Beautiful Ruins (18 page)

Then Pat did something he hadn’t done in years. Walking back to Kurtis’s flat, he saw a funky music store, a big red storefront called Reckless Records, and after pretending to browse awhile, Pat asked the clerk if they had anything by the Reticents.

“Ah right, yeah,” the clerk said, his pocked face sliding into recognition. “Late eighties, early nineties . . . sort of a soft-pop punk thing—”

“I wouldn’t say soft—”

“Yeah, one of them grunge outfits.”

“No, they were before that—”

“Yeah, we wouldn’t have anything by them,” the clerk said. “We do more—you know—relevant stuff.”

Pat thanked him and left the store.

This was probably why Pat slept with Umi when he got back to the flat. Or maybe it was just her being alone in her underwear, Joe and Kurtis having gone to watch a football match at a pub. “Okay if I sit?” Pat asked, and she swung her legs around on the couch and he stared at the little triangle of her panties, and soon they were fumbling, lurching, as awkward as London traffic (Umi:
We mightn’t let Kurty know about this
), until they found a rhythm, and eventually, as he’d done so many times before, Pat Bender fucked himself back into existence.

Afterward, with only their legs touching, Umi peppered him with personal questions the way someone might inquire about the fuel economy of a car she’s just test-driven. Pat answered honestly, without being forthcoming.
Had he ever been married?
No.
Not even close?
Not really.
But what about that song “Lydia”? Wasn’t she the love of his life?
It amazed him, what people heard in that song.
Love of his life?
There was a time when he thought so; he remembered the apartment they’d shared in Alphabet City, barbecuing on the little balcony and doing the crossword puzzle on Sunday mornings. But what had Lydia said after she caught him with another woman?
If you really do love me, then it’s even worse, the way you act
.
It means you’re cruel
.

No, Pat told Umi, Lydia wasn’t the love of his life. Just another girl.

They moved backward this way, from intimacy to small talk.
Where was he from?
Seattle, though he’d lived in New York for a few years and most recently in Portland.
Siblings?
Nope. Just him and his mother.
What about his father?
Never really knew the man. Owned a car dealership. Wanted to be a writer. Died when Pat was four.

“I’m sorry. You must be awfully close to your mum, then.”

“Actually, I haven’t talked to her in more than a year.”

“Why?”

And suddenly he was back at that bullshit intervention: Lydia and his mom across the room (
We’re worried, Pat
and
This has to stop
), refusing to meet his eyes. Lydia had known Pat’s mom first, had met her through community theater in Seattle, and unlike most of his girlfriends, whose disappointment was all about the way his behavior affected
them
, Lydia complained on Pat’s mother’s behalf: how he ignored her for months at a time (until he needed money), how he broke promises to her, how he still hadn’t repaid the money he’d taken. You can’t keep doing this, Lydia would say, it’s killing her—
her
, in Pat’s mind, really meaning both of them. To make them happy, Pat quit everything but booze and pot, and he and Lydia lurched along for another year, until his mother got sick. In hindsight, though, their relationship was probably done at that intervention, the minute she stood on his mother’s side of the room.

“Where is she now?” Umi asked. “Your mum?”

“Idaho,” Pat said wearily, “in this little town called Sandpoint. She runs a theater group there.” Then, surprising himself: “She has cancer.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.” Umi said that her father had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

Pat could’ve asked for details, as she’d done, but he said, simply, “That’s tough.”

“Just a bit—” Umi stared at the floor. “My brother keeps saying how brave he is.
Dad’s so brave. He’s battling so bravely.
Bloody misery, actually.”

“Yeah.” Pat felt squirmy. “Well.” He assumed that enough polite post-orgasm conversation had passed, at least it would have in America; he wasn’t sure of the British exchange rate. “Well, I guess . . .” He stood.

She watched him get dressed. “You do this a bit,” she said, not a question.

“I doubt more than anyone else,” Pat said.

