Double Feature

by Donald E. Westlake

  “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 all 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 Captain’s 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 girlfriends 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 girlfriend is a model who gets hired by Dawn Devayne for a commercial for the captain’s 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 Captain’s Pearls. “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 I 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.

  After I ate I walked around for half an hour, and then I went back to the motel and all of a sudden I was very sleepy. I had the television on, and the light, and I still wore all my clothes except my shoes, but I fell asleep anyway, lying on top of the bedspread, and when I woke up the TV was hissing and it was nearly four in the morning. I was very thirsty, and nervous for some reason. Lonely, I felt lonely. I drank water, and went out to the street again, and after a while I found an all-night supermarket called Hughes. I took a cart and went up and down the aisles.

  There were some people in there, not many. I noticed something about them. They were all dressed up in suede and fancy denim, like people at a terrific party in some movie, but they were buying the cheapest of everything. Their baskets were filled as though by gnarled men and women wearing shabby pants or faded kerchiefs, but the men were all young and tanned and wearing platform shoes, and the women were all made up with false eyelashes and different-colored fingernails. Also, some of them had food stamps in their hands.

  Another thing. When these people pushed their carts down the aisles they stood very straight and were sure of themselves and on top of the world, but when they lowered their heads to take something off a shelf they looked very worried.

  Another thing. Every one of them was alone. They went up and down the aisles, pushing their carts past one another—from up above, they must have looked like pieces in a labyrinth game—and they never looked at one another, never smiled at one another. They were just alone in there, and from up front came the clatter of the cash register.

  After a while I didn’t want to be in that place any more. I bought shaving cream and a can of soda and an orange, and walked back to the motel and went to bed.

  * * *

  There wasn’t anybody in the phone book named Byron Cartwright, who was the famous agent who had changed Estelle’s name to Dawn Devayne and then guided her to stardom. In the motel office they had the five different Los Angeles phone books, and he wasn’t in any of them. He also wasn’t in the yellow pages under “Theatrical Agencies.” Finally I found a
listing for something called the Screen Actors’ Guild, and I called, and spoke to a girl who said, “Byron Cartwright? He’s with GLA.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “GLA,” she repeated, and hung up.

  So I went back to the phone books, hoping to find something called GLA. The day clerk, a sunken-cheeked faded-eyed man of about forty with thinning yellow hair and very tanned arms, said, “You seem to be having a lot of trouble.”

  “I’m looking for an actor’s agent,” I told him.

  His expression lit up a bit. “Oh, yeah? Which one?”

  “Byron Cartwright.”

  He was impressed. “Pretty good,” he said. “He’s with GLA now, right?”

  “That’s right. Do you know him?”

  “Don’t I wish I did.” This time he was rueful. His face seemed to jump from expression to expression with nothing in between, as though I were seeing a series of photographs instead of a person.

  “I’m trying to find the phone number,” I said.

  I must have seemed helpless, because his next expression showed the easy superiority of the insider. “Look under Global-Lipkin,” he told me.

  Global-Lipkin. I looked, among “Theatrical Agencies,” and there it was: Global-Lipkin Associates. You could tell immediately it was an important organization; the phone number ended in three zeroes. “Thank you,” I said.

  His face now showed slightly belligerent doubt. He said, “They send for you?”

  “Send for me? No.”

  The face was shut; rejection and disapproval. Shaking his head he said, “Forget it.”

  Apparently he thought I was a struggling actor. Not wanting to go through a long explanation, I just shrugged and said, “Well, I’ll try it,” and went back to the phone booth.