Rudolph Wurlitzer - Slow Fade

“Sal Mineo. They called him Plato. He was killed a while ago. In real life, that is. Some kind of fag drug scene.”

They turned up the steep road to the observatory and pulled into the parking lot. Beneath them millions of lights shone through the gathering darkness like electric night flowers. Walker got out of the car and walked over to a bench. He felt slightly faint and sat for a while just concentrating on his diaphragm moving up and down. He had forgotten about the girl when she put her hands lightly on top of his head. It was a gesture that he was not prepared for and his thighs and arms began to tremble.

“Why were you away so long?” she asked. “I didn’t even hear about you until a month ago.”

“I don’t know, really. After a while it was too hard to get back.”

“I always wanted to do that,” she said, sighing. “Just take off and fuckola movieola.”

As her hands dropped to his shoulders, he shut his eyes. Surely she wasn’t doing what she seemed to be doing, her hands now rubbing against the back of his neck.

“Are all of these moves on the reentry list?” he asked.

“So far, yes.”

“If they weren’t, would you do this anyway?”

“If I wasn’t riding for the brand, I wouldn’t be here, if that’s what you mean.”

And then it was too late as she dropped to her knees in front of the bench, her cheek rubbing against his protruding cock. He wanted with all his heart and soul to withdraw, to let his member defiantly wilt under her caress, a caress that was now involving her thumb and forefinger as she unzipped his fly. But it had been more than a year since he had had an erection much less an orgasm, and heart and soul were not enough to stop the throbbing swell within him. Oh, fuck his father, he thought, that he would have conceived of this scheme, this little hired bitch in front of him, kneeling under his distant direction, her mouth now wet and immense as it circled around him for the arranged Welcome Home, Son. A spurt was now beginning from his toes, shuddering up his trunk, and causing him nearly to lose consciousness as he came and came down to the last squeezed drop. Afterwards she drove him in silence back to his father’s house on Mulholland, a professional to the end and, as she nodded good night to him from the car, not without tenderness.

A Mexican maid whom he didn’t recognize answered the door of the rambling Spanish Tudor house with its view of the San Fernando Valley which he avoided looking at as he followed her into the entrada and down the inlaid Provençal-tiled steps to the massive oak-beamed living room with its stone fireplace and Japanese and Eskimo artifacts hanging on the wall. It was clearly not the room for him to be in, and rather than accept the drink the maid was offering him he said he would prefer to go to his room. She informed him impassively that his room, the room that he had been raised in and always slept in when he visited was “ no más ,” the “ señora ” having taken it for herself. He followed the maid out a side door and around the side of the pool to a guest cottage he had never seen before.

The two-room suite, with kitchenette and sauna, was clean and white with freshly cut roses on the dresser in a blue china vase. He sat down on the king-sized bed but immediately rose, feeling an overwhelming need to touch or smell something familiar. He stepped outside to the pool, a body of water he had no trouble remembering. But as he sat down on a deck chair, he discovered that even that familiar space had been rearranged.

“Hi there,” spoke a robust English voice from the far side of the pool.

Walker dimly made out a man’s head protruding from a bubbling Jacuzzi. The Jacuzzi, too, was new, as well as another guest cottage behind the end of the pool.

“Just landing?” the man asked. “I detest that flight from New York, although the one over the pole from London is a thousand times more horrific.”

“I came in from Hong Kong,” Walker said, trying to remember if they knew each other.

“Whatever.” The man’s head disappeared and reemerged like an inquisitive seal. “But I don’t envy you that project. Detroit in the summer is not my cup of tea, although I seriously doubt if the old bastard will ever get to it.”

“What’s wrong with him?” Walker asked, sure now that he had been mistaken for somebody else.

“I suppose he’s just run out of whatever primitive fuel his motor requires; rage, fear — who knows? But don’t misunderstand, I’ll definitely shed a tear, perhaps two, if he drops dead and not just because it’ll cost me more than a few quid if he doesn’t finish this current shoot. As it is, he’s three million over with all the usual demented nonsense going on. . But I love him like a brother, or perhaps a half-brother.”

Walker got up and went into the house. No one was around and he walked upstairs and entered his father’s room. It hadn’t changed in over thirty years: piles of scripts on his mahogany desk, the overflowing floor-to-ceiling bookcase, the huge bed framed with elephant tusks, the two Modigliani nudes and the map of Venice on the wall, his hand-tooled guns resting in their Chippendale glass case. The only evidence of the new señora was a floppy straw hat on the seat of a wicker armchair.

He walked down the hall and entered his own room. Everything had changed. Gone were the original drawings of the sets of three Busby Berkeley films his father had given him on his thirteenth birthday; the framed picture of his now dead mother standing next to her Cessna, looking like Amelia Earhart in a flying outfit, his father peering dimly out of the cockpit; and his books and all the rest of the list he was incapable of recalling. They were all gone. Replaced by bare white walls, an austere single bed, a simple desk made from oak planks, two straight-backed unpainted wooden chairs, an old captain’s chest, and a round hand-stitched rug. He picked up a photograph on the desk showing a small girl of eight or nine, a puppy in her arms, standing in front of a man and woman, all of them dressed in woolen pants, heavy boots, and parkas. The man’s Indian face, severe and unsmiling, stared straight at the camera, while the woman, pale and white-haired, gazed at the top of her daughter’s head with a wistful smile. Behind them smoke drifted out of a tar-paper shack, a mountainous pile of wood off to one side.

He walked next door to his sister’s room. It, too, had been stripped of its past and made into a library-TV room. All except for her books, which were still in their wall-to-ceiling bookcases, and one framed photograph over the new white couch. He studied the photograph as if looking for clues. His sister, blond and pale and fragile, stood next to him on a tennis court. They wore immaculate white shorts and T-shirts, holding their racquets out to the side as if ready to receive a volley from across the net. They were both smiling — his sister less so, but she had always been more reluctant when it came to games and social activities. He must have been sixteen and she, of course, two years younger. There was nothing in her face to suggest any inner turbulence, nothing more than a pretty Beverly Hills teenager smiling for the camera.

Walker lay down on the couch and closed his eyes, immediately falling into an exhausted sleep.

The next morning he missed his plane to Santa Fe even though the maid woke him and the driver waited outside in the limousine. Taking a later flight gave him time to have the maid cut his hair and pick out some clothes for him on Rodeo Drive while he remained in bed. When he finally landed in Santa Fe his appearance had changed considerably. Although still gaunt and ravaged, he looked, at first sight, like a mannequin in a store window, with his new Adidas sneakers, French jeans, and brightly checkered sport shirt.