Six
After the weekend, we went back to the old routine until Wednesday evening, when, on the plane back to Los Angeles, Dawn said, “We won’t be going out to dinner tonight.”
“No?”
“My mother’s coming over, with her husband.”
I felt a sudden nervousness. “Oh,” I said.
She laughed at my expression. “Don’t worry, she won’t even remember you.”
“She won’t?”
“And if she does, she won’t care. I’m not sixteen any more.”
Nevertheless, it seemed to me that Dawn was also nervous, and when we got to the house she immediately started finding fault with Wang and the other servants. These servants, a staff of four or five, I almost never saw — except for the cook at breakfast — but now they were abruptly visible, cleaning, carrying things, being yelled at for no particular reason. Dawn had said her mother would arrive at eight, so I went off to my own room with today’s Hollywood Reporter — I was getting so I recognized some of the names in the stories there — until the digital clock read 7:55. Then I went out to the living room, got a drink from Wang, and sat there waiting. Dawn was out of both sight and hearing now, probably changing her clothes.
They came in about ten after eight, two short leathery-skinned people in pastel clothing that looked all wrong. Dawn’s mother had on a fuzzy pink sweater of the kind worn by young women twenty years ago, with a stiff-looking skirt and jacket in checks of pale green and white. Her shoes were white and she carried a white patent leather purse with a brass clasp. None of the parts went together, though it was understandable that they would all belong in the same wardrobe. She looked like a blind person who’d been dressed by an indifferent volunteer.
Her husband, as short as she was but considerably thinner, was dressed more consistently, in white casual shoes, pale blue slacks, white plastic belt, and white and blue short-sleeved shirt. He had a seamed and bony face, the tendons stood out on his neck, and his elbows looked like the kind of bone soothsayers once used to tell the future. With his thin black hair slicked to the side over his browned scalp, and his habit of leaning slightly forward from the waist at all times, and his surprisingly bright pale blue eyes, he looked like a finalist in some Senior Citizens’ golf tournament.
I stood up when the doorbell rang, and moved tentatively forward as Wang let them both in, but I was saved from introducing (explaining) myself by Dawn’s sudden arrival from the opposite direction. Striding forward in a swirl of floor-length white skirt, she held both arms straight out from the shoulder and cried, “Mother! Leo! Delighted!”
All I could do was stare. She had redone herself from top to bottom, had changed her hair, covered herself with necklaces and bracelets and rings, made up her face differently, dressed herself in a white ballgown I’d never seen before, and she was coming forward with such patently false joy that I could hardly believe I’d ever watched her do a good job of acting. I was suddenly reminded of that whore back in New York, and I realized that now Dawn herself was pretending to be Dawn Devayne. Some imitation Dawn Devayne, utterly impregnable and larger than life, had been wrapped around the original, and the astonishing thing was, the real Dawn Devayne was just as bad at imitating Dawn Devayne as that whore had been.
I don’t mean to say that finally I saw Estelle again, tucked away inside those layers of Dawn, as I had seen the Hispanic hidden inside the whore. It was Dawn Devayne, the one I had come to know over the last week, who was inside this masquerade.
But now Dawn was introducing me, saying, “Mother, this is a friend of mine called Orry. Orry, this is my mother, Mrs. Hettick, and her husband Leo.”
Leo gave me a firm if bony handclasp, and a nod of his pointed jaw. “Good to know you,” he said.
Dawn’s mother gave me a sharp look. Inside her mismatched vacation clothing and her plump body and her expensive beauty shop hair treatment she was some kind of scrawny bird. She said, “You in pictures?”
“No, I’m not.”
“Seen you someplace.”
“Come along, everybody,” Dawn said, swirling and swinging her arms so all her jewelry jangled, “we’ll sit out by the pool for a while.”
I didn’t think there was anything wrong with the evening except that Dawn was so tense all the time. Her mother, whom I’d never met before except when she was yelling at me, did a lot of talking about arguments she’d had with different people in stores — “So then I said, so then she said...” — but she wasn’t terrible about it, and she did have an amusing way of phrasing herself sometimes. Leo Hettick, who sat to my right in the formal dining room where we had our formal dinner, was an old Navy man as it turned out, who’d done a full thirty years and got out in 1972, so he and I talked about different tours we’d spent, ships we’d been on, what we thought of different ports and things like that. Meantime, Dawn mostly listened to her mother, pretending the things she said were funnier than they were.
What started the fight was when Mrs. Hettick turned to me, over the parfait and coffee, and said, “You gonna be number five?”
I had to pretend I didn’t know what she was talking about. “I beg pardon?”
“You’re living here, aren’t you?”
“I’m a houseguest,” I said. “For a couple of weeks.”
“I know that kind of houseguest,” she said. “I’ve seen a lot of them.”
Dawn said, “Mother, eat your parfait.” Her tension had suddenly closed down in from all that sprightliness, had become very tightly knotted and quiet.
Her mother ignored her. Watching me with her quick bird eyes she said, “You can’t be worse than any of the others. The first one was a child molester, you know, and the second was a faggot.”
“Stop, Mother,” Dawn said.
“The third was impotent,” her mother said. “He couldn’t get it up if the flag went by. What do you think of that?”
“I don’t think people should talk about other people’s marriages,” I said.
Leo Hettick said, “Edna, let it go now.”
“You stay out of this, Leo,” she told him, and turned back to say to me, “The whole world talks about my daughter’s marriages, why shouldn’t I? If you are number five, you’ll find your picture in newspapers you wouldn’t use to wrap fish.”
“I don’t think I read those papers,” I said.
“No, but my mother does,” Dawn said. Some deep bitterness had twisted her face into someone I’d never seen before. “My mother has the instincts of a pig,” she said. “Show her some mud and she can’t wait to start rooting in it.
“Being your mother, I get plenty of mud to root in.”
I said, “I was the first husband, Mrs. Hettick, and I always thought you were the child molester.”
“Oh, Orry,” Dawn said; not angry but sad, as though I’d just made some terrible mistake that we both would suffer for.
Slowly, delightedly, as though receiving an unexpected extra dessert, Mrs. Hettick turned to stare at me, considering me, observing me. Slowly she nodded, slowly she said, “By God, you are, aren’t you? That filthy sailor.”