Slow Fade (11 page)

“It’s not that. My wife died and I never got to it again.”

“I’m the opposite,” she said. “When someone dies on me, I can’t get enough.”

“I guess I’ve been shut down,” he said.

“For two hundred dollars I’ll take care of your fear for the rest of the day. I can’t promise the night.”

As he took off his clothes she noticed the bandage over his leg. “My producer shot me when I tried to run away,” he explained.

“Film scum,” she said, as if she knew what she was talking about.

He lay down on the bed but refrained from touching her. Staring at the ceiling, he said: “There’s a line in
The African Queen
when Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn are floating down this river and he says to her: ‘Pinch me, Rosie. Here we are, going down the river like Anthony and Cleopatra.’ ”

“Do you feel we’re floating down a river?” she asked as her fingers reached over and caressed his cock.

“In a way.”

“Then why don’t you slide inside me so that you can get with the current.”

Turning her over on her side, he entered into her. Holding her breasts and shutting his eyes, he remained very still, breathing evenly and smelling the faint perfume in her hair. When she finally responded, sighing and moving her hips, he stopped her, his hand pressing down on her thigh. They remained that way for several minutes, not moving, his breathing matching hers. His mind empty, he felt his blood roaring through him and a delicious agony invading his entire body. He passed through that and entered a quiet place, a calm that was soon replaced by fear as she started to move again and he felt he was going to explode, but she pulled herself in and the pressure in his throat and ears receded as she lay perfectly still. He had no idea who she was and in fact had no memory of her, even the color of her hair. She might have been asleep except that she was saying, “You’re on the money, honey. Hold it right there.” He held it right there while a great shaking sadness stole into him that began in his feet and swept up into his loins, and on the crest of that terrifying emptiness, he came.

Rosie immediately fell asleep while Walker lay awake and thought of his wife for the first time since her death and the last time they had made love when she had been so freaked and lustful lying underneath him on the sandy soil somewhere in the middle of the scorched plains of India. Some clinging residue of the smell and taste of her enveloped him for a moment, and to stop thinking about her, he went over to the desk and began to write.

DELHI. TRAIN STATION — MIDDAY
. . .
Jim and Lacey descend from the train carrying only one bag apiece. Stunned and dazed from the blistering heat, they walk slowly down the crowded platform
. . . .
A plump Indian in a white shirt and pale blue turban stands at the end of the platform with a sign: Jim and Lacey Rankin
. . .
“You are to please follow me,” he says, picking up their bags as they identify themselves. They follow him through the station and onto the street to an old white Chrysler sedan parked in back of a ricksha stand. The driver puts their bags in the trunk and opens the back door
. . . .
A blond, blue-eyed woman, large-boned and fleshy underneath a straw hat and yellow cotton dress, leans over from the backseat, one leg extended in a plaster cast. “Must excuse me,” she says in a high-pitched upper-class English accent. “Broke my foot falling off a horse. Humiliating. I’m Miranda Witherspoon. So glad. Terrible time. Not sure what train you were on, your telegram from Madras very vague. Your father called this morning all lathered up about your missing sister. Your father is a lion to work for. My husband, Charles, is quite terrified of him. I say, you’re traveling awfully light.”
. . .
Lacey explains that the rest of their bags were stolen on the train
. . . .
Miranda is outraged. “How ugly it’s all getting. There’s no point in traveling any more. It’s a defensive life now, at best
. . . .
But never mind. Everything can be replaced and it’s more amusing to have your clothes made for you here. One never brings the right things.”
. . .
The huge car slowly maneuvers through a side street as hands press against the window for alms. They turn into a wide boulevard, passing government buildings and then a row of fashionable hotels and villas set back from the road. Entering through an open iron gate, they park in front of a large nineteenth-century colonial house surrounded by flat well-clipped lawns and a variety of terraced flower gardens. Suddenly they are harbored inside a familiar world of comfort and control and they are glad to be there
. . . .
A uniformed servant opens the door and they follow Miranda as she hobbles inside
. . . .

