Enough [A Travesty (novel) and Ordo (novelette)]

One

My name is Ordo Tupikos, and I was born in North Flat, Wyoming on November gth, 1936. My father was part Greek and part Swede and part American Indian, while my mother was half Irish and half Italian. Both had been born in this country, so I am one hundred per cent American.

My father, whose first name was Samos, joined the United States Navy on February 17th, 1942, and he was drowned in the Coral Sea on May 15th, 1943. At that time we were living in West Bowl, Oklahoma, my mother and my two sisters and my brother and I, and on October 12th of that year my mother married a man named Eustace St. Claude, who claimed to be half Spanish and half French but who later turned out to be half Negro and half Mexican and passing for white. After the divorce, my mother moved the family to San Itari, California. She never remarried, but she did maintain a long-term relationship with an air conditioner repairman named Smith, whose background I don’t know.

On July 12th, 1955, I followed my father’s footsteps by joining the United States Navy. I was married for the first time in San Diego, California on March 11th, 1958, when I was twenty-one, to a girl named Estelle Anlic, whose background was German and Welsh and Polish. She put on the wedding license that she was nineteen, having told me the same, but when her mother found us in September of the same year it turned out she was only sixteen. Her mother arranged the annulment, and it looked as though I might be in some trouble, but the Navy transferred me to a ship and that was the end of that.

By the time I left the Navy, on June 17, 1959, my mother and my half brother, Jacques St. Claude, had moved from California to Deep Mine, Pennsylvania, following the air conditioner repairman named Smith, who had moved back east at his father’s death in order to take over the family hardware store. Neither Smith nor Jacques was happy to have me around, and I’d by then lost touch with my two sisters and my brother, so in September of that year I moved to Old Coral, Florida, where I worked as a carpenter (non-union) and where, on January 7th, 1960, I married my second wife, Sally Fowler, who was older than me and employed as a waitress in a diner on the highway toward Fort Lauderdale.

Sally, however, was not happy tied to one man, and so we were divorced on April 12th, 1960, just three months after the marriage. I did some drinking and trouble-making around that time, and lost my job, and a Night Court judge suggested I might be better off if I rejoined the Navy, which I did on November 4th, 1960, five days before my twenty-fourth birthday.

From then on, my life settled down. I became a career man in the Navy, got into no more marriages, and except for my annual Christmas letter from my mother in Pennsylvania I had no more dealings with the past. Until October 7th, 1974, when an event occurred that knocked me right over.

I was assigned at that time to a Naval Repair Station near New London, Connecticut, and my rank was Seaman First Class. It was good weather for October in that latitude, sunny, clean air, not very cold, and some of us took our afternoon break out on the main dock. Norm and Stan and Pat and I were sitting in one group, on some stacks of two by fours, Norm and Stan talking football and Pat reading one of his magazines and me looking out over Long Island Sound. Then Pat looked up from his magazine and said, “Hey, Orry.”

I turned my head and looked at him. My eyes were half-blinded from looking at the sun reflected off the water. I said, “What?”

“You never said you were married to Dawn Devayne.”

Dawn Devayne was a movie star. I’d seen a couple of her movies, and once or twice I saw her talking on television. I said, “Sure.”

He gave me a dirty grin and said, “You shouldn’t of let that go, boy.”

With Pat, you play along with the joke and then go do something else, because otherwise he won’t give you any peace. So I grinned back at him and said, “I guess I shouldn’t,” and then I turned to look some more at the water.

But this time he didn’t quit. Instead, he raised his voice and he said, “Goddamit, Orry, it’s right here in this goddam magazine.”

I faced him again. I said, “Come on, Pat.”

By now, Norm and Stan were listening too, and Norm said, “What’s in the magazine, Pat?”

Pat said, “That Orry was married to Dawn Devayne.”

Norm and Stan both grinned, and Stan said, “Oh, that.”

“Goddamit!” Pat jumped to his feet and stormed over and shoved the magazine in Stan’s face. “You look at that!” he shouted. “You just look at that!”

I saw Stan look, and start to frown, and I couldn’t figure out what was going on. Had they set this up ahead of time? But not Stan; Norm sometimes went along with Pat’s gags, but Stan always brushed them away like mosquitoes. And now Stan frowned at the magazine, and he said, “Son of a bitch.”

“Now, look,” I said, “a joke’s a joke.”

But nobody was acting like it was a joke. Norm was looking over Stan’s shoulder, and he too was frowning. And Stan, shaking his head, looked at me and said, “Why try to hide it, for Christ’s sake? Brother, if I’d been married to Dawn Devayne, I’d tell the world about it.”

“But I wasn’t,” I said. “I swear to God, I never was.”

Norm said, “How many guys you know named Ordo Tupikos?”

“It’s a mistake,” I said. “It’s got to be a mistake.”

Norm seemed to be reading aloud from the magazine. He said, “Married in San Diego, California, in 1958, to a sailor named Ordo Tu—”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “I was married then to, uh, Estelle—”

“Anlic,” Pat said, and nodded his head at me. “Estelle Anlic, right?”

I stared at him. I said, “How’d you know that name?”

“Because that’s Dawn Devayne, dummy! That’s her real name!” Pat grabbed the magazine out of Norm’s hands and rushed over to jab it at me. “Is that you, or isn’t it?”

There was a small black-and-white photo on the page, surrounded by printing. I hadn’t seen that picture in years.

It was Estelle and me, on our wedding day, a picture taken outside City Hall by a street photographer. There I was in my whites — you don’t wear winter blues in San Diego — and there was Estelle. She was wearing her big shapeless black sweater and that tight tight gray skirt down to below her knees that I liked in those days. We were both squinting in the sunlight, and Estelle’s short dark hair was in little curls all around her head.

