At first, the nurse said the doctor was administering a treatment, and she asked if she could take a message.

"Sure," Tanya said agreeably, without hesitation.

"May I ask who's calling?"

"Tanya Thomas."

There was a long pause. Normally, the nurse would have thought it was a coincidence, but the doctor had an odd knack for getting in touch with famous people to participate in benefits for them, or just outright donate money.

"The Tanya Thomas?" She felt stupid asking. Tanya Thomas?" She felt stupid asking.

"I guess so," Tanya laughed. "I went to college with Dr. Phillips," she explained. It was interesting that Zoe never bragged about it. Her only interest in Tanya was their history together.

The nurse listening to her was clearly impressed that Tanya and the doctor were friends, and she said she was going to see if Dr. Phillips had finished her procedure. There was another wait, and a moment later, Tanya heard a familiar voice on the line. She had a soft smoky voice, and a seriousness which she conveyed even over the telephone lines, when she dealt with a serious subject.

"Tan?" she asked, with a small, slow voice. "Is that you? My nurses almost went crazy."

"It's me. You sound like Dr. Salk from what I'm reading in the paper. You've been pretty busy, and you forgot to send me a Christmas card last year." It always felt like being kids again when she talked to her. It brought back old times, just as it did when Tanya saw Mary Stuart.

"I didn't send any. I was too busy. I had a baby." She said it with the same gentle smile, and Tanya could just see her as she listened.

"You did what? Are you married?" But she doubted it. Zoe had never wanted to get married. She was satisfied with her career and long-term monogamous relationships, but she was more interested in issues and changing the course of medical history than in getting married, and she always had been. "What are you telling me? Have you joined the rest of the bourgeois population? What happened?"

"Don't get too worked up. I adopted. And no, I'm not married. I haven't changed that much. I've just been really busy."

"How old is the baby?" It was so sweet just thinking about it, and in some ways, so unlike Zoe. She had never struck Tanya as terribly maternal. And judging from the age she knew so well, Zoe had done it when she was forty-three. She must have decided to give motherhood a try before it was too late, but it was interesting that she hadn't decided to get pregnant.

"She's nearly two now. She just kind of happened into my life. Her mother was a patient, and fortunately, she did not have AIDS, but she was homeless. She didn't want to keep Jade, so I did. She's half Korean. And it's been perfect. I would never have been able to take the time out of my practice to get pregnant." And she had never been involved with anyone she wanted that permanent a tie to. Not in recent years at least. Her heart was in her work, and she would have done anything in life for her patients.

"When am I going to see her?" Tanya asked wistfully, thinking about her old friend and the little Korean girl she had adopted. Jade. She loved the name. And it was so like Zoe.

"I'll send you a picture," Zoe said apologetically, as she signaled to a nurse waiting for her in the doorway. She pointed to her watch and held up five fingers to her. She wanted five more minutes to talk to Tanya. But there were over forty patients waiting for her in the waiting room, some of them too ill to be there. It was a familiar story to Zoe. But she could take at least five minutes out for old times' sake.

"How about doing better than a snapshot? How about coming to Wyoming?" Tanya had just decided to ask her on the spur of the moment. What if Zoe came, and Jade, and Mary Stuart... but she knew that was silly. Mary Stuart was going to Europe with her daughter. "It's just a thought. I've rented a cabin at a fancy dude ranch for two weeks in July and I have no one to go with." She sounded tired and forlorn, and Zoe knew her well enough to sense that things weren't going well, and if it were true, she was sorry to hear it.

"What about your husband?"

"That proves what I always suspected about you. You don't buy groceries, and you don't read tabloids." Zoe had been much too thin all her life, and was the envy of every woman who knew her, but she laughed at Tanya's comment.

"You're right on both counts. I never have time to eat, and I wouldn't read that junk if you paid me."

"That's comforting. Anyway, to answer your question, he's gone. He moved out this week, as a matter of fact. And now his ex-wife won't let me see his kids, because I'm being sued by a bodyguard who claims that I tried to seduce him. Actually, it's all so sick it's not worth trying to explain to a rational human being. Don't bother to figure it out. I can't, and I live here." But what Zoe heard more than the words was the distress in her friend's voice. She sounded genuinely distraught over the state of her life at the moment.

