Beautiful Ruins Read online

  “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

  Before 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 t
he 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.