Where we left off in Chapter 3: (At her kitchen table, in present day Los Angeles, Tina lifts her head from its resting spot on her arms. She had nodded off in thoughts of yesterday. She hears the doorbell and then knocking. Tina turns and looks at her watch. It was already 5:30. She walks to the door and opens it, finding Bette standing there, looking back at her. Tina is still with one foot in her remembrance as she tries to fully separate herself from her daydreaming…Bette, while always captivated by those eyes, looks at Tina with some concern.)

BETTE- “Hi. I hope I’m not too early.” (And now Chapter 4…)

TINA- “What?”

BETTE- “Angelica called and said to be here earlier. It’s 5:30, so I’m just a little early.”

TINA- “She called?”

BETTE- “Yeah. Sorry…”

TINA- “No no no…come in…I just…I was having some tea.” (Bette walks in and has to take a moment to take in the surroundings…the familiar surroundings…) “Can I make you some?”

BETTE- “Mmmm?”

TINA- “Tea?”

BETTE- “Yes, yes please…” (Tina walks to the kitchen and Bette follows. Tina is looking for things to prepare and Bette tries to assist…and bumps into her.)

TINA- (Staring at her…) “Stop…”

BETTE- “What?”

TINA- “I got it Bette…have a seat…”

BETTE- “Oh…sorry I…”

TINA- “It’s ok.” (Tina looks away and then back at her. Bette smiles and nods but Tina doesn’t look away and just stands there. Bette’s eyes dart side to side as she gazes back at Tina.)

BETTE- “T?”

TINA- (She shakes her head, as though to clear it…) “Peppermint?”

BETTE- (Her eyebrows come together…) “What?”

TINA- “Peppermint? Camomile? The tea…”

BETTE- (She looks at Tina with some concern…) “Peppermint…”

TINA- “Fine.” (Bette’s cell phone rings.)

BETTE- “Hello. Hi sweetie. Yes. I’m here. What? Well…but…ok, but…yes, yes, but…ok, soon…please…no…ok…but…what? What? No. Honey please…I can’t…ok…fine…bye…” (She hangs up and looks at Tina.) “She’s going to be a little late. She got held up.”

TINA- “Why didn’t she just call here?”

BETTE- “I don’t know. She called me instead, is that such a big deal? She must have…”

TINA- “She must have thought it would be easier to deal with YOU.”

BETTE- “What does THAT mean?”

TINA- (Ignoring where that was going…) “When is she coming?”

BETTE- “She said a half hour.”

TINA- (Sarcastic…) “Great.”

BETTE- “Hey now…”

TINA- (Shaking her head…) “Sorry, I just…” (as though refocusing…) “peppermint…okay…” (She turns to make the tea.)

BETTE- “Are you ok?”

TINA- “I’m fine.”

BETTE- “Ok.”

TINA- (Looking back at her…) “Ok?”

BETTE- “Good.”

TINA- “Fine.”

BETTE- “Honey.”

TINA- “Excuse me?”

BETTE- “Not sugar, honey.”

TINA- (Giving her a look…) “Yeah, I think I know that thanks.”

BETTE- (A bit dramatized…) “Just making sure.”

TINA- “Oh fuck off.” (Bette looks at her with some surprise and then chuckles and Tina sort of joins her.) “Just relax okaaaaaay?”

BETTE- “You’re the one that seems all wound up Kennard…”

TINA- “I’m FINE…now just sit down and stop…stop…”

BETTE- “WHAT?”

TINA- “Looking at me…”

BETTE- “I’m not looking at you…”

TINA- “Just relax…”

BETTE- “Okay, Tina…” (She walks up to her and takes her by the arms…) “What’s going on?”

TINA- (Her countenance changes and she looks at her, her gaze moving from side to side…) “Tuscany…”

BETTE- (Her eyebrows come together…) “Italy?”

TINA- (Sighing…) “You’re really pissing me off now…”

BETTE- (She gets it…) “OHhhhh….Tuuuuuscany…”

TINA- “Yeah…uh huh…”

BETTE- “T…”

TINA- “Yeah…right…T…I think I’ll have camomile…”

BETTE- “On second thought skip the honey, some cognac will do just fine…what’s wrong with you? Why Tuscany? Why now?”

TINA- “I…” (She looks around…her eyes are starting to show her mental exhaustion as they shed their hapless tears…) “I don’t know…I’m so tired…”

BETTE- “Hey…” (She puts her hand on Tina’s face…) “It’s ok. I don’t know what’s going on but it’s ok. Come here…”

TINA- “No no no…”

BETTE- “I won’t kiss you Kennard…just come here…” (she wipes a few tears from Tina’s face and she pulls her into her embrace and Tina succumbs.) “It’s ok.” (She rubs Tina’s back for a while as she sways just a bit to comfort her.) “You know…every time I hear the word ‘Tuscany’, especially when you say it, I think the left side of my face goes all tingly and I get the urge to duck…” (Tina finally chuckles into her sobs and Bette laughs.) “It’s ok…” (Bette holds her steady for a few more moments and they remain in their embrace.)

