"Dart, Iris Rainer - Beaches 01 - Beaches" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dart Iris Rainer)

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-by 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 / 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, "Gee, 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.
Beach Haven, New Jersey, 1960
The pictures of the singers were already up on the bulletin board. The dancers' pictures would go up today. That's the way John Perry hired them. Singers and dancers. Then he hoped they could act. Actually, it didn't matter much; the tourists loved them, no matter what. Picked out their favorites, not by talent, but by personality and looks, or sometimes just because they resembled someone familiar. A grandchild, a child, whatever.
This year would be Perry's best season. That's what he told Marilyn Loughlin, his assistant, and the choreographer. That's what he told her every year. But this year he had that young boy dancer, Richie Day, and that crazy loud-mouthed girl singer, Cee Cee Bloom. She got to him. Even at the audition in New York, she got to him. She stood out in that room full of nervous girls with a don't-give-a-shit attitude he admired, even though her fat mother was sitting there the whole time eating a stinking lunch, which two of the girls had complained privately to him, made them nauseous.
Then the girl sang, and it was all he could do to contain himself. Christ, if she knew how good she was, she'd ask for money. He even liked her choices of songs. First she sang "I'm Going Back" from Bells Are Ringing- and he believed her.
One minute before, she'd come clomping in in those big ugly shoes, wearing that brown Dynel coat that was ripped up near the shoulder, looking like some whacko off the street. Then she'd handed her music to Jay Miller, sat down on the stool, and in just the time it took for Miller to play the arpeggio, somehow, magically, she'd become the girl from the answering service, in love, and rejected.
The second song was even better. The choice was perfect. That sexy oldie, "Daddy." A totally new character. Slinky, sexy, dynamic. Mother of God. The girl was only nineteen. But when he watched her work, John Perry was gone. He had to hire her for his stock company before anyone else heard her.
He'd never hired anyone on the spot like that. Summer kids were a dime a dozen. He tried to seem casual, but his heart was pounding as he laid it all out for her. Non-Equity, tiny salary, room, board, transportation, and laundry. Some weeks leads, some chorus. Maybe she could play Annie in Annie Get Your Gun. Maybe Adelaide in Guys and Dolls-did she dance? Yes, great. No, he didn't need to see that. Accommodations were small. Ten or eleven girls in two rooms. No scenery to build; he had apprentices to do that.
She'd go get her mother and ask. That mother. The kid would probably take the job just to be away from her. Leona-she called her by her first name-was still sitting in the reception room with the girl singers. Now she was reading a movie magazine she must have been keeping in that Saks Fifth Avenue shopping bag. When had she ever shopped in Saks Fifth Avenue? The girl took her mother into the corridor outside the reception room, and John
40 Zris Rainer Dart
closed the door to the rehearsal hall, turning to look at Marilyn and Jay.
"Jesus Christ," Marilyn said. "Where'd she come from? Think we'll get her?"
"Honey, I'd go down on Godzilla if we could have that one," Perry exclaimed.
Jay Miller laughed and wiped his eyes. He loved John Perry. The little scamp was only thirty-one years old and the owner of the most successful nonunion summer stock theater in the East. During the year, he directed and produced industrial shows, not yet able to make it in the real mainstream of show business. But in the summer, John Perry was a star. On the little island forty miles north of Atlantic City, in the town of Beach Haven, New Jersey, the locals idolized his flamboyant lifestyle and the tourists fell in love with his theatrical charm. At the Sunshine Summer Theater, his baby, he introduced the shows, directed the shows, and somehow managed to convert an unruly, moderately talented group of stagestruck young kids into a functioning repertory company that delivered a different musical comedy every week.
The door opened slowly. It was Leona; Cee Cee stood behind her, almost timidly. John led them into the room. No one said a word as Leona sat down on the rickety folding chair that creaked in protest against her enormous weight.
"When does she start?" Leona asked.
Perry tried to conceal his excitement. "June fifteenth."
And now she was here. In the house on Ohio Avenue with the rest of his summer kids, each of whom would pale in comparison to Cee Cee Bloom. Of course, they all had something to offer, Perry thought. Two of the dancers, Annie and Kaye, had separately confided to Marilyn that they'd never played leads and would do anything to play Louise in Gypsy. One of them would inevitably approach him. She'd wait until the others were asleep, walk over to his house on the beach complaining of insomnia,
pleased to find him receptive to her visit. Then it would be a glass of wine, a walk on the beach and some sidelong looks, and he would have her. John loved making love to pretty little dancers; their tummies were so flat. And even though they were all small-breasted, they made up for that by being limber. God, were they limber; as they climbed all over him-not telling him what they wanted until he had come and was stroking their long straight hair.
"A dancer could play the part in Gypsy," they would say as though they weren't campaigning for themselves, but for the entire dance community at large. "There's really only one song and it's pretty easy."
It was odd, Perry thought. Because it was usually the girl he would have given the part to, anyway, even if she hadn't lured him to bed. But performers were so insecure.
Cee Cee took her time unpacking. In fact, she folded everything so neatly, she was sure Leona would have laughed her ass off and asked her who she was trying to impress. The room looked like a goddamned reformatory with those five metal beds stuck into corners, each next to some crummy unpainted dresser and a rod for hanging clothes instead of a closet. Chintzy.
Cee Cee was the last of the company to arrive on "the island," as they called it. The others were already unpacked, organized, and downstairs giggling and getting to know each other, and she was nervous. If only there was one familiar face. One person she knew from home, even someone she didn't like, she would feel better. Instead, there was a blur of new people she couldn't sort out. A few girl dancers with big calves and straight hair, a tall skinny boy dancer, an older guy (very faggy), Peggy somebody or other, who was vocalizing in the bathroom when Cee Cee first arrived-or at least that's what she said she was doing, even though Cee Cee knew she was just showing off her high notes-and some others she couldn't