Westlake, Donald E - SSC 02

by Enough (v1. 1)

  Then marriage number three, in 1966, was to another movie actor, Ken Forrest, who was an older man, a contemporary of Gable and Tracy who was still making movies but wasn't quite the power he used to be. That marriage ended in 1968 when Forrest shot himself on a yacht off the coast of Spain; Dawn Devayne was in London making a picture when it happened.

  And the fourth marriage, in 1970, was to a Dallas businessman with interests in computers and airlines and oil. His name was Ralph Chucklin, and that marriage had ended with a quiet divorce in 1973. "Dawn is dating now," the article said, "but no one in particular tops her list. I'm still looking for the right guy,' she says."

  Then the article got to talking about her age, and the person who wrote the article raised the question as to whether a thirty-two year old woman was young enough to still make it as the next Sex Goddess of the World. "Dawn is more beautiful every year," the article said, and then it went back to all the business about Women's Lib and television and X-rated movies and looser sexual codes, and it said the next Superstar Sex Symbol wasn't likely to be another girl-child type like the ones before, but would be more of an adult woman, who could bring brains and experience to sex. "Far from the dumb blondes of yesteryear," the article said, "Dawn Devayne is a bright blonde, who combines with good old-fashioned lust the more modern feminine virtues of intelligence and independence. A Jane Fonda who doesn't nag." And the article finished by saying maybe the changed social conditions meant there wouldn't be any more Blonde Bombshells or Sexpot Movie Queens, which would make the world a colder and a drabber place, but the writer sure hoped there would be more, and the best bet right now to bring sex back to the world was Dawn Devayne.

  There were photographs with the article, full page color pictures of Dawn Devayne with her clothes off, and when I finished reading I sat there on the toilet a while longer looking at the pictures and trying to remember Estelle. Nothing. The face, the eyes, the smile, all different. The stomach and legs were different. Even the nipples didn't remind me of Estelle Anlic's nipples.

  There's something wrong, I thought. I wondered if maybe this Dawn Devayne woman had a criminal record or was wanted for murder somewhere or something like that, and she'd just paid Estelle money to borrow her life story. Was that possible?

  It sure didn't seem possible that this sexy woman was Estelle. I know it was sixteen years, but how much can one person change? I sat studying the pictures until I noticed I was beginning to get an erection, so I left the head and went back to work.

  * * *

  All I could think about, the next three days, was Dawn Devayne. I was once married to her, married to a sexy movie star. Me. I just couldn't get used to the idea.

  And the other guys didn't help. Norm and Stan and Pat spread the word, and pretty soon all the guys were coming around, even some of the younger officers, talking and grinning and winking and all that. Nobody came right out with the direct question, but what they really wanted to know was what it was like to be in bed with Dawn Devayne.

  And what could I tell them? I didn't know what it was like to be in bed with Dawn Devayne. I knew what it was like to be in bed with Estelle Anlic—or anyway I had a kind of vague memory, after sixteen years—but that wasn't what they wanted to know, and anyway I didn't feel like telling them. She was a teenage girl, sixteen (though she told me nineteen), and I was twenty-one, and neither of us was exactly a genius about sex,

  but we had fun. I remember she had very very soft arms and she liked to have her arms around my neck, and she laughed with her mouth wide open, and she always drowned her french fries in so much ketchup I used to tell her I had to eat them with ice tongs and one time in bed she finally admitted she didn't know what ice tongs were and she cried because she was sure she was stupid, and we had sex that time in order for me to tell her (a) she wasn't stupid, and (b) I loved her anyway even though she was stupid, and that's the one time in particular I have any memory of at all, which is mostly because that was the time I learned I could control myself and hold back ejaculation almost as long as I wanted, almost forever. We were both learning about things then, we were both just puppies rolling in a basket of wool, but the guys didn't want to hear anything like that, it would just depress them. And I didn't want to tell them about it either. Their favorite sex story anyway was one that Pat used to tell about being in bed with a girl with a candle in her ass. That's what they really wanted me to tell them, that Dawn Devayne had a candle in her ass.

