Fadeout

by Joseph Hansen

  “Not drowning his sorrows?”

  “He hadn’t any sorrows,” she said. “Not anymore.”

  “This book of his stories—was he happy about it?”

  “Very.” She nodded.

  “Was that what he’d always written—humor?”

  “Far from it,” she said. “Gloom and doom. Lots of pain and death and failure. Dust and cobwebs.”

  “So maybe comedy was what he ought to have been doing all along,” Dave said. “Could that be what you meant by his writing about . . . the wrong things.”

  “Looks that way,” she said.

  Phil stood in the doorway. “Mr. Brandstetter, it’s my brother’s bedtime. And he’d like to meet you. He hates to miss anybody. See . . . he can’t get out much.” The blue eyes pleaded.

  Dave glanced at Gretchen. She looked hopeful. He set down his drink and stood up smiling. “Lead the way.”

  The room was at the back of the ramshackle house. It had been painted and papered with the same love as the front room, only here the love had paid off, maybe just because of the room’s occupant. There were shelves stacked with tattered National Geographies and paperback books frayed from reading. Model cars stood on the dresser. The ceiling was covered with automobile license plates. A work-table was littered with tiny bottles of bright plastic paint and glue. There was an old electric typewriter, a new television set. A scarred white hospital bed dominated the room. Beside it, in a wheelchair, sat a boy.

  His body was ten-year-old size, in fresh blue cotton pajamas and a plaid bathrobe. His head with its wetly combed-down hair was too big for his body. It was a handsome head but hard for him to control. It rolled back and to the side when he saw Dave. The mouth stretched, trying for a smile and for words. In time he managed both. The words came haltingly and loud. It was almost a man’s voice.

  “Thank you . . . for com . . . ing back,” he said.

  It wasn’t easy for him to make his hand go where he wanted it to. It strayed from his lap, the arm bending too much and too often at the elbow and the wrist, the fingers curling and stiffening. But finally he had it out for a handshake. Dave took it. The grip was warm and convulsively strong.

  “It’s good to meet you, Buddy,” he said. “This is quite a room you’ve got here.” He looked at the models again. “These are beautiful.” He nudged a 1932 Ford along the dresser top.

  “They help me . . . learn . . . coordination,” Buddy said.

  Dave looked at him for a second without understanding. He had thought Phil or Gretchen must have put them together. Christ, the agonizing patience of the kid!

  “Do you . . . play chess, Mr. . . . Brand . . . stetter?”

  “I’m what’s called a potzer.” Dave grinned.

  The boy laughed. It was a loud, strangling sound. “Have you got . . . time for a . . . game?”

  “Oh, Buddy,” Gretchen protested, “it’s after nine, sweetheart. You know you need your rest.”

  “Anyway . . .” Phil was standing beside the wheelchair. He drew the boy’s head affectionately against him. “Mr. Brandstetter’s only here on business for his company.”

  Dave looked at the board with the chessmen painstakingly set out. He tried to read in Buddy’s eyes, which were gray like the rain, and the only thing not moving in his beautiful, tormented face, how important it was. He decided it was important. He said:

  “I’ll come back. How about tomorrow afternoon?”

  Buddy’s head yawed again in an unmeant parody of ecstasy. His mouth worked once more at the smile and the words. “If you don’t . . . mind . . . playing another . . . potzer.” Hoarse shout of indragged laughter. Happy, crooked wave of the hand.

  “I’ll be here at four,” Dave said.

  He had left his car under a walnut tree beside the house. The rain had brought down the tree’s tattered, blackened leaves, plastered the hood and roof with them. He cleared them off the windshield, got into the car and started the engine. Then he turned on the headlights and saw Mrs. Mundy. Her kimono was soaked and clung to her loose breasts and belly and hips. She reeled toward him, waving an empty wine bottle.

  “Wait!” she bawled. “Hold on, there.”

  He got out of the car. “Mrs. Mundy, you shouldn’t be out in the rain like this. Where’s your coat?”

  “Listen.” She clutched his sleeve. Her large, unfocused eyes—maybe they’d once been beautiful—peered up at him through draggled strands of hair. Her breath stank of rotten grapes. “I know what you’re here for. You’re tryin’ to figure out how . . . how your comp’ny won’t have to . . . pay us our money.”

