The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction (117 page)

I must have gone to sleep almost at once, though I’d been sure I would stay awake for hours. But the pool lights ceased to shine on the blue-green drapes, darkness and silence drifted down like a collapsing tent – four white numerals floating in the black said 11:42, then 11:43 – and I closed my eyes and slept.

To awake in the same darkness, with the white numbers reading 12:12 and some fuss taking place at the edge of my consciousness. I didn’t know where I was, I didn’t know what that pair of twelves meant, and I couldn’t understand the rustling and whooshing going on. In my bewilderment I thought I was assigned to a ship again, and we were in a storm; but the double twelve made no sense.

Then one of the twelves became thirteen, and I remembered where I was, and I understood that someone was at the glass doors leading to the pool, making a racket. Then Dawn Devayne’s voice, loud and rather exasperated, said, “Orry?”

“Yes?”

“Open these damn drapes, will you?”

At the Chinese restaurant there had been a red-jacketed young man who parked the cars. He leaped into every car that came along, and whipped it away with practiced skill, as though he’d been driving
that
car all his life. At some point he must have had a first car, of course, the car in which he’d learned to drive and with which he’d gotten his first license, but if some customer of the restaurant were to drive up in that car today would the young man recognize it? Would it feel
different
to him? Since his driving technique was already perfect with any car, what special familiarity would he be able to display? It could not be by skill that he would show his particular relationship with this car; possibly it would be with a breakdown of skill, a tiny reminiscent awkwardness.

Dawn Devayne was wonderful in bed. It’s true, she was what men thought she would be, she was agile and quick and lustful and friendly and funny and demanding and responsive and exhausting and exhilarating and plunging and utterly skillful. Her skill produced in me responses of invention I hadn’t known I possessed. Fran Skiburg was right; there
are
other things to do. I did things with Dawn Devayne that I’d never done before, that it had never occurred to me to do but that now came spontaneously into my mind. For instance, I followed with the tip of my tongue all the creases of her body; the curving borders of her rump, the line at the inside of each elbow, the arcs below her breasts. She laughed and hugged me and gave me a great deal of pleasure, and not once did I think of Estelle Anlic, who was not there.

We’d turned the lights on for our meeting, and when she kissed my shoulder and leaned away to turn them off again the digital clock read 2:02. In the dark she kissed my mouth, bending over me, and whispered, “Welcome back, Orry.”

“Mmm.” I said nothing more, partly because I was tired and partly because I still hadn’t fixed on a name to call her.

She rolled away, adjusting her head on the pillow next to me, settling down with a pleasant sigh, and when next I opened my eyes vague daylight pressed grayly at the drapes and the clock read 6:03, and Dawn Devayne was asleep on her back beside me, tousled but beautiful, one hand, palm up, with curled fingers, on the pillow by her ear.

How did Estelle look asleep? She was becoming harder to remember. We had lived together in off-base quarters, a two-room apartment with a used bed. Sunlight never entered the bedroom, where the sheets and clothing and the very air itself were always just slightly damp. Estelle would curl against me in her sleep, and at times I would awake to find her arm across my chest. A memory returned; Estelle once told me she’d slept with a toy panda in her childhood, and at times she would call me Panda. I hadn’t thought of that in years. Panda.

Dawn Devayne’s eyes opened. They focused on me at once, and she smiled, saying, “Don’t frown, Orry, Dawn is here.” Then she looked startled, stared toward the drapes, and cried, “My God, dawn
is
here! What time is it?”

“Six oh six,” I read.

“Oh.” She relaxed a little, but said, “I have to get back to my room.” Then she looked at me with another of her private smiles and said, “Orry, do you know you’re terrific in bed?”

“No,” I said. “But you are.”

“A workman is as good as his tools,” she said, grinning, and reached under the covers for me. “And you’ve been practicing.”

“So have you.”

She laughed, pulling me closer, with easy ownership. “Time for a quickie,” she said.

We swam together naked in the pool while the sun came up. (“If Wang
does
look,” she’d answered me, “I’ll blind him.”) Then at last she climbed out of the pool, wet, glistening gold and orange in the fresh sunlight, saying, “Time to face the new day, baby.”

