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 WIP-PER, 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 Captains 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.
* * *
Rod drove us back home. Again Dawn Devayne sat up front with him, while I shared the back seat with Rod's friend, who was called Dennis. In the dark, wearing his black jumpsuit and with his pale-skinned hands and face and wispy yellow hair, Dennis was startling to look at, almost unearthly. And when he touched the back of my hand with a fingertip, his skin was so cold that I automatically flinched away.
He ignored that; maybe people always flinched when he touched them. "I know who you are," he said, and his small head floating there had a smile on it that was very sweet and innocent, as though he were on his way to his First Communion. My God, I thought, youd last six hours on a ship. They'd shove tvliat was left in a canvas bag.
I said, "You do?"
"Orry," he said. "That's not a common name."
"No, I guess it isn't."
"You were in the Navy."
"I still am."
"You were married to Dawn."
"That's right," I said.
He turned his sweet smile and his wide eyes toward the two heads up front. They were talking seriously together now, Dawn Devayne and Rod, about some disagreement they were having with the director, and what they should do about it tomorrow.
Dennis, staring and smiling so hard that it was as though he wanted to burrow into their ears and live inside their brains, said, "It must have been wonderful. To know her at the very beginning of her career. If only I'd met Rod, all those years ago." When he looked at me again, his eyes were luminous. Maybe he was crying. "I keep everything that's ever written about him," he said. "I have dozens of scrapbooks, dozens. That's how I know about you."
"Ah."
"Do you keep scrapbooks?"
"About what?" Then I understood. "Oh, you mean Dawn Devayne."
"You don't? I'll never be blase about Rod. Never."
* * *
In the house Dawn Devayne held my forearm and said, "Orry, I'm bushed. I'm sorry, baby, I can't talk tonight. Come along with me tomorrow, all right? We'll have some time together."
"All right." I was disappointed, but she did look tired. Also, my own body was still more on East Coast time, three hours later; I wouldn't mind sleeping, after such a long day. I don't know why it is, but emotions are exhausting.
"I'm going to swim for five minutes," she said, "and then hit the sack. We get up at seven around here. You ready for that?"
"I will be." And I smiled at her. God knows she wasn't Estelle, but I felt just the same as though I knew her. We were old friends in some other way, entirely different and apart from reality. I suspected that was a form of human contact she had learned to develop, as a means of dealing with all the faces a movie star has to meet. It wasn't the real thing, but that didn't matter. It was a friendly falseness, a fakery that made life smoother.
* * *
I watched her swim. She was naked, and she spent as much time diving as she did swimming, and it was the same nude body that had excited me so much in the magazine pictures, and yet my sexual feelings were thwarted, imprisoned. Maybe it was because I was being a peeping torn and felt ashamed of myself. Or maybe it was because, in accepting the counterfeit friendship of Dawn Devayne, I had lessened the existence of Estelle Anlic just that much more, and I felt guilty about that. Whatever it was, for as long as I looked at her I kept feeling the lust rise, and then become strangled, and then rise, and then become strangled.
I should have stopped looking, of course, but I couldn't. The most I could do was close my eyes from time to time and argue with myself. But I couldn't leave, I had to stay kneeling at a corner of the darkened room, with one edge of the drapes pulled back just far enough to peek out, during the ten minutes that Dawn Devayne spent moving, diving, swimming, the green-white underwater lights and yellow surrounding lanterns glinting and flashing off the wet sheen slickness of her flesh. Drops of water caught in her hair made tiny flashing round rainbows. Her legs were long, her body strong and sleek, a tanned thorough-bred, graceful and self-contained.
When at last she put on a white robe and walked away, I awkwardly stood, padded across the room by the dim light filtering through the drapes, and slid into the cool bed. A few seconds later, as though waiting for me to settle, the pool lights went off.
FOUR
I must have gone to sleep almost at once, though I'd been sure I would stay awake for hours. But the pool lights ceased to shine on the blue-green drapes, darkness and silence drifted down like a collapsing tent—four white numerals floating in the black said 11:42, then 11:43— and I closed my eyes and slept.
To awake in the same darkness, with the white numbers reading 12:12 and some fuss taking place at the edge of my consciousness. I didn't know where I was, I didn't know what that pair of twelves meant, and I couldn't understand the rustling and whooshing going on. In my bewilderment I thought I was assigned to a ship again, and we were in a storm; but the double twelve made no sense.
