“In what way strange, Orry?” This time he sounded like a chaplain, sympathetic and understanding.
“It took me a while to figure that out.” I chanced looking at him again, and he had just a small smile going now, he looked expectant and receptive. It was easier to face him with that expression. I said, “There was a picture of Estelle and me in the magazine, from our wedding day.”
“Got it!” He bounded up from the sofa and hurried over to the desk. I became aware then that most of the knick-knacks and things around on the desk and the tables and everywhere had some connection with golf; small statues of golfers, a gold golf ball on a gold tee, things like that.
Byron Cartwright came back with a small photo in a frame. He handed it to me, smiling, then sat down again and said, “That’s the one, right?”
“Yes,” I said, looking at it. Then I turned my face toward him, not so much to see him as to let him see me. “You can recognize me from that picture.”
“I know that,” he said. “I was noticing that, Orry, you’re remarkable. You haven’t aged a bit. I’d hate to see a picture of me taken sixteen years ago.”
“I’m not talking about getting older,” I said. “I’m talking about getting different. I’m not different.”
“I believe you’re right.” He moved the class-ring hand to pat my knee, then put it back on the sofa. “Dawn told me a little about you, Orry,” he said. “She told me you were the gentlest man she’d ever met. She told me she’s thought about you often, she’s always hoped you found happiness somewhere. I believe you’re still the same good man you were then.”
“The same.” I pointed at Estelle in the photo. “But that isn’t Dawn Devayne.”
“Ha ha,” he said. “I’ll have to go along with you there.”
I looked at him again. “How did that happen? How do people change, or not change?”
“Big questions, Orry.” If a smile can be serious, his smile had turned serious. But still friendly.
“I kept thinking about it,” I said. I almost told him about Fran then, and the changes all around me, but at the last second I decided not to. “So I came out to talk to her about it,” I said. And then, because I suddenly realized this could be a brush-off, that Byron Cartwright might have the job of smiling at me and being friendly and telling me I wasn’t going to be allowed to see Estelle, I added to that, “If she wants to see me.”
“She does, Orry,” he said. “Of course she does.” And he acted surprised. But I could see he was acting surprised.
I said, “You were supposed to find out if I’d changed or not, weren’t you? If I was going to be a pest or something.”
Grinning, he said, “She told me you weren’t stupid, Orry. But you could have been an impostor, you know, maybe some maniac or something. Dawn wants to see you, if you’re still the Orry she used to know.”
“That’s the problem.”
He laughed hugely, as though I’d said a joke. “She’s filming up in Stockton today,” he said, “but she’ll be flying back when they’re done. She wants you to go out to the house, and she’ll meet you there.”
“Her house?”
“Well, naturally.” Chuckling at me, he got to his feet, saying, “You’ll be driven out there now, unless you have other plans.”
“No, nothing.” I also stood.
“I’ll phone down for the car. You came in through the parking area?”
“Yes.”
“Just go straight back down. The car will be by the elevators.”
“Thank you.”
We shook hands again, at his prompting, and this time he held my hand in both of his and gazed at me. The religious feeling was there once more, this time as though he were an evangelist and I a cripple he was determined would walk. Total sincerity filled his eyes and his smile. “She’s my little girl now, too, Orry,” he said.
* * *
The envelope containing the day clerk’s pictures was gone from the table out front.
* * *
“Hello, Harry,” I said. He was holding the door open for me.
He gave me a kind of roguish grin, and waggled a finger at me. “You didn’t tell me you were pals with Dawn Devayne.”
“It was a long story,” I said.
“Good thing I didn’t have anything bad to say, huh?” And I could see that inside his joking he was very upset.
I didn’t know what to answer. I gave him an apologetic smile and got into the car and he shut the door behind me. It wasn’t until we were out on Sunset driving across the line into Beverly Hills, that I decided what to say: “I don’t really know Dawn Devayne,” I told him. “I haven’t seen her for sixteen years. I wasn’t trying to be smart with you or anything.”
