He nodded. “You’re right,” he said.
“Then how?” I asked him. “She decided to be somebody else. How is it possible to do that?”
He shrugged and grinned, friendly and amiable but not really able to describe colors to a blind man. “You find somebody you’d rather be,” he said. “It really is as simple as that, Orry.”
I knew he was wrong. There was truth in the idea that people like Dawn and himself had found somebody else they’d rather be, but it surely couldn’t be as simple as that. Everybody has fantasies, but not everybody throws away the real self and lives in the fantasy.
Still, it would have been both rude and useless to press him, so I said; “Thank you,” and got out of the car.
“Hold the door,” he said. Then he patted the front seat, as though calling a dog, and said, “Dennis, come on up.” And Dennis, a nervous high-bred afghan hound in his fawn-colored jumpsuit, clambered gratefully into the front seat.
I was about to shut the door when Rod leaned over Dennis and said, “One more little piece of advice, Orry.”
“Yes?”
“Don’t ask Dawn that question.”
“Oh,” I said.
The picture was gone from the front hallway. My luggage from the motel was in my room, and Dawn was naked in the pool, her slender long intricate body golden-green in the underwater lights. I opened the drapes and stepped out to the tepid California air and said, “Shall I join you in there?”
“Hey, baby,” she called, treading water, grinning at me, sunny and untroubled. “Come on in, the water’s fine.”
5
The rest of the days that week were all the same, except that no more unfortunate presents came from Byron Cartwright. Dawn and I got up early every morning, flew to Stockton, she worked in the movie and napped – alone – after lunch, we flew back to Los Angeles, and then there’d be dinner in a restaurant with several other people, a shifting cast that usually included Rod and Wally and Dennis, plus others, sometimes strangers and sometimes known to me. Then Dawn and I would go back to the house and swim and go to bed and play with one another’s bodies until we slept. The sex was wonderful, and endlessly various, but afterwards it never seemed real. I would look at Dawn during the daytime, and I would remember this or that specific thing we had done together the night before, and it wasn’t as though I’d actually done it with her. It was more as though I’d dreamed it, or fantasized it.
Maybe that was partly because we always slept in the guest room, in what had become my bed. Dawn never took me to her own bed, or even brought me into her private bedroom. Until the second week I was there, I was never actually in that wing of the house.
On the Thursday evening we stayed longer in Stockton, to see the film shot the day before. Movie companies when they’re filming generally show the previous day’s work every evening, which some people call the dailies and some call the rushes. Its purpose is to give the director and performers and other people involved a chance to see how they’re doing, and also so the film editor and director can begin discussing the way the pieces of film will be organized together to make the movie. Dawn normally stayed away from the rushes, but on Thursday evening they would be viewing the sequence that she and Rod had argued about with Harvey, so the whole group of us stayed and watched.
I suppose movie people get so they can tell from the rushes whether things are working right or not, but when I look at half a dozen strips of film each recording the same action sequence or lines of dialogue, over and over and over, all I get is bored. Nevertheless, I could sense when the lights came up in the screening room that almost everybody now believed Harvey to have been right all along. Rod wouldn’t come right out and admit it, but it was clear his objections were no longer important to him. Dawn, on the other hand, had some sort of emotional commitment to her position, and all she had to say afterwards was, grumpily, “Well, I suppose the picture will survive, despite that.” And off she stomped, me in her wake.
Still, by the time we reached the plane to go back to Los Angeles, she was in a cheerful mood again. Bad temper never lasted long with her.
Friday afternoon there were technical problems of some sort, delaying the shooting, so after Dawn’s nap she and I sat in the parlor of her dressing room and talked together about the past. It was one of those conversations full of sentences beginning, “Do you remember when—?” We talked about troubles we’d had with the landlord, about the time we snuck into a movie theater when we didn’t have any money, things like that. She didn’t seem to have any particular attitude about these memories, neither nostalgia nor revulsion; they were simply interesting anecdotes out of our shared history.
