Beautiful Ruins (30)

Or wait . . . is that the pill he took an hour ago? Ah yes, there it is, kicking in right on schedule: beneath the script, decrepit nerve terminals and endothelial cells release nitric oxide into the corpus cavernosum, which stimulates the synthesis of cyclic GMP, stiffening the well-used smooth muscle cells and flooding the old spongy tissue with blood.

The script rises in his lap like the flag at Iwo Jima.

“Hello there.” Michael sets the script on the garden table next to his Fresca, pushes himself up, and starts toward the house for Kathy.

His silk pajama pants straining, Michael shuffles past the gravity pool, the life-size chess board, the koi pond, Kathy’s exercise ball and yoga mat, the wrought-iron outdoor Tuscan brunch table. He spots Wife No. 4 through the open kitchen door, in yoga pants and tight T-shirt. He gets the full protuberant effect of his recent investment in her, the top-of-the-line viscous silicone gel sacs implanted in her retromammary cavities, for minimal capsular contracture and scarring, between breast tissue and pectoralis muscle, replacing the old, slightly drooping silicone sacs.

It’s hot.

Kathy’s always telling him not to shuffle—It makes you look a hundred—and Michael reminds himself to pick up his feet. She’s just turned her back to him when he steps through the open slider into the kitchen. “Excuse me, miss,” he says to his wife, positioning himself so she can see his pajama tent-pole. “You order the wood pizza?”

But she has those infernal earbuds in and hasn’t seen or heard him—or maybe she’s just pretending she hasn’t. When things were at their worst the last two years, Michael sensed a whiff of condescension from her, a nurse’s on-duty patience in her tone. Kathy has reached the magical “half his age” mark—thirty-six to his seventy-two—Michael making a late career of thirtysomething women. It’s scandalous when a man his age dips into the twenties, but no one flinches when the woman is in her thirties; here, you could be a hundred, date a thirty-year-old, and still seem respectable. Unfortunately, Kathy is also five inches taller than him, and this is the truly unbridgeable gap; he sometimes gets an unpleasant picture in his mind of their lovemaking, of him scurrying across her hilly landscape like a randy elf.

He comes around the counter and positions himself so she can see the disturbance in his pajama pants. She looks up, then down, then up again. She removes her earbuds. “Hi, honey. What’s up?”

Before he can say the obvious, Michael’s cell phone vibrates, jumping on the counter between them. Kathy slides the buzzing phone to him, and if not for the chemical help, her lack of interest might endanger Michael’s condition.

He checks the number on the phone. Claire? At four forty-five on a Wild Pitch Friday—what could this be? His assistant is whip-smart—and he has the superstitious belief that she might have that rare quality: luck—but she makes life so tough on herself. The girl anguishes over everything, is constantly measuring herself, her expectations, her progress, her sense of worth. It’s exhausting. Michael has even become suspicious that she’s looking for another job—he has a sixth sense for such things—and this is probably the reason he holds up a finger to Kathy and takes the call.

“What is it, Claire?”

She rambles, chatters, titters. My God, he thinks, this girl, with her unshakable upper-middlebrow taste, her world-weary, faux cynicism. He always warns her about cynicism; it is as thin as an eighty-dollar suit. She’s a great reader, but she lacks the cool clarity required for producing. I don’t love it, she’ll say about an idea, as if love had anything to do with it. Michael’s producing partner, Danny, calls Claire the Canary—as in coal mine—and half-jokingly suggests they use her as a reverse barometer: “If the Canary likes it, we pass.” For instance, even though she admitted Hookbook was a big idea, she begged him not to produce it. (Claire: After all the films you’ve produced, is this really the kind of thing you want to be known for making? Michael: Money is the kind of thing I want to be known for making.)

On the phone, Claire is at her mumbling, apologetic worst, droning on about Wild Pitch Friday, about some old Italian guy and a writer who happens to speak his language, and Michael starts to interrupt, “Claire—” but the girl won’t even pause for breath. “Claire—” he says again, but his assistant won’t let him in.

“The Italian guy is looking for an old actress, somebody named”—and Claire utters a name that momentarily takes away his breath—“Dee Moray?”

Michael Deane’s legs go out from under him. The phone drops from his right hand onto the counter as the fingers on his left hand skitter for purchase; only Kathy’s quick reflexes keep him from falling all the way to the floor, from possibly hitting his head on the counter and impaling himself on his erection.

“Michael! Are you okay?” Kathy asks. “Is it another stroke?”

Dee Moray.

So this is what ghosts are like, Michael thinks. Not white corporeal figures haunting your dreams, but old names buzzed over cell phones.

He waves his wife off and grabs the phone from the counter. “It’s not a stroke, Kathy, let me go.” He concentrates on breathing. A man so rarely gets the full sweep of his life. But here is Michael Deane, chemically enhanced erection straining his silk pajamas in the open kitchen of his Hollywood Hills home, holding on to a tiny wireless telephone and speaking across fifty years: “Don’t move. I’ll be right there.”