  “Gretchen’s money,” he said.

  “Ours.” She nodded. “Fifty—fifty thous’n’ dollars. Your comp’ny don’t want to pay it, so you’re makin’ out like Fox Olson never died. Well, I say . . . what if he didn’t die? What if he did just . . . dis’pear? So what? What skin is that off your nose, Mr. Brans . . .” She couldn’t make her mouth finish it. “Do you know . . . ?” she began fiercely, and flung her arm out toward the shack. The bottle flew from her hand. It lit with a wet sound in the darkness. “Do you know what that money can mean to us? To my boys and me? Not her. Her Grandpa’s got all the money in the world. But us! Poor Buddy, poor Phil?” The wine had loosened her face. Now self-pity broke it apart. She began to cry. “Be fair, Mr. Brans . . . Have heart. If your comp’ny pays . . . it don’t cost you nothin’. It’s a tough life. What do you wanna go makin’ it tougher for. . . .”

  “Come on,” he said. He put an arm around her soft, sodden shapelessness and steered her, sobbing, back to the shack.

  6

  The Pima Motor Inn imitated a mission. Cloisters. Thick whitewashed walls. Strings of painted gourds beside the doors. Black iron latches and hinges. Black iron grillwork on the deep-set windows. Worn Indian rugs on the cracked tile floors. Now, after ten days of rain, the place was so damp the walls felt soft. Moss grew in the shower.

  He didn’t care. Toweling himself—Christ, he’d lost weight these last weeks!—he knew all that mattered was that the place wasn’t his, his and Rod’s. Madge Dunstan had been right. He ought to have left the house, sold it. It had been a bad place for him to stay from the moment he’d learned Rod was never coming back to it alive. Empty. Worse—haunted.

  Because the emptiness hurt, but not so much as the regret. In that wide white wickerwork bed of theirs, regret took the place of sleeping, and at the table in the brick-and-copper kitchen, the place of eating. It made him refuse to pick up the phone, unable to pick up the phone, unable, if he had picked it up, to talk. Even less able to talk to anyone—even Madge—face to face. Regret. Because, as he had told the girl in the car this afternoon, twenty years was a long time.

  In twenty years you could say and do a lot you wish you hadn’t. In twenty years you could store up a lot of regrets. And then, when it was too late, when there was no one left to say “I’m sorry” to, “I didn’t mean it” to, you could stop sleeping for regret, stop eating, talking, working, for regret. You could stop wanting to live. You could want to die for regret.

  It was only remembering the good times that kept you from taking the knife from the kitchen drawer and, holding it so, tightly in your fist, on the bed, naked to no purpose except that that was how you came into the world and how your best moments in the world had been spent—holding it so, roll onto the blade, slowly, so that it slid like love between your ribs and into that stupidly pumping muscle in your chest that kept you regretting.

  The good memories stopped you.

  For him they began with that crazy bed. Nineteen forty-five. He was just out of the army. Los Angeles was crowded. Unable to find an apartment, unwilling to stay with his father and stepmother number four—his own age, pretty and stupid—he had taken the college money banked for him as a kid, and made a down payment on a house. A little old one-story wooden side-street place. Christmas was two weeks off. He wanted to move in before that. Maybe because he was very young, the first thing he thought of
buying was a bed.

  The nearest furniture store was on Western Avenue, a broad, bright acre of shiny woods and metal-shot fabrics. Tinsel and bells overhead. Loudspeakers tinkling carols. Crowds of shoppers in rain-damp coats. He edged among them, looking for a clerk. They were all busy. But in a far corner he saw one, a short, dark boy, finishing a sale. The boy took crumpled bills from a worried-looking Mexican woman, punched the cash register, handed the woman her change and her receipt, and gave her a smile. Dazzling.

  I want you, Dave thought, and wondered if he’d said it aloud, because the boy looked at him then, over the heads of a lot of other people. Straight at him. And there was recognition in the eyes, curious opaque eyes, like bright stones in a stream bed. He ignored the other customers. He came to Dave.

  “May I help you?” Zero for originality.

  “I’m looking for a bed.”

  For a second, the start of a smile twitched the boy’s mouth. It didn’t develop. “Single or double?”

