Beautiful Ruins (89)

“Come on, ten minutes in the backseat? The kids are all doing it.”

“What about the babysitter?”

“Why not? I’m game,” he said. “Think we can talk her into it?”

She’d known the joke was coming and still it made her laugh. She almost always knew what was coming with Alvis, and still she laughed.

“She’s gonna want four bucks an hour for that,” Debra said.

Still holding her, Alvis sighed deeply. “Baby, when you’re funny, it is the sexiest thing.” He closed his eyes, leaned his head back, and smiled as broadly as his thin face would allow. “Sometimes I wish we weren’t married so I could ask you again.”

“Ask anytime you want.”

“And risk you saying no?” He kissed her and then stepped away, swept his arm, and bowed. “Your chariot.” She curtsied and climbed into the cold Corvair. He pushed the door closed and stayed there, looking down into the car. She flicked the wipers and a slick of wet goo washed over the edge of the car and nearly hit Alvis.

He jumped away, and she smiled as she watched Alvis walk to his car.

She felt better, but she was still puzzled about why Ron had angered her so much. Was it just because he was a horny prick? Or was there something familiar and cutting in what he’d said—the love of your life? Maybe not. But it didn’t have to be like that, did it? Couldn’t you outgrow the little-girl fantasy? Couldn’t love be gentler, smaller, quieter, not quite all-consuming? Was that what Ron made her feel—guilt (You use people), perhaps over the suggestion that, at a tough point in her life, she’d traded on her looks for an older man’s love, for some security and a brand-new Corvair, given up on love for her own reflection in his lovesick eyes? Maybe she was Maggie. This started the crying again.

She followed the Biscayne, mesmerized by the blinking taillights. Denny Street was nearly empty. She really hated Alvis’s car; it was such an old person’s sedan. He could take any Chevy off the lot and he chose a Biscayne? At the next red light she pulled up alongside him, rolled her window down. He leaned across the seat and rolled the passenger window down.

“You really need a new car,” she said. “Why don’t you get another Corvette?”

“Can’t.” He shrugged. “I’ve got a kid now.”

“Kids don’t like Corvettes?”

“Kids love Corvettes.” He waved his hand behind him, like a magician, or a girl in a showroom. “But there’s no backseat.”

“We can put him on the roof.”

“We’re gonna put five kids on the roof?”

“Are we having five?”

“Did I forget to talk to you about that?”

She laughed, and felt the urge to . . . what, apologize? Or just to tell him, for the thousandth time—perhaps reassuring herself—that she loved him?

Alvis put a cigarette in his mouth and capped it with the car lighter, his face lit by the yellow glow. “No more picking on my car,” he said. Then he winked one of his bleary brown eyes, stepped on the gas and brake at the same time, the big motor yowling, tires beginning to chirp and spit yellow smoke, and he timed it perfectly, so that just as the light in front of them changed green, he popped the brake and the car seemed to leap forward. And, in Debra Bender’s memory, the noise would always precede what happened: the Biscayne firing into the intersection just as an old black pickup truck—headlights off, gunned at the last minute by another drunk trying to make a late-amber light—streaked in from the left, thundered, then crumpled Alvis’s car door, T-boned the Biscayne, and drove it through the intersection, an endless screech of steel and glass, Debra screaming at the same terrible pitch, her anguished cry lingering long after the tangled cars came to rest against the faraway curb.





17

The Battle for Porto Vergogna



April 1962



Porto Vergogna, Italy





Pasquale watched Richard Burton and Michael Deane scurry toward their rented speedboat, his Aunt Valeria chasing them, screaming and pointing her crooked finger: “Murderers! Assassins!” Pasquale stood uneasily. The world was fractured, broken in so many ways that Pasquale could barely conceive of which shard to reach for: his father and mother both gone now, Amedea and his son in Florence, his aunt screaming at the cinema people. The pieces of his broken life lay on the ground before him like a mirror that had always stared back, but which had now broken to reveal the life behind it.

Valeria was wading into the water, cursing and crying, spittle on her old gray lips, when Pasquale reached her. The boat had backed away from the pier. Pasquale took his aunt by her thin, bony shoulders. “No, Zia. Let them go. It’s okay.” Michael Deane was staring back at him from the boat—but Richard Burton was staring straight ahead, rubbing the neck of the wine bottle between his palms as they made their way toward the breakwater. Behind them, the fishermen’s wives watched quietly. Did they know what Valeria had done? She fell back into Pasquale’s arms, weeping. They stood on the shore together and watched the speedboat putter around the point, its nose rising proudly as the pilot gunned it, and the boat roared, rose, and sped away.

Pasquale helped Valeria back to the hotel and put her in her room, where she lay in her bed weeping and muttering. “I did a terrible thing,” she said.