"So, my chance to be chosen, unlike myself, is very slim. Suppose I try to increase my odds by doing something dazzling, like buying the birth mother a car or a fur coat?"
"That would be trafficking in babies, and that's illegal. Every cent that goes toward supporting the birth mother is accountable to the court. Submitted in a financial statement under penalty of perjury. I've had a couple list an ice-cream cone they bought when they took the birth mother to the beach."
"So my only chance is to be Mr. Nice Guy. So nice that I beat out the picket fences and the dogs."
"But, Rick, don't even bother filling out the card unless you understand that the whole point of these relationships, yours with the girl, is to make her feel okay about her pregnancy in a world that makes her feel like dirt because of it. To let her know that she's okay, and that by giving you the baby she's doing the right thing.
"Let me tell you a little bit more about these girls. Most of them are sent to me by their church groups and their right-to-life groups. Most of the time they haven't been out seducing boys; more likely they've been raped by some friend of the family or date-raped by some hotshot at the high school, and are too mortified to talk about it. When they come into this office, or send their sometimes barely readable letter, they've not yet spoken the words 'I'm pregnant' to anyone else.
"Some of them haven't been to a doctor yet. They broke open a piggy bank and bought an early pregnancy test that they did at home, locked in a bathroom they share with the rest of the family. Or they've just missed two periods and they're trying to hide morning sickness at the family breakfast table and they're scared to death. I try to create a cocoon for them. A time during which it's okay for them to be pregnant. I mean, hell, they already are pregnant. They don't want abortions, so why not make them feel as if all is well, and not only are they going to emerge from all of this just fine, but that some nice couple is going to be able to love this baby that they're bringing into the world.
"Wait until you meet some of these girls, Rick, and I hope you do. You thought I was just some pushy hustler when I told you there were some very moving stories in these girls. Well after you get to meet and know some of them . . . you tell me."
It looked to Rick as if Feldman was holding back tears, and he wondered if this was the lawyer's standard speech. Nevertheless, he looked down at the desk at the form he'd now completely filled out about himself, and he signed it.
When he got back to the office, Andrea looked nervous.
"Nat Ross's office called. They want you up there right away."
The door was open, and he could see there was a group of four or five people waiting for him. Nat Ross, Ian Kleier, who was Ross's second in command, plus a few underlings, and . . . shit, Kate Sullivan and a few of her entourage.
"Ricky!" Nat Ross said with such glee, it was as if he were a kid on a hot day and Rick was the ice-cream man. Rick felt numb the way one does in the face of certain disaster.
"Sit, my friend, and we can get you coffee or a Coke or a glass of wine, maybe even a coffee cake," Ross added and Rick wondered for an instant if the son of a bitch was making fun of his weight. "What's your pleasure?"
"Nothing, thanks," Rick said. His desire to bolt was so strong that sitting was an effort, so his compromise was to perch on the edge of his chair, his two hands holding firmly onto the rim, readying himself to stand and run.
"I'm here to tell you," Nat Ross said, "that Kate is insane about the White House story. She has now called me, how many times, Katie, eight times? Nine times?"
Rick didn't look at her, but out of the corner of his eye he saw Kate Sullivan turn in her chair and answer demurely, "Maybe even more."
"Now to me, the idea of the two of you together would make such a full-out blockbuster picture that it brings tears to my eyes. So I wanted to do this honestly and aboveboard and cut through all the crap, and say that to you both, and tell you if we can be big kids and drop all the personality stuff, we can make a picture that this studio will back a thousand percent. So let me get your input on this. Okay?"
There was what seemed like an endless silence. Rick's mind raced. This was unconscionable, to be put in this position. The point was clear. The picture was now Sullivan's. If he said no, next week it would be Sydney Pollack or Garry Marshall called in to direct a picture Rick had been developing passionately for how long?
"I pass," he said, standing and walking out the door, straight to the stairs, not bothering to wait for the elevator. His head rang as he pounded all the way down, took a deep breath, opened the door to the third floor, and made his way along the deeply carpeted hallway to his office.