But they led me finally, despite Rod’s advice, to ask her the question that had brought me out here. “You’ve changed an awful lot since then,” I said. “How did you do that?”
She frowned at me, apparently not understanding. “What do you mean, changed?”
“Changed. Different. Somebody else.”
“I’m not somebody else,” she said. Now she looked and sounded annoyed, as though somebody were pestering her with stupidities. “I dyed my hair, that’s all. I learned about makeup, I learned how to dress.”
“Personality,” I said. “Emotions. Everything about you is different.”
“It is not.” Her annoyance was making her almust petulant. “People change when they grow older, that’s all. It’s been sixteen years, Orry.”
“I’m still the same.”
“Yes, you are,” she said. “You still plod along with those flat feet of yours.” “I suppose I do,” I said.
Abruptly she shifted, shaking her head and softening her expression and saying, “I’m sorry, Orry, you didn’t deserve that. You’re right, you are the same man. You were wonderful then, and you’re wonderful now.”
“I think the flat feet was more like the truth,” I said, because that is what I think.
But she shook her head, saying, “No. I loved living with you, Orry, I loved being your wife. That was the first time in my life I ever relaxed. You know what you taught me?”
“Taught you?”
“That I didn’t have to just run all the time, in a panic. That I could slow down, and look around.”
I wanted to ask her if that was when she realized she could become somebody else, but I understood by now that Rod had been right, it wasn’t something I could ask her directly, so I changed the subject. But I remembered what the magazine article had said about me being a “stock figure, the San Diego sailor in every sex star’s childhood,” and I wondered if what Dawn had just said was really true, if being with me had in some way started the change that turned Estelle Anlic into Dawn Devayne. Plodding with my flat feet? Most of the Estelle Anlics in the world marry flat-footed Orry Tupikoses; what had been different with us?
Saturday we drove to Palm Springs, to the home of a famous comedian named Lennie Hacker, for a party. There were about two hundred people there, many of them famous, and maybe thirty of them staying on as house guests for the rest of the weekend. Lennie Hacker had his own movie theater on his land, and we all watched one of his movies plus some silent comedies. That was in the afternoon. In the evening, different guests who were professional entertainers performed, singing, dancing, playing the piano, telling jokes. It was too big a party for anybody to notice one face more or less, so I didn’t have to explain myself to anybody. (There was only one bad moment, at the beginning, when I was introduced to the host. Lennie Hacker was a short round man with sparkly black eyes and a built-in grin on his face, and when he shook my hand he said, “Hiya, sailor.” I thought that was meant to be some kind of insult joke, but later on I heard him say the same thing to different other people, so it was just a way he had of saying hello.)
I’d never been to a party like this – a famous composer sat at the piano, singing his own songs and interrupting himself to make put-down gags about the lyrics – and I just walked around with a drink in my hand, looking at eve
rything, enjoying being a spectator. (I was wearing the Edwardian jacket and the full-sleeved shirt, no longer self-conscious about my appearance.) Dawn and I crossed one another’s paths from time to time, but we didn’t stay together; she had lots of friends she wanted to spend time with.
As for me, I had very few conversations. Rod and Dennis were there, and I had a few words with Rod about the silent comedies we’d seen, and I also made small talk with a few other people I’d met at different restaurant dinners over the last week. At one point, when I was standing in a corner watching two television comedians trade insult jokes in front of an audience of twenty or thirty other guests, Lennie Hacker came over to me and said, “Listen.”
“Yes?”
“You look like an intelligent fella,” he said. He looked out at the crowd of his guests, and made a sweeping gesture to include them all. “Tell me,” he said, “who the fuck are all these people?”
“Movie stars,” I said.
“Yeah?” He studied them, skeptical but interested. “They look like a bunch a bums,” he said. “See ya.” And he drifted away.
A little later I ran into Byron Cartwright, who beamed at me and took my hand in both of his and said, “How are you, Orry?”
