The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction (115 page)

“Is that right?” I put Maury Dee’s photograph away and twisted the red string around the closure tabs.

“And I’ll tell you something,” said the driver. “The bigger they are, the nicer they are. You’d be amazed, some of the people been sitting right where you are right now.”

“I bet.”

“But you know who’s the best of them all? I mean, just a nice regular person, not stuck up at all.”

“Who’s that?”

“Dawn Devayne,” he said. “She’s always got a good word for you, she’ll take a joke, she’s just terrific.”

“That’s nice,” I said.

“Terrific.” He shook his head. “Always remembers your name. ‘Hi, Harry,’ she says. ‘How you doing?’ Just a terrific person.”

“I guess she must be all right,” I said.

“Terrific,” he said, and turned the car in at one of the taller buildings just before the Beverly Hills line. We drove down into the basement parking garage and the driver stopped next to a bank of elevators. He hopped out and opened my door for me, and when I got out he said, “Eleventh floor.”

“Thanks, Harry,” I said.

All you could see was artificial plants. I stepped out of the elevator and there were great pots all over the place on the green rug, all with plastic plants in them with huge dark-green leaves. Beyond them, quite a ways back, expanses of plate glass showed the white sky.

I moved forward, not sure what to do next, and then I saw the receptionist’s desk. With the white sky behind her, she was very hard to find. I went over to her and said, “Excuse me.”

She’d been writing something on a long form, and now she looked up with a friendly smile and said, “May I help you?”

“I’m supposed to see Byron Cartwright.”

“Name, please?”

“Ordo Tupikos.”

She used her telephone, sounding very chipper, and then she smiled at me again, saying, “He’ll be out in a minute. If you’ll have a seat?”

There were easy chairs in among the plastic plants. I thanked her and went off to sit down, picking up a newspaper from a white formica table beside the chair. It was called
The Hollywood Reporter
, and it was magazine size and printed on glossy paper. I read all the short items about people signing to do this or that, and I read a nightclub review of somebody whose name I didn’t recognize, and then a girl came along and said, “Mr Tupikos?”

“Yes?”

“I’m Mr Cartwright’s secretary. Would you come with me?”

I put the paper down and followed her away from the plants and down a long hall with tan walls and brown carpet. We passed offices on both sides of the hall; about half were occupied, and most of the people were on the phone.

I suddenly realized I’d forgotten the day clerk’s photograph. I’d left it behind in the envelope on the table with
The Hollywood Reporter
.

Well, that actually was what he’d asked me to do; leave it in the office. Maybe on the way back I should take it out of the envelope.

The girl stopped, gesturing at a door on the left. “Through here, Mr Tupikos.”

Byron Cartwright was standing in the middle of the room. He had a big heavy chest and brown leathery skin and yellow-white hair brushed straight back over his balding head. He was dressed in different shades of pale blue, and there was a white line of smoke rising from a long cigar in an ashtray on the desk behind him. The room was large and so was everything in it; massive desk, long black sofa, huge windows showing the white sky, with the city of Los Angeles down the slope on the flat land to the south, pastel colors glittering in the haze; pink, peach, coral.

Byron Cartwright strode toward me, hand outstretched. He was laughing, as though remembering a wonderful time we’d once shared together. Laughter made erosion lines crisscrossing all over his face. “Well, hello, Orry,” he said. “Glad to see you.” He took my hand, and patted my arm with his other hand, saying, “That’s right, isn’t it? Orry?”

“That’s right.”

“Everybody calls me By. Come in, sit down.”

I was already in. We sat together on the long sofa. He crossed one leg over the other, half turning in my direction, his arm stretched out toward me along the sofa back. He had what looked like a class ring on one finger, with a dark red stone. He said, “You know where I got it from? The name ‘Orry’? From Dawn.” There was something almost religious about the way he said the name. It reminded me of when Jehovah’s Witnesses pass out their literature; they always smile and say, “Here’s good news!”

I said, “You told her about me?”

“Phoned her the first chance I got. She’s on location now. You could’ve knocked her over with a feather, Orry, I could hear it in her voice.”

“It’s been a long time,” I said. I wasn’t sure what this conversation was about, and I was sorry to hear Dawn Devayne was “on location”. It sounded as though I might not be able to get to see her.

