The Stork Club

by Iris Rainer Dart

  "Sure," he said, sitting at the foot of the bed. "Would you do that for me?"

  "For you, yes," she said, her little round pink face very serious, her blond lashes batting hard behind the glasses. "But keep in mind," she said, "if I'm critical, it's because I am a student of the classics."

  "I'll certainly factor your literary background into my assessment of the critiques."

  "Oh, thanks ever so," she said, assuming the haughtiest voice. Then she opened the blue cover of the top script and looked at the title page. "Well here's one that's bound to do wonders for your career. It's called The Hand of Doom. I think I'll start with this and work my way up."

  He started toward the door. "You," he said, "are a piece of work."

  "What's for dinner?" she asked.

  "I'll ask Nellie," he said.

  "Nellie went home early, her mother's sick," she told him.

  The point was clear. Dinner was up to him.

  "What do you like on your pizza?" he asked.

  "You'd feed pizza to the woman whose body is nutritionally responsible for your child?"

  "I'll make a salad," he mumbled grudgingly.

  "Be sure to throw in some protein," she shouted after him.

  Standing in the kitchen alone he chuckled, trying to imagine what the personality would be of the baby that came out of that girl. A feisty little pink-faced girl? A tough, smart-mouthed boy? Four more weeks and, God willing, he would be holding the little creature in his arms.

  A few evenings later, Doreen, who had fallen asleep over one of Rick's scripts, was awakened by the sound of the doorbell. The doctor had told her she could go as far as the bathroom, and the front door wasn't much farther than that, so she figured it would be all right if she answered it. Whoever was at the door was making a big racket, loud, with the brass door knocker. Doreen couldn't find her own robe, but an old one of Rick's was hanging on the inside of the door, so she threw that one over her nightgown and hurried to see what was so urgent.

  The woman who stood in the doorway was so gorgeous to look at, at least to Doreen, that she was certain this must be a movie star. It wasn't Candice Bergen, but she looked a lot like her.

  "Is Mr. Reisman at home?"

  "No he isn't," Doreen said.

  "Do you expect him soon?"

  Doreen nodded.

  The woman moved forward, backing Doreen into the living room.

  "I'll just wait here," she said, plopped down in a chair, picked up a magazine, and began leafing through it. "Tell you what," she said to Doreen without even looking up at her. "I'll have a scotch and water."

  "Great," Doreen said, and was about to head back into her room to get back into bed when the blond woman said, "Make it for me, okay?"

  Doreen looked at her and said, "Honey, I wouldn't know scotch if you cooked me in it. Make it yourself," and went back into her room. After a few minutes she could hear the woman talking loudly to someone, and she realized it must be into a telephone because there were no other voices out there. Uh-oh, she thought, what if she's making long-distance calls? What if Rick doesn't even know her and I let her into the house? I better keep an eye on her.

  So she put the robe on again and walked back into the living room. When she got there, the woman was drinking some kind of alcohol in a glass she'd found in one of the cabinets and smoking a cigarette. The butt of a previous cigarette had already been put out on what Doreen recognized was one of Rick's good china plates, which this lady had obviously pulled out of the cabinet when she couldn't find an ashtray.

  "I figured if I waited long enough, this asshole would come to his senses and call me, and then not one fucking word. I mean, it's such bullshit. So after a few weeks went by I called his office three times, and he never called me back. And that bitch secretary of his, that Andrea, kept saying, 'Sorry, Mona, he's so busy,' you know? Then I read in Variety that the studio dumped him.