"Pack my things," he said to Andrea, who tore the headset off and said, "Huh?"
"I said pack my things. I don't work here anymore." The phone rang.
It was Nat Ross, Andrea came to the door of his inner office to tell him. Rick was putting photographs into a box he'd pulled from the closet.
"I'm out."
"He knows you're here."
"There's no more to say," he told her. "You finish this, please, I'm leaving."
He was in the parking lot about to get into his car when Nat Ross approached him. It was odd to see Ross in the parking lot, since no one ever did. The joke was that if you arrived on the lot at six A.M. and felt the hood of Nat Ross's car, it was already cold. And he was rumored to leave at midnight.
"Ricky, don't be dumb." He was walking toward the car. "I gave you an overall deal here and a lot of money after your last two pictures did no business at all. You're not exactly a hot property. In fact, the reality is, you're a fucking Popsicle. And I'm the guy who got the money for you because I bet my board here that you have at least one more picture left in you, and we might as well be the ones who get it."
Rick started the car. Who would fault him if he ran this cocksucker over now?
"This is a real chance for you to come back. With the biggest star in this town. Don't be dumb," Nat yelled after Rick's car as it squealed out of the parking lot.
"So what do you want? You think it's all a bowl of cherries?" Bobo asked. This morning his teeth had been bothering him. Now while he and Rick sat on the bed playing gin, the yellow dentures smiled at them from a glass on the chest of drawers across the room. "Your father and I struggled plenty. I told you how we fought with that bastard Harry Cohn till we were blue in the gederim. You're a spoiled no-goodnik. A few things fall apart, a couple of flops, and you're having a career crisis. What do you want, for Chris' sake?"
"I guess I like my career like I like my pastrami," Rick answered. "Hot and on a roll, and at the moment it isn't either of those. The writer on Time Flies dropped dead in a Pizza Hut, the second draft of Count on Me came back and it's a serious disappointment, I lost the rights to the novel of Bloody Wonderful, and then there's Kate Sullivan. Kate Sullivan is doing Always a Lady, and I'm not. It was my project for two years, and they gave it to her, Uncle B., so I walked. Packed up my office and walked."
"Gin," Bobo said, laying his matching suits on the card table.
"Et tu, Brute?" Rick laughed. "Christ, how did you do that so fast? I've got nothing here." Rick fanned his cards out on the table.
"You're a lousy shuffler and you owe me sixty-three cents," Bobo said.
"I took my phone off the hook and I've been all alone for days, trying to decide what to do."
Bobo looked at him, frowning. "What are you worrying? You got the world by the balls. There's a million stories out there. In your life alone there's a million. Make a movie about me and your dad. Two young guys in the early days in Hollywood. Make a movie about what it was like to be a kid on the back lot in those days, from the kid's point of view. You want to tell a good story? Tell the one about your parents dying in that plane crash. The biggest loss this business ever knew."
Bobo shuffled the cards as he spoke and Rick grinned as he watched the old cardshark whip them back and forth between his hands, fanning them, cascading them, making them rise and f
all at one point as if they were defying gravity.
"No," Rick said. "I won't tell that one."
Bobo shrugged and dealt the cards with a spin.
"Ingeleh, listen to me. Go make a deal with another studio. Don't sit around at the old folks' home with all the alter kockers who are waiting to die. I feel too young to be here. So what in the hell do you get out of a place like this?'' Rick hadn't even picked up his cards. Bobo's were already sorted.
"I'm learning about what it's like to be retired," Rick said, "because that may be what I do next."
After he'd lost seven dollars and seventeen cents to his uncle, Rick said good-bye to the old man and hugged him. When he did, he could smell the English Leather cologne Bobo still splashed on every morning.
"Don't do anything stupid. You're one in a million, kid. Those shmeck-drecks who took away your project should all kiss your ass and thank you for the privilege."
"I'll tell them," Rick said.
