“For you it does.”
Wesley watched a sailboat slowly coming about in the offshore breeze and felt himself to be in a kind of agony. He was either saying things that were too personal or not relevant at all.
“Are you considering other projects?” Harold was asking.
“I’m developing a script to be shot in India. A contemporary story about young Americans searching for themselves and finding the opposite.”
“That seems a sweaty task,” Harold said. “Sort of a producer’s nightmare.”
“I would rather read about it myself,” Wesley admitted.
“Perhaps you don’t want to work at all. Perhaps it’s time for philosophy and rumination.”
“Perhaps.” Wesley rose slowly from his seat. Swaying slightly he looked down at them, his face stern and yet somehow fragile. “My store is not open, gentlemen. Either for personal little forays into my beleaguered psyche or for broad popular entertainment. But perhaps you can develop something between yourselves.”
With that he left them, walking slowly down to the beach along the edge of the sea, his white linen pants rolled up past his ankles, his blue cotton shirt falling loosely over his waist. The air was heavy and moist and he walked in a slow shuffle through the sand. His body was no longer friendly to him. His joints ached and his breathing was shallow and he moved with no obvious purpose or direction. He could not remember a time when he wasn’t involved in some project, either going toward or leaving behind. There had always been something to fasten on to, people around to keep him going, keep him on the point, pull him through. It was true that over the past decade he had come to take it all for granted, that he had in a sense just gone through the motions as developments formed around him from the accumulated weight of his professional presence. It was a somewhat startling fact that he was still functioning at all after more than thirty films in the can, that the inevitable damage to body, mind, and soul, although severe and now seemingly terminal, had been held in check enough for him to sustain a reputation as a safe and bankable director. There had always been a raw primitive edge to his work, a kind of sentimental passion that every once in a while would bring in gold from the box office. But all of that was gone now.
He took off his white linen jacket and lay down on the warm sand. But the noon light was hard and exhausting and abruptly he moved off the beach to sit in the shade of two giant palm trees. The light was softer and more diffuse and that pleased him. An awareness of light was what cushioned him when he approached a scene, what protected him from the mechanical boredom of the medium. But fuck light, he thought. He was headed for a black hole. The journey of his son toward the disappearance of his daughter reminded him of that. He resented having to read Walker’s pages. It was a forced and unnatural arrangement, one that he shouldn’t have initiated. But unfolding the remaining pages, he began to read anyway:
INTERIOR — DAY. . Jim walks through the hotel lobby, obviously distraught, his clothes torn and matted from the festival hi-jinks. . As he picks up the key at the front desk, he is handed a slip of paper from Samendra with Clementine’s address in New Delhi. . Entering his room he reaches for a bottle of Scotch on the dresser. The curtains are drawn against the late afternoon sun and Lacey is sleeping, curled in on herself as if for protection. She opens her eyes, regards him. “Could you come into bed and just hold me for a minute?” she asks. . He takes a long pull from the bottle and steps out of his clothes before he answers: “I have to get into the shower. I’m covered with piss and slime and probably have about three months to live.” He disappears into the bathroom. . As he’s standing under the shower Lacey enters beside him and starts soaping his back, kissing him on the shoulder. “I get panicked when you get weird and aggressive.” She reaches around his waist and takes hold of his cock. “I need an adventure,” she says, squeezing him gently. . He shuts his eyes as her soapy fingers surround him. “What kind of an adventure?” He turns her around and lifts one of her legs so that he can slide into her. “Any kind as long as it’s new,” she whispers as he slowly begins to move inside her. .
(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.)
14
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.