Slow Fade (14 page)

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 happen, 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
. . . .

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.”