Beautiful Ruins (16 page)

Pasquale stood above the folded man, shaking and thinking, Stand up. Stand up and fight; let me hit you again. But slowly Pasquale’s anger faded. He looked around. No one had seen the punch. It must’ve looked as if Michael Deane had simply taken his seat again. Pasquale stepped back a little.

After he caught his breath, Deane unrolled, looked up with a grimace, and said, “Ow! Shit.” Then he coughed. “I suppose you think I deserved that.”

“Why you leave her alone like this! She is scared. And sick.”

“I know. I know. Look, I’m sorry about how things turned out.” Deane coughed again and rubbed his chest. He looked around warily. “Can we talk about this outside?”

Pasquale shrugged and they walked toward the door.

“No more hitting, right?”

Pasquale agreed and they left the hotel and walked outside to the Spanish Steps. The piazza was full, merchants yelling out prices for flowers. Pasquale waved them off as they walked deeper into the piazza.

Michael Deane continued to rub his chest. “I think you broke something.”

“Dispiace,”
Pasquale muttered, even though he wasn’t sorry.

“How is Dee?”

“She is sick. I bring a doctor from La Spezia.”

“And your doctor . . . examined her?”

“Yes.”

“I see.” Michael Deane nodded grimly and started in on his thumbnail again. “Then I don’t suppose I need to guess what the doctor told you.”

“He ask for her doctor. To talk.”

“He wants to talk to Dr. Crane?”

“Yes.” Pasquale tried to remember the exact conversation, but he knew the translation would be impossible.

“Look, you should know that none of this was Dr. Crane’s idea. It was mine.” Michael Deane pulled back, as if Pasquale might hit him again. “All Dr. Crane did was explain to her that her symptoms were
consistent
with cancer. Which they are.”

Pasquale wasn’t sure he understood. “Are you come to get her now?” he asked.

Michael Deane didn’t answer right away, but looked around the piazza. “Do you know what I like about this place, Mr. Tursi?”

Pasquale looked at the Spanish Steps, at the wedding-cake ascension of stairs leading up to the church of Trinità dei Monti. On the steps nearest him, a young woman was leaning forward on her knees, reading a book while her friend drew on a sketch pad. The steps were covered with people like this, reading, taking photographs, and in intimate conversations.

“I like the self-interest of the Italian people. I like that they aren’t afraid to ask for exactly what they want. Americans are not like that. We talk around our intentions. Do you know what I mean?”

Pasquale didn’t. But he also didn’t want to admit it and so he just nodded.

“You and I should explain our positions. I’m obviously in a difficult position and you appear to be someone who can help.”

Pasquale was having trouble concentrating on these meaningless words. He couldn’t imagine what Dee Moray saw in this man.

They had reached the Fountain of the Old Boat in the center of the piazza—the Fontana della Barcaccia. Michael Deane leaned against it. “Do you know about this fountain, the sinking boat?”

Pasquale looked at the sculpted boat in the center of the fountain, water roiling up through the center of it. “No.”

“It’s unlike any other sculpture in the city. All of these earnest, serious pieces and this one, it’s comic—ridiculous. To my thinking, that makes it the truest piece of art in the city. Do you know what I mean, Mr. Tursi?”

Pasquale didn’t know what to say.

“A long time ago, during a flood, the river lifted a boat and dumped it here, where the fountain sits today. The artist was trying to capture the random nature of disaster.

“His point was this: sometimes there is no explanation for the things that happen. Sometimes a boat simply appears on a street. And as odd as it may seem, one has no choice but to deal with the fact that there’s suddenly a boat on the street. Well . . . such is the position I find myself in here in Rome, on this movie. Except it’s not just one boat. There are fucking boats on every fucking street.”

Again, Pasquale had no idea what the man meant.

“You may think what I’ve done to Dee is cruel. I won’t argue that, from a certain vantage, it was. But I just deal with whatever disasters arise, one at a time.” With that, Michael Deane produced an envelope from his suit coat. He pressed it into Pasquale’s hand. “Half is for her. And half is for you, for what you’ve done and for what I hope you can do for me now.” He put a hand on Pasquale’s arm. “Even though you’ve assaulted me, I’m going to consider you a friend, Mr. Tursi, and I will treat you as a friend. But if I find out that you have given her less than half or that you have talked to anyone about this, I will no longer be your friend. And you don’t want that.”