“Fine,” I said.
“Listen, Orry,” he said. He kept my hand in one of his, and put his other arm around my shoulders, turning me a bit away from the room and the party, making ours a private conversation. “I’ve wanted to have a good talk with you,” he said.
“You have?”
“I’m sorry about that picture.” He looked at me with a pained smile. “The way Dawn talked about you, I thought she’d like that reminder.”
I didn’t know what to say. “I guess so,” I told him.
“But things are good between you two, aren’t they? No trouble there.”
“No, we’re fine.”
“That’s good, that’s good.” He thumped my back, and finally released my hand. “You two look good together, Orry,” he said. “You did way back then, and you do now.”
“Well, she looks good.”
“The two of you,” he insisted. “Together. When’s your leave up, Orry? When do you have to go back to the Navy?”
“In two weeks.”
“Do you want me to fix it?”
“Fix it?”
“We could get you an early release,” he said. “Get you out of the Navy.”
“I’ve only got two years before I collect my pension.”
“We could probably work something out,” he told me. “Make some arrangement with the Navy. Believe me, Orry, I know people who know people.”
I said, “But I couldn’t go on living at Dawn’s house.”
“Orry,” he said, chuckling at me and patting my arm. “You were her first love, Orry. You’re her man. Look how she took you right in again, the minute you showed up. Look how well you’re getting along. In some little corner of that girl, Orry, you’ve always been her husband. She left the others, but she was taken away from you.”
I stared at him. “Marry her? Dawn Devayne? Mr Cartwright, I don’t—”
“By. Call me By. And think about it, Orry. Will you do that? Just think about it.”
There was no question in the Hacker household about our belonging together, Dawn and me. We’d been initially shown by a uniformed maid to a bedroom we were to share on the second floor, overlooking Hacker’s private three-hole golf course, and by one o’clock in the morning I was ready to return to it and go to sleep, although the party was still going strong. I found Dawn with a group of people singing show tunes around the piano, and I told her, “I’m going to sleep now.”
“Stick around five minutes, we’ll go up together.”
I did – it’s surprising how many old lyrics we all remember, the words to songs we no longer know we know – and then we found our way to the right bedroom, used the private bath next door, and went to bed. When I reached for Dawn, though, she laughed and said, “You must be kidding.”
I was. I realized I was too sleepy to have any true interest in sex, that I’d started only out of a sense of obligation, that I’d felt it was my duty to perform at this point. “You’re right,” I said. “See you in the morning.”
“You’re a good old boy, Orry,” she said, and kissed my chin, and rolled away, and I guess we both went right to sleep.
When I woke up it was still dark, but light of some sort was glittering faintly outside the window, and there were distant voices. I’d lived with Dawn Devayne less than a week, but already I was used to the rounded shapes of her asleep beside me, and already I missed the numerals of the digital clock shimmering white in the darkness. I didn’t know what time it was, but it had to be very late.
I got up from bed and looked out the window, and the illumination came from floodlights over the golf course. Lennie Hacker and some of his male guests were playing golf out there. I recognized Byron Cartwright among them. Lennie Hacker’s distinctive nasal voice said something, and the others laughed, and somebody drove a white ball high up out of the light, briefly out of existence before it suddenly bounced, small and white and clear, on the clipped grass of the green.
The men moved as a group, accompanied by a servant driving a golf cart filled with bags and clubs. A portable bar was mounted on the back of the cart, and they were all having drinks from it, but no one appeared drunk, or sloppy, or tired. None of them were particularly young, but none of them were in any way old.
