Beautiful Ruins (35 page)

“I’m not worried about me,” Lyle says. “It’s just . . . I promised your mother. I don’t know who will take care of you now.”

In the wake of that realization—that Lyle believes he has been caring for
her
—Lydia understands that she’s most alive when she’s caring for someone else, and goes to Idaho to take care of Pat’s ailing mother. Then, one night, she’s asleep in Debra’s living room when the phone rings. The lights come up on the other side of the stage—revealing Pat, standing in a red phone booth, calling his mother for help. At first Lydia is excited to hear from him. But all Pat seems to care about is that he’s run out of money and needs help to get home from London. He doesn’t even ask about his mother.

Lydia goes quiet on the other end of the call. “Wait. What time is it there?” he asks. “Three,” Lydia says quietly. And Pat’s head falls to his chest exactly as it did in the first scene.

“Who is it, dear?” comes a voice from offstage—the first words Pat’s mother has spoken in the entire play. In his London phone booth, Pat whispers, “Do it, Lydia.” Lydia takes a deep breath, says, “Nobody,” and hangs up, the light going out in the phone booth.

Pat is reduced to being a vagrant in London—ragged, sitting drunk on a street corner playing his guitar cross-legged. He’s busking, panhandling to make enough money to get home. A passing Londoner stops and offers Pat a twenty-euro note if he’ll play a love song. Pat starts to play the song “Lydia,” but he stops. He can’t do it.

Back in Idaho, with snow on the cabin window marking the passage of time, Lydia gets another phone call. Her stepfather has died in the nursing home. She thanks the caller and goes back to making tea for Pat’s mother, but she can’t. She just stares at her hands. She seems entirely alone in the scene, in the world. And that’s when a knock comes at the door. She answers. It is Pat Bender, framed in the same doorway Lydia stood in at the beginning of the play. Lydia stares at her long-lost boyfriend, this derelict Odysseus who’s been wandering the world trying to get home. It’s the first time they’ve been onstage together since that awful moment when he stood before her, naked, at the start of the play. Another long silence between them follows, echoing the first, extends as long as an audience can possibly bear (
Somebody say something!
), until Pat Bender gives just the slightest shudder onstage, and whispers, “Am I too late?”—somehow conveying even more nakedness than in the first scene.

Lydia shakes her head no: his mother is alive still. Pat’s shoulders slump, in relief and exhaustion and humility, and he holds out his hands—an act of surrender. Dee’s voice comes again from offstage: “Who is it, dear?” Lydia glances over her shoulder and somehow the moment stretches even longer. “Nobody,” Pat replies, his voice a broken husk. Then Lydia reaches out for his hand, and in the instant their hands touch, the lights go down. The play is over.

Claire gasps, releasing what feels like ninety minutes of air. All the travelers feel it—some kind of completion—and in the rush of applause they feel, too, the explorer’s serendipity: the accidental, cathartic discovery of oneself. In the midst of this release, Michael leans over to Claire and whispers again, “Did you
see
that?”

On her other side, Pasquale Tursi holds his hand to his heart as if suffering an attack.
“Bravo,”
he says, and then,
“È
troppo tardi?”
Claire has to guess at his meaning, for their erstwhile Italian translator seems unreachable, his head in his hands. “Fuck me,” Shane says. “I think I’ve wasted my whole life.”

Claire, too, finds herself drawn inward by what she’s just seen. Earlier, she told Shane that her relationship with Daryl was “hopeless.” Now she realizes that throughout the play she was thinking of Daryl, hopeless, irredeemable Daryl, the boyfriend she can’t seem to let go of.
Maybe
all love is hopeless
. Maybe Michael Deane’s rule is wiser than he knows: We want what we want—
we love who we love.
Claire pulls her phone out and turns it on. She sees the latest text from Daryl:
Pls just let me know U R OK.

She types back:
I’m okay.

Next to her, Michael Deane puts his hand on her arm. “I’m buying it,” he says.

Claire glances up from her phone, thinking for a moment that Michael is talking about Daryl. Then she understands. She wonders if her deal with Fate is still in play. Is
Front Man
the great movie that will allow her to stay in the business? “You want to buy the play?” she asks.

“I want to buy everything,” Michael Deane says. “The play, his songs—all of it.” He stands up and looks around the little theater. “I’m buying the whole goddamn thing.”

B
y flashing her business card (
Hollywood? No shit?
) Claire gets an enthusiastic invitation to the after-party from a goateed and liberally pierced doorman named Keith. On his directions, they walk a block from the theater toward a brick storefront, which opens to a wide set of stairs, the building intentionally unfinished, all exposed pipes and half-exposed brick. It reminds Claire of climbing to countless parties in college. But there’s something off in the scale, in the width of hallways and the heights of ceilings—all the extravagant, wasted space in these old Western towns.