"It doesn't sound like much fun. Wyoming sounds like a great idea. I wish I could go with you." The nurse was standing in the doorway flailing again, but Zoe didn't want to cut Tanya off. It sounded like she needed someone to talk to. So Zoe signaled for another five minutes, and the nurse disappeared again with a look of desperation.

"Don't you think you could come, Zoe? Maybe just for a weekend?"

"I wish I could. I don't have anyone working with me right now. I'd have to leave a call group covering me, and my patients really hate it. Most of them are so sick they want to know I'm going to be here."

"Don't you ever take time off?" Tanya said in amazement, not that she took much time off either. But what she did was a lot less rigorous than caring for dying patients.

"Not very often," Zoe confessed. "In fact," she said apologetically, "I'd better get back to work now, or they're going to break my office door down and lynch me. I'll call you sometime. Don't let the assholes get you down, Tan. They're all lesser beings, and it's just not worth it."

"I try to remember that most of the time, but they get you anyway. Somehow they always win, in this town anyway, or at least in this business,"

"You don't deserve that," Zoe said in her gentle voice, and Tanya smiled broadly for the first time that morning.

"Thanks. Oh, I saw Mary Stuart the other day, by the way."

"How is she?" Zoe sounded tense when she asked, but it was still the same old thing, and Tanya never paid any attention to it. She had continued to give each of them news of the other over the years, and she still had fantasies about getting them back together, like the old days.

"She's all right, more or less. Her son died last year, I don't think any of them have recovered. I think right now everything is still a little shaky."

"Tell her I'm sorry," Zoe said softly, and she was. "What did he die of? An accident?"

"I think so," Tanya said vaguely, she didn't want to tell her it was a suicide. She knew how private and pained Mary Stuart felt about it. "He was at Princeton. He was twenty."

"That's a shame." She dealt with death so constantly, but she had never grown blase about it. It was a defeat she still hated, and knew she would never accept with grace. Every time she lost a patient, she felt cheated.

"I know, you have to go... but think about Wyoming, if you can. It would be fun, wouldn't it?" It was a crazy dream, but it appealed to Tanya, and Zoe smiled at the thought. For her, it wasn't even a dream. She hadn't had a vacation in eleven years now. "Call me sometime." She sounded wistful and lonely, and Zoe wished that she could reach out to her and hold her. It was odd to think that someone with so much could be so vulnerable and unhappy. For those who didn't know her life, they would never have believed the beatings Tanya and people like her had taken, and the price Tanya's fame had cost her.

"I'll send pictures of Jade, I promise!" she said before she hung up, and as soon as she did, three nurses descended on her, complaining about the crowds in the waiting room, but the one who had taken the call looked at her with amazement.

"I couldn't believe that was really her. What's she like?" Everyone always asked, but it was such a dumb question.

"She's one of the nicest women I know, the most decent. She works like a dog, and she's so talented she doesn't even realize it. She deserves a much better shake than she's had in life. Maybe one day she'll get it," Zoe said wisely, as she followed them out of her office, but the nurse who had taken the call couldn't understand what Zoe was saying.

"She's won Grammys, Academy awards, platinum records, they say she makes ten million dollars when she does a concert tour, and a million bucks a concert when she doesn't. What else is there?"

"A whole lot, Annalee, believe me. You and I have more in our lives than she does." It was heartbreaking to think that she had to call a friend from college to find someone to go on vacation with. At least Zoe had her baby.

"I don't get it," the nurse said, shaking her head, as Zoe disappeared into a treatment room. And in Los Angeles, Tanya sat staring at the photograph of Zoe in the paper. And then, just for the hell of it, she decided to call Mary Stuart.

"Hi there, guess who I just talked to five minutes ago?"

"The president," Mary Stuart teased, happy to hear her voice again. Ever since she'd come through New York, she'd missed her.

"No. Zoe. She's running an AIDS clinic in San Francisco. There was a big article about it in this morning's L.A. Times L.A. Times, and she adopted a baby. She's almost two, her name is Jade, and she's half Korean."

"That's sweet," Mary Stuart said, trying to feel generous about her old friend, but even after more than twenty years, some of the old wounds still smarted. "I'm happy for her," she said, and meant it. "It's so typical of her, isn't it? Adopting, I mean, and an Asian child. She really turned out to be just who she started out to be. And the AIDS clinic doesn't surprise me either. Is she married?"