She laughed. “That’s what I love about you good-lookin’ blokes. What, me? Have sex?”

I
f London was an alien city, Edinburgh was another planet.

They took the train, Joe falling asleep the minute it pulled out of King’s Cross, so that Pat could only guess at the things he saw out the window—clothesline neighborhoods, great ruins in the distance, grain fields and clusters of coastal basalt that made him think of the Columbia River Gorge back home.

“Right, then,” Joe said four and a half hours later, sniffing awake and glancing around as they pulled into the Edinburgh station.

They emerged from the station at the bottom of a deep draw—a castle on their left, the stone walls of a Renaissance city on their right. The Fringe Festival was bigger than Pat had expected, every streetlight and pole covered with a flyer for one show or another, the streets swarming with people: tourists, hipsters, middle-aged show-goers, and performers of every imaginable kind—mostly comedians, but actors and musicians, too, acts in singles, pairs, and improv troupes, a whole range of mimes and puppeteers, fire jugglers, unicyclists, magicians, acrobats, and Pat didn’t know what—living statues, guys dressed like suits on hangers, break-dancing twins—a medieval festival gone freak.

At the festival office, an arrogant prick with a mustache and an accent even heavier than Joe’s—all lilting rhythms and rolling
R
s—explained that Pat was expected to provide his own marketing and that his stipend would be half what Joe had promised—Joe saying someone named Nicole had ensured the rate—Mustache saying Nicole couldn’t “ensure her own
arse
”—Joe turning to Pat to say not to worry, he wouldn’t take a commission—Pat surprised that he’d ever planned to.

Outside, as they walked toward their accommodations, Pat took everything in. The city walls were like a series of cliff faces, the oldest part—the Royal Mile—leading from the castle and curling like a cobblestone stream down a canyon of smoke-stained stone edifices. The bustling noise of the festival stretched in every direction, the grand houses gutted to make way for stages and microphones, the sheer number of desperate performers sinking Pat’s spirits.

Pat and Joe were put up in a boarder’s room below street level, in an older couple’s flat. “Say somefin’ funny!” the cross-eyed husband said when he met Pat.

That night, Joe led Pat to his show—up a street, down an alley, through a crowded bar into another alley, to a narrow, high door with an ornate knob in the middle. An uninterested woman with a clipboard led Pat to his greenroom, a closet of standpipes and mops, Joe explaining that crowds often started slowly but built quickly in Edinburgh, that there were dozens of influential reviewers, and once the reviews came in—“You’re a bloody lock for four stars”—the crowds would soon follow. A minute later, the woman with the clipboard announced him, and Pat came around the corner to a smattering of applause, thinking, What’s less than a smattering? because there were only six people in the room, scattered out among forty folding chairs, three of the six being Joe and the old couple they were staying with.

But Pat had played his share of empty rooms, and he killed in this one, even riffing a new bit before “Lydia”—“She told our friends she
discovered
me with another woman. Like, what—she’d discovered a cure for polio? She told people she
caught
me having sex, like she’d apprehended Carlos the Jackal. I mean, you could catch bin Laden if you came home and he was fucking someone in your bed.”

Pat felt the thing he’d noticed before, that even the appreciation of a small crowd could be profound—he loved how British people hung on the first syllable of that word,
brill
iant, and he stayed up all night with an even-more excited Joe, talking about ways to market the show.

The next day, Joe presented Pat with posters and handbills advertising the show. Across the top was a picture of Pat holding his guitar—under the heading
Pat Bender: I Can’t Help Meself!
along with the tagline “One of America’s Most Outrageous Comedy Musicians!” and “Four Stars” from something called “The Riot Police.” Pat had seen such flyers for other performers at the festival, but . . . “I Can’t Help Meself”? And this “One of America’s . . .” bullshit? Every act had to put up such handbills, Joe explained. Pat didn’t even like being called a “comedy musician.” He wasn’t some Weird Al novelty act. Writers were allowed to be irreverent and still be serious. And filmmakers. But musicians were expected to be earnest shit-heels—
I love you, baby
and
Peace is the answer
. Fuck that!