  "Well, you know what a softie I am. Right? I felt sorry for him, so I sent him a really sweet note that he never answereo, and I called his house and left message after message on the fucking machine, and he still didn't call me back, and then I read in the Hollywood Reporter that he made a deal at Universal, so I sent him some flowers over there, and you think he calls me one time? Zippo. Not even a thank-you note from the rude little asshole. And Katy Biggard said she saw him on the beach in Malibu last week, and that he must be dying or something because he lost all this weight, and you know what a pig he's always been. You'd get sick if you saw him naked. Anyway, I got really worried about him and came running over here and this troll who works for him answers the door, and she wouldn't even make me a drink. I'll tell you, I'm just sick and tired of it. So listen—"

  Doreen had heard enough. "This isn't an ashtray," she said, grabbing the plate away from Mona, who had been tamping out another cigarette and now dropped hot ashes onto her own hand and screamed. Doreen grabbed the phone away from Mona. "He is not an asshole or a pig," and slammed it into the phone cradle. "And Andrea is not a bitch." Then she grabbed the five-foot-nine Mona by the arm and steered her toward the door. "I am not a troll, and you," she said, opening the front door and shoving Mona out through it, "are not welcome here!"

  Before she could shut the door in the stunned Mona's hang-jawed face, Mona bellowed, "Who the fuck are you? I'm going to tell Rick about this and he's going to fire your fat ugly little ass for treating me like this. So I just want you to tell me right now who you are!"

  "I," Doreen said, realizing that she was wearing Rick's robe, untied it and let it fall dramatically to the floor as she told the flabbergasted Mona, "am the mother of Rick Reisman's baby." And then she closed the door in Mona's stunned face.

  Doreen remembered what her mother once told her about how to deal with a man: Wait until his stomach is full before you break any bad news to him. So she waited until she and Rick finished the dinner Nellie had left for them that night and were about to watch the news on television. Then she told him about Mona's visit. He didn't react visibly until the end of the story, when to Doreen's delight he let out a big laugh. There was enormous relief in it, and he obviously loved imagining little Doreen pushing big Mona out the door. "I'm sorry," he said, hoping Doreen wasn't insulted by his laughter, but the feeling was too rich to hold inside.

  Things were coming together for him at Universal the way they never had before. All of his new projects were exciting, and within six months one of them was sure to move onto the floor, and he would be back in the world where he operated best. Interacting with the actors, taking close-up pictures of human behavior. That was when he felt most comfortable, creating those moments of truth.

  There was one script that had its hooks deeper into him than the others. The leading character was a brilliant scientist who discovers a possible cure for cancer, and the story is about the battles he fights when he enters a nightmarish world of people who don't want that cure to be found just yet.

  "Robert Redford," Doreen said the minute she finished reading the script, "and nobody else. Maybe with you directing, Clint Eastwood could pull it off."

  Sometimes Rick had to stifle a laugh when she talked that way. Since she'd started doing some of his reading she was beginning to sound like a salty, too hip, William Morris agent.

  "Redford is perfect," Doreen went on, "because this character has to have that kind of gorgeousness, since every woman in the whole movie falls in love with him."

  "I'll send it to his agent," Rick said.

  "Smart move," Doreen told him and moved on to the next script in the pile. She had two weeks to go until the baby was born, and these days she just kind of slid from room to room, from chair to chair. The big event of her day was, without fail, turning on the television and watching "Jeopardy!"

  "What is Soledad prison?" he heard her say out loud, answering the question with a question like the "Jeopardy!" contestants. "Who was Geppetto?" And when she got the answer wrong she would say to herself, "Doreeeen, you are so stupid!"

&n
bsp; "Last year in school we had a discussion about our ideal man," she said one night when Rick got home just as the "Jeopardy!" closing credits were rolling by. "Guess who I picked."

  "Who?"

  "Alex Trebek. He is truly brainy, which to me is the most important quality anyone can have."

  "I have a bachelor's degree and two master's," Rick said, realizing he was feeling jealous of the game-show host.

  "I know," she said. "When I found out I was going to meet you, I went to the library in Kansas City and read about you in that big book about directors that came out a few years back. It tells all the details of your life. It had everything in it about you and your parents and Uncle Bobo, with pictures of them when they were young."

  "Kansas City was a long way for you to go to check up on someone," he said.

  "Not someone," she said abruptly. "Maybe the father of the only baby I might ever have. Those other people from Los Angeles, the first ones Mr. Feldman introduced me to, they didn't seem as if they had a lot going for them upstairs, and that's why I didn't pick them."

