"Want me to stay?" Gloria asked. "I always got you to sleep real easily."
Rick felt shaky. Embarrassed. When Bobo had come to visit in the past, Rick had made it his business to produce the most socially acceptable friends he had to meet his uncle. These two were from the bottom of the barrel.
"He wants us to go, Glory," Animal said, looking now from Rick to Bobo and then back again. Rick's eyes couldn't meet Bobo's. Then, as if it were a peace offering, Animal extracted a vial from his inside coat pocket. "Want me to toot you up?" he asked Rick.
"No," Rick said.
"Not this time, huh?" Animal said, grinning a grin that showed his bad teeth. "How 'bout you, man?" he asked Bobo.
Bobo didn't say a word. His expression made the already nervous Animal look down at his feet and say, "Yeah, well, like maybe you'll gimme a call if you change your mind. C'mon there, Glory."
The girl looked hurt but she tried to make the best of a bad situation by patting Rick on the cheek and saying, "Call me, huh?" Then they were out the door. It was already a gray dawn outside and Rick's head was pounding. He looked at Bobo, who was looking long at him.
"Boychik," Bobo said, after their eyes had searched each other's for a long sad moment. "Tell me something. Isn't it time for you to take stock of what you're doing to yourself? To make a decision to be a man instead of a lowlife."
Those words, coming from the gentle Bobo, who could never deliberately hurt another human being, stung him. And they were mild compared to what he wanted to call himself.
"You're going on fifty, for Christ's sake," Bobo said, as if Rick didn't know that. "What in the hell are you going to do? Do you wanna die being known as a drug-taking womanizer who made a couple of movies? Love somebody, for God's sake, make a life for yourself, stop thinking with your dick before you're an old sick man and an old sick joke, because that's where you're heading. Charlie Fall is dead, but at least his charitable work lives on and his name lives on in his children and his memory lives on with Patty. You'll die and won't even leave anyone who will come and make sure your headstone didn't topple over with the last earthquake. Ricky, you've been my relative for nearly fifty years, and from way back, even before you got so heavy, when you looked good and you were dating Farrah Fawcett or screwing Jackie Bisset, I never stopped feeling sorry for you."
Bobo, who had taken a taxi all the way from Calabassas, then cooked an uneaten dinner, and been awakened twice in the same night, had dark circles under his eyes. The two men stood silently in the cold living room, the smell of the chicken that neither they nor the sleeping maid had cleaned up still in the air. "What are you going to do? And I mean right away, because I can't stand it."
Many answers tumbled around in Rick's mind, and the one that came out surprised him almost as much as it did Bobo.
"I'm going to adopt a baby," he said.
13
WHEN BARBARA SPOTTED A RARE DAY with a few open hours coming up on her calendar, she decided to get on the phone and schedule some personal appointments. Her psychiatrist, her hairdresser, and oh yes . . . the postcard from Howie Kramer's office was beckoning. At least this time she'd gone as far as calling Marcy Frank and asking for the information on the woman gynecologist. But where did she put that number? The biggest problem with having three desks in three different locations was that the damn number could be anywhere. She shuffled through some papers, and was delighted to come upon the phone number of Dr. Gwen Phillips she'd scribbled down last week.
"My name is Barbara Singer. I was referred by Marcy Frank," she said. "I need to come in for a routine checkup."
"The doctor's out of town for three weeks," the voice on the phone told her. "And when she gets back she's very backed up, but I can schedule you in, let's see . . . the earliest I have would be . . . in six weeks."
"Thanks anyway," Barbara said, hanging up, congratulating herself for at least making the effort, and relieved not to have to face the unfamiliar. So much for new doctors, she mused and laughed to herself when she thought about that character Billy Crystal used to play on "Saturday Night Live" who always said, "Remember, looking good is more important than feeling good," so she dialed her hairdresser.
"Well, Mrs. S., after December you won't have me to kick around anymore, so you'd better start thinking about which other operator you're gonna switch over to who can do your color.''
