When at last she put on a white robe and walked away, I awkwardly stood, padded across the room by the dim light filtering through the drapes, and slid into the cool bed. A few seconds later, as though waiting for me to settle, the pool lights went off.
I must have gone to sleep almost at once, though I’d been sure I would stay awake for hours. But the pool lights ceased to shine on the blue-green drapes, darkness and silence drifted down like a collapsing tent – four white numerals floating in the black said 11:42, then 11:43 – and I closed my eyes and slept.
To awake in the same darkness, with the white numbers reading 12:12 and some fuss taking place at the edge of my consciousness. I didn’t know where I was, I didn’t know what that pair of twelves meant, and I couldn’t understand the rustling and whooshing going on. In my bewilderment I thought I was assigned to a ship again, and we were in a storm; but the double twelve made no sense.
Then one of the twelves became thirteen, and I remembered where I was, and I understood that someone was at the glass doors leading to the pool, making a racket. Then Dawn Devayne’s voice, loud and rather exasperated, said, “Orry?”
“Yes?”
“Open these damn drapes, will you?”
At the Chinese restaurant there had been a red-jacketed young man who parked the cars. He leaped into every car that came along, and whipped it away with practiced skill, as though he’d been driving that car all his life. At some point he must have had a first car, of course, the car in which he’d learned to drive and with which he’d gotten his first license, but if some customer of the restaurant were to drive up in that car today would the young man recognize it? Would it feel different to him? Since his driving technique was already perfect with any car, what special familiarity would he be able to display? It could not be by skill that he would show his particular relationship with this car; possibly it would be with a breakdown of skill, a tiny reminiscent awkwardness.
Dawn Devayne was wonderful in bed. It’s true, she was what men thought she would be, she was agile and quick and lustful and friendly and funny and demanding and responsive and exhausting and exhilarating and plunging and utterly skillful. Her skill produced in me responses of invention I hadn’t known I possessed. Fran Skiburg was right; there are other things to do. I did things with Dawn Devayne that I’d never done before, that it had never occurred to me to do but that now came spontaneously into my mind. For instance, I followed with the tip of my tongue all the creases of her body; the curving borders of her rump, the line at the inside of each elbow, the arcs below her breasts. She laughed and hugged me and gave me a great deal of pleasure, and not once did I think of Estelle Anlic, who was not there.
We’d turned the lights on for our meeting, and when she kissed my shoulder and leaned away to turn them off again the digital clock read 2:02. In the dark she kissed my mouth, bending over me, and whispered, “Welcome back, Orry.”
“Mmm.” I said nothing more, partly because I was tired and partly because I still hadn’t fixed on a name to call her.
She rolled away, adjusting her head on the pillow next to me, settling down with a pleasant sigh, and when next I opened my eyes vague daylight pressed grayly at the drapes and the clock read 6:03, and Dawn Devayne was asleep on her back beside me, tousled but beautiful, one hand, palm up, with curled fingers, on the pillow by her ear.
How did Estelle look asleep? She was becoming harder to remember. We had lived together in off-base quarters, a two-room apartment with a used bed. Sunlight never entered the bedroom, where the sheets and clothing and the very air itself were always just slightly damp. Estelle would curl against me in her sleep, and at times I would awake to find her arm across my chest. A memory returned; Estelle once told me she’d slept with a toy panda in her childhood, and at times she would call me Panda. I hadn’t thought of that in years. Panda.
Dawn Devayne’s eyes opened. They focused on me at once, and she smiled, saying, “Don’t frown, Orry, Dawn is here.” Then she looked startled, stared toward the drapes, and cried, “My God, dawn is here! What time is it?”
“Six oh six,” I read.
“Oh.” She relaxed a little, but said, “I have to get back to my room.” Then she looked at me with another of her private smiles and said, “Orry, do you know you’re terrific in bed?”
“No,” I said. “But you are.”
“A workman is as good as his tools,” she said, grinning, and reached under the covers for me. “And you’ve been practicing.”
“So have you.”
She laughed, pulling me closer, with easy ownership. “Time for a quickie,” she said.
We swam together naked in the pool while the sun came up. (“If Wang does look,” she’d answered me, “I’ll blind him.”) Then at last she climbed out of the pool, wet, glistening gold and orange in the fresh sunlight, saying, “Time to face the new day, baby.”
“All right.” I followed her up to the blue tiles.
“Orry.”
“Yes?”
“Take a look in the closet,” she said. “See if there’s something that fits you. Wang can have your other stuff cleaned.”
I knew she was laughing at me, but in a friendly way. And the problem of what to call her was solved. “Thanks, Dawn,” I said, “I will.”
“See you at breakfast.”
I wore the gray slacks, but neither the full-sleeved shirt nor the Edwardian jacket seemed right for me, so I found instead a green shirt and a gray pullover sweater. “That’s fine,” Dawn said, with neutral disinterest.
A limousine took us to Burbank Airport, over the hills and across the stucco floor of the San Fernando Valley, a place that looks like an over-exposed photograph. Dawn asked me questions as we rode together, and I told her about my marriage to Sally Fowler and my years in the Navy, and even a little about Fran Skiburg, though not the part where Fran got so excited about me having once been married to Dawn Devayne. There were spaces of silence as we rode, and I could have asked her my question several times, but there didn’t seem to be any way to phrase it. I tried different practice sentences in my head, but none of them were right:
“Why aren’t you Estelle Anlic any more, when I’m still Orry Tupikos?” No. That sounded as though I was blaming her for something.
“Who would I be, if I wasn’t me?” No. That wasn’t even the right question.
“How do you stop being the person you are and become somebody entirely different? What’s it like?” No. That was like a panel-show question on television, and anyway not exactly what I was trying for.
Dawn herself gave me a chance to open the subject, when she asked me what I figured to do after I retired from the Navy two years from now, but all I said was, “I haven’t thought about it very much. Maybe I’ll just travel around a while, and find some place, and settle down.”
“Will you marry Fran?”
“That might be an idea.”
At Burbank Airport we got on a private plane with the two actors, Rod and Wally, and the grim-faced man named Frank and the heavyset quiet man called Bobo, all of whom I’d met last night. Listening to conversations during the flight, I finally worked it out that Frank was a photographer whose job it was to take pictures while the movie was being made; the “stills man”, he was called. Bobo’s job was harder to describe; he seemed to be somewhere between servant and bodyguard, and mostly he just sat and smiled at everybody and looked alert but not very bright.