The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction (118 page)

“Yes,” I said, but before I could say anything else – explain, apologize, defend – Wang came in to say, “Miss Dawn say, everybody out.”

Rod, nodding at the picture and ignoring Wang, said thoughtfully, “Byron Cartwright, the avalanche that walks like a man.”

Wang said to me, “You, too. Miss Dawn say, go away, eat dinner, come back.”

“All right,” I said.

We were joined by Frank’s wife and Wally’s girl and Rod’s friend Dennis in an Italian restaurant that looked like something from a silent movie about Biblical times. Bronze-colored plaster statues, lots of columns, heavily framed paintings of Roman emperors on the walls. The food was covered with too much tomato sauce.

My story was amazing but short, and when I was done Rod and Wally told stories for the rest of dinner about other disastrous gestures made by Byron Cartwright in the past. He was everyone’s warmhearted uncle, except that his instincts were constantly betrayed by his inability to think through the effect of his activities. As a businessman he was considered one of the best (toughest, coldest, coolest) in his very tough business, but away from the office his affection toward his clients and other acquaintances led him to one horrible misjudgment after another.

(These acts of Byron Cartwright’s were not simple goofs like sending flowers to a hay-fever victim. As with the picture to Dawn and me, each story took about five minutes to explain the characters and relationships involved, the nuances that turned Byron Cartwright’s offerings into Molotov cocktails, and while some of the errors were funny, most of them produced only groans among the listeners at the table. It was Wally who finally summed it up, saying, “Most mutations don’t work, and By is simply one more proof of it. You can’t have an agent with a heart of gold, it isn’t a viable combination.”)

After dinner, Rod drove me back to Dawn’s house, with Dennis a silent worshipper vibrating behind us on the back seat. As we neared the house, Rod said, “May I give you a piece of advice, Orry?”

“Sure.”

“You haven’t known Dawn for a long time, and she’s probably changed a lot.”

“Yes, she has.”

“I don’t think she’ll ever mention that picture again,” Rod told me, “and I don’t think you ought to bring it up either.”

“You may be right.”

“If it’s still there, have Wang get rid of it. If you want it yourself, tell Wang to ship it off to your home. But don’t show it to Dawn, don’t ask her about it. Just deal with Wang.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I agree with you.”

We reached the house, and Rod stopped in front of the door. “Good luck,” he said.

I didn’t immediately leave the car. I said, “Do you mind if I ask you a question?”

“Go ahead.”

“You saw how different Dawn used to be, when she was Estelle Anlic. And if you remember the picture, I haven’t changed very much.”

“Hardly at all. The Navy must agree with you.”

“The reason I came out here,” I said, “was because I had a question in my mind about that. I wanted to know how a person could change so completely into somebody different. Somebody with different looks, a different personality, a whole different kind of life. I mean, when I married Estelle, she wasn’t anybody who could even
hope
to be a movie star.”

Rod seemed both amused and in some hidden way upset by the question. He said, “You want to know how she did it?”

“I suppose. Not exactly. Something like that.”

“She decided to,” he said. He had a crinkly, masculine, self-confident smile, but at the same time he had another expression going behind the smile, an expression that told me the smile was a fake, a mask. The inner expression was also smiling, but it was more intelligent, and more truly friendly. He said, using that inner expression, “Why did you ask
me
that question, Orry?”

It was, of course, because I believed he’d somehow done the same sort of thing as Dawn, that somewhere there existed photos of him in some unimaginable other person. But it would sound like an insult to say that, and I said nothing, floundering around for an alternate answer.

He nodded. “You’re right,” he said.

“Then how?” I asked him. “She decided to be somebody else. How is it possible to
do
that?”

He shrugged and grinned, friendly and amiable but not really able to describe colors to a blind man. “You find somebody you’d rather be,” he said. “It really is as simple as that, Orry.”

I knew he was wrong. There was truth in the idea that people like Dawn and himself had found somebody else they’d rather be, but it surely couldn’t be as simple as that. Everybody has fantasies, but not everybody throws away the real self and lives in the fantasy.

Still, it would have been both rude and useless to press him, so I said; “Thank you,” and got out of the car.

“Hold the door,” he said. Then he patted the front seat, as though calling a dog, and said, “Dennis, come on up.” And Dennis, a nervous high-bred afghan hound in his fawn-colored jumpsuit, clambered gratefully into the front seat.

I was about to shut the door when Rod leaned over Dennis and said, “One more little piece of advice, Orry.”

“Yes?”

“Don’t ask Dawn that question.”

“Oh,” I said.

The picture was gone from the front hallway. My luggage from the motel was in my room, and Dawn was naked in the pool, her slender long intricate body golden-green in the underwater lights. I opened the drapes and stepped out to the tepid California air and said, “Shall I join you in there?”

“Hey, baby,” she called, treading water, grinning at me, sunny and untroubled. “Come on in, the water’s fine.”

The rest of the days that week were all the same, except that no more unfortunate presents came from Byron Cartwright. Dawn and I got up early every morning, flew to Stockton, she worked in the movie and napped – alone – after lunch, we flew back to Los Angeles, and then there’d be dinner in a restaurant with several other people, a shifting cast that usually included Rod and Wally and Dennis, plus others, sometimes strangers and sometimes known to me. Then Dawn and I would go back to the house and swim and go to bed and play with one another’s bodies until we slept. The sex was wonderful, and endlessly various, but afterwards it never seemed real. I would look at Dawn during the daytime, and I would remember this or that specific thing we had done together the night before, and it wasn’t as though I’d actually done it with
her
. It was more as though I’d dreamed it, or fantasized it.

Maybe that was partly because we always slept in the guest room, in what had become my bed. Dawn never took me to her own bed, or even brought me into her private bedroom. Until the second week I was there, I was never actually in that wing of the house.

On the Thursday evening we stayed longer in Stockton, to see the film shot the day before. Movie companies when they’re filming generally show the previous day’s work every evening, which some people call the
dailies
and some call the
rushes
. Its purpose is to give the director and performers and other people involved a chance to see how they’re doing, and also so the film editor and director can begin discussing the way the pieces of film will be organized together to make the movie. Dawn normally stayed away from the rushes, but on Thursday evening they would be viewing the sequence that she and Rod had argued about with Harvey, so the whole group of us stayed and watched.

I suppose movie people get so they can tell from the rushes whether things are working right or not, but when I look at half a dozen strips of film each recording the same action sequence or lines of dialogue, over and over and over, all I get is bored. Nevertheless, I could sense when the lights came up in the screening room that almost everybody now believed Harvey to have been right all along. Rod wouldn’t come right out and admit it, but it was clear his objections were no longer important to him. Dawn, on the other hand, had some sort of emotional commitment to her position, and all she had to say afterwards was, grumpily, “Well, I suppose the picture will survive, despite that.” And off she stomped, me in her wake.

Still, by the time we reached the plane to go back to Los Angeles, she was in a cheerful mood again. Bad temper never lasted long with her.

Friday afternoon there were technical problems of some sort, delaying the shooting, so after Dawn’s nap she and I sat in the parlor of her dressing room and talked together about the past. It was one of those conversations full of sentences beginning, “Do you remember when—?” We talked about troubles we’d had with the landlord, about the time we snuck into a movie theater when we didn’t have any money, things like that. She didn’t seem to have any particular attitude about these memories, neither nostalgia nor revulsion; they were simply interesting anecdotes out of our shared history.

But they led me finally, despite Rod’s advice, to ask her the question that had brought me out here. “You’ve changed an awful lot since then,” I said. “How did you do that?”

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 almust 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.”