There were photographs with the article, full-page color pictures of Dawn Devayne with her clothes off, and when I finished reading I sat there on the toilet a while longer looking at the pictures and trying to remember Estelle. Nothing. The face, the eyes, the smile, all different. The stomach and legs were different. Even the nipples didn’t remind me of Estelle Anlic’s nipples.
There’s something wrong, I thought. I wondered if maybe this Dawn Devayne woman had a criminal record or was wanted for murder somewhere or something like that, and she’d just paid Estelle money to borrow her life story. Was that possible?
It sure didn’t seem possible that this sexy woman was Estelle. I know it was sixteen years, but how much can one person change? I sat studying the pictures until I noticed I was beginning to get an erection, so I left the head and went back to work.
All I could think about, the next three days, was Dawn Devayne. I was once married to her, married to a sexy movie star. Me. I just couldn’t get used to the idea.
And the other guys didn’t help. Norm and Stan and Pat spread the word, and pretty soon all the guys were coming around, even some of the younger officers, talking and grinning and winking and all that. Nobody came right out with the direct question, but what they really wanted to know was what it was like to be in bed with Dawn Devayne.
And what could I tell them? I didn’t know what it was like to be in bed with Dawn Devayne. I knew what it was like to be in bed with Estelle Anlic – or anyway I had a kind of vague memory, after sixteen years – but that wasn’t what they wanted to know, and anyway I didn’t feel like telling them. She was a teenage girl, sixteen (though she told me nineteen), and I was twenty-one, and neither of us was exactly a genius about sex, but we had fun. I remember she had very very soft arms and she liked to have her arms around my neck, and she laughed with her mouth wide open, and she always drowned her french fries in so much ketchup I used to tell her I had to eat them with ice tongs and one time in bed she finally admitted she didn’t know what ice tongs were and she cried because she was sure she was stupid, and we had sex that time in order for me to tell her (a) she wasn’t stupid, and (b) I loved her anyway even though she was stupid, and that’s the one time in particular I have any memory of at all, which is mostly because that was the time I learned I could control myself and hold back ejaculation almost as long as I wanted, almost forever. We were both learning about things then, we were both just puppies rolling in a basket of wool, but the guys didn’t want to hear anything like that, it would just depress them. And I didn’t want to tell them about it either. Their favorite sex story anyway was one that Pat used to tell about being in bed with a girl with a candle in her ass. That’s what they really wanted me to tell them, that Dawn Devayne had a candle in her ass.
But even though I couldn’t tell them any stories that would satisfy them, they kept coming around, they kept on and on with the same subject, they couldn’t seem to let it go. It fascinated them, and every time they saw me they got reminded and fascinated all over again. In fact, a couple of the guys started calling me “Devayne”, as though that was going to be my new nickname, until one time I picked up a wrench and patted it into my other palm and went over to the guy and said:
“My name is Orry.”
He looked surprised, and a little scared. He said:
“Sure. Sure, I know that.”
I said:
“Let me hear you say it.”
He said:
“Jeez, Orry, it was just a—”
“Okay, then,” I said, and went back over to where I was working, and that was the last I heard of that.
But it wasn’t the last I heard of Dawn Devayne. For instance, I was more or less going then with a woman in New London named Fran Skiburg, who was divorced from an Army career man and had custody of the three children. She was part Norwegian and part Belgian and her husband had been almost all German. Fran and I would go to the movies sometimes, or she’d cook me a meal, but it wasn’t serious. Mostly, we didn’t even go to bed together. But then somebody told her about Dawn Devayne, and the next time I saw Fran she was a different person. She kept grinning and winking all through dinner, and she hustled the kids to bed earlier than usual, and then sort of crowded me into the living room. She liked me to rub her feet sometimes, because she was standing all day at the bank, so I sat on the sofa and she kicked off her slippers and while I rubbed her feet she kept opening and closing her knees and giggling at me.
Well, I was looking up her skirt anyway, so I slid my hand up from her feet, and the next thing we were rolling around on the wall-to-wall carpet together. She was absolutely all over me, nervous and jumpy and full of loud laughter, all the time wanting to change position or do this and that. Up till then, my one complaint about Fran was that she’d just lie there; now all of a sudden she was acting like the star of an X-movie.
I couldn’t figure it out, until after it was all finished and I was lying there on the carpet on my back, breathing like a diver with the bends. Then Fran, with this big wild-eyed smile, came looming over me, scratching my chest with her fingernails and saying, “What would you like to do to me? What do you really want to do to me?”
This was after. I panted at her for a second, and then I said, “What?”
And she said, “What would you do to me if I was Dawn Devayne?”
Then I understood. I sat up and said, “Who told you that?”
“What would you do? Come on, Orry, let’s do something!”
“Do what? We just did everything!”
“There’s lots more! There’s lots more!” Then she leaned down close to my ear, where I couldn’t see her face, and whispered, “You don’t want me to have to say it.”
I don’t know if she had anything special in mind, but I don’t think so. I think she was just excited in general, and wanted something different to happen. Anyway, I pushed her off and got to my feet and said, “I don’t know anything about any Dawn Devayne or any kind of crazy sex stuff. That’s no way to act.”
She sat there on the green carpet with her legs curled to the side, looking something like the nude pictures in Pat’s magazines except whiter and a little heavier, and she stared up at me without saying anything at all. Her mouth was open because she was looking upward so her expression seemed to be mainly surprised. I felt grumpy. I sat down on the sofa and put on my underpants.
And all at once Fran jumped up and grabbed half her clothes and ran out of the room. I finished getting dressed, and sat on the sofa a little longer, and then went out to the kitchen and ate a bowl of raisin bran. When Fran still didn’t come back, I went to her bedroom and looked in through the open door, and she wasn’t there. I said, “Fran?”
No answer.
The bathroom door was closed, so I knocked on it, but nothing happened. I turned the knob and the door was locked. I said, “Fran?”
A mumble sounded from in there.
“Fran? You all right?”
“Go away.”
“What?”
“Go away!”
That was the last she said. I tried talking to her through the door, and I tried to get her to come out, and I tried to find out what the problem was, but she wouldn’t say anything else. There wasn’t any sound of crying or anything, she was just sitting in there by herself. After a while I said, “I have to get back to the base, Fran.”