Rudolph Wurlitzer - Slow Fade

(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 over 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.”