For the first time, Joe was frustrated by Pat, his pale cheeks going pink. “Look. This is just how it’s done, Pat. You know who the fuckin’ Riot Police are? Me.
I
gave you the four stars.” He threw a handbill at Pat. “I paid for this whole bloody thing!”

Pat sighed. He knew it was a different world, a different time—bands expected to blog and flog and twit and fuck-knew-what. Hell, Pat didn’t even own a cell phone. Even in the States, no one got away with being a quiet, brooding artist anymore; every musician had to be his own publicist now—bunch of self-promoting twats posting every fart on a computer. A rebel now was some kid who spent all day making YouTube videos of himself putting Legos up his ass.

“Legos in his arse.” Joe laughed. “You should use that.”

That afternoon they went around handing out flyers on the street. At first it was as demeaning and pathetic as Pat had imagined, but he kept looking over at Joe and being humbled by the fevered energy of his young friend—“See the act what’s blown ’em away in the States!”—and so Pat did his best, concentrating on the women. “You should come,” he’d say, turning his eyes on, pressing a handbill into a woman’s hands. “I think you’ll like it.” There were eighteen people at his show that night, including the reviewer from something called The Laugh Track, who gave Pat four stars and—Joe read excitedly—wrote on his blog that “the onetime singer for the old American cult band the Reticents delivers a musical monologue that is truly something different: edgy, honest, funny. He is a genuine comic misanthrope.”

The next night twenty-nine people came, including a decent-looking girl in black stretch pants, who stuck around after the show to get stoned with him. Pat banged her against the standpipe in his greenroom closet.

H
e woke with Joe across from him in a kitchen chair, already dressed, arms crossed. “Ya
fooked
Umi?”

Disoriented, Pat thought he meant the girl after the show. “You
know
her?”

“Back in London, ya daft prick! Did you sleep with Umi?”

“Oh. Yeah.” Pat sat up. “Does Kurtis know?”

“Kurtis? She told me! She asked if you’d mentioned her!” Joe tore off his glasses and wiped his eyes. “Do you remember, after you sang ‘Lydia’ in Portland, I said I was in love with my best mate’s girl—Umi. Remember?”

Pat did recall Joe talking about someone, and now that he mentioned it, the name did sound familiar, but he was so excited by the prospect of a UK tour that he hadn’t really been listening.

“Kurtis bunks every bird in the East End—just like the daft prick in your song—and I haven’t told Umi a
fookin’
thing about it because Kurt’s me mate. And the first chance you get . . .” His face went from pink to red and his eyes welled. “I
love
that girl, Pat!”

“Joe, I’m sorry. I had no idea you felt that way.”

“Who did you think I was talking about?” Joe snapped his glasses back on and stalked out of the room.

Pat sat there awhile, feeling genuinely awful. Then he dressed and went out in the packed streets to look for Joe. What had he said,
like the daft prick in your song
? Jesus, did Joe think that song was some kind of parody? Then he had a horrible thought: Christ . . . was it? Was he?

All afternoon Pat looked for Joe. He even tried the castle, which buzzed with camera-snapping tourists, but no Joe. He wandered back down into New Town, to the top of Calton Hill, a gentle crest covered with incongruent monuments from different periods in Edinburgh’s past. The city’s entire history was an attempt to get a better vantage, a piece of high ground on which to build higher—spires and towers and columns, all of them with narrow spiral staircases to the top—and Pat suddenly saw humanity the same way: it was all this scramble to get
higher
, to see enemies and lord it over peasants, sure, but maybe more than that—to build something, to leave a trace of yourself, to have people see . . . that
you were once up there, onstage
. And yet what was the point, really? Those people were gone, nothing left but the crumbling rubble of failures and unknowns.