TO THE INTERIOR
. . .
Charles Witherspoon, his taut athletic face full of concern and studied alertness, strides across the cool Cambodian tiles of the veranda, through the narrow glass doors, into the spacious Edwardian living room where they all stand waiting for him, servants offering glasses of sherry and elegant hors d’oeuvres. Charles wears white cotton slacks and a starched white shirt with pink collar and is all business and hysterical prep-school charm
. . . .
“Wonderful to finally see you. I’ll fill you in on your sister before your father’s call. That’s in a few hours. I’ve quite a sheet on her, but you’ll be relieved to know she’s okay. Just off on various pilgrimages here and there. Religious trips, mostly. A common enough ailment in this country. Right now she’s off in Benares or thereabouts, questing or seeking, I suppose you would say. But God, you probably want to change and have a bath before we get into all of that.”
. . .

INTERIOR
. . .
Their suite of rooms is modern and air-conditioned and looks out on the gardens and a flock of wandering peacocks
. . . .
“So that’s it,” Jim says, after they have each bathed and Jim is changing into his pants. “We’ll get drunk tonight and go back in the morning.”
. . .
Lacey has changed into a blue sari that Miranda has loaned her and looks odd and strangely childlike. “I don’t see why we should go back. We’ve already put a lot into finding her. We’ve been drugged and robbed and molested, for god’s sake. Although once I knew they weren’t going to kill or rape us I leaned into it a little.”
. . .
“What do you mean, leaned into it?”
. . .
“Some part of me was stimulated.”
. . .
He looks at her as if she’s lost her mind. “Listen, Lacey, I’m not in good shape and I want to go home. My sister doesn’t need us. It’s obvious that she doesn’t want to be found. She’s never had the consideration to even send anyone a postcard. She’s been totally self-indulgent and I don’t see why I have to waste my life trying to find her, especially now that she’s off on a lark with some guru.”
. . .
“Aren’t you curious?” Lacey asks
. . . .
“Not really.”
. . .
But Lacey persists: “If you don’t have the energy to find her, how do you expect me to find you or you to find me?”
. . .
The question infuriates him: “Sweet Jesus. I can’t stand that kind of talk. I don’t want to find you. You don’t want to find me. In any case we’re right in front of each other.”
. . .
“Then maybe I should step off to the side, away from you, because I have no idea who I am around you.”
. . .
“Maybe you should,” he says, pulling back within himself
. . . .

