Beautiful Ruins Read online

  Or wait . . . is that the pill he took an hour ago? Ah yes, there it is, kicking in right on schedule: beneath the script, decrepit nerve terminals and endothelial cells release nitric oxide into the corpus cavernosum, which stimulates the synthesis of cyclic GMP, stiffening the well-used smooth muscle cells and flooding the old spongy tissue with blood.

  The script rises in his lap like the flag at Iwo Jima.

  “Hello there.” Michael sets the script on the garden table next to his Fresca, pushes himself up, and starts toward the house for Kathy.

  His silk pajama pants straining, Michael shuffles past the gravity pool, the life-size chess board, the koi pond, Kathy’s exercise ball and yoga mat, the wrought-iron outdoor Tuscan brunch table. He spots Wife No. 4 through the open kitchen door, in yoga pants and tight T-shirt. He gets the full protuberant effect of his recent investment in her, the top-of-the-line viscous silicone gel sacs implanted in her retromammary cavities, for minimal capsular contracture and scarring, between breast tissue and pectoralis muscle, replacing the old, slightly drooping silicone sacs.

  It’s hot.

  Kathy’s always telling him not to shuffle—It makes you look a hundred—and Michael reminds himself to pick up his feet. She’s just turned her back to him when he steps through the open slider into the kitchen. “Excuse me, miss,” he says to his wife, positioning himself so she can see his pajama tent-pole. “You order the wood pizza?”

  But she has those infernal earbuds in and hasn’t seen or heard him—or maybe she’s just pretending she hasn’t. When things were at their worst the last two years, Michael sensed a whiff of condescension from her, a nurse’s on-duty patience in her tone. Kathy has reached the magical “half his age” mark—thirty-six to his seventy-two—Michael making a late career of thirtysomething women. It’s scandalous when a man his age dips into the twenties, but no one flinches when the woman is in her thirties; here, you could be a hundred, date a thirty-year-old, and still seem respectable. Unfortunately, Kathy is also five inches taller than him, and this is the truly unbridgeable gap; he sometimes gets an unpleasant picture in his mind of their lovemaking, of him scurrying across her hilly landscape like a randy elf.

  He comes around the counter and positions himself so she can see the disturbance in his pajama pants. She looks up, then down, then up again. She removes her earbuds. “Hi, honey. What’s up?”

  Before he can say the obvious, Michael’s cell phone vibrates, jumping on the counter between them. Kathy slides the buzzing phone to him, and if not for the chemical help, her lack of interest might endanger Michael’s condition.

  He checks the number on the phone. Claire? At four forty-five on a Wild Pitch Friday—what could this be? His assistant is whip-smart—and he has the superstitious belief that she might have that rare quality: luck—but she makes life so tough on herself. The girl anguishes over everything, is constantly measuring herself, her expectations, her progress, her sense of worth. It’s exhausting. Michael has even become suspicious that she’s looking for another job—he has a sixth sense for such things—and this is probably the reason he holds up a finger to Kathy and takes the call.

  “What is it, Claire?”

  She rambles, chatters, titters. My God, he thinks, this girl, with her unshakable upper-middlebrow taste, her world-weary, faux cynicism. He always warns her about cynicism; it is as thin as an eighty-dollar suit. She’s a great reader, but she lacks the cool clarity required for producing. I don’t love it, she’ll say about an idea, as if love had anything to do with it. Michael’s producing partner, Danny, calls Claire the Canary—as in coal mine—and half-jokingly suggests they use her as a reverse barometer: “If the Canary likes it, we pass.” For instance, even though she admitted Hookbook was a big idea, she begged him not to produce it. (Claire: After all the films you’ve produced, is this really the kind of thing you want to be known for making? Michael: Money is the kind of thing I want to be known for making.)

  On the phone, Claire is at her mumbling, apologetic worst, droning on about Wild Pitch Friday, about some old Italian guy and a writer who happens to speak his language, and Michael starts to interrupt, “Claire—” but the girl won’t even pause for breath. “Claire—” he says again, but his assistant won’t let him in.

  “The Italian guy is looking for an old actress, somebody named”—and Claire utters a name that momentarily takes away his breath—“Dee Moray?”