Then one of the twelves became thirteen, and I remembered where I was, and I understood that someone was at the glass doors leading to the pool, making a racket. Then Dawn Devayne's voice, loud and rather exasperated, said, "Orry?"
"Yes?"
"Open these damn drapes, will you?"
* * *
At the Chinese restaurant there had been a red-jacketed young man who parked the cars. He leaped into every car that came along, and whipped it away with practiced skill, as though he'd been driving that car all his life. At some point he must have had a first car, of course, the car in which he'd learned to drive and with which he'd gotten his first license, but if some customer of the restaurant were to drive up in that car today would the young man recognize it? Would it feel different to him? Since his driving technique was already perfect with any car, what special familiarity would he be able to display? It could not be by skill that he would show his particular relationship with this car; possibly it would be with a breakdown of skill, a tiny reminiscent awkwardness.
Dawn Devayne was wonderful in bed. It's true, she was what men thought she would be, she was agile and quick and lustful and friendly and funny and demanding and responsive and exhausting and exhilarating and plunging and utterly skillful. Her skill produced in me responses of invention I hadn't known I possessed. Fran
Skiburg was right; there are other things to do. I did things with Dawn Devayne that I'd never done before, that it had never occurred to me to do but that now came spontaneously into my mind. For instance, I followed with the tip of my tongue all the creases of her body; the curving borders of her rump, the line at the inside of each elbow, the arcs below her breasts. She laughed and hugged me and gave me a great deal of pleasure, and not once did I think of Estelle Anlic, who was not there.
We'd turned the lights on for our meeting, and when she kissed my shoulder and leaned away to turn them off again the digital clock read 2:02. In the dark she kissed my mouth, bending over me, and whispered, "Welcome back, Orry."
"Mmm." I said nothing more, partly because I was tired and partly because I still hadn't fixed on a name to call her.
She rolled away, adjusting her head on the pillow next to me, settling down with a pleasant sigh, and when next I opened my eyes vague daylight pressed grayly at the drapes and the clock read 6:03, and Dawn Devayne was asleep on her back beside me, tousled but beautiful, one hand, palm up, with curled fingers, on the pillow by her ear.
How did Estelle look asleep? She was becoming harder to remember. We had lived together in off-base quaters, a two-room apartment with a used bed. Sunlight never entered the bedroom, where the sheets and clothing and the very air itself were always just slightly damp. Estelle would curl against me in her sleep, and at times I would awake to find her arm across my chest. A memory returned; Estelle once told me she'd slept with a toy panda in her childhood, and at times she would call me Panda. I hadn't thought of that in years. Panda.
Dawn Devayne's eyes opened. They focused on me at once, and she smiled, saying, "Don't frown, Orry, Dawn is here." Then she looked startled, stared toward the drapes, and cried, "My God, dawn is here! What time is it?"
"Six oh six," I read.
"Oh." She relaxed a little, but said, "I have to get back to my room." Then she looked at me with another of her private smiles and said, "Orry, do you know you're terrific in bed?"
"No," I said. "But you are."
"A workman is as good as his tools," she said, grinning, and reached under the covers for me. "And you've been practicing."
"So have you."
She laughed, pulling me closer, with easy ownership. "Time for a quickie," she said.
* * *
We swam together naked in the pool while the sun came up. ("If Wang does look," she'd answered me, "I'll blind him.") Then at last she climbed out of the pool, wet, glistening gold and orange in the fresh sunlight, saying, "Time to face the new day, baby."
"All right." I followed her up to the blue tiles.
"Orry."
"Yes?"
"Take a look in the closet," she said. "See if there's something that fits you. Wang can have your other stuff cleaned."
I knew she was laughing at me, but in a friendly way.
And the problem of what to call her was solved. "Thanks, Dawn," I said. "I will." "See you at breakfast."
* * *
I wore the gray slacks, but neither the full-sleeved shirt nor the Edwardian jacket seemed right for me, so I found instead a green shirt and a gray pullover sweater. "That's fine," Dawn said, with neutral disinterest.
