Текст книги "Beautiful Ruins"

Автор книги: Jess Walter

Соавторы: Jess Walter
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Текущая страница: 22 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

20

The Infinite Blaze

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Sandpoint, Idaho

Debra wakes in the dark, on the back deck of her cabin, on the tree side, where she likes to watch the stars. The air is cool, sky clear, pinpricks of light fierce tonight. Insistent. They don’t twinkle, they burn. The front deck of the cabin overlooks the mountain-rimmed glacial lake, and this is the view that causes most visitors to gasp. But she doesn’t like the front deck as much at night, when light from the docks, the boats, and the other cabins compete for attention. She prefers it back here, in the shade of the house, in a tight, round clearing of pine and fir trees, where it’s just her and the sky, where she can see for fifty trillion miles, for a billion years. She’d never really been a sky-watcher until she married Alvis, who liked to drive into the Cascades and look for clear spots away from the light pollution. He considered it a shame when people couldn’t grasp the infinite—a failure not just of imagination but of simple vision.

She hears the crunch of gravel; that must have been what woke her—Pat’s Jeep coming down the long driveway. They’re home from the play. How long was she asleep? She reaches out for her cold teacup. A while. She feels toasty-warm, except for one of her feet, which has slipped out of the blanket. Pat has rigged up two fireplace-shaped space heaters on either side of her favorite chaise, so that she can sleep out here. She balked at first at the waste of electricity; she could just wait until summer. But Pat promised to turn off every light every time he left a room “for the rest of my life,” if she would only indulge him this one thing. And she has to admit, it is lovely sleeping out here; it’s her favorite thing, waking outside in the cold, nestled in the little incubator her son built for her. She turns off the heaters, checks the horrible pad she sleeps on now—it’s dry, thank God—pulls her big cardigan around herself, and starts for the house, a little wobbly still. Inside, she hears the garage door close below.

The cabin sits on a jutting point, two hundred feet above a bay on this deep mountain lake. The house is mostly vertical, designed by her and built with the money she got from selling their home in Seattle: four stories, with an open floor plan and a two-car garage below. Pat and Lydia have the second floor to themselves, the third is common living space—an open living room/kitchen/dining area—and the top floor belongs to Dee: bedroom, bathroom with Jacuzzi tub, and her sitting room. When she was having it built, of course, she had no idea she would spend virtually her entire time here as a cancer patient, and then—after the treatments had all been exhausted and she decided to let the disease run its course—in this weakened end-time. If she had, she might have gone with a rancher, with fewer stairs.

“Mom? We’re home!”

He yells up the stairs every time he comes in the house and she pretends she doesn’t know why. “Still alive,” she’s tempted to say, but it would sound harsh. She doesn’t feel bitter that way, but it’s funny to her, the way people treat the dying—like aliens.

She starts down the staircase. “How’d it go tonight? Good crowd?”

“Small but happy,” Lydia calls up the stairs. “The ending worked better tonight.”

“Are you hungry?” Debra asks. Pat is always hungry after a performance, and he’s been especially famished while doing this play. As soon as Lydia finished writing it, she showed it to Debra, who was torn. It was the best thing Lydia had ever written, a perfect capstone to the cycle of autobiographical pieces Lydia started years earlier with a play about her parents’ divorce. And Debra fully believed that she couldn’t finish the cycle without writing about Pat. The real problem with Front Man was that there was only one person she could imagine playing Pat—and that was Pat. She and Lydia both worried that he might backslide if he had to relive those days—but Debra told Lydia she should let him read it. He took the pages downstairs and came back up three hours later, kissed Lydia, and insisted they do it—and that he play himself. It would be harder, he thought, to watch someone else play him at the peak of his self-absorption than it would to play it all out again himself. He’s been acting with the TAGNI group for more than a year now; it gives him a healthy outlet for performing—not in the narcissistic way he used to with his bands, but in a tighter, disciplined, collaborative spirit. And he’s a natural, of course.

Debra is beating eggs when Pat swings around the kitchen pillar and kisses her cheek. Kid still fills a room. “Ted and Isola said to say hi.”

“Yeah?” She pours the eggs in the pan. “And how are they?”

“Crazy right-wing nut jobs.”

She slices cheese for his omelet, Pat eating every other piece. “I hope you told them that,” she says, “because I’m getting awfully tired of them constantly writing checks to support the theater.”

“They want us to do Thoroughly Modern Millie. Ted wants to be in it. Said I’d be great in it, too. Can you imagine? Me and Ted in a play together.”

“Yeah, I’m not sure you have the chops to act with Ted.”

