Beautiful Ruins (14)

“Why don’t you both come on back to the conference room,” she says.

In the office, they sit beneath posters for Michael’s classic movies (Mind Blow; The Love Burglar). No time for pleasantries; it’s the first pitch meeting in history in which no water is proffered. “Mr. Tursi, would you like to go first?”

He looks around, confused. “Mr. Deane . . . is not here?” His accent is heavy, as if he’s chewing on each word.

“I’m afraid he’s not here today. Are you an old friend of his?”

“I meet him . . .” He stares at the ceiling. “Eh, nel sessantadue.”

“Nineteen sixty-two,” says the young guy. When Claire looks curiously at him, Shane shrugs. “I spent a year studying in Italy.”

Claire imagines Michael and this old guy, back in the day, tooling around Rome in a convertible, screwing Italian actresses, drinking grappa. Now Pasquale Tursi looks disoriented. “He say . . . you . . . ever need anything.”

“Sure,” Claire says. “I promise I’ll tell Michael all about your pitch. Why don’t you just start at the beginning?”

Pasquale squints as if he doesn’t understand. “My English . . . is long time . . .”

“The beginning,” Shane tells Pasquale. “L’inizio.”

“There’s this guy . . .” Claire urges.

“A woman,” Pasquale Tursi says. “She come to my village, Porto Vergogna . . . in . . .” He looks over at Shane for help.

“Nineteen sixty-two?” Shane says again.

“Yes. She is . . . beautiful. And I am build . . . eh . . . a beach, yes? And tennis?” He rubs his brow, the story already getting away from him. “She is . . . in the cinema?”

“An actress?” Shane Wheeler asks.

“Yes.” Pasquale Tursi nods and stares off into space.

Claire checks her watch and does her best to jumpstart his pitch: “So . . . an actress comes to this town and she falls for this guy who’s building a beach?”

Pasquale looks back at Claire. “No. For me . . . maybe, yes. E— l’attimo, yes?” He looks at Shane for help. “L’attimo che dura per sempre.”

“The moment that lasts forever,” Shane says quietly.

“Yes,” Pasquale says, and nods. “Forever.”

Claire feels pinched by those words in such close proximity, moment and forever. Not exactly KFC and Hookbook. She suddenly feels angry—at her silly ambition and romanticism, at her taste in men, at the loopy Scientologists, at her father for watching that stupid movie and then leaving, at herself for coming back to the office—at herself because she keeps hoping for better. And Michael: Goddamn Michael and his goddamn job and his goddamn business cards and his goddamn old buzzard friends and the goddamn favors he owes the goddamn people he screwed back when he screwed everything that screwed.

Pasquale Tursi sighs. “She was sick.”

Claire flushes with impatience: “With what? Lupus? Psoriasis? Cancer?”

At the word cancer, Pasquale looks up suddenly and mutters in Italian, “Sì. Ma non è così semplice—”

And that’s when the kid Shane interrupts. “Uh, Ms. Silver? I don’t think this guy’s pitching.” And he says to the man, in slow Italian, “Questo è realmente accaduto? Non in un film?”

Pasquale nods. “Sì. Sono qui per trovarla.”

“Yeah, this really happened,” Shane tells Claire. He turns back to Pasquale. “Non l’ha più vista da allora?” Pasquale shakes his head no, and Shane turns back to Claire again. “He hasn’t seen this actress in almost fifty years. He came to find her.”

“Come si chiama?” Shane Wheeler asks.

The Italian looks from Claire to Shane and back again. “Dee Moray,” he says.

And Claire feels a tug in her chest, some deeper shift, a cracking of her hard-earned cynicism, of this anxious tension she’s been fighting. The actress’s name means nothing to her, but the old guy seems utterly changed by saying it aloud, as if he hasn’t said the name in years. Something about the name affects her, too—a crush of romantic recognition, those words, moment and forever—as if she can feel fifty years of longing in that one name, fifty years of an ache that lies dormant in her, too, maybe lies dormant in everyone until it’s cracked open like this—and so weighted is this moment she has to look to the ground or else feel the tears burn her own eyes, and at that moment Claire glances at Shane, and sees that he must feel it, too, the name hanging in the air for just a moment . . . among the three of them . . . and then floating to the floor like a falling leaf, the Italian watching it settle, Claire guessing, hoping, praying the old Italian will say the name once again, more quietly this time—to underline its importance, the way it’s so often done in scripts—but he doesn’t do this. He just stares at the floor, where the name has fallen, and it occurs to Claire Silver that she’s seen too goddamn many movies.





3

The Hotel Adequate View



April 1962



Porto Vergogna, Italy





All day he waited for her to come downstairs, but she spent that first afternoon and evening alone in her room on the third floor. And so Pasquale went about his business, which seemed not like business at all but the random behavior of a lunatic. Still, he didn’t know what else to do, so he threw rocks at the breakwater in the cove and he chipped away at his tennis court and he glanced up occasionally at the whitewashed shutters over the windows in her room. In the late afternoon, when the feral cats were sunning themselves on the rocks, a cool spring wind chopped the surface of the sea and Pasquale retreated to the piazza to smoke alone, before the fishermen came to drink. At the Adequate View, there was no noise from upstairs, no sign at all that the beautiful American was even up there, and Pasquale worried again that he had imagined the whole thing—Orenzio’s boat lurching into the cove, the tall, slender American walking up the narrow staircase to the best room in the hotel, on the third floor, pushing open the window shutters, breathing in the salty air, pronouncing it “Lovely,” Pasquale saying she should let him know if there was anything “upon you are happy to having,” and her saying, “Thank you,” and pushing the door closed, leaving him to descend the tight, dark staircase alone.