dialed 911.
When she'd given the necessary information to the operator and was about to run back into the bathroom again to try to rouse Shelly, she looked on the bedside table, and there, with nothing else around it, in a silver frame, was an old photograph of her. She remembered the day Shelly snapped it. They had gone to ride the carousel at the Santa Monica Pier. She was wearing shorts and a shirt, sporting the first suntan of her life, and holding her arms up in a gesture of pure joy, but still she winced when she saw it. Because to her she looked like a frizzy-haired witch. But Shelly had framed it, and kept it by his bed. Ruthie marched into the bathroom.
"You're gonna live, schmuck," she announced to Shelly's inert body. "I'm here to tell you," she said, kneeling beside him and taking him in her arms, "that anyone who can stand to look at that picture of me every day can live through a stomach pump. For me, Shel. You have to live. For me."
He was in the hospital for two days, and Ruthie stayed there too. She slept in a chair both nights and covered herself with a blanket that a sympathetic nurse brought in for her. Shelly refused to say anything until she took him out of the hospital and back to her condo where she put him in her decorated-by-a-decorator bedroom. And naturally his first words were a joke when he looked around, winced, and remarked, "Either that wallpaper goes or I do." Then he fell asleep.
An odd comfort filled Ruthie as she lay on her new living room sofa, knowing he was nearby. Later, when she brought him some tea, he stared out the window and said, "Davis decided to go back to his wife. She met him in New York, and they were together and he said he wants her back. Told me I had to get my stuff out of his place by the end of the . . ." His voice lost control and he put his face in the pillow.
"Shel, don't!" Ruthie said, sitting down next to him. "You'll get over him. You'll start to work again. You'll work on my projects with me, and we'll have fun again, and soon you'll meet someone else."
"You shouldn't have found me," he told her. "It was a waste of your time. Eventually I'll just do it again. I don't want to be without him. I don't want to go back to work. I want to stay home and—"
"Have babies?" Ruthie said. There was anger in it, and a little bit of a joke, but Shelly looked at her seriously.
"Yeah," he said. "I would like that."
Ruthie laughed. "You're right. I should have let you bump yourself off. You're a wacko." She stood, and touched his hand. "While you were sleeping I threw out every pill and hid everything sharp in the house, so if you want to do it again, you'll have to go somewhere else. I've got a meeting at ABC."
She was already in the garage of her building when the idea hit her with such force that she spun around, rang for the elevator, which was too slow in coming, so she ran up the stairs to the third floor and down the hall to her apartment.
"Shelly?" she said. He was in the bathroom with the door closed. "Shelly, don't you dare try anything," she shrieked at the door, which she discovered when she turned the knob was locked.
"For God's sake, I'm on the john," he said. He emerged a few minutes later, looking haggard and green. "I thought you had a meeting."
"I do," she said, "but this is more important. Shelly, let's have a baby together."
"Oh, Christ," he said.
"We don't have to have sex to do it. There's lots of other ways."
"This I have to hear," he said, but for a second she saw a smile in his eyes that reminded her of the old Shelly.
"Some gay women are even doing it with turkey basters."
That got him. He was smiling, and then he giggled.
"I could get pregnant." She was so excited she was pulling at the sleeve of his pajamas. "With our baby. And after the baby's born if you still don't want to work, I could go back to work, and you could take care of her."
"Or him," Shelly said, seeming to warm to the idea.
"Shelly, say yes. At least say you'll think about it. Can you picture it? A little baby from you and me? We'd name it after Sid Caesar if it was a boy, or Imogene Coca if it was a girl. It would have a great sense of humor. It would come out and say, 'A funny thing happened to me on the way to the delivery room.' Shel, maybe I can't even make babies. Maybe you can't. Maybe you have comedy sperm, like in that Woody Allen movie. But isn't it worth a try?"
Shelly walked out of the room past her and into the kitchen, leaving her standing there alone. Obviously he thought she was so crazy he wasn't even going to talk about it.
