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once in her life, instead of being led by the underpants she was trying to behave like a grown woman, to reserve judgment, to see what happened.
The first thing that happened was that John’s producer friend was offered a power job at an agency, which he took, so he no longer needed John, which meam that John was out looking for a job every day. Cee Cee called some of her friends at the studios, who said they would look out for something for him, and she asked Larry Gold to try to get some producers he knew to try to find something for John, but after some time passed and he couldn’t find any job at all and didn’t even have a job interview in sight, he started hanging around at the studio on Fridays when Cee Cee’s show was taping.
Nobody seemed to mind him being at the tapings, everyone was friendly to him. He chatted with all of the people on the staff of the show. Sometimes after they’d repeated the same sketch again and again, and he was tired of watching it, he would walk down and sit in the commissary to have a cup of coffee and read the trade papers, and soon people who ate there regularly knew him by name and knew that he had something to do with Cee Cee, probably he was her boy friend. Seemed like a decent guy.
Then he started coming to the rehearsals during the week too, sitting in the back on a folding chair with a little spiral notebook in which every now and then he’d scratch some notes. Later, when Cee Cee was taking a break, he’d come into the dressing room and when everyone was gone but the two of them, he would take out the spiral notebook and say things to her like, “You know that spot in the hospital sketch where you’re the doctor giving the patient the reflex test? Well whoever that day player is, he’s mugging so much it upstages everything you’re doing.”
“He’s not a day player. He’s part of the company of people who do the sketches with me.”
“Well, the director is doing you a major disservice if he keeps letting him get away with that behind you.”
“I’ll look into it,” she said. There were more notes like that. They were good notes. Good for Cee Cee, from someone who seemed to care more about her than about the general welfare of the show. It was much more personal care than she’d ever had from Larry Gold. And it felt familiar, because it was the way John had advised her when
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she was a young struggling singer, and the way Leona had focused on her, from the phrasing of each line she sang to the color of the mascara she wore. But she liked it for another reason too. Because John was telling it to her like it really was and, with very few exceptions, she was already up to her ears in yes-men. People who always said, “You were brilliant, Cee Cce,” even when she knew she wasn’t.
“That sketch is completely tasteless,” John would tell her after
watching the rehearsal. “Beneath you and the show. Don’t do it.” “Arc you sure?”
“Think about what it says. Is that the kind of statement you want to make?”
This man directs Shakespeare, she would think. He must have class. I do hooker jokes. What do I know? I’ll have them cut it,” she would say after reading it again through newly educated eyes, and go out to face the producer and the head writer to tell them to cut the sketch, knowing they would exchange looks and tell her she was being difficult, but she didn’t care what they did. John was right, and she was starting to feel very tied to him again. The man she had been the most intimate with in her life.
How odd that she had been continuing to fend off their sexual intimacy. Hadn’t let him lay a finger on her all this time, though they joked about it and it was always in the air between them. But she had to admit she was starting to feel so hooked into him that she didn’t want to think of what adding sex to what they had now could mean to them emotionally.
It didn’t take people long to start thinking of John as a good way to get to Cee Cee. If the netvork wanted her to do some promotions or get her to come and perform at the affiliates convention, something she hated, they would start the convecsations with John to feel out how he liked their ideas, or to have him help them determine what was the best way” to approach her. One afternoon at the commissary a successful television producer named Jay Green put his coffee cup on the table across from where John was sitting, and when John looked up, Jay Green smiled and introduced himself. After they’d talked for a while, he told John he’d like to give him a script to read that was a potential miniseries with a part in it that was perfect for Cee Cee.
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“She won’t do a miniseries. We think she should only do features,” John told him.
The television producer’s eyes smiled at that statement, but the rest of his face was serious as he said something about how he was sure John would change his mind when he read the script he had in mind and also, he dropped, it might be something John would be interested in co-producing with him. So John took the script and read it several times, making notes about things in the story he thought should be changed and parts of what the lead character did that wouldn’t be suitable for Cee Cee, and over the next two weeks he took several meetings with Jay Green before even mentioning the project to Cee Cee.
The night he did mention it to her, her mind was in a million different places, and later when she thought back to it, all she remembered was John saying he had a chance to produce some television show, and she had thought, Thank God, he’s going to have a job, and she said “Great.” So when Larry Gold called her at home and said he needed to talk to her without anybody else around, she couldn’t imagine what was such a big deal and a secret, but she took the call in her bedroom and closed the door.
“Look, forgive me,” he started out. “But you and I have been together for a lot of years. Okay? And I’m hoping we’ll continue to be for a lot more years, so I’ll be straight with you. Are you shtupping that guy Perry? I mean is that why he thinks he can take meetings on projects and make promises to people that you’re gonna do the projects without even checking in with me?”
“What?”