"Nope. I guess she's smarter than we are. Has Bill left for London yet?"

"Yesterday." She was suddenly silent then, as she thought about what she'd done the night before, and she knew Tanya would think she had done the right thing, although it had been very painful. "I put Todd's things away last night. I guess it was long overdue, but I just wasn't ready before this."

"No one's keeping score," Tanya said gently. "You do what you have to do to survive around here." And then she told Mary Stuart about Nancy not letting her take the kids to Wyoming. She was bitterly disappointed about it, and Mary Stuart could hear it. She knew how much those children meant to her. In some ways, they had been the best part of her marriage.

"That's rotten," she said with feeling.

"What isn't? I just agreed to pay half a million dollars to that blackmailer who sold his ass and mine to the tabloids."

"God, that's awful. Why so much?"

"Because everyone's scared. My lawyers are terrified of juries. They figure they could never win a jury trial. The other side would make me look like a monster rolling in money. There's no way to portray anything good or wholesome to them. Celebrity Celebrity equals equals slut slut, or at the very least a person who deserves to cough up large sums of money to those either less fortunate, less honest, or extremely lazy. They ought to put that definition in the dictionary," she said, munching on a piece of toast, and Mary Stuart smiled. Tanya sounded upset, but not as devastated as she could have, considering everything that was happening to her. She could have been in bed with the covers over her head, and she wasn't. Tanya always had a lot of guts. Mary Stuart admired that about her. Whatever life did to her, she picked herself up, and went on her way again, dented, scratched, with broken corners here and there, but she was back on her feet, with a big smile, singing her heart out. "Have you heard from Bill since he left?" Tanya asked, thinking about what Mary Stuart had told her. She still found it remarkable that he didn't want his wife with him in London. And from what Mary Stuart said, she didn't even think he was cheating on her. He just didn't want her with him.

"Not yet. Alyssa called yesterday though. Our trip has been canceled."

"It has?" Tanya sounded stunned. "What happened?"

"She got a better offer. With a boy in tow." Mary Stuart smiled, but her voice sounded disappointed. "You can't beat that at her age."

"Or mine either," Tanya laughed, thinking about it. "So where does that leave you?"

"Pretty much beached, I guess, I'm trying to figure out what to do for the next two months. Bill and I talked about it again before he left, but he's adamant about not wanting me to come over. He thinks it would be 'distracting.' To tell you the truth, I was thinking of coming out to visit you for a few days, if you have time. I can stay at a hotel. New York is just so awful in July and August, and we didn't do anything about a summer house this year because we knew Bill would be gone all summer."

"What about Wyoming?" Tanya's face lit up as she asked her. At least half the dream could come true. Even if Zoe couldn't come, she and Mary Stuart could go to Wyoming for two weeks and play cowgirls. "Would you come with me? I have a cabin on this great ranch. It's supposed to be the height of luxury, Western style, and I can't see myself going alone. I've got the time blocked out, and I was going to give it away to someone else today, my secretary probably, or someone I work with."

Mary Stuart looked pensive, as she sat in her kitchen, thinking about it. "It sounds like fun. I don't have anything else to do. I'm not sure what a great rider I am anymore, although I'm certainly well padded."

"Don't give me that, you're fifteen pounds underweight. But who cares if we never ride? Who'll know? We can stare at the mountains and drink coffee, or champagne, or chase wranglers,"

"Oh, great. Here come the tabloids. I'm not going anywhere with you if you're going to trash my reputation." But Mary Stuart was laughing at her. She loved the idea of going to a ranch with Tanya. Before, when Tanya had mentioned it, she hadn't even thought about it, because she was going to Europe to meet Alyssa, and Tanya was going to Wyoming with Tony's children.

"I promise, I'll behave. Just come. I'd love it." Tanya's eyes were shining as she said it. "Will you, Stu?"

Mary Stuart grinned when she heard her old college name. "I'd love it. When do we go?" She had the whole summer before her.

"Right after the Fourth. Go buy yourself some boots. I've still got my old ones."

"I'll go shopping this afternoon. How do I get there?" She had so much to do, arrangements to make, cowboy boots to buy. All of a sudden she felt like a kid again, and the thought of spending two weeks with Tanya thrilled her. It was just what she needed.