Pasquale pauses at the door.
“È qui, lei?”
Is she here?

Maybe, says Shane, looking up from his phone.
“C’è una festa, per gli attori.”
It is a party for the actors. Shane returns to his phone and sends a text message to Saundra: “Can we talk? Please? I realize now what an ass I’ve been.”

Pasquale looks up at the building where Dee might be, removes his hat, smooths his hair, and starts up the stairs. At the top of the landing, Claire helps the winded Michael Deane up the last steps. There are three doors to three apartments on the second floor and they walk to the back of the building, to the only open door, propped open with a jug of wine.

This back apartment is big and lovely in the same primitive way as the rest of the building. It takes a moment for them to adjust to the candlelight—it’s a huge two-story open loft with high ceilings. The room itself is a work of art, or a junk pile—filled with old school lockers, hockey sticks, and newspaper boxes—all of this surrounding a curved staircase made of old timbers, which seems to float in thin air. Upon further inspection, they can see that the staircase is held with three lines of coiled cable.

“This whole apartment is furnished with found art,” says Keith, the theater doorman, who arrives right behind them. He has spiky, thin hair and painful-looking studs in his lips, neck, upper ears, and nose, as well as pirate hoops in his ears. He has acted in TAGNI productions himself, he tells them, but he’s also a poet, painter, and video artist. (
That’s all?
Claire wonders.
Interpretive dancer? Sand sculptor?
)

“A video artist?” Michael is intrigued. “And is your camera nearby?”

“I always have my camera,” Keith says, and he produces a small, simple digital from his pocket. “My life is my documentary.”

Pasquale scans the party, but there’s no sign of Dee. He leans over to ask Shane for help, but his translator is staring helplessly at Saundra’s return text:
You just NOW realized you’re an ass? Leave me alone.

Keith sees Pasquale and Michael looking around, mistakes this for curiosity, and steps in to explain. The apartment’s designer, he says, is a former Vietnam vet, featured last month in
Dwell
magazine. “His general concept is that every design form has an innate maturity alongside its youthful nature, that too often we cast aside the more interesting forms just when they’re starting to grow into this older, more interesting second nature. Two old hockey sticks—who cares. But hockey sticks made into a chair? Now, that’s something.”

“It’s all wonderful,” Michael says earnestly, gazing around at the room.

The cast and crew aren’t at the party yet; so far it’s just fifteen or twenty black-glasses-and-hippie-sandaled audience members, with their low talk, little squalls of laughter, all of them taking turns inspecting the strange travelers of the lost Deane Party. The crowd is familiar, Claire thinks: smaller, a little rougher around the edges, but not much different from an after-party anywhere. Wine and snacks are lined up on a metallic table made from the door of an old freight elevator; a small backhoe bucket is filled with ice and beer. Claire is relieved, when she goes to the bathroom, to find that the toilet is an actual toilet, and not an old boat motor.

Finally, the cast and crew begin arriving. Word of the great Michael Deane’s presence seems to be spreading throughout the crowd, and the ambitious make their way over, casually mentioning their appearance in the straight-to-video movies shot in Spokane, appearing alongside Cuba Gooding Jr., Antonio Banderas, John Travolta’s sister. Everyone Claire meets seems to be an artist of some kind—actors and musicians and painters and graphic artists and ballet instructors and writers and sculptors and more potters than a town this size could possibly support. Even the teachers and attorneys also act, or play in bands, or sculpt blocks of ice—Michael fascinated by all of them. Claire is amazed at his energy and genuine curiosity. He’s also on his third glass of wine—more than she’s ever seen him drink.

An attractive older woman in a sundress, her deep sun-worshipping wrinkles the opposite of Michael’s smooth skin, leans in close and actually touches his forehead. “Jesus,” she says, “I love your face,” as if it’s a piece of art he’s created.

“Thank you,” Michael says, because it is—his work of art.

The woman introduces herself as Fantom “with an F,” and explains that she makes tiny sculptures out of soap, which she sells at craft shows and barter fairs.

“I’d love to see them,” Michael says. “Is everyone here an artist?”

“I know,” Fantom says as she digs through her bag. “It gets old, huh?”

While Michael looks at tiny soap art, the rest of the Deane Party is growing anxious. Pasquale watches the door nervously as his lovesick translator, still stinging over Saundra’s texted rejection, pours a tall glass from a bottle of Canadian whiskey and Claire asks Keith about the play.

