Beautiful Ruins (18)

“No, this is the place,” she said. “I’m meeting someone here. It was his idea. He’ll be here tomorrow, hopefully. I understand this town is quiet and . . . discreet?”

Pasquale nodded, said, “Oh, yes,” and made a note to try to find the word dus-kreet in his father’s English-Italian dictionary. He hoped it meant romantic.

“Oh. I found this in my room. In the bureau.” She handed Pasquale the neat stack of paper she’d carried down: The Smile of Heaven. It was the first chapter of a novel by the only other American guest who had ever come to the hotel before, the writer Alvis Bender, who every year lugged in his little typewriter and a stack of blank carbon paper for two weeks of drinking and occasional writing. He’d left a carbon of the first chapter for Pasquale and his father to puzzle over.

“Is the pages of a book,” Pasquale said, “by an American, yes? . . . A writer. He come to the hotel. Every year.”

“Do you think he would mind? I didn’t bring anything to read and it looks like all the books you have here are in Italian.”

“Is okay, I think, yes.”

She took the pages, leafed through them, and set them on the railing. For the next few minutes they stood quietly, staring out at the lanterns, whose reflections bobbed together on the sea’s surface like two sets of strung lights.

“It’s beautiful,” she said.

“Mmm,” Pasquale said, but then he remembered Gualfredo saying the woman was not supposed to be here. “Please,” he said, recalling an old phrase book: “I inquire your accommodation?” When she said nothing, he added: “You have satisfaction, yes?”

“I have . . . I’m sorry . . . what?”

He licked his lips to give the phrase another try. “I am try to say—”

She rescued him. “Oh. Satisfaction,” she said. “Accommodations. Yes. It’s all very nice, Mr. Tursi.”

“Please . . . I am, for you, Pasquale.”

She smiled. “Okay. Pasquale. And for you I am Dee.”

“Dee,” Pasquale said, nodding and smiling. It felt forbidden and dizzying just to say her name back to her, and the word escaped from his mouth again. “Dee.” And then he knew he had to think of something else to say or he might just stand there all night saying Dee over and over. “Your room is close from a toilet, yes, Dee?”

“Very convenient,” she said. “Thank you, Pasquale.”

“How long will you stay?”

“I . . . I don’t know. My friend has some things to finish. He’ll arrive hopefully tomorrow, and then we’ll decide. Do you need the room for someone else?”

And even though Alvis Bender should be arriving soon, too, Pasquale said, quickly, “Oh, no. Is no one else. All for you.”

It was quiet. Cool. The water clucked.

“What exactly are they doing out there?” she asked, pointing with her cigarette at the lights dancing on the water. Beyond the breakwater, the fishermen dangled the lanterns over the sides of their skiffs, fooling the fish into feeding at the fake dawn, and then swung their nets through the water at the thrashing school.

“They are fishing,” Pasquale said.

“They fish at night?”

“Sometimes at night. But more in the day.” Pasquale made the mistake of staring into those expansive eyes. He’d never seen a face like this, a face that looked so different from every angle, long and equine from the side, open and delicate from the front. He wondered if this was why she was a film actress, this ability to have more than one face. He realized he was staring and had to clear his throat and turn away.

“And the lights?” she asked.

Pasquale glanced out at the water. Now that she mentioned it, this view really was quite striking, the way the fishing lanterns floated above their reflections in the dark sea. “For . . . is . . .” He searched for the words. “Make fish to . . . They . . . uh . . .” He ran into a wall in his mind and mimed a fish swimming up to the surface with his hand. “Go up.”

“The light attracts the fish to the surface?”

“Yes,” Pasquale said, greatly relieved. “The surface. Yes.”

“Well, it’s lovely,” she said again. From behind them, Pasquale heard a few short words, and then “Shhh” from the window next to the deck, where Pasquale’s mother and his aunt would be huddled in the dark, listening to a conversation that neither of them could understand.

A feral cat, the angry black one with the bad eye, stretched near Dee Moray. It hissed when she reached for it and Dee Moray pulled her hand back. Then she stared at the cigarette in her other hand and laughed at something far away.

Pasquale thought she was laughing at his cigarettes.

“They are expensive,” he said defensively. “Spanish.”

She tossed her hair back. “Oh, no. I’ve been thinking about how people sit around for years waiting for their lives to begin, right? Like a movie. You know what I mean?”

“Yes,” said Pasquale, who had lost the sense of what she was saying after people sit but was so taken by the toss of her liquid blond hair and her confidential tone that he would have agreed to having his own fingernails pulled out and fed to him.

She smiled. “I think so, too. I know I felt that way. For years. It was as if I was a character in a movie and the real action was about to start at any minute. But I think some people wait forever, and only at the end of their lives do they realize that their life has happened while they were waiting for it to start. Do you know what I mean, Pasquale?”