"Why don't you come to L.A., and we'll ride my bus to Jackson Hole. We can do it in two days easy. We can sleep, eat, read, watch movies, whatever you want. My driver never even talks to me. You can do anything you want on the way to Wyoming." She had a real rock-star bus, with two huge living rooms, hidden beds, a marble bathroom, and a full kitchen. It was perfect.

"I'll be there."

"I'll pick you up at the airport." Tanya gave her the dates, and Mary Stuart wrote them down carefully. This wasn't what she had expected to do by any means, but suddenly she realized that this was her ticket to freedom.

She sent Bill a fax as soon as she hung up, telling him that Alyssa had canceled their trip, and they would not be coming to London. Instead she and Tanya Thomas would be spending two weeks in Wyoming, and she promised to send him the details when she had them. She said that she hoped everything was going well, and that they were settling in at the hotel. She told him she'd be leaving for Los Angeles the following week, after the Fourth, and she'd fax him from there. She signed it love love, but this time she didn't say that she missed him.

After she sent the fax to him, she picked up her handbag, and went out to buy cowboy boots at Billy Martin's.

And in California, Tanya was hopping around her kitchen like a kid, thinking about their trip. She and Mary Stuart were going to have a ball. She was in great spirits all day thinking about it, and that night at the benefit she looked spectacular in a black sequined dress that clung to her extraordinary figure, and everyone said her performance had never been better.

"You were hot!" Jean whispered as Tanya came off the stage, spent but pleased. It had been a great night, and the crowd had loved her. "You're the best!" There were curtain calls and encores, and people pressing around her everywhere. There were wild screams from the crowd, and flowers flung at her, and gifts pressed into her hands, and even someone's underwear flying through the air, but she dodged it. They adored her, and as the police whisked her away, she couldn't help thinking about the insanity of her life, the wild dichotomies of which celebrity was made, how passionately she was loved, how desperately she was hated.

Chapter 8.

The rest of Zoe Phillips's day, after Tanya called, went like all her days, it just flew by as she went diligently from patient to patient. Most of her patients were homosexual men, but in recent years, she was seeing more and more women and heterosexuals, who had contracted the disease either sexually, or with IV drugs, or transfusions. But the cases she hated most, and she had had many of them, were the children. It was like working in an underdeveloped country. She could offer them no cure, and there was so little she could do to help them. Sometimes only a gesture, a touch of the hand, a gift of time, a moment at their bedside before they died. She spent untold hours visiting her patients. She was tireless and had been for years, since the first cases were documented in the early eighties. In the years since, AIDS had become her nemesis, her obsession, and her passion. By the end of each day, she was drained of all energy and emotion. The only human being she could still think of offering anything to at all was her daughter. She tried to spend as much time as possible with her, she even went home for lunch sometimes, just to be with her. Early on she had brought her to work with her, and kept her in her office in a basket. But once Jade began to walk, it was all over. She was just getting ready to go home to her on the day Tanya called, when Sam Warner, her only relief doctor at the time, dropped by to see how things were going. He was a good doctor and a nice man. Zoe had known him for years professionally, and they had been good friends in medical school, when they'd gone to Stanford. They'd been inseparable for a while, and when they were young, Zoe had always suspected that Sam had a crush on her, but she'd been far too intent on her work to acknowledge it, and he'd never done anything about it. He moved to Chicago for his residency, and they had lost touch for a while, long enough for him to get married, and then divorced. And when he finally moved back to California, they eventually ran into each other again and resumed their old friendship. But it was nothing more than that now. They were buddies, and he loved doing relief work in her practice.

"How's it going here? I haven't heard from you in weeks." He popped his head around her office door as she put away her papers. He had the look of a large, cuddly teddy bear. He was tall and broad and warm, with ever tousled brown hair and big brown eyes, and no matter how hard he tried, he always looked rumpled. But Zoe knew he was brilliant with her patients. He was great with people of all ages and sizes, and he was the only relief doctor she trusted. "Don't you ever take a day off?" he asked, with a look of concern. His specialty was doing locum tenens for an interesting assortment of doctors. That meant he was a full-time "relief doctor," with no practice of his own. This was what he did for a living. And he particularly enjoyed Zoe's practice. She ran a tight ship, and he thought she was a truly great physician, working in a nearly impossible field at the moment.