“All right.” I followed her up to the blue tiles.

“Orry.”

“Yes?”

“Take a look in the closet,” she said. “See if there’s something that fits you. Wang can have your other stuff cleaned.”

I knew she was laughing at me, but in a friendly way. And the problem of what to call her was solved. “Thanks, Dawn,” I said, “I will.”

“See you at breakfast.”

I wore the gray slacks, but neither the full-sleeved shirt nor the Edwardian jacket seemed right for me, so I found instead a green shirt and a gray pullover sweater. “That’s fine,” Dawn said, with neutral disinterest.

A limousine took us to Burbank Airport, over the hills and across the stucco floor of the San Fernando Valley, a place that looks like an over-exposed photograph. Dawn asked me questions as we rode together, and I told her about my marriage to Sally Fowler and my years in the Navy, and even a little about Fran Skiburg, though not the part where Fran got so excited about me having once been married to Dawn Devayne. There were spaces of silence as we rode, and I could have asked her my question several times, but there didn’t seem to be any way to phrase it. I tried different practice sentences in my head, but none of them were right:

“
Why aren’t you Estelle Anlic any more, when I’m still Orry Tupikos?
” No. That sounded as though I was blaming her for something.

“
Who would I be, if I wasn’t me?
” No. That wasn’t even the right question.

“
How do you stop being the person you are and become somebody entirely different? What’s it like?
” No. That was like a panel-show question on television, and anyway not exactly what I was trying for.

Dawn herself gave me a chance to open the subject, when she asked me what I figured to do after I retired from the Navy two years from now, but all I said was, “I haven’t thought about it very much. Maybe I’ll just travel around a while, and find some place, and settle down.”

“Will you marry Fran?”

“That might be an idea.”

At Burbank Airport we got on a private plane with the two actors, Rod and Wally, and the grim-faced man named Frank and the heavyset quiet man called Bobo, all of whom I’d met last night. Listening to conversations during the flight, I finally worked it out that Frank was a photographer whose job it was to take pictures while the movie was being made; the “stills man”, he was called. Bobo’s job was harder to describe; he seemed to be somewhere between servant and bodyguard, and mostly he just sat and smiled at everybody and looked alert but not very bright.

We flew from Burbank to Stockton, where another limousine took us to the movie location, which was an imitation Louisiana bayou in the San Joaquin River delta. The rest of the movie people, who were staying in nearby motels and not commuting home every night, were already there, and most of the morning was spent with the crew endlessly preparing things – setting up reflectors to catch the sunlight, laying a track for the camera to roll along, moving potted plants this way and that along the water’s edge – while Dawn and Rod argued for hours with the director, a fat man with pasty jowls and an amused-angry expression and a habit of constantly taking off and putting back on his old black cardigan sweater. His name was Harvey, and when I was introduced to him he nodded without looking at me and said, “Ted, they really
are
putting that fucking dock the wrong place,” and a short man with a moustache went away to do something about it.

The argument, with Dawn and Rod on one side and Harvey on the other, wasn’t like anything I’d ever seen in my life. When the people I’ve known get into an argument, they either settle it pretty soon or they get violent; the men hit and the women throw things. Dawn and Rod and Harvey almost immediately got to the point where hitting and throwing would start, except it never happened. Dawn Devayne stood with her feet apart and her hands on her hips, as though leaning into a strong wind, and made firm logical statements of her point of view, salted with insults; for instance, “The motivation throughout the whole story, you cocksucker, is for my character to feel protective toward Jenny.” Rod’s style, on the other hand, was heavy sarcasm: “Since it’s a
given
that you have the sensitivity of a storm drain, Harvey, why not simply accept the fact that Dawn and I have thought this over very carefully.” Harvey, with his angry-amused smile, always looked as though he was either just about to say something horribly insulting or would suddenly start pounding the other two with a piece of wood, and his
manner
was very insulting-patronizing-hostile, but in fact he merely kept saying things like, “Well, I think we’ll simply all be much happier if we do it my way.”

