Beautiful Ruins (2 page)

For eight months after his father’s death, this was the sum of Pasquale Tursi’s life. And if he wasn’t entirely happy, he wasn’t unhappy, either. Rather, he found himself inhabiting the vast, empty plateau where most people live, between boredom and contentment.

And perhaps this is where he would have always lived had not the beautiful American arrived on this cool, sunny afternoon, Pasquale standing chest-deep in the water twenty meters away, watching the mahogany boat come to rest against the wooden bollards of the pier, the woman standing in the stern, gentle wind ruffling the sea around her.

She was impossibly thin, and yet amply curved, the beautiful American. From Pasquale’s vantage in the sea—sun flickering behind her, wind snapping her wheat-blond hair—it was as if she were another species, taller and more ethereal than any woman he’d ever seen. Orenzio offered her a hand, and after a moment of hesitation she took it. He helped her from his boat onto the narrow pier.

“Thank you,” came an uncertain voice from beneath the hat, and then,
“Grazie,”
the Italian word breathy and unpracticed. She took her first step toward the village, seemed to stagger a moment, and then regained her balance. It was then that she pulled the hat off to get a look at the village, and Pasquale saw her full features and was mildly surprised the beautiful American wasn’t . . . well . . . more beautiful.

Oh, she was striking, certainly, but not in the way he’d expected. First, she was as tall as Pasquale, nearly six feet. And from where he stood, weren’t her features a bit too much for such a narrow face—plunging jawline so pronounced, mouth so full, eyes so round and open that she seemed startled? And could a woman be
too
thin, so that her curves seemed sudden, alarming? Her long hair was pulled back into a ponytail and her skin was lightly tanned, drawn tight over features that were somehow at once too sharp and too soft—nose too delicate for such a chin, for such high cheeks, for those big dark eyes. No, he thought, while she was striking, this was no great beauty.

But then she turned directly to him, and the disparate features of her drastic face came together as a single, perfect thing, and Pasquale recalled from his studies how some buildings in Florence could disappoint from various angles and yet always presented well in relief, always photographed well; that the various vantages were made to be composed; and so, too, he thought, some people. Then she smiled, and in that instant, if such a thing were possible, Pasquale fell in love, and he would remain in love for the rest of his life—not so much with the woman, whom he didn’t even know, but with the moment.

He dropped the rock he was holding.

She glanced away—right, then left, then right again—as if looking for the rest of the village. Pasquale flushed over what she must be seeing: a dozen or so drab stone houses, some of them abandoned, clinging like barnacles to the cliff seam. Feral cats poked around the small piazza, but otherwise all was quiet, the fishermen out in their boats for the day. Pasquale sensed such disappointment when people hiked in accidentally or arrived by boat through a mistake in cartography or language, people who believed they were being taken to the charming tourist towns of Porto
venere
or Porto
fino
only to find themselves in the
brutto
fishing village of Porto Vergogna.

“I’m sorry,” the beautiful American said in English, turning back to Orenzio. “Should I help with the bags? Or is it part of . . . I mean . . . I don’t know what has been paid for and what hasn’t.”

Done with devilish English after that “beach” business, Orenzio merely shrugged. Short, jug-eared, and dull-eyed, he carried himself in a manner that often suggested brain damage to tourists, who were so impressed by this slack-eyed simpleton’s ability to operate a motorboat that they tipped him lavishly. Orenzio, in turn, surmised that the duller he behaved, and the less English he mastered, the more he would be paid. So he stared and blinked stupidly.

“Should I get my own luggage, then?” the woman asked again, patiently, a little helplessly.

“Bagagli, Orenzio,”
Pasquale called to his friend, and then it dawned on Pasquale: this woman was checking into
his
hotel! Pasquale started wading over to the pier, licking his lips in preparation for speaking unpracticed English. “Please,” he said to the woman, his tongue like a hunk of gristle in his mouth, “I have honor and Orenzio for carry you bag. Go upon Ad-e-quate View Hotel.” The comment appeared to confuse the American, but Pasquale didn’t notice. He wanted to end with a flourish and tried to think of the proper word to call her (
Madam?
) but he longed for something better. He had never really mastered English, but he’d studied enough to have a healthy fear of its random severity, the senseless brutality of its conjugations; it was unpredictable, like a cross-bred dog. His earliest education in the language had come from the only American to ever stay in the hotel, a writer who came to Italy each spring to chip away at his life’s work—an epic novel about his experiences in World War II. Pasquale tried to imagine what the tall, dashing writer might say to this woman, but he couldn’t think of the right words and he wondered if there was an English equivalent for the Italian staple
bella
: beautiful. He took a stab: “Please. Come. Beautiful America.”

