“I guess so.”
“It’s just amazing that you never knew. Didn’t any reporters ever come around, any magazine writers?”
“I never knew anything,” I told him. “When the fellows told me about it, I didn’t believe them. Then they showed me the magazine.”
“Well, it’s just astonishing.” But he didn’t seem to imply that I might be a liar. He kept smiling at me, and shaking his head with his astonishment.
“It sure was astonishing to me,” I said.
He nodded, letting me know he understood completely. “So the first thing you thought,” he said, “you had to see her again, just had to say hello. Am I right?”
“Not to begin with.” It was hard talking when looking directly at him, because his face was so full of smiling eagerness. I leaned forward a little, resting my elbows on my knees, and looked across the room. There was a huge full-color blown-up photograph of a horse taking up most of the opposite wall. I said, looking at the horse, “At first I just thought it was eerie. Of course, nice for Estelle. Or Dawn, I guess. Nice for her, I was glad things worked out for her. But for me it was really strange.”
“In what way strange, Orry?” This time he sounded like a chaplain, sympathetic and understanding.
“It took me a while to figure that out.” I chanced looking at him again, and he had just a small smile going now, he looked expectant and receptive. It was easier to face him with that expression. I said, “There was a picture of Estelle and me in the magazine, from our wedding day.”
“Got it!” He bounded up from the sofa and hurried over to the desk. I became aware then that most of the knick-knacks and things around on the desk and the tables and everywhere had some connection with golf; small statues of golfers, a gold golf ball on a gold tee, things like that.
Byron Cartwright came back with a small photo in a frame. He handed it to me, smiling, then sat down again and said, “That’s the one, right?”
“Yes,” I said, looking at it. Then I turned my face toward him, not so much to see him as to let him see me. “You can recognize me from that picture.”
“I know that,” he said. “I was noticing that, Orry, you’re remarkable. You haven’t aged a bit. I’d hate to see a picture of me taken sixteen years ago.”
“I’m not talking about getting older,” I said. “I’m talking about getting different. I’m not different.”
“I believe you’re right.” He moved the class-ring hand to pat my knee, then put it back on the sofa. “Dawn told me a little about you, Orry,” he said. “She told me you were the gentlest man she’d ever met. She told me she’s thought about you often, she’s always hoped you found happiness somewhere. I believe you’re still the same good man you were then.”
“The same.” I pointed at Estelle in the photo. “But that isn’t Dawn Devayne.”
“Ha ha,” he said. “I’ll have to go along with you there.”
I looked at him again. “How did that happen? How do people change, or not change?”
“Big questions, Orry.” If a smile can be serious, his smile had turned serious. But still friendly.
“I kept thinking about it,” I said. I almost told him about Fran then, and the changes all around me, but at the last second I decided not to. “So I came out to talk to her about it,” I said. And then, because I suddenly realized this could be a brushoff, that Byron Cartwright might have the job of smiling at me and being friendly and telling me I wasn’t going to be allowed to see Estelle, I added to that, “If she wants to see me.”
“She does, Orry,” he said. “Of course she does.” And he acted surprised. But I could see he was acting surprised.
I said, “You were supposed to find out if I’d changed or not, weren’t you? If I was going to be a pest or something.”
Grinning, he said, “She told me you weren’t stupid, Orry. But you could have been an impostor, you know, maybe some maniac or something. Dawn wants to see you, if you’re still the Orry she used to know.”
“That’s the problem.”
He laughed hugely, as though I’d said a joke. “She’s filming up in Stockton today,” he said, “but she’ll be flying back when they’re done. She wants you to go out to the house, and she’ll meet you there.”
“Her house?”
“Well, naturally.” Chuckling at me, he got to his feet, saying, “You’ll be driven out there now, unless you have other plans.”
“No, nothing.” I also stood.
“I’ll phone down for the car. You came in through the parking area?”
“Yes.”
“Just go straight back down. The car will be by the elevators.”
“Thank you.”
We shook hands again, at his prompting, and this time he held my hand in both of his and gazed at me. The religious feeling was there once more, this time as though he were an evangelist and I a cripple he was determined would walk. Total sincerity filled his eyes and his smile. “She’s my little girl now, too, Orry,” he said.
The envelope containing the day clerk’s pictures was gone from the table out front.
“Hello, Harry,” I said. He was holding the door open for me.
He gave me a kind of roguish grin, and waggled a finger at me. “You didn’t tell me you were pals with Dawn Devayne.”
“It was a long story,” I said.
“Good thing I didn’t have anything bad to say, huh?” And I could see that inside his joking he was very upset.
I didn’t know what to answer. I gave him an apologetic smile and got into the car and he shut the door behind me. It wasn’t until we were out on Sunset driving across the line into Beverly Hills, that I decided what to say: “I don’t really know Dawn Devayne,” I told him. “I haven’t seen her for sixteen years. I wasn’t trying to be smart with you or anything.”
“Sixteen years, huh?” That seemed to make things better. Lifting his head to look at me in the rear-view mirror, he said, “Old high-school pals?”
I might as well tell him the truth; he’d probably find out sooner or later anyway. “I was married to her.”
The eyes in the rear-view mirror got sharper, and then fuzzier, and then he looked out at Sunset Boulevard and shifted position so I could no longer see his face in the mirror. I don’t suppose he disbelieved me. I guess he didn’t know what attitude to take. He didn’t know what to think about me, or about what I’d told him, or about anything. He didn’t say another word the whole trip.
The house was in Bel Air, way up in the hills at the very end of a curving steep street with almost no houses on it. What residences I did see were very spread out and expensive-looking, though mostly only one story high, and tucked away in folds and dimples of the slope, above or below the road. Many had flat roofs with white stones sprinkled on top for decoration. Like pound cake with confectioner’s sugar on it.
At the end of the street was a driveway with a No Trespassing sign. Great huge plants surrounded the entrance to the driveway; they reminded me of the plants in Byron Cartwright’s outer office, except that these were real. But the leaves were so big and shiny and green that the real ones looked just as fake as the plastic ones.
The driveway curved upward to the right and then came to a closed chain-link gate. The driver stopped next to a small box mounted on a pipe beside the driveway, and pushed a button on the box. After a minute a metallic voice spoke from the box, and the driver responded, and then the gate swung open and we drove on up, still through this forest of plastic-like plants, until we suddenly came out on a flat place where there was a white stucco house with many windows. The center section was two stories high, with tall white pillars out front, but the wings angling back on both sides were only one story, with flat roofs. These side sections were bent back at acute angles, so that they really did look like wings, so that the taller middle section would be the body of the bird. Either that, or the central part could be thought of as a ship, with the side sections as the wake.