"But I'm warning you, Lainie. One misstep and I'll be all over you. I'll close the goddamned store down, and we'll forget about the life-style, because I'll take over raising her and you can go get your old job back at Valley BMW."
The bastard, the rotten lousy bastard. "Mitch, what
do you want from me?" The curious mixture of feelings that made her at once want to pummel him and fall into his arms, begging him to fix all of this, bewildered her.
"All I want is for my daughter to be okay," he said. "Everything else is incidental. So if right now she's okay living with you, then that's what I want. I'm through begging you to understand all of this, because I don't understand it myself. And I can reassure you I'm not stepping away from her life. In fact, I'm going to come back to those group sessions too, because I don't want to miss out on anything that has to do with her. Understand that and—"
A whimper floated down from upstairs and then a "Mamaaaa . . .," and Lainie turned and hurried up to the baby's room. When she walked in, Rose was standing, holding on to the side of the crib, and seeing Lainie made her little face brighten. "Up, Mama. Up." Her baby, her sweet baby girl. The worst thing Lainie could do was fall apart. She had to prove to Mitch that she was the most stable force for Rosie right now.
"Daddy's here, sweetheart," she said, trying to smile.
There was pure joy in Rosie's face. "Daddeeee," she squealed again and again while Lainie put her on the changing table. And just as she was placing the dry diaper under the sweet little bottom, she felt Mitch standing close behind her. So close that for an instant she thought he was there to put his arms around her and say, Let's be a family again. But instead he spoke directly to Rose. "Hello, Daddy's angel. We're going to go play today," and he moved away. When the clean diaper was on and a pink playsuit over it, Mitch hoisted the diaper bag strap onto his shoulder. "See you at five," he said and took the baby out of her arms.
"Bye-bye, Mama," Rosie said, opening and closing her little fist in a wave that was aimed at her own face.
Lainie waved a little wave back to her and said, "Bye-bye, my sweet girl."
After that Mitch came back to the weekly sessions of the group. He would bustle in as if it were a business meeting. Sometimes he'd even take notes. He never said much, certainly never talked about what he and Lainie were going through. And Barbara left it alone, waiting for one of them to talk about it, but neither of them did. Lainie would watch him hug and kiss Rose good-bye after the session and then leave. Always she wanted to go after him, grab his sleeve, and say, What about me? I know you want to hug me too. Please, Mitch, come home.
The loneliness of life without him created an enormous void. She tried to fill it with school. She even joined the gym For Women Only in Studio City where Sharon belonged. Sometimes she would go to classes there in the morning when Mitch took the baby, but she preferred the early-evening aerobics class. She would drop Rosie off with the ever-stoic Margaret Dunn, who had actually gone out and bought a box full of baby toys, which sat waiting for Rose in her living room.
One night after Lainie left school, she picked the baby up at her mother's and headed home on the freeway. In the garage she pulled on her backpack of books, came around to the passenger side of the car, opened the door, and gently lifted the sleeping Rosie out of the baby car seat. Then she closed and locked the car and started out of the garage, stopping in terror when she saw someone stepping out of the shadows. It was Jackie.
Lainie's adrenaline raced and she put one of her hands around the back of the baby's head, as if to hide her, and rushed past.
"Lainie," Jackie said, "stop! I'm not the enemy. Let me come in and talk to you for five minutes. That's all I want."
"Get out of here, Jackie. You made a deal with me and Mitch. You told me that after the baby was born you were going to get out of our lives. But you lied." She was trying to find her house key as she moved along the stone path through the foliage leading to the door of her condo. Jackie stayed close behind her.
"I know what I said, but, Lainie, I need you to listen."
Lainie opened the door and looked at her. "I don't care what you need. Go away. You've done enough." The sharpness in Lainie's voice awakened Rosie, who opened her eyes. And then, though she was just getting to an age where she was afraid of strangers, she smiled, showing all her new teeth, and put her arms out to Jackie. It was clear this was no stranger.