“That’s because I had such a bad teacher,” he says. Then: “How are you feeling?”

“I’m good,” she says.

“Did you take a Dilaudid?”

“No.” She hates pain medication, doesn’t want to miss a thing. “I feel fine.”

Pat puts his hand on her forehead. “You’re warm.”

“I’m fine. You just came from outside.”

“So did you.”

“I was in that oven you built me. I’m probably cooked.”

He reaches for the cutting board. “Let me finish. I can make an omelet.”

“Since when?”

“I’ll have Lydia do it. She’s good at that woman’s work.”

Debra stops cutting onions and slashes in his direction with the knife.

“Unkindest cut of all,” he says.

It’s like a little gift, the way he surprises her sometimes with the things he remembers. “I used to teach that play,” she says. Without thinking, she quotes her own favorite line: “Cowards die many times before their deaths. The valiant never taste of death but once.”

Pat sits at the counter. “That hurts more than the knife.”

Lydia comes up the stairs then, towel-drying her hair after her shower. She tells Debra all over again that Ted and Isola were at the play, and that they asked after her.

Debra knows by heart the inflection of their concern, How IS she?

Still alive. Oh, the things she would say if she could—but it’s a minefield of courtesies and manners, this dying business. She’s constantly being offered homeopathic remedies by the funky people up here: magnets and herbs and horse liniments. Some people give her books—self-help books, tomes on grieving, pamphlets on dying. I’m beyond help, self– or otherwise, she wants to say, and Aren’t the grieving books more for the survivors? and Thanks for the book on dying, but that’s the one part I have covered. They’ll ask Pat, How IS she? and they’ll ask her, How ARE you? But they don’t want to hear that she’s tired all the time, that her bladder is leaky, that she’s on the watch for her systems shutting down. They want to hear that she’s at peace, that she’s led a great life, that she’s happy her son has returned—and so that’s what she gives them. And the truth is, most of the time, she IS at peace, HAS led a great life, IS happy her son has returned. She knows which drawer the phone number for hospice is in; and the company with the hospital bed; and the provider of the morphine drip dispenser. Some days she wakes slowly from her nap and thinks it would be okay to just go on sleeping—that it would not be scary at all. Pat and Lydia are as solid as she could hope, and the board has agreed to let Lydia take over the theater. The cabin is paid for, with enough left in the bank for taxes and other expenses, so Pat can spend the rest of his life puttering around outside in the early mornings, which he loves—gardening, painting and staining, pruning trees, working on the driveway and the retaining walls, anything to keep his hands moving. Sometimes, now, when she sees how content Pat and Lydia are, she feels like a spent salmon: her work here is done. But other times, honestly, the whole idea of being at peace just pisses her off. At peace? Who but the insane would ever be at peace? What person who has enjoyed life could possibly think one is enough? Who could live even a day and not feel the sweet ache of regret?

Sometimes, during her various rounds of chemo, she had wanted the pain and discomfort to be over so badly that she could imagine being comforted by her own death. That was one of the reasons she’d decided—after all of the chemicals and radiations and surgeries, after the double mastectomy, after the doctors tried every measure of conventional and nuclear weaponry against her diminishing frame, and after they still found traces of cancer in her pelvic bones—to just let the thing run its course. Let it have her. The doctors said there might still be something to be done, depending on whether it was a primary or secondary cancer, but she told them it didn’t matter anymore. Pat had come home, and she preferred six months of peace to another three years of needles and nausea. And she’s gotten lucky: she’s made it almost two years, and has felt good throughout most of it, although it still stuns her to catch a glimpse in the mirror: Who is this relic, this tall, thin, flat-chested old woman with her white porcupine hair?

Debra pulls her sweater around herself, warms her tea. She leans against the sink and smiles as she watches her son eat his second helping of eggs, Lydia reaching over to take a cheesy mushroom from the top. Pat looks up at his mother, to see if she’s caught the blatant thievery. “You’re not going to stab her?”

And that’s when a car announces itself on the gravel outside. Pat hears it, too, and checks his watch. He shrugs. “No idea.”

Pat goes to the window, puts his hand to the glass, and peers down toward the driveway, the faint glow of headlights down there. “That’s Keith’s Bronco.” He steps away from the window. “The after-party. He’s probably wasted. I’ll go take care of it.”

He skips down the stairs like a boy.

“How was he tonight?” Debra asks quietly when he’s gone.

