“John went back to Ohio?” Nina asked her as Cee Cee absently bit into a piece of toast that was black around the edges.
“Yeah,” Cee Cee said. “How do you know? Did you hear us fighting last night?”
“Uh-huh. He was really mean to you.”
“Yeah, that was pretty bad. And as if he hadn’t hurt me enough, I, like a schmuck, followed him out to the car and stood there crying while he was putting his things in the trunk. It was like I was saying,
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I didn’t have enough. Give me more shit. Can you believe it? So he did. He told me I had a star complex, that I take myself too seriously, and that I’ve lost my sense of humor. I was so hurt by that, I forgot to mention that only six months ago the New York Times called me the comedy star of the decade.” She giggled a ripple of a giggle at that, then looked at Nina with a pained grin that had toast crumbs all around it.
“Well, why didn’t you?”
“Well, I would have but at that moment, I didn’t remember.” “What do you mean?”
Cee Cee put her elbows on the table now and rested her face in her two hands. “I mean I lost it. He was rejecting me so I totally lost it, forgot that every day for the last two weeks I woke up with a speech in my head I was planning to make to him, about how you can’t go backward in life, and how even though it felt good to see him and be with him, and how I’d be willing, even glad to help his career in any way I could if he wanted my help, I couldn’t keep allowing him to take over my life the way he was trying to, and the way he did when I was a kid.”
“Good speech,” Nina said, putting a piece of bread in the toaster for herself.
“Isn’t it?” Cee Cee said. “Too bad it’s on the cutting room floor. I was even gonna say that he ought to start to meet some other women and date them because I didn’t want to go back to a romance with him, and certainly not a marriage. And all of a sudden when I heard him saying he was on his way back to Ohio, all my plans to be rational went right out the French doors. I mean, I panicked because all I could think was ‘He’s leaving me. How can he leave me?’ And I looked at the same man I couldn’t wait to get rid of two weeks before and thought, ‘How am I going to live without him?’
“So I said, and this is the part I hate myself for, in this real dramatic voice I said, ‘John … don’t go to her. Stay here and we’ll try to work it out.’ I still can’t believe I was so crazed I was asking him to stay and I didn’t even want him to. And then, as if it wasn’t bad enough, he said something that really got me. He said that after all this time, he’d better confess the truth, which was that when he showed up in Atlantic City, he was really coming to ask me to be an investor in the Sunshine… you know, that theater he used to own?
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Not to renew, anything, not because he cared about me, but then when he aw me onstage that night he got tangled up in the web of his feelings’ for me. Do you love that phony bullshit? The web of his feelings? Like I was the spider and he was the fly, and that it took him till now to realize it was all just him reacting to the bad way his wife had treated him a few years back and trying to get back at her was childish and that he wanted to go home. ‘Of course, you do,’ I told him. ‘Maybe she can bask in your glory. But as far as I can see, you don’t even need any sunscreen to bask in that goddamned glory.’”
Cee Cee wiped her mouth with a napkin. Her eyes were full and her face was red, and she stood and walked away toward the sink for no apparent reason except to hide that fact from Nina. For a while she stared out the window at the ocean, then finally she asked Nina, “Can I fix you anything?”
“No thanks,” Nina told her, “I’ll just have my toast.” Then she walked over to the sink and put an arm around Cee Cee as the day filled with sunshine and a couple wearing matching white sweat suits jogged north along the beach outside the window.
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Dear Cecilia,
First I’ll start by saying don’t get excited, it’s not a big deal because if it was I would call you up instead of writing it in this letter, but I’m not so hot in the ticker department if you know what I mean.
Believe me, you have got enough on your mind with a television show and somebody else’s daughter to worry about without having to think about me. So all I’m doing is writing to say “hello” and thanks for all the money you send me from some guy named Wayne Gordon’s office whoever he may be.
Time goes by so fast, it’s hard to believe your mother, may she rest in peace, is already gone so many years. If she was alive she would be calling you every day saying why don’t you come and visit once in a while, but I don’t believe in telling children what to do.
You know that old expression “all I know is what I read in the paper”? That’s what I should say, since down the street at the newsstand I see your picture in the paper all the time.
Everyone here thinks you’re some big deal, and when I tell them you’re my daughter, they think I am too.
Your father,
Nathan Bloom
MIAMI BEACH, FLORIDA
IN MIAMI BEACH the light of the day is so soft and flattering, Cee Cee decided, as her taxi drove down Collins Avenue, the reason why so many old people moved there had to be because the light made them look younger. Her father had lived in an apartment in Miami Beach off and on for years in which it had cost her a fortune to keep him, and now he was dying there in a Jewish convalescent home where it was costing her even more. She had been summoned by his doctor twe days ago, who told her Nathan was having chest pains and trouble breathing but that he refused to go into a hospital, and maybe her input would change his mind.
The call made Cee Cee want to pick up the phone, call Nathan, and shout, “Daddy, get your ass into the hospital,” but a lifetime of guilt for ignoring him prompted her to call off a few days of production meetings for her show and ask her travel agent to book her to Miami (God’s waiting room) Beach.