Pasquale pulled his arm away. Was this awful man accusing
him
of being dishonest? He remembered Dee’s word and he said, “Please! I am frank!”

“Yes, good,” Michael Deane said, holding up his hands as if he were afraid Pasquale would hit him again. Then his eyes narrowed and he stepped in close. “You want to be frank? I can be frank. I was sent here to save this dying movie. That’s my only job. My job has no moral component. It is not good and it is not bad. It is merely my job to get the boats off the streets.”

He looked away. “Obviously your doctor is right. We misled Dee to get her out of here. I’m not proud of myself for that. Please tell her, Dr. Crane shouldn’t have chosen stomach cancer. He didn’t mean to scare her. You know doctors—almost too analytical. He chose it because the symptoms could match up with those of early pregnancy. But it was only supposed to be for a day or two. That’s why she was supposed to go to Switzerland. There’s a doctor there who specializes in unwanted pregnancies. He’s safe. Discreet.”

Pasquale was a few steps behind. So it was true. She
was
pregnant.

Michael Deane reacted to Pasquale’s look. “Look, please tell her how sorry I am.” Then he patted the envelope in Pasquale’s hand. “Tell her . . . it’s the way things sometimes are. And I am truly sorry. But she needs to go to Switzerland as Dr. Crane advised her to do. The doctor there will take care of everything. It’s all paid for.”

Pasquale stared at the envelope in his hands.

“Oh, and I have something else for her.” He reached in the same jacket pocket and removed three small, square photographs. They appeared to have been taken on the set of the movie—he could see a camera crew in the background of one—and while the pictures were small, Pasquale could see clearly, in all three of them, Dee Moray. She wore a kind of long, flowing dress and was standing with another woman, both of them flanking a third woman, a beautiful, dark-haired woman who was in the foreground of the pictures. In the best photo, Dee and this dark-haired woman were leaning back, caught by the photographer in a genuine moment, dissolving in laughter. “These are continuity photos,” Michael Deane said. “We use these pictures to make sure we get the setup for the next shot right. Costumes, hair . . . make sure no one puts on a wristwatch. I thought Dee might want to have these.”

Pasquale looked hard into the top photo. Dee Moray had her hand on the other woman’s arm, and they were laughing so hard that Pasquale would have given anything right then to know what was so funny. Maybe it was the same joke she’d shared with him, about this man who loved himself so much.

Deane was looking down at the top photo, too. “She has an interesting look. Honestly, I didn’t see it at first. I thought Mankiewicz had lost his mind—casting a blond woman as an Egyptian lady-in-waiting. But she has this quality . . .” Michael Deane leaned in. “And I’m not just talking tits here. There’s something else . . . an authenticity. She’s a real actress, that one.” Deane shook off this thought and looked back at the top photo. “We’ll have to reshoot the scenes with Dee in them. There aren’t many. What with the delays, the rains, the labor stuff, then Liz got sick, and then Dee got sick. When I sent her away, she told me she was disappointed that no one would ever know she was in this movie. So I thought she would want these.” Michael Deane shrugged. “Of course, that was when she thought she was dying.”

It hung in the air, the word
dying
.

“You know,” Michael Deane said, “I sort of imagined that she’d eventually call me and we’d laugh about this. That it would be a funny story that two people share years later, maybe we’d even . . .” He trailed off, smiled wanly. “But that’s not going to happen. She’s going to want my balls. But please . . . tell her that once she’s over her anger, if she remains cooperative, I’ll get her all the film work she wants when we all get back to the States. Could you tell her that? She could be a star if she wants to be.”

Pasquale felt like he might be sick. He was trying so hard not to hit Michael Deane again—wondering what kind of man abandons a pregnant woman—when a realization came to him, so obvious that it hit him square in the chest, and he gasped. He’d never had a thought as
physical
as this one, like a kick to his gut:
Here I am, angry at this man for abandoning a pregnant woman . . .

While my own son is raised believing that his mother is his sister.

Pasquale flushed. He remembered crouching on the machine-gun nest and saying to Dee Moray:
It is not always that simple.
But it was. It was entirely simple. There was one kind of man who ran from such responsibility. He and Michael Deane were such men. He could no more hit this man than he could hit himself. Pasquale felt the sickness of his own hypocrisy and covered his mouth.