  “Double,” Dave said. “I don’t want to sleep alone forever.”

  The boy didn’t react. He was already moving off. “I’ve got something to show you.”

  It turned out to be extra wide.

  Dave laughed. “I didn’t say I wanted to sleep with an army. I hope that’s over with.”

  “Wait,” the boy said, “let me tell you about this bed. See, most of the furniture in this place is put together with wooden pegs and glue. Wartime restrictions. But this bed is built. It’s prewar. The mattress too. They’ve been here years. I can give you a good price.”

  It was white wicker, swirls, arabesques.

  “I’ll feel like I’m waking up every morning in my basinet,” he said.

  The boy let the smile develop now. “Not if you’ve got somebody with you.”

  “Seriously, isn’t it a little chichi for a male?”

  The boy shook his head. “Use rough fabrics for the spread and curtains. Plain colors.”

  “Will you help me pick them out?”

  “Aw . . . I’m sorry.” He meant it. “That’s in another department.”

  Dave felt lost. The boy saw it and laughed.

  “Don’t look so worried. . . .” He began writing out the sales slip. “You can do it. Just stay away from yellow, with your coloring. Blues would be right for you, but too cold with white. Try burnt orange.” He looked up. “Name? Address?”

  They painted the walls burnt orange, had a spread made to match and curtains of white muslin. Because the boy did help him pick out the fabrics. And the paint. Not for the bedroom only. For the rest of the place too. And to remodel it, something Dave wouldn’t have thought of. It was a shambles on Christmas Eve, the floor strewn with tatters of old wallpaper, rumpled tarpaulins, color-dribbled paint cans, buckets of plaster, brushes, putty knives, crowbars. . . . He didn’t care. He couldn’t have been happier.

  When he’d seen Rod first, talked to him first, heart running quick as a watch, mouth dry, he had told himself, This will be good for exactly one sweet night. The kid was feminine. A flit. Nobody he could live with. A decorator, for Christ sake! One cut above a hairdresser . . . But Christmas Eve, lying naked and warm against Rod in that preposterous bed, both of them with the smell of paint in their hair that no amount of showering would take out, listening to the church bells off across the rainy midnight city, he understood he had been wrong. No, it hadn’t gone on long yet. Only two weeks. But he knew, they both knew it was forever. . . .

  Now, sitting lonely in the limp and faded blue corduroy bathrobe Rod had given him a dozen birthdays ago, sitting smoking a cigarette on the edge of one of the supersoft twin beds in the damp white room of the Pinia Motor Inn, he reflected wryly that what they’d both been too young to know was the meaning of forever. It was what he’d tried to tell the girl in the car today.

  How two people could wear on each other. In small ways. Little kid habits like Rod’s of leaving things, clothes he’d taken off, magazines he’d read, pans he’d cooked in, right where he’d dropped them. Of “forgetting” chores, the dirty dishes, the greasy stove, when it was his turn to do them. The look of wide-eyed hurt when Dave lost his temper and bawled him out. As if, he thought now, they’d meant anything, done or undone.

  Rod had adored the loud, shiny, successful Broadway musicals. In record shops, while Dave sweated out a choice between Messiaen’s new Chronochromie and an E. Power Biggs Buxtehude organ recital, sure they couldn’t afford either, Rod, with cries of glee, would gather armloads of glittering original-cast albums. And play them, morning, noon and night, until Dave threatened to smash them over his head. For every recital of Schonberg songs or Gesualdo madrigals Dave took him to, Rod dragged Dave to half a dozen brassy Pajama Games, Gypsys, Most Happy Fellas, where Dave sat in the dark with clenched teeth, groaning for the end. Rod’s taste in films had been even worse. He’d worshiped a dim galaxy of minor screen queens, would sit up half the night in the blue glow of the television set enchanted by the tired wisecracks of Iris Adrian or Marie Windsor in forgotten RKO second features of the thirties. . . .