Barbara looked up from the notes she'd been reading to pass the minutes until the timer rang to signal that the hair color had penetrated and she could get back to the office. Now she caught a glimpse of herself in the beauty-shop mirror, her face ringed with white cotton, her hair matted into bizarre bunches and coated with the gooey shoe-polish dye Delia applied to cover the ever encroaching gray. The pretty, skinny-as-an-arrow Delia was running a fat plastic comb through Barbara's ends, making sure the awful stuff covered every single surface of her hair.
"I'm going to get pregnant," Delia told her, "and all these chemicals aren't good for anybody who's pregnant, so by the end of this year, I'm quitting for a while."
"I'm glad for you, Delia, but sad for me. Maybe when you leave I'll just be au naturel for a while, and let my hair go gray."
"Oh my God, you're joking! That would be a disaster," Delia said, emitting an outraged laugh. Barbara wasn't joking. It was an idea she'd been considering for a while, but after that reaction she decided to reconsider. When her hair was colored and blown out she hurried to her car, thinking that after that affront from Delia, it was a good thing she was on her way to check in with her own therapist.
Morgan was more like a friendly old uncle to her after all these years and when she first settled into the peeling old leather chair, on which she had been responsible for some of the peeling, she felt relieved to be able to blurt out what was on her mind.
"I'm on overwhelm, Morgs," she told him. It had been nearly a year since she'd visited the old family friend who'd been her therapist off and on since the sixties. Today he peered at her over his smudged half-glasses, and his lived-in face registered genuine concern. "My kids aren't kids anymore. Heidi sometimes goes weeks without calling, and Jeff will be off to college in the fall to heaven knows where.
"I spend five half-days in the clinic with individual families and five at my private office with the same. I lead parenting groups all week and two on Saturdays for my working parents who can only come in on the weekends. And now I'm all fired up about a new group. It's for families whose babies are the result of the new technologies and arrangements, like open adoption, or insemination. I want to create a context, a language, a way for these children to talk about things. But I've got to tell you, I'm worried about it. What if it's a mistake and families like these want to be in the mainstream and not treated separately? What if I can't think of answers for them to give these children? I mean how can a couple tell the child of a gay father what the ugly names mean? What will those two little girls who have been born via a sperm donor think about men, and how will they relate to them when they're women?
"Last night I had a dream that I was sitting in my office and this creature walked in. It was somewhere between a stegosaurus and Dumbo. I mean, it was green and spiked but it had cute baby blue eyes and a trunk, and it said, 'I'm here to inquire about the new group!' " The thought of what a dream like that might mean sent her into a peal of laughter she knew by the look on Morgan's face was a little too hysterical. Then she stopped laughing and thought about what was going on in her life.
"I joined some fancy health club last month, paid the fee, and walked out after ten minutes because I couldn't handle the stress of destressing. I think after all is said and done, I'm a fraud. I keep saying I'm going to slowly cut back and take time to do nothing, but instead I keep piling it on myself. I just recited my life's schedule to you, Morgan, now you tell me, does that sound like the agenda of a woman who's looking for peace?"
Morgan took off the Benjamin Franklin glasses and wiped them with a handkerchief he pulled out of his pocket. "Wh
at does your mother think about the idea for the new group?''
"Are you kidding? It's so up her alley, I sometimes wonder if the real reason I'm organizing it is to please her. She thinks it's the first really important thing I've done in years."
Morgan raised his eyebrows and made a note. The walnut desk clock was ticking and she realized she'd been complaining for so long she was already halfway through the session. "Anyway, to hell with Gracie, let's get back to me. Am I taking on something so huge that I'll kick myself? The more I read about these questions the more complicated it all sounds, and I don't want to lead these people to think I have answers for them when I don't. I'll just be feeling my way with them. I know how to help families with developmental problems, but this feels so much bigger than that."
"I think if you make it clear . . . that you're there to find out the answers with them, then you're not leading anyone astray."