“That’s not Dawn Devayne,” I said. “Dawn Devayne has blonde hair.”

Pat said something scornful about people dyeing their hair, but I didn’t listen. I’d seen the words under the picture and I was reading them. They said: “Dawn and her first husband, Navy man Ordo Tupikos. Mama had the marriage annulled six months later.”

Norm and Stan had both come over with Pat, and now Stan looked at me and said, “You didn’t even know it.”

“I never saw her again.” I made a kind of movement with the magazine, and I said, “When her mother took her away. The Navy put me on a ship, I never saw her after that.”

Norm said, “Well, I’ll be a son of a bitch.”

Pat laughed, slapping himself on the hip. He said:

“You’re married to a movie star!”

I got to my feet and went between them and walked away along the dock toward the repair sheds. The guys shouted after me, wanting to know where I was going, and Pat yelled, “That’s my magazine!”

“I’ll bring it back,” I said. “I want to borrow it.” I don’t know if they heard.

I went to the Admin Building and into the head and closed myself in a stall and sat on the toilet and started in to read about Dawn Devayne.

The magazine was called True Man, and the picture on the cover was a foreign sports car with a girl lying on the hood. Down the left side of the cover was lettering that read:

Inside the magazine, the article was titled, Is Dawn Devayne The World’s New Sex Queen? by Abbie Lancaster. And under the title in smaller letters was another question, with an answer:

“Where did all the bombshells go? Dawn Devayne is ready to burst on the scene.”

Then the article didn’t start out to be about Dawn Devayne at all, but about all the movie stars that had ever been considered big sex symbols, like Jean Harlow and Marilyn Monroe and Rita Hayworth and Jayne Mansfield. Then it said there hadn’t been any major sex star for a long time, which was probably because of Women’s Lib and television and X-rated movies and looser sexual codes. “You don’t need a fantasy bed-warmer,” the article said, “if you’ve got a real-life bed-warmer of your own.”

Then the article said there were a bunch of movie stars who were all set to take the crown as the next sex queen if the job ever opened up again. It mentioned Raquel Welch and Ann-Margret and Goldie Hawn and Julie Christie. But then it said Dawn Devayne was the likeliest of them all to make it, because she had that wonderful indescribable quality of being all things to all men.

Then there was a biography. It said Dawn Devayne was born Estelle Anlic in Big Meadow, Nebraska on May 19th, 1942, and her father died in the Korean conflict in 1955, and she and her mother moved to Los Angeles in 1956 because her mother had joined a religious cult that was based in Los Angeles. It said her mother was a bus driver in that period, and Dawn Devayne grew up without supervision and hung around with boys a lot. It didn’t exactly say she was the neighborhood lay, but it almost said it.

Then it came to me. It said Dawn Devayne ran away from home a lot of times in her teens, and one time when she was sixteen she ran away to San Diego and married me until her mother took her home again and turned her over to the juvenile authorities, who put her in a kind of reformatory for wayward girls. It called me a “stock figure.” What it said was:

“...a sailor named Ordo Tupikos, a stock figure, the San Diego sailor in every sex star’s childhood.”

I didn’t much care for that, but what I was mostly interested in was where Estelle Anlic became Dawn Devayne, so I kept reading. The article said that after the reformatory Estelle got a job as a carhop in a drive-in restaurant in Los Angeles, and it was there she got her first crack at movie stardom, when an associate producer with Farber International Pictures met her and got her a small role in a B-movie called Tramp Killer. She played a prostitute who was murdered. That was in 1960, when she was eighteen. There was a black-and-white still photo from that movie, showing her cowering back from a man with a meat cleaver, and she still looked like Estelle Anlic then, except her hair was dyed platinum blonde. Her stage name for that movie was Honey White.

Then nothing more happened in the movies for a while, and Estelle went to San Francisco and was a cashier in a movie theater. The article quoted her as saying, “When ‘Tramp Killer’ came through, I sold tickets to myself.” She had other jobs too for the next three years, and then when she was twenty-one, in 1963, a man named Les Moore, who was the director of Tramp Killer, met her at a party in San Francisco and remembered her and told her to come back to Los Angeles and he would give her a big part in the movie he was just starting to work on.

(The article then had a paragraph in parentheses that said Les Moore had become a very important new director in the three years since Tramp Killer, which had only been his second feature, and that the movie he wanted Dawn Devayne to come back to Los Angeles for was Bubbletop, the first of the zany comedies that had made Les Moore the Preston Sturges of the sixties.)

So Dawn Devayne — or Estelle, because her name wasn’t Dawn Devayne yet and she’d quit calling herself Honey White — went back to Los Angeles and Les Moore introduced her to a star-making agent named Byron Cartwright, who signed her to exclusive representation and who changed her name to Dawn Devayne. And Bubbletop went on to become a smash hit and Dawn Devayne got rave notices, and she’d been a movie star ever since, with fifteen movies in the last eleven years, and her price for one movie now was seven hundred fifty thousand dollars. The article said she was one of the very few stars who had never had a box-office flop.

About her private life, the article said she was “between marriages.” I thought that would mean she was engaged to somebody, but so far as I could see from the rest of the article she wasn’t. So I guess that’s just a phrase they use for people like movie stars when they aren’t married.

Anyway, the marriages she was between were numbers four and five. After me in 1958, her next marriage was in 1963, to a movie star named Rick Tandem. Then in 1964 there was a fight in a nightclub where a producer named Josh Weinstein knocked Rick Tandem down and Rick Tandem later sued for divorce and said John Weinstein had come between him and Dawn Devayne. The article didn’t quite say that Rick Tandem was in reality queer, but it got the point across.

