Beautiful Ruins (7)

Then Claire starts for the bathroom, officially adding Daryl to her deal with Fate, like a hostage (Bring me a great film idea today or the strip-clubbing boyfriend gets it!). She pictures the names on her schedule, and wonders if one will magically step up. She imagines them as fixed points on a map: her nine thirty having an egg-white omelet as he goes over his pitch in Culver City, her ten fifteen doing tai chi in Manhattan Beach, her eleven rubbing one off in the shower in Silver Lake. It’s liberating to pretend her decision is up to them now, that she’s done all she can, and Claire feels almost free, stepping openly, nakedly, into the capricious arms of Destiny—or at least into a hot shower.

And that’s when a single wistful thought escapes her otherwise made-up mind: a wish, or maybe a prayer, that amid today’s crap she might hear just one . . . decent . . . pitch—one idea for a great film—so she won’t have to quit the only job she’s ever wanted in her entire life.

Outside, the sprinklers spit laughter against the rock garden.

Also naked, eight hundred miles away in Beaverton, Oregon, Claire’s last appointment of the day, her four P.M., can’t decide what to wear. Not quite thirty, Shane Wheeler is tall, lean, and a little feral-looking, narrow face framed by an ocean-chop of brown hair and two table-leg sideburns. For twenty minutes, Shane has been coaxing an outfit from this autumn-leaf pile of discarded clothes: wrinkly polos, quirky secondhand Ts, faux Western button shirts, boot-cut jeans, skinny jeans, torn jeans, slacks, khakis, and cords, none of it quite right for the too-talented-to-care nonchalance he imagines is appropriate for his first-ever Hollywood pitch meeting.

Shane absentmindedly rubs the tattoo on his left forearm, the word ACT inked in elaborate gangster calligraphy, a reference to his father’s favorite Bible passage and, until recently, Shane’s life motto—Act as if ye have faith and it shall be given to you.

His was an outlook fed by years of episodic TV, by encouraging teachers and counselors, by science-fair ribbons, participant medals, and soccer and basketball trophies—and, most of all, by two attentive and dutiful parents, who raised their five perfect children with the belief—hell, with the birthright—that as long as they had faith in themselves, they could be anything they wanted to be.

So in high school, Shane acted as if he were a distance runner and lettered twice, acted as if he were an A student and pulled them, acted as if a certain cheerleader was in his wheelhouse and she asked him to a dance, acted as if he were a shoo-in for Cal-Berkeley and got in and for Sigma Nu and they pledged him, acted as if he spoke Italian and studied abroad for a year, acted as if he were a writer and got accepted to the University of Arizona’s MFA creative writing program, acted as if he were in love and got married.

But recently, fissures have appeared in this philosophy—faith proving to be not nearly enough—and it was in the run-up to his divorce that his soon-to-be ex-wife (So tired of your shit, Shane . . .) dropped a bombshell: the Bible phrase he and his father endlessly quoted, “Act as if ye have faith . . . ,” never actually appears in the Bible. Rather, as far as she could tell, it came from the closing argument given by the Paul Newman character in the film The Verdict.

This revelation didn’t cause Shane’s trouble, but the news did seem to explain it somehow. This is what happens when your life is authored not by God but by David Mamet: you can’t find a teaching job and your marriage dissolves just as your student loans come due and the project you’ve worked on for six years, your MFA thesis—a book of linked short stories called Linked—is rejected by the literary agent you’ve secured (Agent: This book doesn’t work. Shane: You mean, in your opinion. Agent: I mean in English). Divorced, jobless, and broke, his literary ambition scuttled, Shane saw his decision to become a writer as a six-year detour to nowhere. He was in the first funk of his life, unable to even get out of bed without ACT to spur him on. It fell to his mother to yank him out of it, convincing him to go on antidepressants and hopefully rescuing the blithely confident young man she and his father had raised.

“Look, it’s not like we were a religious family anyway. We only went to church on Christmas and Easter. So your dad got that saying from a thirty-year-old movie instead of a two-thousand-year-old book? That doesn’t mean it isn’t true, does it? In fact, maybe that makes it more true.”

Inspired by his mother’s deep faith in him, and by the low dose of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor he’d recently begun taking, Shane had what could only be described as an epiphany: Weren’t movies his generation’s faith anyway—its true religion? Wasn’t the theater our temple, the one place we enter separately but emerge from two hours later together, with the same experience, same guided emotions, same moral? A million schools taught ten million curricula, a million churches featured ten thousand sects with a billion sermons—but the same movie showed in every mall in the country. And we all saw it! That summer, the one you’ll never forget, every movie house beamed the same set of thematic and narrative images—the same Avatar, same Harry Potter, same Fast and the Furious, flickering pictures stitched in our minds that replaced our own memories, archetypal stories that became our shared history, that taught us what to expect from life, that defined our values. What was that but a religion?

Also, movies paid better than books.

And so Shane decided to take his talents to Hollywood. He started by contacting his old writing professor, Gene Pergo, who had tired of being a teacher and ignored essayist and had written a thriller called Night Ravagers (hot-rodding zombies cruise postapocalyptic Los Angeles looking for human survivors to enslave), selling the film rights for more than he’d made in a decade of academia and small-house publishing, and quitting his teaching job midsemester. At the time, Shane was in the second year of his MFA, and Gene’s defection was what passed for scandal in the program—faculty and students alike huffing at the way Gene shat all over the cathedral of literature.