Still, by the time we reached the plane to go back to Los Angeles, she was in a cheerful mood again. Bad temper never lasted long with her.
Friday afternoon there were technical problems of some sort, delaying the shooting, so after Dawn’s nap she and I sat in the parlor of her dressing room and talked together about the past. It was one of those conversations full of sentences beginning, “Do you remember when—?” We talked about troubles we’d had with the landlord, about the time we snuck into a movie theater when we didn’t have any money, things like that. She didn’t seem to have any particular attitude about these memories, neither nostalgia nor revulsion; they were simply interesting anecdotes out of our shared history.
But they led me finally, despite Rod’s advice, to ask her the question that had brought me out here. “You’ve changed an awful lot since then,” I said. “How did you do that?”
She frowned at me, apparently not understanding. “What do you mean, changed?”
“Changed. Different. Somebody else.”
“I’m not somebody else,” she said. Now she looked and sounded annoyed, as though somebody were pestering her with stupidities. “I dyed my hair, that’s all. I learned about makeup, I learned how to dress.”
“Personality,” I said. “Emotions. Everything about you is different.”
“It is not.” Her annoyance was making her almust petulant. “People change when they grow older, that’s all. It’s been sixteen years, Orry.”
“I’m still the same.”
“Yes, you are,” she said. “You still plod along with those flat feet of yours.” “I suppose I do,” I said.
Abruptly she shifted, shaking her head and softening her expression and saying, “I’m sorry, Orry, you didn’t deserve that. You’re right, you are the same man. You were wonderful then, and you’re wonderful now.”
“I think the flat feet was more like the truth,” I said, because that is what I think.
But she shook her head, saying, “No. I loved living with you, Orry, I loved being your wife. That was the first time in my life I ever relaxed. You know what you taught me?”
“Taught you?”
“That I didn’t have to just run all the time, in a panic. That I could slow down, and look around.”
I wanted to ask her if that was when she realized she could become somebody else, but I understood by now that Rod had been right, it wasn’t something I could ask her directly, so I changed the subject. But I remembered what the magazine article had said about me being a “stock figure, the San Diego sailor in every sex star’s childhood,” and I wondered if what Dawn had just said was really true, if being with me had in some way started the change that turned Estelle Anlic into Dawn Devayne. Plodding with my flat feet? Most of the Estelle Anlics in the world marry flat-footed Orry Tupikoses; what had been different with us?
Saturday we drove to Palm Springs, to the home of a famous comedian named Lennie Hacker, for a party. There were about two hundred people there, many of them famous, and maybe thirty of them staying on as house guests for the rest of the weekend. Lennie Hacker had his own movie theater on his land, and we all watched one of his movies plus some silent comedies. That was in the afternoon. In the evening, different guests who were professional entertainers performed, singing, dancing, playing the piano, telling jokes. It was too big a party for anybody to notice one face more or less, so I didn’t have to explain myself to anybody. (There was only one bad moment, at the beginning, when I was introduced to the host. Lennie Hacker was a short round man with sparkly black eyes and a built-in grin on his face, and when he shook my hand he said, “Hiya, sailor.” I thought that was meant to be some kind of insult joke, but later on I heard him say the same thing to different other people, so it was just a way he had of saying hello.)
I’d never been to a party like this – a famous composer sat at the piano, singing his own songs and interrupting himself to make put-down gags about the lyrics – and I just walked around with a drink in my hand, looking at everything, enjoying being a spectator. (I was wearing the Edwardian jacket and the full-sleeved shirt, no longer self-conscious about my appearance.) Dawn and I crossed one another’s paths from time to time, but we didn’t stay together; she had lots of friends she wanted to spend time with.
As for me, I had very few conversations. Rod and Dennis were there, and I had a few words with Rod about the silent comedies we’d seen, and I also made small talk with a few other people I’d met at different restaurant dinners over the last week. At one point, when I was standing in a corner watching two television comedians trade insult jokes in front of an audience of twenty or thirty other guests, Lennie Hacker came over to me and said, “Listen.”
“Yes?”
“You look like an intelligent fella,” he said. He looked out at the crowd of his guests, and made a sweeping gesture to include them all. “Tell me,” he said, “who the fuck are all these people?”
“Movie stars,” I said.
“Yeah?” He studied them, skeptical but interested. “They look like a bunch a bums,” he said. “See ya.” And he drifted away.
A little later I ran into Byron Cartwright, who beamed at me and took my hand in both of his and said, “How are you, Orry?”
“Fine,” I said.
“Listen, Orry,” he said. He kept my hand in one of his, and put his other arm around my shoulders, turning me a bit away from the room and the party, making ours a private conversation. “I’ve wanted to have a good talk with you,” he said.
“You have?”
“I’m sorry about that picture.” He looked at me with a pained smile. “The way Dawn talked about you, I thought she’d like that reminder.”
I didn’t know what to say. “I guess so,” I told him.
“But things are good between you two, aren’t they? No trouble there.”
“No, we’re fine.”
“That’s good, that’s good.” He thumped my back, and finally released my hand. “You two look good together, Orry,” he said. “You did way back then, and you do now.”
“Well, she looks good.”
“The two of you,” he insisted. “Together. When’s your leave up, Orry? When do you have to go back to the Navy?”
“In two weeks.”
“Do you want me to fix it?”
“Fix it?”
“We could get you an early release,” he said. “Get you out of the Navy.”
“I’ve only got two years before I collect my pension.”
“We could probably work something out,” he told me. “Make some arrangement with the Navy. Believe me, Orry, I know people who know people.”
I said, “But I couldn’t go on living at Dawn’s house.”
“Orry,” he said, chuckling at me and patting my arm. “You were her first love, Orry. You’re her man. Look how she took you right in again, the minute you showed up. Look how well you’re getting along. In some little corner of that girl, Orry, you’ve always been her husband. She left the others, but she was taken away from you.”
I stared at him. “Marry her? Dawn Devayne? Mr Cartwright, I don’t—”
“By. Call me By. And think about it, Orry. Will you do that? Just think about it.”
There was no question in the Hacker household about our belonging together, Dawn and me. We’d been initially shown by a uniformed maid to a bedroom we were to share on the second floor, overlooking Hacker’s private three-hole golf course, and by one o’clock in the morning I was ready to return to it and go to sleep, although the party was still going strong. I found Dawn with a group of people singing show tunes around the piano, and I told her, “I’m going to sleep now.”