Slow Fade

by Rudolph Wurlitzer

  EVELYN sat in the dressing room of Conchita de Paragon, the ancient Peruvian actress, consort, and business magnate. They were both wrapped in terry cloth robes and sat together on a low divan waiting for their hair to dry. Beneath them, through latticed French windows, they could see Wesley sitting in a wicker armchair on the far side of the lawn reading Walker’s last pages and occasionally firing a small hand-tooled Smith and Wesson at a target attached to the trunk of an oak tree three hundred feet away. A bemused gardener stood behind the bench, bringing back the target for Wesley’s inspection after each round.

  “You have read these pages?” Conchita asked. It was to her estate in Connecticut that they had come for the day, to return that night for a television interview that Wesley had agreed to.

  “Last night,” Evelyn said. “Wesley was too drunk to read them.”

  “His son writes the script?”

  “Yes. There’s another man that helps, a producer.”

  “What is the story?”

  “It’s about a man and his wife looking for the man’s sister who has disappeared in India. So far they haven’t found her.”

  “I don’t think Wesley will make another film,” Conchita said. “Not even with his family.”

  Very slowly she placed a cigarette into a long ivory holder, not bothering to light it. She was very old, and countless nips and tucks with the surgeon’s knife around her eyes and in back of her head gave her face a haunted glacial look.

  “He needs to work very badly,” Evelyn said.

  “Of course he does. That’s why he’s coming to me for money. He wants to hold on, to find some way to stop this terrible decay which is rushing on him like a black train. It’s a great ignorance, this avoidance, unfortunately an ignorance which I share.”

  They had just emerged from the Jacuzzi, one of the many health aids and comforts that composed Conchita’s vast and spectacular dressing room. Evelyn had never imagined a room like this one, with its sunken bath, sauna and steam rooms, stretch bar, high colonic table, racks and racks of clothes, soft Oriental rugs, erotic Picasso drawings, and inlaid Moroccan tiles. It was an inner sanctum, a domain that only a chosen few were ever allowed to enter, and Evelyn felt overwhelmed to have been ushered in directly out of the limousine while Wesley went off to the garden to read Walker’s pages.

  Conchita reached out to touch Evelyn’s hair with a gnarled arthritic hand. “Your husband is a violent man. I used to know him well. We were lovers when he made that trashy comedy in Santiago. It was before his son was born, the son that now haunts him. The film was a disaster and he behaved very badly. No one would hire him afterwards. He would come to me and lay his head on my breast and suck at me like an infant. Very sweet and alarming. After that it was impossible between us as lovers, but on another level we have managed to be friends. He comes to me occasionally as he does now, to regain my respect because there are not too many people he can regain anything with any more.”

  “Will you give him your respect?”

  “Of course. Every time. Even if it’s not there. But not the money. I don’t think he wants the money. He is a sick man. Not just the heart. Although I know he’s had warnings. But his soul, that’s in trouble. He does not have the energy or the will to see his way through such a commitment.”

  “Without a film to make he’ll go up to Labrador and let himself die.”

  “Perhaps that is the best way. Men like him don’t do well at the end of their lives. They are too attached to the world. When life finally fails them they become hysterical and a great stench rises off them, a great isolation. They are left with no image of themselves that is real, that they can depend on. They’re like old mercenaries, unable to remember what side they fought on, who won the war, what it was even about. It has been my fate to love such men.”

  She paused to watch the gardener walk slowly to the target and remove it from the tree and walk just as slowly back to Wesley, who carefully looked it over.

  “Why are you telling me this?” Evelyn asked.

  “Wesley wouldn’t have told me the truth, and I wanted to see for myself what kind of creature would be with him at the end.”

  “I’ve thought of leaving him.”

  “That would be foolish and sentimental.”

  “Maybe so. But I won’t go back to Labrador.”

  “That is for you to decide. But I would try and remain somewhat in the boundaries of your marital contract. Wesley will leave you more than enough to last you for the rest of your days. He is chivalrous, in his way, and he has made a great deal of money over the years.”

  “Ever since I’ve come to this country all I’ve heard about is contracts. Making them, breaking them, looking for them.”

  “It’s the land of the big deal,” Conchita said without irony. “I embrace that cliché. It has gotten me this far in spectacular fashion.”

  “Then why won’t you make a deal with Wesley?”