She stared at him for just a moment—the longest moment of his life to that point—then smiled and looked down demurely. “Thank you. Is this your hotel?”

Pasquale finished sloshing through the water and arrived at the pier. He pulled himself up, shaking the water from his pant legs, and tried to present himself, every bit the dashing hotelier. “Yes. Is my hotel.” Pasquale pointed to the small, hand-lettered sign on the left side of the piazza. “Please.”

“And . . . you have a room reserved for us?”

“Oh yes. Many is room. All is room for you. Yes.”

She looked at the sign, and then at Pasquale again. The warm gust was back and it roused the escaped hairs from her ponytail into streamers around her face. She smiled at the puddle dripping off his thin frame, then looked up into his sea-blue eyes and said, “You have lovely eyes.” Then she replaced the hat on her head and started making her way toward the small piazza and the center of what little town lay before her.

Porto Vergogna had never had
un liceo
—a high school—and so Pasquale had boated to La Spezia for secondary school. This was where he’d met Orenzio, who became his first real friend. They were tossed together by default: the shy son of the old hotelier and the short, jug-eared wharf boy. Pasquale had even stayed sometimes with Orenzio’s family during the winter weeks, when the passage was difficult. The winter before Pasquale left for Florence, he and Orenzio had invented a game that they played over glasses of Swiss beer. They would sit across from each other at the docks in La Spezia and fire offenses back and forth until they either ran out of words or started repeating themselves, at which point the loser would have to drain the pint before him. Now, as he hoisted the American’s bags, Orenzio leaned over to Pasquale and played a dry version of the game. “What did she say, nut-smeller?”

“She loves my eyes,” Pasquale said, missing his cue.

“Come on, ass-handler,” Orenzio said. “She said nothing like this.”

“No, she did. She is in love with my eyes.”

“You are a liar, Pasqo, and an admirer of boys’ noodles.”

“It is true.”

“That you love boys’ noodles?”

“No. She said that about my eyes.”

“You are a fellater of goats. The woman is a cinema star.”

“I think so, too,” Pasquale said.

“No, stupid, she really is a performer of the cinema. She is with the American company working on the film in Rome.”

“What film?”

“Cleopatra
. Don’t you read the newspapers, shit-smoker?”

Pasquale looked back at the American actress, who was climbing the steps to the village. “But she’s too fair-skinned to play Cleopatra.”

“The whore and husband-thief Elizabeth Taylor is Cleopatra,” Orenzio said. “This is another player in the film. Do you really not read the newspapers, bung-slopper?”

“Which role is she?”

“How should I know? There must be many roles.”

“What’s her name?” Pasquale asked.

Orenzio handed over the typed instructions he’d been given. The paper included the woman’s name, said that she should be taken to the hotel in Porto Vergogna, and that the bill should be sent to the man who had arranged her trip, Michael Deane, at the Grand Hotel in Rome. The single sheet of paper said that this Michael Deane was a “special production assistant” for “20th Century Fox Pictures.” And the woman’s name—

“Dee . . . Moray,” Pasquale read aloud. It wasn’t familiar, but there were so many American movie stars—Rock Hudsons, Marilyn Monroes, John Waynes—and just when he thought he knew them all, some new one became famous, almost as if there were a factory in America manufacturing these huge movie-screen faces. Pasquale looked back up to where she was already making her way up the steps of the cliff seam and into the waiting village. “Dee Moray,” he said again.

Orenzio looked over his shoulder at the paper. “Dee Moray,” Orenzio said. There was something intriguing in the name and neither man could stop saying it. “Dee Moray,” Orenzio said again.

“She is sick,” Orenzio said to Pasquale.

“With what?”

“How would I know this? The man just said she was sick.”

“Is it serious?”

“I don’t know this, either.” And then, as if winding down, as if even he were losing interest in their old game, Orenzio added another insult,
uno che mangia culo
—“one who eats ass.”

Pasquale watched as Dee Moray moved toward his hotel, taking small steps along the stone pathway. “She can’t be too sick,” he said. “She’s beautiful.”

“But not like Sophia Loren,” Orenzio said. “Or the Marilyn Monroe.” It had been their other pastime the winter before, going to the cinema and rating the women they saw.

“No, I think she has a more intelligent beauty . . . like Anouk Aimée.”

“She is so skinny,” Orenzio said. “And she’s no Claudia Cardinale.”

“No,” Pasquale had to agree. Claudia Cardinale was perfection. “I think it is not so common, though, her face.”