  Michael Deane’s legs go out from under him. The phone drops from his right hand onto the counter as the fingers on his left hand skitter for purchase; only Kathy’s quick reflexes keep him from falling all the way to the floor, from possibly hitting his head on the counter and impaling himself on his erection.

  “Michael! Are you okay?” Kathy asks. “Is it another stroke?”

  Dee Moray.

  So this is what ghosts are like, Michael thinks. Not white corporeal figures haunting your dreams, but old names buzzed over cell phones.

  He waves his wife off and grabs the phone from the counter. “It’s not a stroke, Kathy, let me go.” He concentrates on breathing. A man so rarely gets the full sweep of his life. But here is Michael Deane, chemically enhanced erection straining his silk pajamas in the open kitchen of his Hollywood Hills home, holding on to a tiny wireless telephone and speaking across fifty years: “Don’t move. I’ll be right there.”

  The first impression one gets of Michael Deane is of a man constructed of wax, or perhaps prematurely embalmed. After all these years, it may be impossible to trace the sequence of facials, spa treatments, mud baths, cosmetic procedures, lifts and staples, collagen implants, outpatient touch-ups, tannings, Botox injections, cyst and growth removals, and stem-cell injections that have caused a seventy-two-year-old man to have the face of a nine-year-old Filipino girl.

  Suffice it to say that, upon meeting Michael for the first time, many people stare open-mouthed, unable to look away from his glistening, vaguely lifelike face. Sometimes they cock their heads to get a better angle, and Michael mistakes their morbid fascination for attraction, or respect, or surprise that someone his age could look this good, and it is this basic misunderstanding that causes him to be even more aggressive about fighting the aging process. It’s not just that he gets younger-looking each year, that’s common enough here; it’s as if he is somehow transforming himself, evolving into a different being altogether, and this transformation defies any attempts to explain it. Trying to picture what Michael Deane looked like as a young man in Italy fifty years ago, based on his appearance now, is like standing on Wall Street trying to understand the topography of Manhattan Island before the Dutch arrived.

  As this strange man shuffles toward him, Shane Wheeler can’t quite get his mind around the idea that this lacquered elf is the famous Michael Deane. “Is that—”

  “Yes,” Claire simply says. “Try not to stare.”

  But this is like ordering someone to stay dry in a rainstorm. Especially when he shuffle-walks, the contradiction is just too much, as if a boy’s face has been grafted onto the body of a dying man. He’s dressed strangely, too, in silk pajama pants and a long wool coat that covers most of his torso. If Shane didn’t know this was one of the most famous producers in Hollywood, he might go with escaped mental patient.

  “Thanks for calling, Claire,” Michael Deane says once he’s reached them. He points to the door of the bungalow. “The Italian’s in there?”

  “Yeah,” she says, “we told him we’d be right back.” Claire has never heard Michael so shaken; she tries to imagine what could have happened between these two to upset Michael this way, to have him call from the car and ask Claire and “the translator” to meet him outside, so he could take a minute before seeing Pasquale.

  “After all these years,” Michael says. He usually speaks in a clipped hurry, like a forties gangster rushing his lines. But now his voice seems strained, uneasy—although his face remains remarkably neutral, placid.

  Claire steps forward, takes Michael
’s arm.

  “Are you okay, Michael?”

  “I’m fine.” And only then does he look at Shane. “You must be the translator.”

  “Oh. Well, I studied for a year in Florence, so I do speak a little Italian. But actually I’m a writer. I’m here to pitch a film idea—Shane Wheeler?” There is no recognition on Michael Deane’s face that the man is even speaking English. “Anyway, it’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Deane. I loved your book.”

  Michael Deane bristles at the mention of his autobiography, which his editor and ghostwriter turned into a how-to-pitch-in-Hollywood primer. He spins back to Claire. “What did the Italian say . . . exactly?”

  “Like I told you on the phone,” Claire says. “Not much.”

  Michael Deane looks at Shane again, as if there might be something in the translation that Claire has missed.

