Enough! (A Travesty and Ordo) (29 page)

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
cliche, 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.