Beautiful Ruins Read online

  Sometimes she makes a guess about Wild Friday Pitchers, and she does this now: mop-haired sideburns in factory-torn blue jeans and faux Western shirt? Michael’s old coke dealer’s son. And old silver-haired, blue-eyed charcoal suit? This one’s tougher. Some guy Michael met in 1965 while getting rimmed at an orgy at Tony Curtis’s house?

  The frantic younger guy sees her approaching. “Are you Claire Silver?”

  No, she thinks. “Yes,” she says.

  “I’m Shane Wheeler, and I am so sorry. There was traffic and I got lost and . . . Is there any chance we could still have our meeting?”

  She looks helplessly at the older guy, who removes his hat and extends the business card. “Pasquale Tursi,” he says. “I am look . . . for . . . Mr. Deane.”

  Great: two lost causes. A kid who can’t find his way around LA, and a time-traveling Italian. Both men stare at her, hold out Michael Deane business cards. She takes the cards. The young guy’s card is, predictably, newer. She turns it over. Below Michael’s signature is a note from the agent Andrew Dunne. She recently screwed Andrew, not in that she had sex with him—that would be forgivable—but she asked him to hold off circulating a sizzle reel for his client’s unscripted fashion show, If the Shoe Fits, while Michael considered it; instead, he optioned a competing show, Shoe Fetish, which effectively killed Andrew’s client’s idea. The agent’s note reads: “Hope you enjoy!” A payback pitch: Oh, this must be horrible.

  The other card is a mystery, the oldest Michael Deane business card she’s ever seen, faded and wrinkled, from Michael’s first studio, 20th Century Fox. It’s the job that catches her—publicity? Michael started in publicity? How old is this card?

  Honestly, after the day she’s had, if Daryl had texted anything other than kfc and unrated hookbook, she might just have told these two guys the game was up—they’d missed today’s charity wagon. But she thinks again about Fate and the deal she made. Who knows? Maybe one of these guys . . . right. She unlocks the door and asks their names again. Sloppy sideburns = Shane. Popping eyes = Pasquale.

  “Why don’t you both come on back to the conference room,” she says.

  In the office, they sit beneath posters for Michael’s classic movies (Mind Blow; The Love Burglar). No time for pleasantries; it’s the first pitch meeting in history in which no water is proffered. “Mr. Tursi, would you like to go first?”

  He looks around, confused. “Mr. Deane . . . is not here?” His accent is heavy, as if he’s chewing on each word.

  “I’m afraid he’s not here today. Are you an old friend of his?”

  “I meet him . . .” He stares at the ceiling. “Eh, nel sessantadue.”

  “Nineteen sixty-two,” says the young guy. When Claire looks curiously at him, Shane shrugs. “I spent a year studying in Italy.”

  Claire imagines Michael and this old guy, back in the day, tooling around Rome in a convertible, screwing Italian actresses, drinking grappa. Now Pasquale Tursi looks disoriented. “He say . . . you . . . ever need anything.”

  “Sure,” Claire says. “I promise I’ll tell Michael all about your pitch. Why don’t you just start at the beginning?”

  Pasquale squints as if he doesn’t understand. “My English . . . is long time . . .”

  “The beginning,” Shane tells Pasquale. “L’inizio.”

  “There’s this guy . . .” Claire urges.

  “A woman,” Pasquale Tursi says. “She come to my village, Porto Vergogna . . . in . . .” He looks over at Shane for help.

  “Nineteen sixty-two?” Shane says again.

  “Yes. She is . . . beautiful. And I am build . . . eh . . . a beach, yes? And tennis?” He rubs his brow, the story already getting away from him. “She is . . . in the cinema?”

  “An actress?” Shane Wheeler asks.

  “Yes.” Pasquale Tursi nods and stares off into space.

  Claire checks her watch and does her best to jumpstart his pitch: “So . . . an actress comes to this town and she falls for this guy who’s building a beach?”

  Pasquale looks back at Claire. “No. For me . . . maybe, yes. E— l’attimo, yes?” He looks at Shane for help. “L’attimo che dura per sempre.”

