“For god’s sake, why do you let him go out in this shape?” Wesley dimly heard Sheila ask Evelyn. “He’s on his last legs.”
“He does what he wants to do,” Evelyn said matter-of-factly.
“Oh, rubbish. You can’t just let him get drunk and pass out on the table like some kind of degenerate.”
Evelyn stared hard at Sheila, so that Sheila had to lift up her glass and look away. “It’s not that I give a damn,” Sheila said. “It’s just that it’s distasteful and unnecessary.”
“I agree,” Wesley said thickly. “If you want a deal talk to my producer over here.”
“I’m not making a deal with anyone,” A.D. said. “Not even myself.” He helped Wesley out of his chair and all three of them made their way back through the crowd and onto the street.
They walked toward Seventh Avenue until Wesley became dizzy again and sat down on the steps of Carnegie Hall. To one side a blind violinist in a New York Yankees cap played the Bach Chaconne.
“Are you in pain?” Evelyn asked.
“Not hardly,” Wesley replied. As if to prove his point he stood up and tapped the violinist on the shoulder. Handing him a wad of bills, he took up the violin and started to play, the bow scratching over the strings as he sang in a hoarse baritone:
“ ’Twas on the tenth of March, my friend,
As you may understand.
Two men from Labrador
Started for Newfoundland.
’Twas eight o’clock in the morning
As they left Point Amour,
To travel across those gloomy straits
Those men from Labrador.
They had four dogs and a komatik
And a little canvas boat.
A mail bag and three nights’ grub
And that was all she wrote.”
He handed the fiddle back and started out again for Fifty-ninth Street. When they reached the park he turned and walked inside. A.D. angrily watched him go. “What kind of a joust is that? That might play in Hollywood or up there in Labrador, but that won’t last an hour on my street.”
Evelyn sat down on the same bench they had shared before, the one facing the Plaza. She shut her eyes, as if wanting to shut it all out.
“So I say, what am I fooling around making deals with him for?” A.D. went on, sitting down and impulsively picking up her hand.
“He might have one film left in him,” she said, opening her eyes and looking at him.
He asked her if she wanted a drink and when she said yes he took her downtown.
“He must have put a special hook into you for you to put up with all his jive,” A.D. said in the cab. “Great man that he is.”
“No hook,” she said and smiled. “When I was a kid we used to play a game called Green Gravel. We’d hold hands and go around in a circle. The person whose name you said would have to turn and go around with his back to the circle. Then we’d all sing:
“Green gravel, green gravel.
The grass is so green.
And all the fair ladies
Are shamed to be seen.
Oh, someone, oh, someone.
Your true love is dead.
I’ll send you a letter
To turn ’round your head.”
“Are you trying to tell me someone’s dead?” A.D. asked as they got out of the cab at Sheridan Square and entered a dimly lit bar-restaurant.
“Not really,” she said. “Just that I don’t really believe in true love.”
A thin, middle-aged black woman sat behind the piano and sang sad songs in a small plaintive voice. They sat through the set and had several drinks, and when A.D. asked Evelyn for her back story she sighed and said that she didn’t like to get into any of that but then she had another drink and told him anyway.
“My father was Eskimo. My mother German. She came to Labrador as a nurse on the Moravian freight boat and she stayed on when she met my father. They started a trading post up on the northern end of Labrador, near Hebron. It was a lonely place, but there were five of us kids and we roamed pretty wild and never seemed to mind the isolation. When we got older we always made a point of coming home at the end of the summer and helping out however we could, and then we would all get into my father’s boat and spend a few weeks hunting and fishing. This one summer I had come up from St. John’s, where I had been laid off from clerking in a store and was waiting for an opening as a schoolteacher. Everyone was there but my oldest brother, who was off working on a trawler, so when we set off we had a full boat.
“Two days after we landed up at the inlet where we kept a fishing shack a big thunderstorm came down and the lightning struck the boat, went down the mast, burned a hole through the boat, and blew the radio to pieces. So we were cut off, but we didn’t think much about it, my father going ahead fixing the boat while my two younger brothers went inland to fish on one of the lakes and maybe get some deer or caribou. I stayed around the shack with my sister and mother, helping my father a little and cooking and picking berries and putting in a supply of wood. It was all work we were used to and none of it was hard and we were having a good time when my youngest brother, Duncan, walked in and collapsed before we could get him inside the shack. He was shaking and having trouble breathing, and he said that my other brother, Early, had the same thing but was too sick to come in. A few hours later his lungs gave out and he couldn’t catch his breath and he died. My mother thought it might be the Spanish flu, which is a terrible thing in those parts. One time it took nearly half of Labrador away in an epidemic.
