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.”
“Well, she looks good.”
“The two of you,” he insisted. “Together. When’s your leave up, Orry? When do you have to go back to the Navy?”
“In two weeks.”
“Do you want me to fix it?”
“Fix it?”
“We could get you an early release,” he said. “Get you out of the Navy.”
“I’ve only got two years before I collect my pension.”
“We could probably work something out,” he told me. “Make some arrangement with the Navy. Believe me, Orry, I know people who know people.”
I said, “But I couldn’t go on living at Dawn’s house.”
“Orry,” he said, chuckling at me and patting my arm. “You were her first love, Orry. You’re her man. Look how she took you right in again, the minute you showed up. Look how well you’re getting along. In some little corner of that girl, Orry, you’ve always been her husband. She left the others, but she was taken away from you.”
I stared at him. “Marry her? Dawn Devayne? Mr. Cartwright, I don’t—”
“By. Call me By. And think about it, Orry. Will you do that? Just think about it.”
There was no question in the Hacker household about our belonging together, Dawn and me. We’d been initially shown by a uniformed maid to a bedroom we were to share on the second floor, overlooking Hacker’s private three-hole golf course, and by one o’clock in the morning I was ready to return to it and go to sleep, although the party was still going strong. I found Dawn with a group of people singing show tunes around the piano, and I told her, “I’m going to sleep now.”
“Stick around five minutes, we’ll go up together.”
I did — it’s surprising how many old lyrics we all remember, the words to songs we no longer know we know — and then we found our way to the right bedroom, used the private bath next door, and went to bed. When I reached for Dawn, though, she laughed and said, “You must be kidding.”
I was. I realized I was too sleepy to have any true interest in sex, that I’d started only out of a sense of obligation, that I’d felt it was my duty to perform at this point. “You’re right,” I said. “See you in the morn—
“You’re a good old boy, Orry,” she said, and kissed my chin, and rolled away, and I guess we both went right to sleep.
When I woke up it was still dark, but light of some sort was glittering faintly outside the window, and there were distant voices. I’d lived with Dawn Devayne less than a week, but already I was used to the rounded shapes of her asleep beside me, and already I missed the numerals of the digital clock shimmering white in the darkness. I didn’t know what time it was, but it had to be very late.
I got up from bed and looked out the window, and the illumination came from floodlights over the golf course. Lennie Hacker and some of his male guests were playing golf out there. I recognized Byron Cartwright among them. Lennie Hacker’s distinctive nasal voice said something, and the others laughed, and somebody drove a white ball high up out of the light, briefly out of existence before it suddenly bounced, small and white and clear, on the clipped grass of the green.
The men moved as a group, accompanied by a servant driving a golf cart filled with bags and clubs. A portable bar was mounted on the back of the cart, and they were all having drinks from it, but no one appeared drunk, or sloppy, or tired. None of them were particularly young, but none of them were in any way old.
The golf course made a wobbly triangle around an artificial pond, with the first tee and the third green forming the angle nearest the house. As the players moved away toward the first green, I looked beyond the lit triangle, seeing only black darkness, but sensing the other Palm Springs estates around us, and then the great circle of desert around that. Desert. These men — some men — had come out to this desert and by force of will had converted it into a royal domain. “To live like kings.” That’s a cliché, but here it was the truth. In high school I read that the ancient Roman emperors had ordered snow carted down from the mountain peaks to cool their palaces in summer. It has always been the prerogative of kings to make a comfortable toy of their environment. Here, where a hundred years ago they would have broiled and starved and died grindingly of thirst, these men strolled on clipped green grass under floodlights, laughing together and reaching for their drinks from the back of a golf cart.
If I married Dawn Devayne—
I shook my head, and closed my eyes, and then turned away from the window to look at the mound of her asleep in the bed. It was a good thing I’d been warned about Byron Cartwright’s sentimental errors, or I might actually have started dreaming about such impossibilities, and wound up a character in another Byron Cartwright horror story: “And the poor fellow actually proposed to her!” If an Indian who had grubbed his lean and careful existence from this desert a hundred years ago were to return here now, how could he set up his tent? How could he take up his life again? He’s never been here. I was married to Estelle Anlic once, a long time ago. I was never married to Dawn Devayne.