Then marriage number three, in 1966, was to another movie actor, Ken Forrest, who was an older man, a contemporary of Gable and Tracy who was still making movies but wasn’t quite the power he used to be. That marriage ended in 1968 when Forrest shot himself on a yacht off the coast of Spain; Dawn Devayne was in London making a picture when it happened.

And the fourth marriage, in 1970, was to a Dallas businessman with interests in computers and airlines and oil. His name was Ralph Chucklin, and that marriage had ended with a quiet divorce in 1973. “Dawn is dating now,” the article said, “but no one in particular tops her list. I’m still looking for the right guy,’ she says.”

Then the article got to talking about her age, and the person who wrote the article raised the question as to whether a thirty-two year old woman was young enough to still make it as the next Sex Goddess of the World. “Dawn is more beautiful every year,” the article said, and then it went back to all the business about Women’s Lib and television and X-rated movies and looser sexual codes, and it said the next Superstar Sex Symbol wasn’t likely to be another girl-child type like the ones before, but would be more of an adult woman, who could bring brains and experience to sex. “Far from the dumb blondes of yesteryear,” the article said, “Dawn Devayne is a bright blonde, who combines with good old-fashioned lust the more modern feminine virtues of intelligence and independence. A Jane Fonda who doesn’t nag.” And the article finished by saying maybe the changed social conditions meant there wouldn’t be any more Blonde Bombshells or Sexpot Movie Queens, which would make the world a colder and a drabber place, but the writer sure hoped there would be more, and the best bet right now to bring sex back to the world was Dawn Devayne.

There were photographs with the article, full page color pictures of Dawn Devayne with her clothes off, and when I finished reading I sat there on the toilet a while longer looking at the pictures and trying to remember Estelle. Nothing. The face, the eyes, the smile, all different. The stomach and legs were different. Even the nipples didn’t remind me of Estelle Anlic’s nipples.

There’s something wrong, I thought. I wondered if maybe this Dawn Devayne woman had a criminal record or was wanted for murder somewhere or something like that, and she’d just paid Estelle money to borrow her life story. Was that possible?

It sure didn’t seem possible that this sexy woman was Estelle. I know it was sixteen years, but how much can one person change? I sat studying the pictures until I noticed I was beginning to get an erection, so I left the head and went back to work.

All I could think about, the next three days, was Dawn Devayne. I was once married to her, married to a sexy movie star. Me. I just couldn’t get used to the idea.

And the other guys didn’t help. Norm and Stan and Pat spread the word, and pretty soon all the guys were coming around, even some of the younger officers, talking and grinning and winking and all that. Nobody came right out with the direct question, but what they really wanted to know was what it was like to be in bed with Dawn Devayne.

And what could I tell them? I didn’t know what it was like to be in bed with Dawn Devayne. I knew what it was like to be in bed with Estelle Anlic — or anyway I had a kind of vague memory, after sixteen years — but that wasn’t what they wanted to know, and anyway I didn’t feel like telling them. She was a teenage girl, sixteen (though she told me nineteen), and I was twenty-one, and neither of us was exactly a genius about sex, but we had fun. I remember she had very very soft arms and she liked to have her arms around my neck, and she laughed with her mouth wide open, and she always drowned her french fries in so much ketchup I used to tell her I had to eat them with ice tongs and one time in bed she finally admitted she didn’t know what ice tongs were and she cried because she was sure she was stupid, and we had sex that time in order for me to tell her (a) she wasn’t stupid, and (b) I loved her anyway even though she was stupid, and that’s the one time in particular I have any memory of at all, which is mostly because that was the time I learned I could control myself and hold back ejaculation almost as long as I wanted, almost forever. We were both learning about things then, we were both just puppies rolling in a basket of wool, but the guys didn’t want to hear anything like that, it would just depress them. And I didn’t want to tell them about it either. Their favorite sex story anyway was one that Pat used to tell about being in bed with a girl with a candle in her ass. That’s what they really wanted me to tell them, that Dawn Devayne had a candle in her ass.

But even though I couldn’t tell them any stories that would satisfy them, they kept coming around, they kept on and on with the same subject, they couldn’t seem to let it go. It fascinated them, and every time they saw me they got reminded and fascinated all over again. In fact, a couple of the guys started calling me “Devayne,” as though that was going to be my new nickname, until one time I picked up a wrench and patted it into my other palm and went over to the guy and said:

“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 girl friends 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 girl friend is a model who gets hired by Dawn Devayne for a commercial for the captains 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.

A receptionist answered. When I asked for Byron Cartwright she put me through to a secretary, who said, “Who’s calling, please?”

“Ordo Tupikos.”

“And the subject, Mr. Tupikos?”

“Dawn Devayne.”

“One moment, please.”

I waited a while, and then she came back and said, “Mr. Tupikos, could you tell me who you’re with?”

“With? I’m sorry, I...”

“Which firm.”

“Oh. I’m not with any firm, I’m in the Navy.”

“In the Navy.”

“Yes. I used to be—” But she’d gone away again.

Another wait, and then she was back. “Mr. Tupikos, is this official Navy business?”

“No,” I said. “I used to be married to Dawn Devayne.”

There was a little silence, and then she said, “Married?”

“Yes. In San Diego.”

“One moment, please.”

This was a longer wait, and when she came back she said, “Mr. Tupikos, is this a legal matter?”

“No, I just want to see Estelle again.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Dawn Devayne. She was named Estelle when I married her.”

A male voice suddenly said, “All right, Donna, I’ll take it.”

“Yes, sir,” and there was a click.

The male voice said, “You’re Ordo Tupikos?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. It wasn’t sensible to call him “sir,” but the girl had just done it, and in any event he had an authoritative officer-like sound in his voice, and it just slipped out.

He said, “I suppose you can prove your identity.”