"I try not to take time off," she said in answer to his question. "My patients don't like it." Although they liked Sam, she felt an obligation not to let them down or desert them. She did rounds at the hospital, and visited them in their homes sometimes, even on Sundays, and Sam knew that.

"You need to take time off," he scolded as he watched her take off her white coat and toss it in the laundry. "It's good for you, and besides," he grinned at her, "I need the money."

"I think I still owe you from last time, Sam. I've got a new bookkeeper and so far she's a disaster." She smiled at him, he was always incredibly patient about payment. She had learned in medical school that he was from a wealthy family in the East and had independent means, but he never said anything about it, and nothing about him suggested ostentation. He drove a battered old car, wore simple clothes, mostly work shirts and jeans, and he wore an ancient pair of boots that he obviously loved and looked as though they'd been worn by ten thousand cowboys.

"Anything new around here?" he asked. He liked keeping up to date on her practice, so he wasn't flying completely blind whenever she asked him to take over. And the only time she did was when she was sick, or had a special event to go to. But she hadn't gone out much lately. She'd been too tired at night, and incredibly busy in the daytime, and she was just as happy to stay home with her baby. And when she went out on a date, which she did occasionally, she wore her beeper and took her own calls, and sometimes, if she had to, she walked out of a play, or left dinner even before she'd touched it. It didn't make her a very exciting date, but it made her one hell of a good doctor.

"Nothing much new." She filled him in as she changed her shoes. "We seem to have a lot of new kids at the moment, young ones." They had contracted AIDS during gestation, from their mothers.

"I'll take a look around after you're gone." She never minded him looking at her files. She had no secrets from Sam. "Kiss Jade for me."

"Thanks." She smiled, and left the office. She took a quick look at her watch, it was one of those rare nights when she had a date, and knew she had to hurry. But it was already too late for that. It was six forty-five, and Richard Franklin was picking her up at seven-thirty. He was a well-known breast surgeon at UC, and they'd met two years before when they'd both been speaking at the same medical convention. And she'd been intrigued by the natural rivalry of their fields, he had been irked at the attention AIDS got in the press, citing the fact that more people died of breast cancer than AIDS, and the research funds should have been directed toward cancer. It had provided a lively argument for them, and a basis for an interesting friendship. And over the past two years, she'd gone out with him several times, especially lately. He was a brilliant man, and she enjoyed his company, and sometimes even more than that, but Richard Franklin was not the kind of man one fell in love with. There had been others in her life who had meant a great deal to her, but no one in a long time. The last man she had really cared about had died of AIDS from a blood transfusion ten years before, and that had been the beginning of her clinic when he left her all his money. There had been one or two special people since, but no one like him, and no one had ever made her want to get married. Certainly not Richard Franklin.

She drove home in her old Volkswagen van. She had bought it when she adopted Jade, and she often used it to help transport patients, and eventually she thought she'd use it for car pools. And she used it now to drive home as quickly as she could. She had bought a lovely old house on Edgewood, close to UC Hospital, near the forest. She went for walks in the woods there with Jade, and the view from her living room was spectacular. She had a clear view of the Golden Gate and the Marin Headlands. And as soon as she opened her front door, Jade let out a scream of excitement. "Mommy!" Zoe swept the little girl into her arms, and held her there, cuddling her, while Jade waved her arms and told her all about a dog and a rabbit and raisins and play group. It wasn't highly intelligible, but Zoe knew exactly what she was saying. "Babbit! Babbit!" she said, clapping her hands excitedly, and Zoe knew immediately that she had seen it at their neighbor's, "Mommy, Babbit!"

"I know. Maybe we'll get one, one of these days." She set the toddler down in the kitchen then, and took a bite of her dinner. It was hamburger and rice, prepared by the Danish au pair, Inge. It wasn't fabulous, but it was wholesome, and Jade was brandishing a handful of raw carrots she had gnawed on, as Zoe hurried upstairs to her bedroom. She wanted to change as quickly as she could, and then come back to spend a few minutes with Jade before she went out with Dick Franklin. This was exactly why she hated going out at night. It gave her absolutely no time with her daughter. But her outings and dates were rare, just as her days off were.