  But even though I couldn't tell them any stories that would satisfy them, they kept coming around, they kept on and on with the same subject, they couldn't seem to let it go. It fascinated them, and every time they saw me they got reminded and fascinated all over again. In fact, a couple of the guys started calling me "Devayne," as though that was going to be my new nickname, until one time I picked up a wrench and patted it into my other palm and went over to the guy and said:

  "My name is Orry."

  He looked surprised, and a little scared. He said:

  "Sure. Sure, I know that."

  I said:

  "Let me hear you say it."

  He said:

  "Jeez, Orry, it was just a—"

  "Okay, then," I said, and went back over to where I was working, and that was the last I heard of that.

  But it wasn't the last I heard of Dawn Devayne. For instance, I was more or less going then with a woman in New London named Fran Skiburg, who was divorced from an Army career man and had custody of the three children. She was part Norwegian and part Belgian and her husband had been almost all German. Fran and I would go to the movies sometimes, or she'd cook me a meal, but it wasn't serious. Mostly, we didn't even go to bed together. But then somebody told her about Dawn Devayne, and the next time I saw Fran she was a different person. She kept grinning and winking all through dinner, and she hustled the kids to bed earlier than usual, and then sort of crowded me into the living room. She liked me to rub her feet sometimes, because she was standing all day at the bank, so I sat on the sofa and she kicked off her slippers and while I rubbed her feet she kept opening and closing her knees and giggling at me.

  Well, I was looking up her skirt anyway, so I slid my hand up from her feet, and the next thing we were rolling around on the wall-to-wall carpet together. She was absolutely all over me, nervous and jumpy and full of loud laughter, all the time wanting to change position or do this and that. Up till then, my one complaint about Fran was that she'd just lie there; now all of a sudden she was acting like the star of an X-movie.

  I couldn't figure it out, until after it was all finished and I was lying there on the carpet on my back, breathing like a diver with the bends. Then Fran, with this big wild-eyed smile, came looming over me, scratching my chest with her fingernails and saying, "What would you like to do to me? What do you really want to do to me?"

  This was after. I panted at her for a second, and then I said, "What?"

  And she said, "What would you do to me if I was Dawn Devayne?"

  Then I understood. I sat up and said, "Who told you that?"

  "What would you do? Come on, Orry, let's do something!"

  "Do what? We just did everything!"

  "There's lots more! There's lots more!" Then she leaned down close to my ear, where I couldn't see her face, and whispered, "You don't want me to have to say it."

  I don't know if she had anything special in mind, but I don't think so. I think she was just excited in general, and wanted something different to happen. Anyway, I pushed her off and got to my feet and said, "I don't know anything about any Dawn Devayne or any kind of crazy sex stuff. That's no way to act."

  She sat there on the green carpet with her legs curled to the side, looking something like the nude pictures in Pat's magazines except whiter and a little heavier, and she stared up at me without saying anything at all. Her mouth was open because she was looking upward so her expression seemed to be mainly surprised. I felt grumpy. I sat down on the sofa and put on my underpants.

  And a
ll at once Fran jumped up and grabbed half her clothes and ran out of the room. I finished getting dressed, and sat on the sofa a little longer, and then went out to the kitchen and ate a bowl of raisin bran. When Fran still didn't come back, I went to her bedroom and looked in through the open door, and she wasn't there. I said, "Fran?"

  No answer.

  The bathroom door was closed, so I knocked on it, but nothing happened. I turned the knob and the door was locked. I said, "Fran?"

  A mumble sounded from in there.

  "Fran? You all right?" Go away.

  "What?"

  "Go away!"

  That was the last she said. I tried talking to her through the door, and I tried to get her to come out, and I tried to find out what the problem was, but she wouldn't say anything else. There wasn't any sound of crying or anything, she was just sitting in there by herself. After a while I said, "I have to get back to the base, Fran."

  She didn't say anything to that, either. I said it once or twice more, and said some other things, and then I left and went back to the base.

  * * *

  I was shaving the next morning when I suddenly remembered that picture, the one in the magazine of Estelle and me on our wedding day. We were squinting there in the sunlight, the both of us, and now I was squinting again because the light bulb over the mirror was too bright. Shaving, I looked at myself, looked at my nose and my eyes and my ears, and here I was. I was still here. The same guy. Same short haircut, same eyebrows, same chin.