Forget it, he was saying. Letting her down easy. It was a ridiculous idea and a stupid time to present it. Three days after a man tried to kill himself over the love of his life, she was asking him to have a baby with her. No wonder she was still single, without a prospect in sight. She didn't have an ounce of subtlety in her entire body. And Shelly was being gracious by pretending she never said any of those things. Just strolling right by her into the kitchen. She would go in there now and apologize for being insensitive, then hurry to her meeting at the network.
"Shel," she said, walking into the kitchen. Shelly had his back to her, and when he turned she squealed and he laughed, because in his hand he was holding what he had just taken out of the top drawer by the sink. A turkey baster.
"You rang?" he answered.
8
AND THAT'S HOW you conceived Sid?" Barbara tried to keep the astonishment out of her voice.
"That's how," Ruthie said.
"Were you concerned at all in these times about having a baby with a gay man?"
"No. We talked about it, and decided that it was safe, because since his long-ago relationship with Les, Shelly had only been with Davis. And Davis told him he was fresh from a monogamous relationship with a woman he'd been married to for years. So that seemed to be the safest person in the world for him to be involved with." She looked down at her lap when she added, "Davis and I never did have sex.
"Anyway—we went ahead. Sometimes we'd inseminate me, and when I got my period we'd say to each other, 'It wasn't supposed to work. Two weirdos like us have no business trying to bring a kid into this world.' But then a week or so would go by and we'd be working or talking or at the movies and Shel would say, 'So I guess you'll be ovulating next week, huh?' And I'd say, 'Yeah,' and he'd get this look in his eye and I'd say, 'I think the best day would be Friday.' And then we'd try again."
Her eyes were fogging up and she thought for a while then seemed to bring her mind back to the room. "Anyway, one morning I woke up and I just knew I was pregnant. I was puking my guts out. I left work at lunchtime and went to the doctor's. By the time I got home from work at dinnertime, they called to tell me I was preg. I was so excited, I called Shelly and he rushed home.
"We laughed and we cried and we did our versions of what our parents were going to say when they heard.'' She looked long at Barbara, then said, "Let me tell you something. Heterosexual couples think they have a monopoly on joy, but if you had seen the two of us, you'd have known there were never two happier people in the world than we were when Sid was born. The last two and a half years have been magical for us, even though we've had a few ups and downs in our careers, because we have that boy and he makes everything in life pale by comparison."
Sid, the comedy kid, was born at Cedars-Sinai Hospital. He weighed five pounds eight ounces.
"How small is he?" one of the writers asked Shelly.
"He's so small that when he's naked, he looks like he's wearing a baggy suit," Shelly answered, then passed out cigars to everyone on the writing staff.
"How did Ruthie do in the labor room?" someone asked at lunch.
"Just like you'd expect for a Jewish girl. She said, 'Honey, I'm too tired. You push,' " Shelly answered, and ordered champagne for everyone at the table.
The night Ruthie and Sid came home from the hospital to the new house she and Shelly had bought in Westwood because it had a play yard fit for a prince, an entire video crew met them at the door. Shelly had hired them because he was afraid if he relied on his own technical know-how to preserve the historic moment, he would screw it up.
As it turned out, Shelly directed every move they made. Sid with the nanny, Sid with Ruthie, and Sid being adored by both grandmothers, who had been invited to visit simultaneously in the hopes that, as Shelly put it, "While sharing a hotel room, they will get on each other's nerves so much they'll spontaneously combust."
They didn't. They were soul sisters in every way, and at some point, while alone at the Bel-Air Sands Hotel, out of their children's earshot, they must have made a pact that neither of them would mention the word marriage for fear of expulsion. And after cheek pinching, toe naming, and tushie biting their grandchild ad nauseam, they waved at the video camera so often that when they watched the replay even they couldn't tell themselves apart. ("Look, there's me giving him a bath." "What are you talking about? That's me giving him a bath.") And each of them referred to Sid as "my grandson."
