Enough! (A Travesty and Ordo) (23 page)

All I could think about, the next three days, was Dawn Devayne. I was once married to her, married
to a sexy movie star. Me. I just couldn’t get used to the idea.

And the other guys didn’t help. Norm and Stan
and Pat spread the word, and pretty soon all the guys were coming around, even
some of the younger officers, talking and grinning and winking and all that.
Nobody came right out with the direct question, but what they really wanted to
know was what it was like to be in bed with Dawn Devayne.

And what could I tell them? I didn’t know what
it was like to be in bed with Dawn Devayne. I knew what it was like to be in
bed with Estelle Anlic—or anyway I had a kind of vague memory, after sixteen
years—but that wasn’t what they wanted to know, and anyway I didn’t feel like
telling them. She was a teenage girl, sixteen (though she told me nineteen),
and I was twenty-one, and neither of us was exactly a genius about sex, but we had fun. I
remember she had very very soft arms and she liked to have her arms around my
neck, and she laughed with her mouth wide open, and she always drowned her
french fries in so much ketchup I used to tell her I had to eat them with ice
tongs and one time in bed she finally admitted she didn’t know what ice tongs
were and she cried because she was sure she was stupid, and we had sex that
time in order for me to tell her (a) she wasn’t stupid, and (b) I loved her
anyway even though she was stupid, and that’s the one time in particular I have
any memory of at all, which is mostly because that was the time I learned I
could control myself and hold back ejaculation almost as long as I wanted,
almost forever. We were both learning about things then, we were both just
puppies rolling in a basket of wool, but the guys didn’t want to hear anything
like that, it would just depress them. And I didn’t want to tell them about it
either. Their favorite sex story anyway was one that Pat used to tell about
being in bed with a girl with a candle in her ass. That’s what they really
wanted me to tell them, that Dawn Devayne had a candle in her ass.

But even though I couldn’t tell them any
stories that would satisfy them, they kept coming around, they kept on and on
with the same subject, they couldn’t seem to let it go. It fascinated them, and
every time they saw me they got reminded and fascinated all over again. In
fact, a couple of the guys started calling me “Devayne,” as though
that was going to be my new nickname, until one time I picked up a wrench and
patted it into my other palm and went over to the guy and said:

“My name is Orry.”

He looked surprised, and a little scared. He
said:

“Sure. Sure, I know that.”

I said:

“Let me hear you say it.”

He said:

“Jeez, Orry, it was just a—”

“Okay, then,” I said, and went back
over to where I was working, and that was the last I heard of that.

But it wasn’t the last I heard of Dawn
Devayne. For instance, I was more or less going then with a woman in New London named Fran Skiburg, who was divorced from
an Army career man and had custody of the three children. She was part
Norwegian and part Belgian and her husband had been almost all German. Fran and
I would go to the movies sometimes, or she’d cook me a meal, but it wasn’t
serious. Mostly, we didn’t even go to bed together. But then somebody told her
about Dawn Devayne, and the next time I saw Fran she was a different person.
She kept grinning and winking all through dinner, and she hustled the kids to
bed earlier than usual, and then sort of crowded me into the living room. She
liked me to rub her feet sometimes, because she was standing all day at the
bank, so I sat on the sofa and she kicked off her slippers and while I rubbed
her feet she kept opening and closing her knees and giggling at me.

Well, I was looking up her skirt anyway, so I
slid my hand up from her feet, and the next thing we were rolling around on the
wall-to-wall carpet together. She was absolutely all over me,
nervous and jumpy and full of loud laughter, all the time wanting to
change position or do this and that. Up till then, my one complaint about Fran
was that she’d just lie there; now all of a sudden she was acting like the star
of an X-movie.

I couldn’t figure it out, until after it was
all finished and I was lying there on the carpet on my back, breathing like a
diver with the bends. Then Fran, with this big wild-eyed smile, came looming
over me, scratching my chest with her fingernails and saying, “What would
you like to do to me? What do you really want to do to me?”

This was after. I panted at her for a second,
and then I said, “What?”

And she said, “What would you do to me if
I was Dawn Devayne?”

Then I understood. I sat up and said,
“Who told you that?”

