Rudolph Wurlitzer - Slow Fade

“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.”