"Meanwhile, just so their target ain't so big, you should take off a couple of pounds,'' the old man added, giving Rick a kind of sharp rap on the arm that he remembered his father giving him when he was a little boy that meant, Do what I'm telling you or you'll regret it. Rick said, "Yeah, yeah, yeah," and headed for the exit.
He'd been doing nothing for nearly three weeks. Stuffing his face with junk food, watching game shows and soap operas on TV, inviting an occasional lady to come over to cook dinner and "roll around on top of me naked," which was how he'd once described a sexual evening to Charlie. "They call me, I say bring dinner. They feed me, we do it, I fall asleep. With any luck, they're gone before breakfast." It was a schedule he kept in between the six-month-long "steady girls."
That morning at the beginning of the fourth week, as he lay in bed at ten o'clock in the morning counting the knotholes in the vaulted ceiling over his bed and telling himself that fifty was the perfect age at which it was excusable for him to have a mid-life crisis, the phone rang. Harvey Feldman didn't announce himself. Just started talking the minute he heard Rick's voice.
"If it's safe to assume you're still interested, one of my clients is a fifteen-year-old pregnant girl named Lisa," he said. "She's from Akron, Ohio. She's in town with her sister and she's already met a few families. I told her about you. She didn't seem to mind that you were single, and seemed curious to meet you. It's a very long shot. But if you like I can ask her to come over."
Rick couldn't believe his own reaction. Panic. More anxiety than he could remember feeling in years. Stage fright. "Listen, I need a little while to straighten up and shave and shower and . . . how pregnant? So the baby's due when? Christ, I don't even know if I should waste this girl's time, Harvey." He'd been struggling so much about how to handle his split from the studio that he'd pretty much put the baby thing out of his mind. It was a crazy spur-of-the-moment idea he'd had in the middle of the night, designed to try to save himself. And then in a panic he'd run to Feldman and afterward felt so dumb. How could he sit now and be interviewed, as if he were up for a part, by some little pregnant girl? This was lunacy.
"Rick," the lawyer said, "if you've changed your mind, if it isn't right, if it isn't something you're dying to do, hang up the phone. I've already told you how committed you have to be to something like this to make it right. And only you know the answer to that."
Rick lay silently, still looking at the ceiling. Finally he spoke.
"What time?"
"How's four this afternoon?"
"I'll be here."
Lisa was six months' pregnant and told Rick she had been referred to Mr. Feldman by her right-to-life group. She was blond and green-eyed and pink-skinned and wore what was probably a hand-me-down polyester maternity top over some faded jeans. Her older sister was waiting in the car in Rick's driveway, despite Rick's attempts to have Lisa go out and get her.
"She doesn't want to interfere," Lisa told him.
Each time Lisa asked him a question and he answered it, she made a check mark with a plastic Bic pen on a little tablet from which she'd read the question. "And would you continue to go to your job after you adopted my baby?" She read the question without looking at him.
"I would," Rick said, "but I would have someone very qualified here to care for the baby while I was gone."
Lisa made some kind of a note.
"How many hours a day do you work?" she read.
"That depends. If I'm in the development stage of a project I can sometimes be home by six. If I'm shooting, sometimes I can be gone all day and night." It occurred to him that the words development and shooting meant nothing to her. He was about to explain when she frowned and looked him in the eye.
"Mr. Reisman," she said, "I'm scared that you wouldn't see the baby enough. And that you don't have enough extended family to care for it. Only that old uncle of yours that you mentioned, and I doubt that he's really interested. The honest-to-God's truth is I'm really worried about how fat you are at your age. I mean, you could die when the baby's only a year old, and then what'll happen to it? You don't have a wife, and from what I can figure, it doesn't look much like you're planning on having one either, as busy as you are and all. And that sounds a little weird to me too. So the way I see it, there's not much point to our going on and me asking you questions about my baby's education and all. Is there? 'Cause there's not a shot that I'm gonna pick you, and I hope you'll understand."
It was so blunt that Rick almost laughed, but there was something about the little girl's serious face that stopped him.
"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
WITHIN 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 g
ive 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.
The Stork Club Page 17
