Enough! (A Travesty and Ordo) (26 page)

“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.