“Sixteen years, huh?” That seemed to make things better. Lifting his head to look at me in the rear-view mirror, he said, “Old high school pals?”
I might as well tell him the truth; he’d probably find out sooner or later anyway. “I was married to her.”
The eyes in the rear-view mirror got sharper, and then fuzzier, and then he looked out at Sunset Boulevard and shifted position so I could no longer see his face in the mirror. I don’t suppose he disbelieved me. I guess he didn’t know what attitude to take. He didn’t know what to think about me, or about what I’d told him, or about anything. He didn’t say another word the whole trip.
* * *
The house was in Bel Air, way up in the hills at the very end of a curving steep street with almost no houses on it. What residences I did see were very spread out and expensive-looking, though mostly only one story high, and tucked away in folds and dimples of the slope, above or below the road. Many had flat roofs with white stones sprinkled on top for decoration. Like pound cake with confectioner’s sugar on it.
At the end of the street was a driveway with a No Trespassing sign. Great huge plants surrounded the entrance to the driveway; they reminded me of the plants in Byron Cartwright’s outer office, except that these were real. But the leaves were so big and shiny and green that the real ones looked just as fake as the plastic ones.
The driveway curved upward to the right and then came to a closed chain-link gate. The driver stopped next to a small box mounted on a pipe beside the driveway, and pushed a button on the box. After a minute a metallic voice spoke from the box, and the driver responded, and then the gate swung open and we drove on up, still through this forest of plastic-like plants, until we suddenly came out on a flat place where there was a white stucco house with many windows. The center section was two stories high, with tall white pillars out front, but the wings angling back on both sides were only one story, with flat roofs. These side sections were bent back at acute angles, so that they really did look like wings, so that the taller middle section would be the body of the bird. Either that, or the central part could be thought of as a ship, with the side sections as the wake.
The driver stopped before the main entrance, hopped out, and opened the door for me. “Thanks, Harry,” I said.
Something about me—my eyes, my stance, something—made him soften in his attitude. He nodded as I got out, and almost smiled, and said, “Good luck.”
* * *
The Filipino who let me in said his name was Wang. “Miss Dawn told me you were coming,” he said. “She said you should swim.”
“She did?”
“This way. No luggage? This way.”
The inside was supposed to look like a Spanish mission, or maybe an old ranch house. There were shiny dark wood floors, and rough plaster walls painted white, and exposed dark beams in the ceiling, and many rough chandeliers of wood or brass, some with amber glass.
Wang led me through different rooms into a corridor in the right wing, and down the corridor to a large room at the end with bluish-green drapes hanging ceiling-to-floor on two walls, making a great L of underwater cloth through which light seemed to shimmer. A king-size bed with a blue spread took up very little of the room, which had a lot of throw rugs here
and there on the dark-stained random-plank floor. Wang went to one of the dressers—there were three, two with mirrors—and opened a drawer full of clothing. “Swim suit,” he said. “Change of linen. Everything.” Going to one of two doors in the end wall, he opened it and waved at the jackets and coats and slacks in the closet there. “Everything.” He tugged the sleeve of a white terrycloth robe hanging inside the door. “Very nice robe.”
“Everything’s fine,” I said.
“Here.” He shut the closet door, opened the other one, flicked a light switch. “Bathroom,” he said. “Everything here.”
“Fine. Thank you.”
He wasn’t finished. Back by the entrance, he demonstrated the different light switches, then pointed to a lever sticking horizontally out from the wall, and raised a finger to get my complete attention. “Now this,” he said. He pushed the lever down, and the drapes on the two walls silently slid open, moving from the two ends toward the right angle where the walls met.
Beyond the drapes were walls of sliding glass doors, and beyond the glass doors were two separate views. The view to the right, out the end wall, was of a neat clipped lawn sweeping out to a border of those lush green plants. The view straight ahead, of the section enclosed by the three sides of the house, was of a large oval swimming pool, with big urns and statues around it, and with a small narrow white structure on the fourth side, consisting mostly of doors; a cabana, probably, changing rooms for guests who weren’t staying in rooms like this.
