Beautiful Ruins (107)

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.





21

Beautiful Ruins



There would be nothing more obvious, more tangible, than the present moment.

And yet it eludes us completely.

All the sadness of life lies in that fact.

—Milan Kundera



This is a love story, Michael Deane says.

But, really, what isn’t? Doesn’t the detective love the mystery, or the chase, or the nosy female reporter, who is even now being held against her wishes at an empty warehouse on the waterfront? Surely the serial murderer loves his victims, and the spy loves his gadgets or his country or the exotic counterspy. The ice trucker is torn between his love for ice and truck, and the competing chefs go crazy for scallops, and the pawnshop guys adore their junk, just as the Housewives live for catching glimpses of their own Botoxed brows in gilded hall mirrors, and the rocked-out dude on ’roids totally wants to shred the ass of the tramp-tatted girl on Hookbook, and because this is reality, they are all in love—madly, truly—with the body mic clipped to their back buckle, and the producer casually suggesting just one more angle, one more Jell-O shot. And the robot loves his master, alien loves his saucer, Superman loves Lois, Lex, and Lana, Luke loves Leia (till he finds out she’s his sister), and the exorcist loves the demon even as he leaps out the window with it, in full soulful embrace, as Leo loves Kate and they both love the sinking ship, and the shark—God, the shark loves to eat, which is what the mafioso loves, too—eating and money and Paulie and omertà—the way the cowboy loves his horse, loves the corseted girl behind the piano bar, and sometimes loves the other cowboy, as the vampire loves night and neck, and the zombie—don’t even start with the zombie, sentimental fool; has anyone ever been more lovesick than a zombie, that pale, dull metaphor for love, all animal craving and lurching, outstretched arms, his very existence a sonnet about how much he wants those brains? This, too, is a love story.

And in the room, the Dutch financiers with the forty mil to kill wait for Michael Deane to elaborate, but he just sits with his index fingers steepled in front of his mouth. A love story. He’ll speak when he’s ready. This is his room, after all; he’s only sorry he won’t be able to attend his own funeral, because he’d leave that fucking room with a deal for a network pilot and a reality show set in hell. After the Donner! pitch (for thirty grand, that kid really sold it), Michael got out of his constraining deal with the studio. Now he’s producing on his own again—six unscripted shows already in some stage of production—surviving the post-studio world just fine, thank you, raking in more money than he ever thought possible. Now the money guys come to him. He feels thirty again. So the Dutch financiers wait, and they wait, until finally the index fingers fall away from Michael Deane’s preternaturally smooth mouth and he speaks: “This is a secondary cable immersion reality show called Rich MILF/Poor MILF. And as I say, it is, above all, a love story—”