  A lie. She thought she had to tell Rick a lie to cover, and it made him want to reach over, touch her hair gently, and tell her that he knew the truth about what had happened with that couple, and it didn't matter to him. But there was something about the way her jaw was set that told him to allow her to rewrite the uncomfortable story about that rejection with any ending she wanted.

  "It's also why I went to the library to check up on you."

  "How did I stack up?" he asked her gently.

  "Not bad," she answered.

  Sid Sheinberg called that night to tell Rick that Robert Redford not only loved the project but wanted to meet on the fifteenth about doing it, less than a week away, and Rick excitedly told Doreen. She nodded.

  "There you go," she said.

  At Doreen's most recent doctor's appointment, the doctor set Rick up with a beeper system.

  "In case," the doctor explained, "you're not in your office when she goes into labor, and we need you right away." Every morning before Rick left for work, he attached the beeper to his belt and gave it a little pat.

  "No false alarms," Doreen promised him. "I know you're busy, so I won't call unless I'm as sure as I can be that I'm ready to burst."

  "I'll be there for you," he promised in return.

  There was something indescribable about being in a room with Robert Redford. Even to Rick, who had known and worked closely with many famous stars. Maybe it was seeing with one's own eyes that the actor's look, the exquisite face, the stance, the bright-eyed boyishness, had nothing to do with the camera, but was very real.

  "He'll only be in town for these eight hours. At five-thirty he gets on an airplane and will be out of the country for six months. He loves the script. He loves the character, he loves your work. There are a few creative points he'd like to change."

  That was the part of what the agent said that stuck in Rick's stomach. What could those points be? The character of the scientist was certainly not perfect. He was neurotic, a drinker, maybe Redford didn't like that. But changing that would take all the bite out of the work.

  "I'm sure you know if he says yes, it's a go project, and my sense of it is that if you iron out those three points, he'll be ready to shoot it the minute he gets back."

  Redford. The image of Doreen's little face the day she suggested Rick try to get him came rushing back to Rick as he began telling Robert Redford about the genesis of the project and what had made him interested in it in the first place. Redford nodded and smiled, and Rick could tell by the comments he interjected that they agreed completely on the tone of the piece. Thank God.

  Doreen. Last night when he walked by her room, he heard her reading passages of Alice in Wonderland out loud. Any day now she would be going into labor, and his baby would be born. A baby. A fifty-year-old man adopting a baby. Somehow in the conversation with Redford, the subject of children came up. Probably because Phillips, the character in the script, had children, and Redford asked Rick if he had any. "Well. . . almost," Rick said, and he found himself rattling out the entire story of Doreen and the impending birth and adoption.

  "Now that's a story for a movie," Redford told him. Everyone in the meeting, all the executives and agents laughed at that comment. And now they were coming to the down side. The part of the meeting where Robert Redford would tell Rick what changes he thought the material required. Rick knew he would have to determine then and there if he thought the changes would work for or destroy the material as he saw it. He was about to steer the conversation in that inevitable direction when the unmistakable sound of the beeper he was wearing on his belt filled the entire room. Everyone turned and looked at Rick.

  "Must have been something I ate for lunch," Rick joked as he jumped to his feet. Doreen, the baby, his baby, was about to be born. To come into the world and be his heir, his family. Now, it was happening now, right in the middle of this coveted meeting with Robert Redford. A meeting that couldn't be changed or rescheduled for at least six months, after which the chance for the project to happen, the intense interest that could get Robert Redford to commit and the movie to be a certainty, would surely be gone.

  "Gentlemen," Rick said, with a slight bow of his head, "the scientist with the cure for cancer will just have to wait, because as of this moment, I'm about to be a father." And on very light feet, he left Robert Redford's meeting and went to take Doreen Cobb to the hospital.