“Some intense shit, huh?” says Keith. “Debra mostly puts on kiddie plays, musicals, holiday farces—whatever gets the skiers off the mountain for a couple hours. But once a year she and Lydia do something original like this. She gets crap from the board sometimes, from the cranky Christians especially, but that was the tradeoff for her
.
Come keep the tourists happy, and once a year you can bust out something like that.”

By this time, all of the cast and crew have made it to the party—except for Pat and Lydia. Claire finds herself in conversation with Shannon, the actress who played the girl in bed with Pat at the start of the play. “I understand you’re from”—Shannon swallows, can barely say the word—“Hollywood?” She blinks quickly, twice. “What’s
that
like?”

Two glasses of wine in, Claire feels the strain of the last forty-eight hours, and smiles, stops to think about the question. Yes, what
is
it like? Certainly not like she dreamed. But maybe that’s okay. We want what we want. At home, she works herself into a frenzy worrying about what she isn’t—and perhaps loses track of just where she is. She takes a moment to look around—at this apartment built of garbage on some crazy island of artists in the mountains, where Michael is happily giving out business cards to soap-makers and actors, telling them he “might have something” for them, where Pasquale is nervously watching the door for a woman he hasn’t seen in nearly fifty years, where a quickly drunk Shane has rolled up his sleeve to explain the origin of his tattoo to an impressed Keith—and that’s when Claire realizes that Pat Bender and his mother and his girlfriend are not coming to this after-party.

“What? Oh yeah,” Keith says, confirming her suspicion. “They never come to the after-party. It’d kill Pat to be around all this booze and weed.”

“Where are they?” Michael asks.

“Probably up at the cabin,” Keith says. “Chilling with Dee.”

Michael Deane grabs Keith by the arm. “Will you take us there?”

Claire jumps in. “Maybe we should wait until morning, Michael.”

“No,” says the leader of the hope-drunk Deane Party. He glances over at old, patient Pasquale and makes one last fateful decision: “It’s been almost fifty years. No more waiting.”

19

The Requiem

April 1962

Porto Vergogna, Italy

P
asquale woke in darkness. He sat up and reached for his watch. Four thirty. He heard the fishermen’s low voices and the sound of boats skidding down to the shore. He rose, dressed quickly, and hurried down through the dusky predawn to the shore, where Tomasso the Communist was fixing his gear in his boat.

“What are you doing here?” Tomasso asked.

Pasquale asked Tomasso if he would motor him to La Spezia later for his mother’s requiem mass.

Tomasso touched his chest. “Of course,” he said. He would fish for a few hours and then come back to take Pasquale before lunch. Would that work?

“Yes, perfect,” Pasquale said. “Thank you.”

His old friend tipped his cap, climbed back in the boat, and pulled the starter rope, the motor clearing its throat. Pasquale watched Tomasso join the other fishermen, their shells bobbing on the soft-rocking sea.

Pasquale went back to the hotel and went to bed, but sleep wouldn’t come. He lay on his back and thought of Dee Moray in bed just above him.

In the summers sometimes, his parents used to take him to the beach at Chiavari. Once he was digging in the sand when he saw a beautiful woman sunning herself on a blanket. Her skin glistened. Pasquale couldn’t stop staring. When she finally packed up her blanket and left, she’d waved at him, but young Pasquale was far too mesmerized to wave back. Then he saw something fall from her bag. He ran over and picked it from the sand. It was a ring, set with some kind of reddish stone. Pasquale held it in his hand for a moment as the woman walked away. Then he looked up to see that his mother was watching him, waiting to see what he would do.
“Signora!”
he called after the woman, and chased her down the beach. The woman stopped, took the ring back, thanked him, patted him on the head, and gave him a fifty-lira coin. When he returned, Pasquale’s mother said, “I hope that is what you would have done even if I wasn’t watching you.” Pasquale wasn’t sure what she meant. “Sometimes,” she said, “what we want to do and what we must do are not the same.” She put a hand on his shoulder. “Pasqo, the smaller the space between your desire and what is right, the happier you will be.”

He couldn’t tell his mother why he hadn’t returned the ring right away: he imagined that if he gave a girl a ring, they would be married and he would have to leave his parents. And while his mother’s lecture had gone over his seven-year-old head, Pasquale saw now what she meant—how much easier life would be if our intentions and our desires could always be aligned.

When the sun finally crested the cliffs, Pasquale washed at the basin in his room and put on his old, stiff suit. Downstairs, he found his Aunt Valeria awake in the kitchen, sitting in her favorite chair. She glanced sideways at his suit.