TINA- “How did we get here?”

BETTE- “Somewhere we made a wrong turn I guess and somehow this is where we ended up.”

TINA- “I remember a carpenter…”

BETTE- “Mmm…and then a rich girl who swept you off your feet, annoyed the hell out of me, but whom we both ended up befriending…granted I didn’t get to like her until much later…”

TINA- “After the man…”

BETTE- “Right, the guy with the annoying little kid…took my Tina away…”

TINA- “And then along came the immature artist to take YOU away…”

BETTE- “Immature?”

TINA- “A little too footloose and fancy free if you ask me…all wrong for you by the way…”

BETTE- “Would you find anyone right for me?”

TINA- “Guess not.”

BETTE- “Me neither.”

TINA- “Mmmm.”

BETTE- “And a few since then.”

TINA- “Yeah…a few. I’m tired. I’m so tired.”

BETTE- “So to relax you decided to think about Tuscany?”

TINA- “Couldn’t help it.”

BETTE- “Did Angelica say something to stir things up?”

TINA- “It’s been hard Bette.”

BETTE- “I know.”

TINA- “I can’t do this anymore.”

BETTE- “T….”

TINA- “Yeah?”

BETTE- “Is this going to end in me getting slapped again?”

TINA- “If you leave me sobbing in the middle of the kitchen, and just take off, and then return after I’ve been crying all night…I’d say it’s likely…” (Bette chuckles.)

BETTE- “I’m not leaving.”

TINA- “I don’t want you to.”

BETTE- (She slowly brings her face forward so that they’re looking at one another…) “What DO you want, Tina Kennard?” (Tina looks at her and their eyes transfixed, and Tina smirks, her tears not yet dried. Bette notices a look…) “What? What are you thinking?”

TINA- “This isn’t ending like it did after you came back in Tuscany, so take that idea out of your mind…” (Bette smiles…) “Nuh uh…”

BETTE- “Hey, I didn’t assume anything…I was afraid to even come here after all…”

TINA- “It’s not going to happen…”

BETTE- “I know…I didn’t come here expecting anything of the sort…”

TINA- “And you also didn’t expect me to be slobbering all over you in tears either….”

BETTE- “Tina…relax…besides Angelica is coming home soon. This is important.”

TINA- “Mhmm.”

BETTE- “What?”

TINA- “I don’t know, but my gut tells me I’ve fallen victim…perhaps we both have…to a Porter junior conspiracy.”

BETTE- “Oh come on…I don’t think she’d do that.”

TINA- “Bette…”

BETTE- “Yes?”

TINA- “I REALLY can’t do this anymore. My heart is tired. We need to figure all this out. She needs you…”

BETTE- “I need you.”

TINA- “What?”

BETTE- “I told you back at the hotel…”

TINA- “And as I told you then…”

BETTE- “NO…listen to me…”

TINA- “No no no no no…”

BETTE- “What ‘no no no’?????”

TINA- “That’s what you said in Tuscany… ‘listen..’ you said…”

BETTE- “Will you please just let Tuscany go?”

TINA- “Excuse me?!”

BETTE- “Yes Tina, let it go…please let it all go…”

TINA- “Are you insane?”

BETTE- “I must be because I keep coming back to you…” (Tina looks at her intensely, not sure where she’s going with this…) “…coming back to us, to this hope against hope, to this…” (She looks around…) “this house…our home…our family…and every time I face the same awful pain…you ‘can’t do this anymore’…neither can I, but you won’t let it go…you won’t stop ‘doing this’” (she gestures around…) “…you keep bringing us back to the same place…do you think maybe…just for once, we could stop ‘doing this’, whatever the fuck it is, and do something different? Would you please stop torturing me, for once these past two decades, and revert to those moments of clarity you DID share with me those years ago…even after the carpenter, the Hellry, and the artist? Do you think you could just look at me and tell me, instead of what you can’t DO anymore, what it is you WANT to do…what it is you want most…what it is you want from me? Because Tina whatever it is, it’s yours…it’s all yours…so please…now that your most recent lover has left you and mine has given up on me…both of them no doubt victims of something they know nothing about…now that our daughter is butting heads with us about wanting each of us in her life and part of her ‘family’…do you think maybe…just maybe…we could at least try to do what we really have always wanted instead of meeting up like strangers in the night every now and then in places all over the world but here and making love everywhere but here only to go back to our respective lives and live them while yearning, dreaming, and desperately wanting fucking Tuscany? Do you think T, do you think we could just try it instead of fear it and run from it?!” (She looks at Tina exasperated and Tina just stares at her.)