Lydia picks at the leftover onions and mushrooms on Pat’s plate. “Great. You couldn’t take your eyes off him. God, I’ll be glad when this play is over, though. Some nights, he just sits there afterward and stares out, with . . . these distant eyes. For fifteen minutes, he’s just done. I feel like I’ve been holding my breath since I finished this goddamned play.”

“You’ve been holding your breath a lot longer than that,” Debra says, and they both smile. “It’s a wonderful play, Lydia. You should just let go and enjoy it.”

Lydia drinks from Pat’s orange juice. “I don’t know.”

Debra reaches across the table for Lydia’s hand. “You had to write it, and he had to play it, and I’m just so grateful I got to see it.”

Lydia cocks her head and her brow wrinkles, fighting off tears. “Goddamn it, Dee. Why do you do that?”

Then, through three layers of floor, they hear voices on the stairs, Pat and Keith, and someone else, and then a rumbling up the steps, five, maybe six sets of feet.

Pat comes up first, shrugging. “I guess there were some old friends of yours at the show tonight, Mom. Keith brought them—I hope it’s all right . . .”

Pat is followed by Keith. He doesn’t seem drunk, but he is carrying his little video camera, which he sometimes uses to chronicle—hell, Debra isn’t sure what Keith chronicles, exactly. “Hey, Dee. Sorry to bother you so late, but these people really wanted to see you . . .”

“It’s okay, Keith,” she says, and then the other people come up the stairs, one at a time: an attractive young woman with curly red hair, and then a thin, mop-headed young man who does look drunk—neither of whom Debra recognizes—and then a strange creature, a slightly hunched older man in a suit coat, as skinny as she is, at once vaguely familiar and not; he has the strangest, lineless face, like one of those computer renderings of a face aging, only done in reverse, a boy’s face grafted onto the neck of an old man—and finally, another old gentleman, in a charcoal-gray suit. This last man catches her attention as he steps away from the others, to the counter separating the kitchen from the living room. He removes his fedora and looks at her with a set of eyes so pale blue they seem nearly transparent—eyes that take her in with a mixture of warmth and pity, eyes that sweep Dee Moray back fifty years, to another life—

He says, “Hello, Dee.”

Debra’s teacup drops to the counter. “Pasquale?”

There were times, of course, years ago, when she thought she might see him again. That last day in Italy, as she watched him motor away from the hotel, she couldn’t have imagined not seeing him again. Not that there was any spoken agreement between them, but there was something implicit, the hum of attraction and anticipation. When Alvis told her that Pasquale’s mother had died, that he was going to the funeral and might not come back, Dee was stunned; why hadn’t Pasquale told her? And when a boat arrived with her luggage, and Alvis said Pasquale wanted him to get her back to the States safely, she thought that Pasquale must have needed some time alone. So she went home to have the baby. She’d sent him a postcard, thinking, maybe . . . but there was no answer. After that, she thought about Pasquale sometimes, although not as often as the years passed; she and Alvis did talk about going to Italy on vacation, going back to Porto Vergogna, but they never made it. Then, after Alvis died and she got her degree in teaching, with a minor in Italian, she’d thought about taking Pat; she even called a travel agent, who said that not only was there “no listing for a Hotel Adequate View,” but that she couldn’t even find this town, Porto Vergogna. Did she perhaps mean Portovenere?

By then, Debra could almost wonder if the whole thing—Pasquale, the fishermen, the paintings in the bunker, the little village on the cliffs—hadn’t been some trick of the mind, another of her fantasies, a scene from some movie she’d watched.

But no—here he is, Pasquale Tursi, older, of course, his black hair gone slate-gray, those deep lines in his face, his jaw falling into a slight jowl, but with the eyes, still the eyes. It is him. And he edges forward a step, until the only thing separating them is the kitchen counter.

She feels a flash of self-consciousness and her twenty-two-year-old’s vanity rises: God, what a fright she must look. For several seconds, they stand there, a gimpy old man and a sick old woman, just four feet apart now, but separated by a thick granite counter, by fifty years and two fully lived lives. No one speaks. No one breathes.

Finally, it is Dee Moray who breaks the silence, smiling at her old friend: “Perchè hai perso così tanto tempo?” What took you so long?

That smile is still too large for her lovely face. But what really gets to him is this: she has learned Italian. Pasquale smiles back and says, quietly, “Mi dispiace. Avevo fare qualcosa di importante.” I’m sorry. There was something important I had to do.