She came downstairs twenty minutes later in a long black velvet skirt and a white lace blouse, she looked like an old family portrait, and her long red hair had been brushed and rebraided. She wore it in a long braided tail down her back, just as she had in college.

"Pitty Mama!" the little girl said, clapping her hands again, and Zoe smiled as she pulled her onto her lap. She was incredibly tired, "Thank you, Jade. How's my big girl today?" she asked, as the child snuggled close to her, and Zoe smiled as she held her. This was what life was all about, not excitement, not glamour, not even money or success, and certainly none of the things Tanya had talked to her about. The important things in life, as far as Zoe was concerned, were good health and children, and she never lost sight of their importance. She had no chance to, she had daily reminders in her office.

She and Jade played with some big pink Lego blocks for a little while, and then the doorbell rang. It was Richard Franklin. He looked very sleek and cool when he walked in. He was wearing gray slacks and a blazer, but she saw that he was wearing an expensive tie, and as usual, he looked as though he'd just had a haircut. Dr. Franklin always looked impeccable, and as though he was expecting to give a lecture to the hospital's most important donors. He knew his specialty perfectly, and it was impossible not to admire his knowledge, if not his bedside manner. He and Zoe had always been extremely different, but fascinated somehow with each other.

"And how are you tonight, Dr. Franklin?" she asked after the au pair let him in. She was crouched on the floor, still playing blocks with her daughter.

"I'm impressed," he said, managing to look both very handsome and extremely lofty. There had always been something very arrogant about him, and Zoe suspected that was what appealed to her, there was an irresistible desire to tame him. But until the present, in any case, she had controlled it. "Do you do that often?" He indicated the game she was playing with Jade, where she built a large pink house of Lego blocks, and Jade destroyed it.

"As often as I can," she said honestly, knowing full well that it made him uncomfortable. He had confessed to her long since that he felt uneasy around children. He had never had any of his own, and like her, he had never been married. He claimed that the opportunity had never presented itself to him at the right time, but she sensed fairly accurately that he was basically too self-centered. "Would you like to play?" she teased, she couldn't imagine him on his hands and knees on the floor, playing anything. He might mess up his hair, or uncrease his trousers. She knew that most of her contemporaries thought he was a stuffed shirt, and he was in a way, but he was so incredibly smart, and at fifty-five, he was extremely attractive. On the surface he was the kind of man her family would have liked her to marry years before, but her parents were long dead, and it seemed exotic enough to her just to date him.

"Are you ready?" he asked expectantly, not particularly amused to be watching her play with Jade. He had gotten tired of it in less than a minute. And their reservation at Boulevard was at eight, and it was quite a distance from Edgewood, and so popular they didn't like holding tables, even for important doctors.

"Ready, sir," she said, shrugging into a little velvet jacket. Even in June, it was cold at night in San Francisco, and she looked very pretty as she picked Jade up again and kissed her.

"I love you, little mouse," she said, rubbing noses with her, and then giving her a butterfly kiss on the cheek with her eyelashes as the little girl giggled. "I'll see you later." As she said the words, Jade's lower lip began to stick out, and Zoe could see instantly that tears were about to happen. She gave her quickly to the au pair, and waved just as Jade let out a wail, but by then they were out the door, and the au pair turned her around to distract her. In the past year, Zoe had become the master of the fast exit.

"You do that very well," he said admiringly. It was very unusual for him to go out with women with young children. Most of the time he preferred women who were too involved in their careers to marry or have kids, which was exactly what Zoe had been when he met her. And then she had stunned him by adopting a baby. It hadn't been at all what he'd expected of her, and it had somehow altered their relationship, but he still found her agonizingly attractive, and he would have liked to spend a lot more time with her. But she was too busy with her practice most of the time, and now with the child, so he did the best he could, and accepted crumbs from her table. "I haven't seen you in two weeks," he complained as he started his dark green Jaguar.

"I've been busy," she said simply. "I have a lot of very sick patients," she said matter-of-factly. She had lost several of late, and it had been very depressing for her because she always got so close to them, particularly in the end, when it was always so touching, and so pathetic.

"I have very sick patients too," he said, sounding mildly irritated, as he headed toward downtown, and through the Haight just below her.