The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction (114 page)

Another thing. Every one of them was alone. They went up and down the aisles, pushing their carts past one another – from up above, they must have looked like pieces in a labyrinth game – and they never looked at one another, never smiled at one another. They were just alone in there, and from up front came the clatter of the cash register.

After a while I didn’t want to be in that place any more. I bought shaving cream and a can of soda and an orange, and walked back to the motel and went to bed.

*   *   *

There wasn’t anybody in the phone book named Byron Cartwright, who was the famous agent who had changed Estelle’s name to Dawn Devayne and then guided her to stardom. In the motel office they had the five different Los Angeles phone books, and he wasn’t in any of them. He also wasn’t in the yellow pages under “Theatrical Agencies”. Finally I found a listing for something called the Screen Actors’ Guild, and I called, and spoke to a girl who said, “Byron Cartwright? He’s with GLA.”

“I’m sorry?”

“GLA,” she repeated, and hung up.

So I went back to the phone books, hoping to find something called GLA. The day clerk, a sunken-cheeked faded-eyed man of about forty with thinning yellow hair and very tanned arms, said, “You seem to be having a lot of trouble.”

“I’m looking for an actor’s agent,” I told him.

His expression lit up a bit. “Oh, yeah? Which one?”

“Byron Cartwright.”

He was impressed. “Pretty good,” he said. “He’s with GLA now, right?”

“That’s right. Do you know him?”

“Don’t I wish I did.” This time he was rueful. His face seemed to jump from expression to expression with nothing in between, as though I were seeing a series of photographs instead of a person.

“I’m trying to find the phone number,” I said.

I must have seemed helpless, because his next expression showed the easy superiority of the insider. “Look under Global-Lipkin,” he told me.

Global-Lipkin. I looked, among “Theatrical Agencies”, and there it was: Global-Lipkin Associates. You could tell immediately it was an important organization; the phone number ended in three zeroes. “Thank you,” I said.

His face now showed slightly belligerent doubt. He said, “They send for you?”

“Send for me? No.”

The face was shut; rejection and disapproval. Shaking his head he said, “Forget it.”

Apparently he thought I was a struggling actor. Not wanting to go through a long explanation, I just shrugged and said, “Well, I’ll try it,” and went back to the phone booth.

A receptionist answered. When I asked for Byron Cartwright she put me through to a secretary, who said, “Who’s calling, please?”

“Ordo Tupikos.”

“And the subject, Mr Tupikos?”

“Dawn Devayne.”

“One moment, please.”

I waited a while, and then she came back and said, “Mr Tupikos, could you tell me who you’re with?”

“With? I’m sorry, I . . .”

“Which firm.”

“Oh. I’m not with any firm, I’m in the Navy.”

“In the Navy.”

“Yes. I used to be—” But she’d gone away again.

Another wait, and then she was back. “Mr Tupikos, is this official Navy business?”

“No,” I said. “I used to be married to Dawn Devayne.”

There was a little silence, and then she said, “Married?”

“Yes. In San Diego.”

“One moment, please.”

This was a longer wait, and when she came back she said, “Mr Tupikos, is this a legal matter?”

“No, I just want to see Estelle again.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Dawn Devayne. She was named Estelle when I married her.”

A male voice suddenly said, “All right, Donna, I’ll take it.”

“Yes, sir,” and there was a click.

The male voice said, “You’re Ordo Tupikos?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. It wasn’t sensible to call him “sir”, but the girl had just done it, and in any event he had an authoritative officer-like sound in his voice, and it just slipped out.

He said, “I suppose you can prove your identity.”

That surprised me. “Of course,” I said. “I still look the same.”
I
still look the same.

“And what is it you want?”

“To see Estelle. Dawn. Miss Devayne.”

“You told my secretary you were with the Navy.”

“I’m
in
the Navy.”

“You’re due to retire pretty soon, aren’t you?”

“Two years,” I said.

“Let me be blunt, Mr Tupikos,” he said. “Are you looking for money?”

“Money?” I couldn’t think what he was talking about. (Later, going over it in my mind, I realized what he’d been afraid of, but just at that moment I was bewildered.) “Money for what?” I asked him.

He didn’t answer. Instead, he said, “Then why show up like this, after all these years?”

“There was something in a magazine. A friend showed it to me.”

“Yes?”

“Well, it surprised me, that’s all.”

“
What
surprised you?”

“About Estelle turning into Dawn Devayne.”