Wang showed me that the drapes opened when the lever was pushed down, and closed when it was pulled up. He demonstrated several times; back and forth ran the drapes, indecisively. Then he said, “You swim.”
“All right.”
“Miss Dawn say she be back, seven o’clock.”
The digital clock on one of the dressers read three fifty-two. “All right,” I said, and Wang grinned at me and left.
* * *
It was a heated pool. When I finally came out and slipped into the terrycloth robe I felt very rested and comfortable. In the room I found a small bottle of white wine, and a glass, and half a dozen different cheeses on a plate under a glass dome. I had some cheese and wine, and then I shaved, and then I looked at the clothing here.
There was a lot of it, but in all different sizes, so I really didn’t have that much to choose from. Still, I found a pair of soft gray slacks, and a kind of ivory shirt with full sleeves, and a black jacket in a sort of Edwardian style, and in the mirror I almost didn’t recognize myself. I looked taller, and thinner, and successful. I picked up the wine glass and stood in front of the mirror and watched myself drink. All right, I thought. Not bad at all.
I went out by the pool and walked around, wearing the clothes and carrying the wine glass. Part of the area was in late afternoon sun and part in shade. I strolled this way and that, admiring my reflections in the glass doors all around, and trying not to smile too much. I wondered if Wang was watching, and what he thought about me. I wondered if there were other servants around the place, and what kind of job it was to be a servant for a famous movie star. Like being assigned to an Admiral, I supposed. I was once on a ship with a guy who’d been an Admiral’s servant for three years, and he said it was terrific duty, the best in the world. He lost his job because he started sleeping with some other officer’s wife. He always claimed he’d kept strictly away from the Admiral’s family and friends, but there was this Lieutenant Commander who lived in the same area near Arlington, Virginia, and whose wife kept trying to suck up to the Admiral’s wife. That’s how Tony met her, one time when she came over and the Admiral’s wife wasn’t there. According to Tony it wasn’t his fault there was trouble; it was just that the Lieutenant Commander’s wife kept making things so obvious, hanging around all the time, honking horns at him, calling him on the phone in the Admiral’s house. “So they kicked me out,” he said. (Tony wasn’t very popular with the guys on the ship, which probably wasn’t fair, but we couldn’t help it. The rest of us had been assigned here as a normal thing, but he’d been sent to this ship as a punishment. If this was punishment duty, what did that say about the rest of us? Nobody particularly wanted to think about that, so Tony was generally avoided.)
Anyway, he did always claim that the job of servant to the brass was the best duty in the world, and I suppose it is. Except for being the brass, of course, which is probably even better duty, except who thinks that way?
After a while I went back into the room, and the digital clock said six twenty-four. I looked at myself in the mirror one more time, and all of a sudden it occurred to me I was looking at Dawn Devayne’s clothes. Not my clothes. She’d come home, she wouldn’t see somebody looking terrific, she’d see somebody wearing her clothes.
No. I changed into my own things, and went back to the living room by the main entrance. There were long low soft sofas there, in brown corduroy. I sat on one, and read more Hollywood Reporters, and pretty soon Wang came and asked me if I wanted a drink.
I did.
* * *
She arrived at twenty after seven, with a bunch of people. It later turned out there were only five, but at first it seemed like hundreds. To me, anyway. I didn’t give them separate existences then; they were just a bunch of laughing, hand-waving, talking people surrounding a beautiful woman named Dawn Devayne.
Dawn Devayne. No question. The clear, bright, level gray eyes. The skin as smooth as a lion’s coat. Those slightly sunken cheeks. (Estelle had round cheeks.) The look of intelligence, sexiness, recklessness. Of course that was Dawn Devayne; I’d seen her in the movies.
I got to my feet, looking through the wide arched doorway from the living room to the entrance hall, where they were clustered around her. That group all bunched there made me realize Dawn Devayne already had her own full life, as much as she wanted. What was I doing here? Did I think I could wedge myself into Dawn Devayne’s life? How? And why?
