Within an hour, Cee Cee was getting out of the car at LAX. She’d asked Jake, the limo driver who usually drove her to an exercise teacher’s studio at lunchtime, to drive her home instead. While he waited, she packed and called the airlines. Shit. There were no seats available to Monterey. Not that afternoon, or that evening.
“How ’bout outta Burbank?” she asked.
Why had she let her lousy secretary take the day off to go see her goddamned parents in San Diego? And there was no way she could call her pain-in-the-ass business manager to try and get the airlines to bump somebody and give the seat to her. Because then her business manager would know she was leaving town, and he’d try to stop her. She had to get on a plane. Had to. Now. She’d never tried this before, but maybe it would work.
“Hey, this is Cee Cee Bloom, for chrissake,” she yelled into the telephone, “and I gotta get to Monterey. Today. Now.”
“Sorry, Miss Blue,” the dumb bimbo on the other end of the line said. Blue. The vacuum head didn’t even get who Cee Cee was.
“But sometimes people change their plans and don’t show up, so you could come to the airport and stand by, or—”
“The name’s Bloom, you stupid dipshit. Bloom,” Cee Cee said, and slammed down the receiver. A cigarette. She lit a cigarette and paced. What could she do? Connections. She needed connections. Who were her connections? Cee Cee dialed the number at Burbank Studios.
“Burbank Studios.”
“Ray Stark,” Cee Cee said.
“Ray Stark’s office.”
“This is Cee Cee Bloom.”
“He’s in Europe, Miss Bloom.”
“I need to borrow his airplane.”
“Why don’t I have him call you when I hear from him?”
“When will that be?”
“Tonight. Tomorrow morning at the latest.”
“Thanks anyway.” Cee Cee slammed the phone down. Jesus Christ. She started to shuffle through her address book for more ideas, but finally slapped it shut in frustration. “Ahh, why not,” she thought and grabbed the small overnight suitcase she’d packed and ran down the steps.
“Hey, Jakee,” she hollered out to the limo driver. “Let’s hit the road, pal. I’m gonna pretend I’m a real person and fly standby.”
Jake, he was okay. She’d make him swear he’d never seen her leave CBS. Say that she’d gone out a back door and that he didn’t know where she was.
“There’s five hundred bucks in it for you, Jake-o,” she said just as they were driving onto the San Diego Freeway going south. “Buy somethin’ for your kid.”
“Fuck you, Cee Cee,” Jake said. “You think you have to buy my loyalty? I never saw you since I drove you in this morning at eight, even if they cut my balls off.”
Cee Cee’s eyes filled with tears of embarrassment. Why were people so nice to her even if she was such an asshole? How could she be so stupid to offer Jake money? God, she was a klutz.
“I’m sorry,” Cee Cee said, and she was silent for the rest of the ride. Thinking about how dumb she was. So friggin’ dumb and crass, and all the money and clothes and chauffeurs in the world couldn’t take that away.
It took her till she was twenty-one, for chrissake, before she figured out why, when you ate in a restaurant, they put all those forks next to your plate. Who needed more than one fork? She always figured the forks were there to give you a choice of what size you liked the best. God knows Leona never taught her stuff about forks, and J.P., well he didn’t know much more than Cee Cee did. Even though he always pretended he did, the phony.
And tipping. Christ, she never knew anything about tipping. She always gave too much or not enough, or gave it to the wrong people. Once she got off an elevator. She was with Bertie that time—where the hell were they? maybe in Hawaii—and when they stepped off the elevator, Cee Cee handed the elevator girl a quarter. When the elevator door closed, Bertie said, “I must be going crazy. I could have sworn I saw you tip the elevator girl.” And Cee Cee said, “You mean you’re not supposed to?” And Bertie laughed so hard at that she had to lean against the wall in the hallway just to laugh. Of course, Cee Cee laughed with her, pretending it was a joke, pretending she’d never done that before, but the truth was she really didn’t know one thing about manners or politeness, especially when it came to money.
Well, who was gonna teach her? Nathan didn’t know and Leona sure as hell didn’t know, and once when her business manager was telling Cee Cee about payment for a certain club date he told her she was gonna be paid in increments, and before she looked it up and found out that increments were a series of payments, she thought they were little gold coins or something like that.