That surprised me. “Of course,” I said. “I still look the same.” I still look the same.

“And what is it you want?”

“To see Estelle. Dawn. Miss Devayne.”

“You told my secretary you were with the Navy.”

“I’m in the Navy.”

“You’re due to retire pretty soon, aren’t you?”

“Two years,” I said.

“Let me be blunt, Mr. Tupikos,” he said. “Are you looking for money?”

“Money?” I couldn’t think what he was talking about. (Later, going over it in my mind, I realized what he’d been afraid of, but just at that moment I was bewildered.) “Money for what?” I asked him.

He didn’t answer. Instead, he said, “Then why show up like this, after all these years?”

“There was something in a magazine. A friend showed it to me.”

“Yes?”

“Well, it surprised me, that’s all.”

“What surprised you?”

“About Estelle turning into Dawn Devayne.”

There was a very short silence. But it wasn’t an ordinary empty silence, it was a kind of slammed-shut silence, a startled silence. Then he said, “You mean you didn’t know? You just found out?”

“It was some surprise,” I said.

He gave out with a long loud laugh, turning his head away from the phone so it wouldn’t hurt my ears. But I could still hear it. Then he said, “God damn, Mr, Tupikos, that’s a new one.”

I had nothing to say to that.

“All right,” he said. “Where are you?”

I told him the name of the motel.

“I’ll get back to you,” he said. “Some time today.”

“Thank you,” I said.

The phone booth was out in front of the motel, and I had to go back through the office to get to the inner courtyard and my room. When I walked into the office the day clerk motioned to me. “Come here.” His expression now portrayed pride.

I went over and he handed me a large black-and-white photograph; what they call a glossy. The blacks in it were very dark and solid, which made it a little bit hard to make out what was going on, but the picture seemed to have been taken in a parking garage. Two people were in the foreground. I couldn’t swear to it, but it looked as though Ernest Borgnine was strangling the day clerk.

“Whadaya think of that?”

I didn’t know what I thought of it. But when people hand you a picture — their wife, their girl friend, their children, their dog, their new house, their boat, their garden — what you say is very nice. I handed the picture back. “Very nice,” I said.

Everybody knows about the movie stars’ names being embedded in the sidewalks of Hollywood Boulevard, but it’s always strange when you see it. There are the squares of pavement, and on every square is a gold outline of a five-pointed star, and in every other star there is the name of a movie star. Every year, fewer of those names mean anything. The idea of the names is immortality, but what they’re really about is death.

I took a walk for a while after talking to Byron Cartwright, and I walked along two or three blocks of Hollywood Boulevard with some family group behind me that had a child with a loud piercing voice, and the child kept wanting to know who people were:

“Daddy, who’s Vilma Banky?

“Daddy, who’s Charles Farrell?”

“Daddy, who’s Dolores Costello?”

“Daddy, who’s Conrad Nagel?”

The father’s answers were never loud enough for me to hear, but what could he have said? “She was a movie star.” “He used to be in silent movies, a long time ago.” Or maybe, “I don’t know. Emil Jannings? I don’t know.”

I didn’t look back, so I have no idea what the family looked like, or even if the child was a boy or a girl, but pretty soon I hated listening to them, so I turned in at a fast-food place to have a hamburger and onion rings and a Coke. I sat at one of the red formica tables to eat, and at the table across the plastic partition from me was another family — father, mother, son, daughter — and the daughter was saying, “Why did they put those names there anyway?”

“Just to be nice,” the mother said.

The son said, “Because they’re buried there.”

The daughter stared at him, not knowing if that was true or not. Then she said, “They are not!”

“Sure they are,” the son said. “They bury them standing up, so they can all fit. And they all wear the clothes from their most famous movie. Like their cowboy hats and the long gowns and their Civil War Army uniforms.”

The father, chuckling, said, “And their white telephones?”

The son gave his father a hesitant smile and a head-shake, saying, “I don’t get it.”

“That’s okay,” the father said. He grinned and ruffled the son’s hair, but I could see he was irritated. He was older, so his memory stretched back farther, so his jokes wouldn’t always mean anything to his son, whose memories had started later — and would probably end later. The son had reminded his father that the father would some day die.

After I ate I didn’t feel like walking on the stars’ names any more. I went up to the next parallel street, which is called Yucca, and took that over to Highland Avenue and then on back to the motel.

When I walked into the office the day clerk said, “Got a message for you.” His expression was tough and secretive, like a character in a spy movie. The hotel clerk in a spy movie who is really a part of the spy organization; this is the point where he tells the hero that the Gestapo is in his room.

“A message?”

“From GLA,” he said. His face flipped to the next expression, like a digital clock moving on to the next number. This one showed make-believe comic envy used to hide real envy. I wondered if he really did feel envy or if he was just practicing being an actor by pretending to show envy. No; pretending to hide envy. Maybe he himself was actually feeling envy but was hiding it by pretending to be someone who was showing envy by trying to hide it. That was too confusing to think about; it made me dizzy, like looking too long off the fantail of a ship at the swirls of water directly beneath the stern. Layers and layers of twisting white foam with bottomless black underneath; but then it all organizes itself into swinging straight white lines of wake.

I said, “What did they want?”

“They’ll send a car for you at three o’clock.” Flip; friendliness, conspiracy. “You could do me a favor.”

“I could?”

From under the counter he took out a tan manila envelope, then halfway withdrew from it another glossy photograph; I couldn’t see the subject. “This,” he said, and slid the photo back into the envelope. Twisting the red string on the two little round closure tabs of the envelope, he said, “Just leave it in the office, you know? Just leave it some place where they can see it.”

“Oh,” I said. “All right.” And I took the envelope.