  “Because that would be a very small deal that would never come to anything. I have complete confidence that Wesley will sabotage each effort to sustain himself as a man of action.”

  “You won’t do any better,” Evelyn said angrily. “You’re certainly not prepared for the end.”

  Conchita looked at her gratefully. Rarely was she able to speak directly about the one subject that obsessed her beyond all others. “Ah, but I am prepared. I will do better even though I am older and have perhaps more fear and vanity than even Wesley Hardin. I’m like one of those fish that you find in European ponds that live for seven hundred years because they keep to the same slow steady rhythm and avoid all shocks. Which is why I must leave you now and why you must tell Wesley that I can see him no more. Somewhere in the next life we will meet again, but in the meantime he has my undying respect.”

  With that, she went out through a side door.

  In the limousine going back to New York Evelyn told Wesley that Conchita had decided not to finance the film. He had not asked before, staring out the window and drinking bourbon on the rocks from the portable bar. He was wearing pale yellow slacks and brown Italian shoes and a soft and very old and frayed white shirt with a red bandanna around his neck. The way he sat, so contained within himself, caught at Evelyn’s throat, and she thought she had never seen anyone so handsome and at the same time so lost and vulnerable. That made it all the sadder because at that moment she was beginning to feel that she might have enough courage truly to leave him.

  “Why didn’t she see me?” he asked.

  “She couldn’t handle the shock.”

  Wesley poured himself another shot of bourbon. “I thought she might have given something just out of perversity or amusement. It doesn’t matter. I don’t really care.”

  “What do you care about?” she asked. He didn’t answer and she didn’t ask again, knowing how those kinds of questions infuriated him. Instead she asked what he thought about Walker’s last pages.

  “I don’t think anything about them,” he said flatly.

  “You must have thought something,” she persisted.

  His eyes narrowed, and she recoiled from his fear and anger.

  “Everything, then,” he said evenly. “I thought everything.”

  She forced herself to reach out and hold his hand. “Do you want me to leave, Wesley? I can, you know. I would be all right.”

  “Of course I don’t want you to leave,” he said quickly. But he wasn’t able to meet her eyes, and she knew that part of him, at least, wanted her to leave and she laughed, thinking that perhaps in his mind he had already gotten rid of her.

  “Evelyn,” he said in a way that made her turn to face him again. “Don’t keep asking me questions about living and dying and going to Labrador or not going to Labrador.”

  “I’ve never asked those questions.”

  “Maybe not, but they’re always in the air. It’s like asking me who I am. It’s an insult. At this point I am who I am.”

  “You’re impossible, Wesley. You don’t
play fair, and you never listen to anyone.”

  “I do with you.”

  “Not really. Only when you’re bored or distracted.”

  “I’m not bored,” he insisted.

  “All right, you’re not bored.”

  “Seriously, Evelyn, I’m going to do this script. It’s all inside trains and rooms, and I’m a goddamn master at getting people in and out of trains and rooms. I can shoot it in Ceylon. I don’t have to go to India. I can do the whole thing below the line for under six million. That includes freak-outs, travel expenses, doctor bills, and bribes. I have a meeting with an Indian businessman next week who has given me a verbal guarantee over the phone.”

  “I’m happy for you,” she said as they both turned and looked out their separate windows.

  The driver let them out in front of a run-down five-story loft building in lower Manhattan. Wesley, who had thought they were going to NBC, asked the driver if he had made a mistake.

  “It’s a cable station,” the driver said. “It’s where they told me to take you.”

  They walked up four flights to the top floor and were greeted by a thin young man in wire-rimmed glasses who carried a large manila envelope which he dropped as he shook Wesley’s hand. Staring up from the floor were old publicity stills of Wesley kissing some of the stars he had directed.

  “I’m hysterical,” the young man said, bending down to pick up the stills. “I’m also your TV Host or interviewer or whatever.”

  They followed him into the studio, a small rectangular room with two swivel armchairs facing each other on a low stage against a background of false brick. In front of the stage two dozen film aficionados waited for Wesley’s arrival. Among them A.D. and Sidney, with Sidney filming Wesley and Evelyn coming through the door.

  Wesley put up his hands, experiencing real terror.

  Sidney reacted by swinging around and shooting Evelyn and then panning the audience.

  “Have you heard from your son and heir?” A.D. asked Wesley, holding a microphone in front of him.

  “I read the latest pages.”

  “How do they play?”

