INTERIOR — DAY . . . Jim walks through the hotel lobby, obviously distraught, his clothes torn and matted from the festival hi-jinks . . . As he picks up the key at the front desk, he is handed a slip of paper from Samendra with Clementine’s address in New Delhi. . . . Entering his room he reaches for a bottle of Scotch on the dresser. The curtains are drawn against the late afternoon sun and Lacey is sleeping, curled in on herself as if for protection. She opens her eyes, regards him. “Could you come into bed and just hold me for a minute?” she asks. . . . He takes a long pull from the bottle and steps out of his clothes before he answers: “I have to get into the shower. I’m covered with piss and slime and probably have about three months to live.” He disappears into the bathroom. . . . As he’s standing under the shower Lacey enters beside him and starts soaping his back, kissing him on the shoulder. “I get panicked when you get weird and aggressive.” She reaches around his waist and takes hold of his cock. “I need an adventure,” she says, squeezing him gently. . . . He shuts his eyes as her soapy fingers surround him. “What kind of an adventure?” He turns her around and lifts one of her legs so that he can slide into her. “Any kind as long as it’s new,” she whispers as he slowly begins to move inside her. . . .
(I’m stopping here to say, who are you, Pop, and why are we indulging in this devious contract? Somehow, wherever Clementine is, she would probably find our attention unnecessary, even distasteful. She never needed your approval, for one thing, at least not as much as I did and still do. And then, too, she might not want to be found. It’s as if you and I are both in a waiting room and need to pass time while we wait for our separate exits. But Clementine might not be in the waiting room, at least not this one. She might have stepped outside altogether. But we can’t let her go, can we? And I can’t let you go, nor you me, no matter how much we might want to release each other. So send money and I’ll send pages. Post the next check to General Delivery, Salt Lake City, and add expense money and whatever paternal bonus you might be able to spare. We’re traveling through Utah, angling toward Nevada. I had a slight accident with my leg so the healing process has been interrupted but nothing serious. The process within is another story. But one positive aspect to our contract is that it gives me a slice of time to deal with culture shock while I unravel my own back story. I’m grateful for that even if it means confronting death and separation and a few other essential questions that I have no answers for. . . . By the way, your instincts about A.D. Ballou, if instincts is the right word, proved to be shrewd and on the point. Without his relentless ambition to find a slot in the movie biz I would never have the edge or perversity to continue, and as it is, of course, I might fade at any moment. I have to threaten you with that from time to time as that is what you inevitably threaten me with. Although Mr. Ballou, for one, is determined to bring all the elements together. But from what I hear on TV and read in the papers, any future projects you might conceive are strictly in the realm of fantasy. Is it true that the head of M-G-M has been quoted as saying as far as he’s concerned you’ve “misdirected your last film”? Perhaps you think an independently financed film will rescue you, but I can promise you that India doesn’t rescue anyone. It’s like the movie business in that way. . . . Did you notice how I controlled the scenes for you, keeping the exteriors to a manageable minimum so the background doesn’t devour the foreground? And the sex is mostly in easy close-ups where you’ll be able to shoot interiors out of the country if the censors bother you, which they will. All of this sounds as if I think you’re going to go over there. I don’t really. Evelyn told me that you think you’re dying, but I told her you always say that and probably what happened was that you stumbled for a brief moment on your own inhibited sense of impermanence. . . .Waiting for your next installment . . .Walker.)
WESLEY stood up and folded the pages, putting them back in his pants pocket. Then he walked down the beach and slowly climbed the stone steps that wound their way up a steep hill to a clearing overlooking the entire coast. Wesley’s house was one of several in various stages of construction scattered about on the periphery of the clearing and mostly obscured by thick jungle foliage. The entire compound was the dream and obsession of Sam Colson, an ex-San Francisco restaurateur, sometime actor and movie impresario, who had bailed out of a potential business scandal by sinking all his funds and cash flow into a south-of-the-border real estate venture called Vivi la Viva. Wesley had known Senor Viva, as he was locally called, for over twenty years and had used the compound before when there was only Sam’s house and a guesthouse with a thatched roof and no running water. After he had separated from his third wife, Wesley had stayed for over five months, sleeping, drinking, and reading all of Conrad before going back to L.A. and doing everything all over again. But these days the compound had a more worldly vibration, being mostly inhabited by a loose mélange of high-class drug dealers, movie people, radical lawyers and their more infamous clients, well-heeled social drifters from L.A. and New York, and the odd surprise wandering in off the beach, all of whom Wesley preferred to avoid. Except for Sam, who lay watching him from a hammock as good as naked in a pair of bikini briefs barely visible among the folds of his ample stomach, a pair of round dark glasses perched on the end of his soft and fleshy nose. He offered Wesley a sip of his gin and tonic.