There was a very short silence. But it wasn’t an ordinary empty silence, it was a kind of slammed-shut silence, a startled silence. Then he said, “You mean you didn’t know? You just found out?”

“It was some surprise,” I said.

He gave out with a long loud laugh, turning his head away from the phone so it wouldn’t hurt my ears. But I could still hear it. Then he said, “God damn, Mr Tupikos, that’s a new one.”

I had nothing to say to that.

“All right,” he said. “Where are you?”

I told him the name of the motel.

“I’ll get back to you,” he said. “Some time today.”

“Thank you,” I said.

The phone booth was out in front of the motel, and I had to go back through the office to get to the inner courtyard and my room. When I walked into the office the day clerk motioned to me. “Come here.” His expression now portrayed pride.

I went over and he handed me a large black-and-white photograph; what they call a glossy. The blacks in it were very dark and solid, which made it a little bit hard to make out what was going on, but the picture seemed to have been taken in a parking garage. Two people were in the foreground. I couldn’t swear to it, but it looked as though Ernest Borgnine was strangling the day clerk.

“Whadaya think of that?”

I didn’t know what I thought of it. But when people hand you a picture – their wife, their girlfriend, their children, their dog, their new house, their boat, their garden – what you say is
very nice
. I handed the picture back. “Very nice,” I said.

Everybody knows about the movie stars’ names being embedded in the sidewalks of Hollywood Boulevard, but it’s always strange when you see it. There are the squares of pavement, and on every square is a gold outline of a five-pointed star, and in every other star there is the name of a movie star. Every year, fewer of those names mean anything. The idea of the names is immortality, but what they’re really about is death.

I took a walk for a while after talking to Byron Cartwright, and I walked along two or three blocks of Hollywood Boulevard with some family group behind me that had a child with a loud piercing voice, and the child kept wanting to know who people were:

“Daddy, who’s Vilma Banky?”

“Daddy, who’s Charles Farrell?”

“Daddy, who’s Dolores Costello?”

“Daddy, who’s Conrad Nagel?”

The father’s answers were never loud enough for me to hear, but what could he have said? “She was a movie star.” “He used to be in silent movies, a long time ago.” Or maybe, “I don’t know. Emil Jannings? I don’t know.”

I didn’t look back, so I have no idea what the family looked like, or even if the child was a boy or a girl, but pretty soon I hated listening to them, so I turned in at a fast-food place to have a hamburger and onion rings and a Coke. I sat at one of the red formica tables to eat, and at the table across the plastic partition from me was another family – father, mother, son, daughter – and the daughter was saying, “Why did they put those names there anyway?”

“Just to be nice,” the mother said.

The son said, “Because they’re buried there.”

The daughter stared at him, not knowing if that was true or not. Then she said, “They are not!”

“Sure they are,” the son said. “They bury them standing up, so they can all fit. And they all wear the clothes from their most famous movie. Like their cowboy hats and the long gowns and their Civil War Army uniforms.”

The father, chuckling, said, “And their white telephones?”

The son gave his father a hesitant smile and a headshake, saying, “I don’t get it.”

“That’s okay,” the father said. He grinned and ruffled the son’s hair, but I could see he was irritated. He was older, so his memory stretched back farther, so his jokes wouldn’t always mean anything to his son, whose memories had started later – and would probably end later. The son had reminded his father that the father would some day die.

After I ate I didn’t feel like walking on the stars’ names any more. I went up to the next parallel street, which is called Yucca, and took that over to Highland Avenue and then on back to the motel.

When I walked into the office the day clerk said, “Got a message for you.” His expression was tough and secretive, like a character in a spy movie. The hotel clerk in a spy movie who is really a part of the spy organization; this is the point where he tells the hero that the Gestapo is in his room.

“A message?”

“From GLA,” he said. His face flipped to the next expression, like a digital clock moving on to the next number. This one showed make-believe comic envy used to hide real envy. I wondered if he really did feel envy or if he was just practicing being an actor by pretending to show envy. No; pretending to
hide
envy. Maybe he himself was actually feeling envy but was hiding it by pretending to be someone who was showing envy by trying to hide it. That was too confusing to think about; it made me dizzy, like looking too long off the fantail of a ship at the swirls of water directly beneath the stern. Layers and layers of twisting white foam with bottomless black underneath; but then it all organizes itself into swinging straight white lines of wake.

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 Grauman’s 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 rear-view 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 off-stage 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.”