INTERIOR
. . .
On that edge they descend to the garden, where Charles meets them inside a cool marble gazebo on the far side of the lawn. Jim asks after his father
. . . .
“He has called off the search for your sister,” Charles replies with a weary smile. “I spoke to him two days ago. Apparently she has written him a letter. He wouldn’t disclose the contents, but one must assume she’s well. He’s anxious to talk to you, of course.” He opens a large notebook bound in brown leather. “Let me start from that point where your sister left Madras, which is where your knowledge of her ends. She flew to Delhi and spent two and a half weeks at the Imperial Hotel. From there she took the train to Jaipur, where she stayed for over a month, keeping to herself and seeing no one. She took her meals in her room and every afternoon walked in the gardens of the hotel, which once belonged to a maharaja and which is all very grand. Four months later she turned up in Poona to study with Sri Iynagar, a renowned yoga teacher with an international reputation. Perhaps you know of him? Aside from regularly attending yoga classes, she underwent rigorous purification asanas, which involved fasting for a month and cleaning out her entire intestinal tract. After several months studying with Iynagar she met a French disciple of Bhagwan Sri Raj Neesh, a most radical and controversial teacher who was at that time living in Poona. Your sister and the Frenchman became lovers and she moved into his rented room in a large house near the ashram inhabited by other sannyasins. They listened to Bhagwan’s daily lectures and participated in several training courses or intensives on various meditation techniques, modern as well as traditional, such as primal therapy and vipassana. But your sister was never able to become a disciple of Bhagwan. Even though she wore orange, the prescribed color at the ashram, she refused to wear the mala over her neck with Bhagwan’s picture hanging from it. She and the Frenchman quarreled. He insisted that she surrender to Raj Neesh and she grew more stubborn in her refusals. Finally she left altogether and hired a car to take her to Bombay. She rented a suite of rooms in the Taj Mahal Hotel and made contact with Western students living in cheap hotels nearby who supplied her with opium and hashish. During this time she made two visits to Ganeshpuri to visit Swami Mucktananda’s ashram, a day’s drive from Bombay. Three months later she appears in Goa living with an American in a small house on the beach. He is known to the rather bizarre and anachronistic collection of Westerners living there as Jack the Smack, with a reputation for having supported himself exporting jewelry and religious objects to the West, mostly through smuggling. But I gathered that he and your sister were at first obsessively in love and never out of each other’s sight. But then she began to withdraw into herself, meditating or taking long aimless walks down the beach. Once she sat outside the house for a day and a half without moving and refused all efforts to communicate. Jack the Smack tried to ignore her and involved himself in the soft traffic of Goa hustles and pleasures. But one night her relentless self-absorption enraged him and he lost control, knocking her across the room where she fell against a chair and badly bruised her shoulder. They never spoke again and the next day she left. Two months later she showed up outside of New Delhi to attend a meditation camp run by a Burmese Buddhist monk. She had acute dysentery and the camp was very rough and primitive with fourteen hours of sitting meditation a day. But she survived, afterwards returning to Delhi and leaving immediately for Dharamsala in the north to visit a Tibetan refugee camp. While there, she took refuge with a Lama Yeshe and after studying with him for six months left for the Kulu valley in the foothills of the Himalayas, intending to do a year’s retreat. At first she lived in a cave, but was unable to adjust to the brutal conditions and moved to a small house, outside of a small town, with no heat or plumbing. After several weeks her health deteriorated, and she returned to Delhi to consult a doctor as well as Lama Yeshe, who had moved there with his family. I spoke to him a few days ago. Your sister stayed in Delhi for several months, and when she regained her health she went on a pilgrimage to Saranath, hoping to complete her prostrations. She is most likely there now.”
. . .
Charles looks up from his notebook, snapping it shut and pouring them martinis from a portable bar. “That sort of thing happens over here,” Charles says. “Exotic obsessions of deliverance which leave the mind strung out on deluded hope and the stomach full of parasites.”
. . .

(Dear Pop. I’m stopping here for a beat. The stench of too much exposition, for one thing. But that phone call is similar to the one we had when I called you from Benares. Do you remember? You were shooting that feeble comedy in the south of France. I hung up when you started screaming at me to come home, that as far as you were concerned it was okay if you never saw Clem again. She had made her decision to disappear and you had made your decision to let her. I have many of those same feelings about you these days, Pop
. . . .
As for now, I’m sitting in room 703 in Caesar’s Palace planning to drive to Albany and see Lama Yeshe, who, if he is there, will most likely know if Clem is still on the planet. Room 703 reminds me of
Bustin’ Out
, which you started in Vegas in September of ’73 and didn’t finish until March of ’74. You fired me twice on that one before I quit altogether. But as one of three associate producers, I managed to scam twenty-five grand off the top with the help of the prop man and the production manager. Old Teddy Penders and Benson. Part of your family. Over fifteen pictures together. They stole you blind, and not only that, they didn’t have much respect for you. Benson said you hadn’t done any good work since the late fifties. Certainly
Bustin’ Out
proves that theory. Your moves on that one were so off the wall that it gave me the courage to try and separate myself from you altogether. But it wasn’t until I went off to India that I made any headway on that score. What a drag it was then and still is to talk to you, as if you swallowed whole all that public relations baloney about being one of the few people in the business who have any real compassion or moral code. All that hype about you being a frontier man, aligned in the pantheon with Ford, Raoul Walsh, and Hawks, just crafting your entertainments for the general populace. Maybe so. But I’m aware of how numb and antagonistic you are to everything outside of your immediate desires, except, of course, your “work,” which you pull around you like a slimy second skin so that you won’t have to live or be responsible for the other layers of your life.)