“You have to put in an elevator,” Wesley gasped, wiping his face with his shirt sleeve and taking the gin and tonic. “I can’t make the steps any more.”
“Forget the steps. I haven’t been down those steps in six months. Longer. When you get to be our age life has to become a series of well-arranged retreats.”
Wesley collapsed into a low-slung beach chair, staring up at Sam’s patriarchal presence. “My life is more a rout than a retreat.” Suddenly he felt irritated. “You read those pages?”
“Of course I read those pages. Evelyn had them Xeroxed and she gave them to me. How do you expect me not to read those pages? I know both your demented children. I even, if you recall, tried to have ingress with your daughter at a particularly precarious moment in my life.”
“So you did,” Wesley admitted.
“And as for Walker, no matter how twisted and deluded he might be, I’m sure he doesn’t expect you to go over to India and shoot some crappy mystical adventure story that involves your own kids.”
“Why not? It’s a good hook. It’s personal. Motivated.”
“You’ve never done anything personal in your life. And who knows where your motivations spring from. I speak to you as a friend. You should quit. Actually, you have quit. If you come back in the ring, you’re going to get your head knocked off.”
Wesley drained the rest of Sam’s drink. “I don’t really care about winning and losing any more. But I’m probably too compulsively theatrical and ignorant to do nothing.”
“Not theatrical,” Sam said, swinging his fat legs over the hammock and peering down at Wesley. “Too attached to all the bullshit.”
Sam refilled the glass with the gin from a thermos tucked into the rear of the hammock. Taking a drink, he handed the glass to Wesley and went on. “One option is to consciously bury yourself alive in a beautiful, incestuous patch of paradise such as this one. Although I strongly suspect that when you finally approach the angel of death all suntanned and distracted, you might find yourself in the coldest hell, such would be your accumulation of rage, fear, and remorse.”
“I’d make that deal,” Wesley said. “One moment being equal to another. Except that I’ve fouled all my nests, including this one.”
“What a pity. I was so looking forward to sabotaging our sunset years together.”
Sam pulled a black silk kimono around him and together the two old friends walked across the clearing down a soft and verdant path decorated on either side with Japanese rock and flower arrangements, a narrow plunging waterfall, and a shaded grotto used mostly for midday drugs and backgammon. They stopped in front of Wesley’s house, a wood and concrete cantilevered form sweeping out o
ver a steep cliff facing the Pacific.
Wesley hesitated, not wanting to go inside. “I’m sliding,” he said and sat down on a curved stone bench. “I won’t be around this time next year.”
Sam let his bulk come to rest on the stone bench. “That’s entirely possible, although it could be your mind that’s on the slide.”
“It’s my heart, actually. And certain key pores in my skin which seem to leak energy and a certain, I don’t know, essential juice. I’m finished, Sam, and that’s not a bad thing to know. It’s a kind of relief.”
“If this is your way of saying that you’re going to India, then I agree with you.”
Wesley fumbled through his jacket pocket for a cigarette. “Not India, not Mexico, not L.A. ever again. In fact, why don’t you use the house on Mulholland and take a break from all this Shangri-La stuff? You’re as stuck in your fun as I am.”
For the first time Sam looked at his friend with real concern. “I might do that. But you’ll need a foxhole. You can’t just hang out at resorts and film festivals.”
“I still have my father’s place. Or at least I think I do. Off the coast of Labrador.”
“What about Evelyn?”
