Beautiful Ruins (69)

He reached for the notebook. “Put that down!”

She flipped forward, looking for whatever had been so dangerous that he’d give her his pot pipe rather than admit he was writing a song.

“Fucking put it down, Mom!”

She found the last page with writing on it—the song he must have been trying to hide—and her shoulders slumped when she saw the heading: “The Smile of Heaven,” the title of Alvis’s book. She read the chorus: I used to believe/He’d come back for me/Why’s heaven smiling/When this shit ain’t funny—

Oh. Debra felt awful. “I— I’m sorry, Pat. I thought—”

He reached up and took the notebook back.

She so rarely saw beneath Pat’s smooth, sarcastic surface that she sometimes forgot a boy was there—a hurt boy who was still capable of missing his father even though he didn’t remember him. “Oh, Pat,” she said. “You’d rather I thought you were smoking pot . . . than writing a song?”

He rubbed his eyes. “It’s a bad song.”

“No, Pat. It’s really good.”

“It’s maudlin crap,” he said. “And I knew you’d make me talk about it.”

She sat on the bed. “So . . . let’s talk about it.”

“Ah, Jesus.” He looked past her, at a point on the floor. Then he blinked, laughed, and this seemed to snap him out of some trance. “It’s no big deal. It’s just a song.”

“Pat, I know it’s been hard on you—”

He winced. “I don’t think you understand just how much I don’t want to talk about this. Please. Can’t we talk about it later?”

When she didn’t budge, Pat pushed her gently with his foot. “Come on. I have more maudlin crap to write and you’re going to be late for your date. And when you’re tardy, P.E. Steve makes you run laps.”

P.E. Steve drove a Plymouth Duster with deep bucket seats. He had a gone-to-seed-superhero look, with blocky, side-parted hair and a square jaw, and an athletic body just starting to swell with middle age. Men have a half-life, she thought, like uranium.

“What should we see?” Steve asked her in the car.

She felt ridiculous even saying it: “The Exorcist II.” She shrugged. “I heard some kids in the library talking about it. It sounded good.”

“Fine with me. I figured you more for a foreign-film buff, something with subtitles that I’d have to pretend to understand.”

Debra laughed. “It has a good cast,” she said, “Linda Blair, Louise Fletcher, James Earl Jones.” She could barely even say the real name. “Richard Burton.”

“Richard Burton? Isn’t he dead?”

“Not yet,” she said.

“Okay,” P.E. Steve said, “but you might have to hold my hand. The first Exorcist scared the shit out of me.”

She looked out the window. “I didn’t see it.”

They ate dinner at a seafood place and she noted when he took one of her shrimp without asking. The conversation was easy and casual: Steve asking about Pat, Debra saying that he was doing better. Funny how every conversation about Pat assumed a baseline of trouble.

“You shouldn’t worry about him,” Steve said, as if reading her mind. “He’s a lousy floor-hockey player, but he’s a good kid. The talented ones like that? The more trouble they get in, the more successful they are as adults.”

“How do you know that?”

“ ’Cause I never got in trouble and now I’m a P.E. teacher.”

No, this wasn’t bad at all. They sat early in the theater with a shared box of Dots and a shared armrest, and shared backgrounds (She: widowed a decade earlier, mother dead, dad remarried, younger brother and two sisters; He: divorced, two kids, two brothers, parents in Arizona). Shared gossip, too: the one about some kids discovering a cache of the shop teacher’s raunchy porn above the lathe (He: I guess that’s why they call it wood shop) and Mrs. Wylie seducing the gear-head Dave Ames (She: But Dave Ames is just a boy; He: Yeah, not anymore).

Then the lights went down and they settled into their seats, P.E. Steve leaning over and whispering, “You seem different from how you are at school.”

“How am I at school?” she asked.

“Honestly? You’re kinda scary.”

She laughed. “Kinda scary?”

“No. I didn’t mean ‘kinda.’ Completely scary. Utterly intimidating.”

“I’m intimidating?”

“Yeah, I mean . . . look at you. You have seen yourself in a mirror, right?”

She was saved from the rest of this conversation by the coming attractions. Afterward, she leaned forward with anticipation, feeling the buzz she always felt when one of HIS films started. This one started with a mash of fire and locusts and devils, and when he finally came on, she felt both exhilaration and sadness: his face was grayer, ruddier, and his eyes, a version of those eyes she saw every day at home, but now like burned-out bulbs, the spark almost gone.

The movie swung from stupid to silly to incomprehensible, and she wondered if it would make more sense to someone who’d seen the first Exorcist. (Pat had snuck into a theater to see it and pronounced it “hilarious.”) The plot employed some kind of hypnosis machine made of Frankenstein wires and suction cups, which appeared to allow two or three people to have the same dream. When he wasn’t on-screen, she tried to concentrate on the other actors, to catch bits of business, interesting decisions. Sometimes, when she watched his films, she’d think about how she would’ve played a particular scene across from him—as she instructed her students: to notice the choices the actors made. Louise Fletcher was in this movie, and Debra marveled at her easy proficiency. Now there was an interesting career, Louise Fletcher’s. Dee could have had that kind of career—maybe.