Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter

  —all those lovely wrecked lives—

  —and in Universal City, California, Claire Silver threatens to quit unless Michael Deane leaves Debra “Dee” Moore and her son alone, and agrees to produce just one project from their trip to Sandpoint: a film based solely on Lydia Parker’s play Front Man, the poignant story of a drug-addicted musician who wanders off into the wilderness and eventually returns to his long-suffering mother and girlfriend. The budget is just $4 million, and after every financier and studio in Hollywood passes, it is funded entirely by Michael Deane himself, although he doesn’t tell Claire that. The film is directed by a young Serbian comic-book artist and auteur, who writes the script himself, based loosely on Lydia’s play, or at least the part of the play he read. The auteur makes the musician younger and, generally, more likeable. And, rather than having issues with his mother, in this version the musician has issues with his dad—so the young director can explore his own feelings for his distant, disapproving father. And, rather than having his girlfriend be a playwright in the Northwest, who takes care of her stepfather, the girlfriend in the film becomes an art teacher who works with poor black kids in Detroit, so that they can get some better music on the sound track and also take advantage of the big “Film in Michigan” tax break. In the final script, the Pat character—whose name is changed to Slade—doesn’t steal from his mother or cheat repeatedly on his girlfriend, but harms only himself with his addiction, itself changed from cocaine to alcohol. (He’s got to be relatable and likeable, Michael and the director agree.) These changes come slowly, one at a time, like adding hot water to a bath, and with each step Claire convinces herself that they’re sticking to the important parts of the story—“to its essence”—and in the end she’s proud of the film, and of her first coproducer credit. Her dad says, “It made me cry.” But the person most moved by Front Man is Daryl, who is still on relationship-probation when Claire brings him to an early screening. Late in the film (after Slade’s girlfriend Penny has confronted the gangbangers threatening the school where she teaches) Slade sends Penny a text message from London: Just let me know you’re okay. Daryl gasps and leans over to Claire, tells her, “I sent you that message.” Claire nods: she’d suggested it to the director. The film ends with Slade being rediscovered by a record executive vacationing in the UK, and headed for success—but on his terms. As Slade’s unpacking his guitar after a show he hears a woman’s voice. “I am okay,” she says, and Slade turns to see Penny, finally answering his text. In the theater, Daryl begins crying, for the film is clearly a harsh love letter from his girlfriend about his porn addiction, for which he agrees to seek treatment. And, in fact, Daryl’s treatment is an unqualified success; his not waking every day at noon to surf Internet porn and sneaking out to strip clubs at night has given him newfound energy and passion for life—which he channels into his relationship with Claire, and into a shop he opens in Brentwood with another former set designer, making custom furniture for industry people. Front Man plays at several festivals, wins the audience award in Toronto, and is generously reviewed. With the foreign box office, it even ends up earning Michael a decent profit—“Sometimes it’s like I shit money,” he tells a profiler for The New Yorker. Claire knows the movie is far from perfect, but with its success, Michael allows her to buy two other scripts for development, Claire happy to no longer expect the dead perfection of museum art, but embrace the sweet lovely mess that is real life. After some initial buzz, Front Man is passed over by the Academy Awards, but it does garner three Independent Spirit nominations. Michael can’t go to the ceremony (he’s off in Mexico recovering from his divorce and receiving a controversial human-growth hormone treatment), but Claire is happy to represent the film’s producers, Daryl accompanying her in an eggplant-colored tuxedo she finds for him in a thrift store. He looks great, of course. Unfortunately, Front Man doesn’t win any Indie Spirit awards, either, but afterward Claire feels buoyant with achievement (and with the two bottles of ’88 Dom Perignon that Michael generously reserved for her table) and she and Daryl have sex in the limo, after which she convinces the driver to veer through a KFC drive-through for a bucket of Extra Crispy, Daryl nervously fingering the engagement ring in his purple pants pocket—

