Her hand was strong when I took it; I could feel the bones, as though I were holding a small wild bird in my palm. “Hello . . .” I said, stumbling because I didn’t know what name to use. I couldn’t call her Estelle, and I couldn’t call her Dawn, and I wouldn’t call her Miss Devayne.
“We’ll talk later on,” she said, squeezing my hand, then turned to the others, who had followed her. “This is Orry,” she said. “An old friend of mine.” And said the names of everybody else.
Wang arrived then, and while he took drink orders Dawn Devayne looked at me, frowning slightly at my clothing, saying, “Didn’t Wang give you a room?”
“Yes. Down at the end there.”
Her glance at my clothes was a bit puzzled, but then her expression cleared and she grinned at me, saying, “Yes, Orry. I’m beginning to remember you now.”
“I don’t remember you at all,” I told her. Which was true. So far, Estelle Anlic had made no appearance in this room.
She still didn’t. Dawn Devayne laughed, patting my arm, saying, “We’ll talk later, after this crowd goes.” She turned half away: “Wang! Get over here.” Back to me: “What are you drinking?”
I tried not to drink too much, not wanting to make a fool of myself. Though Dawn Devayne had spoken about the others as though they would leave at any instant, in fact they stayed on for an hour or more, mostly gossiping about absent people involved in the movie they were currently making. Then we all got into two cars and drove down to Beverly Hills for dinner at a Chinese restaurant. I rode in the same car with Dawn Devayne, a tan-colored Mercedes Benz with the license plate WIPPER, but I didn’t sit beside her. I rode in back with a grim-faced moustached man named Frank, whose job I didn’t yet know, while Dawn Devayne sat beside the driver, a tall and skinny, leathery-faced, sly-smiling man named Rod, who I remembered as having played the airline pilot in The Captain’s Pearls, and who was apparently Dawn Devayne’s co-star again this time. The other three people, an actor named Wally and an unidentified man called Bobo and a heavyset girl named June, followed us in Wally’s black Porsche, which also had a special license plate; BIG JR.
Phone-calling had been done before we’d left the house, and four more people joined us at the restaurant; Frank’s plump wife, a tough-looking blonde girl for Wally, a grinning hippie-type guy in blue denim for June, and a willowy young man in a black jumpsuit for Rod. I realized Rod must be the faggot Dawn Devayne had been kissing all day, and the fact of his homosexuality startled me a lot less than what she had shouted in his presence.
The eleven of us filled an alcove at the rear of the restaurant. Eleven people can’t possibly be quiet; we made our presence felt. There was a party atmosphere, and I saw other patrons glancing our way with envy. We were, after all, quite obviously having a wonderful time. Not only that, but at least two of us were famous. But perhaps in Beverly Hills there’s more sophistication about movie fame than in most other places; no one came by the table in search of autographs.
As for the party atmosphere, that was more apparent than real. Dawn Devayne and Rod and Wally and June’s hippie-type friend did a lot of loud talking, mostly anecdotes about the movie world or the record business, to which June’s friend belonged, but the rest of us were no more than audience. We laughed at the right moments, and otherwise sat silent, eating one platter of Chinese food after another. Rounds of drinks kept being ordered, but I let them pile up in front of me – four glasses, eventually – while I drank tea.
Rod drove us back home. Again Dawn Devayne sat up front with him, while I shared the back seat with Rod’s friend, who was called Dennis. In the dark, wearing his black jumpsuit and with his pale-skinned hands and face and wispy yellow hair, Dennis was startling to look at, almost unearthly. And when he touched the back of my hand with a fingertip, his skin was so cold that I automatically flinched away.
He ignored that; maybe people always flinched when he touched them. “I know who you are,” he said, and his small head floating there had a smile on it that was very sweet and innocent, as though he were on his way to his First Communion. My God, I thought, you’d last six hours on a ship. They’d shove what was left in a canvas bag.
I said, “You do?”
“Orry,” he said. “That’s not a common name.”
“No, I guess it isn’t.”
“You were in the Navy.”
“I still am.”
“You were married to Dawn.”
“That’s right,” I said.
He turned his sweet smile and his wide eyes toward the two heads up front. They were talking seriously together now, Dawn Devayne and Rod, about some disagreement they were having with the director, and what they should do about it tomorrow.
Dennis, staring and smiling so hard that it was as though he wanted to burrow into their ears and live inside their brains, said, “It must have been wonderful. To know her at the very beginning of her career. If only I’d met Rod, all those years ago.” When he looked at me again, his eyes were luminous. Maybe he was crying. “I keep everything that’s ever written about him,” he said. “I have dozens of scrapbooks, dozens. That’s how I know about you.”
“Ah.”
“Do you keep scrapbooks?”
“About what?” Then I understood. “Oh, you mean Dawn Devayne.”
“You don’t? I’ll never be blasé about Rod. Never.”
In the house Dawn Devayne held my forearm and said, “Orry, I’m bushed. I’m sorry, baby, I can’t talk tonight. Come along with me tomorrow, all right? We’ll have some time together.”
“All right.” I was disappointed, but she did look tired. Also, my own body was still more on East Coast time, three hours later; I wouldn’t mind sleeping, after such a long day. I don’t know why it is, but emotions are exhausting.
“I’m going to swim for five minutes,” she said, “and then hit the sack. We get up at seven around here. You ready for that?”
“I will be.” And I smiled at her. God knows she wasn’t Estelle, but I felt just the same as though I knew her. We were old friends in some other way, entirely different and apart from reality. I suspected that was a form of human contact she had learned to develop, as a means of dealing with all the faces a movie star has to meet. It wasn’t the real thing, but that didn’t matter. It was a friendly falseness, a fakery that made life smoother.
I watched her swim. She was naked, and she spent as much time diving as she did swimming, and it was the same nude body that had excited me so much in the magazine pictures, and yet my sexual feelings were thwarted, imprisoned. Maybe it was because I was being a peeping tom and felt ashamed of myself. Or maybe it was because, in accepting the counterfeit friendship of Dawn Devayne, I had lessened the existence of Estelle Anlic just that much more, and I felt guilty about that. Whatever it was, for as long as I looked at her I kept feeling the lust rise, and then become strangled, and then rise, and then become strangled.
I should have stopped looking, of course, but I couldn’t. The most I could do was close my eyes from time to time and argue with myself. But I couldn’t leave, I had to stay kneeling at a corner of the darkened room, with one edge of the drapes pulled back just far enough to peek out, during the ten minutes that Dawn Devayne spent moving, diving, swimming, the green-white underwater lights and yellow surrounding lanterns glinting and flashing off the wet sheen slickness of her flesh. Drops of water caught in her hair made tiny flashing round rainbows. Her legs were long, her body strong and sleek, a tanned thoroughbred, graceful and self-contained.