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.
SIX
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 eight, 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 Devayne was just as bad at imitating Dawn Devayne as that whore had been.
I don’t mean to say that finally I saw Estelle again, tucked away inside those layers of Dawn, as I had seen the Hispanic hidden inside the whore. It was Dawn Devayne, the one I had come to know over the last week, who was inside this masquerade.
But now Dawn was introducing me, saying, “Mother, this is a friend of mine called Orry. Orry, this is my mother, Mrs. Hettick, and her husband Leo.”
Leo gave me a firm if bony handclasp, and a nod of his pointed jaw. “Good to know you,” he said.
Dawn’s mother gave me a sharp look. Inside her mismatched vacation clothing and her plump body and her expensive beauty shop hair treatment she was some kind of scrawny bird. She said, “You in pictures?”
“No, I’m not.”
“Seen you someplace.”
“Come along, everybody,” Dawn said, swirling and swinging her arms so all her jewelry jangled, “we’ll sit out by the pool for a while.”
* * *
I didn’t think there was anything wrong with the evening except that Dawn was so tense all the time. Her mother, whom I’d never met before except when she was yelling at me, did a lot of talking about arguments she’d had with different people in stores—“So then I said, so then she said…”—but she wasn’t terrible about it, and she did have an amusing way of phrasing herself sometimes. Leo Hettick, who sat to my right in the formal dining room where we had our formal dinner, was an old Navy man as it turned out, who’d done a full thirty years and got out in 1972, so he and I talked about different tours we’d spent, ships we’d been on, what we thought of different ports and things like that. Meantime, Dawn mostly listened to her mother, pretending the things she said were funnier than they were.
What started the fight was when Mrs. Hettick turned to me, over the parfait and coffee, and said, “You gonna be number five?”
I had to pretend I didn’t know what she was talking about. “I beg pardon?”
“You’re living here, aren’t you?”
“I’m a houseguest,” I said. “For a couple of weeks.”
“I know that kind of houseguest,” she said. “I’ve seen a lot of them.”
Dawn said, “Mother, eat your parfait.” Her tension had suddenly closed down in from all that sprightliness, had become very tightly knotted and quiet.
Her mother ignored her. Watching me with her quick bird eyes she said, “You can’t be worse than any of the others. The first one was a child molester, you know, and the second was a faggot.”
“Stop, Mother,” Dawn said.
“The third was impotent,” her mother said. “He couldn’t get it up if the flag went by. What do you think of that?”
“I don’t think people should talk about other people’s marriages,” I said.
Leo Hettick said, “Edna, let it go now.”
“You stay out of this, Leo,” she told him, and turned back to say to me, “The whole world talks about my daughter’s marriages, why shouldn’t I? If you are number five, you’ll find your picture in newspapers you wouldn’t use to wrap fish.”
“I don’t think I read those papers,” I said.
“No, but
my mother does,” Dawn said. Some deep bitterness had twisted her face into someone I’d never seen before. “My mother has the instincts of a pig,” she said. “Show her some mud and she can’t wait to start rooting in it.”
“Being your mother, I get plenty of mud to root in.”
I said, “I was the first husband, Mrs. Hettick, and I always thought you were the child molester.”
“Oh, Orry,” Dawn said; not angry but sad, as though I’d just made some terrible mistake that we both would suffer for.
Slowly, delightedly, as though receiving an unexpected extra dessert, Mrs. Hettick turned to stare at me, considering me, observing me. Slowly she nodded, slowly she said, “By God, you are, aren’t you? That filthy sailor.”
“You treated your daughter badly, Mrs. Hettick. If you’d ever—”
But she didn’t care what I had to say. Turning back to her daughter, crowing, she said, “You running through the whole lot again? A triumphant return tour! Let me know when you dig up Ken Forrest, will you? At least he’ll be stiff this time.”
Leo Hettick said, “That’s just about enough, Edna.”
His wife glared at him. “What do you know about it?”
“I know when you’re being impolite, Edna,” he said. “If you remember, you made me a promise, some little time ago.”
She sat there, glaring at him with a sullen stare, her body looking more than ever at odds with her clothing; the fuzzy pink sweater, most of all, seeming like some unfunny joke. While the Hetticks looked at one another, deciding who was in charge, I found myself remembering that magazine’s description of me as “a stock figure,” and of course here was another stock figure, the quarrelsome mother of the movie star. I thought of myself as something other than, or more than, a stock figure; was Mrs. Hettick also more than she seemed? What did it mean that she had broken up her daughter’s first marriage, to a sailor, and later had married a sailor herself, and wore clothing dating from the time of her daughter’s marriage? What promise had she made her husband, “some little time ago”? Was he a stock figure? The feisty old man telling stories on the porch of the old folks’ home; all the rest of us were simply characters in one of his reminiscences.
Maybe that was the truth, and he was the hero of the story after all. He was certainly the one who decided how this evening would end; he won the battle of wills with his wife, while Dawn and I both sat out of the picture, having no influence, having no part to play until Edna Hettick’s face finally softened, she gave a quick awkward nod, and she said, “You’re right, Leo. I get carried away.” She even apologized to her daughter, to some extent, turning to Dawn and saying, “I guess I live in the past too much.”