A limousine took us to Burbank Airport, over the hills and across the stucco floor of the San Fernando Valley, a place that looks like an over-exposed photograph. Dawn asked me questions as we rode together, and I told her about my marriage to Sally Fowler and my years in the Navy, and even a little about Fran Skiburg, though not the part where Fran got so excited about me having once been married to Dawn Devayne. There were spaces of silence as we rode, and I could have asked her my question several times, but there didn't seem to be any way to phrase it. I tried different practice sentences in my head, but none of them were right:
"Why aren't you Estelle Anlic any more, when I'm still Orry Tupikos?" No. That sounded as though I was blaming her for something.
"Who would I be, if I wasn't me?" No. That wasn't even the right question.
"How do you stop being the person you are and become somebody entirely different? What's it like?" No. That was like a panel-show question on television, and anyway not exactly what I was trying for.
Dawn herself gave me a chance to open the subject, when she asked me what I figured to do after I retired from the Navy two years from now, but all I said was,
"I haven't thought about it very much. Maybe 111 just travel around a while, and find some place, and settle down."
"Will you marry Fran?"
"That might be an idea."
At Burbank Airport we got on a private plane with the two actors, Rod and Wally, and the grim-faced man named Frank and the heavyset quiet man called Bobo, all of whom I'd met last night. Listening to conversations during the flight, I finally worked it out that Frank was a photographer whose job it was to take pictures while the movie was being made; the "stills man," he was called. Bobo's job was harder to describe; he seemed to be somewhere between servant and bodyguard, and mostly he just sat and smiled at everybody and looked alert but not very bright.
We flew from Burbank to Stockton, where another limousine took us to the movie location, which was an imitation Louisiana bayou in the San Joaquin River delta. The rest of the movie people, who were staying in nearby motels and not commuting home every night, were already there, and most of the morning was spent with the crew endlessly preparing things—setting up reflectors to catch the sunlight, laying a track for the camera to roll along, moving potted plants this way and that along the water's edge—while Dawn and Rod argued for hours with the director, a fat man with pasty jowls and an amused-angry expression and a habit of constantly taking off and putting back on his old black cardigan sweater. His name was Harvey, and when I was introduced to him he nodded without looking at me and said, "Ted, they really are putting that fucking dock the wrong place," and a short man with a moustache went away to do something about it.
The argument, with Dawn and Rod on one side and Harvey on the other, wasn't like anything I'd ever seen in my life. When the people I've known get into an argument, they either settle it pretty soon or they get violent; the men hit and the women throw things. Dawn and Rod and Harvey almost immediately got to the point where hitting and throwing would start, except it ne
ver happened. Dawn Devayne stood with her feet apart and her hands on her hips, as though leaning into a strong wind, and made firm logical statements of her point of view, salted with insults; for instance, "The motivation throughout the whole story, you cocksucker, is for my character to feel protective toward Jenny." Rod's style, on the other hand, was heavy sarcasm: "Since it's a given that you have the sensitivity of a storm drain, Harvey, why not simply accept the fact that Dawn and I have thought this over very carefully." Harvey, with his angry-amused smile, always looked as though he was either just about to say something horribly insulting or would suddenly start pounding the other two with a piece of wood, and his manner was very insulting-pa-tronizing-hostile, but in fact he merely kept saying things like, "Well, I think we'll simply all be much happier if we do it my way."
Unless there's a fist fight, the person who remains the calmest usually wins most arguments, so I knew from the beginning Harvey would win this one, but it went on for hours anyway, and when it ended (Harvey won, and Dawn and Rod both sulked) they only had time before lunch to shoot one small scene with Dawn and Wally on the riverbank. It was just a scene where Dawn said, "I don't think they'll ever come back, Billy." They shot it eight times, with the camera in three different positions, and then we all had a buffet lunch brought out from Stockton by a catering service.
Dawns dressing room was a small motor home, where she took a nap by herself after lunch, while I walked around looking at everything. Another part of the Dawn-Wally scene was shot, with just Wally visible in the picture, talking to an empty spot in space where Dawn was supposed to be, and then they set up a more complicated scene involving Dawn and Rod and some other people getting into a boat and rowing away. Dawn woke up while the crew was still preparing that one, and she and Rod groused together about Harvey, but when they went out to shoot the scene everybody was polite to everybody else, and then the day was over, and we flew back to Los Angeles.
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