“After we buried Duncan we set out for Early. We found him a day later and he was almost dead. My mother had her doctor’s bag and she nursed him for two days, but finally he rolled over and died. By that time my mother had figured out it might be something to do with the water they were drinking, because the lake had a pink cast to it. People always used to say the army had dumped some chemicals up there years before and a few Eskimo and Indians had died from unknown causes, but no one ever did anything about it. My father told the Department of Lands and Forest but that was about it.
“After we buried Early we went on up to Joe Poquet’s place, an old trapper who had a cabin by the head of the lake. When we found him he was lying on his bunk and he had been dead quite a while, because half his face was eaten away by weasels. Joe had written something on a piece of paper: To the Finder. Everything I have is yours. Soon I’m a dead man. We buried Joe as soon as we could, just wanting to get away from that place, and as we were about to pull out a seaplane banked in over the lake and came right out of the sun and landed in front of us.
“The first man out of the plane was Wesley. He was up there fishing with some of his Hollywood friends, and they were looking for Joe Poquet to be a guide for them, their other guide having been too much on the booze. They flew us back to the boat and spent a few days with us helping my father get the boat ready, and then they took off for Goose Bay and we sailed down there as well. I met Wesley in St. John’s and one thing led to another and he offered me a job and, after holding out for two months, I took it and flew off to L.A., where I was his secretary before we got married. Although it wasn’t really like that. There were a lot of in-between times, too.”
“I’m sure there’s a way to bank all of that,” A.D. said.
Evelyn withdrew her hand from his. “I don’t want to bank anything. I had been thinking of Joe Poquet and how he looked when he first walked in after a winter’s trapping. He looked like Wesley did before he went into the park.”
A.D. felt her slipping away and tried to pull her back. “Well, sure. Two brothers gone and then dealing with Wesley’s losses. That’s a burn, all right. Now, if it was me doing the song that’s where I’d find my hook, in all that suffering. ‘Oh baby, don’t shut the door / On Labrador / Don’t go away / with nowhere to stay’. . . But don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to cop your story. I have plenty of stories. I don’t need yours. I love it. I’d use it. But I don’t need it.”
“That’s good, because you can’t have it.”
A.D. held up his hands in surrender. “Hey. Believe me. I don’t want it. No bad intentions. But just for Wesley, we should be traveling together.”
“We can never travel together.”
A.D. didn’t break stride. “Of course not. We have different deals with Wesley. But we can acknowledge each other’s position.”
“Not even that,” Evelyn said, standing up.
She looked down at him and started to say something, then suddenly turned and left. A.D. made no move to stop her. He’d go one more round with both of them, he thought, and if he came up empty he’d jump off the train and land somewhere else. That was one act he knew how to do.
OUT ON the road, Walker was having his own problems with images, unable to summon up a gesture, object, or even visual mood that might allow him to reenter the script. He had started to ponder the story, for one thing, questioning and trying to remember his own experience, and that had produced an almost instant paralysis as well as a smoldering rage toward his father for having trapped him inside such a hokey progression. Until now he had been mostly on automatic, letting A.D. prod him toward expressing some kind of form, however banal, that might lead him toward finding what he was looking for, not just if Clementine was alive or dead, but how he was doing as well. But as he traveled on, crossing the prairies and the Mississippi River and driving into the heart of Illinois and Indiana, his dread increased, finally causing him to veer off the road into a cornfield.
He stumbled out of the van, running between two rows of corn until he collapsed. Hugging the earth, he listened for the drone of an airplane. But there was nothing. Staring up at the empty sky, he shut his eyes. But no image appeared, inside or outside. He ran on until he collapsed again. He was halfway across the field before he remembered Cary Grant running through a cornfield in North by Northwest, a single-engine crop duster hunting him from the air. It was as if he had been unnaturally seized and he sat down and dissolved each image until the scene was erased from his mind. The effort exhausted him, and it was several hours before he backed the van onto the highway and drove toward the state line.
In Ohio he checked into a motel and had a long bath and half a bottle of Scotch before he let himself return to the scene in New Delhi with Lama Yeshe. They were images that carried a great deal more anxiety than Cary Grant running for his life through a cornfield, and he wrote them fast, without stopping, until he was too drunk to go on.