When Pasquale said nothing, Michael Deane glanced back at the Fontana della Barcaccia and frowned. “This is the world, I guess.”

And then Michael Deane walked away, into the crowd, leaving Pasquale leaning against the fountain. He opened the heavy envelope. It was filled with more money than he’d ever seen—a stack of American currency for Dee and Italian lire for him.

Pasquale put the photos in the envelope and closed it. He looked all around. The day was overcast. People were spread all over the Spanish Steps, resting, but in the piazza and on the street they moved with purpose, at different speeds but in straight lines, like a thousand bullets fired at a thousand different angles from a thousand different guns. All of these people moving in the way they thought right . . . all of these stories, all of these weak, sick people with their betrayals and their dark hearts—
This is the world
—swirling all around him, speaking and smoking and snapping photographs, and Pasquale felt himself turn hard, and he thought he might spend the rest of his life standing here, like the old fountain of the stranded boat. People would point to the statue of the poor villager who had naively come to the city to talk to the American movie people, the man who had been frozen in time when his own weak character was revealed to him.

And Dee! What was he going to tell her? Would he assail the character of this man she loved, this snake Deane, when Pasquale himself was a species of the same snake? Pasquale covered his mouth as a groan came out.

He felt a hand on his shoulder just then. Pasquale turned. It was a woman, the interpreter who had moved down the line of centurion extras earlier in the day. “You’re the man who knows where Dee is?” she asked in Italian.

“Yes,” Pasquale said.

The woman looked around and then squeezed Pasquale’s arm. “Please. Come with me. There is someone who would like very much to talk to you.”

9

The Room

Recently

Universal City, California

The Room is everything. When you are in The Room, nothing exists outside. The people hearing your pitch could no more leave The Room than choose to not orgasm. They MUST hear your story. The Room is all there is.

Great fiction tells unknown truths. Great film goes further. Great film improves Truth. After all, what Truth ever made $40 million in its first weekend of wide release? What Truth sold in forty foreign territories in six hours? Who’s lining up to see a sequel to Truth?

If your story improves Truth, you will sell it in The Room. Sell it in The Room and you’ll get The Deal. Get The Deal and the world awaits like a quivering bride in your bed.

—From chapter 14 of
The Deane’s Way: How I Pitched Modern Hollywood to America and How You Can Pitch Success Into Your Life Too
, by Michael Deane

In The Room, Shane Wheeler feels the exhilaration Michael Deane promised. They are going to make
Donner!
He knows it. Michael Deane is his Mr. Miyagi and he has just waxed the car. Michael Deane is his Yoda and he has just raised the ship from the muck. Shane
did it.
He’s never felt so invigorated. He wishes Saundra could’ve been here to see it, or his parents. He might have been a little nervous in the beginning, but he’s never been as sure of anything as he is of this: he killed that pitch.

The Room is suitably quiet. Shane waits. It is old Pasquale who speaks first, pats Shane on the arm, and says,
“Penso è andata molto bene.”
I think that went very well.

“Grazie
, Mr. Tursi.”

Shane glances around the room. Michael Deane is totally inscrutable, but Shane isn’t sure that human expression is even possible anymore on his face. He does look to be deep in thought, though, his wrinkly hands crossed in front of his smooth face, his index fingers raised like a steeple before his lips. Shane looks hard at the man: is one of his brows higher than the other? Or is it just fixed that way?

Then Shane glances to Michael Deane’s right, where Claire Silver has the strangest look on her face. It could be a smile (she loves it!) or a grimace (God, is it possible she hated it?), but if he had to name it he might go with
pained bemusement
.

Still no one speaks. Shane starts to wonder if maybe he’s misread The Room—all of last year’s self-doubt creeping back in—when . . . a noise comes from Claire Silver. A humming through her nose, like a low motor starting. “Cannibals,” she says, and then she loses it—full, out-of-control, breathless laughter: high, manic, and chirping, and she puts a hand out toward Shane. “I— I’m sorry, it’s not— I just— It’s—” And then she gives in to the laughter; she dissolves in it.

