Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

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."

"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."

"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.

"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.

"I didn't realize you had so much stuff," Maxine said, when they'd looked through all the rooms.

"Oh I was a top-of-the-line obsessive. No question. And I was organized." She went over to one of the filing cabinets, opened it, and fingered through it till she found the file she wanted.

"What's this?" Maxine said.

"Letters from you to me. Usually Dictated but not read."

"I was a bitch, I know. I was just trying to protect him the only way I knew how."

"And it worked. I never really got near him. Nobody did."

"Maybe if I had been less paranoid, he'd have been less paranoid. Then we wouldn't have tried to hide him away, and none of this—"

Tammy interrupted her. "Enough of that," she said. "Let's start a bonfire out in the back yard, and get this done."

"A bonfire? For what?"

"For things like these." She proffered the Maxine Frizelle file. "Things it's nobody's business to ever see or read."

"Is there much like that?"

"There's enough. You want to start a fire with these, and I'll bring some more stuff out?"

"Sure. Anywhere in particular?"

"Arnie built a barbecue pit to the right of the back door. Only he never finished it. We could use that."

"Done."

Maxine took the papers outside, leaving Tammy to go through the cabinets collecting other files that for one reason or another she didn't want people to see. She wasn't proud of what her over-bearing tendencies had led her to do or say on occasion; this was the perfect time to clean up her past a little. It wasn't so much the thought of posterity that drove her to do this (although she was aware that she had become a part of a footnote to Hollywood history), rather it was the desire to keep these unflattering missives and notes out of the hands of the members of the Appreciation Society who would come in here after they'd gone to cast dice and divide the lots.

When she took the first armful out to the back yard she found that Maxine had made quite a healthy fire with the copies of her own letters.

"Is that all?"

"No, no," Tammy said, studying the fire. "There's a lot more." She kept staring. "You know that's what I used to think ghosts were like?" she said. "Flames in the sun. Invisible, but there."

Maxine took the files from Tammy, and proceeded to feed them to the flames.

"Are we ever going to set the record straight?" Tammy wondered aloud.

"Like how?"

"Write our own book."

"Lauper and Frizelle's Guide to the Afterlife?"

"Something like that."

"It'd just be another opinion," Maxine said, poking at the fire with the stick she'd picked up. "People would go on believing their favorite versions."

"You think?"

"For sure. You can't change people's opinion about stuff like that. It's embedded. They believe what they believe."

"I'll go get some more stuff."

"Historians of the future are going to curse us for this, you know that?"

"Probably," Tammy said, catching a thin, black smut that was spiraling up from the fire like some bizarre insect. It crumbled in her hand. She brushed her palms together briskly, to clean it off. Then she went back inside for some more fuel for the fire.

Three or four trips out into the back yard and she'd done all she needed to do. She stood in the front bedroom, where she'd always kept her special treasures, and assessed the contents. She could only imagine how many fights there would be over the contents of this room: how much bitching and bargaining. Her gaze went to the back of the room, where—hidden out of sight behind several boxes of film stills—was the holy of holies: the box of photographs of Todd that she and she alone owned. The idea that these would become bargaining material like all the other bits and pieces they were leaving was repugnant. It was fine for the fans to have their petty arguments over crew-jackets and scraps of costuming, but not her precious photographs.

She carefully negotiated her way through the piles of bric-a-brac (her legs, still mending, were beginning to ache) to where her treasure lay hidden. Then she slipped her hand down into the hiding-place, and pulled the box out into view.

The rest could go to the fire or the fans, but this, and this alone, she would keep, she decided. She put it under her arm and went outside to see how her fire-stoker was doing.

"Is that the last of it?" Maxine said, looking at the box under Tammy's arm.

"No, I'm keeping this."

"Oh? Okay."

"It's just pictures of Todd."

The fire was still burning strongly; waves of heat rose up out of the half-finished pit, making the air undulate. While she stared at the fire Tammy opened the box of photographs, and as she did so some instinct—a kind of repugnance for the woman who had obsessed so often on these pictures—made her toss the box lid aside, and with one unpremeditated movement, pluck the pictures and the little roll of negatives out of the box and toss them into the middle of the fire.

"Changed your mind, huh?" Maxine said.

"Yep."

The flames were already curling around the first of the series, but Maxine could see him clearly enough.

"He was younger then."

"Yeah. They were taken on Life Lessons."

"Are those the negatives you're burning?"

"Don't ask."

"That must have cost you a small fortune. But he surely was a good-looking man."

The first of the photographs had been consumed. Now the second and the third.

"Are these the last of it, then?"

"I think so," Tammy said. "They can argue over the rest."

"Only I'm parched. Watching fires is thirsty work."

"You want me to get you a Coke or a beer?"

"No. I want us to get back in the car and go home."

"Home," Tammy said, still looking at the fire. The sixth, seventh and eighth pictures were being consumed. The roll of negatives had already curled up into a little black ball.

"Yes, home," Maxine said.

She took Tammy's hand, and kissed the back of it. "Where you belong."

The last of the photographs had come into view, preserved from the heat of the flames on which it sat by the bottom of the box. This was always the picture she'd stared at most often, and most intensely; the one in which she'd often willed Todd's gaze to shift, just a few degrees, so he would look out at her. The fire had caught it now. In a few seconds it would be ashes.

Suddenly, just as impetuously as she'd delivered the pictures into the fire, she now reached down and plucked this one out. She blew on the flames, which only encouraged them.

"Here," Maxine said and, snatching the photograph from Tammy's hand, dropped it to the ground and quickly stamped out the flames.

"You left it a bit late for a change of mind."

Tammy picked the picture up, nipping out the last orange worms of fire that crawled around its charred edges. Three-quarters of the image had been consumed, and the remaining portion was browned by the heat and dirt of Maxine's stamping, but Todd's face, shoulder and chest had survived. And his eyes, of course, just one second from meeting the gaze of the camera. Imminent, but permanently averted.

"You really want to keep that?"

"Yes. If you don't mind. We'll frame it and we'll find a place in the house where we can say hello to him once in a while."

"Done." She headed back to the house. "I'm going to call the airport. Find out when the next plane back to Los Angeles is. Are you ready to go?"

"Just say the word."

Tammy looked down at the picture in her hand. Maxine was right; she had left it a little late to salvage it. But there might come a time when she and Maxine needed the comfort of this face; when they were no longer young, and the imminence of his gaze would carry with it the promise of a reunion in another, kinder place.

She glanced up, to be sure Maxine had gone inside, then she gave the bitter-smelling scrap of photograph a quick kiss. Having done so, she smiled at the man in the picture, and at herself for all her years of vain adoration. Well, she'd made her peace with it, at least. She slipped the photograph into her pocket and went inside, leaving the fire to burn itself out in Arnie's half-finished handiwork.