The golf course made a wobbly triangle around an artificial pond, with the first tee and the third green forming the angle nearest the house. As the players moved away toward the first green, I looked beyond the lit triangle, seeing only black darkness, but sensing the other Palm Springs estates around us, and then the great circle of desert around that. Desert. These men – some men – had come out to this desert and by force of will had converted it into a royal domain. “To live like kings.” That’s a cliché, but here it was the truth. In high school I read that the ancient Roman emperors had ordered snow carted down from the mountain peaks to cool their palaces in summer. It has always been the prerogative of kings to make a comfortable toy of their environment. Here, where a hundred years ago they would have broiled and starved and died grindingly of thirst, these men strolled on clipped green grass under floodlights, laughing together and reaching for their drinks from the back of a golf cart.
If I married Dawn Devayne—
I shook my head, and closed my eyes, and then turned away from the window to look at the mound of her asleep in the bed. It was a good thing I’d been warned about Byron Cartwright’s sentimental errors, or I might actually have started dreaming about such impossibilities, and wound up a character in another Byron Cartwright horror story: “And the poor fellow actually proposed to her!” If an Indian who had grubbed his lean and careful existence from this desert a hundred years ago were to return here now, how could he set up his tent? How could he take up his life again? He’s never been here. I was married to Estelle Anlic once, a long time ago. I was never married to Dawn Devayne.
6
After the weekend, we went back to the old routine until Wednesday evening, when, on the plane back to Los Angeles, Dawn said, “We won’t be going out to dinner tonight.”
“No?”
“My mother’s coming over, with her husband.”
I felt a sudden nervousness. “Oh,” I said.
She laughed at my expression. “Don’t worry, she won’t even remember you.”
“She won’t?”
“And if she does, she won’t care. I’m not sixteen any more.”
Nevertheless, it seemed to me that Dawn was also nervous, and when we got to the house she immediately started finding fault with Wang and the other servants. These servants, a staff of four or five, I almost never saw – except for the cook at breakfast – but now they were abruptly visible, cleaning, carrying things, being yelled at for no particular reason. Dawn had said her mother would arrive at e
ight, so I went off to my own room with today’s Hollywood Reporter – I was getting so I recognized some of the names in the stories there – until the digital clock read 7:55. Then I went out to the living room, got a drink from Wang, and sat there waiting. Dawn was out of both sight and hearing now, probably changing her clothes.
They came in about ten after eight, two short leathery-skinned people in pastel clothing that looked all wrong. Dawn’s mother had on a fuzzy pink sweater of the kind worn by young women twenty years ago, with a stiff-looking skirt and jacket in checks of pale green and white. Her shoes were white and she carried a white patent leather purse with a brass clasp. None of the parts went together, though it was understandable that they would all belong in the same wardrobe. She looked like a blind person who’d been dressed by an indifferent volunteer.
Her husband, as short as she was but considerably thinner, was dressed more consistently, in white casual shoes, pale blue slacks, white plastic belt, and white and blue short-sleeved shirt. He had a seamed and bony face, the tendons stood out on his neck, and his elbows looked like the kind of bone soothsayers once used to tell the future. With his thin black hair slicked to the side over his browned scalp, and his habit of leaning slightly forward from the waist at all times, and his surprisingly bright pale blue eyes, he looked like a finalist in some Senior Citizens’ golf tournament.
I stood up when the doorbell rang, and moved tentatively forward as Wang let them both in, but I was saved from introducing (explaining) myself by Dawn’s sudden arrival from the opposite direction. Striding forward in a swirl of floor-length white skirt, she held both arms straight out from the shoulder and cried, “Mother! Leo! Delighted!”
All I could do was stare. She had redone herself from top to bottom, had changed her hair, covered herself with necklaces and bracelets and rings, made up her face differently, dressed herself in a white ballgown I’d never seen before, and she was coming forward with such patently false joy that I could hardly believe I’d ever watched her do a good job of acting. I was suddenly reminded of that whore back in New York, and I realized that now Dawn herself was pretending to be Dawn Devayne. Some imitation Dawn Devayne, utterly impregnable and larger than life, had been wrapped around the original, and the astonishing thing was, the real Dawn Devagne was just as bad at imitating Dawn Devayne as that whore had been.
The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction Page 94