Of the six other people fanned out around them in this room, only one understands what they’ve said: Shane Wheeler, who, even after four quick, desperate glasses of whiskey, is still moved by the bond translators often develop with their subjects. It’s been quite a day for him, waking up with Claire, finding out his movie pitch was nothing but a distraction, trying unsuccessfully to negotiate better terms during the long trip, then the catharsis of that play, identifying with the ruined life of Pat Bender, reaching out to and getting shut down by his ex; after all of that, and the whiskeys, the emotion of Pasquale’s reunion with Dee is almost more than Shane can bear. He sighs deeply, a little whoosh of air that brings the others back into the room . . .

They all watch Pasquale and Dee intently. Michael Deane grips Claire’s arm; she covers her mouth with her other hand; Lydia glances over at Pat (even now, she can’t help worrying). Pat looks from his mother to this kindly old man—Did she call him Pasquale?—and then his vision swings over to Keith, standing at the top of the stairs, moving to the side with that goddamned camera he carries everywhere, framing the scene, inexplicably filming this moment. “What are you doing?” he asks. “Put that camera away.” Keith shrugs and nods his head toward Michael Deane, the man paying him to do this.

Debra becomes aware, too, of the other people in the room. She looks around at the expectant faces until her eyes fall on the other old man, the one with the strange plastic, impish face. Jesus. She knows him, too—

“Michael Deane.”

He draws his lips back over his brash, white teeth. “Hello, Dee.”

Even now, she feels dread just saying his name, and hearing him say hers; Deane senses this, because he looks away. She’s read stories about him over the years, of course. She knows about his long trail of success. For a time she even stopped watching credits for fear of simply seeing his name: A Michael Deane Production.

“Mom?” Pat takes another step toward her. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” she says. But she stares at Michael, every eye following hers.

Michael Deane feels their stares and he knows: this is his room now. And The Room is everything. When you are in The Room, nothing exists outside. The people hearing your pitch could no more leave The Room than—

Michael begins, turning to Lydia first, and smiling, all charm. “And you must be the author of the masterpiece we just saw.” He holds out his hand. “Truly. It was a wonderful play. So moving.”

“Thank you,” Lydia says, shaking his hand.

Now Deane turns back to Debra: Always speak first to the toughest person in The Room. “Dee, as I told your son downstairs, his performance was remarkable. A chip off the old block, as they say.”

Pat shrinks from the praise, looks down, and scratches his head uncomfortably, like a kid who has just broken a lamp with a football.

Achip off the old block—Debra shudders at the description, at the threat she senses but can’t quite make out yet (What exactly does he want?), and at the way Michael Deane is taking over this room, watching her son with that old dead-gazed purposefulness, that hunger, a half-smirk on his surgically implacable face.

Pasquale senses her discomfort. “Mi dispiace,” he says, and he reaches a hand over the counter between them. “Era il modo unico.” It was the only way to find her.

Debra feels herself tense, like a bear protecting a cub. She concentrates on Michael Deane, addressing him as evenly as she can, trying to take the edge out of her voice, not entirely successfully. “Why are you here, Michael?”

Michael Deane treats this as if it were an honest question about his intentions, an invitation to unpack his traveling salesman bag. “Yes, I should get right to that, after disturbing you so late in the evening. Thank you, Dee.” Having transformed Dee’s accusation into an invitation, he turns now to Lydia and Pat. “I don’t know if your mother’s ever mentioned me, but I am a film producer”—he smiles with humble understatement—“of some repute, I suppose.”

Claire reaches out to take his arm—“Michael . . .” (Not now, don’t ruin this good thing you’re doing by trying to produce it)—but Michael can no more be stopped than a tornado now. He uses Claire’s gesture to pull her in, patting her hand as if she’s just reminded him of his manners. “Of course. Forgive me. This is Claire Silver, my chief development executive.”

Development executive? He can’t possibly mean that. Still, she’s speechless—long enough to look up silently, to see them all staring at her, Lydia especially, sitting on the edge of the counter. Claire has no choice but to echo what Michael said: “It really was a great play.”

“Thank you,” Lydia says again, blushing with gratitude.

“Yes,” Michael Deane says, “great,” and The Room is all his now, this rustic cabin no different than any conference room he’s ever pitched. “Which is why Claire and I were wondering . . . if you might be interested in selling the film rights—”

Lydia laughs nervously, almost giddily. She shoots a quick glance to Pat, then back to Michael Deane. “You want to buy my play?”

“The play, maybe the whole cycle, perhaps everything—” Michael Deane lets this hang a moment. “I’d like to option all of it,” working hard to sound casual, “your whole story,” subtly turning to include Pat, “both of you,” avoiding Dee’s gaze. “I’d like to buy your . . .” and he trails off, as if what comes next is mere afterthought, “life rights.”

We want what we want.