TINA- (As though to break the tension and her realizations, she says like she proved her point…) “See!”

BETTE- “What?”

TINA- “I was right…you were hoping for things to go like that day in Tuscany…that’s what all this is about…I knew it…” (She nods and smirks nervously, turning away…)

BETTE- (Smiling and grabbing her arm gently and turning her, and shaking her head at Tina as she smiles…) “You drive me crazy.”

TINA- “Apparently the feeling is mutual…and for Angie too…” (Bette chuckles…and Tina nods.)

BETTE- “T…tell me what you want…” (She puts her hand on Tina’s chest just below her nape…) “what’s in there? Tell me…”

TINA- (Putting her hand over Bette’s…) “Fear … After all these years…all the trials and tribulations, all the hurt…”

BETTE- “All the love?”

TINA- (She tilts her head looking at Bette…) “After all these years and all the drama…and we’re talking decades here…you want to go back to what we had once…you want my heart to go back to that nostalgic place?”

BETTE- “What? No. I want more than just that…I want your heart to go back to that night we first touched…when we first gave and received our total selves…I want your heart to go back to the night we conceived our first child…” (Tina’s head drops just a little and Bette lifts her chin slowly with her hand…) “back to the night Angelica came into our lives…back to every time we looked passed all our walls and fears and were just with one another…just together…just you and me. You told me once, a long time ago, before Angelica was born, that you feared you had lost my love, that I didn’t look at you in the same way anymore, as though I wasn’t showing the same pride of being with you anymore, as though something was lost. I didn’t reply to you then, but I’m telling you now…I had lost myself and I feared losing you. I started grasping for control that I felt had left me and I almost totally lost you in the process. And you lost yourself in our relationship but you eventually rediscovered yourself, as did I. And I’ve known all this time, even in all these years without you, that you are my life. You and that young woman we raised are the most important part of my life. When I run from you I seek you, when I run to you I find myself again. I don’t want to do THIS anymore…I can’t do THIS anymore…I’m tired too…I want you…I want my life back.” (Tina stares at the eyes that are trying to say as much as what Bette’s lips have spoken. Bette touches Tina’s face and kisses her.)

TINA- “You want your life back? In Tuscany you told me that after I go back to my life I should make a choice.”

BETTE- “And now I’m asking you to state it. I ask what’s in your heart and you say fear…but I’ve just shown you what’s my heart…it’s you.” (Tina succumbs to another kiss.)

TINA- “We need to talk about this.”

BETTE- “Are my kissing skills waning?”

TINA- “No…but we need to work things out.”

BETTE- “Mmm. But…”

TINA- “But first…a tour…”

BETTE- (She pulls her head away a bit…) “A tour?”

TINA- “You haven’t been here in a while. I think I better show you around, to help you remember things again…”

BETTE- “Things like that I don’t forget…”

TINA- “It’s a very limited tour…”

BETTE- “It’s not that small a house…”

TINA- “We’re not touring the whole house…”

BETTE- “T…what…”

TINA- “This way to the bedroom…I think you might like what I’ve done with it…”

BETTE- (Smiling…) “T…”

TINA- “Relax Porter, it’s not what you think…”


(And another time beckons…a couple of years ago on a warm summer’s day in a Tuscan house…)

TINA- “You left Bette…you left me alone here…you just left…”

BETTE- “I didn’t want you to be hurt anymore…for either of us…you said you can’t do this anymore, well neither can I…neither can I Tina…I love you and all I do is think about you…I can’t get on with my life, I can’t move on with another woman, I can’t live my life…”

TINA- “You seem to be doing just fine. And if it was that easy for you to up and leave, then fuck…what do I care anymore…leave…I’m better off without you, you’re right…it’s time to get on with it…get on with life. I don’t need you anymore and since I’m such a burden on your momentum in life, then off you go Bette. No one’s holding you down…”

BETTE- “That’s not what I said…that’s not fair…”

TINA- “Fair? FAIR?!!!”

BETTE- “Tina listen to me…Tina…” (She slowly walks up to her and touches her arm and then weathers the force of Tina’s hand slapping Bette’s away. Bette tries to reach out with her other arm but is met with the same resistance.) “T…” (Bette’s feeling a pronounced pain of this overt rejection…) “Please don’t…”

TINA- (She looks at her and hold back her emotion as best she can…) “Do you have any idea what you did to me?”