“Jay Green thinks that I should be opening negotiations on your behalf for some piece of dreck miniseries I don’t think you would spit on. And he says he knows you’re available to do it because Perry’s his partner, and that’s what Perry’s saying. Cee Cee, what’s the haps here? I thought we decided no miniseries and no Movies of the Week.”
Cee Cee searched her mind trying to think if she had said yes to something and forgotten about it, or led John to believe she wanted to do a miniseries. To begin with she hadn’t even read whatever script Larry was talking about. But she didn’t want to tell that to Larry. It would make John look ridiculous, so instead she said, “Well, we did discuss the fact that it was a terrific part.”
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“You’ve got to be kidding!” Larry said. “With a page-one rewrite by Alvin Sargent, maybe it’s a good part. But other than that, this thing belongs in the trash masher. Cee Cee, I’m always the first one
to tell you how brilliant you are. But, in this case.., reconsider.”
Reconsider. Reconsider what? John had committed her to something and she wasn’t even certain what the something was.
“Not really committed. How could I commit you without you seeing it? Don’t be crazy,” he told her that night. Antonia, the housekeeper, was off, Nina was at Kevin’s, and John had brought takeout Chinese from the Mandarin for dinner for the two of them. “Look, I have to admit the script is not one hundred percent. But Jay says once we get the network to say yes, we can afford to bring in a new writer and I’ll supervise the writing. That way we’ll know from day to day exactly what we’re getting. I’ll tell you what. On Saturday morning, let’s drive up to Santa Barbara. You can read the script in a bungalow at the Biltmore, and we can get away from all the tensions here. I know you’re going to see the potential in this, and drop your prejudices about miniseries.”
Cee Cee watched him while he said all that, opening all of the little
white cartons of Chinese food, as the steam rose from each one, not looking at her while he talked. For a long time she’d recognized that to be in her position was to be a target for every person who thought she could help to get them something they needed or somewhere they wanted to go, and though that had probably been true for years and years, this was the time when she prayed it wasn’t the case. Figured that John, since he had loved her when she had been nowhere and nobody, would be exempt from needing her that way. And on Saturday night in the bungalow at the Santa Barbara Biltmore she let him make love to her for the first time in fifteen years, hoping the act of sex would not only ease her worries but rekindle some deeply rooted passions from years before.
Every man she’d been with since him, no matter how hot and sexy,
took a while to psych her out, and of course the reverse was true, too. To know exactly where and when to touch one another, how hard to press here, how gently to rub there, which moans meant go on and which meant stop. But within seconds the two of them had one another going the way they always had during their ten-year mar° riage. He was holding her face in his two hands, telling her how he’d
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never stopped loving her, knowing how she always needed to hear the words, how protestations of love were more erotic to her than any touch. She was holding his great ass and pulling his pelvis toward her, while he promised her they were going to be together forever, telling her how much he wanted her, how he’d lived his life just waiting to come back to her this way, then pulling her to him hungrily and kissing her with a long searching kiss, during which he moved his hands under her sweater, easily in one move unfastening the front clasp on her bra, then finding her nipples and taking them between his thumb and forefinger the way he remembered she loved it and playing with them first softly, then squeezing until she moaned, and then if only from the long absence of sex in her life she was filled with heat, the aching needy place inside her that had to have him there to fill it, and she felt her knees getting weak.
Again with the agility he’d always had, which she used to think was almost sleight of hand and be jealous of every woman he had been with, since it was obviously a result of years and years of practice, he unbuttoned the top button on her slacks, then unzipped them and gentled them down to the floor by rubbing his own body against hers until the pants moved to her thighs, then to her knees, and when they were piled around her ankles, before she could step out of them he slid his fingers under the lace on the thigh of her panties and pressed them into the swollen throbbing folds longing to be caressed.
Oh, yes, she wanted it, and she pressed her pelvis hard against his fingers so he could feel the urgency in her, and he lifted her and carried her to the bed, quickly removing his own clothes, then the rest of hers, while she somehow managed to find an instant of presence of mind to grab for her purse on the floor and fish around inside it for one of the condoms she’d shoved in there just before she left her house.
But by the time she found it, he was moving astride her, and she helped him on with the balloonlike piece of rubber, afraid one of her nails might tear it, then looked at his very familiar body and his very familiar cock, and his face contorted with a passion she remembered so long ago could make her wild with desire for him, and realized with a sudden discomforting wave of sobriety she never had during sex, as he entered her with a first thrust, that it was only the lubrication of the condom that made his slide inside of her anything but unyielding,
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because she felt nothing. Then he thrust harder and this time she was wetter as her body responded to the sex, any sex because it had been so long, but she knew as she began to relax into the physical feelings, that this moment she had hoped for was nothing more than what she’d heard people call a mercy fuck. Because all she felt for him now was sorry.