“Can I come too?” Nina asked. She was a skinny beanpole now, with long curly fly-away hair that was always in her eyes and a closelipped smile she used, to try to cover the mouthful of braces on her teeth.
“Of course you can, but why would you want to?” Cee Cee asked. “While you’re seeing your dad, I could visit my aunt.” Bertie’s Aunt Neetie. Cee Cee’s first impulse was to say, “No way, Jos,” and close the issue because she couldn’t bear the thought of Nina spending even one minute with the Miami Bitch, which was how she thought of Neetie. Aside from Michael Barron, Neetie was Nina’s only living blood relative, and she was always hovering out
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there with something shitty to say about Cee Cee in her letters or phone calls to Nina, or something sn,.‘de to say about everyone in show business in general as if she knew them all personally, and she was an expert at constantly making the point to Nina that Bertie, if she was alive, would have done everything pertaining to Nina so much better than Cee Ccc did. So that when Nina openly and candidly read the poison missives out loud to Cee Cee, it was all Cee Cee could do not to call the old witch in Florida and tell her to fuck off, but she didn’t. Instead she took a deep breath and tried to explain away the things Neetie had written, and though there was no doubt in her mind that Nina’s spending a few days with Neetie would cost a lot of deep breaths and a lot of explaining, she still answered, “Sure, honey. I’ll help you pack.”
Things had been a little rough with her and Nina recently, and late at night when Nina was long asleep, Cee Cee turned to the now dog eared child-raising books looking for answers. This time to read about what they called pre-adolescence. A time when confusion reigned because at eleven they were no longer children and not quite adolescents.
This stage usually hits parents with a wallop. Your stable, reasonable and well-behaved child seems suddenly to have taken an overdose of obnoxious pills.
Nina seemed to fade in and
out of surliness. She was a classic case of being neither here nor there, still sleeping with teddy bears but blushing and flirting when one of the crew members on Cee Cee’s show kidded with her. And when Cee Cee saw that, she wished like hell there had been a healthy relationship Nina could have witnessed somewhere along the line, a man she could have had some time with, since she had lived her whole life without a father. A man.
Men. Now there was a joke. Each time a new one came into Cee Cee’s life, she was amazed to see that no matter how bad the departure of the last one had been, the kid was still ready and willing to pin her hopes on the new one. Once Cee Cee read a quote somewhere that said a woman without a man couldn’t meet a man of any age without thinking, even for a second, maybe this is the man. And she could see by the way Nina closely observed each man who showed any interest in Cee Cee, the way she asked him telling questions about himself,
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that she too was trying to test the potential each one had to be the man in their household.
But none had worked out. Some of the men who found their way to their door were too interested in Cee Cee’s stardom, wanted to use her power for their own purposes or to be able to say they were involved with a star. Others were intimidated by her lifestyle, and she had to admit it wasn’t exactly easy. After all, there was no dating her in a conventional way. Everywhere she went she was swamped with autograph seekers, besieged by photographers, and stared at by everyone else. So the men who stepped forward, as she described it, “bearing bouquets of flowers and cocks that didn’t fall to half-mast as they approached my famous and exquisite bod,” were rare and unusual.
And even when they did, eventually some interior buzzer of hers buzzed, like the rasping end-bell on a game show telling the contestant the answer was wrong, and Cee Cee would know it was over with this one too, so she would try to explain nicely, then turn down his requests to come over, and eventually stop taking his calls at all, and soon another would be phased out.
“No more Clan?” Nina would ask (or Chad or Mark or Roger).
“Not for me,” Cee Cee would answer, knowing she would have to face the disappointment in Nina’s eyes again.
Perhaps there is an in-law or a relative, a grandfather or an uncle who can play an active male role with your children. In rare cases a male friend can do this. This person can be invited over to dinner or picnics. He can take the children to movies, take them fishing or camping, take them to sports events, go swimming or sailing with them.
Yeah, sure. There was no one in their lives to fit that bill, except for Hal, but he lived and worked in New Yock, and these days only came in on occasional visits. Cee Cee’s father, who had never been a force in her life, was another story. As soon as she’d started making money she had helped him to move out of an old folks home in New York to an apartment in Miami Beach. Bought him stock, MCA, Warners, enough to give him a reason to get up in the morning, to call his broker and check on his money.
Over the years she had extended vague invitations to him to come to Los Angeles to visit, never sure what she would do with him if he said yes and showed up, but Nathan Bloom had always declined.
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Now he was ailing and not long for this world, and the illness had dictated that he move back into a convalescent home, the one toward which her taxi now moved through the bright, sunny Miami Beach day.
“Why don’t I take this cab to Neetie’s and you take that one to see your dad? You don’t need to come with me to see Neetie,” Nina had said to her at the Miami airport.
“You mean because she loathes and despises me and that makes you uncomfortable?”
“Yes,” Nina answered.