  “The moment that lasts forever,” Shane says quietly.

  “Yes,” Pasquale says, and nods. “Forever.”

  Claire feels pinched by those words in such close proximity, moment and forever. Not exactly KFC and Hookbook. She suddenly feels angry—at her silly ambition and romanticism, at her taste in men, at the loopy Scientologists, at her father for watching that stupid movie and then leaving, at herself for coming back to the office—at herself because she keeps hoping for better. And Michael: Goddamn Michael and his goddamn job and his goddamn business cards and his goddamn old buzzard friends and the goddamn favors he owes the goddamn people he screwed back when he screwed everything that screwed.

  Pasquale Tursi sighs. “She was sick.”

  Claire flushes with impatience: “With what? Lupus? Psoriasis? Cancer?”

  At the word cancer, Pasquale looks up suddenly and mutters in Italian, “Sì. Ma non è così semplice—”

  And that’s when the kid Shane interrupts. “Uh, Ms. Silver? I don’t think this guy’s pitching.” And he says to the man, in slow Italian, “Questo è realmente accaduto? Non in un film?”

  Pasquale nods. “Sì. Sono qui per trovarla.”

  “Yeah, this really happened,” Shane tells Claire. He turns back to Pasquale. “Non l’ha più vista da allora?” Pasquale shakes his head no, and Shane turns back to Claire again. “He hasn’t seen this actress in almost fifty years. He came to find her.”

  “Come si chiama?” Shane Wheeler asks.

  The Italian looks from Claire to Shane and back again. “Dee Moray,” he says.

  And Claire feels a tug in her chest, some deeper shift, a cracking of her hard-earned cynicism, of this anxious tension she’s been fighting. The actress’s name means nothing to her, but the old guy seems utterly changed by saying it aloud, as if he hasn’t said the name in years. Something about the name affects her, too—a crush of romantic recognition, those words, moment and forever—as if she can feel fifty years of longing in that one name, fifty years of an ache that lies dormant in her, too, maybe lies dormant in everyone until it’s cracked open like this—and so weighted is this moment she has to look to the ground or else feel the tears burn her own eyes, and at that moment Claire glances at Shane, and sees that he must feel it, too, the name hanging in the air for just a moment . . . among the three of them . . . and then floating to the floor like a falling leaf, the Italian watching it settle, Claire guessing, hoping, praying the old Italian will say the name once again, more quietly this time—to underline its importance, the way it’s so often done in scripts—but he doesn’t do this. He just stares at the floor, where the name has fallen, and it occurs to Claire Silver that she’s seen too goddamn many movies.

  3

  The Hotel Adequate View

  April 1962

  Porto Vergogna, Italy

  All day he waited for her to come downstairs, but she spent that first afternoon and evening alone in her room on the third floor. And so Pasquale went about his business, which seemed not like business at all but the random behavior of a lunatic. Still, he didn’t know what else to do, so he threw rocks at the breakwater in the cove and he chipped away at his tennis court and he glanced up occasionally at the whitewashed shutters over the windows in her room. In the late afternoon, when the feral cats were sunning themselves on the rocks, a cool spring wind chopped the surface of the sea and Pasquale retreated to the piazza to smoke alone, before the fishermen came to drink. At the Adequate View, there was no noise from upstairs, no sign at all that the beautiful American was even up there, and Pasquale worried again that he had imagined the whole thing—Orenzio’s boat lurching into the cove, the tall, slender American walking up the narrow staircase to the best room in the hotel, on the third floor, pushing open the window shutters, breathing in the
salty air, pronouncing it “Lovely,” Pasquale saying she should let him know if there was anything “upon you are happy to having,” and her saying, “Thank you,” and pushing the door closed, leaving him to descend the tight, dark staircase alone.

  Pasquale was horrified to find that, for dinner, his aunt Valeria was making her signature ciuppin, a soup of rockfish, tomatoes, white wine, and olive oil. “You expect me to take your rotten fish-head stew to an American cinema star?”

  “She can leave if she doesn’t like it,” Valeria said. So, at dusk, with the fishermen pulling their boats up into the cove below, Pasquale clicked up the narrow staircase built into the rock wall. He knocked lightly on the third-floor door.

