Beautiful Ruins (33)

They all turn to look at him, and for a moment Shane questions his resolve, recalls the dark period he’s just come through. Before that, Shane Wheeler always knew he was headed for great things. Everyone told him so—not just his parents, but strangers, too—and while he didn’t exactly tear it up in college and Europe and grad school (all on his parents’ dime, as Saundra liked to point out), he never doubted he’d be a success.

But during the collapse of his brief marriage, Saundra (and the crabby marriage counselor who clearly took her side) described a very different pattern: a boy whose parents never said no, who never required him to do chores or to get a job, who stepped in whenever he got into trouble (Exhibit A: the spring-break thing with the police in Mexico), who supported him financially long after they should have. Here he was, almost thirty, and he’d never had a real job. Here he was, seven years out of college, two years out of his master’s program, married—and his mother still sent him a monthly clothing allowance? (She likes buying my clothes, Shane argued. Isn’t it cruel to make her stop?)

In that doomed final month of the marriage—in what felt like a live autopsy of his manhood—Saundra tried to make him feel “better” by insisting it wasn’t entirely his fault; he was part of a ruined generation of young men coddled by their parents—by their mothers especially—raised on unearned self-esteem, in a bubble of overaffection, in a sad incubator of phony achievement.

Men like you never had to fight, so you have no fight in you, she said. Men like you grow up flaccid and weak, she said. Men like you are milk-fed veal.

And what milk-fed Shane did next only proved her point: after a particularly heated argument, when Saundra went to work, he moved out, taking the car they’d bought together and heading for Costa Rica and a job on a coffee plantation he’d heard about from some friends. But the car died in Mexico, and—broke and carless—Shane made his way back to Portland and moved back in with his parents.

Since then, he’s come to regret his behavior and has apologized to Saundra, even sending her the irregular check for her part of the car (birthday money from his grandparents, mostly), and promising that soon he’d pay her back completely.

The most painful thing about Saundra’s milk-fed-veal rant (as he’s begun to think of it) was not the truth of it, which was undeniable. Yeah, she was right; he could see that. The awful thing is that he didn’t see it before. As Saundra said with incredulity, I think you really believe your shit. And he did. He really believed his own shit. And now, after she’d blown it all up . . . he really didn’t.

For the first few months of their divorce, Shane felt empty and alone in his humiliation. Without his old belief in his slow-brewing talents, Shane was rudderless, adrift, and he sank into the depths of depression.

Which is why—he realizes now—he’s got to make the most of this second chance, to go out and prove that ACT wasn’t simply a motto or a tattoo, a childish delusion, but the truth. He is not milk-fed veal. He is a bull, a man on the come, a winner.

Shane takes a deep breath in the studio bungalow offices of Michael Deane Productions, looks from Claire Silver to Michael Deane and back, and with all the old, Mamet-inspired confidence he can muster, says: “I came here to pitch a movie. And I’m not translating another word until you hear it.”





6

The Cave Paintings



April 1962



Porto Vergogna, Italy





The narrow trail was etched into the cliff face like bunting on the side of a wedding cake, a series of switchbacks zigzagging the steep ledge behind the village. Pasquale stepped carefully along the old goat path and continually looked back to make sure Dee was behind him. Near the top, the trail had been washed out by this year’s heavy winter rains and Pasquale reached back for Dee’s warm hand as the path gave way to bare rock. At the last switchback, an unlikely orange grove had been planted on the cliff side—six gnarled trees, three on each side, tied to the rocks with wire to keep them from blowing over the side. “Is a little more only,” Pasquale said.

“I’m fine,” she said, and they made their way along the last stretch of trail, the lip of the cliff just over their heads now, Porto Vergogna peeking out from the rocks sixty vertical meters beneath them.

“You feel bad? Stop or go?” Pasquale asked over his shoulder. He was becoming accustomed to speaking English again.

“No, let’s keep going. It’s nice to be out walking.”

Finally, they crested the cliff and stood on the ledge above the village, the drop-off right at their feet—wind ripe, sea pulsing, foam curling on the rocks below.

Dee stood near the edge, so frail that Pasquale had the urge to grab her, to keep her from being blown away by the wind. “It’s gorgeous, Pasquale,” she said. The sky was hazy-clear beneath a smear of faint cloud, washed-out blue against the darker sea.

On top of the cliffs, trails spiderwebbed the hills. He pointed up one trail to the northwest, up the coast. “This way, Cinque Terre.” Then he pointed east, behind them, over the hills toward the bay. “This way, Spezia.” Finally, he turned to the south and showed her the trail they were going to take; it carved the hills for another kilometer before dipping back into the craggy, unpopulated valley along the shoreline. “Portovenere this way. Is easy at first, then difficult. Only for goats is trail from Venere.”