I didn’t think there was anything wrong with the evening except that Dawn was so tense all the time. Her mother, whom I’d never met before except when she was yelling at me, did a lot of talking about arguments she’d had with different people in stores – “So then I said, so then she said . . .” – but she wasn’t terrible about it, and she did have an amusing way of phrasing herself sometimes. Leo Hettick, who sat to my right in the formal dining room where we had our formal dinner, was an old Navy man as it turned out, who’d done a full thirty years and got out in 1972, so he and I talked about different tours we’d spent, ships we’d been on, what we thought of different ports and things like that. Meantime, Dawn mostly listened to her mother, pretending the things she said were funnier than they were.
What started the fight was when Mrs Hettick turned to me, over the parfait and coffee, and said, “You gonna be number five?”
I had to pretend I didn’t know what she was talking about. “I beg pardon?”
“You’re living here, aren’t you?”
“I’m a houseguest,” I said. “For a couple of weeks.”
“I know that kind of houseguest,” she said. “I’ve seen a lot of them.”
Dawn said, “Mother, eat your parfait.” Her tension had suddenly closed down in from all that sprightliness, had become very tightly knotted and quiet.
Her mother ignored her. Watching me with her quick bird eyes she said, “You can’t be worse than any of the others. The first one was a child molester, you know, and the second was a faggot.”
“Stop, Mother,” Dawn said.
“The third was impotent,” her mother said. “He couldn’t get it up if the flag went by. What do you think of that?”
“I don’t think people should talk about other people’s marriages,” I said.
Leo Hettick said, “Edna, let it go now.”
“You stay out of this, Leo,” she told him, and turned back to say to me, “The whole world talks about my daughter’s marriages, why shouldn’t I? If you are number five, you’ll find your picture in newspapers you wouldn’t use to wrap fish.”
“I don’t think I read those papers,” I said.
“No, but my mother does,” Dawn said. Some deep bitterness had twisted her face into someone I’d never seen before. “My mother has the instincts of a pig,” she said. “Show her some mud and she can’t wait to start rooting in it.”
“Being your mother, I get plenty of mud to root in.”
I said, “I was the first husband, Mrs Hettick, and I always thought you were the child molester.”
“Oh, Orry,” Dawn said; not angry but sad, as though I’d just made some terrible mistake that we both would suffer for.
Slowly, delightedly, as though receiving an unexpected extra dessert, Mrs Hettick turned to stare at me, considering me, observing me. Slowly she nodded, slowly she said, “By God, you are, aren’t you? That filthy sailor.”
“You treated your daughter badly, Mrs Hettick. If you’d ever—”
But she didn’t care what I had to say. Turning back to her daughter, crowing, she said, “You running through the whole lot again? A triumphant return tour! Let me know when you dig up Ken Forrest, will you? At least he’ll be stiff this time.”
Leo Hettick said, “That’s just about enough, Edna.”
His wife glared at him. “What do you know about it?”
“I know when you’re being impolite, Edna,” he said. “If you remember, you made me a promise, some little time ago.”
She sat there, glaring at him with a sullen stare, her body looking more than ever at odds with her clothing; the fuzzy pink sweater, most of all, seeming like some unfunny joke. While the Hetticks looked at one another, deciding who was in charge, I found myself remembering that magazine’s description of me as “a stock figure”, and of course here was another stock figure, the quarrelsome mother of the movie star. I thought of myself as something other than, or more than, a stock figure; was Mrs Hettick also more than she seemed? What did it mean that she had broken up her daughter’s first marriage, to a sailor, and later had married a sailor herself, and wore clothing dating from the time of her daughter’s marriage? What promise had she made her husband, “some little time ago”? Was he a stock figure? The feisty old man telling stories on the porch of the old folks’ home; all the rest of us were simply characters in one of his reminiscences.
Maybe that was the truth, and he was the hero of the story after all. He was certainly the one who decided how this evening would end; he won the battle of wills with his wife, while Dawn and I both sat out of the picture, having no influence, having no part to play until Edna Hettick’s face finally softened, she gave a quick awkward nod, and she said, “You’re right, Leo. I get carried away.” She even apologized to her daughter, to some extent, turning to Dawn and saying, “I guess I live in the past too much.”
“Well, it’s over and forgotten,” Dawn said, and invented a smile.
After they left – not late – the smile at last fell like a dead thing from Dawn’s mouth. “I have a headache,” she said, not looking at me. “I don’t feel like swimming tonight, I’m going to bed.”
Her own bed, she meant. I went off to my room, and left the drapes partway open, and didn’t go to sleep till very late, but she never came by.
It was ten forty-three by the digital clock when I awoke. I put on the white robe and wandered through the house, and found Wang in the kitchen. Nodding at me with his usual polite smile, he said, “Breakfast?”
“Is Dawn up yet?”
“Gone to work.”
I couldn’t understand that. Last night she’d been upset, and of course she’d wanted to be alone for a while. But why ignore me this morning? I had breakfast, and then I settled down with magazines and the television set, and waited for the evening.
By nine o’clock I understood she wasn’t coming home. It had been a long long day, an empty day, but at least I’d been able to tell myself it would eventually end, Dawn would come home around seven and everything would be the same again. Now it was nine o’clock, she wasn’t here, I knew she wouldn’t be here tonight at all, and I didn’t know what to do.
I thought of all the people I’d met in the last week and a half, Dawn’s friends, and the only ones I might talk to at all were Byron Cartwright or Rod, but even if I did talk to one of them what would I say? “Dawn and her mother had a little argument, and Dawn didn’t sleep with me, and she left alone this morning and hasn’t come back.” Rod, I was certain, would simply advise me to sit tight, wait, do nothing. As for Byron Cartwright, this was a situation tailor-made for him to do the wrong thing. So I talked to no one, I stayed where I was, I watched more television, read more magazines, and I waited for Dawn.
The next day, driven more by boredom than anything else, I finally explored that other wing of the house. Dawn’s bedroom, directly across the pool from mine, was all done in pinks and golds, with a thick white rug on the floor. Several awkward paintings of white clapboard houses in rural settings were on the walls. They weren’t signed, and I never found out who’d done them.
But a more interesting room was also over there, down a short side corridor. A small cluttered attic-like place, it was filled with luggage and old pieces of furniture and mounds of clothing. Leaning with its face to the wall was the blown-up photograph, unharmed, and atop a ratty bureau in the farthest corner slumped a small brown stuffed animal; a panda? The room had a damp smell – it reminded me of our old apartment in San Diego – and I didn’t like being in there, so I went back once more to the television set.