  Shane Wheeler uses the option money from Donner! to rent a small apartment in the Silver Lake area of Los Angeles. Michael Deane gets him a job on a reality show he sells to the Biography Channel based on Shane’s suggestion, called Hunger, about a houseful of bulimics and anorexics. But the show is too sad for even Shane, let alone viewers, and he gets a job as a writer for another show, called Battle Royale, in which famous battles are re-created through computer graphics, so that history is like watching Call of Duty, all accompanied by a fast-moving narration by William Shatner, the scripts written by Shane and two other writers in modern vernacular (“Restricted by their own code of honor, the Spartans were about to get totally stomped . . .”). He continues to work on Donner! in his spare time, until a competing Donner Party project makes it to the screen first—William Eddy portrayed as a lying coward—and this is when Shane finally gives up on cannibals. He also tries once more with Claire, but she seems pretty happy with her boyfriend, and once Shane meets the guy he understands: the dude is way better-looking than Shane. He pays Saundra back for the car, and throws in a little more for her ruined credit, but she remains cool to him. One night after work, though, he hooks up with a production assistant named Wylie, who is twenty-two and thinks he’s brilliant and eventually wins his heart by getting an ACT tattoo on her lower back—

  In Sandpoint, Idaho, Pat Bender wakes at four, makes the first of three pots of coffee, and fills the predawn hours with chores around the cabin. He likes starting work before he’s had a chance to really wake up; it gives the day some momentum, keeps him moving forward. As long as he has something to do, he feels good, so he clears brush or he splits wood or he strips, sands, and stains the front deck, or the back deck, or the outbuildings, or he starts the whole process again on the front deck: strip, sand, stain. Ten years ago, he would’ve thought this some kind of Sisyphean torture, but now he can’t wait to slide into his work boots, make coffee, and step into the dark morning; he likes the world best when he’s alone in it, that dark, predawn quiet. Later, he goes into town with Lydia to work on sets for the theater’s summer-stock children’s production. Dee passed on to Lydia the community-theater fund-raising trick: cast as many cute kids as you can and watch their rich ski parents and the flip-flopped lake-folk buy up all the tickets, then use the proceeds to pay for the arty stuff. Capitalism aside, the plays are what another person might call “adorable,” and Pat secretly likes them better than the too-serious adult fare. He takes one big role a year, usually in something Lydia picks for him; he and Keith are doing True West next. He’s never seen Lydia happier. After he tells the crazy zombie producer that he isn’t interested in selling his “life rights,” and—as politely as he can—to “leave us the fuck alone,” the guy still steps up and buys the rights to Lydia’s play. When Front Man comes out, Pat has no interest in seeing it, but when people tell him that the story was drastically changed, that it bears almost no resemblance to his own life, he is profoundly grateful. He’ll take unknown over failure at this point. With some of the option money, Lydia wants to take a trip—and maybe they will, but Pat can also imagine never leaving North Idaho again. He’s got his coffee and he’s got his ritual, his work around the cabin, and with the new satellite dish Lydia buys him for his birthday, he’s got nine hundred channels and he’s got Netflix, which he uses to work his way chronologically through his father’s movies—he’s in 1967 now, The Comedians—and he gets a perverse thrill out of seeing bits of himself in his father, although he’s not looking forward to the inevitable decline. Lydia likes watching these movies, too—she teases him about having his father’s build (Last time I saw legs like that, there was a message tied to them)—sweet Lydia who makes all of the rest of the odd bits come together as a life. And on those
days when Lydia, the lake, his coffee, his woodworking, and the Richard Burton film library aren’t nearly enough, on those evenings when he craves—fucking craves—the old noise and a girl on his lap and a line on the table, when he recalls the way the barista smiled at him in the coffee shop across from the theater, or even thinks of Michael Deane’s business card in that drawer in the kitchen, of calling and asking, “How would this work exactly?”—on those days when he imagines getting just a wee bit higher (See: every day), Pat Bender concentrates on the steps. He recalls his mother’s faith in him, and what she told him that night he found out about his father (Don’t let this change anything), the night he forgave her and thanked her—and Pat works: he strips, he sands, he stains—strips, sands, and stains, strip-sand-stains, as if his life depended on it, which, of course, it does. And in the dark morning he always rises clear again, resolute; the only thing he really misses is—