The car was a black Cadillac limousine with a uniformed chauffeur who held the door for me and called me, “sir.” It didn’t seem to matter to him that he was picking me up at a kind of seedy motel, or that I was wearing clothes that were somewhat shabby and out of date. (I wear civvies so seldom that I almost never pay any attention to what clothing I own or what condition it’s in.)

I had never been in a limousine before, with or without a chauffeur. In fact, this was the first time in my life I’d ever ridden in a Cadillac. I spent the first few blocks just looking at the interior of the car, noticing that I had my own radio in the back, and power windows, and that there were separate air conditioner controls on both sides of the rear seat.

There were grooves for a glass partition between front and rear, but the glass was lowered out of sight, and when we’d driven down Highland and made a right turn onto Hollywood Boulevard, going past Graumans Chinese theater, the chauffeur suddenly said, “You a writer?”

“What? Me? No.”

“Oh,” he said. “I always try to figure out what people are. They’re fascinating, you know? People.”

“I’m in the Navy,” I said.

“That right? I did two in the Army myself.”

“Ah,” I said.

He nodded. He’d look at me in the rearview mirror from time to time while he was talking. He said, “Then I pushed a hack around Houston for six years, but I figured the hell with it, you know? Who needs it. Come out here in sixty-seven, never went back.”

“I guess it’s all right out here.”

“No place like it,” he said.

I didn’t have an answer for that, and he didn’t seem to have anything else to say, so I opened the day clerk’s envelope and looked at the photograph he wanted me to leave in Byron Cartwright’s office.

Actually it was four photographs on one eight-by-ten sheet of glossy paper, showing the day clerk in four poses, with different clothing in each one. Four different characters, I guess. In the upper left, he was wearing a light plaid jacket and a pale turtleneck sweater and a medium-shade cloth cap, and he had a cigarette in the corner of his mouth and he was squinting; looking mean and tough. In the upper right he was wearing a tuxedo, and he had a big smile on his face. His head was turned toward the camera, but his body was half-twisted away and he was holding a top hat out to the side, as though he were singing a song and was about to march offstage at the end of the music. In the bottom left, he was wearing a cowboy hat and a bandana around his neck and a plaid shirt, and he had a kind of comical-foolish expression on his face, as though somebody had just made a joke and he wasn’t sure he’d understood the point. And in the bottom right he was wearing a dark suit and white shirt and pale tie, and he was leaning forward a little and smiling in a friendly way directly at the camera. I guess that was supposed to be him in his natural state, but it actually looked less like him than any of the others.

The whole back of the photograph was filled with printing. His name was at the top (MAURY DEE) and underneath was a listing of all the movies he’d been in and all the play productions, with the character he performed in each one. Down at the bottom were three or four quotes from critics about how good he was.

The driver turned left on Fairfax and went down past Selma to Sunset Boulevard, and then turned right. Then he said, “The best thing about this job is the people.”

“Is that right?” I put Maury Dee’s photograph away and twisted the red string around the closure tabs.

“And I’ll tell you something,” said the driver. “The bigger they are, the nicer they are. You’d be amazed, some of the people been sitting right where you are right now.”

“I bet.”

“But you know who’s the best of them all? I mean, just a nice regular person, not stuck up at all.”

“Who’s that?”

“Dawn Devayne,” he said. “She’s always got a good word for you, she’ll take a joke, she’s just terrific.”

“That’s nice,” I said.

“Terrific.” He shook his head. “Always remembers your name. ‘Hi, Harry,’ she says. ‘How you doing?’ Just a terrific person.”

“I guess she must be all right,” I said.

“Terrific,” he said, and turned the car in at one of the taller buildings just before the Beverly Hills line. We drove down into the basement parking garage and the driver stopped next to a bank of elevators. He hopped out and opened my door for me, and when I got out he said, “Eleventh floor.”

“Thanks, Harry,” I said.

Three

All you could see was artificial plants. I stepped out of the elevator and there were great pots all over the place on the green rug, all with plastic plants in them with huge dark-green leaves. Beyond them, quite a ways back, expanses of plate glass showed the white sky.

I moved forward, not sure what to do next, and then I saw the receptionist’s desk. With the white sky behind her, she was very hard to find. I went over to her and said, “Excuse me.”

She’d been writing something on a long form, and now she looked up with a friendly smile and said, “May I help you?”

“I’m supposed to see Byron Cartwright.”

“Name, please?”

“Ordo Tupikos.”

She used her telephone, sounding very chipper, and then she smiled at me again, saying, “Hell be out in a minute. If you’ll have a seat?”

There were easy chairs in among the plastic plants. I thanked her and went off to sit down, picking up a newspaper from a white formica table beside the chair. It was called The Hollywood Reporter, and it was magazine size and printed on glossy paper. I read all the short items about people signing to do this or that, and I read a nightclub review of somebody whose name I didn’t recognize, and then a girl came along and said, “Mr. Tupikos?”

“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 rearview 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 rearview 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 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 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.”

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.

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, you’d last six hours on a ship. They’d shove what 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 thoroughbred, 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 quarters, 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 overexposed 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 I’ll 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 never 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-patronizing-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.

There was a huge gift-wrapped package in the front hall at Dawn’s house. It was about the size and shape of a door, all wrapped up in colorful paper and miles of ribbon and a big red bow, and a card hung from the bow reading, “Love to Dawn and Orry, from By.”

Dawn frowned and said, “What’s that asshole up to now?”

Rod and Wally and Frank and Bobo had come in with us, and Wally said, “It’s an aircraft carrier. By gave you an aircraft carrier.”

“For God’s sake, open it,” Rod said.

“I’m afraid to,” Dawn told him. She tried to make that sound like a joke, but I could see she really was afraid to open it. I later learned that Byron Cartwright’s sentimentalism was famous for causing embarrassment, but I don’t think even Dawn suspected what he had chosen to send us. I know I didn’t.