The point had become too fine for Orenzio. “I could bring a three-legged dog into this town, Pasqo, and you would fall in love with it.”

That’s when Pasquale became worried. “Orenzio, did she intend to come here?”

Orenzio smacked the page in Pasquale’s hand. “This American, Deane, who drove her to La Spezia? I explained to him that no one comes here. I asked if he meant Portofino or Portovenere. He asked what Porto Vergogna was like, and I said there was nothing here but a hotel. He asked if the town was quiet. I said to him only death is quieter, and he said, ‘Then that is the place.’ ”

Pasquale smiled at his friend. “Thank you, Orenzio.”

“Fellater of goats,” Orenzio said quietly.

“You already said that one,” Pasquale said.

Orenzio mimed finishing a beer.

Then they both looked toward the cliff side, forty meters uphill, where the first American guest since the death of his father stood regarding the front door of his hotel. Here is the future
,
thought Pasquale.

Dee Moray stopped and looked back down at them. She shook out her ponytail and her sun-bleached hair snapped and danced around her face as she took in the sea from the village square. Then she looked at the sign and cocked her head, as if trying to understand the words:

THE HOTEL ADEQUATE VIEW

And then the future tucked her floppy hat under her arm, pushed open the door, ducked, and went in.

After she disappeared inside the hotel, Pasquale entertained the unwieldy thought that he’d somehow summoned her, that after years of living in this place, after months of grief and loneliness and waiting for Americans, he’d created this woman from old bits of cinema and books, from the lost artifacts and ruins of his dreams, from his epic, enduring solitude. He glanced over at Orenzio, who was carrying
someone’s
bags, and the whole world suddenly seemed so unlikely, our time in it so brief and dreamlike. He’d never felt such a detached, existential sensation, such terrifying freedom—it was as if he were hovering above the village, above his own body—and it thrilled him in a way that he could never have explained.

“Dee Moray,” Pasquale Tursi said, suddenly, aloud, breaking the spell of his thoughts. Orenzio looked over. Then Pasquale turned his back and said the name again, to himself this time, in something less than a whisper, embarrassed by the hopeful breath that formed those words. Life, he thought, is a blatant act of imagination.

2

The Last Pitch

Recently

Hollywood, California

B
efore sunrise—before Guatemalan gardeners in dirty dinged lawn trucks, before Caribbeans come to cook, clean, and clothe, before Montessori, Pilates, and Coffee Bean, before Benzes and BMWs nose onto palmed streets and the blue-toothed sharks resume their endless business—
the gentrification of the American mind
—there are the sprinklers: rising from the ground to spit-spray the northwest corner of Greater Los Angeles, airport to the hills, downtown to the beaches, the slumbering rubble of the entertainment regime.

In Santa Monica, they call to Claire Silver in the predawn quiet of her condo—
psst hey
—her curly red hair splayed out on the pillow like a suicide. They whisper again—
psst hey
—and Claire’s eyelids flutter; she inhales, orients, glances over at the marbled shoulder of her boyfriend, sprawled asleep on his 70 percent of the king-size. Daryl often cracks the bedroom window behind their bed when he comes in late, and Claire wakes like this—
psst hey
—to water spritzing the rock garden outside. She’s asked the condo manager why it’s necessary to water a bed of rocks every day at five
A.M.
(or at all, for that matter), but of course sprinklers are not the real issue.

Claire wakes jonesing for data; she fumbles on the crowded bedside table for her BlackBerry, takes a digital hit. Fourteen e-mails, six tweets, five friend requests, three texts, and her calendar—life in a palm. General stuff, too: Friday, sixty-six degrees on the way to seventy-four. Five phone calls scheduled today. Six pitch meetings. Then, amid the info dump she sees a life-changing e-mail, from [email protected]. She opens it.

Dear Claire,

Thanks again for your patience during this long process. Both Bryan and I were very impressed by your credentials and your interview and we’d like to meet you to talk more. Would you be available for coffee this morning?

Sincerely,

James Pierce

Museum of American Screen Culture

Claire sits up. Holy shit. They’re going to offer her the job. Or are they?
Talk more?
They’ve already interviewed her twice; what can they possibly need to talk about? Is this it? Is today the day she gets to quit her dream job?

Claire is chief development assistant for the legendary film producer Michael Deane. The title’s phony—her job’s all assisting, no developing, and she’s nobody’s chief. She tends Michael’s whims. Answers his calls and e-mails, goes for his sandwiches and coffee. And mostly she reads for him: great herds of scripts and synopses, one-sheets and treatments—a stampede of material going nowhere.

