He said, “I suppose you can prove your identity.”
That surprised me. “Of course,” I said. “I still look the same.” I still look the same.
“And what is it you want?”
“To see Estelle. Dawn. Miss Devayne.”
“You told my secretary you were with the Navy.”
“I’m in the Navy.”
“You’re due to retire pretty soon, aren’t you?”
“Two years,” I said.
“Let me be blunt, Mr Tupikos,” he said. “Are you looking for money?”
“Money?” I couldn’t think what he was talking about. (Later, going over it in my mind, I realized what he’d been afraid of, but just at that moment I was bewildered.) “Money for what?” I asked him.
He didn’t answer. Instead, he said, “Then why show up like this, after all these years?”
“There was something in a magazine. A friend showed it to me.”
“Yes?”
“Well, it surprised me, that’s all.”
“What surprised you?”
“About Estelle turning into Dawn Devayne.”
There was a very short silence. But it wasn’t an ordinary empty silence, it was a kind of slammed-shut silence, a startled silence. Then he said, “You mean you didn’t know? You just found out?”
“It was some surprise,” I said.
He gave out with a long loud laugh, turning his head away from the phone so it wouldn’t hurt my ears. But I could still hear it. Then he said, “God damn, Mr Tupikos, that’s a new one.”
I had nothing to say to that.
“All right,” he said. “Where are you?”
I told him the name of the motel.
“I’ll get back to you,” he said. “Some time today.”
“Thank you,” I said.
The phone booth was out in front of the motel, and I had to go back through the office to get to the inner courtyard and my room. When I walked into the office the day clerk motioned to me. “Come here.” His expression now portrayed pride.
I went over and he handed me a large black-and-white photograph; what they call a glossy. The blacks in it were very dark and solid, which made it a little bit hard to make out what was going on, but the picture seemed to have been taken in a parking garage. Two people were in the foreground. I couldn’t swear to it, but it looked as though Ernest Borgnine was strangling the day clerk.
“Whadaya think of that?”
I didn’t know what I thought of it. But when people hand you a picture – their wife, their girlfriend, their children, their dog, their new house, their boat, their garden – what you say is very nice. I handed the picture back. “Very nice,” I said.
Everybody knows about the movie stars’ names being embedded in the sidewalks of Hollywood Boulevard, but it’s always strange when you see it. There are the squares of pavement, and on every square is a gold outline of a five-pointed star, and in every other star there is the name of a movie star. Every year, fewer of those names mean anything. The idea of the names is immortality, but what they’re really about is death.
I took a walk for a while after talking to Byron Cartwright, and I walked along two or three blocks of Hollywood Boulevard with some family group behind me that had a child with a loud piercing voice, and the child kept wanting to know who people were:
“Daddy, who’s Vilma Banky?”
“Daddy, who’s Charles Farrell?”
“Daddy, who’s Dolores Costello?”
“Daddy, who’s Conrad Nagel?”
The father’s answers were never loud enough for me to hear, but what could he have said? “She was a movie star.” “He used to be in silent movies, a long time ago.” Or maybe, “I don’t know. Emil Jannings? I don’t know.”
I didn’t look back, so I have no idea what the family looked like, or even if the child was a boy or a girl, but pretty soon I hated listening to them, so I turned in at a fast-food place to have a hamburger and onion rings and a Coke. I sat at one of the red formica tables to eat, and at the table across the plastic partition from me was another family – father, mother, son, daughter – and the daughter was saying, “Why did they put those names there anyway?”
“Just to be nice,” the mother said.
The son said, “Because they’re buried there.”
The daughter stared at him, not knowing if that was true or not. Then she said, “They are not!”
“Sure they are,” the son said. “They bury them standing up, so they can all fit. And they all wear the clothes from their most famous movie. Like their cowboy hats and the long gowns and their Civil War Army uniforms.”
The father, chuckling, said, “And their white telephones?”
The son gave his father a hesitant smile and a headshake, saying, “I don’t get it.”
“That’s okay,” the father said. He grinned and ruffled the son’s hair, but I could see he was irritated. He was older, so his memory stretched back farther, so his jokes wouldn’t always mean anything to his son, whose memories had started later – and would probably end later. The son had reminded his father that the father would some day die.
After I ate I didn’t feel like walking on the stars’ names any more. I went up to the next parallel street, which is called Yucca, and took that over to Highland Avenue and then on back to the motel.
When I walked into the office the day clerk said, “Got a message for you.” His expression was tough and secretive, like a character in a spy movie. The hotel clerk in a spy movie who is really a part of the spy organization; this is the point where he tells the hero that the Gestapo is in his room.
“A message?”
“From GLA,” he said. His face flipped to the next expression, like a digital clock moving on to the next number. This one showed make-believe comic envy used to hide real envy. I wondered if he really did feel envy or if he was just practicing being an actor by pretending to show envy. No; pretending to hide envy. Maybe he himself was actually feeling envy but was hiding it by pretending to be someone who was showing envy by trying to hide it. That was too confusing to think about; it made me dizzy, like looking too long off the fantail of a ship at the swirls of water directly beneath the stern. Layers and layers of twisting white foam with bottomless black underneath; but then it all organizes itself into swinging straight white lines of wake.
I said, “What did they want?”
“They’ll send a car for you at three o’clock.” Flip; friendliness, conspiracy. “You could do me a favor.”
“I could?”
From under the counter he took out a tan manila envelope, then halfway withdrew from it another glossy photograph; I couldn’t see the subject. “This,” he said, and slid the photo back into the envelope. Twisting the red string on the two little round closure tabs of the envelope, he said, “Just leave it in the office, you know? Just leave it some place where they can see it.”
“Oh,” I said. “All right.” And I took the envelope.
The car was a black Cadillac limousine with a uniformed chauffeur who held the door for me and called me, “sir”. It didn’t seem to matter to him that he was picking me up at a kind of seedy motel, or that I was wearing clothes that were somewhat shabby and out of date. (I wear civvies so seldom that I almost never pay any attention to what clothing I own or what condition it’s in.)
I had never been in a limousine before, with or without a chauffeur. In fact, this was the first time in my life I’d ever ridden in a Cadillac. I spent the first few blocks just looking at the interior of the car, noticing that I had my own radio in the back, and power windows, and that there were separate air-conditioner controls on both sides of the rear seat.