  The cigarette was burning his fingers. He mashed it out in the ashtray and sighed grimly. He was thinking wrong again. Regretting again. Sorry for his sourness at Rod’s harmless games. Actually, he’d had fun out of them too because happiness with Rod splashed over. Less easy to understand was why Rod had put up with him. He had, after all, sat cheerfully through chamber music recitals Dave knew bored him, trudged amiably at Dave’s heels through long galleries of paintings and sculptures that meant nothing to him, listened while Dave read aloud articles on science and war and politics he didn’t grasp a tenth of, breathed quietly but awake through hours of static avant-garde films and ancient flickering Dreyer and Griffith classics, with never a murmur of protest. Murmur of protest, hell! With thanks, and with at least a try at talking about them sensibly.

  And how good he’d been about his friends. The ones Dave had scattered. Because Rod’s taste in people was appalling. Dave didn’t need a second evening with any of them to know he couldn’t stand it. The giddy mannerisms, the worn-out camp clichés that passed for wit, the shrill, empty chatter about women’s clothes and Judy Garland. Not to mention the whimpering two-in-the-morning phone calls from Lincoln Heights jail for rescue from the detectives they’d made passes at. When Dave had slammed the door on some and hung up the phone on the rest, Rod had told him with a wan smile:

  “They think you’re an ogre.”

  “I am,” Dave said. “I eat boys. But very selectively. Come here. Let me show you.”

  So there had been mostly only the two of them. It had been enough. After all, the musicals hadn’t all been bad, nor the recitals all boring, and the Yvonne de Carlo costumes were funny, and Rod’s eyes had shone at the glitter of gold and jewels in the “Art Treasures of Ancient Turkey” exhibit, and all the reading hadn’t been sternly informational. They’d liked sharing detective stories—Arthur Crook, Nero Wolfe, Miss Marple, characters he wouldn’t read about again because they wouldn’t speak the same without Rod’s voice. He read well. If he hadn’t been so nelly he’d have made a fine actor. But it hadn’t been possible to school out of him all the femininity. Dave had tried. So had Rod. The affectations went, but what underlay them was ingrained. Real. Himself. Dave gave up trying after a while. Age took care of it to some extent. Death took care of it completely.

  No. That was how he mustn’t think. Tears came hot into his eyes. He got up and walked the room. Remember something else. For God’s sake, forget about the dying. Remember the trip to Oak Canyon, the cabin in the woods, making love by the light of crackling pine logs, waking in the morning to see out the window the whole landscape snow-muffled, white, white. . . . The glinting crystal chandeliers and mirrors of the Music Center. Nureyev leaping in a shaft of golden light . . . The glow of pride when Rod was able to open that first small shop of his, the chaste black-and-gold sign above the white fanlit door: R. FLEMING, INTERIORS . . . The sun-bright Easter mornin
g they’d wakened to find that Tatiana, their fat, striped, indignant old cat (Rod called her Tatty Anna) had presented them with six striped kittens at the foot of the bed . . . The turning, twinkling, tremendous Christmas tree in that Greek Theatre production of The Nutcracker one warm, midsummer night . . . Rod’s shout of triumphant laughter at the news that he’d been chosen to decorate all the apartments of a new building towering among the fountains of Century City . . . The bulging eyes of the supermarket cashier when he saw the shopping cart full of champagne and oysters, caviar and pate they’d bought the day the first fantastic check arrived . . . Remember those things. . . .

  But he kept remembering instead the eerily whispering corridors of the hospital late that last night, the smells of the hospital, kept seeing sharp and photographic his own feet in their scuffed brown loafers, pacing up and down, up and down, hour after hour, outside the door of the room where Rod’s cut and gutted body lay mindless with drugs but still feeding, feeding the spreading, burgeoning red horror that would not die until it killed the thing it fed on. . . .

  And he knew he’d never sleep tonight. He got the pint of Old Crow from his suitcase, poured steeply from it into the clear plastic bathroom glass, added a twist of tap water, then took from the dresser top Fox Olson’s scripts, and got into bed. Not soon, but sooner than he would have thought, he began to laugh.

  7

  He even slept. Knocking woke him. He still sat propped against thin pillows and a hard headboard. His neck and shoulders ached. The scripts had slid off his knees. Now, when he straightened his stiff legs under the thin, machine-made Indian-style blankets, the scripts slithered to the floor. The lamp glowed sickly in the daylight. Wincing, he switched it off. In the glass that wasn’t glass the dregs of whiskey lurked like a neglected friendship. He made a sound, cleared his throat, tried again.