Finally it was Wally and Rod who pulled off the bow and the ribbon and the paper, and inside was the wedding day picture, Estelle and me in San Diego, squinting in the sunlight. The picture had been blown up to be slightly bigger than life, and it was in a wooden frame with a piece of glass in front of it, and here were these two stiff uncomfortable figures in grainy gray, staring out of some horrible painful prison of the past. Usually this picture was perfectly ordinary, neither wonderful nor awful, but blown up to life size — larger than life — it became a kind of cruelty.

Everybody stared at it. Wally said, “What the hell is that?”

They hadn’t recognized that earlier me. Dawn wouldn’t have been recognizable anyway, of course, but expanding the original photo had strained the rough quality of the negative beyond its capacity, so that I myself might not have guessed at first the white blob face was mine.

After the first shock of staring at the picture, I turned to look at Dawn, to see her with a face of stone, glaring — with hatred? rage? revulsion? bitterness? resentment? — at her own image in the photograph. She turned her head, flashed me a look of irritation that I’d been watching her, and without a word strode out of the room.

Rod, with the eager look of the born gossip, said, “I don’t know what’s going on here, but it looks to me like By’s done it again.”

Wally was still frowning at the picture. “What is that?” he said. “Who are those people?”

“Orry? Isn’t that you?”

It was the voice of Frank, the stills man, the professional photographer, who had backed away from the giant picture, across the hall and through the doorway into the next room, until he was distant enough to see it clear. Head cocked to one side, eyes half closed, he was standing against the back of a sofa in there, studying the picture.

At first I didn’t say anything. Wally turned to frown at Frank, then at me, then at the picture, then at me again. “You? That’s you?”

Rod and Bobo were moving toward Frank, squinting over their shoulders at the picture as they went. I said to Wally, “Yes. It’s me.”

“That girl is familiar,” Frank said.

I felt obscurely that Dawn would want to be protected, though I didn’t see how it was going to be possible. “That’s my wife,” I said. “Or, she was my wife. That was our wedding day.”

Rod and Bobo were now standing next to Frank, gazing at the picture, and Wally was moving back to join them. I was like a stage performer, and they were my audience, and the picture was used in my act. Frank said, “I know that girl. What’s her name?”

Rod suddenly said, “Wait a minute, I know that picture! That’s Dawn!”

“Yes,” I said, but before I could say anything else — explain, apologize, defend — Wang came in to say, “Miss Dawn say, everybody out.”

Rod, nodding at the picture and ignoring Wang, said thoughtfully, “Byron Cartwright, the avalanche that walks like a man.”

Wang said to me, “You, too. Miss Dawn say, go away, eat dinner, come back.”

“All right,” I said.

We were joined by Frank’s wife and Wally’s girl and Rod’s friend Dennis in an Italian restaurant that looked like something from a silent movie about Biblical times. Bronze-colored plaster statues, lots of columns, heavily-framed paintings of Roman emperors on the walls. The food was covered with too much tomato sauce.

My story was amazing but short, and when I was done Rod and Wally told stories for the rest of dinner about other disastrous gestures made by Byron Cartwright in the past. He was everyone’s warmhearted uncle, except that his instincts were constantly betrayed by his inability to think through the effect of his activities. As a businessman he was considered one of the best (toughest, coldest, coolest) in his very tough business, but away from the office his affection toward his clients and other acquaintances led him to one horrible misjudgment after another.

(These acts of Byron Cartwright’s were not simple goofs like sending flowers to a hay-fever victim. As with the picture to Dawn and me, each story took about five minutes to explain the characters and relationships involved, the nuances that turned Byron Cartwright’s offerings into Molotov cocktails, and while some of the errors were funny, most of them produced only groans among the listeners at the table. It was Wally who finally summed it up, saying, “Most mutations don’t work, and By is simply one more proof of it. You can’t have an agent with a heart of gold, it isn’t a viable combination.”)

After dinner, Rod drove me back to Dawn’s house, with Dennis a silent worshipper vibrating behind us on the back seat. As we neared the house, Rod said, “May I give you a piece of advice, Orry?” Sure.

“You haven’t known Dawn for a long time, and she’s probably changed a lot.”

“Yes, she has.”

“I don’t think she’ll ever mention that picture again,” Rod told me, “and I don’t think you ought to bring it up either.”

“You may be right.”

“If it’s still there, have Wang get rid of it. If you want it yourself, tell Wang to ship it off to your home. But don’t show it to Dawn, don’t ask her about it. Just deal with Wang.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I agree with you.”

We reached the house, and Rod stopped in front of the door. “Good luck,” he said.

I didn’t immediately leave the car, I said, “Do you mind if I ask you a question?”

“Go ahead.”

“You saw how different Dawn used to be, when she was Estelle Anlic. And if you remember the picture, I haven’t changed very much.”

“Hardly at all. The Navy must agree with you.”

“The reason I came out here,” I said, “was because I had a question in my mind about that. I wanted to know how a person could change so completely into somebody different. Somebody with different looks, a different personality, a whole different kind of life. I mean, when I married Estelle, she wasn’t anybody who could even hope to be a movie star.”

Rod seemed both amused and in some hidden way upset by the question. He said, “You want to know how she did it?”

“I suppose. Not exactly. Something like that.”

“She decided to,” he said. He had a crinkly, masculine, self-confident smile, but at the same time he had another expression going behind the smile, an expression that told me the smile was a fake, a mask. The inner expression was also smiling, but it was more intelligent, and more truly friendly. He said, using that inner expression, “Why did you ask me that question, Orry?”