“Well, it’s over and forgotten,” Dawn said, and invented a smile.
* * *
After they left—not late—the smile at last fell like a dead thing from Dawn’s mouth. “I have a headache,” she said, not looking at me. “I don’t feel like swimming tonight, I’m going to bed.”
Her own bed, she meant. I went off to my room, and left the drapes partway open, and didn’t go to sleep till very late, but she never came by.
* * *
It was ten forty-three by the digital clock when I awoke. I put on the white robe and wandered through the house, and found Wang in the kitchen. Nodding at me with his usual polite smile, he said, “Breakfast?”
“Is Dawn up yet?”
“Gone to work.”
I couldn’t understand that. Last night she’d been upset, and of course she’d wanted to be alone for a while. But why ignore me this morning? I had breakfast, and then I settled down with magazines and the television set, and waited for the evening.
* * *
By nine o’clock I understood she wasn’t coming home. It had been a long long day, an empty day, but at least I’d been able to tell myself it would eventually end. Dawn would come home around seven and everything would be the same again. Now it was nine o’clock, she wasn’t here, I knew she wouldn’t be here tonight at all, and I didn’t know what to do.
I thought of all the people I’d met in the last week and a half, Dawn’s friends, and the only ones I might talk to at all were Byron Cartwright or Rod, but even if I did talk to one of them what would I say? “Dawn and her mother had a little argument, and Dawn didn’t sleep with me, and she left alone this morning and hasn’t come back.” Rod, I was certain, would simply advise me to sit tight, wait, do nothing. As for Byron Cartwright, this was a situation tailor-made for him to do the wrong thing. So I talked to no one, I stayed where I was, I watched more television, read more magazines, and I waited for Dawn.
* * *
The next day, driven more by boredom than anything else, I finally explored that other wing of the house. Dawn’s bedroom, directly across the pool from mine, was all done in pinks and golds, with a thick white rug on the floor. Several awkward paintings of white clapboard houses in rural settings were on the walls. They weren’t signed, and I never found out who’d done them.
But a more interesting room was also over there, down a short side corridor. A small cluttered attic-like place, it was filled with luggage and old pieces of furniture and mounds of clothing. Leaning with its face to the wall was the blown-up photograph, unharmed, and atop a ratty bureau in the farthest corner slumped a small brown stuffed animal; a panda? The room had a damp smell—it reminded me of our old apartment in San Diego—and I didn’t like being in there, so I went back once more to the television set.
People on game shows are very emotional.
* * *
Saturday morning I finally admitted to myself that Dawn was staying away only because I was still there. I’d been alone now for three days, except for Wang and the silent anonymous other servants—from time to time the phone would ring, but it was Wang’s right to answer it, and he always assured me afterward it was nothing, nothing, unimportant—and all I’d done was sit around and think, and try to ignore the truth, and by Saturday morning I couldn’t hide it from myself any more.
Dawn would not come back until I had given up and left. She couldn’t throw me out of her house, but she couldn’t face me either, not now or ever again. I belonged in the room with the photograph and the panda and the old clothing, the furniture, the bits and pieces of Estelle Anlic.
I knew the answer now to the question I’d brought out here. In order to create a new person to be, you have to hate the old person enough to kill it. Estelle was Dawn, and Dawn was happy.
She had dealt with my sudden reappearance out of the past by forcing me also to accept Dawn Devayne, to put this new person in Estelle’s place in my memory, so that once more Estelle would cease to exist.
But the mother remained outside control, with her dirty knowledge; in front of her, Estelle was only pretending to be Dawn Devayne. After Wednesday night, Dawn must believe her mother had recreated Estelle also in my mind, turned Dawn back into Estelle in my eyes. No wonder she couldn’t be in my presence any longer.
I put the borrowed clothes away and packed my bag and asked Wang to call a taxi. There wasn’t anybody to say goodbye to.
* * *
Back on the base a week early, I explained part of the situation to the Commander and applied for a transfer, and got it. I told Fran everything—almost everything—and she moved to Norfolk to be near me at my new post (where my history with Dawn Devayne never came to light), and when I retired this year we were married.
I don’t go to Dawn Devayne movies. I also don’t do those things with Fran that I’d first done with Dawn. I don’t have any reason not to, it’s just I don’t feel that way any more. And Fran’s vehemence for new sexual activity was only a temporary thing anyway; she very quickly cooled back down to what she had been before. We get along very well.
Sometimes I have a dream. In the dream, I’m walking on Hollywood Boulevard, on the stars’ names, and I stop at one point, and look down, and the name in the pavement is ESTELLE ANLIC. I just stand there. That’s the dream. Later, when I
wake up, I understand there isn’t any Estelle Anlic any more; she’s buried out there, on Hollywood Boulevard, underneath her name, standing up, squinting in the San Diego sun.
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