Enough! (A Travesty and Ordo) (25 page)

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motel, or that I was wearing clothes that were somewhat shabby and out of date.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.”