It was, of course, because I believed he’d somehow done the same sort of thing as Dawn, that somewhere there existed photos of him in some unimaginable other person. But it would sound like an insult to say that, and I said nothing, floundering around for an alternate answer.

He nodded. “You’re right,” he said.

“Then how?” I asked him. “She decided to be somebody else. How is it possible to do that?”

He shrugged and grinned, friendly and amiable but not really able to describe colors to a blind man. “You find somebody you’d rather be,” he said. “It really is as simple as that, Orry.”

I knew he was wrong. There was truth in the idea that people like Dawn and himself had found somebody else they’d rather be, but it surely couldn’t be as simple as that. Everybody has fantasies, but not everybody throws away the real self and lives in the fantasy.

Still, it would have been both rude and useless to press him, so I said, “Thank you,” and got out of the car.

“Hold the door,” he said. Then he patted the front seat, as though calling a dog, and said, “Dennis, come on up.” And Dennis, a nervous high-bred afghan hound in his fawn-colored jumpsuit, clambered gratefully into the front seat.

I was about to shut the door when Rod leaned over Dennis and said, “One more little piece of advice, Orry.”

“Yes?”

“Don’t ask Dawn that question.”

“Oh,” I said.

The picture was gone from the front hallway. My luggage from the motel was in my room, and Dawn was naked in the pool, her slender long intricate body golden-green in the underwater lights. I opened the drapes and stepped out to the tepid California air and said, “Shall I join you in there?”

“Hey, baby,” she called, treading water, grinning at me, sunny and untroubled. “Come on in, the water’s fine.”

Five

The rest of the days that week were all the same, except that no more unfortunate presents came from Byron Cartwright. Dawn and I got up early every morning, flew to Stockton, she worked in the movie and napped — alone — after lunch, we flew back to Los Angeles, and then there’d be dinner in a restaurant with several other people, a shifting cast that usually included Rod and Wally and Dennis, plus others, sometimes strangers and sometimes known to me. Then Dawn and I would go back to the house and swim and go to bed and play with one another’s bodies until we slept. The sex was wonderful, and endlessly various, but afterwards it never seemed real. I would look at Dawn during the daytime, and I would remember this or that specific thing we had done together the night before, and it wasn’t as though I’d actually done it with her. It was more as though I’d dreamed it, or fantasized it.

Maybe that was partly because we always slept in the guest room, in what had become my bed. Dawn never took me to her own bed, or even brought me into her private bedroom. Until the second week I was there, I was never actually in that wing of the house.

On the Thursday evening we stayed longer in Stockton, to see the film shot the day before. Movie companies when they’re filming generally show the previous day’s work every evening, which some people call the dailies and some call the rushes. Its purpose is to give the director and performers and other people involved a chance to see how they’re doing, and also so the film editor and director can begin discussing the way the pieces of film will be organized together to make the movie. Dawn normally stayed away from the rushes, but on Thursday evening they would be viewing the sequence that she and Rod had argued about with Harvey, so the whole group of us stayed and watched.

I suppose movie people get so they can tell from the rushes whether things are working right or not, but when I look at half a dozen strips of film each recording the same action sequence or lines of dialogue, over and over and over, all I get is bored. Nevertheless, I could sense when the lights came up in the screening room that almost everybody now believed Harvey to have been right all along. Rod wouldn’t come right out and admit it, but it was clear his objections were no longer important to him. Dawn, on the other hand, had some sort of emotional commitment to her position, and all she had to say afterwards was, grumpily, “Well, I suppose the picture will survive, despite that.” And off she stomped, me in her wake.

Still, by the time we reached the plane to go back to Los Angeles, she was in a cheerful mood again. Bad temper never lasted long with her.

Friday afternoon there were technical problems of some sort, delaying the shooting, so after Dawn’s nap she and I sat in the parlor of her dressing room and talked together about the past. It was one of those conversations full of sentences beginning, “Do you remember when—?” We talked about troubles we’d had with the landlord, about the time we snuck into a movie theater when we didn’t have any money, things like that. She didn’t seem to have any particular attitude about these memories, neither nostalgia nor revulsion; they were simply interesting anecdotes out of our shared history.

But they led me finally, despite Rod’s advice, to ask her the question that had brought me out here. “You’ve changed an awful lot since then,” I said. “How did you do that?”

She frowned at me, apparently not understanding. “What do you mean, changed?”

“Changed. Different. Somebody else.”

“I’m not somebody else,” she said. Now she looked and sounded annoyed, as though somebody were pestering her with stupidities. “I dyed my hair, that’s all. I learned about makeup, I learned how to dress.”

“Personality,” I said. “Emotions. Everything about you is different.”

“It is not.” Her annoyance was making her almost petulant. “People change when they grow older, that’s all. It’s been sixteen years, Orry.”

“I’m still the same.”

“Yes, you are,” she said. “You still plod along with those flat feet of yours.”

“I suppose I do,” I said.

Abruptly she shifted, shaking her head and softening her expression and saying, “I’m sorry, Orry, you didn’t deserve that. You’re right, you are the same man. You were wonderful then, and you’re wonderful now.”

“I think the flat feet was more like the truth,” I said, because that is what I think.

But she shook her head, saying, “No. I loved living with you, Orry, I loved being your wife. That was the first time in my life I ever relaxed. You know what you taught me?”

“Taught you?”

“That I didn’t have to just run all the time, in a panic. That I could slow down, and look around.”

I wanted to ask her if that was when she realized she could become somebody else, but I understood by now that Rod had been right, it wasn’t something I could ask her directly, so I changed the subject. But I remembered what the magazine article had said about me being a “stock figure, the San Diego sailor in every sex star’s childhood,” and I wondered if what Dawn had just said was really true, if being with me had in some way started the change that turned Estelle Anlic into Dawn Devayne. Plodding with my flat feet? Most of the Estelle Anlics in the world marry flat-footed Orry Tupikoses; what had been different with us?