"Hello, darling girl," Jackie said, her own blue eyes filling. The baby bounced up and down with glee to see her. "I made the deal because I was stupid," she said to Lainie. "I thought the pregnancy experience could be separated out of the experience of creating an ongoing life. But it can't. I need to be with her. Listen, Lainie, you and I and Mitch could fight about it like those people in New Jersey did, and all those other ugly cases, and maybe I'd lose, but you know what? I'm her mother. She has my genes, and she grew inside me and she'll grow up and, yes, she'll have lots of De Nardo in her, but one day you'll hear her laugh my big dumb laugh, or hear her voice on the telephone and for a second you'll think it's me. Or you'll see her putting on weight in the same spots I do, and just like you see your own mother in you, we all do, you'll see me in her.
"Lainie, I made a mistake, a big one. And so did you and so did Mitch. You were probably afraid he'd love you less or leave you if you said no to the whole idea, and I had some big need to feel important and special the way I did once before in my life, and that
was when I was pregnant and gave birth to my son. So for each of our own reasons we went for it, and pretty soon, before we knew it, my baby with your husband was growing inside me. Well, all I can say is that even though I've only seen her these few times since she was born . . . I love her.
"Let's continue the good relationship we had when I was pregnant and let me be with her. Look at me, Lainie, and talk to me from the womanness inside you. Not the place that's afraid maybe someday Rose will decide she likes me better than she likes you, and not the part where you're afraid your mother or Mitch's sisters will tell you you're crazy for letting me be around her, but from the feeling, caring person who knows what it is to hurt and suffer and be taken advantage of, because I know in that part of you, you have to believe nobody can have too many people loving them, too many mothers looking out for them.
"I don't want Mitch. Believe me, I never have, or you would have known it instinctively and never picked me as a surrogate. And Mitch doesn't want me. But what he understood when I came to him, in some primitive instinctive way, was something that shook him to the core and made him bring the baby to me—he understood that no legal papers in the world are going to make me not her mother.
"And by doing that was he cheating on you? Fuckin' A, he was cheating on you, worse than if he had been screwing me six ways till Sunday every time we met. Because his was a lie of the spirit, and it was bad for Rose to be a party to it. Mitch should have been able to speak up and say to you, 'Lainie, I did bad. This whole thing was wrong. I should have kept on trying to adopt, because as long as Jackie needs to be near this baby, we have to work something out.' Only he was afraid. He had fallen into his own macho trap. And then he saw
how much you loved the baby. How connected you were to her from day one, and how transformed you were by having her. He was afraid if he even mentioned my name you would hate him or leave him or both.
"Lainie, what do we do? Don't keep that baby from me. Let me see her sometimes, I beg you."
My God, Lainie thought, what can I do? Their eyes were locked as Lainie rolled back and forth from her heels to her toes in a way she had learned that the baby found soothing. Rose had her tiny head against her chest now, and was making that keening noise she made just before she fell off to sleep.
"This is a nightmare," Lainie said, and she heard her own voice sound almost unrecognizable and filled with pain. "And what makes it so difficult is that I look at you and I think, This woman is right. If I had given birth to Rosie, no matter what I'd signed or how much anyone had given me they'd have to kill me first before they could take her away. Dear God, why did I ever agree to this? Dear God, forgive me for being a party to this, Jackie, I'm so sorry," she said, and wept, and the two women embraced and wept holding on to each other with the baby, their baby, asleep in the middle of their tearful embrace. And when Jackie left, after Lainie promised to try to figure out what to do about all of it, the scent of Shalimar was still in the foyer.
35
T
HE MEMORIAL SERVICE for Davis Bergman was held at the big rambling house in Brentwood that Shelly and Davis had completely remodeled when they were together. As Ruthie and Shelly entered the backyard where the rented white folding chairs, the ones with the padded seats which cost a little more per chair, were lined up in rows facing a rented podium, Ruthie watched Shelly trying to maintain his equilibrium. But as they turned the comer and he looked at the rose garden he'd created and tended, and saw it now in full bloom, the profusion of open peach and fuchsia and crimson flowers made him stop and emit a pained sound. As if someone had kicked him in the stomach. For a long moment he was immobilized.
