She didn’t say anything to that, either. I said it once or twice more, and said some other things, and then I left and went back to the base.
I was shaving the next morning when I suddenly remembered that picture, the one in the magazine of Estelle and me on our wedding day. We were squinting there in the sunlight, the both of us, and now I was squinting again because the light bulb over the mirror was too bright. Shaving, I looked at myself, looked at my nose and my eyes and my ears, and here I was. I was still here. The same guy. Same short haircut, same eyebrows, same chin.
The same guy.
What did Fran want from me, anyway? Just because it turns out I used to be married to somebody famous, all of a sudden I’m supposed to be different? I’m not any different, I’m the same guy I always was. People don’t just change, they have ways that they are, and that’s what they are. That’s who they are, that’s what you mean by personality. The way a person is.
Then I thought: Estelle changed.
That’s right. Estelle Anlic is Dawn Devayne now. She’s changed, she’s somebody else. There isn’t any – she isn’t – there isn’t any Estelle Anlic any more, nowhere on the face of the earth.
But it isn’t the same as if she died, because her memories are still there inside Dawn Devayne, she’d remember being the girl with the mother that drove the bus, and she’d remember marrying the sailor in San Diego in 1958, and even in that article I’d read there’d been a part where she was remembering being Estelle Anlic and working as a movie cashier in San Francisco. But still she was changed, she was somebody else now, she was different. Like a wooden house turning itself into a brick house. How could she . . . how could anybody do that? How could anybody do that?
Then I thought: Estelle Anlic is Dawn Devayne now, but I’m still me. Ordo Tupikos, the same guy. But if she was – If I’m –
It was hard even to figure out the question. If she was that back then, and if she’s this now, and if I was that . . .
I kept on shaving. More and more of my face came out from behind the white cream, and it was the same face. Getting older, a little older every minute, but not—
Not different.
I finished shaving. I looked at that face, and then I scrubbed it with hot water and dried it on a towel. And after mess I went to Headquarters office and put in for leave. Twenty-two days, all I had saved up.
The first place I went was New York, on the bus, where I looked in a magazine they have there called Cue that tells you what movies are playing all over the city. A Dawn Devayne movie called “The Captain’s Pearls” was showing in a theater on West 86th Street, which was forty-six blocks uptown from the bus terminal, so I walked up there and sat through the second half of a Western with Charles Bronson and then The Captain’s Pearls came on.
The story was about an airline captain with two girlfriends both named Pearl, one of them in Paris and one in New York. Dawn Devayne played the one in New York, and the advertising agency she works for opens an office in Paris and she goes there to head it, and the Paris girlfriend is a model who gets hired by Dawn Devayne for a commercial for the captain’s airline, and then the captain has to keep the two girls from finding out he’s going out with both of them. It was a comedy.
This movie was made in 1967, which was only nine years after I was married to Estelle, so I should have been able to recognize her, but she just wasn’t there. I stared and stared and stared at that woman on the screen, and the only person she reminded me of was Dawn Devayne. I mean, from before I knew who she was. But there wasn’t anything of Estelle there. Not the voice, not the walk, not the smile, not anything.
But sexy. I saw what that article writer meant, because if you looked at Dawn Devayne your first thought was she’d be terrific in bed. And then you’d decide she’d also be terrific otherwise, to talk with or take a trip together or whatever it was. And then you’d realize since she was so all-around terrific she wouldn’t have to settle for anybody but an all-around terrific guy, which would leave you out, so you’d naturally idolize her. I mean, you’d want it without any idea in your head that you could ever get it.
I was thinking all that, and then I thought, But I’ve had it! And then I tried to put together arms-around-neck ice-tongs-stupid Estelle Anlic with this terrific female creature on the screen here, and I just couldn’t do it. I mean, not even with a fantasy. If I had a fantasy about going to bed with Dawn Devayne, not even in my fantasy did I see myself in bed with Estelle.
After the movie I walked back downtown toward the bus terminal, because I’d left my duffel bag in a locker there. It was only around four-thirty in the afternoon, but down around 42nd Street the whores were already out, strolling on the sidewalks and standing in the doorways of shoe stores. The sight of a Navy uniform really agitates a whore, and half a dozen of them called out to me as I walked along, but I didn’t answer.
Then one of them stepped out from a doorway and stood right in my path and said, “Hello, sailor. You off a ship?”
I started to walk around her, but then I stopped dead and stared, and I said, “You look like Dawn Devayne!”
She grinned and ducked her head, looking pleased with herself. “You really think so, sailor?”
She did. She was wearing a blonde wig like Dawn Devayne’s hair style, and her eyes and mouth were made up like Dawn Devayne, and she’d even fixed her eyebrows to look like Dawn Devayne’s eyebrows.
Only at a second look none of it worked. The wig didn’t look like real hair, and the make-up was too heavy, and the eyebrows looked like little false moustaches. And down inside all that phony stuff she was Puerto Rican or Cuban or something like that. It was all like a Halloween costume.
She was poking a finger at my arm, looking up at me sort of slantwise in imitation of a Dawn Devayne movement I’d just seen in The Captain’s Pearls. “Come on, sailor,” she said. “Wanna fuck a movie star?”
“No,” I said. It was all too creepy. “No, no,” I said, and went around her and hurried on down the street.
And she shouted after me, “You been on that ship too long! What you want is Robert Redford!”
This was my first time in Los Angeles since 1963, when the Gulf of Tonkin incident got me transferred from a ship in the Mediterranean to a ship in the Pacific. They’d flown me with a bunch of other guys from Naples to Washington, then by surface transportation to Chicago and by air to Los Angeles and Honolulu, where I met my ship. I’d had a two-day layover in Los Angeles, and now I remembered thinking then about looking up Estelle. But I didn’t do it, mostly because five years had already gone by since I’d last seen her, and also because her mother might start making trouble again if she caught me there.
The funny thing is, that was the year Estelle first became Dawn Devayne, in the movie called Bubbletop. Now I wondered what might have happened if I’d actually found her back then, got in touch somehow. I’d never seen Bubbletop, so I didn’t know if by 1963 she was already this new person, this Dawn Devayne, if she’d already changed so completely that Estelle Anlic couldn’t be found in there any more. If I’d met her that time, would something new have started? Would my whole life have been shifted, would I now be somebody in the movie business instead of being a sailor? I tried to see myself as that movie person; who would I be, what would I be like? Would I be different?