Beautiful Ruins (24 page)

He reached for the notebook. “Put that down!”

She flipped forward, looking for whatever had been so dangerous that he’d give her his pot pipe rather than admit he was writing a song.

“Fucking put it down, Mom!”

She found the last page with writing on it—the song he must have been trying to hide—and her shoulders slumped when she saw the heading: “The Smile of Heaven,” the title of Alvis’s book. She read the chorus:
I used to believe/He’d come back for me/Why’s heaven smiling/When this shit ain’t funny—

Oh. Debra felt awful. “I— I’m sorry, Pat. I thought—”

He reached up and took the notebook back.

She so rarely saw beneath Pat’s smooth, sarcastic surface that she sometimes forgot a boy was there—a hurt boy who was still capable of missing his father even though he didn’t remember him. “Oh, Pat,” she said. “You’d rather I thought you were smoking pot . . . than writing a song?”

He rubbed his eyes. “It’s a bad song.”

“No, Pat. It’s really good.”

“It’s maudlin crap,” he said. “And I knew you’d make me talk about it.”

She sat on the bed. “So . . . let’s talk about it.”

“Ah, Jesus.” He looked past her, at a point on the floor. Then he blinked, laughed, and this seemed to snap him out of some trance. “It’s no big deal. It’s just a song.”

“Pat, I know it’s been hard on you—”

He winced. “I don’t think you understand just how much I
don’t
want to talk about this. Please. Can’t we talk about it later?”

When she didn’t budge, Pat pushed her gently with his foot. “Come on. I have more maudlin crap to write and you’re going to be late for your date. And when you’re tardy, P.E. Steve makes you run laps.”

P
.E. Steve drove a Plymouth Duster with deep bucket seats. He had a gone-to-seed-superhero look, with blocky, side-parted hair and a square jaw, and an athletic body just starting to swell with middle age. Men have a half-life, she thought, like uranium.

“What should we see?” Steve asked her in the car.

She felt ridiculous even saying it:
“The Exorcist II.”
She shrugged. “I heard some kids in the library talking about it. It sounded good.”

“Fine with me. I figured you more for a foreign-film buff, something with subtitles that I’d have to pretend to understand.”

Debra laughed. “It has a good cast,” she said, “Linda Blair, Louise Fletcher, James Earl Jones.” She could barely even say the real name. “Richard Burton.”

“Richard Burton? Isn’t he dead?”

“Not yet,” she said.

“Okay,” P.E. Steve said, “but you might have to hold my hand. The first
Exorcist
scared the shit out of me.”

She looked out the window. “I didn’t see it.”

They ate dinner at a seafood place and she noted when he took one of her shrimp without asking. The conversation was easy and casual: Steve asking about Pat, Debra saying that he was doing better. Funny how every conversation about Pat assumed a baseline of trouble.

“You shouldn’t worry about him,” Steve said, as if reading her mind. “He’s a lousy floor-hockey player, but he’s a good kid. The talented ones like that? The more trouble they get in, the more successful they are as adults.”

“How do you know that?”

“ ’Cause I
never
got in trouble and now I’m a P.E. teacher.”

No, this wasn’t bad at all. They sat early in the theater with a shared box of Dots and a shared armrest, and shared backgrounds (She: widowed a decade earlier, mother dead, dad remarried, younger brother and two sisters; He: divorced, two kids, two brothers, parents in Arizona). Shared gossip, too: the one about some kids discovering a cache of the shop teacher’s raunchy porn above the lathe (He:
I guess that’s why they call it
wood
shop
) and Mrs. Wylie seducing the gear-head Dave Ames (She:
But Dave Ames is just a boy
; He:
Yeah, not anymore
).

Then the lights went down and they settled into their seats, P.E. Steve leaning over and whispering, “You seem different from how you are at school.”

“How am I at school?” she asked.

“Honestly? You’re kinda scary.”

She laughed. “Kinda scary?”

“No. I didn’t mean ‘kinda.’ Completely scary. Utterly intimidating.”

“I’m
intimidating?”

“Yeah, I mean . . . look at you. You have seen yourself in a mirror, right?”

She was saved from the rest of this conversation by the coming attractions. Afterward, she leaned forward with anticipation, feeling the buzz she always felt when one of HIS
films started. This one started with a mash of fire and locusts and devils, and when he finally came on, she felt both exhilaration and sadness: his face was grayer, ruddier, and his eyes, a version of those eyes she saw every day at home, but now like burned-out bulbs, the spark almost gone.

The movie swung from stupid to silly to incomprehensible, and she wondered if it would make more sense to someone who’d seen the first
Exorcist
. (Pat had snuck into a theater to see it and pronounced it “hilarious.”) The plot employed some kind of hypnosis machine made of Frankenstein wires and suction cups, which appeared to allow two or three people to have the same dream. When
he
wasn’t on-screen, she tried to concentrate on the other actors, to catch bits of business, interesting decisions. Sometimes, when she watched his films, she’d think about how she would’ve played a particular scene across from him—as she instructed her students: to notice the
choices
the actors made. Louise Fletcher was in this movie, and Debra marveled at her easy proficiency. Now there was an interesting career, Louise Fletcher’s. Dee could have had that kind of career—maybe.

“We can leave if you want,” P.E. Steve whispered.

“What? No. Why?”

“You keep scoffing.”

“Do I? I’m sorry.”

The rest of the movie she sat quietly, with her hands in her lap, watching as he struggled through ridiculous scenes, trying to find something to do with this drek. A few times, she did see bits of his old power crack through, the slight trill in that smooth voice overcoming his boozy diction.

