The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction (120 page)

“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.

People on game shows are very emotional.

Saturday morning I finally admitted to myself that Dawn was staying away only because I was still there. I’d been alone now for three days, except for Wang and the silent anonymous other servants – from time to time the phone would ring, but it was Wang’s right to answer it, and he always assured me afterward it was nothing, nothing, unimportant – and all I’d done was sit around and think, and try to ignore the truth, and by Saturday morning I couldn’t hide it from myself any more.

Dawn would not come back until I had given up and left. She couldn’t throw me out of her house, but she couldn’t face me either, not now or ever again. I belonged in the room with the photograph and the panda and the old clothing, the furniture, the bits and pieces of Estelle Anlic.

I knew the answer now to the question I’d brought out here. In order to create a new person to be, you have to hate the old person enough to kill it. Estelle
was
Dawn, and Dawn was happy.

She had dealt with my sudden reappearance out of the past by forcing me also to accept Dawn Devayne, to put this new person in Estelle’s place in my memory, so that once more Estelle would cease to exist.

But the mother remained outside control, with her dirty knowledge; in front of her, Estelle was only pretending to be Dawn Devayne. After Wednesday night, Dawn must believe her mother had recreated Estelle also in my mind, turned Dawn back into Estelle in my eyes. No wonder she couldn’t be in my presence any longer.

I put the borrowed clothes away and packed my bag and asked Wang to call a taxi. There wasn’t anybody to say goodbye to.

Back on the base a week early, I explained part of the situation to the Commander and applied for a transfer, and got it. I told Fran everything – almost everything – and she moved to Norfolk to be near me at my new post (where my history with Dawn Devayne never came to light), and when I retired this year we were married.

I don’t go to Dawn Devayne movies. I also don’t do those things with Fran that I’d first done with Dawn. I don’t have any reason not to, it’s just I don’t feel that way any more. And Fran’s vehemence for new sexual activity was only a temporary thing anyway; she very quickly cooled back down to what she had been before. We get along very well.

Sometimes I have a dream. In the dream, I’m walking on Hollywood Boulevard, on the stars’ names, and I stop at one point, and look down, and the name in the pavement is ESTELLE ANLIC. I just stand there. That’s the dream. Later, when I wake up, I understand there isn’t any Estelle Anlic any more; she’s buried out there, on Hollywood Boulevard, underneath her name, standing up, squinting in the San Diego sun.