Sorry he was pushing sixty and still trying to find himself, sorry he had left his family instead of hanging in and working on his relationships with them because he had some fantasy that being with Cee Cee could fix his life, and that she had been a party to the fantasy because she’d needed it so badly herself. And now she knew that the security she had begun to feel about leaning on him had been a result of her bottomless need, and also a result of the front he’d developed to get her to depend on him so that he could manipulate her, and the truth was that she couldn’t go back again and find solace in him and security and a mind she respected the way she had when they were just starting out their life together. She had come too far to ever go back.
John was lost now in that other world of sexual heat, eyes closed, moving inside her against her to his own rhythm, and Cee Cee beneath him felt as detached as if she was watching from the back row of a movie theater. “Baby, we’re so close, we’re one person, how did I ever leave you, baby? Oh God, you feel so good to me, you’re mine, you’re still mine, aren’t you, baby? Oh, Cee Cee, oh yes.” It did feel good having a naked man against her own nakedness, it had been much too long and even in her removed watching-froma-distance place she had to admit that. But each time she opened her eyes and saw John there on top of her, so fi/led with the passion she was lacking for him, she knew that though it might be sad to feel anger or hatred about someone you once loved so much, what was much more heartbreaking was to feel pity.
After that night in Santa Barbara things started to slide badly. Cee Cee turned down the miniseries, John went out for a brief spurt of job hunting, and the tension between the two of them became palpable. Once Cee Cee snapped at him and overheard somebody on the crew joke, “Uh oh, trouble in paradise.” One Friday night Nina had stayed up late, but shortly after she’d fallen asleep she was awakened
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by the sound of Cee Cee and John having a fight downstairs. They were probably sitting at the dining-room table, which was directly under her room, so she could hear every word rising from their heated quarrel.
“Hcy, nothing pcrsonal, but you and I both know television is simply a lot of mindless bullshit for morons, which is why your show has been so successful for so long. Because it has no substance.”
“Is that right?” Cee Cee said. She had never thought her show was fodder for PBS, but bullshit for morons was a little low. “If television is such shit, then I’d like to know why you’ve been kissing up to so many people trying to worm your way into it.”
“Oh, now that’s funny. Who in the hell have I been kissing up to?” “Everyone I introduce you to. Everyone I don’t introduce you to. Everyone in the business.”
“You couldn’t be more wrong. Of course with your upbringing you wouldn’t know the difference between someone with charm and someone who is, to use your classy phrase, ‘kissing up.’”
“Oh, honey, let me tell you something,” Cee Cee said in a tone Nina recognized as her haul-off-and-let-one-go voice. “You have been so charming to so many people out here, rumor has it that your nose is browner than George Hamilton’s.”
Nina wasn’t sure what that line meant, but the giddy triumph she heard in Cee Cee’s delivery meant she’d probably been rehearsing it for a while. Then it was quiet and Nina figured maybe they were both sorry for being so mean to one another and had probably made up and were kissing or something, but then she heard John say, “Cee Cee, I’ve been talking to my wife on the phone every night, and the truth is I really miss her. I love her, and I never should have left her for some unrealistic fantasy I had about what you could be for me, or what we could have together, because you were never right for me and you still aren’t.”
Nina felt sick when she heard that, because so many times over the last few months she had seen a girlish look on Cee Cee’s face when she referred to John as a joke, as her “once and future husband,” that made Nina know she wasn’t joking, and now she wished she could rush downstairs and put
her arms around Cee Cee, who had to feel after that news as if John had punched her in the stomach.
“When did you start talking to her every night?” Cee Cee asked
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with the same hurt Nina had heard from her on the first Mother’s Day they had pent together, when Nina had flared at her, “Don’t keep hinting around that it’s Mother’s Day. You’re not my mother and I’m not getting you any gift.” “Oh, I understand,” Cee Cee had said in that voice which had hit a chord so deep in Nina she’d walked immediately over to the Malibu pharmacy and spent ten dollars on a silver
compact and another dollar fifty on a card that said MOTHER’S DAY
GREETINGS TO SOMEONE SPECIAl,. But apparently that voice didn’t have the same effect on John, because now he went on to say, “I’m going home. It’s almost the holidays and I want my family back. My flight leaves tomorrow morning.”
There was no response, and Nina leaned over the edge of her bed to get her face closer to the floor so she could hear the next.
“You talked to her every night? Even when we were in Santa Barbara?”
“Even when we were in Santa Barbara.” “When? You were with me every minute.” “When you were in the shower.” “You filthy rotten lowlife.”
“Likewise I’m sure,” he said, and then Nina heard nothing until the sound of the front door slamming shook the house, and it took Nina a long time after that to fall asleep.
In the morning when she went downstairs she could smell coffee, and when she walked into the kitchen, Cee Cee was there, red-eyed and edgy and fighting to be cheerful. “I think you, me, and Kevin ought to go to the movies tonight,” she said. “Let’s find out what’s playing at the Malibu Cinema.” She was wearing a silk kimono and her face looked as if she hadn’t taken off her makeup properly the night before, still smudged around the eyes, and there was a little red spot on her cheek.
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