“I’m sorry,” Claire says when she can talk again, “I am. But—” And now the laughter peals again, somehow goes higher. “I wait three years for a good movie pitch . . . and when I get it, what’s it about? A cowboy”—she covers her mouth to try to stop the laughter—“whose family gets eaten by a fat German.” She doubles over.

“He’s not a cowboy,” Shane mumbles, feeling himself shrinking, shriveling, dying. “And we wouldn’t
show
the cannibalism.”

“No, no, I’m sorry,” Claire says, breathless now. “I’m sorry.” She covers her mouth again and squeezes her eyes shut but she can’t stop laughing.

Shane sneaks a peek at Michael Deane, but the old producer is just staring off, deep in thought, as Claire snorts through her nose—

And Shane feels the last of the air leave his body. He’s two-dimensional now—a flat drawing of his crushed self. This is how he’s felt the last year, during his depression, and he sees now that it was foolish to believe, even for a minute, that he could muster his old ACT confidence—even in its new, humbler form. That Shane is gone now, dead. A veal cutlet. He mutters, “But . . . it’s a good story,” and looks at Michael Deane for help.

Claire knows the rule: no producer ever admits to
not
liking a pitch, just in case it sells somewhere else and you end up looking like an idiot for passing. You always come up with some other excuse:
The market isn’t right for this,
or
It’s too close to something else we’re doing,
or if the idea is truly awful,
It just isn’t right for us
. But after this day, after the last three years, after everything—she just can’t help herself. All of her gagged responses to three years of ludicrous ideas and moronic pitches gush out in teary, breathless laughter. An effects-driven period thriller about
cowboy
cannibals
? Three hours of sorrow and degradation, all to find out the hero’s son is . . .
dessert
?

“I’m sorry,” she gasps, but she can’t stop laughing.

I’m sorry
: the words seem finally to snap Michael Deane out of some trance. He shoots a cross look at his assistant and drops his hands from his chin. “Claire. Please. That’s enough.” Then he looks at Shane Wheeler and leans forward on his desk. “I love it.”

Claire laughs a few more times, dying sounds. She wipes the tears from her eyes and sees that Michael is serious.

“It’s perfect,” he says. “It’s exactly the kind of film I set out to make when I started in this business.”

Claire falls back in her chair, stunned—hurt, even, beyond the point she realized was possible anymore.

“It’s brilliant,” Michael says, warming up to the idea. “An epic, untold story of American hardship.” And now he turns to Claire. “Let’s option this outright. I want to go to the studio with it.”

He turns back to Shane. “If you’re amenable, we’ll do a short six-month option agreement while I try to set this up with the studio—say, ten thousand dollars? Obviously that’s just to secure the rights against a larger purchase price if it’s further developed. If that’s acceptable, Mr.—”

“Wheeler,” Shane says, barely finding the breath to speak his own name. “Yes,” he manages, “ten thousand is . . . uh . . . acceptable.”

“Well, Mr. Wheeler—that was quite a pitch. You have great energy. Reminds me a bit of myself when I was young.”

Shane looks from Michael Deane to Claire, who has gone pale now, and back again to Michael. “Thank you, Mr. Deane. I practically devoured your book.”

Michael flinches again at the mention of his book. “Well, it shows,” he says, his lips parting to show his gleaming teeth in something like a smile. “Maybe I should have been a teacher, huh, Claire?”

A movie about the Donner Party? Michael as a
teacher
? Language has completely failed Claire now. She thinks of the deal she’d made with herself—
One day, one idea for one film
—and realizes that Fate is truly fucking with her now. It’s bad enough trying to live in this vacuous, cynical world, but if Fate is telling her that she doesn’t even
understand
the rules of the world—well, that’s more than she can bear. People can handle an unjust world; it’s when the world becomes arbitrary and inexplicable that order breaks down.

Michael stands and turns again to his dumbstruck development assistant. “Claire, I need you to set up a meeting at the studio next week—Wallace, Julie . . . everyone.”

“You’re going to take this to the studio?”

“Yes. Monday morning, you, me, Danny, and Mr. Wheeler are going in to pitch
The Donner Party
.”

“Uh, it’s just called
Donner!
” Shane offers. “With an exclamation point?”

“Even better,” Michael says. “Mr. Wheeler, can you give that pitch next week? Just like you did today?”

“Sure,” Shane says. “Yeah.”

