Westlake, Donald E - SSC 02

by Enough (v1. 1)

  "Yes?"

  "I'm Mr. Cartwright's secretary. Would you come with me?"

  I put the paper down and followed her away from the plants and down a long hall with tan walls and brown carpet. We passed offices on both sides of the hall; about half were occupied, and most of the people were on the phone.

  I suddenly realized I'd forgotten the day clerk's photograph. I'd left it behind in the envelope on the table with The Hollywood Reporter.

  Well, that actually was what he'd asked me to do; leave it in the office. Maybe on the way back I should take it out of the envelope.

  The girl stopped, gesturing at a door on the left. "Through here, Mr. Tupikos."

  * * *

  Byron Cartwright was standing in the middle of the room. He had a big heavy chest and brown leathery skin and yellow-white hair brushed straight back over his balding head. He was dressed in different shades of pale blue, and there was a white line of smoke rising from a long cigar in an ashtray on the desk behind him. The room was large and so was everything in it; massive desk, long black sofa, huge windows showing the white sky, with the city of Los Angeles down the slope on the flat land to the south, pastel colors glittering in the haze: pink, peach, coral.

  Byron Cartwright strode toward me, hand outstretched. He was laughing, as though remembering a wonderful time we'd once shared together. Laughter made erosion lines crisscrossing all over his face. "Well, hello, Orry," he said. "Glad to see you." He took my hand, and patted my arm with his other hand, saying, "That's right, isn't it? Orry?"

  "That's right."

  "Everybody calls me By. Come in, sit down."

  I was already in. We sat together on the long sofa. He crossed one leg over the other, half-turning in my direction, his arm stretched out toward me along the sofa back. He had what looked like a class ring on one finger, with a dark red stone. He said, "You know where I got it from? The name 'Orry'? From Dawn." There was something almost religious about the way he said the name. It reminded me of when Jehovah's Witnesses pass out their literature; they always smile and say, "Here's good news!"

  I said, "You told her about me?"

  "Phoned her the first chance I got. She's on location now. You could've knocked her over with a feather, Orry, I could hear it in her voice."

  "It's been a long time," I said. I wasn't sure what this conversation was about, and I was sorry to hear Dawn Devayne was "on location." It sounded as though I might not be able to get to see her.

  "Sixteen years," Byron Cartwright said, and he had that reverential sound in his voice again, with the same happiness around his mouth and eyes. "Your little girl has come a long way, Orry."

  "I guess so."

  "It's just amazing that you never knew. Didn't any reporters ever come around, any magazine writers?"

  "I never knew anything," I told him. "When the fellows told me about it, I didn't believe them. Then they showed me the magazine."

  "Well, it's just astonishing." But he didn't seem to imply that I might be a liar. He kept smiling at me, and shaking his head with his astonishment.

  "It sure was astonishing to me," I said.

  He nodded, letting me know he understood completely. "So the first thing you thought," he said, "you had to see her again, just had to say hello. Am I right?"

  "Not to begin with." It was hard talking when looking directly at him, because his face was so full of smiling eagerness. I leaned forward a little, resting my elbows on my knees, and looked across the room. There was a huge full-color blown-up photograph of a horse taking up most of the opposite wall. I said, looking at the horse, "At first I just thought it was eerie. Of course, nice for Estelle. Or Dawn, I guess. Nice for her, I was glad things worked out for her. But for me it was really strange."

  "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 corrider 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 Devay
ne'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 lions 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."