Beautiful Ruins (11 page)

“Road’s closed. You’ll have to walk around,” Richards said, pointing with his rifle back the way she’d come.

“Yes, fine,” she said, and asked if the road to the west was open. Richards said it was. “Thank you,” she said, and started back up the road. “God bless America.”

“Wait,” I yelled. “I’ll walk you.” I took off my wool helmet liner and patted down my hair with spit.

“Don’t be an idiot,” Richards said.

I turned, tears in my eyes. “Goddamn it, Richards, I am walking this girl home!” Of course, Richards was right. I was being an idiot. Leaving my post was desertion, but at that moment I’d have spent the rest of my war in the stockade to walk six feet with that girl.

“Please, let me go,” I said. “I’ll give you anything.”

“Your Luger,” Richards said without hesitation.

I knew this was what Richards would ask for. He coveted that Luger as much as I coveted dry socks. He wanted it as a souvenir for his son. And how could I blame him? I had been thinking of the son I didn’t have when I bought the Luger at a little Italian market outside Pietrasanta. With no son back home, I’d figured to show it to my wayward girlfriends and my lousy nephews after too many whiskeys, when I’d pretend not to want to talk about my war, then would pull the rusted Luger from a bureau and tell the lazy shits how I wrestled it from a crazy German who killed six of my men and shot me in the foot. The black-market economy of German war trophies depended on such deception: retreating, starving Germans trading their broken weapons and their identifying insignia to starving Italians for bread, and the starving Italians in turn selling them as trophies to Americans like Richards and me, starved for proof of our heroism.

Sadly, Richards never got to give the Luger to his boy, because six days before we shipped home, me to listen to Cubs games on the radio, him to his wife and son, Richards died ingloriously of a blood infection he acquired in a field hospital, after surgery for a ruptured appendix. I never even got to see him after he went in for a fever and gut ache, our moron lieutenant simply informing me that he’d died (“Oh, Bender. Yeah. Look. Richards is dead”), the last and best of my friends to go in my war. And if this marks the end of Richards’s war, I offer this epilogue: A year later I found myself driving through Cedar Falls, Iowa, parking in front of a bungalow with an American flag on the brick porch, removing my cap, and ringing the doorbell. Richards’s wife was a short, boxy thing and I told her the best lie I could imagine, that his last words had been her name. And I handed his little boy the box with my Luger in it, said his daddy had taken it off a German soldier. And as I looked down on those ginger cowlicks, I ached for my own son, for the heir I would never have, for someone to redeem the life I was already planning to waste. And when Richards’s God-sweet boy asked whether his father had been “brave at the war,” I said, with all honesty, “Your dad was the bravest man I ever knew.”

And he was, because on the day I met the girl, Brave Richards said, “Just go. Keep your Luger. I’ll cover for you. Just tell me all about it afterward.”

If, in this confession of fear and discomfort during my war, I have portrayed myself as lacking in valor, I offer this evidence of my Galahad-like heart: I had no intention of laying a hand on that girl. And I needed Richards to know it, that I risked death and dishonor not to nick my willy, but simply to walk with a pretty girl on a road at night, to feel that sweet normalcy again.

“Richards,” I said. “I’m not gonna touch her.”

I think he could see I was telling the truth, because he looked pained. “Then Christ, let me go with her.”

I patted his shoulder, grabbed my rifle, and ran down the road to catch her. She was a fast walker, and when I came upon her, she had edged over to the side of the road. Up close, she was older than I’d thought, maybe twenty-five. She took me in warily. I put her at ease with my bilingual charm:
“Scusi, bella. Fare una passeggiata, per favore?”

She smiled. “Yes. You may walk with me,” she said in English. She slowed and took my arm. “But only if you stop wiping your ass on my language.”

Ah. So it was love.

