As for the party atmosphere, that was more apparent than real. Dawn Devayne and Rod and Wally and June’s hippie-type friend did a lot of loud talking, mostly anecdotes about the movie world or the record business, to which June’s friend belonged, but the rest of us were no more than audience. We laughed at the right moments, and otherwise sat silent, eating one platter of Chinese food after another. Rounds of drinks kept being ordered, but I let them pile up in front of me — four glasses, eventually — while I drank tea.
Rod drove us back home. Again Dawn Devayne sat up front with him, while I shared the back seat with Rod’s friend, who was called Dennis. In the dark, wearing his black jumpsuit and with his pale-skinned hands and face and wispy yellow hair, Dennis was startling to look at, almost unearthly. And when he touched the back of my hand with a fingertip, his skin was so cold that I automatically flinched away.
He ignored that; maybe people always flinched when he touched them. “I know who you are,” he said, and his small head floating there had a smile on it that was very sweet and innocent, as though he were on his way to his First Communion. My God, I thought, you’d last six hours on a ship. They’d shove what was left in a canvas bag.
I said, “You do?”
“Orry,” he said. “That’s not a common name.”
“No, I guess it isn’t.”
“You were in the Navy.”
“I still am.”
“You were married to Dawn.”
“That’s right,” I said.
He turned his sweet smile and his wide eyes toward the two heads up front. They were talking seriously together now, Dawn Devayne and Rod, about some disagreement they were having with the director, and what they should do about it tomorrow.
Dennis, staring and smiling so hard that it was as though he wanted to burrow into their ears and live inside their brains, said, “It must have been wonderful. To know her at the very beginning of her career. If only I’d met Rod, all those years ago.” When he looked at me again, his eyes were luminous. Maybe he was crying. “I keep everything that’s ever written about him,” he said. “I have dozens of scrapbooks, dozens. That’s how I know about you.”
“Ah.”
“Do you keep scrapbooks?”
“About what?” Then I understood. “Oh, you mean Dawn Devayne.”
“You don’t? I’ll never be blase about Rod. Never.”
In the house Dawn Devayne held my forearm and said, “Orry, I’m bushed. I’m sorry, baby, I can’t talk tonight. Come along with me tomorrow, all right? We’ll have some time together.”
“All right.” I was disappointed, but she did look tired. Also, my own body was still more on East Coast time, three hours later; I wouldn’t mind sleeping, after such a long day. I don’t know why it is, but emotions are exhausting.
“I’m going to swim for five minutes,” she said, “and then hit the sack. We get up at seven around here. You ready for that?”
“I will be.” And I smiled at her. God knows she wasn’t Estelle, but I felt just the same as though I knew her. We were old friends in some other way, entirely different and apart from reality. I suspected that was a form of human contact she had learned to develop, as a means of dealing with all the faces a movie star has to meet. It wasn’t the real thing, but that didn’t matter. It was a friendly falseness, a fakery that made life smoother.
I watched her swim. She was naked, and she spent as much time diving as she did swimming, and it was the same nude body that had excited me so much in the magazine pictures, and yet my sexual feelings were thwarted, imprisoned. Maybe it was because I was being a peeping torn and felt ashamed of myself. Or maybe it was because, in accepting the counterfeit friendship of Dawn Devayne, I had lessened the existence of Estelle Anlic just that much more, and I felt guilty about that. Whatever it was, for as long as I looked at her I kept feeling the lust rise, and then become strangled, and then rise, and then become strangled.
I should have stopped looking, of course, but I couldn’t. The most I could do was close my eyes from time to time and argue with myself. But I couldn’t leave, I had to stay kneeling at a corner of the darkened room, with one edge of the drapes pulled back just far enough to peek out, during the ten minutes that Dawn Devayne spent moving, diving, swimming, the green-white underwater lights and yellow surrounding lanterns glinting and flashing off the wet sheen slickness of her flesh. Drops of water caught in her hair made tiny flashing round rainbows. Her legs were long, her body strong and sleek, a tanned thoroughbred, graceful and self-contained.
When at last she put on a white robe and walked away, I awkwardly stood, padded across the room by the dim light filtering through the drapes, and slid into the cool bed. A few seconds later, as though waiting for me to settle, the pool lights went off.
Four
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.”