  “Yes?” the American called through the door. He heard the bedsprings creak.

  Pasquale cleared his throat. “I am sorry for you disturb. You eat antipasti and a soap, yes?”

  “Soap?”

  Pasquale felt angry that he hadn’t talked his aunt out of making the ciuppin. “Yes. Is a soap. With fish and vino. A fish soap?”

  “Oh, soup. No. No, thank you. I don’t think I can eat anything just yet,” she said, her voice muffled through the door. “I don’t feel well enough.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I see.”

  He descended the stairs, saying the word soup over and over in his mind. He ate the American’s dinner in his own room on the second floor. The ciuppin was pretty good. He still got his father’s newspapers by mail-boat once a week, and although he didn’t study them the way his father had, Pasquale flipped through them, looking for news about the American production of Cleopatra. But he found nothing.

  Later, he heard clumping around in the trattoria and came out, but he knew it wouldn’t be Dee Moray; she did not appear to be a clumper. Instead, both tables were full of local fishermen hoping to get a look at the glorious American, their hats on the tables, dirty hair plastered and combed tight to their skulls. Valeria was serving them soup, but the fishermen were really just waiting to talk to Pasquale, since they’d been out in their boats when the American arrived.

  “I hear she is two and a half meters tall,” said Lugo the Promiscuous War Hero, famous for the dubious claim that he had killed at least one soldier from every major participant in the European theater of World War II. “She is a giant.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” Pasquale said as he filled their glasses with wine.

  “What is the shape of her breasts?” asked Lugo seriously. “Are they round giants or alert peaks?”

  “Let me tell you about American women,” said Tomasso the Elder, whose cousin had married an American, making him an expert on American women, along with everything else. “American women cook only one meal a week, but before they marry they perform fellatio. So, as with all life, there is good and there is bad.”

  “You should eat from a trough like pigs!” Valeria spat from the kitchen.

  “Marry me, Valeria!” Tomasso the Elder called back. “I am too old for sex and my hearing will soon be gone. We are made for each other.”

  The fisherman that Pasquale liked best, thoughtful Tomasso the Communist, was chewing on his pipe. He removed it now to weigh in on the subject. He considered himself something of a film buff and was a fan of Italian neorealism and therefore dismissive of American movies, which he blamed for sparking the dreadful commedia all’italiana movement, the antic farces that had replaced the serious existential cinema of the late 1950s. “Listen, Lugo,” he said, “if she is an American actress, it means she wears a corset in cowboy films and has talent only for screaming.”

  “Fine. Let’s see those big breasts fill with air when she screams,” Lugo said.

  “Maybe she will lie naked on Pasquale’s beach tomorrow,” said Tomasso the Elder, “and we can see for ourselves her giant breasts.”

  For three hundred years, the fishermen in town had come from a small pool of young men who’d grown up here, fathers handing over their skiffs and eventually their houses to favored sons, usually the eldest, who married the daughters of other fishermen up and down the coast, sometimes bringing them back to Porto Vergogna. Children moved away, but the villaggio always maintained a kind of equilibrium and the twenty or so houses stayed full. But after the war, when fishing, like everything else, had become an industry, the family fishermen couldn’t compete with the big seiners motoring out of Genoa every week. The restaurants would still buy from a few old fishermen, because tourists liked to see the old men bring in their catches, but this was like working in an amusement park: it wasn’t real fishing, and there was no future in it. An entire generation of Porto Vergogna boys had to leave to find work, to La Spezia and Genoa and even farther for jobs in factories and canneries and in the trades. No longer did the favored son want the fishing boat; already six of the houses were empty, boarded, or brought down; more were sure to follow. In February, Tomasso the Communist’s last daughter, the unfortunately cross-eyed Illena, had married a young teacher and moved away to La Spezia, Tomasso sulking for days afterward. And on one of those cool spring mornings, as Pasquale watched the old fishermen scuff and grumble to their boats, it dawned on him: he was the only person under forty left in the whole town.