“Life rights?” Pat asks. He’s happy for his girlfriend, but he’s suspicious of this old man. “What’s that mean?”

Claire knows. Book, movie, reality show, whatever they can sell about Richard Burton’s train wreck of a son. Dee knows, too. She covers her mouth and manages just a single word, “Wait—” before her knees give and she has to grab the counter for support.

“Mom?” Pat runs around the counter, arriving just as Pasquale gets to her, too. They reach for her at the same time, as she buckles, each taking an arm. “Give her some space!” Pat yells.

Pasquale doesn’t understand this phrase (Give her space?), and he looks across the counter at his translator, but Shane is a little drunk and a little desperate and he chooses instead to translate Michael Deane’s offer for Lydia. “Be careful,” he leans forward and says quietly. “Sometimes he only pretends to like your shit.”

Still shocked by her recent promotion, Claire takes her boss by the arm and pulls him toward the living room. “Michael, what are you doing?” she asks under her breath.

He looks past her, to Dee and the boy. “I’m doing what I came to do.”

“I thought you came to make amends.”

“Amends?” Michael Deane looks at Claire without understanding. “For what?”

“Jesus, Michael. You completely fucked with these people’s lives. Why did you come here if it wasn’t to apologize?”

“Apologize?” Again, Michael doesn’t quite understand what she’s saying. “I came here for the story, Claire. For my story.”

Behind the counter, Dee has regained her balance. She looks across the living room at Michael Deane and his assistant; they seem to be arguing about something. Pat has come around the counter, and is supporting her weight. She squeezes his hand. “I’m okay now,” she says. Pasquale is holding her other hand. She smiles at him again.

There are only three people in the world who know the secret she’s carried for the last forty-eight years, a secret that has defined her since she left Italy, this thing that grew each year until now it fills the room—a room that contains the other two people who know. There were so many reasons for the secret back then—Dick and Liz, and her family’s judgment, and the fear of a tabloid scandal, and most of all (she can admit it now) her own pride, her desire to not let a prick like Michael Deane win—but those reasons fell away over the years, and the only reason she has continued to keep the secret is . . . Pat. She thought it would simply be too much for him. What movie star’s kid ever stood a chance? Especially one with Pat’s appetites? When he was using he was so breakable, and when he was clean his salvation seemed so fragile. She was protecting him, and now she knows what she was protecting him from: this man she has loathed for almost fifty years, who has come into her house and threatened all of it by trying to buy their very lives.

Yet she knows she won’t be around to protect Pat forever. And there is the very real guilt of having kept from him something so important, and her fear that he will now hate her for it. Dee looks at Lydia. This affects her, too. Then she looks at Pasquale, and finally at her son, who stares at her with such deep concern that she knows she has no choice anymore. “Pat, I should– You need to– There’s something—”

And then, even on the cusp of telling him, she feels the first rush of freedom, hope, the weight of this thing already beginning to fall away—

“About your father—”

Pat’s eyes slide from her to Pasquale, but Dee shakes her head. “No,” she says simply. She looks at Michael Deane in the living room and wishes to exert one more, tiny bit of rebellion. She will not let the old vulture see this. “Can we go upstairs?”

“Sure,” Pat says.

Debra looks at Lydia. “You should come, too.”

And so, the doomed Deane Party will not get to see the completion of their journey; they can only watch as Lydia, Dee, and Pat make their way slowly toward the kitchen staircase. Michael Deane gives a small nod to Keith, who starts to follow with his little camera. The leaps in technology and miniaturization are confounding—this little device, the size of a cigarette pack, can do more than the eighty-pound cameras Dee Moray once acted for—and in the camera’s tiny screen Lydia is helping Debra toward the stairs. At first Pat walks behind them—but then he stops and turns, sensing people staring at him—as if waiting for him to do something crazy—and all at once a familiar sensation comes over him, like he used to feel onstage. Pat burns from it, and he spins on Keith.

“I told you to put the fucking camera away,” Pat says, and he grabs it—the screen now recording the last little digital film it will ever make, the deep lines of a man’s palm as Pat stalks through the living room, past the creepy old producer and the red-haired girl, and the drunk dude with the hair. He opens the slider, steps out onto the front porch, and throws the camera as far as he can—grunting as it leaves his hand, toppling over itself—Pat waiting, waiting, until they hear a distant splash in the lake below. He walks back through the room satisfied—“You are my fucking hero,” says the kid with the hair as he passes—and Pat shrugs a slight apology to Keith, then makes his way upstairs to find out that his whole life to this point has been a sweet lie.