“I can’t go to the funeral mass,” his aunt sighed. “I can’t face the priest.”

Pasquale said he understood. And he went outside to smoke on the patio. With the fishermen away, the town felt empty, only the wharf cats moving around the piazza. There was a light haze; the sun had not yet burned off the morning fog, and the waves were falling lifelessly on the shallow rocks.

He heard footsteps on the stairs. How long had he waited for an American guest? And now he had two. The footsteps were heavy on the wooden patio and soon Alvis Bender joined him. Alvis lit his pipe, bent his neck one way and then the other. He rubbed the light bruise over his eye. “My fighting days are over, Pasquale.”

“Are you hurt?” Pasquale asked.

“My pride.” Alvis took a pull from his pipe. “It’s funny,” he said in smoke. “I used to come here because it was quiet and I thought I could avoid the world long enough to write. No more, I guess, eh, Pasquale?”

Pasquale considered his friend’s face. It had such an open quality, was such a clearly American face, like Dee’s face, like Michael Deane’s face. He believed he could spot an American anywhere by that quality—that openness, that stubborn belief in
possibility
, a quality that, in his estimation, even the youngest Italians lacked. Perhaps it was the difference in age between the countries—America with its expansive youth, building all those drive-in movie theaters and cowboy restaurants; Italians living in endless contraction, in the artifacts of generations, in the bones of empires.

This reminded him of Alvis Bender’s contention that stories were like nations—Italy a great epic poem, Britain a thick novel, America a brash motion picture in Technicolor—and he remembered, too, Dee Moray saying she’d spent years “waiting for her movie to start,” and that she’d almost missed out on her life waiting for it.

Alvis lit his pipe again.
“Lei
è
molto bella,”
he said. She is very beautiful.

Pasquale turned to Alvis. He’d meant Dee Moray, of course, but at that moment Pasquale had been thinking of Amedea.
“Sì,”
Pasquale said. Then he said, in English, “Alvis, today is the requiem mass for my mother.”

So gracious were these two men, so fond of each other, that they sometimes had conversations speaking entirely in the other’s language.
“Sì, Pasquale.
Dispiace. Devo venire?”

“No. Thank you. I am go this alone.”

“Posso fare qualcosa?”

Yes. There was one thing he could do, Pasquale said. He looked up to see Tomasso the Communist puttering back into the cove. Almost time. Pasquale turned to Alvis and switched back to Italian to make sure he said it right. “If I do not come back tonight, I need you to do something for me.”

Of course, Alvis said.

“Can you take care of Dee Moray? Make sure she gets back safely to America?”

“Why? Are you going somewhere, Pasquale?”

Pasquale reached in his pocket and handed Alvis the money that Michael Deane had given him. “And give this to her.”

“Of course,” Alvis said, and again, “but where are you going?”

“Thank you,” Pasquale said, again choosing not to answer that question, afraid that if he said aloud what he intended, he might lose the strength to do it.

Tomasso’s boat was nearly at the pier. Pasquale patted his American friend on the arm, looked around the small village, and, without another word, went into the hotel. In the kitchen, Valeria was making breakfast. His aunt never made breakfast, even though Carlo had insisted for years that a hotel hoping to cater to French and Americans must offer breakfast. (
It’s a lazy man’s meal,
she always said.
What laggard expects to eat before doing any work?
) But this morning she was making a French brioche and brewing espresso.

“Is the American whore coming down to eat?” Valeria asked.

Here it was, the moment he figured out who he was to be. Pasquale took a breath and climbed the stairs to see if Dee Moray was hungry. He could tell by the light coming from beneath the door that her window shutters were open. He took a deep breath to steel himself, and tapped lightly on the door.

“Come in.”

She was sitting up in bed, pulling her long hair into a ponytail. “I can’t believe how long I slept,” she said. “You don’t realize how tired you are until you sleep for twelve hours.” She smiled at him, and in that moment, Pasquale doubted that he could ever bridge the gap between his intentions and his desires.

“You look handsome, Pasquale,” she said. And she looked down at her own clothes, the same outfit she’d worn to the train station: tight black pants, a blouse, and a wool sweater. She laughed. “I guess all of my things are still at the station in La Spezia.”

Pasquale looked down at his feet, trying not to meet her eyes.

“Is everything okay, Pasquale?”

“Yes,” he said, and he looked up, catching her eyes. When he wasn’t in the room with her, he had one sense of what was right, but the minute he saw those eyes . . . “You come down for breakfast now? Is a brioche. And
caffè
.”