She’d hoped for so much more when she quit her doctoral film studies program and went to work for the man who was known in the seventies and eighties as the “Deane of Hollywood.” She’d wanted to make movies—smart, moving
films.
But when she arrived three years ago, Michael Deane was in the worst slump of his career, with no recent credits save the indie zombie bomb
Night Ravagers
. In Claire’s three years, Deane Productions has made no other movies; in fact, its only production has been a single television program: the hit reality show and dating Web site Hookbook (Hookbook.net).

And with the monstrous success of that cross-media abomination, movies have become a fading memory at Deane Productions. Instead, Claire’s days are spent listening to TV pitches so offensive she fears she’s singlehandedly hastening the Apocalypse:
Model Behavior
(“We take seven models and put them in a frat house!”) and
Nympho Night
(“We film the dates of people diagnosed with sex addiction!”) and
Drunk Midget House
(“See, it’s a house . . . full of drunk midgets!”).

Michael’s constantly urging her to adjust her expectations, to set aside her highbrow pretensions, to accept the culture on its own terms, to expand her notions of what’s
good
. “If you want to make art,” he’s fond of saying, “go get a job at the
Loov-ruh
.”

So that’s what she did. A month ago, Claire applied for a job she saw posted on a Web site, for “a curator for a new private film museum.” And now, almost three weeks after her interview, the crisp businessmen on the museum’s board of directors appear to be close to offering her the job.

If it’s not a no-brainer, this decision is a quarter-brainer at most: their proposed Museum of American Screen Culture (MASC) will pay better, the hours will be better, and it’s certainly a better use of her master’s degree from UCLA in Moving Image Archive Studies. More than that, she thinks the job might allow her to feel like she’s actually using her brain again.

Michael is dismissive of this intellectual discontent of hers, insisting that she’s just paying her dues, that every producer spends a few years in the wilderness—that, in Michael’s clipped, inimitable lingo, she must “sift shit for the corn,” make her bones with a commercial success or ten so that she can later do the projects she loves. And so she finds herself here, at life’s big crossroad: stick it out with this crass career and her unlikely dream of one day making a great film, or take a quiet job cataloguing relics from a time when film actually mattered?

Faced with such decisions (college, boyfriends, grad school), Claire has always been a pro-con lister, a seeker of signs, a deal-maker—and she makes a deal with herself now, or with Fate:
Either a
good, viable film
idea walks in the door today—or I quit.

This deal, of course, is rigged. Convinced that the money is all in TV now, Michael hasn’t liked a single film pitch, script, or treatment in two years. And everything
she
likes he dismisses as too expensive, too dark, too period, not commercial enough. As if that didn’t make the odds long enough, today is Wild Pitch Friday: the last Friday of the month, set aside for off-the-rack pitches from Michael’s old cronies and colleagues, from every burned-out, played-out has-been and never-was in town. And on this particular Wild Pitch Friday, both Michael and his producing partner, Danny Roth, have the day off. Today—
psst hey
—she has all these shit pitches to herself.

Claire glances down at Daryl, snoozing in the bed next to her. She twinges guilt for not talking to him about the museum job; this is partly because he’s been out late almost every night, partly because they haven’t been talking much anyway, partly because she’s thinking of quitting him, too.

“So?” she says quietly. Daryl makes a deep-sleep noise—something between a grunt and a peep. “Yeah,” she says, “that’s what I figured.”

She rises and stretches, starts for the bathroom. But on the way she pauses over Daryl’s jeans, which sit like a resting dancer on the floor right where he’s stepped out of them—
Psst don’t,
the sprinklers warn—but what choice does she have, really—a young woman at the crossroads, on the lookout for signs? She bends, picks up the jeans, goes through the pockets: six singles, coins, a book of matches, and . . . ah, here it is:

A punch card for something charmingly called
ASSTACULAR: THE SOUTHLAND’S FINEST IN LIVE NUDE ENTERTAINMENT
.
Daryl’s diversion. She turns the card over. Claire doesn’t have much of an instinct for the gradations of the adult entertainment industry, but she imagines the employment of punch cards doesn’t exactly distinguish
ASSTACULAR
as the Four Seasons of titty bars. Oh, and look: Daryl is just two punches from a free lap dance. How excellent for him! She leaves the card next to the snoring Daryl, on her pillow, in the indentation left by her head.

Then Claire starts for the bathroom, officially adding Daryl to her deal with Fate, like a hostage (
Bring me a great film idea today or the strip-clubbing boyfriend gets it!
). She pictures the names on her schedule, and wonders if one will magically step up. She imagines them as fixed points on a map: her nine thirty having an egg-white omelet as he goes over his pitch in Culver City, her ten fifteen doing tai chi in Manhattan Beach, her eleven rubbing one off in the shower in Silver Lake. It’s liberating to pretend her decision is up to them now, that she’s done all she can, and Claire feels almost free, stepping openly, nakedly, into the capricious arms of Destiny—or at least into a hot shower.

