Enough! (A Travesty and Ordo) (28 page)

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.

Dawns 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 giftwrapped 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!”

“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.”

FIVE

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?”