Maria’s mother had raised three sons and three daughters in this village. Her father had died early in the war and her brothers had been conscripted at sixteen, fifteen, and the last at twelve, dragged off to dig Italian trenches and, later, German fortifications. She prayed that at least one of her brothers was alive somewhere north of what was left of the
Linea Gotica
, but she didn’t hold out much hope. Maria gave me the quick history of her little village during the war, squeezed like a washcloth of its young men by Mussolini, then squeezed again by the partisans, again by the retreating Germans, until there were no males between the ages of eight and fifty-five, the town bombed, strafed, and picked clean of food and supplies. Maria had studied English at a convent school, and with the invasion found work as a nurse’s aide at an American field hospital. She was gone weeks at a time but always returned to the village to check on her mother and sisters.

“So when this is all finished,” I asked, “do you have a nice young man to marry?”

“There was a boy, but I doubt he’s alive. No, when this is over I will care for my mother. She is a widow whose three sons were taken from her. When she’s gone, maybe I’ll get one of you Americans to take me to New York City. I’ll live in the Empire State Building, eat ice cream every night in fancy restaurants, and grow fat.”

“I can take you to Wisconsin. You can get fat there.”

“Ah, Wisconsin,” she said, “the cheese and the dairy fields.” She waved her hand in front of her face as if Wisconsin lay just beyond the scrub trees alongside the road. “Cows, farms, and Madison, moon over the river, and the college of Badgers. It is cold in the winter but in the summer there are beautiful farm girls with pigtails and red cheeks.”

She could do that for any state you named, so many American boys in her hospital had taken time to reminisce about the place they came from, often before they died. “Idaho? The deep lakes and big mountains, endless trees and beautiful farm girls with pigtails and red cheeks.”

“No farm girl for me,” I said.

“You will find one after the war,” she said.

I said that after the war I wanted to write a book.

She cocked her head. “What kind of book?”

“A novel. About all of this. Maybe a funny novel.”

She became somber. Writing a book was an important thing to do, she said, not a joke.

“Oh, no,” I said, “I don’t mean to joke about it. I don’t mean that sort of funny.”

She asked what other kind of funny there was and I didn’t know what to say. We were within sight of her village, a cluster of gray shadows that sat like a cap on the dark hill in front of us.

“The sort of funny that makes you sad, too,” I said.

She looked at me curiously and just then, a bird or a bat flushed from the bushes ahead and we both started. I put my arm around Maria’s shoulder. And I can’t say how it happened, but suddenly we were off the road and I was on my back and she was lying on top of me in a grove of lemon trees, the unripe fruit above me like hanging stones. I kissed her lips and cheeks and neck and she quickly undid my pants and held me between her two hands, stroking me expertly with one soft hand and caressing me with the other, as if she had read some top secret army manual on this maneuver. And she was exceptional at it, far better than I’d ever managed to be, so that in no time I was making snuff ling noises and she pressed against me and I smelled lemons and dirt and her, and the world fell away as she shifted her body and aimed me perfectly away from her pretty dress, like a farmwife directing a stream of cow’s milk, toward the unripe lemons, all of this happening in less than a minute, without her having to so much as loosen the bow in her hair.

She said: “There you go.”

To this day, these three words remain the most lovely, sad, awful thing I have ever heard. There you go.

I started crying. “What is it?” she said.

“My feet hurt,” was all I could manage. But of course I wasn’t crying because of my feet. And while I was overcome with gratitude toward Maria, and with regret and nostalgia and relief over being alive this late in my war, I wasn’t crying for those reasons, either. I was crying because clearly I wasn’t the first brute that Maria had so efficiently and delicately brought to fruition using only her hands.

I was crying because, behind her speed and skill, her mastery of technique, there could only exist an awful history. This was a maneuver learned after encounters with other soldiers, when they pushed her to the ground and she wasn’t able to deflect them using only her hands.

There you go.

