The driver stopped before the main entrance, hopped out, and opened the door for me. “Thanks, Harry,” I said.
Something about me – my eyes, my stance, something – made him soften in his attitude. He nodded as I got out, and almost smiled, and said, “Good luck.”
The Filipino who let me in said his name was Wang, “Miss Dawn told me you were coming,” he said. “She said you should swim.”
“She did?”
“This way. No luggage? This way.”
The inside was supposed to look like a Spanish mission, or maybe an old ranch house. There were shiny dark wood floors, and rough plaster walls painted white, and exposed dark beams in the ceiling, and many rough chandeliers of wood or brass, some with amber glass.
Wang led me through different rooms into a corrider in the right wing, and down the corridor to a large room at the end with bluish-green drapes hanging ceiling-to-floor on two walls, making a great L of underwater cloth through which light seemed to shimmer. A king-size bed with a blue spread took up very little of the room, which had a lot of throw rugs here and there on the dark-stained random-plank floor. Wang went to one of the dressers – there were three, two with mirrors – and opened a drawer full of clothing. “Swim suit,” he said. “Change of linen. Everything.” Going to one of two doors in the end wall, he opened it and waved at the jackets and coats and slacks in the closet there. “Everything.” He tugged the sleeve of a white terrycloth robe hanging inside the door. “Very nice robe.”
“Everything’s fine,” I said.
“Here.” He shut the closet door, opened the other one, flicked a light switch. “Bathroom,” he said. “Everything here.”
“Fine. Thank you.”
He wasn’t finished. Back by the entrance, he demonstrated the different light switches, then pointed to a lever sticking horizontally out from the wall, and raised a finger to get my complete attention. “Now this,” he said. He pushed the lever down, and the drapes on the two walls silently slid open, moving from the two ends toward the right angle where the walls met.
Beyond the drapes were walls of sliding glass doors, and beyond the glass doors were two separate views. The view to the right, out the end wall, was of a neat clipped lawn sweeping out to a border of those lush green plants. The view straight ahead, of the section enclosed by the three sides of the house, was of a large oval swimming pool, with big urns and statues around it, and with a small narrow white structure on the fourth side, consisting mostly of doors; a cabana, probably, changing rooms for guests who weren’t staying in rooms like this.
Wang showed me that the drapes opened when the lever was pushed down, and closed when it was pulled up. He demonstrated several times; back and forth ran the drapes, indecisively. Then he said, “You swim.”
“All right.”
“Miss Dawn say she be back, seven o’clock.”
The digital clock on one of the dressers read three fifty-two. “All right,” I said, and Wang grinned at me and left.
It was a heated pool. When I finally came out and slipped into the terrycloth robe I felt very rested and comfortable. In the room I found a small bottle of white wine, and a glass, and half a dozen different cheeses on a plate under a glass dome. I had some cheese and wine, and then I shaved, and then I looked at the clothing here.
There was a lot of it, but in all different sizes, so I really didn’t have that much to choose from. Still, I found a pair of soft gray slacks, and a kind of ivory shirt with full sleeves, and a black jacket in a sort of Edwardian style, and in the mirror I almost didn’t recognize myself. I looked taller, and thinner, and successful. I picked up the wine glass and stood in front of the mirror and watched myself drink. All right, I thought. Not bad at all.
I went out by the pool and walked around, wearing the clothes and carrying the wine glass. Part of the area was in late afternoon sun and part in shade. I strolled this way and that, admiring my reflections in the glass doors all around, and trying not to smile too much. I wondered if Wang was watching, and what he thought about me. I wondered if there were other servants around the place, and what kind of job it was to be a servant for a famous movie star. Like being assigned to an Admiral, I supposed. I was once on a ship with a guy who’d been an Admiral’s servant for three years, and he said it was terrific duty, the best in the world. He lost his job because he started sleeping with some other officer’s wife. He always claimed he’d kept strictly away from the Admiral’s family and friends, but there was this Lieutenant Commander who lived in the same area near Arlington, Virginia, and whose wife kept trying to suck up to the Admiral’s wife. That’s how Tony met her, one time when she came over and the Admiral’s wife wasn’t there. According to Tony it wasn’t his fault there was trouble; it was just that the Lieutenant Commander’s wife kept making things so obvious, hanging around all the time, honking horns at him, calling him on the phone in the Admiral’s house. “So they kicked me out,” he said. (Tony wasn’t very popular with the guys on the ship, which probably wasn’t fair, but we couldn’t help it. The rest of us had been assigned here as a normal thing, but he’d been sent to this ship as a punishment. If this was punishment duty, what did that say about the rest of us? Nobody particularly wanted to think about that, so Tony was generally avoided.)
Anyway, he did always claim that the job of servant to the brass was the best duty in the world, and I suppose it is. Except for being the brass, of course, which is probably even better duty, except who thinks that way?
After a while I went back into the room, and the digital clock said six twenty-four. I looked at myself in the mirror one more time, and all of a sudden it occurred to me I was looking at Dawn Devayne’s clothes. Not my clothes. She’d come home, she wouldn’t see somebody looking terrific, she’d see somebody wearing her clothes.
No. I changed into my own things, and went back to the living room by the main entrance. There were long low soft sofas there, in brown corduroy. I sat on one, and read more Hollywood Reporters, and pretty soon Wang came and asked me if I wanted a drink.
I did.
She arrived at twenty after seven, with a bunch of people. It later turned out there were only five, but at first it seemed like hundreds. To me, anyway. I didn’t give them separate existences then; they were just a bunch of laughing, hand-waving, talking people surrounding a beautiful woman named Dawn Devayne.
Dawn Devayne. No question. The clear, bright, level gray eyes. The skin as smooth as a lion’s coat. Those slightly sunken cheeks. (Estelle had round cheeks.) The look of intelligence, sexiness, recklessness. Of course that was Dawn Devayne; I’d seen her in the movies.
I got to my feet, looking through the wide arched doorway from the living room to the entrance hall, where they were clustered around her. That group all bunched there made me realize Dawn Devayne already had her own full life, as much as she wanted. What was I doing here? Did I think I could wedge myself into Dawn Devayne’s life? How? And why?
“Wang!” she yelled. “God damn it, Wang, bring me liquor! I’ve been kissing a faggot all day!” Then she turned, and over someone’s shoulder, past someone else’s laugh, she caught a glimpse of me beyond the doorway, and she put an expression on her face that I remembered from movies; quizzical-amused. She said something, quietly, that I couldn’t hear, but from the way her lips moved I thought it was just my own name: “Orry.” Then she nodded at two things that were being said to her, stepped through the people as though they were grouped statues, and came through the doorway with her hand out for shaking and her mouth widely smiling. “Orry,” she said. “God damn, Orry, if you don’t bring it back.”