  The same guy.

  What did Fran want from me, anyway? Just because it turns out I used to be married to somebody famous, all of a sudden I'm supposed to be different? I'm not any different, I'm the same guy I always was. People don't just change, they have ways that they are, and that's what they are. That's who they are, that's what you mean by personality. The way a person is.

  Then I thought: Estelle changed.

  That's right. Estelle Anlic is Dawn Devayne now. She's changed, she's somebody else. There isn't any—she isn't —there isn't any Estelle Anlic any more, nowhere on the face of the earth.

  But it isn't the same as if she died, because her memories are still there inside Dawn Devayne, she'd remember being the girl with the mother that drove the bus, and she'd remember marrying the sailor in San Diego in 1958, and even in that article I'd read there'd been a part where she was remembering being Estelle Anlic and working as a movie cashier in San Francisco. But still she was changed, she was somebody else now, she was different. Like a wooden house turning itself into a brick house. How could she . . . how could anybody do that? How could anybody do that?

  Then I thought: Estelle Anlic is Dawn Devayne now, but I'm still me. Ordo Tupikos, the same guy. But if she was— If I'm—

  It was hard even to figure out the question. If she was that back then, and if she's this now, and if I was that ...

  I kept on shaving. More and more of my face came out from behind the white cream, and it was the same face. Getting older, a little older every minute, but not—

  Not different.

  I finished shaving. I looked at that face, and then I scrubbed it with hot water and dried it on a towel. And after mess I went to Headquarters office and put in for leave. Twenty-two days, all I had saved up.

  TWO

  The first place I went was New York, on the bus, where I looked in a magazine they have there called Cue that tells you what movies are playing all over the city. A Dawn Devayne movie called "The Captains Pearls" was showing in a theater on West 86th Street, which was forty-six blocks uptown from the bus terminal, so I walked up there and sat through the second half of a western with Charles Bronson and then "The Captain's Pearls" came on.

  The story was about an airline captain with two girl friends both named Pearl, one of them in Paris and one in New York. Dawn Devayne played the one in New York, and the advertising agency she works for opens an office in Paris and she goes there to head it, and the Paris girl friend is a model who gets hired by Dawn

  Devayne for a commercial for the captains airline, and then the captain has to keep the two girls from finding out he's going out with both of them. It was a comedy.

  This movie was made in 1967, which was only nine years after I was married to Estelle, so I should have been able to recognize her, but she just wasn't there. I stared and stared and stared at that woman on the screen, and the only person she reminded me of was Dawn Devayne. I mean, from before I knew who she was. But there wasn't anything of Estelle there. Not the voice, not the walk, not the smile, not anything.

  But sexy. I saw what that article writer meant, because if you looked at Dawn Devayne your first thought was she'd be terrific in bed. And then you'd decide she'd also be terrific otherwise, to talk with or take a trip together or whatever it was. And then you'd realize since she was so all-around terrific she wouldn't have to settle for anybody but an all-around terrific guy, which would leave you out, so you'd naturally idolize her. I mean, you'd want it without any idea in your head that you could ever get it.

  I was thinking all that, and then I thought, But I've had it! And then I tried to put together arms-around-neck ice-tongs-stupid Estelle Anlic with this terrific female creature on the screen here, and I just couldn't do it. I mean, not even with a fantasy. If I had a fantasy about going to bed with Dawn Devayne, not even in my fantasy did I see myself in bed with Estelle.

  After the movie I walked back downtown toward the bus terminal, because I'd left my duffel bag in a locker there. It was only around four-thirty in the afternoon, but down around 42nd Street the whores were already out, strolling on the sidewalks and standing in the doorways of shoe stores. The sight of a Navy uniform really agitates a whore, and half a dozen of them called out to me as I walked along, but I didn't answer.

  Then one of them stepped out from a doorway and stood right in my path and said, "Hello, sailor. You off a ship?"

  I started to walk around her, but then I stopped dead and stared, and I said, "You look like Dawn Devayne!"