“Sixteen years,” Byron Cartwright said, and he had that reverential sound in his voice again, with the same happiness around his mouth and eyes. “Your little girl has come a long way, Orry.”

“I guess so.”

“It’s just amazing that you never knew. Didn’t any reporters ever come around, any magazine writers?”

“I never knew anything,” I told him. “When the fellows told me about it, I didn’t believe them. Then they showed me the magazine.”

“Well, it’s just astonishing.” But he didn’t seem to imply that I might be a liar. He kept smiling at me, and shaking his head with his astonishment.

“It sure was astonishing to me,” I said.

He nodded, letting me know he understood completely. “So the first thing you thought,” he said, “you had to see her again, just had to say hello. Am I right?”

“Not to begin with.” It was hard talking when looking directly at him, because his face was so full of smiling eagerness. I leaned forward a little, resting my elbows on my knees, and looked across the room. There was a huge full-color blown-up photograph of a horse taking up most of the opposite wall. I said, looking at the horse, “At first I just thought it was eerie. Of course, nice for Estelle. Or Dawn, I guess. Nice for her, I was glad things worked out for her. But for me it was really strange.”

“In what way
strange
, Orry?” This time he sounded like a chaplain, sympathetic and understanding.

“It took me a while to figure that out.” I chanced looking at him again, and he had just a small smile going now, he looked expectant and receptive. It was easier to face him with that expression. I said, “There was a picture of Estelle and me in the magazine, from our wedding day.”

“Got it!” He bounded up from the sofa and hurried over to the desk. I became aware then that most of the knick-knacks and things around on the desk and the tables and everywhere had some connection with golf; small statues of golfers, a gold golf ball on a gold tee, things like that.

Byron Cartwright came back with a small photo in a frame. He handed it to me, smiling, then sat down again and said, “That’s the one, right?”

“Yes,” I said, looking at it. Then I turned my face toward him, not so much to see him as to let him see me. “You can recognize me from that picture.”

“I know that,” he said. “I was noticing that, Orry, you’re remarkable. You haven’t aged a bit. I’d hate to see a picture of
me
taken sixteen years ago.”

“I’m not talking about getting older,” I said. “I’m talking about getting
different
. I’m not different.”

“I believe you’re right.” He moved the class-ring hand to pat my knee, then put it back on the sofa. “Dawn told me a little about you, Orry,” he said. “She told me you were the gentlest man she’d ever met. She told me she’s thought about you often, she’s always hoped you found happiness somewhere. I believe you’re still the same good man you were then.”

“The same.” I pointed at Estelle in the photo. “But that isn’t Dawn Devayne.”

“Ha ha,” he said. “I’ll have to go along with you there.”

I looked at him again. “How did that happen? How do people change, or not change?”

“Big questions, Orry.” If a smile can be serious, his smile had turned serious. But still friendly.

“I kept thinking about it,” I said. I almost told him about Fran then, and the changes all around me, but at the last second I decided not to. “So I came out to talk to her about it,” I said. And then, because I suddenly realized this could be a brushoff, that Byron Cartwright might have the job of smiling at me and being friendly and telling me I wasn’t going to be allowed to see Estelle, I added to that, “If she wants to see me.”

“She does, Orry,” he said. “Of course she does.” And he acted surprised. But I could see he was
acting
surprised.

I said, “You were supposed to find out if I’d changed or not, weren’t you? If I was going to be a pest or something.”

Grinning, he said, “She told me you weren’t stupid, Orry. But you could have been an impostor, you know, maybe some maniac or something. Dawn
wants
to see you, if you’re still the Orry she used to know.”

“That’s the problem.”

He laughed hugely, as though I’d said a joke. “She’s filming up in Stockton today,” he said, “but she’ll be flying back when they’re done. She wants you to go out to the house, and she’ll meet you there.”

“Her house?”

“Well, naturally.” Chuckling at me, he got to his feet, saying, “You’ll be driven out there now, unless you have other plans.”

“No, nothing.” I also stood.

“I’ll phone down for the car. You came in through the parking area?”

“Yes.”

“Just go straight back down. The car will be by the elevators.”

“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 rear-view 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 rear-view 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.”