  “Uh, well,” Shane says, glancing at Claire, “he just said that he met you in 1962. And then he told us about this actress who came to his town, Dee—”

  Michael holds up his hand to keep Shane from saying the whole name. And he looks back to Claire to pick up, as if, in this verbal relay, he might find some answers.

  “At first,” Claire says, “I thought he was pitching a story about this actress in Italy. He said she was sick. And I asked with what.”

  “Cancer,” Michael Deane says.

  “Yeah, that’s what he said.”

  Michael Deane nods. “Does he want money?”

  “He didn’t say anything about money. He said he wanted to find this actress.”

  Michael runs a hand through his postnaturally plugged and woven sandy hair. He nods toward the bungalow. “And he’s in there now?”

  “Yes, I told him I was going to come get you. Michael, what’s this about?”

  “About? This is about everything.” He looks Claire over, all the way down to her heels. “Do you know what my real talent is, Claire?”

  Claire can’t imagine a satisfying answer to a question like that, and thankfully Michael doesn’t wait for an answer.

  “I see what people want. I have a kind of X-ray vision for desire. Ask some guy what he wants to watch on TV and he’ll say news. Opera. Foreign films. But put a box in his house and what’s he watch? Blow jobs and car crashes. Does that mean the country is full of lying degenerates? No. They want to want news and opera. But it’s not what they want.

  “What I do is look at someone”—he narrows his eyes at Claire’s clothing again—“and I see straight to her desire, to what she truly wants. A director won’t take a job and insists it isn’t about the money, I go get him more money. An actor says he wants to work in the States to be near his family, I get him a job overseas so he can get away from his family. That ability has served me for almost fifty years—”

  He doesn’t finish. He takes a deep breath in through his nose and smiles at Shane, as if just remembering he was there. “Those stories of people trading their souls . . . you don’t really understand them until you get a little older.”

  Claire is stunned. Michael never reflects like this, never describes himself as “old” or “older.” If there is one remarkable thing about Michael, Claire would have said an hour ago, it is that for someone with such a rich history, he never looks back, never mentions the starlets he’s had or the movies he’s made, never questions himself, never bemoans the changing culture, the death of movies, the sorts of things she and everyone else here whine about constantly. He loves what the culture loves, its sheer speed, its callous promiscuity, its defections and deflections, its level-seeking ability to always go shallower; to him, the culture can do no wrong. Don’t ever give in to cynicism, he is always telling her, believe in everything. He is a shark ceaselessly swimming forward into the culture, into the future. And yet here he is now, staring off, as if he’s looking directly into the past, a man stricken by something that happened fifty years ago. He takes another deep breath and nods at the bungalow.

  “Okay,” he says. “I’m ready. Let’s go.”

  Pasquale Tursi narrows his eyes and stares at Michael Deane. Can this possibly be the same man? They are sitting in Michael’s office, Michael sliding easily behind his desk, Pasquale and Shane on the couch, Claire in a chair she’s dragged in. Michael has kept his heavy coat on, and his face is placid, but he squirms a bit, uncomfortable in his chair.

  “Good to see you again, my friend,” Michael tells Pasquale, but it comes across as oddly insincere. “It has been a long time.”

  Pasquale simply nods. Then he turns to Shane and asks quietly: “Sta male?”

  “No,” Shane says, and tries to think of how to tell Pasquale that Michael Deane is not sick but has had numerous procedures and surgeries. “Molto . . . uh . . . ambulatori.”

  “What did you tell him?” Michael asks.

  “He, uh . . . he said you look good and I just said you take care of yourself.”

  Michael thanks him, and then asks Shane, “Will you ask if he wants money?”

  Pasquale jerks at the word money. He looks mildly disgusted. “No. I come . . . to find . . . Dee Moray.”

  Michael Deane nods, a bit pained. “I have no idea where she is,” Michael says. “I’m sorry.” Then he looks at Claire, as if for help.

  “I Googled her,” Claire says. “I tried different spellings, looked at the IMDb listing for Cleopatra. There’s nothing.”

  “No,” Michael says, chewing his lip. “There wouldn’t be. It wasn’t her real name.” He rubs his lineless face again, considers Pasquale, and turns to Shane. “Please, translate for me. Tell him that I am sorry for the way I behaved back then.”