  She grinned and ducked her head, looking pleased with herself. "You really think so, sailor?"

  She did. She was wearing a blonde wig like Dawn Devayne's hair style, and her eyes and mouth were made up like Dawn Devayne, and she'd even fixed her eyebrows to look like Dawn Devayne's eyebrows.

  Only at a second look none of it worked. The wig didn't look like real hair, and the make-up was too heavy, and the eyebrows looked like little false moustaches. And down inside all that phony stuff she was Puerto Rican or Cuban or something like that. It was all like a Halloween costume.

  She was poking a finger at my arm, looking up at me sort of slantwise in imitation of a Dawn Devayne movement I'd just seen in The Captains Yearls. "Come on, sailor," she said. "Wanna fuck a movie star?"

  "No," I said. It was all too creepy. "No no," I said, and went around her and hurried on down the street.

  And she shouted after me, "You been on that ship too long! What you want is Robert Redford!"

  * * *

  This was my first time in Los Angeles since 1963, when the Gulf of Tonkin incident got me transferred from a ship in the Mediterranean to a ship in the Pacific. They'd flown me with a bunch of other guys from Naples to

  Washington, then by surface transportation to Chicago and by air to Los Angeles and Honolulu, where I met my ship. I'd had a two-day layover in Los Angeles, and now I remembered thinking then about looking up Estelle. But I didn't do it, mostly because five years had already gone by since I'd last seen her, and also because her mother might start making trouble again if she caught me there.

  The funny thing is, that was the year Estelle first became Dawn Devayne, in the movie called Bubbletop. Now I wondered what might have happened if I'd actually found her back then, got in touch somehow. I'd never seen Bubbletop, so I didn't know if by 1963 she was already this new person, this Dawn Devayne, if she'd already changed so completely that Estelle Anlic couldn't be found in there any more. If I'd met her that time, would something
new have started? Would my whole life have been shifted, would I now be somebody in the movie business instead of being a sailor? I tried to see myself as that movie person; who would I be, what would 1 be like? Would I be different?

  But there weren't any answers for questions like that. A person is who he is, and he can't guess who he would be if he was somebody else. The question doesn't even make sense. But I guess it's just impossible to think at all about movie stars without some fantasy or other creeping in.

  My plane for Los Angeles left New York a little after seven p.m. and took five hours to get across the country, but because of the time zone differences it was only a little after nine at night when I landed, and still not ten o'clock when the taxi let me off at a motel on Cahuenga Boulevard, pretty much on the line separating Hollywood from Burbank. The taxi cost almost twenty dollars from the airport, which was kind of frightening. I'd taken two thousand dollars out of my savings, leaving just over three thousand in the account, and I was spending the money pretty fast.

  The cabdriver was a leathery old guy who buzzed along the freeways like it was a stock car race, all the time telling me how much better the city had been before the freeways were built. Most people pronounce Los Angeles as though the middle is "angel," but he was one of those who pronounce it as though the middle is "angle." "Los Ang-gleez," he kept saying, and one time he said, "I'm a sight you won't see all that much. I'm your native son."

  "Born here?"

  "Nope. Come out in forty-eight."

  The motel had a large neon sign out front and very small rooms in a low stucco building in back. It was impossible to tell what color the stucco was because green and yellow and orange and blue floodlights were aimed at it from fixtures stuck into the ivy border, but in the morning the color turned out to be a sort of dirty cream shade.

  My room had pale blue walls and a heavy maroon bedspread and a paper ribbon around the toilet seat saying it had been sanitized. I unpacked my duffel and turned on the television set, but I was too restless to stay cooped up in that room forever. Also, I decided I was hungry. So I changed into civvies and went out and walked down Highland to Hollywood Boulevard, where I ate something in a fast-food place. It was like New York in that neighborhood, only skimpier. For some reason Los Angeles looks older than New York. It looks like an old old Pueblo Indian village with neon added to it by real estate people. New York doesn't look any older than Europe, but Los Angeles looks as old as sand. It looks like a place that almost had a Golden Age, a long long time ago, but nothing happened and now it's too late.