They were quiet walking to the car. (Steve:
That was . . . interesting.
Debra:
Mmm.
) On the way home she stared out her window, lost in thought. She replayed her conversation with Pat earlier, wondering if she hadn’t missed some important opening. What if she’d just come out and told him:
Oh, by the way, I’m on my way to see a movie starring your real father
—but could she imagine a scenario in which that information helped Pat? What was he going to do? Go play catch with Richard Burton?

“I hope you didn’t pick that movie on purpose,” said P.E. Steve.

“What?” She squirmed in the seat. “I’m sorry?”

“Well, just that it’s hard to ask someone out for a second date after a movie like that. Like asking someone to go on another cruise after the
Titanic
.”

She laughed, but it was hollow. She pretended, to herself, that she went to all of his movies and kept an eye on his career because of Pat—in case it made sense to tell him one day. But she could never tell him; she knew that.

So, if it wasn’t for Pat, why did she still go to the movies—and sit there like a spy watching him destroy himself, daydreaming herself into supporting roles, never the Liz parts, always Louise Fletcher? Although it was never
her
, of course, not Debra Moore the high school drama and Italian teacher, but the woman she’d tried to create all those years ago,
Dee Moray
—as if she’d cleaved herself in two, Debra coming back to Seattle, Dee waking up in that tiny hotel on the Italian coast and getting sweet, shy Pasquale to take her to Switzerland, where she would do what they’d wanted, trade a baby for a career, and it was that career she still fantasized about—
after twenty-six movies and countless plays, the veteran finally gets a supporting actress nomination—

In the bucket seat of P.E. Steve’s Duster, Debra sighed. God, she was pathetic—a schoolgirl forever singing into hairbrushes.

“You okay?” P.E. Steve said. “It’s like you’re fifty miles away.”

“I’m sorry.” She looked over and squeezed his arm. “I had this weird conversation with Pat before I left. I guess I’m still upset about it.”

“You want to talk about it?”

She almost laughed at the idea—confessing the whole thing to Pat’s P.E. teacher. “Thanks,” she said. “But no.” Steve went back to driving and Debra wondered if such a man’s matter-of-fact ease could still have some effect on the fifteen-year-old Pat, or if it was too late for all of that.

They pulled up to her house and Steve turned off the car. She wouldn’t mind going out with him again, but she hated this part of dates—the turn in the driver’s seat, the awkward seeking out of eyes, the fitful kiss and request to see her again.

She glanced over at the house to make sure Pat wasn’t watching—no way she could stand him teasing her about a good-bye kiss—and that’s when she saw something was missing. She got out of the car as if in a trance, started walking toward the house.

“So that’s it?”

She glanced over to see that P.E. Steve had gotten out of the car.

“What?” she said.

“Look,” he said, “this might not be my place, but I’m just gonna say it. I like you.” He leaned on the car, his arm propped on his open door. “You asked me what you were like at school . . . and, honestly, you’re like you’ve been the last hour. I said you were intimidating because of the way you look, and you are. But sometimes it’s like you’re not even in the room with other people. Like no one else even exists.”

“Steve—”

But he wasn’t done. “I know I’m not your type. That’s fine. But I think you might be a happier person if you let people in sometimes.”

She opened her mouth to tell him why she’d gotten out of the car, but
you might be a happier person
pissed her off. She might be a happier person? She might be a— Jesus. She stood there silently—broken, seething.

“Well, good night.” Steve got in his Duster, closed the door, and drove away. She watched his car turn at the end of the street, taillights blinking once.

Then she looked back at her house, and the empty driveway, where her car should have been parked.

Inside, she opened the drawer where she kept the spare car keys (gone, of course), peeked in Pat’s bedroom (empty, of course), looked for a note (none, of course), poured herself a glass of wine, and sat by the window, waiting for him to come home on his own. It was two forty-five in the morning when the phone finally rang. It was the police.
Was she . . . Was her son . . . Did she own . . . tan Audi . . . license plate . . .
She answered:
Yes, yes, yes,
until she stopped hearing the questions, just kept saying
Yes
. Then she hung up and called Mona, who came over and picked her up, drove her quietly to the police station.

They stopped and Mona put her hand on Debra’s. Good Mona—ten years younger and square-shouldered, bob-haired, with sharp green eyes. She’d tried to kiss Debra once after too many glasses of wine. You can always spot the real thing, that affection; why does it always come from the wrong person? “Debra,” Mona said, “I know you love that little fucker, but you can’t put up with his shit anymore. You hear me? Let him go to jail this time.”

“He was doing better,” Debra said weakly. “He wrote this song—” But she didn’t finish. She thanked Mona, got out of the car, and went into the police station.

A thick, uniformed officer in teardrop glasses came out with a clipboard. He said not to worry, her son was fine, but her car was totaled—it had gone over an abutment in Fremont, “a spectacular crash, amazing no one was hurt.”

“No one?”

“There was a girl in the car with him. She’s fine, too. Scared, but fine. Her parents already came down.”

Of course there was a girl. “Can I see him?”

In a minute, the officer said. But first she needed to know that her son had been intoxicated, that they’d found a vodka bottle and cocaine residue on a hand mirror in the car, that he was being cited for negligent driving, driving without a license, failure to use proper care and caution, driving under the influence, minor in possession. (
Cocaine?
She wasn’t sure she’d heard right but she nodded at each charge, what else could she do?) Given the severity of the charges, this matter would be turned over to the juvenile prosecutor, who would make a determination—

Wait. Cocaine?
Where would he get cocaine? And what did P.E. Steve mean that she
didn’t let people in
? She’d love to let someone in. No, you know what she’d do? Let
herself out
! And Mona?
Don’t put up with his shit?
Jesus, did they think she
chose
to be this way? Did they think she had a choice in the way Pat behaved? God, that would be something, just stop putting up with Pat’s shit, go back in time and live some other life—