“Oh Maria . . .” I cried. “I’m sorry.” And I was clearly not the first brute to cry in her presence, either, because she knew just what was needed, unbuttoning the top of her blue dress and putting my head between her breasts, whispering, “Shh, Wisconsin, shh,” her skin so soft and butter-sweet, so wet with my tears that I cried harder and she said, “Shh, Wisconsin,” and I buried my face between those breasts as if her skin were my home, as if Wisconsin lay there, and to this day, it is the greatest place I have ever been, that narrow ribbed valley between those lovely hills. After a moment I stopped crying and managed to regain a bit of dignity, and five minutes later, after I had given her all of my money and cigarettes and pledged my undying love and sworn that I would return, I hobbled shamefully back to my sentry post, insisting to my disappointed, soon-to-be-dead best friend, Richards, that I did nothing more than walk her home.

God, this life is a cold, brittle thing. And yet it’s all there is. That night I settled into my mummy bag, no longer myself but a played-out husk, a shell.

Years passed and I found myself still a husk, still in that moment, still in the day my war ended, the day I realized, as all survivors must, that being alive isn’t the same thing as living.

There you go.

A year later, after I delivered the Luger to Richards’s son, I stopped at a little bar in Cedar Falls and had one of the six million drinks I’ve had since that day. The barmaid asked what I was doing in town and I told her, “Visiting my boy.” Then she asked about my son, that good imaginary boy whose biggest failing was that he didn’t exist. I told her that he was a fine kid, and that I was delivering a war souvenir to him. She was intrigued. What was it? she asked. What thing of significance had I brought home from the war for my boy? Socks, I answered.

But in the end, this is what I brought home from my war, this single sad story about how I lived while a better man died. How, beneath a scraggly lemon branch on a little dirt track outside the village of R—, I received a glorious twenty-second hand job from a girl who was desperately trying to avoid being raped by me.

5

A Michael Deane Production

Recently

Hollywood Hills, California

T
he Deane of Hollywood reclines in silk pajamas on a chaise on his lanai, sipping a Fresca-with-ginseng and looking out over the trees to the glittering lights of Beverly Hills. Open in his lap is a script, the sequel to
Night Ravagers
(
EXT. LOS ANGELES—NIGHT: A black Trans Am speeds past a burning Getty Museum
). His assistant, Claire, has pronounced the script “not even good by crap standards,” and while Claire’s critical limbo stick is set too high, in this case—given the shrinking margin in movies and the shit business the first
Night Ravagers
did—Michael has to agree.

This is a view he’s looked at for twenty years, and yet somehow it seems new to him this late afternoon—the sun sliding over the green-and-glassed hills. Michael sighs with the contentedness of a man back on top. It’s remarkable, the difference a year can make. Not long ago, he’d stopped seeing the beauty in this view, in everything. He’d begun to fear that the end had come—not death (Deane men never succumbed before ninety), but something worse: obsolescence. He was in a terrible slump, with nothing resembling a hit in almost a decade, his only recent credit of any kind the first
Night Ravagers
, which was really more of a
dis
credit. He’d also suffered through the debacle surrounding his memoir, when his publisher’s lawyers decided the book he wanted to write was “libelous,” “self-serving,” and “impossible to fact-check,” and his editor sent a ghostwriter to turn it into some strange hybrid of autobiography and self-help book.

His run seemingly over, Michael was on his way to being one of those ancients who haunt the dining room at the Riviera Country Club, spooning soup and dithering on about Doris Day and Darryl Zanuck. But it turned out the old Deane magic wasn’t quite finished. It’s what he loves about this town, and this business: one simple idea, one good pitch, and you’re back in. He didn’t even entirely understand the pitch that brought him back, this Hookbook (he only pretends to grasp all the computer-bloggy-twitty gewgaw business), but he could tell by the reactions of his producing partner, Danny—and especially his tight-assed, impossible-to-please assistant, Claire—that it was big. So he did what he does best: pitched the shit out of it.

And now Michael Deane is back on every call sheet in town, on every master list for every spec script and sizzle reel. In fact, his biggest problem now is the restrictive life-raft arrangement he made with the studio, giving it a first look at (and a big cut of) whatever he does. Thankfully, his lawyers believe they have a way out of this, too, and Michael has already started looking for office space elsewhere. Just thinking about being out on his own makes him feel thirty again—a tingling excitement in his lap.

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.”

T
he 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.