  —Dee Moray, who sits with one leg crossed over the other on the back bench seat of a water taxi, the sun warming her forearms as her boat shadows the rough Ligurian coastline of the Riviera di Levante. She wears a cream-colored dress, and when the wind gusts she reaches up and presses her matching hat against her head. This causes Pasquale Tursi, next to her, in his usual suit jacket despite the heat (after all, they have dinner reservations later), to nearly double over with nostalgic longing. He has one of his wistful, fanciful thoughts—that he’s somehow summoned from his mind not a fifty-year-old memory of the moment in which he first saw this woman but the actual moment itself. After all, isn’t it the same sea, same sun, same cliffs, same them? And if a moment exists only in one’s perception anyway, then perhaps the rush of feeling he has now is THE MOMENT, and not merely its shadow. Maybe every moment occurs at once, and they will always be twenty-two, their lives always before them. Dee sees Pasquale lost in this reverie and she touches his arm, asks, “Che cos’è?,” and while her years of teaching Italian have allowed them to communicate fairly well, the sentiment he feels is, once again, beyond language, so Pasquale says nothing, just smiles at her, rises, and moves to the front of the boat. He points out the cove to the pilot, who looks dubious but nonetheless negotiates the waves and rounds a rocky point into an abandoned inlet, the single pier long gone, just a few rubbled bits of foundation left, like humps of bone in the grass, all that remains of an unlikely village that once sat in a crease in these cliffs. Pasquale explains to her how he closed the Adequate View and moved to Florence, how the last fisherman died in 1973, how the old village was abandoned and absorbed by the Cinque Terre National Park, the families given a small settlement for their little specks of land. Over dinner in Portovenere, on a patio overlooking the sea, Pasquale explains other things, too, the gentle pull of events after he leaves her that day in his hotel, the sweet contented rhythm of his life after that. No, it is not the foreign excitement of his imagined life with her; instead, Pasquale leads what feels like his life: he marries lovely Amedea, and she is a wonderful wife to him, playful and adoring, as good a friend as he could ever have wanted. They raise sweet little Bruno, and soon after, their daughters Francesca and Anna, and Pasquale takes a good job with his father-in-law’s holding company, managing and renovating old Bruno’s apartment buildings, and he eventually takes over as the patriarch to the Montelupo clan and business, doling out jobs, inheritance, and advice for his children and an army of nieces and nephews, never imagining that one man could ever feel so needed, so full. And it’s a life with no shortage of moments to recommend it, a life that picks up speed like a boulder rolling down a hill, easy and natural and comfortable, and yet beyond control somehow; it all happens so fast, you wake a young man and at lunch are middle-aged and by dinner you can imagine your death. And you were happy? Dee asks, and he answers, Oh, yes, without hesitation, then thinks about it and adds, Not always, of course, but I think more than most people. He truly loved his wife, and if he sometimes daydreams other lives, and other women—her, mostly—he also never doubts that he made the right decision. His biggest regret is that they never got to travel together once the children were gone, before Amedea got sick, before her behavior turned erratic—fits of temper and disorientation that led to a diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer’s. Even then, they have some good years, but her last decade is lost, disappearing out from under them both like sand giving way beneath their feet.