Marsha Bergman, Davis's widow, was surrounded by a group of her friends. Shelly and Ruthie walked to the area where she was standing in order to wait to express their condolences. But long before it was their
turn, someone gestured to Marsha from across the glaring turquoise of the pool, and to their relief, since neither of them knew what they would say to her, she turned and walked in that direction. Shelly said he recognized some of the people from Davis's law practice, but Ruthie didn't see one familiar face.
In the newspaper that morning, the cause of Davis's death was listed as pneumonia. Ruthie suddenly wondered why she'd come to the memorial service of a man she had once hated. She had a strong desire to turn around and leave, but she knew Shelly needed to be there, needed her to get him through this, so she stayed, holding his hand and feeling his anxious presence next to her. Soon most of the white chairs were filled, and she took Shelly's arm and led him to the end seats in the back row.
The service was a kind of free forum with friends of Davis getting up and talking about their memories of him. Sometimes two people would start for the podium at once, and one would defer to the other and sit down. Essentially all the people said what a wonderful guy Davis was and what a happy couple he and Marsha were, and how much they would miss him. Ruthie looked at Shelly to see how he was bearing up, and noticed for the first time that he was holding a small pile of note cards in his hand. When he saw her looking at them, he handed them to her and whispered, "Quick. Punch these up!"
The cards contained notes in Shelly's funny little handwriting that he had prepared so that he could get up and speak about Davis. About his relationship with Davis.
(A) Hilarious sense of humor about our situation. (B) Every day I spent with him was a gift
. Ruthie looked up from the note cards and into Shelly's eyes, and shook her head. "Shel," she said, "I love you. But this material won't play to this crowd." She knew that was the
last thing he wanted to hear, and how much he wanted someone to listen to how hard it was on him that Davis was gone.
At first she saw resentment on his face that she would try to deprive him of this moment, and she was sure he was going to jump to his feet the minute the next speaker was through and storm the podium. But then she saw the resignation, and he took the cards back from her and looked down at them. These were Marsha's friends, at Marsha's house, and they didn't want to hear what Shelly had to say about his love for Davis. Throughout the rest of the speeches, as he listened he took each of the note cards and slowly tore it into small pieces and stuffed the pieces into the pocket of his shirt.
The Hollywood show-business community is small and it didn't take long for Zev Ryder to learn that Davis Bergman, who everyone knew was a former lover of Shelly Milton's, had died, and how. "Oh, fuck! You mean to tell me I'm peeing in the same men's room as this guy? I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm gonna start using the can downstairs. What if it comes off on doorknobs? Oh, Christ. Sometimes at meetings I've picked up half a doughnut out of the box. What if
he's
the one who ate the other half?"
Zev didn't say those things in front of Ruthie and Shelly, just everybody else. And nobody had the nerve to tell him to shut up. Ruthie first got wind of the remarks when Ryder's secretary, a tall, severe, black-haired, white-skinned woman everyone in the office called Morticia, tried to apologize.
"Isn't he just being the bastard of all time?" she asked Ruthie one morning when they both emerged from cubicles in the ladies' room.
Ruthie rinsed her hands and avoided looking at what she knew was her own exhausted face in the mirror. "If you're talking about Zev, yes, he's always the bastard
of all time, also the rat, the pig, the schmuck, and the shitheel. So what else is new?'' She pulled a paper towel down from the metal container on the wall, and watched Morticia apply the dark purple lipstick that made her white skin look even whiter.
"But all the stuff he's been saying about Shelly is really over the top," Morticia said, rubbing her purple lips together to get some effect that Ruthie, who seldom wore makeup, couldn't understand. "I mean, he's got the writers afraid to eat the muffins you make. Haven't you noticed how many are left at the end of the day?"
"Meaning?"
It was clear that Morticia, whose real name was Alice, was reluctant to tear herself away from the mirror, but now she did, and she looked squarely at Ruthie. "Listen, Ruth, I'm telling you right now, you can't quote me. I've got a daughter to support, and you know if Zev suspected I'd said a word he'd throw me out of here . . . but I happen to know he's looking for a way to screw up Shelly's contract. I've heard him on the phone with the Writers' Guild, looking for loopholes, ways to dump him and not have to pay him full salary. Not telling them who he is when he calls, but asking the contracts department at the Writers' Guild what kind of breach of contract, like not showing up, has to take place before you can fire somebody without a payout."