Coldheart Canyon (87 page)

“I didn’t know books could be published so fast.”

“Well it’s just hack-work. It’ll be off the shelves in a month. But Rooney got a quarter of a million dollars’ advance for it. Can you believe that?”

Tammy picked up the book—which was called
Hell’s Canyon
—and flicked through it.

“Did he interview Arnie?”

“Well I didn’t read it
that
closely, but I didn’t see his name.”

“Oh, there’s pictures,” Tammy said, coming to the eight-page section in the middle of the book. To give him his due, Rooney—or somebody working on his behalf—had done a little research. He’d turned up two photographs from the archives of some silent-movie enthusiast. One was a picture of Katya Lupi, dressed in a gown so sheer it looked as though it had been painted on, the other a much more informal photograph which showed Katya, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Theda Bara, Ramon Navarro and a host of other luminaries at a picnic in the shadow of the dream palace in Coldheart Canyon. At the back of the crowd—separated from Katya by several rows of smiling, famous faces—was Willem Zeffer.

Tammy closed the book.

“Don’t want to see any more?”

“I don’t think so. Not today.”

“I’ve been thinking . . . Doctor Zinfandel”—Tammy laughed at Maxine’s perfectly deliberate error—“has told me you’ll be out of here in a week, ten days at the most. I don’t want you going back to Rio Linda, at least not yet. I want you to come and stay with me at the house in Malibu, if it doesn’t have too many distressing memories.”

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Tammy had been worrying about how she’d cope when she was released from the hospital; the offer made her burst with tears of relief.

“Oh Christ, I hadn’t realized you hated the place
that
much!”

Laughter appeared through the tears. “No, no, I’d love to come.”

“Good. Then I’m going to send Danielle—she’s my new assistant—to Sacramento and have her pick up some of your things, if that’s okay with you.”

“That would be perfect.”

Nine days later, Tammy moved out of Cedars-Sinai and Maxine ferried her down to the beach-house. It looked much smaller by day; and somehow more ordinary without the twinkle lights in the trees, and the cars driving up, full of the great and the good. Perhaps it was simply that she’d come to know Maxine so well in the past few weeks (and how strange was that—to have become so fond of this woman she’d despised for years, and to have her sentiments so sweetly returned?), that the house didn’t seem at all alien to her. It was very far from her taste of course (or more correctly, far from her pocketbook) but it was modestly stylish, and the objects on the shelves were elegant and pretty. Sitting on the patio on the second or third evening, sipping a Virgin Mary, the wind warm off the Pacific, she asked Maxine if she’d decorated the place herself, or had it done professionally.

“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.”

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T W O

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.”

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“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 CC[348-676] 9/10/01 2:29 PM Page 665

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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 bull-dozers. 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 . . .”

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“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.”

“So—?”

“Well, I had this huge collection of Todd Pickett memorabilia. And I want to get rid of it. Then I want to think about selling the house.”

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“Meaning you’ll move in with me?”

“If it isn’t too sudden?”

“At our age, nothing’s too sudden,” Maxine said. “But are you sure you want to go through all that stuff yourself ? Can’t you get one of the fans to do it?”

“I could, I suppose,” Tammy said. “But I’d feel better doing it myself.”

“Then we’ll do it together.”

“It’ll be boring. There’s so much stuff. And Arnie’s been using the house on and off so it’ll be a pig-sty.”

“I don’t care. When do you want to go?”

“As soon as possible. I just want to get it over and done with.”

Tammy tried to find Arnie, first at the airport and then at his new girlfriend’s house, just to warn him that they were coming into town, but she didn’t get hold of him. Part of her was glad that Maxine was accompanying her, when there were so many variables she couldn’t predict; but there was another part of her that felt a little uncomfortable at the prospect. Maxine lived in luxury. What would she think when she laid eyes on the scruffed, stuffed, little ranch-house where Tammy and Arnie had lived out the charmless farce of their marriage for fourteen-and-a-half years?

They got an early plane out of Los Angeles, and were in Sacramento by nine-thirty in the morning. Maxine had arranged for a chauffeured sedan to meet them at the airport. The chauffeur introduced himself as Gerald, and said that he was at their disposal. Did they want to go straight to the address he’d been given? Tammy gave Maxine a nearly panicked look: the moment was upon her, and suddenly she was anxious.

“Come on,” Maxine said. “We’ll face the horror together. Then we’ll be out of here by the middle of the afternoon.”

Arnie hadn’t bothered to mow the front lawn, of course, or weed the ground around the two rose bushes that Tammy had attempted to nurture. The bushes were still alive, but only just. The weeds were almost as tall as the bushes.

“Of course he may have changed the lock,” Tammy said as they approached the front door.

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“Then we’ll just get Gerald to shoulder it in,” Maxine said, ever practical. “It’s still your house, honey. We’re not doing anything illegal.”

In fact, the key fitted and turned without any problem; and it was immediately apparent from the general state of the place that Arnie hadn’t after all been a very regular visitor here in a while. But the heating had been left turned up so it was stiflingly hot in all the rooms; a stale, sickly heat. In the kitchen there was some food left out and rotting: a half-eaten hamburger, a pile of fruit which had been corrupted into plush versions of the originals, two plates of pizza crusts. The stink was pretty offensive, but Tammy got to work quickly clearing up the kitchen, while Maxine went around the house opening the windows and turning down the heating.

With the rotted food bagged and set outside, and bleach put down the sink to take away the stench, the place was a little more hospitable, but Tammy made it very clear that she wanted to stay here for as short a time as possible, so they set to work. Given the size of the collection it was obviously not going to be sorted through and disposed of in a day; all Tammy wanted to do was collect up all the stuff that was personal, and either burn it or take it away. The rest she would let members of the Appreciation Society come in and collect. They’d end up fighting over the choicest items no doubt; all the more reason not to be there when they came.