We flew from Burbank to Stockton, where another limousine took us to the movie location, which was an imitation Louisiana bayou in the San Joaquin River delta. The rest of the movie people, who were staying in nearby motels and not commuting home every night, were already there, and most of the morning was spent with the crew endlessly preparing things – setting up reflectors to catch the sunlight, laying a track for the camera to roll along, moving potted plants this way and that along the water’s edge – while Dawn and Rod argued for hours with the director, a fat man with pasty jowls and an amused-angry expression and a habit of constantly taking off and putting back on his old black cardigan sweater. His name was Harvey, and when I was introduced to him he nodded without looking at me and said, “Ted, they really are putting that fucking dock the wrong place,” and a short man with a moustache went away to do something about it.
The argument, with Dawn and Rod on one side and Harvey on the other, wasn’t like anything I’d ever seen in my life. When the people I’ve known get into an argument, they either settle it pretty soon or they get violent; the men hit and the women throw things. Dawn and Rod and Harvey almost immediately got to the point where hitting and throwing would start, except it never happened. Dawn Devayne stood with her feet apart and her hands on her hips, as though leaning into a strong wind, and made firm logical statements of her point of view, salted with insults; for instance, “The motivation throughout the whole story, you cocksucker, is for my character to feel protective toward Jenny.” Rod’s style, on the other hand, was heavy sarcasm: “Since it’s a given that you have the sensitivity of a storm drain, Harvey, why not simply accept the fact that Dawn and I have thought this over very carefully.” Harvey, with his angry-amused smile, always looked as though he was either just about to say something horribly insulting or would suddenly start pounding the other two with a piece of wood, and his manner was very insulting-patronizing-hostile, but in fact he merely kept saying things like, “Well, I think we’ll simply all be much happier if we do it my way.”
Unless there’s a fist fight, the person who remains the calmest usually wins most arguments, so I knew from the beginning Harvey would win this one, but it went on for hours anyway, and when it ended (Harvey won, and Dawn and Rod both sulked) they only had time before lunch to shoot one small scene with Dawn and Wally on the riverbank. It was just a scene where Dawn said, “I don’t think they’ll ever come back, Billy.” They shot it eight times, with the camera in three different positions, and then we all had a buffet lunch brought out from Stockton by a catering service.
Dawn’s dressing room was a small motor home, where she took a nap by herself after lunch, while I walked around looking at everything. Another part of the Dawn–Wally scene was shot, with just Wally visible in the picture, talking to an empty spot in space where Dawn was supposed to be, and then they set up a more complicated scene involving Dawn and Rod and some other people getting into a boat and rowing away. Dawn woke up while the crew was still preparing that one, and she and Rod groused together about Harvey, but when they went out to shoot the scene everybody was polite to everybody else, and then the day was over, and we flew back to Los Angeles.
There was a huge gift-wrapped package in the front hall at Dawn’s house. It was about the size and shape of a door, all wrapped up in colorful paper and miles of ribbon and a big red bow, and a card hung from the bow reading, “Love to Dawn and Orry, from By.”
Dawn frowned and said, “What’s that asshole up to now?”
Rod and Wally and Frank and Bobo had come in with us, and Wally said, “It’s an aircraft carrier. By gave you an aircraft carrier.”
“For God’s sake, open it,” Rod said.
“I’m afraid to,” Dawn told him. She tried to make that sound like a joke, but I could see she really was afraid to open it. I later learned that Byron Cartwright’s sentimentalism was famous for causing embarrassment, but I don’t think even Dawn suspected what he had chosen to send us. I know I didn’t.
Finally it was Wally and Rod who pulled off the bow and the ribbon and the paper, and inside was the wedding-day picture, Estelle and me in San Diego, squinting in the sunlight. The picture had been blown up to be slightly bigger than life, and it was in a wooden frame with a piece of glass in front of it, and here were these two stiff uncomfortable figures in grainy gray, staring out of some horrible painful prison of the past. Usually this picture was perfectly ordinary, neither wonderful nor awful, but blown up to life size – larger than life – it became a kind of cruelty.
Everybody stared at it. Wally said, “What the hell is that?”
They hadn’t recognized that earlier me. Dawn wouldn’t have been recognizable anyway, of course, but expanding the original photo had strained the rough quality of the negative beyond its capacity, so that I myself might not have guessed at first the white blob face was mine.
After the first shock of staring at the picture, I turned to look at Dawn, to see her with a face of stone, glaring – with hatred? rage? revulsion? bitterness? resentment? – at her own image in the photograph. She turned her head, flashed me a look of irritation that I’d been watching her, and without a word strode out of the room.
Rod, with the eager look of the born gossip, said, “I don’t know what’s going on here, but it looks to me like By’s done it again.”
Wally was still frowning at the picture. “What is that?” he said. “Who are those people?”
“Orry? Isn’t that you?”
It was the voice of Frank, the stills man, the professional photographer, who had backed away from the giant picture, across the hall and through the doorway into the next room, until he was distant enough to see it clear. Head cocked to one side, eyes half closed, he was standing against the back of a sofa in there, studying the picture.
At first I didn’t say anything. Wally turned to frown at Frank, then at me, then at the picture, then at me again. “You? That’s you?”
Rod and Bobo were moving toward Frank, squinting over their shoulders at the picture as they went. I said to Wally, “Yes. It’s me.”
“That girl is familiar,” Frank said.
I felt obscurely that Dawn would want to be protected, though I didn’t see how it was going to be possible. “That’s my wife,” I said. “Or, she was my wife. That was our wedding day.”
Rod and Bobo were now standing next to Frank, gazing at the picture, and Wally was moving back to join them. I was like a stage performer, and they were my audience, and the picture was used in my act. Frank said, “I know that girl. What’s her name?”
Rod suddenly said, “Wait a minute, I know that picture! That’s Dawn!”
“Yes,” I said, but before I could say anything else – explain, apologize, defend – Wang came in to say, “Miss Dawn say, everybody out.”
Rod, nodding at the picture and ignoring Wang, said thoughtfully, “Byron Cartwright, the avalanche that walks like a man.”
Wang said to me, “You, too. Miss Dawn say, go away, eat dinner, come back.”
“All right,” I said.
We were joined by Frank’s wife and Wally’s girl and Rod’s friend Dennis in an Italian restaurant that looked like something from a silent movie about Biblical times. Bronze-colored plaster statues, lots of columns, heavily framed paintings of Roman emperors on the walls. The food was covered with too much tomato sauce.