Barbara looked across the desk at Morgan's face and thought of all the times she'd left his office certain that his sage words of the preceding hour had just changed her life. Today the whole idea of spilling out her anxieties to him felt foolish, self-indulgent, and absurd.
"Do you know who Lucy Van Pelt is?" she asked him.
"No."
"Somehow I just flashed on her. She's a character from the cartoon 'Peanuts,' a little girl who runs a psychiatry booth as if it was a lemonade stand. She dispenses advice for five cents. And I guess all of a sudden psychiatry and psychology seem very silly to me. Like a cartoon."
"Now that sounds just like what your mother always says."
"Please. It's bad enough when I hear myself sounding like Gracie, but when you tell me I do, it only reminds me it was probably gross lack of judgment on my part to have a psychiatrist who knows her."
"Or a brilliant choice," he said. "Think of all the time and money you've saved over the years not having to tell me the things I already know about her."
"Good point," she said, but only because she was fond of Morgan and sorry if she'd hurt his feelings, which was probably why she didn't do what she wanted to now, which was to stand, say "I don't want to be here anymore," and leave, the way she had the health club.
"So you think Gracie thinks this group is destined to be your finest work?"
"Absolutely."
Morgan tsked at that. A significant tsk, and Barbara wanted to ask him what it meant, only somehow they went off on another tangent before she could. Heidi and her impossible boyfriend, Jeff's impending departure for school. And it was all such a jumble of so many thoughts, that by the time she pulled up at the drive-through at Carl's Junior to get a very late lunch, she had forgotten everything they'd decided she should do to cope. It had been a hundred-and-twenty-five-dollar visit down the tubes.
"Charbroiled chicken and a diet Coke," she said to an intercom.
"Anything else?"
"That's it."
"Three dollars and ninety-six cents," said a disembodied voice.
"Thank you."
"Have a nice day."
"Likewise," she said, thinking she had no idea whether she'd just spoken to a woman or a man. Faceless communication, like her answering machine, and her fax machine, and donor insemination. If she ever pulled that group together it would be demanding on her skills and a big responsibility, but there wouldn't be a dull moment.
"Aaggh."
"Sorry," Howie Kramer muttered. She had caved and called him. She couldn't wait six weeks to be examined, and when his receptionist said, "Name your time, Mrs. Singer," Barbara wondered how she would ever be able to give up a luxury like that. So now the light, the too-bright light, was bouncing from his head again, right into her eyes, and he was rattling on about one of his famous patients.
Barbara wasn't listening. She was worrying about Scottie Levine and how when she'd asked Ron Levine to come in alone so they could talk, he said on the phone, "That little kid is a mess. Don't you think I see it? Who wouldn't be, living with that shrew? And it breaks my heart because you know my son is my top priority."
"When can you come in?" Barbara asked him.
Silence. Then he said, "Let me look at my calendar.'' Silence. "You know what? I'm going to need to get back to you." Poor little Scottie. How could she help him?
"In a few years that kid will be in intensive therapy,'' Howie Kramer was saying as he scraped her inside with no grace at all. Barbara, startled at what seemed to be a mind-reading comment, wondered how he knew what she'd been thinking.
"What kid?" she asked as Howie removed the metal instrument from inside her. He was in the middle of rattling on with some story that she could tell by the look on his face he considered quite juicy. And though she hadn't been listening, now when she tuned in, it seemed it was, as always, about one of his famous patients. This time it was a woman who had a fear of getting pregnant.
"The baby's due next month. I mean she's one of those people who should just forget about motherhood. To begin with she didn't want to mess up her great body, which is why she figured out a way that she didn't have to. You know her. You've seen her on "Dallas," or maybe it was "Knots Landing." Anyway, she had her husband inseminate her sister. So now the baby's mother is her aunt and the baby's aunt is her mother. Kind of like that old song, 'I'm My Own Grandpa.' Remember that one?" Now Howie was inserting rubber-gloved fingers into Barbara, pressing down on her abdomen and at the same time laughing a red-faced wet-eyed laugh at his own joke.