“What would you do? Come on, Orry, let’s
do something!”

“Do what? We just did everything!”

“There’s lots
more! There’s lots more!” Then she leaned down
close to my ear, where I couldn’t see her face, and whispered, “You don’t
want me to have to say it.”

I don’t know if she had anything special in
mind, but I don’t think so. I think she was just excited in general, and wanted
something different to happen. Anyway, I pushed her off and got to my feet and
said, “I don’t know anything about any Dawn Devayne or any kind of crazy
sex stuff. That’s no way to act.”

She sat there on the green carpet with her
legs curled to the side, looking something like the nude pictures in Pat’s
magazines except whiter and a little heavier, and she stared up at me without
saying anything at all. Her mouth was open because she was looking upward so
her expression seemed to be mainly surprised. I felt grumpy. I sat down on the
sofa and put on my underpants.

And all at once Fran jumped up and grabbed
half her clothes and ran out of the room. I finished getting dressed, and sat
on the sofa a little longer, and then went out to the kitchen and ate a bowl of
raisin bran. When Fran still didn’t come back, I went to her bedroom and looked
in through the open door, and she wasn’t there. I said, “Fran?”

No answer.

The bathroom door was closed, so I knocked on
it, but nothing happened. I turned the knob and the door was locked. I said,
“Fran?”

A mumble sounded from in there.

“Fran? You all right?” Go away.

“What?”

“Go away!”

That was the last she said. I tried talking to
her through the door, and I tried to get her to come out, and I tried to find
out what the problem was, but she wouldn’t say anything else. There wasn’t any
sound of crying or anything, she was just sitting in there by herself. After a
while I said, “I have to get back to the base, Fran.”

She didn’t say anything to that, either. I
said it once or twice more, and said some other things, and then I left and
went back to the base.

*

I was shaving the next morning when I suddenly
remembered that picture, the one in the magazine of Estelle and me on our
wedding day. We were squinting there in the sunlight, the both of us, and now I
was squinting again because the light bulb over the mirror was too bright.
Shaving, I looked at myself, looked at my nose and my eyes and my ears, and
here I was. I was still here. The same guy. Same short
haircut, same eyebrows, same chin.

The same guy.

What did Fran want from me, anyway? Just
because it turns out I used to be married to somebody famous, all of a sudden
I’m supposed to be different? I’m not any different,
I’m the same guy I always was. People don’t just change, they have ways that
they are, and that’s what they are. That’s who they are, that’s what you mean
by personality. The way a person is.

Then I thought: Estelle changed.

That’s right. Estelle Anlic is Dawn Devayne
now. She’s changed, she’s somebody else. There isn’t any—she isn’t—there isn’t
any Estelle Anlic any more, nowhere on the face of the earth.

But it isn’t the same as if she died, because
her memories are still there inside Dawn Devayne, she’d remember being the girl
with the mother that drove the bus, and she’d remember marrying the sailor in
San Diego in 1958, and even in that article I’d read there’d been a part where
she was remembering being Estelle Anlic and working as a movie cashier in San
Francisco. But still she was changed, she was somebody else now, she was
different. Like a wooden house turning itself into a brick house. How could she
…how could anybody do that? How could anybody do
that?

Then I thought: Estelle Anlic is Dawn Devayne
now, but I’m still me. Ordo Tupikos, the same guy. But
if she was—If I’m—

It was hard even to figure out the question.
If she was that back then, and if she’s this now, and if I was that…

I kept on shaving. More and more of my face
came out from behind the white cream, and it was the same face. Getting older,
a little older every minute, but not—

Not different.

I finished shaving. I looked at that face, and
then I scrubbed it with hot water and dried it on a towel. And after mess I
went to Headquarters office and put in for leave. Twenty-two days, all I had
saved up.

TWO

The first place I went was New York, on the bus, where I looked in a magazine
they have there called Cue that tells you what movies are playing all over the
city. A Dawn Devayne movie called “The Captain’s Pearls” was showing
in a theater on West 86th Street, which was forty-six blocks uptown from the
bus terminal, so I walked up there and sat through the second half of a western
with Charles Bronson and then “The Captain’s Pearls” came on.

