My story was amazing but short, and when I was done Rod and Wally told stories for the rest of dinner about other disastrous gestures made by Byron Cartwright in the past. He was everyone’s warmhearted uncle, except that his instincts were constantly betrayed by his inability to think through the effect of his activities. As a businessman he was considered one of the best (toughest, coldest, coolest) in his very tough business, but away from the office his affection toward his clients and other acquaintances led him to one horrible misjudgment after another.
(These acts of Byron Cartwright’s were not simple goofs like sending flowers to a hay-fever victim. As with the picture to Dawn and me, each story took about five minutes to explain the characters and relationships involved, the nuances that turned Byron Cartwright’s offerings into Molotov cocktails, and while some of the errors were funny, most of them produced only groans among the listeners at the table. It was Wally who finally summed it up, saying, “Most mutations don’t work, and By is simply one more proof of it. You can’t have an agent with a heart of gold, it isn’t a viable combination.”)
After dinner, Rod drove me back to Dawn’s house, with Dennis a silent worshipper vibrating behind us on the back seat. As we neared the house, Rod said, “May I give you a piece of advice, Orry?”
“Sure.”
“You haven’t known Dawn for a long time, and she’s probably changed a lot.”
“Yes, she has.”
“I don’t think she’ll ever mention that picture again,” Rod told me, “and I don’t think you ought to bring it up either.”
“You may be right.”
“If it’s still there, have Wang get rid of it. If you want it yourself, tell Wang to ship it off to your home. But don’t show it to Dawn, don’t ask her about it. Just deal with Wang.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I agree with you.”
We reached the house, and Rod stopped in front of the door. “Good luck,” he said.
I didn’t immediately leave the car. I said, “Do you mind if I ask you a question?”
“Go ahead.”
“You saw how different Dawn used to be, when she was Estelle Anlic. And if you remember the picture, I haven’t changed very much.”
“Hardly at all. The Navy must agree with you.”
“The reason I came out here,” I said, “was because I had a question in my mind about that. I wanted to know how a person could change so completely into somebody different. Somebody with different looks, a different personality, a whole different kind of life. I mean, when I married Estelle, she wasn’t anybody who could even hope to be a movie star.”
Rod seemed both amused and in some hidden way upset by the question. He said, “You want to know how she did it?”
“I suppose. Not exactly. Something like that.”
“She decided to,” he said. He had a crinkly, masculine, self-confident smile, but at the same time he had another expression going behind the smile, an expression that told me the smile was a fake, a mask. The inner expression was also smiling, but it was more intelligent, and more truly friendly. He said, using that inner expression, “Why did you ask me that question, Orry?”
It was, of course, because I believed he’d somehow done the same sort of thing as Dawn, that somewhere there existed photos of him in some unimaginable other person. But it would sound like an insult to say that, and I said nothing, floundering around for an alternate answer.
He nodded. “You’re right,” he said.
“Then how?” I asked him. “She decided to be somebody else. How is it possible to do that?”
He shrugged and grinned, friendly and amiable but not really able to describe colors to a blind man. “You find somebody you’d rather be,” he said. “It really is as simple as that, Orry.”
I knew he was wrong. There was truth in the idea that people like Dawn and himself had found somebody else they’d rather be, but it surely couldn’t be as simple as that. Everybody has fantasies, but not everybody throws away the real self and lives in the fantasy.
Still, it would have been both rude and useless to press him, so I said; “Thank you,” and got out of the car.
“Hold the door,” he said. Then he patted the front seat, as though calling a dog, and said, “Dennis, come on up.” And Dennis, a nervous high-bred afghan hound in his fawn-colored jumpsuit, clambered gratefully into the front seat.
I was about to shut the door when Rod leaned over Dennis and said, “One more little piece of advice, Orry.”
“Yes?”
“Don’t ask Dawn that question.”
“Oh,” I said.
The picture was gone from the front hallway. My luggage from the motel was in my room, and Dawn was naked in the pool, her slender long intricate body golden-green in the underwater lights. I opened the drapes and stepped out to the tepid California air and said, “Shall I join you in there?”
“Hey, baby,” she called, treading water, grinning at me, sunny and untroubled. “Come on in, the water’s fine.”
The rest of the days that week were all the same, except that no more unfortunate presents came from Byron Cartwright. Dawn and I got up early every morning, flew to Stockton, she worked in the movie and napped – alone – after lunch, we flew back to Los Angeles, and then there’d be dinner in a restaurant with several other people, a shifting cast that usually included Rod and Wally and Dennis, plus others, sometimes strangers and sometimes known to me. Then Dawn and I would go back to the house and swim and go to bed and play with one another’s bodies until we slept. The sex was wonderful, and endlessly various, but afterwards it never seemed real. I would look at Dawn during the daytime, and I would remember this or that specific thing we had done together the night before, and it wasn’t as though I’d actually done it with her. It was more as though I’d dreamed it, or fantasized it.
Maybe that was partly because we always slept in the guest room, in what had become my bed. Dawn never took me to her own bed, or even brought me into her private bedroom. Until the second week I was there, I was never actually in that wing of the house.
On the Thursday evening we stayed longer in Stockton, to see the film shot the day before. Movie companies when they’re filming generally show the previous day’s work every evening, which some people call the dailies and some call the rushes. Its purpose is to give the director and performers and other people involved a chance to see how they’re doing, and also so the film editor and director can begin discussing the way the pieces of film will be organized together to make the movie. Dawn normally stayed away from the rushes, but on Thursday evening they would be viewing the sequence that she and Rod had argued about with Harvey, so the whole group of us stayed and watched.
I suppose movie people get so they can tell from the rushes whether things are working right or not, but when I look at half a dozen strips of film each recording the same action sequence or lines of dialogue, over and over and over, all I get is bored. Nevertheless, I could sense when the lights came up in the screening room that almost everybody now believed Harvey to have been right all along. Rod wouldn’t come right out and admit it, but it was clear his objections were no longer important to him. Dawn, on the other hand, had some sort of emotional commitment to her position, and all she had to say afterwards was, grumpily, “Well, I suppose the picture will survive, despite that.” And off she stomped, me in her wake.