Unless there’s a fist fight, the person who remains the calmest usually wins most arguments, so I knew from the beginning Harvey would win this one, but it went on for hours anyway, and when it ended (Harvey won, and Dawn and Rod both sulked) they only had time before lunch to shoot one small scene with Dawn and Wally on the riverbank. It was just a scene where Dawn said, “I don’t think they’ll ever come back, Billy.” They shot it eight times, with the camera in three different positions, and then we all had a buffet lunch brought out from Stockton by a catering service.

Dawn’s dressing room was a small motor home, where she took a nap by herself after lunch, while I walked around looking at everything. Another part of the Dawn–Wally scene was shot, with just Wally visible in the picture, talking to an empty spot in space where Dawn was supposed to be, and then they set up a more complicated scene involving Dawn and Rod and some other people getting into a boat and rowing away. Dawn woke up while the crew was still preparing that one, and she and Rod groused together about Harvey, but when they went out to shoot the scene everybody was polite to everybody else, and then the day was over, and we flew back to Los Angeles.

There was a huge gift-wrapped package in the front hall at Dawn’s house. It was about the size and shape of a door, all wrapped up in colorful paper and miles of ribbon and a big red bow, and a card hung from the bow reading, “Love to Dawn and Orry, from By.”

Dawn frowned and said, “What’s that asshole up to now?”

Rod and Wally and Frank and Bobo had come in with us, and Wally said, “It’s an aircraft carrier. By gave you an aircraft carrier.”

“For God’s sake, open it,” Rod said.

“I’m afraid to,” Dawn told him. She tried to make that sound like a joke, but I could see she really was afraid to open it. I later learned that Byron Cartwright’s sentimentalism was famous for causing embarrassment, but I don’t think even Dawn suspected what he had chosen to send us. I know I didn’t.

Finally it was Wally and Rod who pulled off the bow and the ribbon and the paper, and inside was the wedding-day picture, Estelle and me in San Diego, squinting in the sunlight. The picture had been blown up to be slightly bigger than life, and it was in a wooden frame with a piece of glass in front of it, and here were these two stiff uncomfortable figures in grainy gray, staring out of some horrible painful prison of the past. Usually this picture was perfectly ordinary, neither wonderful nor awful, but blown up to life size – larger than life – it became a kind of cruelty.

Everybody stared at it. Wally said, “What the hell is
that
?”

They hadn’t recognized that earlier me. Dawn wouldn’t have been recognizable anyway, of course, but expanding the original photo had strained the rough quality of the negative beyond its capacity, so that I myself might not have guessed at first the white blob face was mine.

After the first shock of staring at the picture, I turned to look at Dawn, to see her with a face of stone, glaring – with hatred? rage? revulsion? bitterness? resentment? – at her own image in the photograph. She turned her head, flashed me a look of irritation that I’d been watching her, and without a word strode out of the room.

Rod, with the eager look of the born gossip, said, “I don’t know what’s going on here, but it looks to
me
like By’s done it again.”

Wally was still frowning at the picture. “What
is
that?” he said. “Who
are
those people?”

“Orry? Isn’t that you?”

It was the voice of Frank, the stills man, the professional photographer, who had backed away from the giant picture, across the hall and through the doorway into the next room, until he was distant enough to see it clear. Head cocked to one side, eyes half closed, he was standing against the back of a sofa in there, studying the picture.

At first I didn’t say anything. Wally turned to frown at Frank, then at me, then at the picture, then at me again. “You? That’s you?”

Rod and Bobo were moving toward Frank, squinting over their shoulders at the picture as they went. I said to Wally, “Yes. It’s me.”

“That girl is familiar,” Frank said.

I felt obscurely that Dawn would want to be protected, though I didn’t see how it was going to be possible. “That’s my wife,” I said. “Or, she
was
my wife. That was our wedding day.”

Rod and Bobo were now standing next to Frank, gazing at the picture, and Wally was moving back to join them. I was like a stage performer, and they were my audience, and the picture was used in my act. Frank said, “I know that girl. What’s her name?”

Rod suddenly said, “Wait a minute,
I
know that picture! That’s Dawn!”