“So I take it you won’t come?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Well make up your mind one way or another,” Maxine replied, exhibiting a little of the impatience which had been happily absent from their exchange thus far. “Do you want to come with me or not?”
The conversation was making Tammy a little weary now. She hadn’t spoke to anybody at such length for several weeks, and the chat-welcome as it was-was taking its toll.
Did she want to go back to the Canyon or not? The question was plain enough. But the answer was a minefield. On the one hand, she could scarcely think of any place on earth she wanted to go less. She’d been jubilant when she’d driven away from it with Maxine and Jerry; she’d felt as though she’d escaped a death-sentence by a hair’s-breadth. Why in God’s name would it make any sense to go back there now?
On the other hand, there was the issue she herself had raised: that of unfinished business. If there was something up there that remained to be done then maybe it was best to get up there and do it. She’d been hiding away from that knowledge for the last several weeks, churning her fears over and over, trying to pretend it was all over. But Maxine had called her bluff. Maybe they’d called each other’s: admitted together what they could not have confessed to apart.
“All right,” she said finally.
“All right, what?”
“I’ll go with you.”
Maxine breathed an audible sigh of relief. “Oh, thank God for that. I was afraid you were going to freak out on me and I was going to have to go up there on my own.”
“When were you planning to do this?”
“Is tomorrow too soon?” Maxine said. “You come to my office and we’ll go from there?”
“Are you going to ask Jerry to come with us?”
“He’s gone,” Maxine replied.
“Jerry’s dead?”
“No, Key West, He’s sold his apartment and moved, all in a week. Life’s too short, he said.”
“So it’s just the two of us.”
“It’s just the two of us. And whatever we find up there.”
SEVEN
On several occasions in the next twelve hours Tammy’s resolve almost failed her and she thought about calling and telling Maxine that she wouldn’t be coming to Los Angeles after all, but though her courage was weak it didn’t go belly up. In fact she arrived at Maxine’s office twenty minutes earlier than they’d arranged, catching Maxine in an uncharacteristic state of disarray, her hair uncombed, her face without blush or lipstick.
She’d lost weight; shed perhaps fifteen pounds courtesy of the Canyon. So had Tammy. Every cloud had a silver lining.
“You look better than you sounded,” Maxine said. “When we first started talking I thought you were dying.”
“So did I, on and off.”
“It was that bad, huh?”
“I locked myself in my house. Didn’t talk to anyone. Did you talk to anybody?”
“I tried. But all people wanted to know about was the morbid stuff. I tell you, there’s a lot of people who I thought were friends of mine who showed their true colors over this. People I thought cared about Todd, who were about as crass as you can get. ‘Was there a lot of blood?’ That kind of thing.”
“Maybe I did the right thing, locking myself away.”
“It’s certainly given me a new perspective on people. They like to talk about death: as long as it’s not theirs.”
Tammy took a look around the office while they chatted. It was very dark, very masculine: antique European furniture, Persian rugs. On the walls, photographs of Maxine in the company of the powerful and the famous: Maxine with Todd at the opening of several of his movies, Maxine with Clinton and Gore at a Democratic fundraiser, when the President-elect still had color in his hair, and a reputation to lose; Maxine with a number of A-list stars, some of whom had fallen from the firmament since the pictures had been taken: Cruise, Van Damme, Costner, Demi Moore, Michael Douglas (looking very morose for some reason), Mel Gibson, Anjelica Huston, Denzel Washington and Bette Midler. And on the sideboard, in Art Nouveau silver frames, a collection of pictures which Maxine obviously valued more highly than the rest. One in particular caught Tammy’s eye: in it Todd was standing along side a very sour, very old woman who was ostentatiously smoking a cigarette.