EXTERIOR. NEW DELHI — NIGHT . . . Jim and Lacey drunkenly climb the outside stairs to the roof where Lama Yeshe leads a puja. Two dozen men, women, and children sit on thick narrow rugs decorated with snow lions and five-pronged dorjes or powerbolts. Lama Yeshe, or Rinpoche as he’s commonly addressed, meaning “precious teacher,” sits on a rug facing them, his body wrapped in a maroon robe. In front of him a small altar holds several rows of torma (sacrificial cakes), framed photographs of various lamas, and a clay statue of Padmasambhava, the Lotus-born guru. It is a relaxed scene, the children playing and crawling around, the women in their black chubas wearing jade and coral earrings and necklaces, the men in Chinese sneakers, cheap slacks, and short-sleeved shirts. Everyone praying with their malas or rosaries. Lama Yeshe looks up from the text he’s reading aloud and strikes a hand-held drum as he nods to his assistant, a young monk with a shaved head who blasts out a triumphant note on a long Tibetan horn. Over all, a chaos of sound rising from the street, radios blaring popular Hindi songs from roofs and open windows. . . . To one side of Lama Yeshe sits the only other Westerner — Byron — clean and attentive in faded jeans and white shirt, his blond hair twisted together into a knot at the back of his head like Lama Yeshe’s. Lama Yeshe whispers something to him and he makes his way toward the three strangers. . . .“Rinpoche will see you at the end of the puja,” he whispers. Jim and Lacey wait until Lama Yeshe ends the ceremony, leading the invocations and prayers as they pass before him, palms pressed together, heads bent forward for a brief blessing. Afterwards, while they’re drinking buttered tea and eating stale cakes and hard candy, Byron motions to Jim and Lacey to come forward. They sit before Lama Yeshe, whose small black eyes shift slowly from one to the other. Lama Yeshe asks where they are from, and when they say “America” he asks how big is it? Are people free there and if they are, how is that freedom measured? What is the color of freedom, the taste and substance of it? . . . Jim says he doesn’t know about any of that, he’s just Clementine’s brother who has come over with his wife to find her. . . .“She is a serious student,” Lama Yeshe says, looking at them while Byron translates. . . . Lama Yeshe and Byron talk back and forth until Byron explains: “Rinpoche says that Clementine’s questions sometimes point to a beginner’s understanding of the fundamental nature of mind.”. . .“I’m glad if she’s a fundamentalist,” Jim says, “but I just want to find her, she hasn’t been in touch with anyone in a year. Her father’s worried. He thinks she might be dead.”. . . Lacey interjects, “We’re all frantic with concern.”. . .“She’s off on a retreat,” Byron says. . . .“I don’t care what she’s doing,” Jim says. “Purifying or polluting her mind or her body or whatever, I want to find her.”. . . Again Byron and Lama Yeshe talk back and forth in Tibetan, with Lama Yeshe laughing and clapping his hands and offering Lacey hard candy from a plastic bowl. “Rinpoche says your view about purifying and polluting is quite correct and all experiences should be a source of insight. From that one taste you might begin to understand that form and emptiness are the same.” Lama Yeshe then says something to Byron, who tells them to wait while he goes downstairs to get a letter from Clementine. While he’s gone, they sit silently with Lama Yeshe.
(Pop . . . I can hear you muttering, “Cut to the chase. That’s where the money is.” Which is true, I suppose, but in that moment something happened to Lacey. We were both drunk and disoriented and trying to stay on the point with Lama Yeshe when suddenly he leaned over to Lacey and snapped his fingers in front of her. She jumped as if she’d been hit but he just smiled at her, not taking his eyes from hers until she relaxed, which was amazing because I’ve seen her relax no more than five times in our marriage. About as much as I have with you or you with me. In retrospect I suspect that Lama Yeshe was trying to prepare Lacey in some subtle mysterious way for what happened later. Certainly in terms of the film I know you’d give such a prototype character as Lama Yeshe some flash, at the least a little prescience or holy mojo. So I’m not loading up the scene with messages and instructions about death. You’d automatically eliminate all of that anyway as, in fact, you do in your own life. But those demons were up there on the roof and Lacey must have picked them up because when Byron returned she started asking questions about death and what was going to happen with her after she died and how could she deal with her fear of death and so on. Lama Yeshe very sweetly gave her some textbook answers: “When death comes, if you have a relaxed mind you will be safe from the lower realms. Let go of whatever you might see or think and direct your attention upward, through the top of your head toward the light. Imagine the image of a precious deity above you and dissolve into the pure light of its essence.”. . .“That’s all very well for you to say,” Lacey replied. “But I don’t know how to do any of that. I don’t even watch television.”. . . Lama Yeshe very patiently explained it to her in another way: “When the moment comes, be like a child, not distracted or clinging to any thought, open but not active or emotional.”. . . Finally Lacey’s anxiety dissolved into a kind of temporary acceptance and Lama Yeshe asked Byron to read a section of Clementine’s letter, which returns us to the script if we haven’t been there already.)