"I'll tell you something, I could write a book, because I've seen it all," he said. Gracie was right, Barbara thought. In this town alone there were probably thousands of people having their babies in unusual ways.
"Well, everything seems okay," he said. He had finished the exam and was removing the gloves. "I'll call you if there's anything wrong with the lab report." Then he looked at her absently. "Did I do a breast check?" Of course going from examining room to examining room, body to body, he probably forgot whose what he had checked, and she was tempted to lie and say yes, but then she'd have to go home afraid there might have been something which had gone undiscovered because of her lie.
"No," she confessed and revealed her breasts, putting her arms behind her head so he could roll his hands around on them to examine her, a process that always made her nervous and one which she was certain required concentration, but not for Howard Kramer, who just continued to talk through it all.
"My wife knows her very well. They go to the same hairdresser. Sandy says she's had every kind of plastic surgery possible. There's a guy over in Santa Monica who specializes in breast augmentation, and he's the one who did her breasts and they are extraordinary. One night we ran into her at Jimmy's and she was wearing—"
"Howie!" Barbara said sharply. "What about mine?"
"Your what?"
"My breasts. Anything unusual?"
"No. They're fine. When was your last mammogram?" he asked, reaching for her chart.
"Nine months ago," she said, making as ladylike a slide from the table as she could, considering her top was wrapped in a paper gown, her bottom was sporting what felt like a paper tablecloth, and she was filled with K-Y Jelly.
"You're in great shape," Howie said. "You check out like a young woman."
"Thanks," Barbara said, as she disappeared behind the curtain of the tiny dressing area and winked a conspiratorial wink at her reflection in the small mirror on the wall, congratulating herself on the fast escape. Then she heard Howie say, "You know, I'm looking at your chart here, and I'm thinking that next time you come in, we should discuss a tubal ligation."
"Great," she replied. "Next time I come in, we'll discuss it in depth."
"Give my best to Stan," Howie said as he exited the examining room and closed the door.
"Only there ain't gonna be any next time," Barbara promised herself out loud.
"Oh here, Mrs. Singer," the receptionist said as Barbara signed the MasterCard charge slip to pay the bill. "Before you go, if you address this card to yourself we'll mail it to you
when it's time for your next checkup.''
"Thanks very much," Barbara said, taking the card, finding a pen on the counter, and starting absently to fill it out. The doctor's phone rang and the receptionist answered it and spoke animatedly to the person on the other end of the line. Barbara took a moment to reconsider, put the pen back on the counter, slipped the blank card into her purse, waved a thank you to the distracted receptionist, and left Howie Kramer's office. Alone on the elevator she tore the card up, and as she exited into the parking lot, she threw it into the first trash can she saw.
The hospital corridor was bustling and she was hurrying to get to her office to get her phone calls out of the way before the staff meeting. She waved a hello to Louise Feiffer, who put up a hand to stop her.
"A woman left this in my office. I think she was interested in the new group. She said she saw the ad."
Barbara opened the envelope. In it was a piece of personalized stationery with the name Elaine De Nardo at the top.
My name is Lainie De Nardo. I saw the ad about your group. I need to talk to you first though, alone if it's okay. If so, please call me, but don't say why you're calling unless you reach me personally. I'd appreciate your confidentiality. Thank you.
Barbara sat at her desk and called Lainie De Nardo, and as she listened to as much of her story as the woman could tell her on the phone, she knew that this was someone who needed the new group in a desperate way.
14
LAINIE COULDN'T BELIEVE that one of the customers actually came all the way from La Jolla every few weeks in a chauffeur-driven limo. And while the woman tried on dozens of outfits, the tall, black, uniformed driver leaned against the car reading a newspaper, where everyone in the store could see him through the big front window. After the woman was dressed again in her own clothes, fishing around in her wallet for her American Express card, she always said the same thing to Lainie: "I'll bet with what I spend here, I could put every one of your kids through college."
The Stork Club Page 12