  “Lui è dispiaciuto,” Shane says.

  Pasquale nods slightly, acknowledging the words if not accepting them. Whatever is between these two men, Shane thinks, it runs deep. Then there is a buzzing and Claire brings her cell phone to her ear. She answers it, and says calmly into the device: “You’re gonna have to go get your own chicken.”

  All three men stare at her. She clicks off the call. “Sorry,” she says, then opens her mouth to explain but thinks better of it.

  Michael looks back to Pasquale and Shane again. “Tell him I’ll find her. That it’s the least I can do.”

  “Egli vi aiuterà a . . . um . . . trovarla.”

  Pasquale simply nods again.

  “Tell him that I plan to do this right away, that I consider it an honor to be able to help, and a chance for redemption, to complete the circle of this thing that I started so many years ago. And please tell him that I never had any intention of hurting anyone.”

  Shane rubs his brow, looks from Michael to Claire. “I’m not sure how to . . . I mean . . . Um . . . Lui vuole fare il bene.”

  “That’s it?” Claire says. “He said fifty words. You said, like, four.”

  Shane feels stung by the criticism. “I told you, I’m not a translator. I don’t know how to say all of that; I just said, He wants to do good now.”

  “No, that’s right,” Michael says. He looks with admiration at Shane, and for a moment, Shane imagines parlaying this translation job into a screenwriting deal. “That’s exactly what I want to do,” Michael says. “I want to do good. Yes.” Then Michael turns to Claire. “This is our number one priority now, Claire.”

  Shane watches all of this with fascination and disbelief. This morning he was sitting in his parents’ basement; now he’s in Michael Deane’s office (the Michael Deane’s office!) while the legendary producer barks orders to his development assistant. In the words of the prophet Mamet, Act as if . . . Go with it. Be confident and the world responds to your confidence, rewards your faith.

  Michael Deane pulls an old Rolodex from a desk drawer and begins spinning it while he talks to Claire. “I’m going to get Emmett Byers to work on this right away. Can you get Mr. Tursi and the translator settled in a hotel?”

  “Look,” Shane Wheeler says, surprising even himself, “I told you. I’m not a translator. I’m a writer.”

  They all turn
to look at him, and for a moment Shane questions his resolve, recalls the dark period he’s just come through. Before that, Shane Wheeler always knew he was headed for great things. Everyone told him so—not just his parents, but strangers, too—and while he didn’t exactly tear it up in college and Europe and grad school (all on his parents’ dime, as Saundra liked to point out), he never doubted he’d be a success.

  But during the collapse of his brief marriage, Saundra (and the crabby marriage counselor who clearly took her side) described a very different pattern: a boy whose parents never said no, who never required him to do chores or to get a job, who stepped in whenever he got into trouble (Exhibit A: the spring-break thing with the police in Mexico), who supported him financially long after they should have. Here he was, almost thirty, and he’d never had a real job. Here he was, seven years out of college, two years out of his master’s program, married—and his mother still sent him a monthly clothing allowance? (She likes buying my clothes, Shane argued. Isn’t it cruel to make her stop?)

  In that doomed final month of the marriage—in what felt like a live autopsy of his manhood—Saundra tried to make him feel “better” by insisting it wasn’t entirely his fault; he was part of a ruined generation of young men coddled by their parents—by their mothers especially—raised on unearned self-esteem, in a bubble of overaffection, in a sad incubator of phony achievement.

  Men like you never had to fight, so you have no fight in you, she said. Men like you grow up flaccid and weak, she said. Men like you are milk-fed veal.

  And what milk-fed Shane did next only proved her point: after a particularly heated argument, when Saundra went to work, he moved out, taking the car they’d bought together and heading for Costa Rica and a job on a coffee plantation he’d heard about from some friends. But the car died in Mexico, and—broke and carless—Shane made his way back to Portland and moved back in with his parents.

  Since then, he’s come to regret his behavior and has apologized to Saundra, even sending her the irregular check for her part of the car (birthday money from his grandparents, mostly), and promising that soon he’d pay her back completely.