  Pasquale left the fishermen in the trattoria to go see his mother, who was in one of her dark periods and had refused to leave her bed for two weeks. When he opened the door, he could see her staring at the ceiling, her wiry gray hair stuck to the pillow behind her, arms crossed over her chest, mouth in the placid death face that she liked to rehearse. “You should get up, Mamma. Come out and eat with us.”

  “Not today, Pasqo,” she rasped. “Today I hope to die.” She took a deep breath and opened one eye. “Valeria tells me there is an American in the hotel.”

  “Yes, Mamma.” He checked her bedsores but his aunt had already powdered them.

  “A woman?”

  “Yes, Mamma.”

  “Then your father’s Americans have finally arrived.” She glanced over at the dark window. “He said they would come and here they are. You should marry this woman and go to America to make a proper tennis field.”

  “No, Mamma. You know I wouldn’t—”

  “Leave before this place kills you like it killed your father.”

  “I would never leave you.”

  “Don’t worry about me. I will die soon enough and go to be with your father and with your poor brothers.”

  “You’re not dying,” Pasquale said.

  “I am already dead inside,” she said. “You should push me out into the sea and drown me like that old sick cat of yours.”

  Pasquale straightened. “You said my cat ran away. While I was at university.”

  She shot him a glance from the corner of her eye. “It is a saying.”

  “No. It’s not a saying. There is no saying such as that. Did you and Papa drown my cat while I was in Florence?”

  “I’m sick, Pasqo! Why do you torment me?”

  Pasquale went back to his room. That night he heard footsteps on the third floor as the American went to the bathroom, but the next morning she still hadn’t emerged from her room, so he went about his work on the beach. When he returned to the hotel for lunch, his Aunt Valeria said that Dee Moray had come down for an espresso, a piece of torta, and an orange.

  “What did she say?” Pasquale asked.

  “How would I know? That awful language. Like someone choking on a bone.”

  Pasquale crept up the stairs and listened at her door, but Dee Moray was quiet.

  He went back outside and down to his beach, but it was hard to tell if the currents had taken any more sand away. He climbed up past the hotel onto the boulders where he’d staked out his tennis court. The sun was high over the coast and hidden by wispy clouds, which flattened the sky and made him feel as if he were under glass. He looked down at the stakes that marked his future tennis court and felt ashamed. Even if he could build forms high enough to contain the concrete to level his court—six feet high at the edges of the boulders�
�and managed to cantilever some of the court so that it hung out over the cliff, he would still have to blast away at the cliff side with dynamite to flatten the northeast corner. He wondered if it was possible to have a smaller tennis court. Maybe with smaller rackets?

  He had just lit a cigarette to think about it when he saw Orenzio’s mahogany boat round the point up the coast near Vernazza. He watched it angle away from the chop along the shoreline, and he held his breath as it passed Riomaggiore. As it got closer he could see there were two people besides Orenzio in the boat. Were these more Americans coming to his hotel? It was almost too much to hope for. Of course, the boat was likely going past him, to lovely Portovenere, or around the point into La Spezia. But then the boat slowed and curled into his narrow cove.

  Pasquale began climbing down from his tennis court, hopping from boulder to boulder. Finally, he walked along the narrow trail down to the shoreline, slowing up when he saw that it wasn’t tourists in the boat with Orenzio, but two men: Gualfredo the bastard hotelier, and a huge man Pasquale had never seen before. Orenzio tied the boat up and Gualfredo and the big man climbed out.

  Gualfredo was all jowls, bald, with a huge brush mustache. The other man, the giant, appeared to be carved from granite. In the boat, Orenzio looked down, as if he couldn’t bear to meet Pasquale’s eyes.

  As Pasquale approached, Gualfredo put his hands out. “So it’s true. Carlo Tursi’s son returns a man to tend the whore’s crack.”

  Pasquale nodded grimly and formally. “Good day, Signor Gualfredo.” He’d never seen the bastard Gualfredo in Porto Vergogna before, but the man’s story was well known on the coast: his mother had carried on a long affair with a wealthy Milan banker, and to buy her silence the man had given her petty-criminal son interest in hotels in Portovenere, Chiavari, and Monterosso al Mare.