Enough! (A Travesty and Ordo) (24 page)

But there weren’t any answers for questions
like that. A person is who he is, and he can’t guess who he would be if he was
somebody else. The question doesn’t even make sense. But I guess it’s just
impossible to think at all about movie stars without some fantasy or other
creeping in.

My plane for Los Angeles left New York a
little after seven p.m. and took five hours to get across the country, but
because of the time zone differences it was only a little after nine at night
when I landed, and still not ten o’clock when the taxi let me off at a motel on
Cahuenga Boulevard, pretty much on the line separating Hollywood from Burbank.
The taxi cost almost twenty dollars from the airport, which was kind of
frightening. I’d taken two thousand dollars out of my savings, leaving just
over three thousand in the account, and I was spending the money pretty fast.

The cabdriver was a leathery old guy who
buzzed along the freeways like it was a stock car race, all the time telling me
how much better the city had been before the freeways were built. Most people
pronounce Los
Angeles
as though the middle is “angel,” but he was one of those who
pronounce it as though the middle is “angle.” “Los
Ang-gleez,” he kept saying, and one time he said, “I’m a sight you
won’t see all that much. I’m your native son.”

“Born here?”

“Nope. Come out
in forty-eight.”

The motel had a large neon sign out front and
very small rooms in a low stucco building in back. It was impossible to tell
what color the stucco was because green and yellow and orange and blue
floodlights were aimed at it from fixtures stuck into the ivy border, but in
the morning the color turned out to be a sort of dirty cream shade.

My room had pale blue walls and a heavy maroon
bedspread and a paper ribbon around the toilet seat saying it had been
sanitized. I unpacked my duffel and turned on the television set, but I was too
restless to stay cooped up in that room forever. Also, I decided I was hungry.
So I changed into civvies and went out and walked down Highland to Hollywood Boulevard, where I ate something in a fast-food
place. It was like New York in that neighborhood, only skimpier. For some reason Los Angeles looks older than New York. It looks like an old old Pueblo Indian village with neon added to it by
real estate people. New York doesn’t look any older than Europe, but
Los Angeles looks as old as sand. It looks like a place
that almost had a Golden Age, a long long time ago, but nothing happened and
now it’s too late.

After I ate I walked around for half an hour,
and then I went back to the motel and all of a sudden I was very sleepy. I had
the television on, and the light, and I still wore all my clothes except my
shoes, but I fell asleep anyway, lying on top of the bedspread, and when I woke
up the TV was hissing and it was nearly four in the morning. I was very
thirsty, and nervous for some reason. Lonely, I felt lonely. I drank water, and
went out to the street again, and after a while I found an all-night
supermarket called Hughes. I took a cart and went up and down the aisles.

There were some people in there, not many. I
noticed something about them. They were all dressed up in suede and fancy
denim, like people at a terrific party in some movie, but they were buying the
cheapest of everything. Their baskets were filled as though by gnarled men and
women wearing shabby pants or faded kerchiefs, but the men were all young and
tanned and wearing platform shoes, and the women were all made up with false
eyelashes and different-colored fingernails. Also, some of them had food stamps
in their hands.

Another thing. When
these people pushed their carts down the aisles they stood very straight and
were sure of themselves and on top of the world, but when they lowered their
heads to take something off a shelf they looked very worried.

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, Im 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 girl friend, 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
head-shake, 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.