Enough! (A Travesty and Ordo) (30 page)

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.

About the Author

DONALD E. WESTLAKE
‘s previous successes range from the slapstick foolery of
The Hot Rock
and
Bank Shot
through the broad canvas of
Dancing Aztecs
to the more thoughtful comedy of
Help I Am Being Held Prisoner
.