Saturday we drove to Palm Springs, to the home of a famous comedian named Lennie Hacker, for a party. There were about two hundred people there, many of them famous, and maybe thirty of them staying on as house guests for the rest of the weekend. Lennie Hacker had his own movie theater on his land, and we all watched one of his movies plus some silent comedies. That was in the afternoon. In the evening, different guests who were professional entertainers performed, singing, dancing, playing the piano, telling jokes. It was too big a party for anybody to notice one face more or less, so I didn’t have to explain myself to anybody. (There was only one bad moment, at the beginning, when I was introduced to the host. Lennie Hacker was a short round man with sparkly black eyes and a built-in grin on his face, and when he shook my hand he said, “Hiya, sailor.” I thought that was meant to be some kind of insult joke, but later on I heard him say the same thing to different other people, so it was just a way he had of saying hello.)

I’d never been to a party like this — a famous composer sat at the piano, singing his own songs and interrupting himself to make put-down gags about the lyrics — and I just walked around with a drink in my hand, looking at everything, enjoying being a spectator. (I was wearing the Edwardian jacket and the full-sleeved shirt, no longer self-conscious about my appearance.) Dawn and I crossed one another’s paths from time to time, but we didn’t stay together; she had lots of friends she wanted to spend time with.

As for me, I had very few conversations. Rod and Dennis were there, and I had a few words with Rod about the silent comedies we’d seen, and I also made small talk with a few other people I’d met at different restaurant dinners over the last week. At one point, when I was standing in a corner watching two television comedians trade insult jokes in front of an audience of twenty or thirty other guests, Lennie Hacker came over to me and said, “Listen.”

“Yes?”

“You look like an intelligent fella,” he said. He looked out at the crowd of his guests, and made a sweeping gesture to include them all. “Tell me,” he said, “who the fuck are all these people?”

“Movie stars,” I said.

“Yeah?” He studied them, skeptical but interested. “They look like a bunch a bums,” he said. “See ya.” And he drifted away.

A little later I ran into Byron Cartwright, who beamed at me and took my hand in both of his and said, “How are you, Orry?”

“Fine,” I said.

“Listen, Orry,” he said. He kept my hand in one of his, and put his other arm around my shoulders, turning me a bit away from the room and the party, making ours a private conversation. “I’ve wanted to have a good talk with you,” he said.

“You have?”

“I’m sorry about that picture.” He looked at me with a pained smile. “The way Dawn talked about you, I thought she’d like that reminder.”

I didn’t know what to say. “I guess so,” I told him.

“But things are good between you two, aren’t they? No trouble there.”

“No, we’re fine.”

“That’s good, that’s good.” He thumped my back, and finally released my hand. “You two look good together, Orry,” he said. “You did way back then, and you do now.”

“Well, she looks good.”

“The two of you,” he insisted. “Together. When’s your leave up, Orry? When do you have to go back to the Navy?”

“In two weeks.”

“Do you want me to fix it?”

“Fix it?”

“We could get you an early release,” he said. “Get you out of the Navy.”

“I’ve only got two years before I collect my pension.”

“We could probably work something out,” he told me. “Make some arrangement with the Navy. Believe me, Orry, I know people who know people.”

I said, “But I couldn’t go on living at Dawn’s house.”

“Orry,” he said, chuckling at me and patting my arm. “You were her first love, Orry. You’re her man. Look how she took you right in again, the minute you showed up. Look how well you’re getting along. In some little corner of that girl, Orry, you’ve always been her husband. She left the others, but she was taken away from you.”

I stared at him. “Marry her? Dawn Devayne? Mr. Cartwright, I don’t—”

“By. Call me By. And think about it, Orry. Will you do that? Just think about it.”

There was no question in the Hacker household about our belonging together, Dawn and me. We’d been initially shown by a uniformed maid to a bedroom we were to share on the second floor, overlooking Hacker’s private three-hole golf course, and by one o’clock in the morning I was ready to return to it and go to sleep, although the party was still going strong. I found Dawn with a group of people singing show tunes around the piano, and I told her, “I’m going to sleep now.”

“Stick around five minutes, we’ll go up together.”

I did — it’s surprising how many old lyrics we all remember, the words to songs we no longer know we know — and then we found our way to the right bedroom, used the private bath next door, and went to bed. When I reached for Dawn, though, she laughed and said, “You must be kidding.”

I was. I realized I was too sleepy to have any true interest in sex, that I’d started only out of a sense of obligation, that I’d felt it was my duty to perform at this point. “You’re right,” I said. “See you in the morn—

“You’re a good old boy, Orry,” she said, and kissed my chin, and rolled away, and I guess we both went right to sleep.

When I woke up it was still dark, but light of some sort was glittering faintly outside the window, and there were distant voices. I’d lived with Dawn Devayne less than a week, but already I was used to the rounded shapes of her asleep beside me, and already I missed the numerals of the digital clock shimmering white in the darkness. I didn’t know what time it was, but it had to be very late.

I got up from bed and looked out the window, and the illumination came from floodlights over the golf course. Lennie Hacker and some of his male guests were playing golf out there. I recognized Byron Cartwright among them. Lennie Hacker’s distinctive nasal voice said something, and the others laughed, and somebody drove a white ball high up out of the light, briefly out of existence before it suddenly bounced, small and white and clear, on the clipped grass of the green.

The men moved as a group, accompanied by a servant driving a golf cart filled with bags and clubs. A portable bar was mounted on the back of the cart, and they were all having drinks from it, but no one appeared drunk, or sloppy, or tired. None of them were particularly young, but none of them were in any way old.

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 Dawns 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.