  Wesley didn’t answer, watching Evelyn as she walked away to stand alone behind the audience.

  But A.D. pressed on: “I can tell you one thing, the pages from Walker might be flat but your footage plays. When you’re at your worst it plays better than when you’re at your best, everything you do in front of the lens is magic, Wesley . . . ”

  Wesley didn’t listen to the rest of it, walking over to the stage to sit down in front of the TV Host, who quickly introduced him:

  “My next guest needs no introduction to a New York audience, having been much in the news lately with two separate lawsuits against M-G-M as well as several controversial public statements about the state of the film business in general and many of its more notorious participants in particular. He is also, of course, one of this country’s finest and most successful directors, having made thirty-seven films. Among film buffs he’s mentioned in the same breath with such legendary figures as John Ford, Howard Hawks, and Sam Peckinpah. He’s also a man who has recently stated that the less said about the process of making films the better. . . . Wesley Hardin, I’m honored that you’re here.”

  When Wesley didn’t respond, the TV Host went on anyway.

  “Given your aversion for interviews, do you find it a contradiction to find yourself here?”

  “Where am I exactly?”

  “Cable Television. Notes Along the Celluloid Trail.”

  “I thought this was NBC.”

  “Would that make a difference?”

  Wesley didn’t hear the question, his attention drawn toward Sidney, who was standing at the back filming the interview. The idea of being manipulated inside someone else’s film made Wesley suddenly thoughtful, as if for the first time he was actually considering the possibilities. The TV Host broke the silence with another question.

  “When most of your contemporaries have either passed away or have retired, it seems remarkable that you should keep on making films.”

  “Not remarkable,” Wesley said finally. “Sad, maybe, and boring.”

  “Even so, you must still manage to find satisfaction in the process. Otherwise why proceed, especially when faced with such obstacles as those you’ve suffered recently from M-G-M?”

  “Bad habits. If I’m not on the trail of a story or a project, I’m anguished and full of rage. I’m convinced I’m going to die.”

  “In that case let’s hope you’re on the trail of a story.”

  “I am. It’s at a very sloppy and intuitive stage, involving members of my family fooling around in a foreign locale. The producer is sitting right over there. He can tell it better than I can.”

  The Host feigned surprise and enthusiasm. “I see that he’s also filming you. Is that part of the project?”

  “I have no idea. You’d have to ask him.”

  “Speaking of your family, is it true that your daughter was named after John Ford’s My Darling Clementine?”

  “No. But I admire the pace and scale of that film. No one does work like that any more. He was secure in his beliefs, I suppose. You don’t have a real drink, do you? Something that will get me through this?”

  “I don’t think we’re allowed.”

  Wesley nodded as if he had heard something profound. He stood up, saying he would be back in a moment, but then changed his mind and called on A.D. to come up and talk about what they were working on. “I don’t want to leave you in the lurch,” he told the Host, introducing A.D. and then walking back to talk to Evelyn, who was putting on her coat. The camera stayed with A.D. and the Host, who was drawing laughs with his deadpan confusion.

  “I take it you are the producer of this project?” the Host began.

  A.D. was trying to relax and present a contained and authoritative image, but he wasn’t succeeding. His eye kept darting over toward Wesley, who was standing against the far wall talking to Evelyn. At one point Sidney came in for a close-up and Wesley said something that made him turn and walk out of the studio.

  “. . . and so, how did all this come about?” the Host was asking.

  A.D. paused, as if gathering himself together, then smiled directly into the camera.

  “I’ve always been a fan, you know? I’ve seen all the great films. And when I had a chance to put together a deal with Wesley Hardin, I jumped. Wesley wants to work with his family and I respect that. It’s altogether a new process for both of us. A departure film. You won’t have seen this kind of a story before from Wesley Hardin. I shouldn’t say this with him over there, but it’s so rare to work with a man his age who still hasn’t lost it. I’ve learned a lot from him. I didn’t know anything about film before I met him. I thought I did, but I didn’t. To be able to put together a deal around him, well, it makes you think about yourself in a different way. . . .”

  A.D. looked over to see how Wesley was receiving all this. He was sitting alone in the back, Evelyn having disappeared.

  “We don’t mean to exclude you,” the Host called out to Wesley. “Please, come on back, Wesley Hardin. We love you.”

  The crowd laughed and cheered, and when A.D. stood up to applaud Wesley as he stepped up onto the podium, they applauded as well.