“Wang!” she yelled. “God damn it, Wang, bring me liquor! I’ve been kissing a faggot all day!” Then she turned, and over someone’s shoulder, past someone else’s laugh, she caught a glimpse of me beyond the doorway, and she put an expression on her face that I remembered from movies; quizzical-amused. She said something, quietly, that I couldn’t hear, but from the way her lips moved I thought it was just my own name: “Orry.” Then she nodded at two things that were being said to her, stepped through the people as though they were grouped statues, and came through the doorway with her hand out for shaking and her mouth widely smiling. “Orry,” she said. “God damn, Orry, if you don’t bring it back.”
Her hand was strong when I took it; I could feel the bones, as though I were holding a small wild bird in my palm. “Hello…” I said, stumbling because I didn’t know what name to use. I couldn’t call her Estelle, and I couldn’t call her Dawn, and I wouldn’t call her Miss Devayne.
“We’ll talk later on,” she said, squeezing my hand, then turned to the others, who had followed her. “This is Orry,” she said. “An old friend of mine.” And said the names of everybody else.
Wang arrived then, and while he took drink orders Dawn Devayne looked at me, frowning slightly at my clothing, saying, “Didn’t Wang give you a room?”
“Yes. Down at the end there.”
Her glance at my clothes was a bit puzzled, but then her expression cleared and she grinned at me, saying, “Yes, Orry. I’m beginning to remember you now.”
“I don’t remember you at all,” I told her. Which was true. So far, Estelle Anlic had made no appearance in this room.
She still didn’t. Dawn Devayne laughed, patting my arm, saying, “We’ll talk later, after this crowd goes.” She turned half away: “Wang! Get over here.” Back to me: “What are you drinking?”
* * *
I tried not to drink too much, not wanting to make a fool of myself. Though Dawn Devayne had spoken about the others as though they would leave at any instant, in fact they stayed on for an hour or more, mostly gossiping about absent
people involved in the movie they were currently making. Then we all got into two cars and drove down to Beverly Hills for dinner at a Chinese restaurant. I rode in the same car with Dawn Devayne, a tan-colored Mercedes Benz with the license plate WIPPER, but I didn’t sit beside her. I rode in back with a grim-faced moustached man named Frank, whose job I didn’t yet know, while Dawn Devayne sat beside the driver, a tall and skinny, leathery-faced, sly-smiling man named Rod, who I remembered as having played the airline pilot in the The Captain’s Pearls, and who was apparently Dawn Devayne’s co-star again this time. The other three people, an actor named Wally and an unidentified man called Bobo and a heavyset girl named June, followed us in Wally’s black Porsche, which also had a special license plate; BIG JR.
Phone-calling had been done before we’d left the house, and four more people joined us at the restaurant; Frank’s plump wife, a tough-looking blonde girl for Wally, a grinning hippie-type guy in blue denim for June, and a willowy young man in a black jumpsuit for Rod. I realized Rod must be the faggot Dawn Devayne had been kissing all day, and the fact of his homosexuality startled me a lot less than what she had shouted in his presence.
The eleven of us filled an alcove at the rear of the restaurant. Eleven people can’t possibly be quiet; we made our presence felt. There was a party atmosphere, and I saw other patrons glancing our way with envy. We were, after all, quite obviously having a wonderful time. Not only that, but at least two of us were famous. But perhaps in Beverly Hills there’s more sophistication about movie fame than in most other places; no one came by the table in search of autographs.
As for the party atmosphere, that was more apparent than real. Dawn Devayne and Rod and Wally and June’s hippie-type friend did a lot of loud talking, mostly anecdotes about the movie world or the record business, to which June’s friend belonged, but the rest of us were no more than audience. We laughed at the right moments, and otherwise sat silent, eating one platter of Chinese food after another. Rounds of drinks kept being ordered, but I let them pile up in front of me—four glasses, eventually—while I drank tea.
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