“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.”
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 pickup 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.”
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.”