And that’s when a single wistful thought escapes her otherwise made-up mind: a wish, or maybe a prayer, that amid today’s crap she might hear just one . . . decent . . .
pitch
—one idea for a
great film
—so she won’t have to quit the only job she’s ever wanted in her entire life.

Outside, the sprinklers spit laughter against the rock garden.

A
lso naked, eight hundred miles away in Beaverton, Oregon, Claire’s last appointment of the day, her four
P.M.
, can’t decide what to wear. Not quite thirty, Shane Wheeler is tall, lean, and a little feral-looking, narrow face framed by an ocean-chop of brown hair and two table-leg sideburns. For twenty minutes, Shane has been coaxing an outfit from this autumn-leaf pile of discarded clothes: wrinkly polos, quirky secondhand Ts, faux Western button shirts, boot-cut jeans, skinny jeans, torn jeans, slacks, khakis, and cords, none of it quite right for the too-talented-to-care nonchalance he imagines is appropriate for his first-ever Hollywood pitch meeting.

Shane absentmindedly rubs the tattoo on his left forearm, the word
ACT
inked in elaborate gangster calligraphy, a reference to his father’s favorite Bible passage and, until recently, Shane’s life motto—
Act as if ye have faith and it shall be given to you.

His was an outlook fed by years of episodic TV, by encouraging teachers and counselors, by science-fair ribbons, participant medals, and soccer and basketball trophies—and, most of all, by two attentive and dutiful parents, who raised their five perfect children with the belief—hell, with the birthright—that as long as they had faith in themselves, they could be anything they wanted to be.

So in high school, Shane acted as if he were a distance runner and lettered twice, acted as if he were an A student and pulled them, acted as if a certain cheerleader was in his wheelhouse and
she asked him
to a dance, acted as if he were a shoo-in for Cal-Berkeley and got in and for Sigma Nu and they pledged him, acted as if he spoke Italian and studied abroad for a year, acted as if he were a writer and got accepted to the University of Arizona’s MFA creative writing program, acted as if he were in love and got married.

But recently, fissures have appeared in this philosophy—faith proving to be not nearly enough—and it was in the run-up to his divorce that his soon-to-be ex-wife (
So tired of your shit, Shane . . .
) dropped a bombshell: the Bible phrase he and his father endlessly quoted, “Act as if ye have faith . . . ,” never actually
appears
in the Bible. Rather, as far as she could tell, it came from the closing argument given by the Paul Newman character in the film
The Verdict
.

This revelation didn’t
cause
Shane’s trouble, but the news did seem to explain it somehow. This is what happens when your life is authored not by God but by David Mamet: you can’t find a teaching job and your marriage dissolves just as your student loans come due and the project you’ve worked on for six years, your MFA thesis—a book of linked short stories called
Linked
—is rejected by the literary agent you’ve secured (Agent:
This book doesn’t work
. Shane:
You mean, in your opinion.
Agent:
I mean in English
). Divorced, jobless, and broke, his literary ambition scuttled, Shane saw his decision to become a writer as a six-year detour to nowhere. He was in the first funk of his life, unable to even get out of bed without ACT to spur him on. It fell to his mother to yank him out of it, convincing him to go on antidepressants and hopefully rescuing the blithely confident young man she and his father had raised.

“Look, it’s not like we were a religious family anyway. We only went to church on Christmas and Easter. So your dad got that saying from a thirty-year-old movie instead of a two-thousand-year-old book? That doesn’t mean it isn’t true, does it? In fact, maybe that makes it
more
true.”

Inspired by his mother’s deep faith
in him
, and by the low dose of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor he’d recently begun taking, Shane had what could only be described as an epiphany:

Weren’t movies
his generation’s
faith anyway
—its true religion? Wasn’t the theater our temple, the one place we enter separately but emerge from two hours later together, with the same experience, same guided emotions, same moral? A million schools taught ten million curricula, a million churches featured ten thousand sects with a billion sermons—but the same movie showed in every mall in the country. And we all saw it! That summer, the one you’ll never forget, every movie house beamed the same set of thematic and narrative images—the same
Avatar
, same
Harry Potter
, same
Fast and the Furious
, flickering pictures stitched in our minds that replaced our own memories, archetypal stories that became our shared history, that taught us what to expect from life, that defined our values. What was that but a religion?