“You got it.” Cee Cee felt remiss agreeing to take separate taxis, but she couldn’t bring herself to have to see Neetie and her pinched, judgmental face waiting for Nina’s cab to drive up outside her building, so she agreed to let Nina get there alone. At the cabstand she gave her enough money to last for several days, exchanged phone numbers with her, and hugged her goodbye, regretting her decision the second the cab pulled away, and she tried hard to fight back the fear that Nina would see Neetie after so many years and love her so much she would beg her aunt and uncle to keep her in Miami Beach.
Even at its worst the L.A. heat didn’t have the kind of dense humidity Miami Beach did. By the time Cee Cee had paid her cabdriver and carried her overnight bag to the door of the Beth Shalom Convalescent Home, she was soaked with sweat, and her black silk sweater stuck to her in several wet places. As she pushed the glass doors to the lobby open, she tried to steel herself for what it would be like seeing Nathan after so long. Nathan, who had been a silent figure behind a newspaper for most of her childhood. Cowering from that cow Leona. “Let the kid sleep late, for chrissake, Leona,” he would offer now and then on a Saturday morning as Leona hollered for a tired Cee Cee to “Getyertapshuzon.” And when he did, Leona would turn on him and yell, “And you mindyerowngoddamnbizness,” and he always did. Occasionally there would be a burst of humor from him, a moment when he could ease the overbearing Leona into an uncharacteristic grin or a sudden girlish giggle. Like when the two of them sang together.
“I’m the sheik of Araby,” Leona would sing, and Nathan with a sexy little twinkle in his eye would follow every line with the words, “Without a pair of pants.”
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“And your love belongs to me.”
“Withot’t a pair of pants.”
“At night when you’re asleep.” “Without a pair of pants.” “Into your tent I’ll creep.” “Without a pair of pants.”
“This is where you got your talent, Cecilia,” Nathan would tell her pointing to himself.
“Oh yeah?” Leona would say. “I guarantee ya, Eddie Cantor ain’t losing any sleep over you, Bloom.” Sometimes by the end of the song he would be wearing a kitchen towel around his little bald head as his costume for the sheik of Araby. Remembering him that way now as she walked up to the desk at the convalescent home made Cee Cee regret all the years she had stayed away from him, and wish she could have them back.
When she asked the nurse at the front desk where 4C was, she answered, “Ahhh, you’re Nate’s daughter. He’s a prince of a man,” then gave her directions to her father’s room. As she moved down the carpeted hall, Cee Cee looked at the old people who sat slumped and staring in wheelchairs posted outside the doors to their rooms, probably because they didn’t want to stay inside the rooms all day but only had the physical wherewithal to get as far as the door jamb.
Now and then the eyes of one of them would meet hers and she would see a glimmer that probably meant, “Look! A young person!” But that was all the contact most of them seemed able to make. On the cardboard plaque outside of room 4C there was a sign which indicated that inside the room there were two occupants. MARTY ELMAN
AND NATHAN BLOOM it said, and there was a photograph of each
man’s face next to his name. Cee Cec looked long at the picture of her father. It was an old one from long ago, in fact it was half of one in which the other half had been her mother standing next to him. Cee Cee knew because somewhere in a box of pictures at home she had the original, and now she wondered if Nathan had used that particular picture because since then no one else had taken another one of him. That thought made her so sad she reached up and put her fingers on the picture.
“They all have them now,” someone said, and Cee Cee turned to see a small round blond nurse holding a pile of what looked like
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sheets. “Originally we started putting pictures up so our Alzheimer’s patients could find their way back to their rooms. Then everybody wanted them.”
Cee Cee nodded a numb nod in reply.
“I’m your father’s nurse, Cee Cee. I would know you even if I never saw you in the movies or on TV, which I did, because he has a milli
on pictures of you in his drawer.”
“He does?” Cee Cee wasn’t sure why that surprised her. “He’s asleep now, I just checked him,” the nurse told her, shaking her head sadly. “Not good. On the first floor alone we lost three this week. They wear out. The human body unfortunately was only designed to last sixty-some years. You take perfect care, you last more. Not such good care, you last less. Your father, he’s in his
eighties, so it’s his time.”
“I’ll go see him.”
“Don’t mind the roommate, Elman. He’s a pain in the tochas. You
know what a tochas is?”
Cee Cee nodded.
“Anyways, how’s that little girl of yours?”
“She’s fine,” Cee Cee said. “Thanks for asking.”
The room was divided by a panel of curtains, and Cee Cee wondered why, with all the money she was paying, Nathan only had a semiprivate room instead of a private one. She made a mental note to ask somebody in charge after she spent some time with her father, whose head was thrown back and his mouth was open in a snore, as he twitched in the throes of a dream.
Overlaid on the disinfectant odor in the room, she breathed in a familiar Nathan scent from her childhood she recognized as Old Spice cologne, and the smell of it brought back the old apartment of her childhood, and the memory of Nathan standing with only a towel wrapped around his waist, his hairless pink chest and fat little arms, leaning over a sink of hot water trying to shave, while Leona hollered at him so much it was a miracle he didn’t cut his face to ribbons.
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