“I don’t know about Evelyn these days,” Wesley said. “But I would hope she’d come with me. She’s from up there. The north anyway.”
Sam started to leave, then turned back toward Wesley and said: “I say fuck ’em all; your kids, your wife, whatever’s left of your career, even your friends. You want to leave, go ahead. You want to pull the plug on yourself, do yourself in, that’s okay. Take what you have left to do and do it. No one cares anyway.”
Then he continued down the path and Wesley went inside.
Closing the door, Wesley moved toward the distant sound of the Beach Boys singing “Good Vibrations.” He stopped at the end of the entrada, looking at the blue tiles on the floor of the clean white living room and through the open glass doors to the wooden deck, where Evelyn lay naked on a towel. A thin bearded man, also naked, was slowly rubbing suntan oil onto her back. He had shut his eyes as if willing all his energy to the ends of his fingers. There was something about the harsh light bouncing off the white walls and Evelyn lying so boldly on her stomach with her thighs slightly parted that reminded Wesley of another scene. Perhaps it was Godard’s Contempt, with Brigitte Bardot stretched out on a stone parapet, her body silhouetted against the warm blue of the Mediterranean. Or was it an image from one of his own films of a floating daydream? Fritz Lang, at the end of his life, had played himself in Godard’s film; an old director, burdened with too much cynical wisdom, trying to promote one last project. Other directors had turned an occasional trick, John Huston had acted, as had Von Stroheim and Welles and Nick Ray. But their performances embarrassed him because he could never do it.
He watched the hand on Evelyn’s back work its way upward, pausing briefly on top of her head before wandering gently toward the cheeks of her ass. Resting there, a middle finger slid slowly down and probed deeper. As Evelyn shifted her rump to welcome the invasion, Wesley walked forward and the bearded man raised his head, his eyes a startling blue. Wesley moved slowly, giving the man time to stand up, while Evelyn, sneaking a look beneath her arm, preferred to remain as she was.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Hardin,” the man said, reaching for his bathing trunks. He had a soft pouting face and curly blond hair; Wesley marked him for an actor or beach hustler.
Wesley stepped up to him, eyes narrowed. “It’s like Texas down here in the sense that no one cares much if a man kills another man for porking around with his wife.”
The man tried hard to be charming: “I am French and unaware of such rules.”
Wesley slapped him on the side of the head with an open palm.
He hadn’t hit a man in forty years and the sudden violence shocked him. The Frenchman seemed more embarrassed than hurt, even somewhat concerned, as if Wesley had made himself vulnerable to a stroke.
He stepped backwards, watching Wesley. “It was a small hedonistic interlude, Mr. Hardin, nothing more.”
“I’m sure,” Wesley said and turned to face the sea.
“He didn’t mean anything serious,” Evelyn said after the man had left. “He works in the French consulate in Mexico City and comes down here to fish.”
“I don’t care about any of that,” Wesley said. “I was reacting to something else.”
Evelyn sat up and wrapped her arms around her knees while Wesley took off his shirt and sat down next to her on an aluminum beach chair. His skin was shockingly pale next to hers, hanging loose and old from his ribs, never to be firm again.
“I might go to New York,” he said, looking out over the railing toward the parallel line of the horizon. “There’s private financing available for the Indian film, at least according to my agent. Perhaps you want to stay here or go on a trip. Maybe Yucatán or Guatemala. You haven’t seen any of the Aztec stuff. “
“You don’t want me with you,” she said flatly.
He avoided her eyes and she stood up and walked over to the edge of the deck. Then she bent down and picked up the tape deck where the Beach Boys were singing “Fun, fun, fun ’til her daddy takes the T-bird away!” and hurled it over the cliff where it shattered on the rocks below. When she turned to face him, her eyes were openly angry. He had never seen her lose control this way and he watched her closely, grateful for the small rush of anxiety that had awakened inside him, for the hint, however slight, that the wall surrounding his heart might have a few expanding cracks in it.
“I don’t want you involved in my internal melodramas,” he said, trying to provoke her even more.
But she didn’t back down. “You use dead or alive like a club. Maybe there’s something simple that you’ve forgotten.”
“Are you telling me to shit or get off the pot?”