The story was about an airline captain with
two girl friends both named Pearl, one of them in Paris and one in New York. Dawn Devayne played the one in New York, and the advertising agency she works for
opens an office in Paris and she goes there to head it, and the Paris girl friend is a model who
gets hired by Dawn Devayne for a commercial for the captains airline, and then the captain has to keep the two
girls from finding out he’s going out with both of them. It was a comedy.

This movie was made in 1967, which was only
nine years after I was married to Estelle, so I should have been able to
recognize her, but she just wasn’t there. I stared and stared and stared at
that woman on the screen, and the only person she reminded me of was Dawn
Devayne. I mean, from before I knew who she was. But there wasn’t anything of
Estelle there. Not the voice, not the walk, not the smile, not anything.

But sexy. I saw what
that article writer meant, because if you looked at Dawn Devayne your first
thought was she’d be terrific in bed. And then you’d decide she’d also be
terrific otherwise, to talk with or take a trip together or whatever it was.
And then you’d realize since she was so all-around terrific she wouldn’t have
to settle for anybody but an all-around terrific guy, which would leave you
out, so you’d naturally idolize her. I mean, you’d want it without any idea in
your head that you could ever get it.

I was thinking all that, and then I thought,
But I’ve had it!
And then I tried to put together arms-around-neck
ice-tongs-stupid Estelle Anlic with this terrific female creature on the screen
here, and I just couldn’t do it. I mean, not even with a fantasy. If I had a
fantasy about going to bed with Dawn Devayne, not even in my fantasy did I see
myself in bed with Estelle.

After the movie I walked back downtown toward
the bus terminal, because I’d left my duffel bag in a locker there. It was only
around four-thirty in the afternoon, but down around 42nd Street the whores
were already out, strolling on the sidewalks and standing in the doorways of
shoe stores. The sight of a Navy uniform really agitates a whore, and half a
dozen of them called out to me as I walked along, but I didn’t answer.

Then one of them stepped out from a doorway
and stood right in my path and said, “Hello, sailor. You
off a ship?”

I started to walk around her, but then I
stopped dead and stared, and I said, “You look like Dawn Devayne!”

She grinned and ducked her head, looking
pleased with herself. “You really think so, sailor?”

She did. She was wearing a blonde wig like
Dawn Devayne’s hair style, and her eyes and mouth were made up like Dawn
Devayne, and she’d even fixed her eyebrows to look like Dawn Devayne’s
eyebrows.

Only at a second look none of it worked. The
wig didn’t look like real hair, and the make-up was too heavy, and the eyebrows
looked like little false moustaches. And down inside all that phony stuff she
was Puerto Rican or Cuban or something like that. It was all like a Halloween
costume.

She was poking a finger at my arm, looking up
at me sort of slantwise in imitation of a Dawn Devayne movement I’d just seen
in
The Captain’s Pearls
. “Come on, sailor,” she said. “Wanna fuck
a movie star?”

“No,” I said. It was all too creepy.
“No no,” I said, and went around her and hurried on down the street.

And she shouted after me, “You been on that ship too long! What you want is Robert Redford!”

*

This was my first time in Los Angeles since 1963, when the Gulf of Tonkin incident got me
transferred from a ship in the Mediterranean
to a ship in the Pacific. They’d flown me with a bunch of other guys from Naples to Washington, then by surface
transportation to Chicago and by air to Los Angeles and Honolulu, where I met my ship. I’d had a two-day layover in Los Angeles, and now I remembered thinking then about
looking up Estelle. But I didn’t do it, mostly because five years had already
gone by since I’d last seen her, and also because her mother might start making
trouble again if she caught me there.

The funny thing is,
that was the year Estelle first became Dawn Devayne, in the movie called
Bubbletop
. Now I wondered what might have happened if I’d actually found her
back then, got in touch somehow. I’d never seen
Bubbletop
, so I didn’t know if
by 1963 she was already this new person, this Dawn Devayne, if she’d already
changed so completely that Estelle Anlic couldn’t be found in there any more.
If I’d met her that time, would something new have started? Would my whole life
have been shifted, would I now be somebody in the movie business instead of
being a sailor? I tried to see myself as that movie person; who would I be, what would I be like? Would I be?