  20

  ONE DAY AT PANACHE, Carin told Lainie she had heard about a way that adopting mothers could actually breast-feed their babies. The adopting mother taped to her nipple a tiny tube that was attached to a container of formula. The baby sucked on the tube and the mother's nipple at the same time, and eventually the adopting mother's hormones took over and her own breast milk came in. Lainie didn't tell the well-meaning Carin that her body would be unable to produce those hormones. Just thanked her for the information.

  Lainie and Jackie had agreed that probably it was best that their next meeting would not be until the amniocentesis, which was fourteen weeks away. Time went by quickly, and no news from Jackie was good news, because it meant that the pregnancy was holding. When the Jackie phone rang in her house and Lainie heard Jackie's by-now-familiar voice saying, "I'm a tank. You'll faint when you see me," she meant it when she answered, "I can't wait."

  As she opened the door to the neonatal doctor's reception area and saw Jackie, something about looking at her there made Lainie reel in disbelief. This wasn't just an idea anymore. There was exquisitely apparent evidence, round and swollen evidence, that Mitch's baby was inside this woman.

  "What do you think?" Jackie asked, stretching her legs out, then pulling herself up to her feet to come and give Lainie a Shalimar-scented hug.

  "I think you look great," Lainie said.

  Jackie stepped back and looked down at her own large middle. "There's our little honey," she said. "And today we're going to see it."

  A young dark-haired pregnant girl across the waiting room put down her magazine, looked over at the two of them, and smiled. "We're having a baby together," Jackie told her. The girl raised her eyebrows, not sure what to say, and seemed relieved when the nurse opened the door and called for Jackie and Lainie to come into the examining room.

  Now, from where she sat on the folding chair that the doctor had pushed into the back corner of the room for her, Lainie could see just the top of Jackie's round belly, which was shiny with oil. The neonatal doctor, handsome with gray hair which looked odd with his very young-looking face, had gently spread the oil on it, the way one lover spreads suntan lotion on the other. The oil made the instrument he held in his hand move more easily on Jackie's abdomen.

  The room was dimly lit so that Jackie, Lainie, the nurse, and the doctor could better see the speckled, writhing figure projected on the tiny TV monitor that was mounted close to the ceiling in the far corner of the room. It looked to Lainie like bad reception on a broken television, b
ut this was the long-awaited picture. The doctor was using it to determine the location of the amniotic fluid, some of which he was going to extract. With the help of his nurse, who held a pointer against the screen, he very carefully showed Lainie and Jackie that the baby had all of its fingers and toes, a perfect spine, and a healthy heartbeat.

  "Jesus, when my Tommy was born, they sure didn't have this kind of thing," Jackie said from her supine position on the table. "In those days, you just crossed your fingers and hoped for the best. Can you tell what it is yet, Doc?"

  "Yes. It's definitely a baby," the doctor joked.

  Jackie emitted a yelp of a laugh, and the grainy figure on the sonogram seemed to jump.

  "I mean the sex," Jackie said.

  "Not from this, but in a few weeks we'll know. Do you want us to tell you when we do, Mrs. O'Malley?"

  "Hell yeah," Jackie answered. "Don't we, Lainie?"

  Lainie had never even thought about knowing the baby's sex before it was born, and whether she wanted to or not. She had asked Jackie to have the amniocentesis to be certain the baby had no genetic defects. She had no idea how Mitch would feel about knowing the sex before the birth.

  "Absolutely," Jackie told the doctor. "That way they'll know if they want to name the baby Jackie for a girl or Jack for a boy," and then she laughed again. "That's a joke, Doc. My name is Jackie, and it's their baby." The doctor nodded with a slight smile.

  "Look," Jackie said, pointing suddenly. "Every time I laugh, it bobbles all around. Isn't that adorable?"

  Lainie tried to focus hard on the screen, but couldn't tell which part of the baby was which, or where the baby stopped and the rest of the picture started. This wasn't what she'd imagined at all. She'd thought that what she would see would look like the photos in the books she'd rushed out to buy the day she heard Jackie was pregnant, A Child Is Born and The Secret Life of the Unborn Child. Now she squinted when the nurse turned on the bright fluorescent overhead lights.