“So this is autobiographical, this movie?”
“I didn’t say it was a movie.” Maxine said, taking some petty pleasure in catching Tammy out. “It may end up on the screen, but right now he’s just working hard to get his feelings down. He and the writer, that is.”
“Who is the writer?”
“I can’t say.”
“You know it would make all this very much more believable if you gave me some more details,” Tammy said.
That was it. Maxine lost her composure. How dare this little bitch suggest her lies weren’t believable?
“You know I’ve really said more than I should already, Tammy,” she snapped. “And I’ve got six calls waiting. So if you’ll excuse me — ”
“Wait — What am I going to tell the members?”
“What I just told you.”
“You swear Todd’s fine?”
“Good God, how many times? Yes. Todd is perfectly fine. In fact, he’s never been better.” She drew a deep breath, and attempted to calm herself a little before she ended up saying something she regretted. “Look, Tammy, I really wish I could tell you more. But this is a matter of Todd’s privacy, as I’m sure you understand. He needs a little time away from the pressure of being a celebrity, so he can work on this project, and when he’s finished I’m sure you’ll be one of the first to hear about it. Now really, I’ve got to go.”
“One more question,” Tammy said.
“Yes.”
“What’s it called?”
“What’s what called?” Maxine replied, playing for time.
“The script. Or the book. Or whatever it’s going to be. What’s it called?”
Oh shit, Maxine thought. Now she was in deep. Well, why the hell not give the damn woman a title? She’d lied herself into a hole as it was, one more shovelful wouldn’t hurt. She pictured Todd in an image now indelibly inscribed in her mind’s eye, sitting waiting for Burrows to start cutting away the bandages. And the title came: “The Blind Leading the Blind,” she said.
“I don’t like that,” Tammy said, already proprietorial.
“Neither do I,” Maxine replied, thinking not just of the title, but of this whole, sprawling, exhausting mess. “Trust me, Tammy. Neither do I.”
Tammy Jayne Lauper lived on Elverta Road in Rio Linda, Sacramento, in a one-story ranch-style house fifteen minutes from the Sacramento International Airport, where her husband had worked for eight years as a baggage handler. They had no kids, nor any hope of having any, this side of a miracle of Biblical proportions. Arnie had a zero sperm count. Tammy didn’t mind much. Just because God had given her breasts the size of watermelons didn’t mean she was born for motherhood. And of course the absence of children left plenty of space in the house for all the files relating to what Arnie sneeringly called Tammy’s little ‘fan club.’
“It isn’t a fan club,” Tammy had pointed out countless times, “it’s an Appreciation Society.” Arnie said Tammy wasn’t no appreciator, she was a fan, plain and simple, and he knew every time they’d used to sleep together and she closed her eyes it was that dickhead Pickett she’d been imagining on top of her fat ass, and that was the whole unvarnished truth of it. When Arnie got to talking like that, Tammy would just tune him out. He’d stop eventually, when he knew he she wasn’t listening; go back to sitting in front of the TV with a beer.
The main center of the Todd Pickett Appreciation Society’s operations was the front bedroom. The room she and Arnie slept in was considerably smaller, but as she’d pointed out to him, it didn’t really matter since all they did was sleep in it. They still had a double bed, though God knows why; he never touched her; and a couple of years back she’d stopped wanting him to. The third bedroom (and all the closets), were used for storage: files of clippings, issues of the fanzine (quarterly for the first year, then monthly, now quarterly again), photographs and biographies to be distributed to new members, copies of press kits from every film Todd had ever made, in twenty-six languages. Downstairs, in what would have been the family room, she kept the Collection. This was made up of items related to Todd and his career, all of them relatively rare, some one-of-a-kind items. Hanging in zipped-up plastic laundry bags were articles of clothing made for the cast and crew of his pictures. On the mantelpiece, still sealed in their boxes were six Todd Pickett dolls that had been the hot thing to own during his teen-idol period, the boxes signed by Todd. Preserved in a vacuum pack were several unused latex makeup pieces for his Oscar-nominated performance as the maimed firefighter in The Burning Year. She didn’t ever look at those. She’d been warned that they deteriorated when they were exposed to sunlight.