Beautiful Ruins (97)

Lydia: Oh.




[Pat climbs slowly out of bed to get his clothes. But he stops. He stands there naked, as if noticing himself for the first time. He looks down, surprised that he’s grown so thick and middle-aged. Finally he turns to Lydia, standing in the doorway. The quiet seems to go on forever.]



Pat: So . . . I guess a threesome’s out of the question.




CURTAIN



In the half-empty theater there is a collective gasp, followed by bursts of agitated, uncomfortable laughter. As the stage goes dark, Claire realizes she’s been holding her breath throughout the play’s short opening scene. Now she’s breathed out, and the whole audience with her, a sudden release of tense, guilty laughter at the sight of this cad standing naked on a stage—his crotch subtly and artfully covered by a blanket over the bed’s footboard.

In the darkness of a set change, ghosts linger in Claire’s eyes. She becomes aware of the scene’s clever staging: played mostly in half-light, forcing the audience to search the near-darkness for the figures, so that when the harsh lights finally come up, Lydia’s tortured face and Pat’s white softness are boned into their retinas like X-rays—that poor girl staring at her naked boyfriend, another woman in their bed, a strobe of betrayal and regret.

This wasn’t what Claire was expecting (community theater? in Idaho?) when they arrived in Sandpoint, a funky Old West ski town on the shores of this huge mountain lake. With no time to check into their hotel, the investigator took them straight to the Panida Theater, its lovely vertical descending sign marking a quaint storefront in the small L-shaped downtown, classic old box office opening into a Deco theater—too big for this small, personal play, but an impressive room nonetheless, carefully restored to its old 1920s movie-house past. The back of the theater was empty, but the front seats had a good spread of black-clad small-town hipsters, older Birkenstockers, and fake blondes in ski outfits, even older moneyed couples, which—if Claire knew her small-town theater—would be this theater group’s patrons. Settled in her hard-backed seat, Claire glanced at the photocopied cover of the playbill: FRONT MAN ? PREVIEW PERFORMANCE ? THEATER ARTS GROUP OF NORTHERN IDAHO. Here we go, she’d thought: amateur hour.

But then the thing starts and Claire is shocked. Shane, too: “Wow,” he whispers. Claire sneaks a glance at Pasquale Tursi, and he appears rapt, although it’s hard to read the look on his face—whether it’s admiration for the play or simple confusion about what that naked man is doing onstage.

Claire glances to her right, at Michael, and his waxen face seems somehow stricken, his hand on his chest. “My God, Claire. Did you see that? Did you see him?”

Yes. There is that, too. It’s undeniable. Pat Bender is some kind of force onstage. She’s not sure if it’s because she knows who his father is, or perhaps because he’s playing himself—but for one quick, delusional moment, she wonders if this might be the greatest actor she’s ever seen.

Then the lights come up again.

It’s a simple play. From that opening scene, the story follows Pat and Lydia out on their parallel journeys. In his, Pat spends three drunken years in the wilderness, trying to tame his demons. He performs a musical-comedy monologue about the bands he used to be in, and about failing Lydia—a show that eventually gets him dragged to London and Scotland by an exuberant young Irish music producer. For Pat the trip smacks of desperation, a misguided final attempt at becoming famous. And it all blows up when Pat betrays Joe by sleeping with Umi, the girl his young friend loves. Joe runs off with Pat’s money and he ends up stranded in London.

In Lydia’s parallel story, her mother dies suddenly and Lydia finds herself stuck caring for her senile stepfather, Lyle, a man she’s never gotten along with. Lyle provides daft comic relief, constantly forgetting that his wife has died, asking the thirty-five-year-old Lydia why she isn’t at school. Lydia wants to move him into a nursing home, but Lyle fights to stay with her, and Lydia can’t quite do it. In a storytelling device that works better than Claire expects, Lydia fills in the gaps and marks the passage of time by talking on the phone to Pat’s mother, Debra, in Idaho. She never appears onstage but is an unseen, unheard presence on the other end of the phone. “Lyle wet the bed today,” Lydia says, pausing for a response from the unseen Debra (or Dee, as she sometimes calls her). “Yes, Dee, it would be natural . . . except it was my bed! I looked up and he was standing on my bed, pissing a hot streak and shouting, ‘Where are the hand towels?’ ”

Finally, Lyle burns himself on the oven while Lydia is at work, and she has no choice but to move him into a nursing home. Lyle cries when she tells him about it. “You’ll be fine,” she insists. “I promise.”

“I’m not worried about me,” Lyle says. “It’s just . . . I promised your mother. I don’t know who will take care of you now.”

In the wake of that realization—that Lyle believes he has been caring for her—Lydia understands that she’s most alive when she’s caring for someone else, and goes to Idaho to take care of Pat’s ailing mother. Then, one night, she’s asleep in Debra’s living room when the phone rings. The lights come up on the other side of the stage—revealing Pat, standing in a red phone booth, calling his mother for help. At first Lydia is excited to hear from him. But all Pat seems to care about is that he’s run out of money and needs help to get home from London. He doesn’t even ask about his mother.