Enough! (A Travesty and Ordo) (27 page)

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.”