. . .With Byron shuffling through the long letter he finally finds the one page Lama Yeshe wants to be read. . . .“It’s true, Rinpoche,” the letter says. “My faith is so precarious that often I think I need a vulgar miracle to pull me through. My mind wanders and I have trouble with even the simplest part of the visualization you gave me. You warned me this would happ
en, that the purpose of this practice is the purification of obscurations, that original mind is encrusted with intellectual delusions and defiling passions and that the ego inevitably resists any attempts to purify it. Maybe so, but I’m still discouraged and resistant. My practice is willful and stale, and I have to force myself to do even a little bit. All I think about is packing my bags and getting on a plane for Bali or Goa and indulging every sort of hedonistic desire. I’m full of self-pity and narcissism, enough to wonder how a rich, fairly attractive young woman who just wanted to play the sitar in a rock-’n’-roll band and fall in love with the lead singer ended up doing prostrations alone in a cold damp shack in the foothills of the Himalayas. It’s even worse than I’m saying, Rinpoche, because I’m too inhibited with you to describe my despair, which is not a good omen for our relationship insofar as it deals with surrender. But every time I think about surrender I always seem to end up shutting more doors. How can any of it work? We can’t speak to each other without a translator. . . . Hi, Byron, Please write me. Your last letter made no sense at all. . . . You’re caught in the stiff robes of formal religion while I’m caught in the naive mind of the deluded seeker. I keep wanting something from all of this, and the more I want the more I seem to fall apart. The most basic precepts elude me. I don’t really know what is virtuous or what isn’t, so how can I know what karma or cause and effect is? When I sit I don’t really sit. When I listen I don’t really listen. When I speak I don’t really speak. I don’t recognize my center of gravity, and my mind is endlessly full of speedy concepts that never give me a moment’s peace. I have no idea what it means to attain realization, especially now that I see that those first experiences were nothing more than a slight crack in the outer layers of my conditioning. And yet I go on because I don’t know how to go back. You say that the source of all phenomena is the mind, and true freedom comes from understanding that the individual mind is fundamentally fallacious. But I have trouble in simply watching my mind much less understanding it. . . . So what am I doing about all these complaints? Nothing. I get up in the morning. I make tea. I do my practice. I take my medicine, although no one seems to know what’s the matter with me. My prayers are empty and hollow. Who am I and why am I here is my only mantra. And so it goes. . . .” Byron hands the page to Lama Yeshe, who replaces it in the rest of the letter. Then he reties the entire package with a red ribbon. Reaching down he touches Lacey lightly on the hair. He looks at her for a long time with such solemnity and compassion that it unnerves her until finally he stands and leaves the roof. . . . “Rinpoche showed you that letter as an example of what a serious student your sister is,” Byron explains. “He also doesn’t think you should meet her in Benares.”. . .“Of course we’re going to Benares,” Jim says. “Especially now that she’s sick and in some kind of depression.”. . .“I wouldn’t say it’s exactly a depression,” Byron objects. “More like a turbulent passage.”. . . Jim is shocked by this casual attitude. “She’s flipped out. All she talks about is what a miserable creature she is.”. . . Byron spreads his arms, shrugging his shoulders. “Listen, I’m only a poor pilgrim myself, but I’m very close to your sister. Too close, actually. I would love to see her. I even need to see her, but Lama Yeshe knows her mind more than I or even you do and no doubt Clementine herself.”. . . But Jim is determined. “At this point I’m not trying to find her mind, only her body. I just want to get her back home and then we can deal with all that other stuff.”. . . Lacey places her hand inside his and they present a united front. . . .“Well sure,” Byron says sadly. “Good luck to you. By the way, do you need any religious artifacts? Offering bowls, tankas, statues, skull cups, butter lamps? Buddha’s tooth? I’m raising money for a plane ticket to the States. One way, no return.”. . . Lacey writes out a thousand-dollar check to Byron, who tells her Lama Yeshe might be going over as well. Impulsively she writes another check for a thousand and that closes the deal. . . . Byron takes the checks, writes his address on a slip of paper and hands it to her. . . .
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