Beautiful Ruins (63)

Dee nodded.

“My friend Alvis Bender, the man who write the book you read, he tell me something like this one time. He say our life is a story. But all stories go in different direction, yes?” He shot a hand out to the left. “You.” And the other to the right. “Me.” The words didn’t match what he’d hoped to say, but she nodded as if she understood.

“But sometimes . . . we are like people in a car on a train, go in same direction. Same story.” He put his hands together. “And I think . . . this is nice, yes?”

“Oh, yes,” she said, and she put her own hands together to show him. “Thank you, Pasquale.” One of her hands fell to Pasquale’s chest and they both stared at it. Then she pulled it away and Pasquale turned to leave, summoning every bit of pride in his body to wear on his back like the shield of the centurion he’d almost become that morning.

“Pasquale!” she called after only a few steps. He turned. And she came down the hallway and kissed him again, and although it was on the lips this time, it was not at all like the kiss she’d given him on the patio outside the Hotel Adequate View. That kiss had been the beginning of something, the moment when it felt like his story was beginning. This was an end, the simple departure of a minor character—him.

She wiped her eyes. “Here,” she said, and she pressed into his hands one of the Polaroid photographs of herself and the woman with dark hair. “To remember me by.”

“No. Is yours.”

“I don’t want that one,” she said. “I have these others.”

“One day you will want it.”

“I’ll tell you what—when I’m old, if I need to convince people that I was in the movies, I’ll come get it. Okay?” She squeezed the picture into his hand, then turned and padded back toward her room and disappeared inside. She closed and latched the door slowly and quietly behind her, like a parent sneaking from the room of a sleeping child.

Pasquale stared at the door. He had wished for this world of the glamorous Americans, and like a dream she had come to his hotel, but now the world was back where it belonged, and he wondered if it would have been better to never have glimpsed what lay behind the door.

Pasquale turned and scuffled up the hall, and down the stairs, past the night clerk and outside, to where Tomasso leaned against a wall, smoking. His cap was pulled down on his eyes. He showed Tomasso the photo of Dee and the other woman.

Tomasso looked at it, then shrugged one shoulder. “Bah,” he said. And the two men started back toward the marina.





12

The Tenth Pass



Recently



Los Angeles, California





Before sunrise, before Guatemalan gardeners, before sharks and Benzes and the gentrification of the American mind—Claire feels a hand on her hip.

“Don’t, Daryl,” she mutters.

“Who?”

She opens her eyes to a blond-wood desk, a flat-screen television, and the kind of painting they put in hotel rooms . . . because this is a hotel room.

She’s on her side, and the hand on her hip is coming from behind her. She looks down, sees that she’s still dressed; at least they didn’t have sex. She rolls over and stares into the big, dewy eyes of Shane Wheeler. She’s never awakened in a hotel room next to a man she just met, so she’s not quite sure what one says in this situation. “Hi,” she says.

“Daryl. Is that your boyfriend?”

“He was ten hours ago.”

“The strip-club guy?”

Good memory. “Yeah,” she says. At some point in their drunken sharing last night, she had explained how Daryl unapologetically watches online porn all day and goes to strip clubs at night and then laughs when she suggests this might be disrespectful to her. (Hopeless, she recalls describing her relationship.) Now, as she lies next to Shane, Claire feels a different sort of hopelessness. What’s the matter with her, going back to this guy’s room? And what to do with her hands now, which not long ago had been running through Shane’s hair and over various parts of his body? She reaches for her silenced BlackBerry, takes a data hit: seven A.M., sixty-one degrees, nine new e-mails, two phone calls, and a simple text message from Daryl: what up— She glances back over her shoulder at Shane again. His hair seems even more unruly than it did last night, his sideburns more late-Elvis than alt-hipster. His shirt is off and she can see, on his skinny left forearm, that damned tattoo, ACT, which she half blames for what happened last night. Only in the movies does such a moment require a boozy flashback: how Michael had her book rooms at the W for Shane and Pasquale, how she drove the Italian to the hotel while Shane followed in his rental car, how Pasquale said he was tired and went to his room, and she apologized to Shane for laughing at his pitch, how he shrugged it off, but in the way people shrug off something that genuinely bothers them. How she said, No, I really am sorry, and explained that it wasn’t him—it was her frustration with the business. How he said he understood and that he felt like celebrating, so they went to the bar and she bought him a drink and gently reminded him that getting a producer interested was only the first step; how he bought the next round of drinks (I just made ten grand; I can afford two cocktails) and she the one after; and how, amid all those drinks, they’d told their stories: first the bland, self-serving surface story one tells a stranger—family, college, career—and then the truth, the pain of Shane’s failed marriage and the rejection of his book of short stories; Claire’s seemingly misguided decision to come out of the cocoon of academia and her anguish over whether to go back in; Shane’s painful realization that he was milk-fed veal; Claire’s failed quest to make one great film; and then the loud, laugh-until-you-cry sharing—My boyfriend is a gorgeous zombie who loves strip clubs! and I actually live in my parents’ basement!—and more drinks came and the commonplace became revelatory—I like Wilco and I like Wilco, too! and My favorite pizza is Thai and Mine, too!—and then Shane rolled up the sleeves on his faux-Western shirt, and Claire’s eyes fell on that tattoo (so weak for ink), that one word, ACT, and she did—leaned over in the bar and kissed him, and his hand rose to her cheek while they kissed, such a simple thing, his hand on her face, but something Daryl never did, and ten minutes later they were in his room, sifting through the minibar for more fuel and making out like college kids, her giggling at the tickle of his bushy sideburns, him pausing to compliment her breasts—a sweet, two-hour, kissing, groping, laughing debate over whether or not to have sex (him: I’m leaning toward Yes; her: I feel like the swing vote) until . . . they must’ve fallen asleep.