"Oh I'd love to say I chose every object in the house, but it was all done for me. Actually Jerry selected the paintings. He's got a good eye for art. It's a gay thing."
Tammy spluttered into her drink.
"He's flying back to California next weekend, to see a friend in the hospital. So I said he should call in. That's all right, yes? If you don't feel up to it, you don't have to see him."
"I'm fine, Maxine," Tammy said. "Believe me, I'm fine."
TWO
As it turned out, the following Saturday, when Jerry came to visit, Tammy was feeling anything but fine. Doctor Zondel had warned her that there would be some days when she felt weaker than others, and this was certainly one of those. She only had herself to blame. The previous day she had decided to take a walk along the beach and, as the day was so sunny, and the air so fresh, she'd completely lost track of time. What she'd planned as a twenty-minute stroll turned into an hour-and-a-quarter trek, which had not only exhausted her, but made her bones and muscles ache. She was consequently feeling frail and tender when Jerry came by the following day, and in no mood for intensive conversation. It didn't matter. Jerry had plenty to talk about without need of prompting: mainly his new and improved state of health.
"I'm trying not to be too much of a Pollyanna about it all in case something goes horribly wrong and the tumor comes back. But I don't think it's going to. I'm fine. And you, honey?"
"I have good days and bad days," Tammy said.
"Today's a bad day," Maxine said, chucking Tammy under the chin to get a smile.
"Look at you, Maxine. If I didn't know better I'd say you had a gay gene in you someplace."
Maxine gave him a supercilious smile. "Well if I did I certainly wouldn't tell you about it."
"Are you implying I gossip?"
"It was not an implication," Maxine dead-panned. "It is a fact of life."
"Well I'll keep my mouth closed about this, I promise," Jerry said, with a mischievous glint. "But were you not once a married lady, Tammy?"
"I'm not getting into this," Tammy said.
"All right, I will say no more on the subject. But I see what I see. And I think it's very charming. Men are such pigs anyway."
Maxine gave him a fierce look. And beneath her makeup, Tammy thought, she was blushing.
"You said you had pictures to show us?" Maxine said.
"I did? Oh yes, I did."
"Pictures of what?" Tammy said, her mind only a quarter committed to the subject at hand, distracted as she was by the exchange that had just taken place between Maxine and Jerry. She knew exactly what Jerry was implying, and although she couldn't remember thinking that she and Maxine had been nesting just like a couple of lesbians, she could see that his innuendo was not without plausibility, from the outside, at least.
And besides, men were pigs; or at least most of the men it had been her misfortune to become attracted to.
Jerry had brought out his pictures now, and passed them over to Maxine, who started to look through them.
"Oh my Lord . . ." she said softly. Maxine handed the photographs over to Tammy one by one, as she'd finished looking at them.
"They were taken by my old camera, so they're not very good. But I stayed all day, to watch the whole thing from beginning to end."
"The thing" Jerry had watched, and had photographed (rather better than his disclaimer suggested), was the Los Angeles Public Works' demolition of Katya Lupi's dream palace.
"I didn't even know they were going to knock it down," Maxine said.
"Well apparently there was a fierce lobby from your gang, Tammy—"
"My gang?"
"The Appreciation Society."
"Oh."
"—to keep the place as some kind of Todd Pickett shrine. You didn't hear about that?" Tammy shook her head. "My, my, you two have had your heads in the sand. Well, there was a petition, saying that the house should be left standing, but the authorities said no, it had to come down. Apparently, it was structurally unsafe. All the foundations had gone. Of course we know why but nobody else can figure it out. Anyway, they sent in the bulldozers. It was all over in six hours. The demolition part at least. Then it took another five or six hours to put the rubble in trucks and drive it away."
"Did anybody come to watch?" Tammy asked.
"Quite a few, coming and going. But not a crowd. Never more than twenty at any one time. And we were kept a long way back from the demolition, which is why the pictures are so poor."
The women had been through all the pictures now. Tammy handed them back to Jerry, who said: "So that's another piece of Hollywood history that's bitten the dust. It makes me sick. This is all we've got faintly resembling a past in this city of ours, and we just take a hammer and knock it all down. How sensible is that?"
"Personally, I'm glad it's gone," Tammy piped up. Another wave of weakness had come over her as she looked at the pictures, and now she felt almost ready to pass out.
"You don't look too good," Maxine said.
"I don't feel too good. Would either of you mind if I went to lie down?"
"Not at all," Jerry said.
Tammy gave him a kiss and started toward her bedroom.
"Aren't you going to tuck her in, Maxine?" Tammy heard Jerry say.
"As it happens, yes." And so saying, she followed Tammy into the bedroom.
"You know, you mustn't let anything Jerry says bother you," Maxine said, once Tammy was lying down. She stroked the creases from the pillow beside Tammy's head.
"I know."
"He doesn't mean any harm."
"I know that too." She looked at Maxine, seeking out her gray eyes. "You know . . . just for the record . . ."
"No, Tammy. We don't have to have this conversation. You don't have a lesbian bone in your body."
"No, I don't."
"And if I do . . . well, I haven't discovered it yet. But, as you raised the subject, I could quite happily take care of you for as long as you'd like. I like your company."
"And I like yours."
"Good. So let's have the world believe whatever it wants to believe."
"Fine by me."
Tammy made a weak little smile, mirrored on Maxine's face.
"Who'd have thought?" Maxine murmured.
She leaned forward and kissed Tammy very gently on the cheek. "Go to sleep, honey. I want you well."
When she'd gone, Tammy lay beneath the coverlet, listening to the reassuring rhythm of conversation between Maxine and Jerry from next door, and the draw and boom of the Pacific.
Of all the people to have found such comfort with: Maxine Frizelle. Her life had taken some very odd turns, no question about that.
But somehow it still seemed right. After the long journeys of late, the pursuits and the revelations, the terrors that could not speak, and those that spoke all too clearly, she felt as though Maxine was somehow her reward; her prize for staying the terrible course.
"Who'd have thought?" she said to herself.
And with Maxine's words on her lips, she fell asleep.
"I want to go back to Rio Linda," Tammy announced two days later. They were sitting on their favorite spot, out on the patio, and today there was a splash of vodka mixed the with tomato juice in Tammy's glass.
"You want to go home?" Maxine said.
Tammy took her hand. "No, no," she said. Then, more fiercely: "God, no. That's not my home any longer."