Anyhow, even now, even though she had a secretary and a maid and a business manager and a driver and a cook and a gardener, when it came to knowing rules about life, she was a lox. Like her mother. Leona, the poor cow. Cee Cee felt like laughing and crying at the same time when she thought about it.
“Chawmed I’m shuwah,” Leona used to say to some dopey shoe salesman wearing a bad rug when he told Leona what attractive feet she had so she’d buy the patent leather pumps from him. Cee Cee would die of humiliation. Wish for one day, even one hour, she could have a pretty mother, a thin mother, a mother who didn’t look at television and eat popcorn and laugh so loud with her mouth open that pieces of chewed popcorn flew across the room.
But you couldn’t pick your mother, and Cee Cee was stuck with Leona saying, “Chawmed I’m shuwah,” and elbowing people out of the way to be the first on line wherever she went. That was Cee Cee’s teacher about life. Leona.
“Thanks a lot,” she said as Jake opened the door for her at the curbside check-in. She was embarrassed to look at him. “I just have this one little bag, so I’ll carry it on and—”
Jake took her gently by the arm. “I’ll walk you up, Cee Cee,” he said.
She knew he must think she looked silly, because she was wearing that dumb outfit she always wore when she didn’t want to be recognized by anybody, and every time she wore it everybody recognized her anyway. Even with the hat, the scarf, and those dumb sunglasses.
“I’ll walk you up ’cause you’ll be less noticeable with me,” Jake offered. Cee Cee bought it.
“S’go,” she said.
The PSA flight was leaving for Monterey in fifteen minutes.
The check-in area was filled with people. Everyone was so busy with their crying children or saying good-bye to loved ones or reading Newsweek that no one even looked at Cee Cee, who sat on a bench while Jake went to get her a standby number.
“Think I’ll make it?” she asked Jake when he got back.
“You’re on,” he said.
“No other standbys?”
Jake patted her on the back.
“You’re on,” he said again, with a look that meant he had somehow used influence to push her through.
“Thanks, Jake,” she said, more embarrassed than ever about offering him the five hundred dollars.
The stewardess recognized her right away. Cee Cee could always see it in people’s eyes. Even though the person was trying to act like Cee Cee was just some regular woman from off the street, their eyes gave it away, got fogged up or something in that way that Cee Cee had once described to Bertie, “As if I’m the Pope and they’re an Italian shoemaker. Ya know?” Bertie had cracked up at that. Cee Cee was always cracking Bertie up. They were the cracker and the crackee. Titles that Bertie made up, and when she told them to Cee Cee she cracked Cee Cee up and Bertie said, “Thank God. For once I made you laugh.”
“Did you want anything to drink?” the stewardess asked.
That’s when Cee Cee realized she was hungry. But shit, this was a goddamned forty-five-minute flight and there wasn’t any food.
“Just a Coca-Cola…and…could I have some extra peanuts?”
The stewardess smiled. “Sure. If you give me your autograph for my daughter. Right on the napkin would be okay. Her name’s Sharon.”
Cee Cee nodded. “Right.” The stewardess handed her a pen. To Sharon, Love, Cee Cee Bloom. That signature. She’d spent years practicing it, and it still looked stupid. Childish.
“Thank you. She’ll be thrilled,” the stewardess said as she put three packs of peanuts on Cee Cee’s tray.
Three packs of peanuts. A Cee Cee Bloom autograph on the open market was worth three packs of peanuts.
The plane dipped and Cee Cee clutched the armrest. Fuck. This had to be a joke. Some sort of gag. Bertie calling. Telling her it was urgent or pressing or some other Bertie word with exclamation points. Anyhow, whatever it was, it worked. It got Softie the Schmuck to walk out of her own rehearsal.
In fact, Cee Cee remembered, maybe Bertie had even been crying a little on the phone. Of course with all those loud mouths in the rehearsal hall yakkin’ so loud it was hard to tell for sure. But right after she told her to hurry up and get to Carmel, it seemed like Bertie’s voice got real weird and mysterious and then she said, “Cee, you have to come because I’m dying to see you.”
Maybe Cee Cee should have asked Bertie more questions. Maybe she should have called her back from a quieter room. Maybe even from home. Because now she was confused and afraid and wondering if what she thought she’d heard wasn’t what Bertie had said at all.