“You have to put in an elevator,” Wesley gasped, wiping his face with his shirt sleeve and taking the gin and tonic. “I can’t make the steps any more.”
“Forget the steps. I haven’t been down those steps in six months. Longer. When you get to be our age life has to become a series of well-arranged retreats.”
Wesley collapsed into a low-slung beach chair, staring up at Sam’s patriarchal presence. “My life is more a rout than a retreat.” Suddenly he felt irritated. “You read those pages?”
“Of course I read those pages. Evelyn had them Xeroxed and she gave them to me. How do you expect me not to read those pages? I know both your demented children. I even, if you recall, tried to have ingress with your daughter at a particularly precarious moment in my life.”
“So you did,” Wesley admitted.
“And as for Walker, no matter how twisted and deluded he might be, I’m sure he doesn’t expect you to go over to India and shoot some crappy mystical adventure story that involves your own kids.”
“Why not? It’s a good hook. It’s personal. Motivated.”
“You’ve never done anything personal in your life. And who knows where your motivations spring from. I speak to you as a friend. You should quit. Actually, you have quit. If you come back in the ring, you’re going to get your head knocked off.”
Wesley drained the rest of Sam’s drink. “I don’t really care about winning and losing any more. But I’m probably too compulsively theatrical and ignorant to do nothing.”
“Not theatrical,” Sam said, swinging his fat legs over the hammock and peering down at Wesley. “Too attached to all the bullshit.”
Sam refilled the glass with the gin from a thermos tucked into the rear of the hammock. Taking a drink, he handed the glass to Wesley and went on. “One option is to consciously bury yourself alive in a beautiful, incestuous patch of paradise such as this one. Although I strongly suspect that when you finally approach the angel of death all suntanned and distracted, you might find yourself in the coldest hell, such would be your accumulation of rage, fear, and remorse.”
“I’d make that deal,” Wesley said. “One moment being equal to another. Except that I’ve fouled all my nests, including this one.”
“What a pity. I was so looking forward to sabotaging our sunset years together.”
Sam pulled a black silk kimono around him and together the two old friends walked across the clearing down a soft and verdant path decorated on either side with Japanese rock and flower arrangements, a narrow plunging waterfall, and a shaded grotto used mostly for midday drugs and backgammon. They stopped in front of Wesley’s house, a wood and concrete cantilevered form sweeping out over a steep cliff facing the Pacific.
Wesley hesitated, not wanting to go inside. “I’m sliding,” he said and sat down on a curved stone bench. “I won’t be around this time next year.”
Sam let his bulk come to rest on the stone bench. “That’s entirely possible, although it could be your mind that’s on the slide.”
“It’s my heart, actually. And certain key pores in my skin which seem to leak energy and a certain, I don’t know, essential juice. I’m finished, Sam, and that’s not a bad thing to know. It’s a kind of relief.”
“If this is your way of saying that you’re going to India, then I agree with you.”
Wesley fumbled through his jacket pocket for a cigarette. “Not India, not Mexico, not L.A. ever again. In fact, why don’t you use the house on Mulholland and take a break from all this Shangri-La stuff? You’re as stuck in your fun as I am.”
For the first time Sam looked at his friend with real concern. “I might do that. But you’ll need a foxhole. You can’t just hang out at resorts and film festivals.”
“I still have my father’s place. Or at least I think I do. Off the coast of Labrador.”
“What about Evelyn?”
“I don’t know about Evelyn these days,” Wesley said. “But I would hope she’d come with me. She’s from up there. The north anyway.”
Sam started to leave, then turned back toward Wesley and said: “I say fuck ’em all; your kids, your wife, whatever’s left of your career, even your friends. You want to leave, go ahead. You want to pull the plug on yourself, do yourself in, that’s okay. Take what you have left to do and do it. No one cares anyway.”
Then he continued down the path and Wesley went inside.
Closing the door, Wesley moved toward the distant sound of the Beach Boys singing “Good Vibrations.” He stopped at the end of the entrada, looking at the blue tiles on the floor of the clean white living room and through the open glass doors to the wooden deck, where Evelyn lay naked on a towel. A thin bearded man, also naked, was slowly rubbing suntan oil onto her back. He had shut his eyes as if willing all his energy to the ends of his fingers. There was something about the harsh light bouncing off the white walls and Evelyn lying so boldly on her stomach with her thighs slightly parted that reminded Wesley of another scene. Perhaps it was Godard’s Contempt, with Brigitte Bardot stretched out on a stone parapet, her body silhouetted against the warm blue of the Mediterranean. Or was it an image from one of his own films of a floating daydream? Fritz Lang, at the end of his life, had played himself in Godard’s film; an old director, burdened with too much cynical wisdom, trying to promote one last project. Other directors had turned an occasional trick, John Huston had acted, as had Von Stroheim and Welles and Nick Ray. But their performances embarrassed him because he could never do it.
He watched the hand on Evelyn’s back work its way upward, pausing briefly on top of her head before wandering gently toward the cheeks of her ass. Resting there, a middle finger slid slowly down and probed deeper. As Evelyn shifted her rump to welcome the invasion, Wesley walked forward and the bearded man raised his head, his eyes a startling blue. Wesley moved slowly, giving the man time to stand up, while Evelyn, sneaking a look beneath her arm, preferred to remain as she was.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Hardin,” the man said, reaching for his bathing trunks. He had a soft pouting face and curly blond hair; Wesley marked him for an actor or beach hustler.
Wesley stepped up to him, eyes narrowed. “It’s like Texas down here in the sense that no one cares much if a man kills another man for porking around with his wife.”
The man tried hard to be charming: “I am French and unaware of such rules.”
Wesley slapped him on the side of the head with an open palm.
He hadn’t hit a man in forty years and the sudden violence shocked him. The Frenchman seemed more embarrassed than hurt, even somewhat concerned, as if Wesley had made himself vulnerable to a stroke.
He stepped backwards, watching Wesley. “It was a small hedonistic interlude, Mr. Hardin, nothing more.”
“I’m sure,” Wesley said and turned to face the sea.
“He didn’t mean anything serious,” Evelyn said after the man had left. “He works in the French consulate in Mexico City and comes down here to fish.”