Beautiful Ruins (19)

He did know what she meant! It was just how he felt—like someone sitting in the cinema waiting for the film to start. “Yes!” he said.

“Right?” she asked, and she laughed. “And when our lives do begin? I mean, the exciting part, the action? It’s all so fast.” Her eyes ran across his face and he flushed. “Maybe you can’t even believe it . . . maybe you find yourself on the outside looking in, like watching strangers eat in a nice restaurant?”

Now she’d lost him again. “Yes, yes,” he said anyway.

She laughed easily. “I’m so glad you know what I mean. Imagine, for instance, being a small-town actress going out to look for film work and having your first role be in Cleopatra? Could you possibly even believe that?”

“Yes,” Pasquale answered more assuredly, picking out the word Cleopatra.

“Really?” She laughed. “Well, I sure couldn’t.”

Pasquale grimaced. He’d answered incorrectly. “No,” he tried.

“I’m from this small town in Washington.” She gestured around with the cigarette again. “Not this small, obviously. But small enough that I was a big deal there. It’s embarrassing now. Cheerleader. County Fair Princess.” She laughed at herself. “I moved to Seattle after high school to act. Life seemed inevitable, like rising out of water. All I had to do was hold my breath and rise all the way to the surface. To some kind of fame or happiness or . . . I don’t know . . .” She looked down. “Something.”

But Pasquale was stuck on one word he wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly: princess? He thought Americans didn’t have royalty, but if they did . . . what would that mean to his hotel, to have a princess stay here?

“Everyone was always telling me, ‘Go to Hollywood . . . you should be in pictures.’ I was acting in community theater and they raised money for me to go. Can you beat that?” She took another drag. “Maybe they wanted to get rid of me.” She leaned in, confiding. “I’d had this . . . fling with another actor. He was married. It was stupid.”

She stared off, and then laughed. “I’ve never told anyone this, but I’m two years older than they think I am. The casting guy for Cleopatra? I told him I was twenty. But I’m really twenty-two.” She thumbed through the typed carbon pages of Alvis Bender’s little novel as if the story of her own life were contained in its pages. “I was using a new name anyway, so I thought, Why not pick a new age, too? If you give them your real age, they sit in front of you doing this horrible math, figuring out how long you have left in the business. I couldn’t bear it.” She shrugged and set the book down again. “Do you think that was wrong?”

He had a fifty-fifty chance of getting this one right. “Yes?”

She seemed disappointed at his answer. “Yeah, I suppose you’re right. Something like that always catches up with you. It’s the thing I hate most about myself. My vanity. Maybe that’s why . . .” She didn’t finish the thought. Instead, she took a last drag of her cigarette, dropped the butt to the wooden patio, and ground it with her deck shoe. “You’re very easy to talk to, Pasquale,” she said.

“Yes, I have pleasure talk to you,” he said.

“Me, too. I have pleasure, too.” She eased up off of the railing, wrapped her arms around her shoulders, and looked out at the fishing lights again. With her arms around herself, she grew even taller and thinner. She seemed to be contemplating something. And then she said, quietly, “Did they tell you that I’m sick?”

“Yes. My friend Orenzio, he tell me this.”

“Did he tell you what’s wrong with me?”

“No.”

She touched her belly. “You know the word cancer?”

“Yes.” Unfortunately, he did know this word. Cancro in Italian. He stared at his burning cigarette. “Is fine, no? The doctors. They can . . .”

“I don’t think so,” she answered. “It’s a very bad kind. They say they can, but I think they’re trying to soften the blow for me. I wanted to tell you to explain that I might seem . . . frank. Do you know this word, frank?”

“Sinatra?” Pasquale asked, wondering if this was the man she was waiting for.

She laughed. “No. Well, yes, but it also means . . . direct, honest.”

Honest Sinatra.

“When I found out how bad it was . . . I decided that from now on I was just going to say what I think, that I would stop worrying about being polite or imagining what people thought of me. That’s a big deal for an actress, refusing to live in the eyes of others. It’s nearly impossible. But it’s important that I don’t waste any more time saying what I don’t mean. I hope that’s okay with you.”

“Yes,” Pasquale said, quietly, relieved to see from her reaction that it was the right answer again.

“Good. Then we’ll make a deal, you and me. We’ll do and say exactly what we mean. And to hell with what anyone thinks about it. If we want to smoke, we’ll smoke, if we want to swear, we’ll swear. How does that sound?”

“I like very much,” Pasquale said.

“Good.” Then she leaned down and kissed him on the cheek, and when her lips grazed his stubbly cheek he felt his breath come short and sharp and he found that he was shaking exactly as when Gualfredo had threatened him.