BETTE- “Tina, I came back…”

TINA- “No…you’re not listening…have you any idea what that feels like?”

BETTE- “I think you’re forgetting you’ve left me at times too…”

TINA- (Looking angered but regrouping…) “That’s different. How could you do that Bette? You made love to me and then just left.”

BETTE- “We’ve been making love all week here…and you threatened to leave…how could YOU do that?”

TINA- “What?”

BETTE- “You can’t do this anymore…that’s what you said. Have you any idea how much that hurts? All at once you were impaling me and telling me that I was hurting you by making love to you…somehow making things worse…somehow making things harder for you in your life…in our bizarre life apart from one another. So I couldn’t carry on hurting you and did what I thought would make things easier for you.”

TINA- “Bette…it hurts to not live my life with you. It hurts to carry on as though we’re just parents to a wonderful young woman but nothing more. It hurts to want you so much but not be able to make a life with you happen.” (She’s losing composure again…) “It hurts to have lost what we once had and to be taunted by brief little pieces of what was lost…it hurts to return to my life every time after I see you. It hurts because the irony is that I’m returning to nothing…because when I leave you I leave the love of my life…it hurts…it hurts so damn much. What made things this way Bette? Why did we let it all go to blazes like that? Why?”

BETTE- (She slowly moves forward, and almost fearing another swipe of Tina’s hand, she slowly touches Tina’s moistened face.) “I don’t have answers, I don’t have solutions, and I can’t undo all the wrongs. But I do know that we have the power to make this right and I don’t know why you’re so reluctant to do just that. Your fear of our love makes me fear, it scares me…I don’t want to see doubt or fear when I look into your eyes…I want to see you, the woman I love looking back at me with the love I once knew so well. When we go back…back to our respective lives soon…I want you to figure it out…I want you to figure out what you want. I want you to decide what you want to do about being hurt by not living your life with me. I want you to make the choice that you WILL make your life with me happen. But right now, all I can do is show you what’s in MY heart, and though you’ve always known what’s there, I could never tire of telling you…of showing you…” (As Bette’s hand reaches her face, Tina hesitates briefly but then takes comfort in it and closes her eyes as she does so. Bette moves up to her and takes Tina into her embrace. After several moments, Tina moves to face Bette and then join their now wet faces by their anxious lips, causing Bette to express a softened voice of yearning. Tina pulls away a bit and rests her forehead on Bette’s.)

TINA- “You’ll always be the love of my life.”

BETTE- “You ARE my life.”

TINA- “Bette…”

BETTE- “Mhm…”

TINA- “Show me…” (Bette pulls her close and turns her on the spot so that Tina’s back is now facing the bed. She grasps Tina’s face gently with both hands and after speak to her with her eyes, Bette’s lips continue the wordless conversation as her hands adore Tina’s face, neck and nape. The tears are mostly dry now and moisture resumes in other ways, and the painful yearning that plagued Tina’s chest that night and morning now beckons atonement. Tina grabs Bette’s shirt with both her hands, holding her close and holding her captive. Bette pulls at Tina’s loose shirt, harkening its demise as she slowly lowers her to the bed and rests her body over Tina’s form. Tina pulls at Bette’s clothing to reveal the body within and pulls at Bette’s lips with her own. The mocha beauty is losing herself in the passionate dance and her tears begin to flow as she stops and touches the fair skinned face.)

BETTE- “I’m sorry…I’m so sorry…I just wanted to…I didn’t want to leave you…ever…”

TINA- (Their eyes meeting and searching…) “Shh…you’re here now…” (She smiles…) “…make it up to me…” (Bette kisses her sweetly…) “I love you…I still love you…I’ll always love you…”


Forgive all your mistakes
There’s nothing I wouldn’t do
To hear your voice again
Sometimes I wanna call you
But I know you won’t be there

Ohh I’m sorry for blaming you
For everything I just couldn’t do
And I’ve hurt myself by hurting you

Some days I feel broke inside but I won’t admit
Sometimes I just wanna hide ’cause it’s you I miss
And it’s so hard to say goodbye
When it comes to this, oooh

Would you tell me I was wrong?
Would you help me understand?
Are you looking down upon me?
Are you proud of who I am?

There’s nothing I wouldn’t do
To have just one more chance
To look into your eyes
And see you looking back

Ohh I’m sorry for blaming you
For everything I just couldn’t do
And I’ve hurt myself, ohh

If I had just one more day
I would tell you how much that I’ve missed you
Since you’ve been away
Ooh, it’s dangerous
It’s so out of line
To try and turn back time

I’m sorry for blaming you
For everything I just couldn’t do
And I’ve hurt myself by hurting you