“I’m telling you that when you married me you didn’t know whether you could go on. That’s what you said then; that you had had this heart attack, that you were burned out and had outlived yourself. I thought you took me with you because you knew I would help you when your time came.”
She watched him now, because she had never talked to him like this. She expected him to turn away and he did, but then he turned back to her, his eyes strangely moist and alive.
“What was in the deal for you when you took up with me?” he asked.
“I would have taken any deal to get out of Labrador, not that you’re just any deal. I was thirty and I thought I was in my slot forever. The most I could hope for was a trip to St. John’s or Labrador City. I never told you I was going to marry someone else. Way before you found me. When you asked me to go with you I had to go. He understood, but if he had run into you he would have killed you. You know how those boys from Goose Bay are.”
“Do you have regrets?” he asked.
“Not too many, most of the time. He married someone else and went to Sudbury to work in the mines. I thought I loved him. That’s something else I learned I don’t know anything about.”
“Would you come to Labrador with me?”
“Probably.”
“Because you owe me?”
“I suppose.”
He sighed. His legs hurt and his feet were cold and he was very tired. Evelyn leaned over and rested her head on his lap.
“Did you read Walker’s script?” he asked.
“Yes, and then I gave it to Sam and he read it. He says Walker’s off the deep end and you’re crazy to indulge him.”
“What do you think?”
“I’d like to know what comes next.”
He shut his eyes, but before he could fall asleep she had helped him into the bedroom. Lying naked on the bed, he felt her lips wander softly over his weary and aching body and then her fingers massaged the soles of his feet until he slept. She lay beside him for a long time before she dressed and took a taxi into town, where she spent the afternoon shopping for a new tape deck and finishing what she had begun with the Frenchman
from Mexico City.
AFTER A.D. had dressed Walker’s wound and they had gotten stoned enough to sleep for a few hours, they drove down off the high mountain plateau in the early morning light and headed north toward Salt Lake City, where they stopped at a Holiday Inn on the outside of town. A.D. ordered a few drinks from room service and checked Walker’s wound again, bathing and hovering over him like an anxious nurse, so much so that Walker finally yelled that he wanted to sleep. A.D. sighed, tucking him in once more before he went outside for a walk alongside the state highway that shot like a smoky arrow into the heart of the city. He was filled with terror that he might have been trying to kill Walker. He had always managed to abuse or self-destruct his own ambitions as if a stubborn force inside him was determined not to let him ever switch tracks or hustle a new deal. Walking around the front of a newly built supermarket, he knelt down on the asphalt behind several produce trucks and vowed then and there not to blow this opportunity or betray himself, no matter what. When he returned to the motel Walker was awake, sitting on the edge of the bed fully dressed.
“Let’s head for Nevada,” Walker said. “We have a few thousand to play with. Maybe we’ll get lucky and walk away from movieland.”
“No way,” A.D. said with sudden vehemence. “The only way you’re going to walk away from movieland is when we complete the deal.”
“Let’s just get to Nevada,” Walker repeated, hobbling for the door.
In three hours they had crossed through the shimmering white hallucinations of the Great Salt Lake Desert and pulled into the parking lot of the Red Garter Casino, a few hundred yards across the state line. After they had checked into a room, they went directly to the tables. They played steadily and morosely, oblivious of time, occasionally passing each other without expression as they changed tables or took a break in the brightly lit twenty-four-hour luncheonette. Once Walker stepped outside to smell the cool desert air. It was night and above him a hundred-and-fifty-foot red, white, and blue cowboy pointed a finger toward the action, signaling “This Is the Place” to a convoy of four Mack trucks groaning in from the desert. The parking lot was alive with cowboys and Indians and Winnebagos from every state. Walker felt an urge to join a herd of tourists filing into a Greyhound bus after an hour’s pit stop in front of the slot machines. He had enough money. He could get off after a few hundred miles, maybe in Oregon. Rent a little house, phone it in to the old man simple and straight, just the facts about Clem. But of course he went back inside. He lost steadily and when he was down to his last two hundred dollars he went back to the room and tried to sleep.
Slow Fade Page 8