“Okay then.” Michael pulls out his cell phone. “And Mr. Wheeler, as long as you’re going to be here over the weekend, would it be asking too much for you to help us with Mr. Tursi? We can pay you for translating and put you up at a hotel. Then we’ll set about getting you a film deal on Monday. How does all that sound?”

“Good?” Shane suggests. He glances over at Claire, who looks even more shocked than he is.

Michael opens a drawer in his desk and begins searching for something. “Oh, and Mr. Wheeler, before you go . . . I wonder if you could ask Mr. Tursi one more question.” Michael smiles at Pasquale again. “Ask him . . .” He takes a deep breath and stammers a bit, as if this is the difficult part for him. “I wonder if he knows if Dee . . . what I’m trying to say is . . . was there a child?”

But Pasquale doesn’t need this particular translation. He reaches into an inside pocket of his suit coat and pulls out an envelope. He pulls from it an old, weathered postcard and carefully hands it to Shane. The front of the postcard has a faded blue drawing of a baby.
IT’S A BOY
! it announces. On the back, the card has been addressed to Pasquale Tursi at the Hotel Adequate View, Porto Vergogna, Italy. Written on the back of the card is a note in careful handwriting:

Dear Pasquale: It seems wrong we didn’t get to say good-bye. But I guess some things are meant just for a certain place and time. Anyway, thank you.

Always—Dee.

P.S.: I named him Pat, after you.

The postcard makes the rounds. When it arrives at Michael, he smiles distantly. “My God. A boy.” He shakes his head. “Well, not a boy anymore, obviously. A man. He’d be . . . Jesus. What? Fortysomething?”

He hands the postcard back to Pasquale, who carefully slides it back in his coat.

Michael stands again and offers his hand to Pasquale. “Mr. Tursi. We’re going to make good on this—you and me.” Pasquale stands and they shake hands uneasily. “Claire, get these gentlemen settled in a hotel. I’ll check in with the private investigator and we’ll reconvene tomorrow.” Michael adjusts his heavy coat over his pajama pants. “Now I’ve got to get home to Mrs. Deane.”

Michael turns to Shane, extends his hand.

“Mr. Wheeler, welcome to Hollywood.”

Michael is already out the door before Claire rises. She tells Shane and Pasquale she’ll be right back, and chases her boss, catching him on the pathway outside the bungalow. “Michael!”

He turns, his face clear and glassy beneath the decorative street-light. “Yes, Claire, what is it?”

She glances back over her shoulder to make sure Shane hasn’t followed her outside. “I can find another translator. You don’t need to string the poor guy along.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The Donner Party?”

“Yes.” He narrows his eyes. “What about it, Claire?”

“The
Donner
Party?”

He stares at her.

“Michael, are you telling me you
liked
that pitch?”

“Are you telling me you
didn’t
?”

Claire blushes. In fact, Shane’s pitch had all the elements: it was compelling, moving, suspenseful. Yeah, it might have even been a great pitch—for a film that
could
never
be made
: a Western epic with no gunfights and no romance, a three-hour sobfest that ends with the villain eating the hero’s child.

Claire cocks her head. “So you’re going into the studio Monday morning and pitching a fifty-million-dollar period movie about frontier cannibalism?”

“No,” Michael says, and his lips slide over his teeth again in that facsimile of a smile. “I’m going into the studio Monday morning and pitching an
eighty
-million-dollar movie about frontier cannibalism.” He turns and starts walking again.

Claire calls after her boss. “And the actress’s kid. It was yours, wasn’t it?”

Michael turns slowly, measuring her. “You have something rare, you know that, Claire? True insight.” He smiles. “Tell me. How did the interview go?”

She’s startled. Just when she starts to see Michael as a kind of caricature, a relic, he’ll show his old power this way.

She glances down at her heels, looks at the skirt she wore today—interview clothes. “They offered me the job. Curator of a film museum.”

“And are you taking it?”

“I haven’t decided.”

He nods. “Look, I really need your help this weekend. Next week, if you still want to leave, I’ll understand. I’ll even help. But this weekend I need you to keep an eye on the Italian and his translator. Get me through this pitch Monday morning and help me find the actress and her kid. Can you do that for me, Claire?”

She nods. “Of course, Michael.” Then, quietly: “So . . . is it? Your kid?”