  At first Amedea simply forgets to shop, or to lock the door, then she loses their car, and then she starts forgetting numbers and names and the uses for common things. He comes inside to see her holding the telephone—with no idea whom she meant to call, or, later, how the thing even works. He locks her in for a while, and then they simply stop leaving the house—and the worst is how he feels himself slipping away in her eyes, and he feels lost in the shimmery mist of identity (would he cease to exist when his wife stops knowing him?). Her last year is nearly unbearable. Caring for someone who has no idea who you are is a ripe hell—the weight of responsibility, bathing and feeding and . . . everything, that weight growing as her cognition fades, until she is like a thing he cares for, a heavy thing he pulls through the last uphill part of their life together; and when his children finally talk him into moving her into a nursing facility near their home, Pasquale weeps with sorrow and guilt, but also with relief, and guilt for his relief, sorrow for his guilt, and when the nurse asks what measures they should take to sustain his wife’s life, Pasquale can’t even speak. So it is Bruno, lovely Bruno, who takes his father’s hand and says to the nurse, We are ready to let her go now. And she does, go, Pasquale visiting every day and talking to that blank face until one day a nurse calls the house as Pasquale is preparing for a visit and says that his wife has passed. He is more distraught by this than he imagined he would be, her final absence like a cruel trick, as if, somehow after she died, the old Amedea would be allowed to return; instead, there is only the hole in him. A year passes and Pasquale finally understands his mother’s sorrow after Carlo died—so long has he existed in the perception of his wife and his family that now he feels like nothing. And it is brave Bruno who recognizes in his father his own battles with depression, and he urges the old man to remember the last moment he felt his being without its relation to beloved Amedea, his last moment of individual happiness or longing—and Pasquale answers without hesitation, Dee Moray, and Bruno asks Who?, the son having never heard the story, of course. Pasquale tells his son everything, then, and it is Bruno again who insists that his father go to Hollywood and find out what happened to the woman in the old photograph, and to thank her—

  Thank me? Debra Bender asks, and in his answer, Pasquale chooses his words carefully, mulling them over for some time, hoping she will understand: I was living in dreams when I met you. And when I met the man you loved, I saw my own weakness in him. Such irony, how could I be a man worthy of your love when I had walked away from my own child? That is why I went back. And it was the best thing I ever did.

  She understands: she began teaching as a kind of self-sacrifice, subverting her own desires and ambitions for the ambitions of her students. But then you find there’s actually more joy and that it really does lessen the loneliness, and this is why her last years, running the theater in Idaho, have felt so rich to her. And what she loved about Lydia’s play: that it gets at this idea that true sacrifice is painless.

  They linger and talk this way for three more hours after dinner, until she feels weak and they walk back to the hotel. They sleep in separate rooms, neither of them sure yet what this is—if it’s anything, or if such a thing is even possible at this hour of their lives—and in the morning they have coffee and talk about Alvis (Pasquale: He was right that tourists would ruin this place; Dee: He was like this island where I lived for a while). And on the deck in Portovenere they decide to go on a hike, but first they plan the rest of Dee’s three-week vacation: next they’ll go south, to Rome, then to Naples and Calabria, then north again to Venice and Lake Como, as long as her strength holds—before returning at the end
to Florence, where Pasquale shows her his big house and introduces her to his children and his grandchildren and his nieces and nephews. Dee is envious at first, but as they keep coming in the door, she is overtaken with joy—there are so many—and she accepts a warm blush of responsibility for all of this, if Pasquale is to be believed, holds a baby and blinks away tears as she watches Pasquale pull a coin from the ear of his grandson (He’s the beautiful one now) and perhaps it’s another day, or maybe two—what business does memory have with time?—before she feels the dark dizziness come and another before she is too weak to rise, another before the sharp tug in her stomach is more than Dilaudid can handle, and then—

  They finish their breakfast in Portovenere, go back to the hotel, and put on hiking boots. Dee assures Pasquale that she’s up for this, and they take a taxi to the end of the road, crowded now with cars and walkers and the bicycles of tourists. At a turnaround, he helps her out of the cab, pays the driver, and they set off once more on a trail along a vineyard leading into the park, up into the striated foothills that serve as backdrop to the sea-scraped cliffs. They have no idea if the paintings have faded away, or have been spray-painted with graffiti, or if the bunker still exists—or, for that matter, if it ever existed at all—but they are young and the trail is wide and easily traveled. And even if they don’t find what they’re looking for, isn’t it enough to be out walking together in the sunlight?