Beautiful Ruins (100)

“What? Oh yeah,” Keith says, confirming her suspicion. “They never come to the after-party. It’d kill Pat to be around all this booze and weed.”

“Where are they?” Michael asks.

“Probably up at the cabin,” Keith says. “Chilling with Dee.”

Michael Deane grabs Keith by the arm. “Will you take us there?”

Claire jumps in. “Maybe we should wait until morning, Michael.”

“No,” says the leader of the hope-drunk Deane Party. He glances over at old, patient Pasquale and makes one last fateful decision: “It’s been almost fifty years. No more waiting.”





19

The Requiem



April 1962



Porto Vergogna, Italy





Pasquale woke in darkness. He sat up and reached for his watch. Four thirty. He heard the fishermen’s low voices and the sound of boats skidding down to the shore. He rose, dressed quickly, and hurried down through the dusky predawn to the shore, where Tomasso the Communist was fixing his gear in his boat.

“What are you doing here?” Tomasso asked.

Pasquale asked Tomasso if he would motor him to La Spezia later for his mother’s requiem mass.

Tomasso touched his chest. “Of course,” he said. He would fish for a few hours and then come back to take Pasquale before lunch. Would that work?

“Yes, perfect,” Pasquale said. “Thank you.”

His old friend tipped his cap, climbed back in the boat, and pulled the starter rope, the motor clearing its throat. Pasquale watched Tomasso join the other fishermen, their shells bobbing on the soft-rocking sea.

Pasquale went back to the hotel and went to bed, but sleep wouldn’t come. He lay on his back and thought of Dee Moray in bed just above him.

In the summers sometimes, his parents used to take him to the beach at Chiavari. Once he was digging in the sand when he saw a beautiful woman sunning herself on a blanket. Her skin glistened. Pasquale couldn’t stop staring. When she finally packed up her blanket and left, she’d waved at him, but young Pasquale was far too mesmerized to wave back. Then he saw something fall from her bag. He ran over and picked it from the sand. It was a ring, set with some kind of reddish stone. Pasquale held it in his hand for a moment as the woman walked away. Then he looked up to see that his mother was watching him, waiting to see what he would do. “Signora!” he called after the woman, and chased her down the beach. The woman stopped, took the ring back, thanked him, patted him on the head, and gave him a fifty-lira coin. When he returned, Pasquale’s mother said, “I hope that is what you would have done even if I wasn’t watching you.” Pasquale wasn’t sure what she meant. “Sometimes,” she said, “what we want to do and what we must do are not the same.” She put a hand on his shoulder. “Pasqo, the smaller the space between your desire and what is right, the happier you will be.”

He couldn’t tell his mother why he hadn’t returned the ring right away: he imagined that if he gave a girl a ring, they would be married and he would have to leave his parents. And while his mother’s lecture had gone over his seven-year-old head, Pasquale saw now what she meant—how much easier life would be if our intentions and our desires could always be aligned.

When the sun finally crested the cliffs, Pasquale washed at the basin in his room and put on his old, stiff suit. Downstairs, he found his Aunt Valeria awake in the kitchen, sitting in her favorite chair. She glanced sideways at his suit.

“I can’t go to the funeral mass,” his aunt sighed. “I can’t face the priest.”

Pasquale said he understood. And he went outside to smoke on the patio. With the fishermen away, the town felt empty, only the wharf cats moving around the piazza. There was a light haze; the sun had not yet burned off the morning fog, and the waves were falling lifelessly on the shallow rocks.

He heard footsteps on the stairs. How long had he waited for an American guest? And now he had two. The footsteps were heavy on the wooden patio and soon Alvis Bender joined him. Alvis lit his pipe, bent his neck one way and then the other. He rubbed the light bruise over his eye. “My fighting days are over, Pasquale.”

“Are you hurt?” Pasquale asked.

“My pride.” Alvis took a pull from his pipe. “It’s funny,” he said in smoke. “I used to come here because it was quiet and I thought I could avoid the world long enough to write. No more, I guess, eh, Pasquale?”

Pasquale considered his friend’s face. It had such an open quality, was such a clearly American face, like Dee’s face, like Michael Deane’s face. He believed he could spot an American anywhere by that quality—that openness, that stubborn belief in possibility, a quality that, in his estimation, even the youngest Italians lacked. Perhaps it was the difference in age between the countries—America with its expansive youth, building all those drive-in movie theaters and cowboy restaurants; Italians living in endless contraction, in the artifacts of generations, in the bones of empires.

This reminded him of Alvis Bender’s contention that stories were like nations—Italy a great epic poem, Britain a thick novel, America a brash motion picture in Technicolor—and he remembered, too, Dee Moray saying she’d spent years “waiting for her movie to start,” and that she’d almost missed out on her life waiting for it.