When the two women left, flying together as far as Chicago ("Isn't it cute? They can't bear to part with each other," Shelly pointed out), Ruthie was forced to admit that she missed them a little bit. It had been fun for there to be people in the world other than Sid's mommy and daddy who thought the baby's every dirty diaper was a work of art.
The day Ruthie got back to work, Sid became a part of the writing staff. If he gurgled at a joke, it stayed in. If he spit up after a punch line, it had to be rewritten. He became the reason to get the rehearsal over early and the reason to stay home from some dull party and the reason to sit around on a Sunday morning and do nothing. The three of them had become, for most intents and purposes, a happy family, with the obvious and unspoken exception, albeit a significant one, that Sid's parents never had and never would consummate their love for each other. And though to the conventional observer this seemed to be a pitiable loss, Ruthie and Shelly's nonsexual relationship created an unclouded kind of comfort between them that many couples never had.
Ruthie couldn't believe her life had become a Kodak commercial. Joy and love and a family whose greatest pleasure was being together. The morning Shelly stayed home from work saying he was "under the weather," Ruthie didn't think much about it. When she got home, Sid was playing with the nanny and on the dining room table there was a note. It was held down by one of the crystal candlesticks her mother sent her years ago, hoping that if she had them she would light shabbat candles. Now, as the nausea of fear seized her, she had the fleeting thought that maybe lighting candles would have saved her from Shelly's words: I have to be away for a while. Believe me I'll come home as soon as I can. Just look after our most precious life for me. You are my world. Shel.
If Sid's arms hadn't been around her legs, and his beautiful little face hadn't been looking up at her, she would have screamed, wept, lost control, because she knew what the note meant and why Shelly was gone. Two weeks passed. Every morning, she woke, fed and played with Sid, then handed him over to the nanny and went to work, where she told everyone who asked that Shelly had a family emergency. It was a description that could cover almost anything. Some nights she was so wrung out with worry she couldn't even sleep, just stared at the phone, begging it to ring and have Shelly on the other end of the call.
Her favorite sleeping position was on her stomach with her right knee jutting out to the side and her right foot sticking out of the covers. It was the way she remembered seeing her mother sleep, and in the past when she woke up and found herself in that position, she thought about her mother and wondered if the positions people slept in were hereditary.
Tonight she maneuvered herself into that position, hoping that just being in it would induce sleep. Maybe she could fool her mind into believing it was time to let go of all the panic she was feeling and ease into dreams. But instead, the silence of the night made the sound of her stepped-up heartbeat all she could hear, and there was no chance that she would sleep.
She probably should get up and write. With Shelly's absence there was so much to do every day at the office that maybe she should get some of it done now. She was wide awake anyway. She ought to use the time to accomplish something instead of lying there worrying where Shelly was, which was all she'd done for the past two weeks.
She turned over on her back and stared at the blue numbers on the digital clock. Twelve-fifteen . . . no . . . twelve-sixteen. She was never going to get to sleep now. She had friends who told her they did their best work at night, when there was no possibility of the phone ringing or the baby crying or an unexpected knock on the door from UPS. Maybe she ought to . . . no, just the thought of getting up and trying to write was so off-putting that after a few minutes of thinking about it, she was back on her stomach with her right knee jutting out to the side and her right foot sticking out of the covers, and this time it worked. She fell into a deep sleep.
The sharp jingle of the phone jarred her awake, and for a second she wasn't even sure where she was. The blue numbers. It was three o'clock. Goddammit. Then it occurred to her that the only calls that came at three in the morning were death calls. Shelly. The phone rang again. She slid on her belly to the end of the bed, leaned toward the night table, and grabbed the telephone receiver.
"Yeah?"
"Howdy, pardner."
"Shelly?'' He was drunk, she knew his three-glasses-of-wine voice only too well, and this was it. "Let me just tell you you'd better be calling to tell me you're being held hostage in Iran, you dog, because you left me here with all the work, making up lies to cover for you with everyone including our son, and now you're waking me up to listen to you do a bad John Wayne? This better be good."