“Yes,” she said. “I’ll be right down.”

He couldn’t say the rest. Pasquale nodded slightly and turned to leave.

“Thank you, Pasquale,” she said.

Hearing his name caused him to turn back again. Looking in her eyes was like standing by a door slightly ajar. How could you
not
push open the door, see what lay inside?

She smiled at him. “Do you remember my first night here, when we agreed that we could say anything to each other? That we wouldn’t hold back?”

“Yes,” Pasquale managed to say.

She laughed uneasily. “Well, it’s strange. I woke up this morning and I realized I had no idea what to do now. If I’m going to have this baby . . . If I’m going to keep acting . . . If I’m going to go to Switzerland . . . or back to the States. I honestly don’t have any idea. But when I woke up, I felt okay. Do you know why?”

Pasquale gripped the doorknob. He shook his head no.

“I was glad that I’d get to see you again.”

“Yes,” he said. “Me, too,” and that door seemed to open a little—and the glimpse he had beyond the door tortured him. He wanted to say more, to say everything on his mind—but he couldn’t. It wasn’t a question of language; he doubted the words existed at all, in any language.

“Well,” Dee said. “I’ll be right down.” And then, just as he was turning away, she added quietly—the words seeming just to tip from her beautiful lips, spilling like water: “Then maybe we can talk about what happens next.”

Next. Yes. Pasquale wasn’t sure how he managed to back out of the room, but he did. He pulled her door closed behind him and stood with his hand outstretched against it, breathing deeply. Finally, he pushed off the door, made it to the stairs, and eventually to his room. Pasquale grabbed his coat, his hat, and his packed bag off his bed. He came out of his room and down the stairs. At the bottom, Valeria was waiting for him.

“Pasqo,” she said. “Will you ask the priest to say a prayer for me?”

He said he would. Then he kissed his aunt on the cheek and went outside.

Alvis Bender was standing on the patio, smoking his pipe. Pasquale patted his American friend on the arm and started down the path to the pier, to where Tomasso the Communist was waiting for him. Tomasso dropped his cigarette and ground it into the rock. “You look good, Pasquale. Your mother would be proud.”

Pasquale climbed in the fish-gut-stained boat and sat in the bow, his knees together like a schoolboy at a desk. He was unable to stop his eyes from sweeping the front of the hotel, where Dee Moray had just stepped onto the porch and was standing next to Alvis Bender. She shielded the sun from her eyes and looked down on him curiously.

Again, Pasquale felt the separate pulls of his mind and body—and right then, he honestly didn’t know which way it would go. Would he stay in the boat? Or would he run up the path to the hotel and take her in his arms? And what would she do if he did? There was nothing explicit between them, nothing more than that slightly open door. And yet . . . what could be more alluring?

In that moment, Pasquale Tursi finally felt wrenched in two. His life was two lives now: the life he would have and the life he would forever wonder about.

“Please,” Pasquale rasped to Tomasso. “Go.”

The old fisherman tugged on the pull-start, but the motor didn’t catch. And Dee Moray called from the hotel patio. “Pasquale! Where are you going?”

“Please,” Pasquale whispered to Tomasso, his legs shaking now.

Finally, the motor caught. Tomasso sat down in back, took the tiller, and started puttering them away from the pier, out of the cove. On the patio, Dee Moray turned to Alvis Bender for an explanation. Alvis must have told her that Pasquale’s mother had died, because her hand went to her mouth.

And Pasquale forced himself to look away then. It was like prying a magnet off steel, but he did it: turned forward in the boat, closed his eyes, still seeing her standing there in his memory. He shook with the strain of not looking back until they rounded the breakwater into the open sea and Pasquale exhaled, his head falling to his chest.

“You are a strange young man,” Tomasso the Communist said.

In La Spezia, Pasquale thanked his old friend and watched Tomasso steer his little fishing boat away from the harbor, back toward the channel between Portovenere and Isola Palmaria.

Then he went to the little chapel near the cemetery, where the priest was waiting, his thin hair run with comb lines. Two old funeral-attending women and a feral-looking altar boy were on hand for the occasion, the chapel dark, moldy, and empty, candlelit. The requiem mass seemed to have nothing to do with his mother, and Pasquale was momentarily shocked when he heard her name in the priest’s Latin drone (
Antonia, requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine
)
.
Right, he thought, she’s gone, and in that realization he broke down. After the funeral, the priest agreed to say a prayer for Pasquale’s aunt, and to say the
trigesimo
in a few weeks, and Pasquale paid the man again. The priest raised his hand to bless him, but Pasquale had already turned to go.