All she heard for the next long time was the crackling hush of the long-distance line, then Shelly said, "I've got bad news and I've got good news. Which do you want first?"
Ruthie sat up and put her feet on the floor, feeling around with them for her slippers. She had to pee. As soon as she got off the phone she would go and . . .
"Ruthie?" Shelly asked.
"I'm here, I'm here, and I can't believe you're doing good-news, bad-news jokes at three in the morning, and using me as the straight man. At least you had the courtesy not to call me collect."
"I didn't have to. I punched in your credit card number. So which do you want first? The bad news or the good news?"
Ruthie sighed and wished for a second that she smoked. This would be the perfect time to light a cigarette.
"Gimme the good news first," she said, turning on her bedside lamp.
"The good news," Shelly said, "is that I'm in Texas and I'm rip-roaring drunk, or as some of the folks here like to call it, shitfaced."
"Yeah? So what's the bad news?"
Silence. Static. Then, "The bad news is that I came here to see a specialist because I suspected I was at risk."
It took a moment for the words to get to her solar plexus, and when they did she didn't think she'd ever be able to breathe again. But the news wasn't a surprise. She'd been waiting to hear it since his departure, feeling all the while as if she was hanging from the edge of a cliff by her fingertips fearing the fall, and at last here it was.
"I'm HIV-positive, Ru-Ru," he said. "But there's good news about that. I don't have any symptoms, and my helper cells are at seven hundred and thirty. Ready for more good news? I've managed to convince my mother it's because I'm an intravenous-drug user."
Shelly was doing horrible jokes at three in the morning from Texas. Ruthie's stomach throbbed and a chill raced through her so that she took her slippers off and pulled the bed covers close around her.
"Okay," she said. "It's funny. We can't use it on the show. It's in terrible ta
ste, but it's funny. And I miss you."
"I'm coming home tomorrow. American Airlines flight two twenty, at two o'clock your time."
"I'll pick you up at the airport," she promised.
"Do you remember," he asked her, "the night a few months ago when we were having dinner at the Mandarin, and the waiter brought the fortune cookies, and when I opened mine it was empty? This must be why."
"I love you," Ruthie said, "I love you, and I'll be at the airport waiting for you tomorrow."
After a while, exhaustion forced her to fall asleep again, but she opened her eyes in a panic at the first light. As she got out of bed, the truth ran over her with the force of a freight train and so immobilized her that she had to recite aloud to herself the steps she needed to take to get dressed. "Put on underpants, socks and bra, sweatpants, sweatshirt."
When she was dressed she walked to Sid's room, where the nanny was dressing him.
"Mama, can we go to the park?" he asked, smiling a delicious smile, and there was a look in his eyes that reminded her so much of Shelly that she had to turn away for a beat to catch her breath.
"How about some eggies?" she asked him.
"Yay, eggies, and jelly on toast," he said.
She held him very close as she carried him into the kitchen and instead of putting him on the floor to play, she held him on her hip while she cooked his eggs. Then while he spooned them into his mouth, she told him her version of the "Three Bears," in which there was a Mommy bear, a Daddy bear, and a Sidney bear. When the nanny had taken him out the door to head for the park, Ruthie called her office and said she wasn't feeling too well, made sure the writers knew how to proceed, then sat on the living room sofa, holding the morning paper but not really reading it.
She thought about going to the airport and what it would be like to see Shelly get off the plane, wondering if his being HIV-positive meant he'd be emaciated and sickly. She'd seen him only two weeks ago and he'd looked great. She felt cold and weak, and didn't know how to spend the day waiting for him to come home, so she made an outing of taking the car to fill it up with gas. She took Sid to Harry Harris's shoe store and bought him some sneakers. She made popcorn and ate all of it. Then she took a very long shower, and decided that instead of driving to the airport she would call a limousine service, so she called Davel Limousines and asked for a driver to pick her up at home to take her to and from the airport.
The Stork Club Page 7
